The Bad "Mess"-aging
Netanyahu, who sees himself as Israel's protector, is losing the world and a generation by repeating a mistake
I remember in 1982, as an exchange student in Norway, how Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon inspired media that was less than flattering. While I was, and still am, a supporter of Israel, it was obvious that the Israeli leadership, under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, struggled to find a footing in a helpful narrative. I felt that the attacks perpetrated against Israel by the PLO warranted a response. Israel had, and has, a right to defend itself against attacks from groups hostile to them. This, however, isn’t the point.
What should be primary among Israeli leadership concerns its ability to beat back aggression on land as well as in the minds of those who can and will be influenced by the images of the victims of their counter-offensives. This is no easy task. But rather than seeing, as Begin promised, “forty years of peace", we’re witnessing how miscalculation and mismanagement, under Benjamin Netanyahu, has generated optical and political messaging that will make it increasingly difficult for Israel to garner the kind of support it might otherwise enjoy both in the region and on US college campuses. Moreover, these missteps, under his leadership, have further alienated an otherwise sympathetic generation of US students on both sides of the issue, many of whom understand, at a visceral level, what it means to be connected to the idea of a homeland, a deep, personal orientation; one that is beyond, yet includes the US.
I was interested, for example, how a heated discussion between a group of “Pro-Palestinian” and a group of Jewish students on the UC Berkeley campus the other day, was oriented around tribal righteousness. The Pro-Palestinian group focused their ire on how the Israelis are committing atrocities against Palestinian children, while the Jewish students countered with a set of arguments that focused on the need to “once-and-for-all” eliminate Hamas as an existential threat to Israel’s continued existence. Both sides had valid points, neither of which could be heard because the core arguments were reductive, limiting capacity for understanding by either side. Entrenched ideology and assorted attachments, rooted in very real fear of historical pain and fear of future repetition; beliefs that build upon “otherness” and a kind of raw, disgraceful, hateful speech (see below) on other college campuses that come from an inability and an unwillingness to step into another being’s lived experience. I’ve written about the post-modern seeds that have given rise to this separation rather than a deeper singularity. There is a human cost to our shared inability to see from another’s experience.
There is a humanitarian disaster happening, as the logarithms of our social media feeds, and our natural tribal-centrism delivers. Add this to the other ugly imagery and reporting that the world sees and reads each day, and one can’t help but be moved by the unfolding inhumanity as well as our inability to empathize with each other.
To be clear, the scenes in Gaza disgust me. So do the images of both Gaza’s hellscape and parents grieving the loss of their children. I also know that if those I loved, were hit the savage way Hamas hit Israelis on October 7th, or I had someone I loved being held as a hostage, I’d be moved to hit back. The problem is that the Israeli response to Hamas’s attack allows for the world, and a generation of potential advocates, to see the conflict in binary terms when there is so much more to both the problem and the potential path toward peace. Then again, this is Hamas’ intent: get the Israeli’s to hit back in asymmetrical ways that make Palestinians, their cause, and those for whom they claim to defend, appear like victims. Then engage this strategy while using these Palestinians, as human shields in the process.
What has happened is that Palestinian people, and what they face, has been conflated with Hamas and their northern equivalents, Hezbollah, with the savagery they’ve imposed. The power and “success” of Israel as both a democracy and an economy has been conflated with the decades-long injustices and oppression faced by Palestinians. Try telling a 4th generation inhabitant of Ramallah, to be patient. Try telling a Palestinian to ignore the encroachment of Israeli settlements into the West Bank. This is neither fair nor helpful, especially since the core messaging that should be inspiring dialog on college campuses is, instead, inspiring hate. And college campuses are, themselves, failing to use lessons from a previous era to guide their choices.
Given how so much of the world (including the US), where multi-faceted geopolitical environments are crudely simplified into binary orientations, we lose the nuance required for participatory engagement. This hurts all of us, including the victims of violent attacks and counter-attacks, where attachments to ill-fitting ideologies, and ideologues, limit our personal and collective approaches to peace. To be sure the US has a role to play. So, too, do the adjacent Arab states. So, too, does Iran.
Those in harms way deserve our attentive participation in finding sustainable solutions. This means the Israelis AND the Palestinians. It also means that the systematic and adroit undermining of solutions by political leaders in the region deserve to be held to a very high standard. With this in mind, the Israeli and Palestinian leadership needs to be strategic in how it secures its people, so that we might be able to live out Begin’s dashed hope, in 1982, for “forty years of peace.”