An alternative to invading Gaza
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart has that rare ability to try to understand where those with radically opposing views are coming form – and to engage with them from there.
In his latest podcast discussion, transcribed below, he starts from why so many Israelis want to go into Gaza and smash Hamas, understanding their anger – and their fear.
And so he asks, how a ground invasion might provide a long-term answer to their concerns and he answers that it won’t – and it can’t.
And so he tries to look for other ways forward: thinking, probing, engaging, exploring…
RK
This article was originally published by the Beinart Notebook on Mon 30 Oct 2023. Read the original here.
An alternative to invading Gaza
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What Peter suggests is a less blood-thirsty means for powerful OUTSIDERS to manage more comfortably for them what those OUTSIDERS see as the Palestinian problem. The Palestinian perspective and Palestinian voice is treated as unimportant and irrelevant. Such an approach doesn’t resolve ANY conflict, especially not one with a 70 year history of oppression and injustice by the mighty and continuing losses and revolts by the weaker party.
The road to peace depends on all the parties having as near an equal input in framing the negotiations and agreeing the way forward as is obtainable.
My feeling is that Israel will only become serious about taking the road to peace if it has no other viable options (eg America takes a huge step back from providing support and / or enough Israelis “vote with their feet” as to affect the state’s long term future). I hope I’m wrong.
maybe Bibi is looking for a place- not Israel -to store the nukes they don’t have.
Problem is, to paraphrase Amos Oz ” both sides have right on their side which compounds the problems.”
I still think that one democratic country (ODS) is the best and only solution. Many of its advocates are posting and advocating now in response to these recent events.
I have great respect for Peter Beinart in his long journey of emancipation from the nightmarish cult that is Zionism. But he has not completed the journey. To take one example, when Beinart writes
“…first Israel should say that it will go after and hunt down the people who masterminded and committed these attacks to the end of their days, till the end of the earth…….it seems to me one can also morally justify that, given what happened”
the residues of an asymmetric colonial attitude to morality are sadly all too evident.
The crimes committed against civilians on October 7th constitute terrible crimes against humanity. But neither in scale nor in barbarity were they worse than the crimes committed by successive Israeli governments in recent years, prior to the events of October 7th; and compared to the Nakba and the ongoing savagery they pale in magnitude. Moreover despite Israell propaganda, there is no evidence in recent years, at least since 2017, that Hamas’s ideology is more malevolent towards Jews as human beings (as opposed to colonisers) than that of the Israeli government towards Palestinians.
So how could a Palestinian, even one who is not a Hamas supporter, interpret such an injunction as Beinart’s above as morally just?
Would it not then be equally just for Hamas or some successor resistance movement to demand that Israeli and IDF leaders be “hunted down….till the end of the earth”?
If not, why not? If so, is that a recipe for peace?