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Palestine stuff again
If you saw your toddler playing with a sharp knife, would you run and grab it away? Probably not: the toddler would instinctively tighten its grip on the knife, probably cutting itself. Instead, you would offer it something better.
I've seen a lot of posts saying, roughly, that the people of Gaza deserve what they're getting because they overwhelmingly support Hamas, which committed such barbarisms on Oct. 7. To which I respond "Of course they support Hamas -- it's the only game in town. When is the last time they were offered something better?"
Which raises the obvious question: what does Hamas offer the people of Gaza? For that matter, what does Fatah offer the people of the West Bank?
If you were a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7, you could expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every day on your commute to work, which you might not get to at all if the searches took too long. Eventually, the next time the simmering war heated up, you might die at random, for no reason, when an Israeli bomb fell on your home. You would live and die ignominiously as a victim. Hamas offered you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor: if Israel was going to kill you anyway, it might as well at least be for a reason of your own choosing.
If you're a Palestinian living in the West Bank, you can expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every time you try to leave the West Bank, or even go from one part of the West Bank to another when there's an Israeli settlement in between. Eventually, a bunch of Israeli settlers will damage your home, intentionally, and the law won't punish them, but if you try to repair it to livability, you're the one breaking the law. Or they'll force you out of your home at gunpoint, and anything you do in self-defense will get you killed; if you come back to your home the next week, you'll find Israeli settlers living in it, having declared it theirs because you abandoned it. Or they'll just kill you outright and tell the police it was in self-defense. In any case, you'll live and die ignominiously as a victim. Fatah, or Hamas for that matter, offers you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor.
Some time in the past two months I saw an excerpt from a speech by one of Netanyahu's cabinet laying out the theory that what sustains Palestinian terrorists is the hope of destroying Israel and having their own country, and that hope must be destroyed: they have to understand that they will never succeed, that they have no hope. Which is perhaps correct for the people whose primary motivation is revenge, but for most ordinary Palestinians, like most ordinary Israelis, the primary motivation is living through the next day, year, even decade, perhaps giving their children a better life than their own. And the lack of hope is exactly what turns people into terrorists: people who have no hope, nothing to lose, do things you wouldn't think any human would stoop to (like October 7).
So what could one offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank that would be better than what Hamas offers them? In the abstract, hope: the hope of living a normal life, with equal rights under the law, not treated automatically as a criminal, not killed or forced from your home at random, seeing your children and grandchildren grow up and thrive. Making that more concrete is tricky, though.
I'm not convinced that a two-state solution will ever work. The British in India tried a religiously-based partition of the land, only months before the British in Palestine tried a religiously-based partition of the land, and the result in both cases was years of unspeakable bloodshed. Even eighty years later, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are still openly hostile to one another, and there's official oppression of religious minorities within each country. It didn't work in Yugoslavia, and it didn't work in Ireland (at least for many decades). Wherever you draw the lines between Israel and Palestine, many Palestinians will see it as not enough ("they forced me/my parents/my grandparents out of our homes at gunpoint, and they're being rewarded for it by gaining legal title to our homes, while we get pushed into the least-desirable pockets of land"), while many Israelis also see it as not enough ("this has been our land for thousands of years, why should they get any of it at all?"). The bloodshed may slow down somewhat, or it may not.
Of course, having grown up in the US, what's obvious to me is a one-state solution, with equal rights for all regardless of race or religion. What can you offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Citizenship, full stop. (And some kind of recompense for property illegally taken from them, at least recently.)
Which would mean the only officially Jewish nation in the world would no longer have a Jewish majority population, and (if all its people really do have equal rights regardless of religion) would no longer be a Jewish nation. Which is no big deal to me -- why should a nation have a religion? -- but thousands of years of Jews living as somewhat-unwanted guests in other people's nations have dreamt of having a nation of their own, and I don't know what that feels like so I'm not in a position to discount it.
I've seen a lot of posts saying, roughly, that the people of Gaza deserve what they're getting because they overwhelmingly support Hamas, which committed such barbarisms on Oct. 7. To which I respond "Of course they support Hamas -- it's the only game in town. When is the last time they were offered something better?"
Which raises the obvious question: what does Hamas offer the people of Gaza? For that matter, what does Fatah offer the people of the West Bank?
If you were a Palestinian living in Gaza before October 7, you could expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every day on your commute to work, which you might not get to at all if the searches took too long. Eventually, the next time the simmering war heated up, you might die at random, for no reason, when an Israeli bomb fell on your home. You would live and die ignominiously as a victim. Hamas offered you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor: if Israel was going to kill you anyway, it might as well at least be for a reason of your own choosing.
If you're a Palestinian living in the West Bank, you can expect to live your life treated as a criminal, subjected to long, random searches and road-blocks every time you try to leave the West Bank, or even go from one part of the West Bank to another when there's an Israeli settlement in between. Eventually, a bunch of Israeli settlers will damage your home, intentionally, and the law won't punish them, but if you try to repair it to livability, you're the one breaking the law. Or they'll force you out of your home at gunpoint, and anything you do in self-defense will get you killed; if you come back to your home the next week, you'll find Israeli settlers living in it, having declared it theirs because you abandoned it. Or they'll just kill you outright and tell the police it was in self-defense. In any case, you'll live and die ignominiously as a victim. Fatah, or Hamas for that matter, offers you the hope of living and dying with dignity, as an actor.
Some time in the past two months I saw an excerpt from a speech by one of Netanyahu's cabinet laying out the theory that what sustains Palestinian terrorists is the hope of destroying Israel and having their own country, and that hope must be destroyed: they have to understand that they will never succeed, that they have no hope. Which is perhaps correct for the people whose primary motivation is revenge, but for most ordinary Palestinians, like most ordinary Israelis, the primary motivation is living through the next day, year, even decade, perhaps giving their children a better life than their own. And the lack of hope is exactly what turns people into terrorists: people who have no hope, nothing to lose, do things you wouldn't think any human would stoop to (like October 7).
So what could one offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank that would be better than what Hamas offers them? In the abstract, hope: the hope of living a normal life, with equal rights under the law, not treated automatically as a criminal, not killed or forced from your home at random, seeing your children and grandchildren grow up and thrive. Making that more concrete is tricky, though.
I'm not convinced that a two-state solution will ever work. The British in India tried a religiously-based partition of the land, only months before the British in Palestine tried a religiously-based partition of the land, and the result in both cases was years of unspeakable bloodshed. Even eighty years later, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are still openly hostile to one another, and there's official oppression of religious minorities within each country. It didn't work in Yugoslavia, and it didn't work in Ireland (at least for many decades). Wherever you draw the lines between Israel and Palestine, many Palestinians will see it as not enough ("they forced me/my parents/my grandparents out of our homes at gunpoint, and they're being rewarded for it by gaining legal title to our homes, while we get pushed into the least-desirable pockets of land"), while many Israelis also see it as not enough ("this has been our land for thousands of years, why should they get any of it at all?"). The bloodshed may slow down somewhat, or it may not.
Of course, having grown up in the US, what's obvious to me is a one-state solution, with equal rights for all regardless of race or religion. What can you offer the people of Gaza and the West Bank? Citizenship, full stop. (And some kind of recompense for property illegally taken from them, at least recently.)
Which would mean the only officially Jewish nation in the world would no longer have a Jewish majority population, and (if all its people really do have equal rights regardless of religion) would no longer be a Jewish nation. Which is no big deal to me -- why should a nation have a religion? -- but thousands of years of Jews living as somewhat-unwanted guests in other people's nations have dreamt of having a nation of their own, and I don't know what that feels like so I'm not in a position to discount it.
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