The Palestine War

After the early, highly successful, Israeli moves against Hezbollah in Lebanon, I saw it reported that Israel was offering to stop the attack on Hezbollah in exchange for Hamas releasing the Israeli hostages in Gaza. I never saw this confirmed, but I find it believable. It would have been a parodic, preposterous reversal of Hezbollah’s own demand for a cease fire in Gaza in exchange for them ceasing missile attacks on Israel—an equally preposterous linkage. Israel works (not always or completely consistently, of course) on a (sometimes very nuanced) tit-for-tat basis with its enemies in a way that I don’t think we could imagine any other country doing. Similar longstanding Israeli policies include the destruction of the homes of the families of those who have committed terrorist attacks—something, of course, justified by no juridical principle, which will always demand that punishment target only the guilty party. High level Israeli politicians can demand creating settlements in “occupied” territory (more neutrally: territory Israel has not yet claimed sovereignty over) in response to every act of Arab violence against Jews. Indeed, many settlements had their origins in this practice. Israel just passed a law allowing for deportation of families of terrorists, even Israel citizens. Such practices could of course be defended on grounds of maintaining deterrence, but they tend to be precisely enough formulated so that there is an unmistakable “eye for an eye” component to them, beyond the kinds of calculations that go into preserving a deterrent. It’s vengeful, but not the kind of revenge a gang or mob would take—we’re not talking about rampages, but purposeful and meaningful acts, negations of a negation (of Jewish life in Israel)—and yet I don’t think any other country operates or thinks this way. There’s the straightforward use of force, where you just crush the enemy beyond the possibility of resistance; and there’s the “hearts and minds” approach, where you try and mix careful targeting of the enemy with cultivation of the inner enemy to your enemy, in the name of at least potentially shared values. Israel has used these approaches as well (that’s what all the wistful talk about “liberating Gaza from Hamas” is about), but I don’t know of anyone else who uses Israel’s more “measured” and even “Biblical” (Old Testament, of course) approach. Needless to say one doesn’t see much appreciation for this approach either—if anything it seems a bit grotesque even, I sense, to many supporters of Israel—but the reason for this is that it stand outside of the “human rights world view” which even “American First” warriors against Jews want to exploit so they can accuse Israel of “genocide” (a particularly incoherent and almost constitutively abused construct of post-Nuremberg international law—no one can explain what it would mean to “stop” a genocide since it’s not a genocide if you can still stop it).

I had always thought that a more sovereignty-oriented American right would be supportive of Israel because it would recognize that the decades long international war against Israel conducted primarily though the UN had its roots, beyond the Arab and Muslim ordeal of international civility, the global dependence on oil, and Communist “anti-imperialism,”  in Israel’s indigestibility by what is now called the “globalist” order. This indigestibility lies precisely in Israel’s insistence on “communicating” directly with its enemies, including the “material” ways mentioned above, rather than accepting as the default position the submission of conflicts to some form of real or imagined international arbitration (which, again, is not to say that some powerful sectors in Israeli politics are not “tempted” by that possibility). And, in fact, such an appreciation of Israel is strikingly evident in Trump’s politics and of many in his circle, even if there is vehement resistance far down on the totem pole. Hatred of Jews blinds many to the obvious reason Trump would support Israel: because a Middle East policed by an Israel-Saudi (and other Gulf States) condominium (with the possibility of adding a post-Islamic Republic regime in Iran and a healthier Egypt at some point) is the best way of minimizing America’s own obligations and intervention in the region, As opposed to what: an Iran-Palestine-Syria-Houthi “axis of resistance”?  Even beyond this the fact that “Palestine” is itself wholly a construct of a UN, post-Nuremberg international legal regime meant to transcend sovereignty through international institutions. The fact that “Palestine” is also a license to murder Jews anywhere just makes it clear the new international legal order that originated in the genocide of the Jews will finally be decisively established when all claims to Jewish sovereignty or power have been eradicated. Only then can the international order be free of the specific “taint” of the “Holocaust” and attain full universality.

“Palestine” is constructed so as to construct all Israeli actions as requiring UN and International legal approval and therefore intrinsically illegitimate. There is not a single thing Israel could do or refrain from doing that would not in some way be covered by some Security Council or General Assembly resolution, some ongoing or threatened international prosecution, and some boycott or sanctions legitimated by one of the above. All the methods here are familiar to those who follow the left carefully: invent some new legal category; get the network of NGOs to frame the issue in terms of that category; get some quasi-official body to issue proclamations and judgments ratifying the category; treat the category and judgment as officially determined and therefore factual, and pressure politicians and the media to use it every time they refer to the situation in question; demonize and delegitimize everyone who refuses to use the term or concede the judgment: in the case of Israel’s war with Hamas, that makes you a “genocide denier” (all of this continues to be modeled on Holocaust discourse, with everyone competing for bandwidth space on the Holocaust network). A secondary model applied to Israel is, of course, South Africa, which provides a playbook for accusing Israel of apartheid and rolling out a whole series of strategies for abolishing it. A tertiary model, itself modeled on the legal framing of Nazism, is perhaps Serbia, the international attack on which birthed the concept of “ethnic cleansing.” All liberal and leftist strategies are conserved, in part by reactivity of the accused, who think that they can turn the power of these totems back on their originators, as many supporters of Israeli sovereignty are doing now, often recycling old “War on Terror” tropes, like “Islamonazi.” This just helps, albeit minimally, to keep ratcheting the terms further.

Israel is an anomaly, just like Jews are. It’s ultimately not a liberal order, nor can it be since it can never erase the specifically Jewish and Judaic elements of the state. Supporters of Israel struggle to make Israel fit the liberal norm by pointing to everyday life in Israel which does, indeed, have a great deal in common with life in other Western liberal democracies—a New Yorker would feel at home in Tel Aviv, etc.—while also straining to attribute the non-liberal elements of Israel to other Western states. While having some truth, e.g., in the way countries like Germany and Ireland provide access to citizenship based on ethnicity, it’s far easier to imagine these countries doing away with such practices and going full America than to imagine Israel doing so. The Jews bought a lot of land pre-1948, but enough only to establish some roots and infrastructure, not an entire country; they acquired some legal justification of their presence and potential sovereignty, but the need to do so is itself suspicious—if they were just there, none of that would be necessary; much of the displacement of the Arab population of what became Israel was a result of war and Arab atrocity propaganda and can be a posteriori justified by the expulsion of Jews from Arab states, but, some of it was just expulsion (attempts to justify which will always be suspect because certain demographic realities needed to be in place for Israel to exist). Every government in the world depends upon other governments and institutions in the world order, but Israel seems uniquely dependent on the US, and therefore uniquely and suspiciously interested in its politics, especially if you think the US shouldn’t support Israel at all (in which case the “Israel lobby” assumes mythical proportions). Most supporters of Israel are liberals themselves and want to lessen the discomfort caused by these anomalies. Similarly, in many ways Israel is not a “settler colony” analogous to the US and Australia since it did constitute a “return” grounded on connections to the land maintained over the centuries—that there has not been a sovereign state on this territory prior to Israel other than the ancient Jewish Commonwealth itself is, at least, interesting. Of course, none of that fits modern norms of legitimacy, and it’s undeniable that Israel’s emergence as a modern state was fundamentally different than that of the decolonized countries—Israel is not a settler colony because it wasn’t a colony of some other country, but that just makes it more anomalous as a kind of autonomous colony transplanting itself not in accord with the logic of discovery and conquest but in the only place it could. I’ve seen that people who have not paid much attention to Israel before and start to notice all this stuff and find it bewildering, and with reason. It’s all sui generis and cannot be fit within existing frameworks of international law and legitimacy, thereby calling for some extraordinary explanation—which are not lacking when Jews are the topic. The specific, and uniquely intense, hatred directed toward Israel certainly draws upon more or less explicit theological frameworks making Jewish power and sovereignty unthinkable (the Catholic Church still can’t quite come to terms with it, let alone Islam), but also derives from this singular condition. I can understand why people who have been “led to believe” that Israel is a typical liberal democracy sometimes become furious when they start to look into Israel marriage laws, immigration law, land property law, etc. It is simply very difficult to examine all these features on their own terms if you don’t love Israel—so, if you don’t love Israel, you’re very likely to hate it. All this makes Israel extremely vulnerable in terms of all liberal political frames, and those countries operating outside of liberal frames, at least to some extent, have other reasons for supporting Israel’s enemies, including Israel’s preference for inclusion within the liberal left (for that matter, there’s no reason to expect non-liberal regimes to have anything in common with each other aside from their rejection of liberalism).

The only argument for Israel likely to withstand all the slings and arrows is one that places order over any abstract principle of legitimacy, or super-sovereignty. Of course, Israelis themselves will be loath to make such an argument, as Israeli political discourse is itself often driven by attempts to smooth out these anomalies, although there are some political figures of some prominence, like Einat Wilf and former justice minister Ayelet Shaked who have come to focus primarily on strengthening Israeli sovereignty (in both cases, though, within liberal political frameworks). But while arguments for Israel sovereignty should eschew abstract political principle it cannot ignore the way Israel serves as a cynosure of international attention and, for the reasons given above, is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. It will seem pretentious and almost a kind of gratuitous baiting for Israel to claim the mantle of the “light unto the nations,” but its anomalous and singular place in world order can be represented otherwise. Israel actually represents another form of world unity than the prevailing human rights world view: one that foregrounds relations of power, international hierarchies and therefore the importance of covenants, necessarily asymmetrical but not therefore invalid, between states operating at the same level within the international “stack” and between imperial and surrogate states. If the question becomes, how can we maintain and even create order replaces the question of how can we guarantee the human rights of each individual on the planet, Israel’s anomaly becomes exemplary rather than monstrous. Putting together jigsaw puzzles of international cooperation on all the possible levels requires accepting anomalies all around. The duality of the Judaic covenant, with an earthly lord but also with a deity sovereign over all sovereigns, could then be freely examined as a particularly meaningful approach to world order. The first step in this direction would be for Israel to solve the anomalous Palestinian question within the framework of the assertion of Israeli sovereignty over all the territory it considers it necessary to control. To echo Napoleon’s proclamation regarding the emancipation of the Jews, with all the necessary historical irony, for the Palestinians as individuals, everything; for the Palestinians as a separate nation with national rights, nothing.

Another anomaly of Israel is that there is no middle ground: either Israel will be sovereign over all the territory it needs to defend itself or it will be obliterated and its people, for the most part, killed (some exiled, if anyone lets them in). All discourse on Israel is predicated on finding some middle ground, with the “two-state solution” being the most symmetrical and therefore obvious formulation, but all that discourse is wrong. This is because the Palestine War gives “Palestine” (not just the people called Palestinians but the entire Palestine apparatus—all those institutions mentioned above, what Lee Smith calls The Global Empire of Palestine) no reason to accept anything less than a complete erasure of any Jewish footprint on the land. Even a single Jew there will represent Zionist contagion. Unless “Palestine” is defunded and dismantled, it will press forward, and I don’t see it being defunded and dismantled—too many careers in too many institutions depend on it, and it is surely supporting various networks of shadowy power across the world. The current wave of riots is making all of this very clear, and it is helpful that any pretense of Jews and Arabs living together in some future Palestine has been dropped by the movement. This way Israelis, Jews, and their supporters, who have been notoriously slow learners, can catch up with reality. Maybe it will lead to some “Greater Israel” yet. But the real tit-for-tat (not to exclude the others) should be that every time “Palestine” renders itself a danger or nuisance, Israel should render itself helpful, if possible indispensable, to at least some powers that be. Meet uselessness and sabotage with usefulness and innovation. Meet the antinomic with the nomic—spread covenants across the globe so as to include the Holy One, Blessed Be He.