I’ve been hesitant to weigh in on the Israel-Hamas war, not only because I do not believe social media is the right place for news, nuance, or persuasion, but also because I have been here before, and it did not end well.
My freshman year of college, I believed Israel was a malicious and illegitimate occupier and perpetrator of gratuitous crimes against Palestinians. As I became more engaged and heard people I respected disagree, I began to suspect I was missing something and expanded my research; over time, I gradually and painfully changed my mind.
After doing a lot of reading, I now believe Israel is legitimate, does deserve to defend itself, and is caught in a particularly complex and difficult situation that is not explainable in 142-character opinions or passionate one-minute video clips on an Instagram story. And I believe the Jews should have one small strip of a homeland on this Earth, where they can be safe, in perpetuity, to simply live life being who they are, being Jewish openly and safely.
I also believe most Palestinians are innocent people who want to live life and enjoy rights and safety, and that Hamas (NOT Palestinians as a whole) is a terrorist organization bent on destroying Israel, willing to use their own citizens as pawns and human shields, and cunning enough to bend public opinion to their will through shameless lying and propaganda.
I learned first-hand that this topic can ignite tension and hurt among friends and loved ones. When I tried to support an anti-BDS movement later in college, through fact-checking and social media awareness, I received hate mail and lost friends. But I also received private notes of appreciation: my take-away is that social media can help people feel heard but can also burn up my credibility and relationships with people who see differently—before I can engage in more meaningful and nuanced conversation with them.
For these reasons, I’ve been hesitant to share my views. I’ve also been hesitant to write or share because to write something compelling requires clarity of mind and purpose, and at this time, I feel little clarity. Then I realized: this is the problem. Propaganda and misinformation spread quickly because they can be so succinct and pretend to provide the clarity people are lacking, filling the void while those who pursue nuance and greater truth dither in the details. And so, I will be the first to admit that I don’t have full clarity in the details, but I have compassion and clarity of purpose, and perhaps that needs to be enough.
My purposes are straightforward and threefold:
A plea for compassion and empathy for the real, individual, human people enmeshed in the current conflict
An urge to critical thought, to questioning what you see–even in the news–and to not share information you haven’t verified
A message of support for Israel as a country and a populace and the only Jewish state, which can and should be separated from whatever you may think of the current government
On Compassion
Remember: there are real people, individual humans suffering, behind the pictures and rhetoric and numbers and words. People, like you and me. Children, teenagers, retired grandparents and newborn babies and parents just struggling to get by. In Israel, in Gaza, all over the world: what we are discussing has normal, innocent people caught in the cross-fire, and nobody deserves to suffer. Sure, we all have our opinions about who is to blame for all the suffering, but before we go into that, please, take a moment and consider the actual people involved. Teenagers and young adults shot down at a music festival–those could be you and your friends at Coachella or Lollapalooza or a concert in Vegas. Families slaughtered and worse, unassuming, in their homes on a holiday–these could be you, home for Thanksgiving, or your parents, or friends. People kidnapped, held for three weeks and counting–these could be you, your grandmother, your nephew, your daughter. People forced to evacuate home as the city around is blown to rubble–this could be your home, your city. Families huddled at home as rockets fall, for too many their last huddle alive–this could be you and your family and your friends. Real people are suffering, Israelis, Gazans, and more: to dehumanize them as pawns, summarize them as a group, ascribe beliefs and politics and actions to them as a whole, does them a disservice. Worse, to blame them, to claim a family of farmers, teenagers dancing, or a baby for goodness sake, deserves any of this, is heartless and cruel and lacks humanity. Every loss of innocent life is a tragedy, no matter whose “side” they are on. Our hearts should go out to the thousands of lives destroyed, upended, or rent apart by this conflict, and our thoughts should go first to compassion, before we turn to politics.
On Critical Thought
Appeals to emotion are rampant, and effective in part because they abnegate the need for nuance and critical thought. It can be helpful to post, and re-post, on social media if only to even out propaganda across the board, show support for people supporting your cause, and perhaps give those supporting the other side some insight into your viewpoint. And yet, if people are convinced by these byte-sized snatches of rhetoric to change their mind, they have not put in enough thought and research to be worth listening to. If the information you get is all from micro-propaganda, you are not informed, no matter how many you’ve seen. If you haven’t discussed the issues with informed and reasonable people who disagree with you, you’re not informed. If you can’t explain why a reasonable, well-meaning, good person would disagree with you, and what their reasonable arguments would be, why you might be wrong and what you would need to see to change your mind, you are missing something. If that describes you, please do stop mindlessly resharing propaganda.
In addition to sorting truth from propaganda, you can tease parts from the whole. “Palestinians” are very different from “Hamas”, as indeed are “Gazans”: noting that Hamas is a terrorist organization says absolutely nothing about the majority of the Palestinian people, except that the fraction that live in Gaza are subject to the rule of a terrorist organization. Saying that Israelis are malicious settler-colonialists because some citizens are building settlements in the West Bank and a very small few are inciting violence is like saying Americans are violent election-deniers because some extremists deny the 2020 presidential election results and a very small few stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 (the situations themselves are not analogous). Ascribing to many the actions or beliefs of a few, while facile, is unreasonable, inaccurate, and unfair.
On Israel
This will be the hardest section to cover because so many people feel so strongly about this issue, to the point that some people’s stance on the issue has overcome even their compassion for those caught in the crossfire (see point 1). If you come away just thinking maybe some reasonable and well-informed people can support Israel not out of “white supremacy”, “colonialism”, or “ignorance”, and countless other things I’ve been called, and still don’t agree with my take, I will consider it a success. It is a difficult topic in part because there are so many layers–millenia worth of them–which, ironically, is a very Jewish way of looking at the issue. There is the current government of Israel, whether or not you support it, and Hamas ruling Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority in West Bank. There is the people of Israel, and the people of Gaza, real, unique, individual people (see point 2) and different from other Palestinians and Jews and Arabs and Druze and others. There is the existence of Israel, and of Gaza, and the West Bank, and the land itself. There is the modern history, defined tragically in periods by wars and violence, incrementing through the decades since the 1800’s. There’s the religious significance of the region, for Jews and Muslims and Christians. There’s the broader history of the region, going back thousands of years. Critically, it is not all-or-nothing: you can recognize the existence of Israel without supporting the current government just as you can support the existence of Italy without supporting Giorgia Meloni. You can care for the people of Israel and the people of Gaza without supporting Israel’s current government and certainly without supporting Hamas. It is also reasonable to support some of what a group does without supporting everything, and to support a group’s existence without supporting all of its actions. A lot of the local individual people manage this nuance, and to blame a people for its government is to blame you for Donald Trump or Obama, or whichever recent president you have recently reviled based on your individual politics.
It is easy to condemn, much harder to suggest feasible alternatives. A devastating fact of life is that sometimes there are no good choices, just some that are less bad than other, more terrible paths. When no good options remain, everything you do will seem wrong: there’s no way to win. Israel is, and has been, in such a situation for decades, and to understand why Israel takes a given action, it is imperative one recognize this bind. You can prefer Israel allow more aid into Gaza, but only if you accept that Hamas will capture a lot of these supplies and use the aid to support their war effort against Israel while reducing the pressure to free the hostages. You can support a ceasefire, but only if you accept that doing so would be a surrender to Hamas, a forfeit of Israeli security to its many enemies, and an abandonment of the at least 238 remaining hostages, or at least recognize this is a reasonable possibility. Before condemning Israel’s actions, I strongly recommend considering what else they could realistically do to guarantee security for their citizens, as is the right and indeed the primary goal of any state.
Finally, if anything, the reaction to the current conflict, not in Israel but around the world, demonstrates exactly why we need a Jewish state. The mobbing of an airport to attack Jews arriving from Tel Aviv. The burning of synagogues. The calls for deaths of Jews. The beatings and antisemitic messages abounding at protests and on college campuses and in the streets. It turns out that “never again” has an expiration date, and if you believe Jews have a right to safety and a sense of security as much as other people, before decrying Israel’s existence, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate how else we could realistically attain such a haven.
Final Word
I wrote this knowing that I might change my mind–and am proud of that. We never have the full picture, and in complex and nuanced areas especially, we should be taking new information into account and letting it shift our positions as appropriate. I am proud that I have changed my mind before on this issue, and expect to shift some degree in the future. I will not pretend to be the ultimate arbiter of Truth. And yet, I am entirely comfortable that I have come to my position through critical thought, intensive research, and all the integrity I possess, and sometimes, in times of great uncertainty, that has to be enough.
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