An Unhappy Family: A Metaphor

Leftists put pressure on the wrong side in the Israel/Palestine conflict

"Separation wall between Israel and Palestine 11 05 (154)" by dlisbona is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I’d like you to imagine a family. When they were young, a couple wanted to have kids, but they struggled to conceive. They eventually decided to adopt a toddler from another continent and welcomed him into their home. They both relaxed afterwards and within months the mother became pregnant.

Unfortunately, though, the family’s life at home is now a mess. The boys are in their teens. The elder boy is quiet and isolated. He spends much of his time in his room making model airplanes. His younger brother, on the other hand, is deeply disturbed. He thinks his brother doesn’t belong in the family and wants him to leave home.

The younger boy will regularly go into his elder brother’s room and smash up his model planes. He has set his bed on fire more than once. He gets in his brother’s face and screams at him that he should go and live in an orphanage. He starts physical fights, which he then loses because he is smaller and weaker. He has ended up in hospital a couple of times because his brother has punched back too hard. He is also on the fringes of racist street gangs, who hate people who look like his brother.

How would you end this cycle of violence? Hopefully, most readers of Sharpen Your Axe are emotionally intelligent enough to realise that any solution has to start with the younger brother. Ideas matter; and the younger boy has unrealistic ideas about what his family life should look like. He needs therapy and anger management; and possibly a fulfilling new hobby. If he stops picking fights, there will be no fights.

Now imagine a group of adults in the neighbourhood heard about the situation. Instead of this common-sense analysis, they agreed with the younger boy’s case. The older boy has no place in the family: his position is illegitimate as he was only adopted on the basis that the couple were infertile. This turned out not to be true, so he should leave immediately and go and live in an orphanage. The adults believe that if the older brother were no longer in the home, the younger boy’s character would magically improve and all would be well in the family.

I hope you all realise that the imaginary adults who support the younger boy’s case are being naive, immature and unrealistic. Of course, this is a metaphor. Do you get it yet? Let’s hand over to Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau, who recently told a journalist: “Israel is a country that has no place on our land. We must remove it because it constitutes a security, military and political catastrophe to the Arab and Islamic nation. We are not ashamed to say this.”

The journalist asked Hamad if he was referring to the complete annihilation of Israel? “Yes, of course.” The Hamas leader went on to say: “We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October one-millionth, everything we do is justified.” He also said the following:

We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Deluge [the name Hamas gave its October 7 onslaught] is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth. Will we have to pay a price? Yes, and we are ready to pay it. We are called a nation of martyrs, and we are proud to sacrifice martyrs.

Well-meaning leftists who have adopted Palestinian nationalism as their own cause are like the imaginary adults in my metaphor. They are putting pressure on the wrong side. Why would you call on Israel to hold a ceasefire without also calling on Hamas to release its hostages and to stop killing innocent Israelis? It is a sad truth that the walls around Gaza are designed to protect Israel from the genocidal killers who rule the strip. The genocidal impulse preceded the construction of the walls.

Complexity

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but we should strive to be foxes (multiple models) not hedgehog (one model that allegedly explains everything). The Middle East is complex. No single model will ever be adequate. The metaphor I have discussed above is meant to be thought-provoking, particularly for people who are applying pressure on the wrong side, rather than a simple explanation of a complex reality.

One of the most insightful articles I have seen since the Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens comes from Substack commentator Matthew Iglesias. He argues that there are actually two wars in Israel/Palestine.

One problem, I think, is that while Israel is waging a just war in Gaza, they are in parallel waging an unjust war in the West Bank. This second war is much less spectacular, much more of a slow burn, and at the moment, is causing much less death and destruction to innocent civilians. That these two wars — one just but spectacularly deadly, one unjust but lower-key — are playing out in tandem is contributing to a confused and polarized debate over a set of issues that were already quite fraught.

Understanding this point helps us understand why so many people, particularly on the left, are vulnerable to bad calls on Israel/Palestine. They fail to realise that Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 - exactly what its critics had said it should do. Hamas took over Gaza soon afterwards and continued to fire rockets at civilians in Israel - a clear war crime. When you probe critics of Israel, many of them immediately begin talking about settlers on the West Bank instead of Gaza. Many of them have adopted hedgehog-like stances without understanding the complex dynamics on the ground.

On the positive side, Noah Smith - another Substack commentator - has argued that aging populations should be taken into account as a key factor in understanding why the conflict in Gaza hasn’t spread throughout the Middle East… yet. He says: “There’s a pretty well-established literature linking youthful population bulges to elevated risk of conflict.” He continues:

The old Middle East, with massive crowds of angry young people thronging the streets, ready to explode into nationalist or sectarian or revolutionary violence, is steadily disappearing, being replaced by a more sedate, aging society. Given the horrific outcomes of the last few decades, it’s hard not to see that as a good thing.

Again, many supporters of the Palestinian cause fail to take this point into account. Many of them fantasise about being revolutionaries. They are able to live this day dream vicariously by identifying with Islamist militants, who wouldn’t think twice about putting their Western allies up against a wall or throwing them off a building if the circumstances called for it.

Cognitive Dissonance

Anyone who has bought into narratives about the need to destroy the state of Israel and has read this far will probably be feeling cognitive dissonance (an uncomfortable feeling we all experience when faced with contradiction) right now. The temptation will be to double down on the starting position, which in many cases involves refusing to accept Israeli sovereignty over a relatively tiny slither of land in the Muslim-dominated Middle East. Conspiracy theories act as a psychologically useful tool for anyone who wants the cognitive dissonance to just go away.

So, any conspiratiorally minded supporters of Palestinian nationalism who have read this far will probably be shaking their heads and spinning wild tales about why my metaphor is misconceived. These tales will often lean heavily on antisemitic conspiracy theories, which have a certain circularity to them - they are designed to blame Jewish people for atrocities against Jews.

The arguments of the antisemitic conspiracy theorists (such as they are) go something like this (with my comments in brackets): Mossad is the best intelligence agency on the planet (probably an exaggeration, given that the US intelligence community had some 854,000 people with top-secret clearance more than a decade ago - equivalent to 9% of the total population of Israel). Mossad must have known that Hamas would have attacked (Maybe Mossad lacks credible human resources in Gaza; and the attacks were planned offline by terrorists who have known each other their whole lives?). Why did Mossad let the attacks happen? (This link in the chain only works with a big dose of intentionality bias). Mossad must have wanted an excuse to attack Gaza and so is really responsible for Hamas’s attacks (the circle is complete).

Go Deeper

If you want to explore the validity of any assumptions about Israeli sovereignty, I recommend Benny Morris’s non-partisan book on the deep roots of the conflict, Righteous Victims. The situation is best seen as a tragedy. On the one hand, Zionist fantasies in the 19th Century about Palestine largely being an uninhabited land set Jewish immigrants to Palestine on a dangerous course. Early Zionists were often reluctant to openly discuss their plans for the region with the Arabs who already lived there. They naively thought that buying land would be enough; and often had superior attitudes to their new neighbours.

On the other hand, the Arabs of Palestine rarely rose above ancient xenophobic attitudes to Jews. These regressive ideas were combined with the strange idea that Islamic lands are inalienable (or impossible to transfer to others) - a point that should trouble people in Spain who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Palestinian nationalism developed as a counter-reaction to Zionism; and genocidal attitudes, like those of Hamas leader Hamad quoted above, were factored in from the early years. These views were behind the war of 1948, when allied Arab forces tried and failed to smother the Israeli state at birth. The failure of this plan set the scene for all the Arab-Israeli conflicts since.

What can we do in the West? I would love to see a movement that puts more pressure on the Palestinian side. Please ask the Palestinians of Gaza to reject Hamas; to stop the violence; to accept Israeli sovereignty; and to build solid institutions that are capable of copying the best aspects of Israeli society (particularly support for startups and minority rights) in a demilitarised state. If this movement gained any traction at all, the time would be right to also apply pressure on Israel to end its slow-burning war in the West Bank.

States and Genocide

Alert readers might be puzzled by my sympathy for Israel given that I have published so many essays criticising nationalism. Let me wind up this week’s essay by explaining my point of view in a little more depth. I think the invention of the ideology of nationalism in Tudor England has had a truly mixed record, which tends to be negative. Nationalism means war. However, nationalism also helped create the modern world, in particular the overlapping institutions of liberal democracy, a market-based economy and the welfare state. The European project is based on outgrowing nationalism; and this has my full support.

Having said that, I strive to be a fox, rather than a hedgehog. Nation-states are a flawed concept, but they form one of the building blocks of the actually existing world. The best claims for new states come from people who have survived pogroms and genocide. The need for a Jewish state stems from the dark history of the Jewish people. In the same vein, British mishandling of the Irish potato famine (1845-52) made the case for Irish independence from the UK when the time came in the 20th Century; just as the Bangladesh genocide of 1971 made the case for the independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan.

In a similar vein, the best case for Palestinian statehood rests on the heavy-handed Israeli occupation of the West Bank, in my opinion. An invasion of Gaza could have serious unintended consequences for Israel, which is probably part of the reason that Hamas wanted to provoke one. This is why Israel’s leaders need a realistic and limited strategy for the ground war. Likewise, it is worth mentioning that I would support a state for the Uyghurs in China, if one became possible in the future.

Please note that my defence of new states to protect people against genocide should not be taken as a full-blooded defence of every action by that state. In the case of Israel, there will always be conflicts between Jewish nationalism and the country’s liberal democracy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu has gone much too far with populist nationalism, in my opinion. His nationalistic policies will always tend to erode democratic institutions. Unfortunately, it is probably necessary to say that my criticisms of Netanyahu are in no way an endorsement of any calls for a fresh genocide of Israelis.

Finally, any Catalan nationalists who have got this far are probably getting over-excited about finding a chink in my armour. Unfortunately for them, it is easy to dismiss claims of an alleged Catalan genocide when the region’s first minister, Pere Aragonès, is the grandson of a man who served as a mayor for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.

As we have discussed before, the middle-class Catalan speakers who support independence largely descend from Franco’s supporters, while working-class Spanish-speakers in the region largely descend from Republicans in Andalucia and elsewhere. Of course, there will be exceptions on both side, given the complexity of family histories throughout Spain. Black-and-white narratives about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath are rarely likely to map well onto the real world - just as they are unlikely to capture the whole truth in the Middle East.

Regular readers will be unsurprised to see that the comments are closed due to the controversial nature of this week’s topic. See you next week!

Further Reading

Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1998 by Benny Morris

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