palestine

And yet, an increasing number of establishment strategic analysts warn that Israel could lose this war on Palestinians despite the cataclysmic violence it unleashed since the Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7. And in provoking the Israeli assault, Hamas may be realizing many of its own political objectives.

By simultaneously staging dramatic, high-profile attacks on more than 100 targets across the country on a single day, lightly armed Vietnamese guerrillas shattered the illusion of success that was being peddled to the US public by the Johnson administration. It signaled to Americans that the war for which they were being asked to sacrifice tens of thousands of their sons was unwinnable.

Hamas’s concept of military victory…is all about driving long-term political outcomes. Hamas sees victory not in one year or five, but from engaging with decades of struggle that increase Palestinian solidarity and increase Israel’s isolation.

If the aim was really to disarm what Winant describes as the Zionist “grief machine,” then in the days of Hamas’s attack and in the immediate aftermath, many on the left should have tried to avoid confirming Zionists’ worst suspicions—that indifference to Jewish death is rampant throughout the world.

The pose of radical hard-heartedness that Winant and others have struck is disastrous politics.

Yet the greatest failure of Winant’s position is ultimately not strategic—it is moral. Winant writes, “the genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for both sides is, tragically, not true.” I recommend that he experiment by uttering this statement to ordinary people on the street, or maybe repeating it to himself facing a mirror, so that he might come to realize its monstrous meaning.

One way of understanding Israel that I think should not be controversial is to say that it is a machine for the conversion of grief into power. The Zionist dream, born initially from the flames of pogroms and the romantic nationalist aspirations so common to the nineteenth century, became real in the ashes of the Shoah, under the sign “never again.” Commemoration of horrific violence done to Jews, as we all know, is central to what Israel means and the legitimacy that the state holds—the sword and shield in the hands of the Jewish people against reoccurrence. Anyone who has spent time in synagogues anywhere in the world, much less been in Israel for Yom HaShoah or visited Yad Vashem, can recognize this tight linkage between mourning and statehood.

This, on reflection, is a hideous fact. For what it means is that it is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.

Most important for me and also for my brother is that his death won’t be used to kill innocent people. And sadly, my government is using cynically the death of people to just kill—they promised it’s going to bring us security, but of course it’s not security. They always tell us, if we’re going to kill enough Palestinians, it’s going to be better for us. But of course it never brings us peace and it never brings us better lives, it just brings more and more terror and more and more people killed, like my brother. And I don’t want anything to happen to people in Gaza like it happened to my brother, and I’m sure he wouldn’t have either.

But as Katsman observes, it is not up to them. The state will do—already is doing—what it does with Jewish grief: transmute it into violence.

The appetite for the most grotesque images of violence against Israelis is so ravenous—leading to the repetition of dubious claims of mass beheading and rape that have the appearance of blood libels—because the apparatus of state grief runs so hot. It demands raw material. Its power, in turn, is such that the most ringing dissents calling instead for peace and humane mourning for all—like Eric Levitz’s and Joshua Leifer’s—nevertheless resonate only as whimpers of sentiment.

hey are participating, presumably without intent, in a new Red Scare being prepared not against stray callous advocates of Hamas, but against all who defend the right of Palestinians to live, and to live as equals.

There is an unmistakable effort to push the pro-Palestinian left, including the Jewish pro-Palestinian left, beyond the pale by weaponizing grief, yielding such darkly comical scenes as German politicians refusing to speak to Bernie Sanders, whose family died in the Shoah, to mark sufficient deference to Jewish death. Such is the power of the Israeli grief machine: it authorizes Germans to tell Jews that they are mourning wrong.

The significance of this fact is that, in the several days that we spent arguing about whether the left was sufficiently decent about Hamas’s victims, Israel geared up its genocide machine—which it now is releasing. Presumably sometime next week, Western leaders will begin to express concerns, by which time it will be too late.

The genuine humane sentiment that it is possible to grieve equally for those on both sides is, tragically, not true. One side has an enormous grief machine, the best in the world, up and running, feeding on bodies and tears and turning them into bombs. The other is starved for grief.

The Israeli government doesn’t care if you, a principled person, perform your equal grief for all victims: it will gobble up your grief for Jews and use it to make more victims of Palestinians, while your balancing grief for Palestinians will be washed away in the resulting din of violence and repression.

Who can begrudge tears for those lost to violence? Nevertheless, how to grieve, what meaning to give those tears, is cruelly a political question whether we like it or not.

It is a high threshold—and right now, perhaps implausible—to imagine that every shiva might become an occasion to curse the state that has made Jews, of all people, into genocidaires. Nonetheless, it is the one that must be met by we Jews who wish to keep fidelity with the full meaning of “never again.”

“We’re the side that thinks we should be coherent,” she says, in answer to a question about why we don’t learn from recycled panics past. “Nobody else is burdened by the idea of coherence.”

Taking the time to stress-test my position in accordance with my professed political beliefs – which sounds obvious but is rarer than ever these days – was immediately calming. I could be asked to condemn Hamas until the cows come home but it wouldn’t change the only coherent conclusion according to my political framework: that Palestine must be free. The illegal occupation must end. It is the root of the violence.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the most influential Israeli politician of our times and the country’s longest-tenured prime minister, was so terrified by the prospect of a Palestinian state, he told his party members as recently as 2019 that bolstering and funding Hamas was a key strategy in thwarting that future and dividing the Palestinian population.

To bring up this context, in an age where political incoherence reigns, is to attract accusations of ‘whataboutery’. That term, fittingly, was created in the 1970s by proponents of continued British occupation in Northern Ireland, wishing to dismiss the political arguments for Irish independence on the basis of the methods used by the IRA.

Incoherence is, to me, those who don’t identify as Zionists sharing calls to denounce senseless civilian murder, yet remaining silent on the thousands dead at the hands of the Israeli state - and the conditions that gave rise to their deaths. Incoherence is denying these killings are equivalent, or relevant, to the Hamas attacks. Incoherence is arguing that increased blockades and carpet bombing millions of people will restore security for Israel and save lives.

That question of how we recuperate this humanity is ultimately an organizing question. People have repeated over and over again over the last few days that you “cannot tell Palestinians how to resist.” To me, it seems there is a very literal dimension to this axiom: They are not asking. Part of what has made the experience of this event feel so different from the status quo—and so different to Palestinians and Jews—comes from the fact that Palestinians were undeniably the actors, for once, not the acted upon. The protagonists of the story. I consider it an enormous failure of our movements that we have not been able to build a vehicle for that kind of reversal in any other way thus far.

There is no formidable political formation that I know of that can hold the political subjectivity of both Jews and Palestinians in this moment without simply attempting to assimilate one into the other. No place where Jews and Palestinians who agree on the basics of Palestinian liberation—right of return, equality, and reparations—are poised to turn the synthesis of these two subjectivities into a coherent strategy.

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