Dear friends,
After months of considering all manner of domestic political starting points, events in Israel-Palestine have moved me to finally launch this Substack newsletter.
This is not meant to be a personal essay, but some context is in order. Context is central to the ongoing purpose of Radical Sense.
I write from northern Israel, on Day 7 of the Israel-Hamas War. I’m here with my partner of five years, Judy Peres, visiting her daughter and her family. In an abundance of caution, I won’t say exactly where we are, but will say that we consider ourselves to be in a safe location. That said, the noise of fighter jets—which is not normal where we are—has been virtually constant since Sunday. I assume that they have been patrolling the Lebanese border. However, we’ve not heard any sirens warning us of incoming rocket or missile attacks, and have been able to go about business pretty much as usual while staying close to home.
We arrived in Israel two weeks ago, and were scheduled to return to Chicago yesterday, with a four-day stopover in Stockholm. The Tel Aviv to Stockholm leg of our return was cancelled three days ago, and three subsequent bookings have been confirmed and, shortly thereafter, cancelled by the airlines.
Such is the situation when one is trying to leave a war zone.
(Up-to-date details on our travel situation can be found at the end of this post, for those who are interested.)
I am a secular gentile, but have been engaged with the Israel-Palestine issue for virtually my entire life, having grown up in an extended neighborhood in Omaha that was home to a large number of Jewish families who were my family’s neighbors and whose children were my classmates and friends. I came of age and formed my political consciousness around the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and followed those events closely. In the early 1990s, I began to study in depth the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, my curiosity piqued by the First Palestinian Intifada and the Oslo Peace Process, and nourished by the work of Israel’s “new historians.” That study project continues.
Judy is a dual American-Israeli citizen, who spent three years with her family in Tel Aviv as a young teenager, then returned to Israel to study in Jerusalem after graduating high school in Chicago. She married an Israeli and gave birth to two daughters here. The family moved to Chicago in 1980, after the rise of the Likud party and the intensification of the Occupation. Her husband, an IDF veteran and reservist, did not want to be faced with the possibility of having to choose between enforcing the Occupation or resisting and going to jail. Judy’s parents emigrated to Israel after her father’s retirement from the Chicago Public School system. Israel is where they had wanted to be, and they both passed away here. Her younger daughter met and married an Israeli when he was a graduate student at Northwestern, and moved to Israel with him after he completed his doctorate. They have two young sons, also born here. Judy also has long-standing family, personal and professional relationships in Israel. Since moving back to the States, she has traveled regularly on trips like the one we are now on. This is the second trip we have taken together.
Israel-Palestine is a small and close-knit, beautiful, diverse and tragic place. Although my connection to this place might be perceived as abstract or academic, there is a strong emotional component to it. I presume to share in the personal and collective horror of what is happening here. It cannot be overstated. Neither can the absolute futility.
Hamas have committed an atrocious war crime, launching an undisciplined horde of armed fighters and non-military zealots at unarmed and lightly defended communities on the Gaza border with the expressed intention to massacre and abduct both civilians and soldiers. It seems impossible to discern an endgame for that operation, unless one assumes that it got out of control when it “succeeded” beyond its planners’ wildest expectations. Hamas, while celebrating its “great victory and clear conquest,” has hinted that this was the case. But this does not in any way excuse or justify their assault.
Late last night, the IDF warned residents of northern Gaza, and the UN refugee agency there, to move to the southern part of the Strip within 24 hours—an impossible task that invites a full-on humanitarian disaster. This is assumed to be in preparation for an even more intense aerial bombardment and ground assault that the UN, the WHO, many governments, and peace activists in Israel and abroad describe as “collective punishment.” It follows on the imposition of what the Israeli Defense Ministry publicly describes as a “siege,” depriving Gazans of shipments of food, fuel and water, and cutting off the meager electricity service Israel customarily provides. These actions are also war crimes.
As this posts, there are less than seven hours remaining until the Gazans’ evacuation window closes. Hamas have exhorted the population to resist the “Zionist propaganda” and remain in place. There are reports that they are physically preventing residents from evacuating, thus forcing them to serve as human shields.
Meanwhile, Israel is preparing to send hundreds of thousands of young, perfunctorily-trained conscripts into an urban warfare environment for which they are totally unprepared. They will pay the price for the failure of the state to protect its citizens. And all of the state’s actions threaten the lives of the hostages being held by Hamas in undisclosed locations throughout Gaza.
The conduct of both sides must be set in historical context and condemned unequivocally.
In coming days, I will try to express my humble opinion on some of the more confounding aspects of the disaster that has befallen this country, which might have been the Promised Land for all of its people and a truly universalist beacon for the rest of the world:
The “misconception” that for decades has gripped the political class and distracted the military leadership, leading to the Gaza debacle.
The role of the Occupation and the steadily increasing oppression of the Palestinians in precipitating Hamas’ turn to extreme violent resistance.
The prospects of a radically new paradigm for relations between Israel and the Palestinians that reverses more than seven decades of divide-and-conquer strategy meant to forestall the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The nuance missing from leftist critiques of Israel as a “settler-colonial” project and/or state.
What Israel is experiencing is the Manichean, zero-sum confrontation of extremist religious and religious-nationalist ideologies. A radical approach to the current conflict requires that the parties seek a way to reconcile the foundational, historical origins of the current conflict through the honest, brutal, good-faith practice of politics at its most humane and profound level.
Call me naive. The alternative is to cynically accept the corrupt and suicidal status quo as inevitable. One of the most objective-yet-heartfelt descriptions of this status quo I’ve read this week came from Ha’aretz correspondent Hanin Majadli:
As a Palestinian woman who sees and is sensitive to the injustices of the occupation and the terrible actions committed by the Israeli army against her people for years on a daily basis, and who writes about them in these pages, I know crimes when I see them and can say very clearly that they are morally unacceptable to me and I was horrified to witness them.
But I also see the context in which these atrocities occurred. I say this not in order to justify them, but to explain what most Israelis have refused to see for years and, as a result, now find themselves surprised and shocked. This is important now, because when there is what we call “quiet” here, no one is interested in talking about the Palestinians, and when there is no “quiet,” they want to flatten Gaza and everyone who lives there. This, unfortunately, is the Israeli emotional spectrum regarding Palestinians. And this circle needs to be broken.
Travel Update
As of Friday afternoon, only three carriers are flying in and out of Ben-Gurion Airport, all of them Israeli. They are booked solid. On Tuesday we were able to book business-class seats on an EL AL flight to Budapest next Tuesday, the only seats and soonest departure available. Yesterday, we managed to snag two seats on a flight leaving Saturday morning on one of the smaller carriers, getting us as far as Istanbul. If it happens, we’ll figure out how to proceed from there. Fingers crossed.
We assume that the Israeli airlines, as a matter of national pride, will continue to serve Ben-Gurion come hell or high water (the first of which now appears to be just around the corner).
Last evening we received word from the US State Department that we can avail ourselves of charter transportation to be scheduled for Americans wishing to leave Israel, beginning today. The options will be via air to Athens or Frankfurt, or by sea from Haifa to Cyprus. We would have no choice as to the destination, and would need to make our own arrangements for onward travel. There is certainly a very large group of Americans seeking assistance, and we have no idea where we stand in the queue.
So, we are safe and have three live options to make our way home. We look forward to seeing our friends and family in Chicago.