How do liberals respond to war in Israel?
Without trusted resources or institutions to guide us, it's up to you to ask questions.
Let’s start with the big picture: Israel, population 10 million, is fighting an unprovoked war that started on October 7th 2023 and has spread to seven fronts in countries representing well over 130 million people.
On October 6th 2023, there was a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Starting with the Hamas massacres on the 7th, there are now attacks on Israel from (1) Gaza, (2) the West Bank, (3) Lebanon, (4) Syria, (5) Iraq, (6) Yemen and (7) Iran. The US military has provided critical support during most of this period. No other countries have rallied to Israel except during the two Iran attacks.
It’s impossible to know the actual death count, but it seems that approximately 23,000 Palestinian civilians and over a 1,300 Israeli civilians have been killed, more than 17,000 Hamas militants are dead, there are around 30 living Israeli hostages held by either Palestinian civilian captors or Hamas terrorists. Nearly 1,000 Israeli soldiers have died, cumulatively, in the 10/7 massacres and ensuing war. Millions of civilians have been displaced in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon.
How do you react to this if you align more-or-less as a Western liberal, or just as someone who hates war?
Like some of you, I was raised as a classic 20th century liberal. My daily bread was the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism, gay rights and what we now call fighting income inequality, climate change and extreme housing costs. Add in environmentalism and labor rights, and you have excellent sustenance to nurture an ethics-based adult. Thanks parents!
Caring about others is the ideal ethical and political orientation. It’s universal, all people are holy and special, and badly needed in a world riven with poverty, greed and violence. Living a moral life also particularly resonates with traditional Jews. Since antiquity we’ve embraced our status as a tiny minority with no plans to proselytize — we stay in our ethnic lane by cultivating and studying our own culture, but, on the other hand, we dedicate ourselves to caring about others, knowing we have no plans to turn the entire world Jewish. We’re simply taught to care.
“The palace is burning” is my favorite Talmudic metaphor for this. Reductively, it means you’re obligated to put out a fire of stranger’s home. It’s a metaphor — the world is full of injustice, it’s our duty to fix it, a job we’ll never fully accomplish, but can never stop trying.
Read Jonathan Sacks’s A Letter In the Scroll for a infinitely more cogent explanation.
This is a long way of saying I’m a liberal. Or at least I started out that way.
So how do we semi/quasi/dedicated liberals respond to the most media-covered war in history that upends lives at school boards as far away as California, to say nothing of the horrors in the region?
Normally I’d say you should read multiple sources of the news and if you’re still in school, choose classes to gain insights.
But not this war.
How can you understand it when otherwise excellent news institutions endlessly predict Palestinian mass starvation — which hasn’t happened, but there have been mass inoculations against polio. Most importantly, how do we process the loss of civilian life?
Despite what you read daily in our best newspapers, Israel hasn’t murdered over 44,000 Palestinian civilians. If that is indeed a true number, it seems like a little less than half of those people were terrorists, making this war one of the lowest ratios of civilian to combatant deaths in history.
Despite the keffiyeh crews at Columbia and Harvard, the only genocide in the Middle East is regularly attempted by Arab armies and militias against the tiny Jewish minority. How do I know? Hamas, Hezbollah and the entire government of Iran literally tells you this is their plan. For decades.
Middle Eastern genocidal destruction of Jewish life is not news. After all, modern radical Islam is the inheritor of Nazism.
You won’t know this by reading mainstream news.
You can dive into the Times of Israel, Dan Senor’s Call Me Back podcast (which is the best coverage of this war, bar none) and The Atlantic for more accurate information, but these are exceptions.
It gets worse. Most academic institutions have shifted from being institutions of higher learning into theocracies of DEI activism dedicated to eradicating settler-colonialists — which, by definition, is everyone on the planet. If you haven’t lived in the same place for 10,000 years, please raise your hand.
I’m sure I sound extremist when I talk about colleges, I loved going to UC Santa Cruz and Stanford, but ask yourself why faculty members now join their students when screaming at Jews on campus. Why are some the presidents of our most hallowed schools dropping like flies, along with their funding and the prestige of their degrees?
Do you really want to hire a recent Harvard grad with no reservations, or would you start asking hard questions?
If you look at K-12 schools, I’ll show you an ever lengthening list of Title VI Office of Civi Rights investigations at school districts across the country.
OK, so you can’t read the news or look to schools to help understand the war. What about the arts? For me, the best of art gives me new ways of understanding what it is to be alive.
If you hope novelists, playwrights, sculptors or filmmakers will bring their own insights to this war, you will be disappointed. Our cultural leading lights have succumbed to cancel culture, antisemitic tropes, or demands for freedom for a people who don’t seem to want it, at least not how Western liberals conceive of freedom, no matter how often they tell Palestinians it’s in their best interest.
The news, universities and artists won’t help. At best they relay disinformation, at worst they advocate for Islamic totalitarianism because they think it’s chic. I wish I was kidding.
Either way, you’re back at square one.
But there is good news. You can ask questions.
Before I get there, let’s set a ground rule. You can’t question legitimacy.
Israelis exist. Palestinians exist. Demanding that this reality change based on whatever framework-of-the-day you subscribe to won’t change reality. Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s be here now, to quote Ram Dass.
There are:
7.2 million Jewish Israeli citizens
2.1 million Arab Israeli citizens
3 million stateless West Bank Arabs, who have been calling themselves Palestinian since around the 1960s
2 million stateless Gaza Palestinians
7.2 million Jews and 7.1 million Arabs.
No one is going anywhere.
Now that we’ve solved irredentism, let’s get back to grappling with this war in a world with none of our typical institutional supports.
Here are three questions that may help.
—First Question—
What motivates the central players?
What do Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran want to achieve?
What does Israel want?
Israel has been consistent: they want the hostages back and for their citizens to live in peace even up to their borders, like they were on October 6th 2023. Like how people live in San Diego.
What about the other side? Are these resistance movements led by courageous civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and SNCC organizers, or are they close cousins of Al Qaeda, ISIS and Boko Haram?
At a high level, the Arab and Persian players share the same mission: global Islamic conquest (from Berkeley to Bahrain, not a joke) and in what passes for peace in the region, Iran transcends 1,400 years of hate between Sunnis and Shias by funding them all.
What let’s Iran pay for all this? I’d argue it’s the fecklessness of Western powers that haven’t toppled the regime, but on a more quotidian level, what keeps Iran going is your friendly fossil-fuel purchasing human, which is to say, everyone on earth.
You can complicate the question by asking what do Palestinians want? Since they lack democratic institutions to represent their interests, you have to ask them directly. As of September 2024, 54% majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza support the Hamas 10/7 attacks, while 35% do not, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy and Social Research.
With the enviable clarity numbers like these bring, we Americans wouldn’t be facing a nail biter election in a few days. Which is to say, this is a profound expression by average Palestinians of their support for Hamas murdering, raping and kidnapping Israeli civilians until all Israeli Jews are murdered or imprisoned. What do you call this? It rhymes with pesticide.
Keep in mind we do have a barometer of Palestinian democratic expression. In what were universally praised as fair and legitimate legislative elections in 2006, Gazans overwhelmingly elected Hamas.
—Question 2—
I don’t care! All this death is terrible, it’s too much! Israel has gone too far!
OK, you’re cheating. Let’s ask this as a question:
What is a nation’s moral response to horrific attacks on its civilians by terrorists who use all people, captors and their own civilians, as human shields?
It’s grim to discuss, but if Israel was truly going too far and attacking the 2 million Gazans indiscriminately, the death toll would match the population — God forbid to even think of such a thing.
Think of this: Israel was attacked by the rulers of Gaza and thousands of civilians. Israel is now fighting back — while providing millions of pounds of food and supplies to the very people it’s fighting, much of which is stolen. Has this ever happened in world history?
War is hell. It’s really bad. But it’s less bad than seeing your family raped, murdered or kidnapped until you too succumb to attack. If that’s the threat that’s literally at your door, you’re obligated to wage war until your family and you are secure.
Despite what settler-colonialist studies majors tell you, this is the story of the world. The palace is on fire. Ideally, people will stop setting the fires. Japan suffered unimaginable tragedy in World War II. We’re still debating if using atomic weapons was the right nove, but what we’re not debating is if we should give Japan Hawaii as compensation, or maybe giving them all our nukes.
Not for nothing, Japan is now one of the wealthiest Westernized democracies on the planet. It lives in harmony with its neighbors, many of whom are totalitarian states armed to the teeth. Was our response in the Pacific theater disproportionate — or, is all war bad, so if you have to engage when attacked, you fight to win, stop when there’s a surrender, and hopefully partner with people you vanquished to rebuild — if they’re dedicated to change. If not, you fight them again.
You don’t need a bachelor’s degree in [insert marginalized group name] studies that costs $320,000 to figure this out.
—Last Question—
What would a Free Palestine look like?
Political extremists on the left and right live in utopian and dystopian fantasy worlds. Everything is going to hell, our nation is profoundly unjust — and your group is the only one who can make fix it. This is AOC and Bernie Sanders as much as it is Trump.
But you’re dedicated to the real world. The goal for many on the left is a Free Palestine. It’s snappy, it’s hard to argue with, it means you can wear a cool headscarf to a bar on Ramadan (I saw this in Brooklyn, still cracks me up) but no, it doesn’t give you permission to wear a feather headdress on Thanksgiving. Good luck keeping this all straight.
What would a Free Palestine look like? Would Free Palestine be like Syria, Egypt, or maybe like Burning Man but forever? Would it be like Columbia University with free vegan meals as long your high net worth parents paid for them in advance and promised to never follow you on Instagram? Would it be like the ISIS caliphate?
Does advocating for Palestinian liberation — Gaza has been free of Israel since 2005 and the PLO has been running half of the West Bank since 1995 — require Palestinian democracy, or is blood-soaked theocracy with very few Pride parades the goal?
If you don’t think it’s important to answer this, then you don’t seem to care very much about the people you plan to liberate. And if you don’t care about them, why is anyone listening to you?
War is tragedy. Grappling with these questions reminds me where I land: Am Yisrael Chai. The People of Israel Live. That’s the literal translation of the cri de couer. Note that no one has to die for Israel to live.
This, to me, is the ultimate takeaway of the war. Everyone is there already. Why not welcome them, or even ignore them, instead of attacking?