If You Don’t Think the Conflict Is Confusing, You Don’t Understand What’s Going On
And, if you are confused, here’s some explanation
In Part 1, I tried to speak a little bit for myself and lots of Jews I know, just to express some of what we’re feeling. Here in Part 2, I’ll try to explain how I see the complicated conflict as it is playing out politically and then in Part 3 I’ll try to explain the four completely different times that people are living in.
Some people think that the Israel-Hamas conflict is simple: whoever demonstrates more dead babies online wins. Dead and wounded babies are horrible, but — not least in the age of bot armies, AI, and a complete lack of platform moderation — this is obvious nonsense. But, in a sense, they are right. After all, one unchecked bulletin from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry about a hospital blast largely derailed a peace visit from President Biden.
The reason that the actual conflict around Gaza right now is so perplexing is that it exists simultaneously on three different physical scales. Individual, national, and global. Two of them are materially simple, one is extremely complex.
Online we are flooded with images of the individual. All news boils down to babies. Babies are injured or killed. It’s appalling and simple: Killing babies is wrong, anyone who hurts babies or supports people who do, must be a monster. We register our outrage. Our brains are wired that way. We don’t have room for nuance when we’re empathizing with wounded infants. The bots and troll armies know that humans work that way, the platform owners make money from the “engagement” — the cycle of outrage continues.
On a global level it’s also relatively simple. There are those who believe in the liberal world order — that all lives are worthwhile, that gender, race, religion and sexuality should not affect agency — and there are those who believe in the selfish pursuit of power. Yes, America and Europe have far more faults than they admit to but, as Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Again, it’s easy to see why selfish powerful people like Vladimir Putin or Ali Khameini use arms, information technology and anti-diplomacy to murder, destroy, and foster division.
On a national level things are impossible: the contemporary Middle East almost intractable. There are a few places that the two radically different scales of individual and global intersect in a way that helps autocracies profit from mass audiences. The most notable one is the area of the eastern Mediterranean around Israel.
It’s notable because, unlike India which gained its independence from Britain a year earlier and which also saw a (much larger) shameful mass emigration of Muslims, Israel has been in a constant state of existential threat since 1948. And, because Israel is the birthplace of Christianity, the homeland of the Jews and a holy city for Islam, it’s both a three way flashpoint and the home to the greatest density of foreign media in the world.
As most Israelis and most Jews around the world well know, there can be no lasting peace without a rapprochement with the surrounding nations and the Palestinians. And, as Amos Oz pointed out, the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is a struggle of "right against right.”
But, as Oz also pointed out, talking on the national level in 2002, there are two wars in the region “One is a just war, and the other is both unjust and futile.” For him, as for the majority of Jews around the world, struggles for Palestinian autonomy are just, terrorist attacks on civilians are unjust. He was talking at a time before most of the Arab monarchies and autocracies had even reached an uneasy peace with Israel — where we were a month ago.
Unfortunately, a situation where Saudi Arabia had good terms with Israel was an untenable threat for Saudi’s major rival for regional power. Whether Iran gave a specific go ahead or or just a general green light, they were fully behind the massacre of October 7. Iran directly runs Hezbollah, the terror organization across Israel’s northern border in Lebanon and funds Hamas, the terror organization that runs Gaza.
So Hamas vs Israel is a proxy war between Iran and the United States to make a point to Saudi Arabia to add to the proxy wars they are fighting in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Nigeria, and Lebanon. if it helps bring the whole world to war and takes the United States out of Ukraine and Iran’s business, so much the better.
But the complications of the actual facts on the ground over the last century are overruled on the one hand by misguided fervor and on the other, photos of babies. It’s so much easier to fix things in other places. It’s so easy to blame the hated foreigner, of another religion. It’s much harder to love your neighbour, fix your own government, learn about geopolitics, and reform the information stream.
At least that’s what Putin, Khamenei and Ismail Haniyeh are banking on.