My Baggage Check on Israel
Where I'm coming from when I write about what's happening in Gaza.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has written a few things about the war in Gaza since the October 7th attacks:
My assessment that outside opinion will have limited impact on Israel’s response;
My take on how it’s affected the U.S. foreign policy apparatus;
Notes on how unpopular the leaders of Israel and Gaza really are;
Some doubts about whether the conflict will spiral into a larger conflagration;
That said, it’s been a few weeks since the hard-working staff has written something about the war. And if I’m being honest, that is because I really don’t want to write much about it.
Why is that? This reminds me of Brian Beutler’s excellent point about the need for baggage checks as a writer. We all bring our own intellectual and personal baggage to any analysis we proffer. This baggage is not necessarily determinative; the idea that one can reduce a person’s intellectual musings to their biography is terribly reductive. On the other hand, the notion that one’s background has zero effect on writing is equally ludicrous.
That is particularly true for any international relations analyst writing about Israel and Gaza in the current moment. So let me just open up my bags and let you inspect them:1
I was born and raised in a Conservative Jewish household. My “Conservative” I mean the religious affiliation, not the political one. I went to Hebrew school after regular school rather than play Little League. I was Bar Mitzvahed, confirmed, and graduated from a Hebrew high school as well as my secular high school. In my Hebrew school education I was taught a version of Israeli history that was… let’s say “devoid of Benny Morris’ contributions to Israeli historiography.” We were taught that Israel willed itself into independence after the Holocaust. This happened despite the hostility of the entire Middle East region to the idea, winning wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Jews took a desert and made it into a land of milk and honey.2 There was no discussion of displaced Palestinians.
I may have been the only Jewish boy who grew up in Connecticut and yet did not go to either Jewish summer camp or Israel. I honestly do not know why — it might be that I never expressed much interest in going. I was the kind of kid who pretended to sleep in on Sundays in the hopes that I would not have to attend Hebrew school; my mother was the kind of Jewish mother who knew the exact amount of guilt to toss in my direction so that I would relent.
My Jewish identity was never in doubt, however, and it’s not a coincidence that the woman I nearly married and the woman I happily married are both Jewish. I found myself taking my Judaism more seriously during the year I lived and worked in Ukraine. It’s possible that the dearth of Jews there made me feel my own identity a bit more.
I started taking the religion dimensions of Judaism more seriously after attending a Rosh Hashanah service with my grandfather in my mid-twenties. The rabbi’s sermon that day was a close reading explaining the passage in Genesis about Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. It was the first time I engaged with Judaism on an intellectual level, and that has stayed with me since.
Meanwhile, in pursuing my Ph.D. in political science I had zero interest in studying the intricacies of Middle East. Specializing in international political economy meant that focusing on a particular area or region was unnecessary — and to the extent that it was I studied post-Soviet affairs. From afar, the Middle East field seemed riven by bitter internecine disputes (much like the region itself). In my teaching, I kept lectures and discussions about the Middle East to a minimum because the student response had the potential to trigger more heat than light.
The one and only time I sojourned to Israel came in 2010 for an intense Academic Exchange-sponsored trip. It lasted ten days and included multiple discussions with prominent Israelis and Palestinians. There were visits to Sderot, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Ramallah.
For many Jews, trips to Israel are a way of connecting more closely to a country that is supposed a safe haven. For me, it was a more alienating experience. Visiting Ramallah and seeing the West Bank in particular was a disturbing experience. I had alwaus been taught that Judaism was not a religion grounded in place — one could pray to God anywhere, not just at a synagogue. The Judaism in Israel, however, felt very much grounded in place. From the Western Wall onwards, it was all about place. Furthermore, the concrete walls separating the occupied territories from Israel proper were oppressive; the wait for Palestinian workers to cross into Israel was interminable.
Within Israel, the rapid growth of the Haredi Jewish population was clearly altering the character of Israeli democracy, shifting the median voter rightward. Everyone we met, Israeli and Palestinian alike, warned that the viability of the two-state solution was only going to last another 18 months, and sure enough they were right. While Palestinian self-governance has been corrupt, It was clear even back then that Netanyahu had no interest in a long-term peace deal with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s decision last year to form a coalition with far-right extremists3 was merely confirmation for me that he can and will do whatever he can to stay in power.
Until 2016, my personal experience with anti-Semitism was blessedly minimal, on the average of one personal incident every decade or so. As the Trump campaign reached its full flower, however, I found myself on the receiving end of daily anti-Semitic vitriol on Twitter. After Trump was elected it subsided but did not disappear. But I won’t lie, it made me think about Israel in a slightly different way — as a theoretical safe haven.
Everything about the current war in Gaza has been horrific. The brutality of the original Hamas attack is beyond comprehension. Hamas’ deliberate strategy was to provoke an extreme reaction by the Israeli military, and they have succeeded in that task. The Israeli response has been brutal on an industrial scale. I do not really trust the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry for casualty counts.4 I do trust the press coverage on the ground, however, and there is no way to read recent accounts in the New York Times or NPR — or this interview with the head of mission for Doctors Without Borders in Palestine — and not be appalled at the loss of civilian life.
I wish the Israeli wartime cabinet would treat Benjamin Netanyahu the same way the British treated Neville Chamberlain in 1940, but it does not seem that this will happen. So on the one hand I see an Israeli leadership that I do not trust and yet fellow Jews expect me to defend its actions. On the other hand, I have had to sit through sessions in which colleagues talk about how Israel’s very creation was an act of “settler colonialism” and bite my tongue in response because debating that claim is an express ticket to madness.
I see a growing groundswell of global anti-Semitism coming from both the left and the right, and the place that is ostensibly supposed to be the safe haven for Jews committing moral suicide.
So yeah, I can and will put on my international relations hat and analyze the situation as dispassionately as possible. It’s what I have been trained to do. But there is no way to think about this situation without my baggage. And there is a lot of it.
Oh, my comments are closed for this post? Yes they most certainly are. I wonder why that is….
The 1982 war in Lebanon went unmentioned.
Click here for a sense of what that constituency believes.
This is colored by my research on the loss of life during the 1990s Iraq sanctions episode. In retrospect it is quite clear that Iraqi authorities successfully hoodwinked outside observers into massively exaggerating the estimated loss of life due to the sanctions.