The War in Gaza - Dinner Table Digest № 65
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
Today’s Digest features some stories related to the recent hostilities in Israel and Palestine. There is a lot for all of us to learn about the conflict, and so I have set out to find stories that will deepen my understanding of the complexity of the conflict.
Sections: Gaza Siege is No Solution / The Nakba / Doomsday Diaries / The Left and Hamas
Laying Siege to Gaza Is No Solution - Yousef Munayyer - Foreign Policy
In this piece Yousef Munayyer lays out some of the consequences of an Israeli siege of Gaza. Needless to say, it’s not pretty.
Israel has sought, time and again, to figure out what to do with Gaza—even before Israel’s ground withdrawal from the territory in 2005. Yitzhak Rabin, who was Israel’s prime minister in the early 1990s, once infamously said: “I wish I could wake up one day and find that Gaza has sunk into the sea.” The 2 million pesky Palestinians who demand to be free from the cage Israel confines them in continue to keep Israeli leaders up at night.
The events of recent days clearly indicate that Israel’s military efforts have failed. And it isn’t for lack of trying: Israeli military campaigns in Gaza have wrought death and destruction on its besieged population for years. Each time, Palestinian fighters are killed, as are scores more Palestinian civilians. Presumably, many of the Palestinian fighters who took part in this weekend’s assault were not alive when Israel first started its campaign of assassinating Palestinian leaders in Gaza in 1993.
It’s no secret that Israeli leadership doesn’t just want to ‘deal’ with the ‘Palestinian Problem,’ but instead simply wants to eliminate Palestinians from what it considers its sovereign territory:
Though Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories for over half a century, Israeli violence against Palestinians has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. International, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights groups have all concluded that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, and the United Nations said 2022 was the deadliest year on record for Palestinians killed in the West Bank by Israeli troops. Killings in 2023 are on pace to surpass those numbers: More than 200 West Bank Palestinians have so far died in the Israeli line of fire this year.
Israeli settlers are also running amok in the West Bank, carrying out mass attacks that even Israeli officials have deemed “pogroms.” The current Israeli government is the most far-right in the country’s history and includes politicians such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was considered too dangerous to even enlist in the Israeli military. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who was handed the reins of the Defense Ministry’s civil administration, putting him in charge of large parts of the West Bank—called for wiping out Palestinian villages.
He quotes one Israeli politician as tweeting this past week, “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” If there is any place for westerners to start learning about the conflict in Israel and Palestine, the Nakba is it.
The Nakba of 1948 - How Palestinians Were Expelled From Their Homes - Vox
Doomsday Diaries - Sarah Aziza - The Baffler Magazine
There’s been a lot of ink spilled lately over the latest violence in Israel and Palestine, but there has been even more blood spilled. To a certain extent, I have chosen to remain ignorant of the ins-and-outs of the conflict in Palestine, simply because there is only so much global conflict that I can take before my brain breaks. That said, I recognize that I have a lot of learning to do, and so I thought I’d start by reading these diary entries from Palestinian-American Sarah Aziza. They reveal a person who is doesn’t understand why the world doesn’t see Israel for the aggressor and oppressor that it is, rather than a seeming perpetual victim. While each entry has no date, they are often independent thoughts, with themes of anguish, despair, along with hope and determination running through the lot of them. Here are a few entries worth highlighting
It will take days to learn the final tally of Israelis killed by Hamas. But by the time the number crosses one hundred, I am panicked. As my stomach churns over images of the dead, I am certain they are already being metabolized by the Zionist machine. I dread the way the violence—both actual and fabricated—will be leveraged to launch a century-sized arsenal into a human cage. This is the cruel calculus of our oppression: my compassion for the slain is shadowed by the towering numbers of our already, and soon-to-be, dead.
“They’re calling us terrorists, Sarah.” My father’s voice is bewildered, wounded. For thirty years he has waited, sure that, one day soon, America will love him back. We are speaking on Sunday, October 8, and the last thirty-six hours have dragged through us like teeth. “They called it this word, massuh . . . massacre?” His mouth fumbles the English word. “Massacre, Baba. That means killing on a mass scale. And you know what? I think it was a massacre . . . There were a lot of people killed.” In the kitchen, my Jewish partner stands soberly over the stove, making food we will not taste. My father sighs. We flounder in complex grief.
It is a sorrow lifetimes larger than words. One wide enough to acknowledge Jewish pain, both recent and historical. As a Palestinian, I refuse to mimic the oppressor by denying the humanity of the deceased. But this sadness sits inside the crater of certainty that the world will still refuse ours. It is a chasm carved by decades of discourse in which only certain bodies bleed. Inside this consensus, there is no violent dispossession of our land, no acceptable form in which we may resist our many slow and instant deaths. It refuses the fact that for decades we have buried hundreds of slain for every one Israeli killed. In this selective, Western gaze, there is only our barbarism, which must be brutally contained. …
Some readers are waiting for me to denounce violent resistance. They imagine that without this assurance, which they ask of no Israeli, I do not have the right to speak. They believe they are owed a version of Palestinian which surrenders everything white, Western liberalism affords our oppressors, and itself: the right to exist, the right to self-defense. They have criminalized our nonviolent forms of protest, killed peaceful demonstrators, imprisoned our poets, and assassinated our journalists. They do not believe in our historical or contemporary suffering. At the same time, they believe it is our natural state—part of the hazy, brown landscape of abjection in the so-called “Arab World.” It is an abjection we must accept, silently and upon the pain of our deaths.
And our dead—oh, our dead. Sometimes I wonder if we die at all. When hundreds of peaceful Gazan protesters were mowed down by Israeli soldiers, we counted them alone. This year, up to the day before the Hamas attacks, Palestinians were murdered at a rate of roughly one per day—more than two hundred by October 6. For us, even funerals can become murder scenes, or grounds for soldier assaults.
If a murderer does not bother to cover their tracks, did they really kill at all?
This piece has given me a lot to think about, that is for sure.
A Left That Refuses to Condemn Mass Murder Is Doomed - Eric Levitz - New York Magazine
I was telling a friend the other day that I often feel like I don’t belong on the political left. I’m definitely not a right-winger, and I am occasionally centrist, but for the most part, my political and economic ideas fall squarely on the moderate left; I consider myself to be a sometime-democratic socialist, sometime-social democrat. And yet, much to my dismay, when tragedies like the Hamas attacks on Israel occur, many on the left are quick to call attention to Israel’s war crimes, while neglecting to mention, let alone condemn, the war crimes of Hamas. In Ontario, there has been a lot of furor over the comments of now ex-Ontario NDP Member of Provincial Parliament Sarah Jama, who not only neglected to mention Hamas in her condemnation of the hostilities in Palestine, but openly flouted the norms of partisan politics by essentially going rogue, leaving her party to clean up the mess. Upon her ejection from caucus, many ONDP activists have been openly critical of the party, some of them moving their donations away from the party headquarters and to Sarah Jama’s Hamilton organizing committee. While I have already commented on the situation elsewhere, the conflict here in Ontario shows that there is something to the idea that left-wing activists, in their support of the Palestinian people, have neglected to sufficiently condemn the terrorism of Hamas. Eric Levitz, writing in the New York Magazine, says this:
The West’s apologists for Palestinian war crimes have far less power than its apologists for Israel’s brutal domination of the Palestinian territories and discrimination against Arab citizens of Israel. But precisely because left-wing critics of Israeli apartheid lack power, we must not forfeit our moral authority. For decades, the Israeli government’s knee-jerk defenders have sought to equate opposition to the occupation with contempt for the security of Jewish Israelis. Now, a loud minority of Palestine’s self-styled champions are blithely affirming this smear, insisting that solidarity with Palestine requires callous indifference toward (or, at the very least, silence about) the mass murder of Jews. In so doing, they are making it easier for their adversaries to discredit and marginalize the broader cause of Palestinian liberation.
And that cause has never been more vital. It is therefore imperative for progressives to disavow all apologia for Hamas’s atrocities and for the broader public to understand that the left’s analysis of the conflict’s origins, and its prescriptions for its resolution, are wholly extricable from the blood lust of a loud minority of pseudo-radicals.
If the left gives up the moral high ground and succumbs to the temptation to tacitly support Hamas, as if Hamas is a group of anti-colonial freedom fighters, they will never have the opportunity to have their voices heard when it comes to supporting the average Palestinian living under Israeli occupation. Levitz continues,
What we actually witnessed was not “the Palestinians” mounting a violent struggle for justice but a far-right theocratic organization committing mass murder in the name of blood-and-soil nationalism. Hamas’s project is antithetical to the left’s foundational values of secularism, universalism, and egalitarianism. And it is also completely at odds with the progressive vision for Palestinian liberation. Western radicals’ predominant prescription for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is a “one-state solution,” in which Israelis and Palestinians all enjoy democratic equality in a single binational state. Hamas’s atrocities have not advanced this ideal but set it back, lending credence to those who insist a one-state solution is a recipe for ceaseless civil war. This weekend was not a triumph for the left’s project in Palestine but a disaster.
Far from being comrades in the struggle against colonialism, Hamas is actually an organization of theocratic Muslim extremists, comparable in nature to the Taliban in Afghanistan. By failing to condemn the terrorism of Hamas and disavowing their contributions to the struggle, left-wing voices are left hanging in the breeze.
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