A Reply to Center-Left Takes on Gaza, Israel, & the Protests
A Reply to Center-Left Takes on Gaza, Israel, & the Protests
Using a recent column by TPM's Josh Marshall
Introduction
I am a long-time reader and subscriber to Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo (TPM) news service. I started reading its excellent coverage of the Iraq War some time around 2003. All as a way to say, I write this as an FOS (or friend of the site), and though this piece is largely centered around a trenchant critique of one of Marshall’s recent posts, I plan to remain a reader and subscriber into the foreseeable future.
I point this out so it is clear that I am taking Marshall to task precisely because I think he is one of the sharpest and most astute observers of US politics. As such, it is ‘worth’ critiquing his piece because I hope it can illuminate some of the slippery ways the ongoing assault on Gaza (and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more generally) is being covered and discussed. Further, I find that Marshall’s column aptly encapsulates the center-left view on these matters, making it all the more useful as a vehicle to advance a critique of this outlook more generally.
This lengthy essay began when I downloaded a PDF of the column and annotated it with my comments and critiques. The essay grows out of expanding (obviously significantly) on those initial comments. To be honest, as I started to do some of the basic research I do when writing about current events, I really found myself digging deeper and deeper into the story I wanted to tell and the arguments I wished to forward.
Marshall’s column is ostensibly written as a reflection on the recent protests and campus turmoil in the US. But as we will see this serves as a vehicle for Marshall to explore wider issues tied to the conflict, both at present and historically.
In short, the analysis and arguments follow the flow of Marshall’s original piece. Given this structure, the discussion begins with a focus on the protests, but the heart of his analysis (and, therefore, my critique) emerges in the latter half.
These are undoubtedly complex matters that no one has all the answers to. At the same time, I think we can always strive to improve our understanding and cast a little more light on this dim terrain.
I always tell my students that writing is not simply translating your ideas into print but a process that helps to develop what you think or how you think about something in the first place. I have learned and developed my thinking so much just in the process of working on this piece. It is my great hope that this can be passed on to you in even some small way.
And though it may seem vain and self-congratulatory, a great deal of the laborious research done to produce this work comes in the latter half, so please be sure to give it a look. My vanity aside, I do think there is some value in looking into some of the things I was able to dig up in developing the analysis and crafting my arguments.
[note: though a large portion is quoted below, since the original column is behind a paywall, if you wish to read it in full, send me a pm via Substack, and I can send you the pdf]
So, let’s commence with a passage from the beginning of the column with Marshall discussing the campus protests. I have added subheadings to give a sense of the central topics covered.
The Protests
The groups which are spearheading most of these protests — specifically, Students for Justice in Palestine but also others —support the overthrow of the current Israeli state and the expulsion of at least some substantial percentage of the current Jewish Israeli population. This is sometimes talked about as though this is envisioned without people actually being killed at a mass scale or under the pretense that Jewish Israelis have other home countries they can relocate to. But that’s not how overthrowing a whole society works…
Is this anti-Semitic? Not as such. It’s a political view that the Israeli state never should have come into existence in the first place and that the events of 1948 should simply be reversed by force, if a solution can’t be voluntarily agreed to. But since a bit over half of Jews in the world live in Israel, that is a demand or an aim that can’t help but seem wildly threatening to the vast majority of Jews in the world, certainly the ones in Israel but by no means only them. [my emphasis]
Firstly, I would presume the ongoing systematic destruction and killing in one of the major Palestinian population centers may even be a touch more 'distressing' to them. Additionally, the government currently carrying out the campaign in Gaza is chock-full of individuals who, in part, built their entire political identity around ensuring that a Palestinian state will never exist, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
What’s more, there are numerous high-ranking officials in the current government openly calling for the 'relocation' of a large swath of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank to be coupled with Israel’s full annexation of the West Bank. There is more to discuss in the vein which will get to a bit later.
But for now, it’s worth noting that though Marshall does grant that these views are not antisemitic per se, he does find them to be seemingly part and parcel to what he will call ‘eliminationist’ views. To be clear, he is referring to those calling for the elimination of the state of Israel, not all Jewish people. As a rhetorical device, it allows him to clearly present the leadership of the protest movements as menacing to the Jewish people while sidestepping the right-wing trope of equating all criticism of Israel as antisemitic.
In sum, in just the first few paragraphs of Marshall’s piece, we have already been invited to participate in constructing a whopper of false equivalences. Namely, apparently, university students chanting ‘down with Israel’ or whatever is not only equivalent to but perhaps even more distressing than the systematic killing and physical destruction of the small plot of land inhabited by a sizable portion of the global Palestinian population. Needless to say, this is being carried out by one of the most advanced institutions of destruction and killing on the planet (aka, the IDF).
There’s also quite a lot of express valorization of Hamas and the October 7th massacres in southern Israel. That, again, can’t help but seem pretty menacing and threatening to most Jews. But I don’t think this is as important as the first point I noted. The valorization is mainly the kind of revolutionary cosplay that is often part and parcel of college activism.
Again, here, one cannot help but wonder how the widespread institutional and public support for Israel, from the Biden administration on down, would not be perceived as an ongoing threat to Palestinian Americans, the wider Arab American community, or the even wider Muslim American community.
To be clear, I certainly stand strongly against any violence or acts of intimidation directed at Jewish students or staff members. Similarly, I have no doubt that Marshall would feel the same about any such behavior directed at members of the Arab American community.
But again, the point is that while there is a dedicated effort to articulate how certain behavior by some participants in campus protests may be menacing to the Jewish community, there seems to be much less thought put into the specter of menace emerging from bearing witness to the horrific, and ongoing acts of violence, being carried out by the Israeli state.
Lastly, in this passage, we get the first taste of Marshall’s barely concealed dismissiveness vis-a-vis the central organizers of the current movement across US campuses. Here, he is referring to some factions within this coalition that have extolled the acts carried out by Hamas on October 7.
For what it’s worth, I would certainly not count myself among this number, but to trot out the ole revolutionary cosplay tag speaks to a wider sort of bemused disdain that animates the piece as a whole. Choosing to stand firm in the face of marching, club-wielding columns of riot police, facing, at times, arrest, potential suspension, or even expulsion does not necessarily make one ‘right,’ but it does seem to bely the notion that these are just kids playing dress up.
Moreover, as we shall see, Marshall himself seems quite eager to slip into the costume of the ‘reasonable adult in the room,’ who really gets ‘how things work.’
Zionism
This gets us to the definition of Zionism. People have used this term to mean many different things over the last century. But the simplest and broadest definition is that it was a historical movement to re-found a Jewish state in Israel-Palestine. Understood as such, Zionism is essentially moot. There is a Jewish-majority state in Israel-Palestine and has been for 75 years. All Zionism really means is that state continuing to exist.
Wow, this is a shockingly shabby set of propositions from an exceedingly sharp person. It also gives us the opportunity to bore a bit deeper into what Marshall is really getting at with this piece and the extremely flimsy pillars his arguments rest upon.
On the one hand, I do get what Marshall is angling at here. Zionism was centered on the creation of a Jewish majority state, and one exists and has existed. But to call the matter moot in the sense that jibes with the Oxford dictionary’s second definition of the word [i.e., having little or no practical relevance] represents an act of an almost impressive degree of steely ignorance.
Undoubtedly, an actual appreciation of the politics within Israel over the last several decades makes it abundantly clear that the dictionary’s first definition of moot [i.e., subject to debate, dispute, or uncertainty] is far more operable and analytically relevant.
Firstly, Zionism can be understood as bound up with the emergence of nationalism as a collection of wider political projects to engineer a cohesive mass polity out of disparate groups. These movements were geared towards creating the mass political communities that define present-day global political dynamics.
Of course, Zionism is quite distinct from ‘French’ or ‘German’ nationalist movements during this period. Importantly, the centuries of abuse and violence towards Jewish communities across Europe were a central driving force from its inception. But it does share key conceptual attributes.
Namely, nationalist projects are always evolving and open to political contestation—ranging from debate and ideological battle to actual mass violence. Put differently, the founding of the state of Israel makes Zionism no more irrelevant than the founding of the modern Italian state renders Italian nationalism irrelevant. Marshall’s bold pronouncement of Zionism as immaterial strikes me as akin to daft claims that the establishment of ‘formal’ independence of a former colony renders questions of colonialism settled, or moot, as Marshall would put it.
As such, I find this rhetorical move all the more galling because I know him to be quite an informed and sharp observer of Israeli politics. Indeed, I have profited a great deal from his analysis along these lines quite a few times over the years.
But again, here, this framing is just a mess at best and profoundly misleading at worst. This is the case if for no other reason than that for decades, a central axis in Israeli politics has centered around what the state’s ultimate boundaries should be. In a very real sense, the arc of Israeli politics is inexorably bound up with the question of what the actual physical scope of the Jewish state should encompass.
As if the radical settler movement, which is a major player in the current Israeli government, is not engaged in a very much ongoing Zionist project? Of course, there are large portions of Jewish Israelis who wholly reject the full annexation of the West Bank [and though he is not Israeli, I would certainly include Marshall in this camp].
But that is just the point: what the ultimate shape the state of Israel should take, geographically, socially, and politically, is very much still a central, if not definitional, question. Indeed, as we will see, Marshall’s chief bone to pick with the protest movement centers around his view that the two-state solution is the only way to peace.
Well, given that nothing close to an actual Palestinian state exists, if Marshall truly believes that the two-state solution is the only ‘rational’ path, then it seems that view necessitates the understanding that the final status of even Israel’s borders remains very much a fluid question far from being resolved.
Further, as we have seen the rise of Orthodox political power, the emergence of ‘eliminationist’ politics at the center of the Israeli government, and continuing assaults on the rights of Arab Israelis [roughly 20% of the population], all seem to a point to a situation where the final outcome of the Zionist project is still very much up in the air. I mean, the fact that numerous actors and parties within Israeli politics adopt Zionism as their organizing ideology offers pretty clear evidence that the term and its ‘ultimate’ meaning or expression remain very much ongoing and fluid.
And to be clear, when I speak of eliminationist politics in Israel, I am referring to the countless public comments by top government officials, including the ‘Decisive Plan’ devised by current Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich—whose detail also includes a post at the defense ministry as well as being appointed by PM Netanyahu to oversee settlement policy in the West Bank.
This ‘plan’ is chock-full of startling yet deliberate language, including [I will italicize Smotrich’s words to avoid confusing them with Marshall’s text].
The continued existence of the two conflicting national aspirations in our small piece of territory will ensure many more years of bloodshed and armed conflict. Only when one of the sides concedes, willingly or by force, and forgoes its national aspirations in the Land of Israel, will the desired peace come about and civilian coexistence become possible.
I hope that readers will agree with the statement that as Jews, we ought not give up our national aspiration for an independent state in the Land of Israel—the only Jewish state in the world. As such, the party that will have to give up its aspiration to realize a national identity in the Land of Israel is the Arab one. The reason we are condemned to a never-ending cycle of bloodshed is that nobody dares voice this simple statement. [my emphasis]
Smotrich goes on to make clear the binary choice this leaves the Palestinian people—which, importantly, he contends are not genuine ‘people.’
Based on this unequivocal starting point, the Arabs of the Land of Israel will face two basic alternatives:
1) Those who wish to forgo their national aspirations can stay here and live as individuals in the Jewish State; they will of course enjoy all the benefits that the Jewish State has brought and is bringing to the Land of Israel. We will discuss the status and living management of those who choose this option in more detail below.
2) Those who choose not to let go of their national ambitions will receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world. [my emphasis]
To be absolutely clear, I have no doubt that Marshall finds Smotrich and his rhetoric both repugnant and beyond that pale. However, as will be argued later on, understanding how these ‘eliminationist’ perspectives have placed themselves firmly at the center of the Jewish Israeli political discourse is essential context.
Further, it bears noting again that we should not be drawn into equating the power and influence of students on a US campus with a powerful member of a government wielding the destructive capabilities of the IDF. Smotrich and his many kindred allies are most certainly NOT doing revolutionary cosplay but indeed carrying out policies at this very moment to actualize their worldview. Getting back to Marshall’s piece.
History and the Present
If it is true that the groups spearheading the protest expressly hold eliminationist goals and beliefs about Israel, it is just as clearly true that the real energy of these protests isn’t about 1948 or even 1967 — they are about what people have been seeing on their TVs for the last six months. And that is a vast military onslaught that has leveled numerous neighborhoods throughout Gaza, led to the substantial physical destruction of much whole strip and lead to the deaths of more than 30,000 people. That’s horrifying. And people know that the U.S. has played a role in it. It's not at all surprising that lots and lots of students are wildly up in arms about that and want to protest to make it stop.
To me, you can’t really understand the situation without recognizing that Hamas started this engagement by launching a massacre of almost unimaginable scale and brutality and then retreated to what has always been its key strategic defense in Gaza, which is intentionally placing their military infrastructure in and under civilian areas so that the price of attacking them militarily is mass civilian casualties that are then mobilized internationally to curtail Israeli military attacks on Hamas.
To start with the first paragraph. Sure, I think Marshall is correct that the recent demonstrations on US campuses are fueled by the horrific images and reports emerging from Gaza, which are, as Marshall states, horrifying. Interestingly, he seems to further concede that it is wholly understandable that US students wish to demand its cessation, particularly given the hefty role the US government has played in backing perpetrations of mass death and destruction.
But again, here, he slides into the ‘dismissive adult in the room’ cosplay1 by indicating that they have nothing to do with the wider history of the conflict, as indicated by his mention of the years 1948 & 1967. Well, maybe, yes and no. Sure, I would gather that quite a few 20-year-olds on campus today are far less steeped in the historical turns and nuances of the conflict than Gen X’ers like Marshall and myself, who grew up in a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was front and center in global political discourse.
But at the same time, what does he (or I, for that matter) truly know about what these thousands of students know or think? I mean, they are students who probably are fairly good at studying up on stuff. Indeed, in the half-year, since this turn in the conflict commenced, I would hazard a guess that quite a few of them have taken the time to learn a good deal of the history.
Further, it seems somewhat silly to juxtapose these in the first place, as I would imagine that there is a positive feedback loop at play. Namely, one becomes horrified by what they are seeing, decides to learn more about the history, and then becomes angered by their understanding of this historical context. But again, to me, it seems the underlying rhetorical thrust of his point is that these kids are all emotional about seeing dead infants and wailing mothers, but they are not operating with the kind of grown-up historical apprehension to fully know what they are signing on for. This would include the ‘eliminationist’ stances coloring the protests that frame a good deal of the piece as a whole.
Now onto the second paragraph, or sentence. Firstly, a pro tip: always be leery of a set of arguments packaged in a 75-word sentence. I am an academic, and my trade involves many long sentences, but this is a dozy. It is especially true when you consider all the work this is doing. So, let’s list them:
1. Hamas started it
2. Hamas hid in Gaza
3. It uses human shields
4. This forces Israel to kill a lot of civilians
5. These deaths are ‘mobilized’ to garner international support
To start, the framing of ‘Hamas started it’ is again true in some sense, but at the same time, to frame it so curtly is wildly misleading, if not disingenuous. One way to think about this is in terms of proximate and deep causes. I would certainly concede that the overriding proximate cause of the current conflict is indeed the horrors perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
Further, I can genuinely appreciate the anger, fear, and disillusionment that this brought about in Israeli society. Certainly, this is further compounded by the fact that the almost unfathomable horrors of the Holocaust are still, by historical standards, very recent events. I do not inhabit a fantasy land, so I indeed had no doubt that the truly horrific acts carried out against Israelis would be met with a swift and large-scale response.
However, acknowledging these aspects does not render the deeper causes inconsequential. In fact, they make understanding the deep causes all the more critical. The fact is that the horrors of October 7, 2023, can be seen as ultimately born of the massive and destabilizing power differentials between the Israeli state and the Palestinian population—albeit a population that is a nation with aspirations for genuine autonomy and sovereignty.
I use the terms state and population quite intentionally because once you boil the current (and long-running, at least well on 50 years) state of affairs, the state of Israel and its various institutions are the ultimate arbiters governing (or controlling) political lives of the entire Palestinian population.
The removal of settlements and direct occupation of Gaza did little to change these facts, i.e., if you have zero control over what crosses your border, you are far from anything that comes close to a sovereign entity. Years of Israeli policy have rendered Gaza and the large Palestinian population centers in the West Bank as something more akin to Native American reservations in the US.
This is, of course, hardly a perfect analogy (few, if any, perfect analogies exist across social and political mosaics), but there are important similarities. The first is that for decades now, the Israeli government has chosen (often through accelerated settlement and removal policies) to push the Palestinian population into ever-winnowing parcels of land.
Of course, the whole Gaza/West Bank (mental and physical) architecture is rooted in the 1948 Nakba, wherein substantial portions of the Palestinian population fled due both to the dangers of being in a war zone and as the result of well-documented terror campaigns to force them off land deemed part and parcel to founding a Jewish majority state. Of course, they were fully solidified into their current dynamic under Israeli control as a result of the 1967 war, which was indeed sparked by an attempted invasion by an alliance of Arab states led by Egypt.
These aspects of history are brought up not to relitigate or provide a lesson on what many are already quite aware of. Rather, it gets to the point of deep causation, and how the ‘Hamas started it’ framing is simply a farcical characterization of how the present state of affairs came to be.
Most importantly, this takes to a lens for understanding the current state of play that gets short shrift in the discourse and certainly finds no place in Marshall’s analysis. The power asymmetries between Israel and its non-Israeli Palestinian population are simply too vast. At the risk of sounding like a pendant, Israel continues to pursue and maintain massive control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza because it can.
This is not to say that Israelis have not been victims of heinous attacks by Palestinian organizations, including but certainly not limited to October 7, 2023. Rather, these are the sorts of tactics that underscore the very asymmetries at work.
Given what we know, I have no doubt that Hamas would much prefer to be manning checkpoints that controlled the movements of all Israelis between central Tel Aviv and its suburbs while carrying out construction projects to build massive Palestinian enclaves surrounding the city—an image that I would guess jars many readers by dint of its sheer incomprehensibility, but that is exactly the point.
Further, understanding the conflict through the lens of power disparities provides a critical means to avoid very real and very dangerous antisemitic tropes. There is, of course, nothing particularly extra evil or conniving about Jewish Israelis. In fact, misusing and abusing situations of gross power discrepancy is sadly one of the most human things to do across cultural, religious, and/or ethnic distinctions.
To be clear, I do not feel this grants any moral license. Indeed, one of the pillars of radical democratic theory has been the ever-abiding need to establish mechanisms to curtail the regularized immorality (or amorality) one expects to emerge out of extreme power imbalances. US citizens should know this dynamic well as US foreign policy, from the Vietnam War to Iraq, to the US back death squads in Central America, and on and on, were all, at the base, a function of extreme power disparities, of course, colored and driven by conviction-stoking ideologies. Anticommunism, War on Terror, etc., etc.
To wit, the carnage we are currently witnessing in Gaza is largely a byproduct of the logic driven by extreme power discrepancies. Again, the IDF is a nuclear-armed, globally-peak-technologically sophisticated force backed by the funds and weapons of the world’s largest military power. I draw this out as a riposte to Marshall’s insinuation that Hamas bears the responsibility for the egregious human toll of the ongoing Gaza campaign.
The Conflict in Gaza
I do not think Marshall is wholly wrong in that Hamas’s agents do, at times, seek to integrate themselves within the population, both to hide and force their opponent to perpetrate gruesome acts against civilians. This has been a widely used tactic in asymmetrical warfare for decades. Again, though it is not behavior I would condone, it is hardly something unique to Hamas or the Palestinians. Certainly, it was a tactic employed by the Vietcong to give one of many examples.
More importantly, the notion that all the bloodshed and carnage in Gaza grows out of this tactic alone simply strains, if not wholly implodes, credulity. Sure, all wars generate false or misleading propaganda, and one must be very cautious about jumping on stories as they filter out. Indeed, Marshall’s insinuation closely parallels the story the IDF would wish you to believe.
That said, we simply have far too many credible reports and, at times, video evidence that the tactics being employed are those of siege warfare. This distinctive approach to conflict is based on achieving aims through the infliction of maximal pain on the entire population. From a tactical, though horrifying, perspective, the notion is that a starved, desiccated population ensures that those Hamas partisans in their midst will necessarily also be killed or simply withered into irrelevance.
This is why the provision of food and fuel and the bombing of various aid efforts have been a central axis of the conflict and those protesting it. I mean, we need only to take the Israeli Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at his word when he spoke in the days following the tragedies of October 7, 2023:
We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. [my emphasis]
For a moment, just take stock for a moment of what your life would be like if water, food, electricity, and fuel suddenly stopped flowing to your local stores. Of course, he notably included the qualifier, which seemingly justified this summary sentence of thousands to certain traumatic suffering and death.
We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.
Again, there are numerous credible reports that indicate that these siege tactics are at play. Indeed, from the perspective of Knesset member and head of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party, Avigdor Lieberman [he has also had past stints as the Minister of Finance, Foreign Affairs, and Defense as well as a deputy Prime Minister] argued in February that the siege was inadequate complaining that by allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza:
We lost all our leverage. If they have everything, food, fuel, and water, how can you pressure them? All the humanitarian assistance strengthens Hamas. [my emphasis]
One of the more moving pieces I have read was by the veteran war correspondent Peter Maass, who likened the ongoing events in Gaza to what he witnessed as a reporter in Sarajevo in the early 1990s. He recounts seeing the horrible murder of a man by sniper fire and how eerily it corresponds to a video from Gaza showing
a grandmother, Hala Khreis, trying to leave a neighborhood that Israeli forces are surrounding. Walking tentatively, she holds the hand of her grandson, who is 5 years old and carries a white flag. Suddenly, a shot rings out and she crumples to the ground dead. Sniper rifles have high-powered scopes — the shooters can see who they are shooting. The attacks on Khreis in 2024 and Bahtanovic in 1993 occurred in daytime and were not accidental. [again, Maas’s words or in italics to distinguish them from Marshall’s]
Again, I do not think these and other horrors unfolding in Gaza are wholly unique in terms of depravities being perpetrated across the globe, nor are they reflective of some innately Jewish evil intent. They are reflective of a logic driven by extreme power disparities. The fact is Israel can place Gaza under total siege, it can order, with the threat of death, hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, and it can control the food, water, and electricity in Gaza.
To be sure, capacity alone does not wholly predict behavior but undoubtedly establishes the horizons of the possible. These capacities are being wed to increasingly fundamentalist-authoritarian ideologies that are nowhere near universally held by Israelis or supporters of Israel but are increasingly driving the action of those who came to power through democratic elections. This will be covered in more detail later on. Back to Marshall’s piece.
‘Eliniminationist’ Politics
But that being true [to recall, the ‘that’ here is referring to the above simplistic claim that the mass casualties in Gaza are almost wholly a function of there human shield tactics] doesn’t make tens of thousands of people less dead. And most of the dead aren’t Hamas. So if you’re a student you say — along with quite a few non-students in the U.S. — all that stuff may be true, but what I’m seeing is the ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocents and I absolutely need that to stop, especially if it is being carried out directly or indirectly with arms my tax dollars bought.
Both of these things are true. And this was brought home to me by a post on Twitter over the weekend by an academic named Don Waxman who is the chair of Israel studies at UCLA and runs a center devoted to Israel studies at the university. I recommend reading the post. But the gist is essentially that he agrees on protesting what has happened in Gaza, is a long time opponent of the occupation and supports greater equality for Israel's Arab minority. But he can’t participate or support these protests because of what I noted above — because the groups running the protests (which is different from the participants) want Israel itself dismantled.
In these moments we sometimes hear people say, well, don’t try to police the decisions of an oppressed group. This gets to the rub of this issue. The real world isn’t black and white. Groups don’t fit neatly into boxes of oppressed and oppressor. People can have whatever beliefs they want and protest about whatever they want. But the groups who are the targets of eliminationist political goals can make their own decisions about what to associate with and what not to.
So here we see the perfect coalescence of the center-left worldview:
sure, this is bad; we don’t want US money and weapons funding this continuing slaughter [even if it is Hamas's fault, and they started it]. Sure, it is good to protest this, but you see, some of these college groups are demanding that Israel be dismantled so that extreme view wards off potential allies.
Again, I cannot help but be somewhat baffled by Marshall’s continuing focus on the ‘eliminationist’ facet when seeming to take no stock of the very real and ongoing eliminationist threat that is clearly directed toward the Palestinians. Indeed, we can revisit the words of the extremely central Israeli political figure of Bezalel Smotrich, who, in March 2023, unabashedly declared:
Is there a Palestinian history or culture? Nothing. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.
Recall that this is the individual tasked by PM Netanyahu to oversee the West Bank. And to see how this outlook translates into policy, a few weeks prior to stating that Palestinians do not exist, Smotrich’s proposed ‘solution’ to a recent pogrom by Israeli settlers in a West Bank town:
I think the village of Huwara needs to be erased.
And lest you think my use of the term pogrom was unnecessarily incendiary or obtuse, that was the exact term employed by IDF Major General Yehuda Fuchs, who stated:
We did not prepare for a pogrom on the scale of dozens of people who come with incendiary devices… they go and set fire to random Palestinian houses, vehicles, etc. – simply indiscriminate terror.
Or, let’s take a look at the current Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a follower of the late Jewish supremacist Meir Kahane (seriously, I recommend clicking through the link to get an idea of the toxicity we are dealing with here). Gvir himself has been convicted of terrorism and incitement 8 times and has openly espoused eliminationist rhetoric in public forums.
As an added bonus, apparently, he is known to display a photo of Baruch Goldstein, who, in February 1994, opened fire with an automatic weapon on 800 worshippers in a Mosque at a holy site, killing 29 and wounding over 100. Ben-Gvir is known to revere Goldstein; I think the implications of this, combined with the fact that Gvir now sits in a prominent government position, are clear enough.
And lest you think I am just cherry-picking a few ‘crazies’ among the ‘normies’ in the Israeli government, in January of this year, fully 12 ministers in the current government attended a conference hosted by the far right, pro-settler organization Nachala. The conference was designed to build momentum for the resettlement of Gaza and deeper expansion of Jewish settlements in the northern West Bank.
And when I say a ‘far’ right organization, I mean pretty darn far. In an interview with Israel National News, Nachala Director Daniela Weiss explained that the ‘resettlement’ of Gaza or expansion of settlements in the northern West Bank is one piece of a larger puzzle. As she explains the interview (again here, I strongly recommend clicking through to watch the video feed of the interview):
We should have a goal besides the war. Besides destroying Hamas and recovering the hostages, we need to plan for the return to the places from which we were wrongly evicted and make all of the Gaza Strip a place for new Israeli communities. Approximately two million Arabs are left in Gaza, and they are not going to stay - they will leave for other countries. They have lost their last reason to stay there.
Israel should create a problem for the Arabs, to the point where Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey are forced to absorb them as refugees as they did from Syria. We should not offer them anything to leave. I am not focused on what is best for them, but on what is best for Israel.
Of course, these are just a few examples of the many similar outlooks and views among powerful Israeli political actors.
Again, it bears pointing out that this woman is not some looney fringe figure but the leader of an organization that was able to draw the attendance of a dozen high-ranking government officials as well as 15 members of the Knesset.
I dig into all of this to compare Marshall’s deep concerns for the ‘eliminationist’ position advanced by American college students with the actual eliminationist politics being embraced and carried out at the highest levels of the Israeli government.
Of course, there is a large portion of Jewish Israelis who would find the above-described rhetoric repellent, several of whom I count as dear friends and have directly heard their deep loathing of these figures and their bigotry. But at the same time, we have to acknowledge that Israel is a democratic society and that all of these ministers came to their positions legitimately. In sum, there is clearly enough of the voting public willing to support these figures and their parties to land them in positions to be included in Netanyahu’s coalition.
To be sure, this includes Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, who declared at a meeting of his Likud party in January that he is doing his best to encourage voluntary migration but noted that
Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it.
Now, if you believe his use of the ‘voluntary’ qualifier carries any weight, you must retain a definition that makes it a synonym for ‘forced.’ I mean, in the same breath, he speaks of the human beings living in Gaza as little more than a spilled liquid that needs to be mopped up.
To this eliminationist cadre, we can add the other normie-ish (at least compared to Ben Gvir and Smotrich) Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel, who said in January that
voluntary migration is the best and most realistic program for the day after the fighting ends.
Indeed, it appears that Netanyahu and his cadre’s talk of mopping up the people of Gaza and depositing them somewhere else is far from idle chatter. The Times of Israel quotes a ‘senior source in the security cabinet’ speaking on the condition of anonymity, told reporters of “clandestine talks with the African nation of Congo and several others for the potential acceptance of Gaza emigrants.1 The source is quoted as saying that:
Congo will be willing to take in migrants, and we’re in talks with others.
Yes, this is as utterly repugnant and disgraceful as it sounds, but only the more tragic because it reflects the real desires and abilities of the Israeli state and its central actors.
Considering all this, my question for Marshall would be how he figures Palestinian Americans and their supporters (let alone Palestinians residing in Palestine) can be expected to see the state of Israel, as currently constituted and directed, as anything but a clear and present threat to their national survival. What evidence does Marshall have that any hope for a more ‘dovish’ turn in Jewish Israeli politics is on the horizon?
We will discuss the Israeli electoral landscape in more detail further down, but for now, it is worth pointing out that among parties receiving Knesset seats in 2022, Labor, the party most closely associated with the peace process and Meretz, the only other Jewish-centered party offering a full-throated backing2 of the peace process collectively won 6.85% of the vote and received a total of 5/120 seats in the Knesset (Labor winning 5, and Meretz failing to meet the qualifying threshold).
Further, it is important to note that openly bigoted and ‘eliminationist’ figures such as Smotrich and Ben Gvir joined the government as ministers in 2022. So, this cannot even be seen as some knee-jerk reaction to the tragedies of October 7, 2023. To be sure, those events have accelerated eliminationist politics among Jewish Israelis, but they are hardly born of those events.
Again, I am genuinely not trying to sully Marshall’s views by homing in on Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and their many political kin. But at the same time, though this is certainly not the political landscape Marshall wishes for Israel, these figures are central to the current political landscape of the Jewish Israeli community. As such, we have to discuss the present situation wherein these existing political dynamics that have been decades in the making, not the ones we wish to be present—or commentators like Marshall entreat us to believe will be conjured out of the void that is the Israeli left at some imagined future date.
Furthermore, this actually existing political and social landscape has been driving a host of eliminationist policies towards the Palestinians for decades—and, again, crucially because the Israeli state has the power and capacity to do so, while for the most part, there is almost nothing the Palestinians can do to stop them from a long-term/structural perspective.
To be clear, I am not trying to posit that the Palestinian population is simply a passive receptor of Israeli policies or lacking in agency. Certainly, as with the Jewish Israeli population, there have been, and continue to be, very stark disagreements about the ‘correct path’ for the Palestinian national movement.
Indeed, one of the scholars who has influenced my thinking immensely is James C. Scott, who has done path-breaking work on the everyday ways seemingly ‘powerless’ individuals subvert and resist macro-political conditions engineered to discipline and control them.
But this important feature of politics amid massive power asymmetries does not negate their ability to definitionally shape the long-term or structural trajectory. To provide a simple example. The Palestinians and their supporters (including many Jewish Israelis) clearly have been voraciously advocating for the dismantling of settlements in the West Bank along with taking full control of East Jerusalem. But over the past several decades, the settlements have expanded massively, and Israel has effectively taken full control of the entire city of Jerusalem. Simply put, these developments are, at base, a function of massive power asymmetries.
And to be sure, this is something the far-right settler movement is happy to highlight as part of their long-term mission to fully annex the West Bank and resettle Gaza. To illustrate the point, let’s return to the views of Daniela Weiss, director of the far-right settler group Nachala. As a reply to those skeptical of the possibility for Jewish Israelis to resettle Gaza, she enthusiastically retorts:
I say to them - they used to call Samaria3 'blank hills of Samaria'. Now there are five hundred thousand Jews in two hundred fifty communities there. We can do the same thing again.
Thus, we can see that the use of state power serves to further reinforce a feedback loop whereby further penetration and development upon Palestinian lands gathers a self-perpetuating momentum.
To bring together the analysis in this section, we can return to Marshall’s penetrating observation that simple dualisms of oppressor vs. oppressed or that “The real world isn’t black and white” often lack nuance. I am an academic doing a great deal of historically-centered political research and analysis focused on a post-colonial society, South Korea. I get it, sure, shit’s complicated.
Alas, we must always be careful to differentiate between nuance which illuminates and that which obfuscates. And here, saying that the politics of Israel-Palestine is messy provides little illumination but rather darkens our analytical horizons by neglecting the vast power asymmetries at play and how they define and have defined the conflict for decades.
Marshall points out how many leftist Jewish Americans, who abhor the sorts of Israeli political figures and their views discussed at length above, feel unable to join the protest movements because “the groups running the protests (which is different from the participants) want Israel itself dismantled [my emphasis].”
But as has been cataloged with some detail, the power realities have yielded a situation where the stewards of the Israeli state, empowered by (enough) Israeli voters, do not simply want the Palestinian nation dismantled but are utilizing their very real capacities to bring this vision to fruition.
Seeing matters in this light allows us to hold a mirror up to Marshall’s proposition that “groups who are the targets of eliminationist political goals can make their own decisions about what to associate with and what not to.”
As was asked above, why should we expect Palestinians or supporters of their cause to endorse the continuation of a massive power capacity [i.e., the state of Israel, as distinguished from all Jewish Israelis or certainly the Jewish people writ large, as currently constituted and governed] that is being deployed towards very real eliminationist goals? Again, animated by policies and practices that began to take shape well before the tragedies of October 7, 2023. Turning back to Marshall’s analysis.
And here let me shift gears to my next main point. The last six months has thrown me very hard back on to defending the existence of Israel, its historical connections to Jews in Europe and the Middle East before the 20th century, its origins as the political expression of a people who are in fact indigenous to Israel-Palestine. And that’s because all of these things are now questioned and attacked as core questions.
I wish to start my reply to this by emphasizing again that I do not see the state of Israel as exceptionally pernicious or some aberrational evil. Indeed, as described above, I see it through a lens of almost inevitable dynamics in political situations defined by vast power asymmetries. And I do not think that anyone can really argue that the Israeli state and the Palestinian population it has ‘governed’ for over a half-century do not feature these dynamics.
Further, unlike perhaps some of my fellow travelers on the Left, I am sympathetic to the impulses that certainly drove many of those at the center of the ultimate establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. To have endured the unspeakable horrors of the holocaust undoubtedly created a deep sense that establishing the state of Israel was central to the very survival of the Jewish people.
This logic no doubt created a sense of moral license or permissibility on the part of those taking part in the conflict driving the action. To be clear, I am not seeking to justify or morally sanction the Nakba. Of course, efforts to understand or sympathize with another plight and ethical sanctioning of particular responses to those conditions are hardly equivalent strains of thought—a lesson seemed much lost on the mainline discourse surrounding Hamas or more radical Palestinian organizations.
But I think this train of thought also obscures the central questions at hand. On the one hand, declaring that one ‘defends the existence of Israel’ can be viewed as a deep and profound expression of faith in a social and political project. On the other hand, it can seen as an airy platitude that tells us very little.
To wit, what Israel are we talking about? Israel as a concept, an idea that the Jewish people need a homeland and this homeland should be located in the far Eastern Mediterranean with its capital in Jerusalem? I mean, that is all well and good; we all have ideas we support and aspirations that seem right and just to us. Or is he referring to the actual state of Israel as the concentration of power and the specific ways that it exercises that power?
Indeed, states and nations are both abstractions and very real, earthy things simultaneously. If we are talking about the state of Israel as an entity that deploys its power in very specific and real ways, then my question for Marshall would be, what are the limits of that support?
There does seem to be a good deal of momentum in Israel to officially annex the West Bank. Further, as we have discussed at some length, there are also forces at the center of the state’s actual policy process that seem intent to either force a large portion of the Palestinians out or subject the Palestinian population to second-class status in perpetuity. Indeed, this has been the de facto arrangement now for over a half-century.
If these, certainly far from implausible scenarios, begin to play out, what would supporting the concept of Israel in the abstract actually mean? Again, one is welcome to conjure up any abstract notions of what Israel is or should be, but what about an Israel that is seemingly edging closer to formalizing its control over the entirety of the West Bank in perpetuity? What when Gazans are shunted into specified zones of allowable habitation?
What would he tell the ‘eliminationist’ protestors then? Yeah, that sucks, and I hate these outcomes too, but you must understand that I support the abstract concept and principle of Israel, so maybe you just need to wait for a few more decades and hope things work themselves out? I am not trying to be facetious here. I have certainly not considered myself an ‘eliminationist’ vis-a-vis Israel, nor am I advocating that now per se.
But at the same time, given the ways that these very dark and foreboding forces have now come to define Israeli state action in reality, I cannot stand by as actually existing elimination policies are unfolding based on certain abstract if historically rooted, commitments. And now, we can turn to Marshall’s final rhetorical salvo.
The Two-State Solution
But the reality is that these conversations, often harrowing and angry, are simply diversions from anything that creates a path forward from the terrible present. There are two national communities deeply embedded in the land. Neither is going anywhere even though there are substantial proportions of both communities who want that to happen to the other one. There’s no way to build something sustainable and dignified without both peoples having a state in which they have self-determination and citizenship. That’s the only plausible endpoint where violence doesn’t remain an ever-present reality. How you get there is another story. And yes, if you think one unified state makes sense, God bless you. If you can get majorities of both groups to agree to that, fine. I don’t live there. If that’s what they want, great. That’s almost certainly never going to be the case. And it’s a failed state in the making.
I have no doubt written too much, but this is a crucial discussion, so please hang with me if you have made it this far.
First, I wish to begin with the snippet purporting that neither national group ‘is going anywhere.’ Have I missed something? This is just patently untrue. Over the last 50 years, Palestinians have persistently experienced being moved (yes, literally moved) into smaller and smaller portions of land. They have seen massive walls and fortified compounds put up. Highways built that they are not allowed to use, their houses surrounded by settlements seeking to force them out, etc.
On the flip side, hundreds of thousands of Jewish Israelis have relocated to the West Bank to these sprawling and clearly permanent settlements in the West Bank. As has been detailed throughout, there are key players in the government who openly support much more drastic steps of moving Palestinians to other countries, such as Jordan and Egypt. It bears repeating that the current chief state official overseeing West Bank policy [Smotrich] is an openly avowed bigot and full-throated proponent of an annexation and eliminationist agenda.
Here, Marshall tucks in an admission that may have been more useful to explore earlier in his piece, noting that “there are substantial proportions of both communities who want that [i.e., the other group leaving the territory] to happen to the other one.” This is the exact kind of equivocation that belies the very massive power asymmetries at play coupled with the kinds of folks at the helm of the Israeli ship of state.
Again, we need to key in on the word want. Undoubtedly, your modal Hamas fighter dreams of removing the Jewish population, i.e., that is what they want. And I agree that that is not a matter to be taken lightly. However, on the flip side, the state of Israel retains its capacity and has acted in very real ways to effectuate policies in this direction. Israel commands one of the most potent military ensembles in the world and is in possession of a fully credible and deliverable nuclear capability. It is also on the receiving end of what seems to be virtually inviolable support from the largest military power in the world.
Marshall moves on to passive-aggressively admonish anyone who dares admit what all the evidence before us points to. Namely, the two-state solution is no longer a viable outcome. I think I have made a fairly decent prima facie case for why this is so above, so I will just add a few more observations.
First being, it is clear that that is not something Jewish Israeli voters desire in any significant portion. A 2022 poll conducted jointly by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in Ramallah and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University found roughly one out of three Jewish Israelis (34%) support a two-state solution.
The report by the researchers in The Jerusalem Post noted that these numbers continue a sharp downward trend. Notably, the portion of Jewish Israelis favoring a one-state solution without equality for Palestinians received slightly higher support, coming in at 37%. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found a significant drop in Palestinian support for a two-state solution, which stood at 33%. Importantly, all of these data were collected well before October 7, 2023. One can safely assume that for their own respective reasons, support has plummeted even further.
This said, polls are snapshots in time and public attitudes can indeed shift significantly. But those shifts often come in tandem with the emergence of leadership from both the political and civil spheres. As noted earlier, no significant parties or figures are actively supporting the two-state solution. But let’s check in with some of the major figures waiting in the wings to take over as PM after Netanyahu.
Yair Lapid
Close watchers of Israeli politics may point to a figure like Yair Lapid, who heads the Yesh Atid party, which won the second-highest vote total, 17.78%, in the 2022 election. Lapid does indeed say he supports a two-state solution, but for reasons we’ll see, he doesn’t, nor would I guess any more than 5-10% max of Jewish Israelis do at present or under any foreseeable circumstance in the future.
First, it is important to note that Lapid describes his vision as akin to a “divorce,” where the two sides separate and go their own ways. Further, his ability to bring about any genuine agreement with his Palestinian counterparts may well be severely tempered by a core principle animating his view of two states as expressed in a 2016 discussion with a reporter:
My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.
Hardly seems like the starting point of a fruitful dialogue. But this reality is made all the more clear when he expressed to the New York Times in a recent interview:4
And I understand that in the end what we need is to have two states, living in peace, one next to each other. One should be stronger than the other, where the other one should be demilitarized. I support in the long term, and after all security measurements have been implemented, the idea that these two people will separate. I want to separate from them. It’s not a favor I’m doing the Palestinians. It’s for my own good. And separating from the Palestinians should come from a position of power because of the horrific events that happened to us lately and not so lately.
Here, we start to get an indication of what Lapid has in mind when he speaks of two states. By any functional definition of a state, not being allowed to have a military means that, in effect, you are not a state.
Call me over-presumptuous, but emphasizing a distinct and necessary power imbalance and a ‘demilitarized’ Palestinian state insinuates a situation wherein ultimate matters of what Israel deems to be within its security interests will have a free hand in exercising its prerogatives largely at will.
Lapid basically lays this out in a speech he gave nine years prior in September 2015, translated and published in Tablet Magazine, stating that under his ‘two-state’ plan:
[Israel] must maintain the security coordination that exists and that allows us into the West Bank to prevent terrorism against Israel.
Nor do I think there is any support among the Israeli public for a negotiated outcome that produces anything approaching what could be considered a Palestinian state. Indeed, I think the available evidence points to the fact that this was the case years before the tragedies of October 27, 2023, transpired.
Think about one of the most basic prerogatives of a state: foreign relations and diplomacy. And let’s just imagine, for argument’s sake, that the Palestinians would accept Israeli control of East Jerusalem and establish a capital in Ramallah. Are we to believe that Israel would ‘permit’ an Iranian, Syrian, or Afghan embassy there?
I would guess even two-state-solutionists would probably acknowledge there is no world where this happens. But that is just the point; they are not talking about a Palestinian state that lines up with a conventional understanding of a state, which is precisely the ability to have an army and allow the building of embassies on one’s sovereign territory.
Sure, one is free to just append the label of state to anything they like, but they cannot change the commonly held definition and practice of being a state. It is vital to understand that almost all two-state-solutionists are not really talking about two states.
And it is essential to note Lapid represents the most ‘progressive’ of any major figure in Israeli politics today vis-a-vis the Palestinians and the two-state solution. Alas, and perhaps not coincidentally, his political star seems to be on the wane at present.
Benny Gantz
So let’s turn to the seeming latest heir apparent to the Netanyahu years (it used to be Lapid), one Benny Gantz. Sure, Gantz doesn’t ooze the sheer scum baggery that seems to be Netanyahu’s special power. And if the polls are to be believed, he has a real shot of becoming the next prime minister; good for him!
But when it comes to the two-state solution, Gantz is flatly not on board. Interestingly, apparently he supports a Palestinian ‘entity’. Maybe the Hebrew works better, but at least in English ‘entity’ is brimming with all sorts not good connotations. Who knows, maybe that is the point.
According to a report by The Times of Israel Gantz, even prior to October 7, 2023 (in September of 2022), Gantz:
stressed the need to “settle our relationship with the Palestinians” and offered his solution of “two entities,” avoiding the word “states.”
First, two entities? So, in this plan (more details of the full think tank proposal Gantz embraces here), the two-entity solution, Israel will dissolve itself from a state to an entity. Well, I doubt it; it seems the meaning is that one ‘entity’ will be a state, and the other entity will be a, well, entity.
What Gantz seems to be getting at is some ‘expanded’ degree of Palestinian autonomy under the overarching auspicious of Israeli state power. In sum, this sounds awfully close to the general constructs of the situation that have persisted since 1967. What’s more, good luck getting any Palestinian support for such a rump ‘entity.’
So, in effect, this is an intellectual exercise touting a continuation of the Netanyahu policy of retaining the status quo, dressed up with a finely honed think-tank report. A report that conjures into existence classic think-tanky terms such as the Israeli-Palestinian Arena. The report leaves little doubt who will be the final authority and arbiter in this ‘arena’.
Naftali Bennett
Lastly, let’s take a look at former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He announced his retirement from politics after stepping down as PM in 2022. Now, he seems interested in testing the waters again and has certainly been a fixture on US cable outlets such as Fox News and CNN. Bennet’s view on two states is fairly straightforward. He is a voracious opponent.
In describing his opposition to the two-state solution, Bennet contends:
We can all envision that if we let go of security in the [Palestinian Authority], then we’ll have hordes of radical Islamic terrorists with machetes killing our families. No one’s going to do that experiment. The very expectation of Israel to do it is insane.
Interestingly, if you look at Point 5 from his 2012 proposal “The Israel Stability Initiative,” we can see language quite similar to the supposed two-state-solutionist Lapid. While the proposal envisages PA ‘autonomy’ in certain areas of the West Bank, it states the necessity of a:
A full Israeli security umbrella for all of Judea and Samaria [aka the West Bank, see note 4]: The success of the initiative is conditional on keeping the territories peaceful and quiet. Peace can only be achieved with the IDF maintaining a strong presence in, and complete security control over, Judea and Samaria.
Though not exhaustive, that is a fairly solid run-through of some of Israel's most prominent potential political leaders. What should be clear is that none of them are entertaining anything that looks like a genuine state and sovereignty for the Palestinians.
Of course, other major figures discussed previously, like Smotrich and Ben Gvir, advocate a full conquest of the West Bank coupled with efforts to expel the Palestinian population to the greatest extent possible.
I dug into this so deeply in order to make it abundantly clear that Marshall’s retreat to the two-state solution is merely symbolic, or perhaps even shambolic. It simply reaffirms what has been clear to expert Israel watchers long before October 7, 2023: whatever political will may have existed for an agreement to create something approaching a genuine Palestinian state of any real substance has long left the vast majority of the Jewish Israeli population.
As such, for Marshall to grandstand with preachy, snarky dismissals of those who operate based on this assumption says more about him than those he seems intent to chide. As Marshall puts it:
And yes, if you think one unified state makes sense, God bless you. If you can get majorities of both groups to agree to that, fine. I don’t live there.
Considering the facts and details I have cataloged throughout this essay, where does Marshall find the basis for his presumed peaceful endpoint of
something sustainable and dignified without both peoples having a state in which they have self-determination and citizenship.
In sum, to reconsider his phrasing: How does he live in this world?
So where does that leave us?
In fairness, I can imagine Marshall or supporters of his conceptions retorting: great, you rained on a lot of parades, but if not the two-state solution, what do you propose? First, I am not against a two-state solution if we are talking about a genuine Palestinian state in the manner discussed above.
But as argued above, I think that is a meaningless platitude at this point. That ship has long sailed, and sure, maybe it will return one day, but given that there is just no evidence supporting that notion, I am not sure what good it does to operate with that as a basic assumption.
Further, the implicit expectations in a call to hold out for the right moment for all the stars to align for this magical Palestinian state that will have real sovereignty is quite a galling proposition to hoist upon the Palestinian population. Like, just hang around and tolerate occupation; maybe in the next half-century, the right political moment may emerge in Israel.
In truth, if you asked me what was most likely, the Israeli state will continue on the path it has been walking. There are several potential forms this morphs into, but there is just zero political will in Israel to grant the Palestinians anything resembling a genuine state or even genuine autonomy. If anything, the process of further expansion of Israeli positions in the West Bank with a not insignificant likelihood of a full annexation at some point in the future.
Let’s just state the key parameters.
1) The Israel-Palestine Arena (to borrow the think tank term) does not contain a clear Jewish majority.
2) Israel demands a clear Jewish majority.
3) Israel demands full security control over the Israel-Palestine Arena under any circumstance or proposed settlement.
4) Israel alone retains the power to translate its wants into outcomes on the ground.
5) Under these circumstances, some sort of diminished state of Palestinian national existence is mandatory.
I wish Marshall or anyone else could explain to me a different scenario that can emerge from these propositions. Other than the Smotrich, force the Palestinians out, plan.
Again, Israel is holding the power here. Further, it has etched out alliances or quasi-alliances with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, and Egypt. Its boldness to make more aggressive unilateral moves against the Palestinian population seems predictably to have an inverse relationship with the degree to which it faces immediate threats from neighboring Arab states.
If anything, it is now (and has been for some time) the Palestinians who are surrounded by adversaries, or at least those seemingly indifferent to their plight. And to be clear, I don’t think all Palestinians are wholly blameless in these matters, but Marshall’s piece centers on Israel and its future, so that was the focus here. Further, as discussed, the Palestinians are forced to operate under conditions dictated by Israel’s inordinate relative power capacity.
There is more to say, but this piece has already morphed into a dozy! So, I will close by offering these thoughts. I do not support the elimination of Israel. I do not and would never support any forced removal of Jews who reside in Israel for the same reasons that I would not support the forced removal of Palestinians. However, I do not support its continuation in present form. I do not think that is the contradiction it may appear to be at first glance.
For me, the most hope lies in the notion of a refounding. I think of the US after the Civil War. Japan after the Meiji Constitution. Turkey after the fall of the Ottomans. I am not saying all of these are laudable historical moments but they provide precedence for the notion of undergoing qualitative changes while retaining essential continuities.
This can be seen as an opportunity to revisit questions of how the human mosaic of this territory and these peoples can be constituted in some just and humane way. That is not, nor has it been, the situation for many decades.
How one gets there is a different question. I do feel as the Israeli state lurches further along the path it has set, it will encounter an increasingly hostile global society, both from some states but also from civil society organizations. Boycotts are attractive because they are confrontational but non-violent, and they have indeed worked towards achieving their goals in previous situations.
To be clear, I draw a firm distinction between the Israeli state and the Jewish people. Just as I find it not too difficult to draw a distinction between the abhorrent state in Russia and the Russian people. I realize that there are many who do not, and all I can say is that sort of vile antisemitism has no place in my worldview or ethics. I do realize the ever-present menace of antisemitism ways heavily on Jewish people of all political persuasions, and sadly, for good reason.
But to me, this is not a reason to temper resistance. To the greatest extent possible, the Israeli state should be boycotted until the toxic status it has bestowed upon the Palestinian nation for decades is repaired in some meaningful way. As Lapid argues in defending his vision, I would contend that, at least from my limited perspective, this holds the prospect of a more flourishing and just existence for both peoples.
That is the world I am living toward.
[note: the image for this piece was created using Bing’s AI image creator]
Just to note here, these quotes and information are taken from The Times of Israel report which was relaying a report from its sister Hebrew publication, Zman Yisrael.
The Yesh Atid party will be discussed a bit later, but I certainly would not characterize the party’s support for the peace process as ‘full-throated.’
In settler discourse, Judea and Samaria refer to what is commonly known as the West Bank. In the view of the American Friends of Judea and Samaria (AFJS): “Judea and Samaria should be fully sovereign parts of the Land of Israel through the complete application of Israeli law in these regions of the country. We feel that the Jewish People have the right to dwell in these areas, as they do in every other part of the country.”
I have no idea whether Marshall read it or not, but I will say that if you read through the interview with Lapid, there is a great deal of overlap between their views.