Here is today's headline in the Washington Post:
Republicans have leadership from Trump who says that Israel is right to evict the Palestinian squatters in Gaza who are delaying development of prime real estate. Trump's has a "just get it done, quick and dirty" style and he sells the value of this approach to Republicans in immigration enforcement, in police use of force, and by strong countries dominating their regions. Trump doesn't apologize for strategic cruelty; sometimes a hard job requires harsh measures, and Trump revels in that reality. Israel has a hard job to do to fulfill its own sense of national destiny.
Democrats are more conflicted about cruelty. They don't have a single strong leader. They hear from many voices. Some describe Palestinians primarily as victims overrun by Zionist colonists in the manner of White settlers expanding and breaking treaties with Native Americans. Others say that Israel is our true friend, that Palestinians choose to be badly led and have brought trouble on themselves. Democrats hear all that and are divided. Whatever else, necessary or unnecessary, justified or unjustified, what Israel is doing to Palestinians in Gaza appears cruel. Democrats agree on that.
Liberals and conservatives segment into the political parties, although imperfectly. Jonathan Haidt, the American psychologist and political scientist, articulated the difference between their moral values. Liberals care about fairness (good) and cruelty (bad) and mostly stop there. They can be open-minded about other values. But conservatives care about additional issues along with those two: Respect for authority, loyalty to the group, and sanctity are also moral values for them. It is not surprising to me that Republicans are currently associated with flag-waving patriotism more than are Democrats. Identity with the group and authority are moral absolutes. A Democrat can see Colon Kaepernick take a knee at the National Anthem and think, "Who does he hurt? Nobody. And besides, he is protesting police cruelty." A Republican sees it and thinks he is dissing the USA.
A Republican Christian likes to see Trump holding up the Bible. Our team wins! A Democratic Christian sees Trump cruelly flouting every element of the Sermon on the Mount preaching humility and kindness to strangers. Hypocrite.
A person strongly oriented toward the preservation of boundaries of a group sees the presence of immigrants here illegally as an offense per se. Add to it a strong respect for authority, and we have a broad group of people happy to see ICE agents using rough force to clean out the squatters, presumably criminals, rapists, and pet-eaters. Illegal immigrants hit all three moral absolutes: group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Democrats tend to see it as a matter of fairness and cruelty. It isn't fair that so many people in the U.S. are the grandchildren of people who came to the U.S. seeking opportunity, but now we shut the door. And it is cruel to round up hard-working people to send them home, or even worse, to prison or some third-country.
Loyalty and sanctity make Israel's effort to create a Jewish state an easier decision for a Trump-led Republican. Israel is a U.S. ally and they want a nation of loyal people, respecting the same sacred beliefs, protected from impurities. Makes sense. Democrats want something that is apparently impossible there, a democratic multicultural state, or two of them side by side. Neither side apparently wants that. Democrats under Biden had a split-the-difference unsatisfactory response: help Israel but urge them not to be too cruel. The result was slow, visible cruelty.
Democrats see the cruelty more vividly than they see the value in an avowedly Jewish nation in a region hostile to its presence. Republicans have a solution that generally unites their party: support Israel in whatever it does. Democrats have a dilemma that will fester and divide them. They want the impossible. A genocidal final solution would disgust the world, so it is politically impossible for Israel. The practical accommodation to that is slow misery, played out in public. There is no endgame to this. It is a problem for the world and for Democrats.
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10 comments:
The Gaza atrocity isn’t a partisan issue, it a humanitarian issue. Republicans are just on the wrong side of history, which is why they want to rewrite it.
In response to Hamas slaughtering 1,200 Israelis, Israel has turned Gaza to rubble and slaughtered over 59,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. Now Israel is starving the population and shooting people who seek food aid. What’s really crazy is that people who criticize this are called antisemitic, as if committing war crimes is part of what it means to be Jewish. If I were Jewish, I would consider that antisemitic.
Republicans can see Colin Kaepernick taking a knee at the national anthem and think he is dissing the USA, and see a crazed mob of armed Trump supporters storm the Capitol and think they’re patriots. Why? Because they’re nuts.
"....an avowably Jewish nation in a region hostile to its presence".
That hostility grew out of the region being subjected to swordpoint religious colonial-imperialism emerging from the Arabian peninsula, a millennium or two after the Jewish nation had been established. Jerusalem was conscripted as "their" holy city in the process.
While "cruel" or "cruelty" is employed seven or eight times in this piece to describe--or bowdlerize--positions opposed by the Western left, "cruel" more aptly describes the conflation of the very Holocaust with a supposedly wished-for "genocidal final solution" in Gaza.
"Cruelty" is used seven or eight times because Trump obviously delights in it, as do Trump's chumps. Thus, the concentration camps like "Alligator Alcatraz."
When you are surrounded by jihadist enemies who want to wipe you off the face of the Earth, you do what you need to do to keep them from accomplishing that.
While you shouldn’t be any more “cruel” than you need to be, survival and self-defense come first. You can’t afford to be any less “cruel“ than is compatible with survival.
And if survival puts you on “the wrong side of history,” then history can go take a flying leap.
Jews were the target of a real genocide, the Holocaust. Accusing us of “genocide“ for something that in no way matches the real one is an egregious act of rhetorical spite.
If Israel had wanted to commit genocide in Gaza, by now there would be no Palestinians left in the area. When the accusers can point to industrial-level gas chambers and crematoria, they will have a point. Until then, they are just taking their antisemitic prejudices out for a stroll.
The word “genocide“ has an emotional punch that derives directly from the Holocaust. Hyper-intellectual definitions of the concept are just tricky ways of defining the meaning down so that it can be weaponized against Israel.
I thought both sides think the other wants the full elimination of the other. From the river to the sea goes both directions. This need not be gas ovens. The ethnic cleansing can be more humane, eg via camps like this one proposed by the Israeli defense minister, in which the whole civilian population is put into a small "humanitarian city" and confined there there in a camp that concentrates the Palestinians problem. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9dgv7v1d06o I thought it was acknowledged that both sides wanted the land for themselves, since no other solution allowed a safe home. It was not necessarily done out of murderous racial hatred, as with Hitler against Jews, Slav, etc, it rather out of a prudent sense of self defense. Neither side wants a democratic multiethnic state because it wouldn't work. I don't consider it an insult to say that Isra el wants Palestinians gone, gone, gone. I consider it a statement of current ideal wish of the best outcome because each side thinks the other wants exactly that. They don't want to live with an intractable enemy. MT's comment proves my point, not his. The goal of ethnic cleansing is too politically objectionable to acknowledge, so it is denied and labeled a racist slur. Slow half measures are better politically. Therefore a concentrated camp labeled "humanitarian" and it is, indeed, such. Life imprisonment, even inter generational life imprisonment, is more humanitarian than death in a gas oven. Both sides have been killing each other with a goal of total elimination for 3000 years. God commanded it, and did so repeatedly. It is an affront to God's demand of a devoted people.An enemy with is dangerous, but out of political prudence Israel does slow steps and half measures.
“Both sides have been killing each other with a goal of total elimination for 3000 years”.
Both “sides”? Israel’s implacable enemy is a now-shrinking branch of fundamentalist Islam, which itself has existed for less than 1500 years. Neither the Canaanites nor Philistines were Arabs, much less Muslims.
It is an Abrahamic and Semitic family war, and only one side in recent decades features eliminationist rhetoric and policy. Israel has repeatedly offered two-state solutions, via leaders on the opposite side of politics from Bibi, and has been repeatedly rebuffed. Today the rulers of Gaza, Hamas, stand with its ally Iran as the primary opponents of regional peace by requiring the destruction of the Israeli state. That’s a one-way street.
I get the distinction between a policy encouraging self deportation and one of gas ovens. We call one ethnic cleansing and the other genocide. But the fact remains that Israeli policy is to have this be a Jewish state, not a multicultural one. Well it is mostly their country and Iran is the Islamic state and Jordan is a Hashemite one so Israel can do it, too. But what settlers are doing in the West Bank and the IDF is doing in Gaza is, indeed, cruel. People assert it is justified but it is justified cruelty toward the end of getting unwanted people to leave. (We are doing that in the USA, too. Sending people guilty of illegal entry and nothing more, sending them to Libya, is both cruel and a message. Get out!!!. It is not genocide and I am not saying it is. It is cruel, though, and a kind of cleansing. I also get the distinction between the mass murder of Caananites and the people in the area 2500 years ago and the Muslim population post Mohammed. Some are "Arabs" and some are local people who are better described as ethically Mediterranean. But the fact remains that the leadership of those non-Jewish people have been, or harbored, attackers of Jewish Israel. Enough of them have said they want Jews gone than Israeli fear of them is not crazy or racist, necessarily. They see an enemy and want them gone or dead. MT's comments about "them or us, and he picks us" is instructive. It applies to both sides, whatever the historic ethnicity. The fact that there is no strong willingness to have a multistage or two-state endgame tells me that the problem is unlikely to be solved with anthing less than total war. In times as recent as Joshua and Ghengis Kahn and Tamerlane and Hitler and Stalin and Mao's great famine the solution was total genocide. We are more civilized now, and we are cutting off the puppy's tail one inch at a time. The solution for Israel is for all the "Palestini9ans," whatever their ethnic identity, to leave. Self deport. Die. Be killed. Be annexed into a neighborhor. Become something other than what they are now. I do not see an Israeli willingness to have Palestinians be fellow citizens in their democracy.
The above long comment is from me, Peter Sage. For some reason I cannot edit it or add my name to it.
What I object to is my tax dollars being used to aid and abet Israel's wanton slaughter of civilians. It isn't a developing nation. If it wants to spend money on ethnic cleansing, let them do it with their own.
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