10/7/24

 Monday, October 7, 2024

1985 PLO terrorists seized the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro

1990 Israel began handing out gas masks to its citizens

1991 Law Professor Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of making sexually inappropriate comments to her

1996 Rupert Murdoch launched Fox News with Roger Ailes as CEO

2016 Washington Post released a videotape of Donald Trump boasting of groping and kissing women without consent

2023 October 7th, Israel

In bed at 8:45, up at 4:25.  46°, high of 64°, autumn in the air.  I saw my first 'snowbird' or slate-colored junco today.  So pretty.

Prednisone, day 146, 7.5 mg., say 25/28.   Prednisone at 5:10.  3 slices of Dave's Bread, toasted, with strawberry preserves at 6:30.  Morning meds at 11:40.

Israel and America, doppelgänger nations.  There is an op-ed by Mairav Zonszein, titled "On Israeli Apathy", in this morning's NYTimes.  She wrote:   

A year since the murderous Oct. 7 Hamas attack set off the war in Gaza, Israel is sinking deeper into an existential crisis. . . The way many Israelis protesting across the country see it — a group largely identified as the secular liberal elite — this is not just about saving the hostages; it is a battle over the state’s character and identity. This, then, is the state’s existential inflection point: between a democracy and authoritarianism, between having an independent court system and one beholden to the executive, between a country with the freedom to protest and hold leaders accountable, and one where open speech is squelched and leaders run roughshod over the populace.

I was struck by how much her comments could apply as well to the United States as to Israel, and it reminded me of how often I have commented in this journal about the similarities between the two nations**, with their military-industrial-technological complexes, their ever-readiness for war, their histories of racism, their beliefs in their own exceptionalism.  I am reminded even more of the warnings of Yeshayahu Leibowitz after the Six-Day War against occupying the captured Arab lands: the Sinai and Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.   He warned that holding on to the captured territories and ruling over the Palestinians who lived there would corrupt Israel and its society.   

Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we must rule.  Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a milllion who are citizens of the state [of Israel] in the area under our rule will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about a catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab. . . The state would no longer be a Jewish state . . . Its problems and needs would no longer be those of the Jewish people in Israel and in the Diaspora.  Its functions would no longer be geared to these needs.  It would be concerned only with the specific problems of rule and administration of this state -- the problems of ruling over both Jews and Arabs.  It's situation would be much like that of the state of Lebanon, perplexed as it is with the relations between Maronite Christians, Moslems, and Druzes.  The state would be harassed by such problems. . . The only concern of the monstrosity calle 'the Undivided Land of Israel' would be the maintenance of its system of rule and administration. . . .  Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population . . .

Leibowitz wrote these words in 1968, after the Six Day War and before the Yom Kippur War, and of course history reveals that indeed the Israelis did have a choice and that they chose not to withdraw from the occupied territories but rather to continue the occupation for the last 57 years with the consequences that Leibowitz predicted.  As Maraiv Zonszein states in this morning's op-ed, Israel is in "a battle over the state’s character and identity. This, then, is the state’s existential inflection point: between democracy and authoritarianism, between having an independent court system and one beholden to the executive office, between a country with the freedom to protest and hold leaders accountable, and one where open speech is squelched and leaders run roughshod over the populace."  This is what Leibowitz predicted. Unfortunately, especially after October 7th, it appears that Israeli society has opted for the kind of state that both Leibowitz and Zonszien feared, a right-wing, fascistic (at least to Palestinians) one where there are precious few people like Leibowitz or Zonszien to be found. 

The deep enmity between the Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs didn't start with the occupation of the territories captured in the Six-Day War.  It started with Zionism, and especially with the Nakba during and aftear Israel's Waar of Liberation.  Although I struggle with the thought, I continue to think that the problem is with Zionism itself which, as it played out through history, became a form of settler colonialism.  The Nakba was real and it is Israel's original sin.  It includes not only the expulsions during Israel's so-called War of Independence but also the denial of the right of return to Palestinians while extending it to Jews throughout the world.

** It is a question whether either Israel or the United States is a nation, and, if so, how.  That each country is a state is beyond question, but not whether either is a nation.  Leibowitz argued that Jews, spread throughout the world, lacked all the identifying commonalities that we associate with nationhood, e.g., language, territory, state, etc., except for Halakhah or Jewish Law, but only the Orthodox, or perhaps the so-called Ultra-orthodox practice Halakhah.  The identifying commonalities among Americans would seem to be state, territory, (for most of us) language, and some shared history, but increasingly we are a seriously polarized people, divided into "red" and "blue" states with widely divergent political values.  Are the people of California and Massachusetts members of the same nation as the people of Alabama and Mississippi?  In the same way that members of the Navajo nation are?  More and more, the 'United' States looks like two countries, like the old Union and the New Confederacy.