Alan Zendell, March 15, 2024

The current conflict between Israel and Hamas, a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran, has serious implications for the entire world. History will view it as a critical turning point for Israel, the Middle East, and the elephant in the room – the nuclear powers’ use of conflicts in the Middle East as surrogates for their own brinksmanship.

What makes this conflict so complex and dangerous is that in some manner, it touches everyone. It affects the world’s energy supply and international shipping, foments intense anger on all sides and spins off terrorist acts like funnel clouds on the edge of a hurricane. It involves generations-old deep-seated grievances and grudges, a two-thousand-year-old world-encompassing family feud. Multi-generational enmity isn’t new. The centuries-long conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, England and both Scotland and Northern Ireland, Japan and Korea, India and Pakistan prove the point.

But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different and more complicated and confounding than the others. It involves two peoples who have been victimized by their neighbors for their entire existence. Antisemitism has existed since the time of Christ, and the Palestinians have been betrayed and abandoned by their Muslim neighbors for more than a century. An objective observer looking at the last seventy-five years would shake their head in dismay. The establishment of Israel as an independent nation was so badly executed by the fledgling United Nations, one might think it was deliberately set up to fail.

Only British imperialism could have conceived such an arrangement. Take a million or so Jews who lived in the “Holy Land” all their lives, throw in another five million refugees and survivors of the Nazi holocaust, and ensconce them on a piece land that looks strangely like New Jersey, surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who want to kill them. Stir in Cold War politics and the world’s thirst for oil and we had a recipe for disaster.

Yet, it is not the case that all Israelis and Palestinians hate each other. As in many such situations, the vast majority of people on both sides are decent people being driven by extremist elements with their own agendas. Hamas is a terrorist organization that has always devoted more of its meager resources to the destruction of Israel than to caring for its own people. Israel, on the other hand, was founded by people who had been persecuted most of their lives and were constantly under attack, so it was natural that many Israelis would appear to be right-wing militants to the rest of the world.  

After decades of conflict, younger Israelis craved peaceful coexistence. By 1990, Israel was evenly split between people who swore never to compromise and those who wanted to negotiate peace with their neighbors. That was the beginning of Benjamin Netanyahu’s career in Israeli politics. He spoke English fluently, sounding like he was from Philadelphia, where he spent much of his childhood, effectively cementing Israel’s wardship with the United States. He charmed us, especially Jewish Americans like my family who felt a kinship to Israel. We didn’t realize all the cheerleading on behalf of the defense of Israel masked a right-wing zealot with a lust for power that sometimes took precedence over what was best for Israel.

The Israeli peace movement might have prevailed, but for the collapse of the Soviet Union, which allowed three million Jews who’d lived under Communist subjugation and were as militant as the original Israelis of 1948, to emigrate to Israel. Netanyahu, a populist politician with Trump-like instincts, recognized his opportunity and took over the right-wing Likud Party which has dominated Israel’s coalition governments for thirty years. Whether or not Netanyahu really believes that risking making Israel a pariah to the rest of the world in his quest to eradicate Hamas is best for Israel, it’s his best chance to remain in power and avert criminal prosecution. It’s not a coincidence that he’s employing the same tactics as Donald Trump to remain in power and out of prison.

Hamas’ attack on Israeli civilians on October 7, 2023 was more destructive, proportionally, to Israel than nine-eleven was to the United States. That it was one of the most despicable acts since World War 2 isn’t up for debate. The issue is whether Netanyahu’s quest to destroy Gaza can be allowed to go unchecked with no regard for the lives of over a million civilians. Many people argue that there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian, just as Americans were propagandized to believe every German in the 1940s was a racist murderer. Netanyahu may believe that, but a growing majority of Israelis do not.

Yesterday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jew in our government, addressed the world, demanding that Netanyahu call for a new election to let the Israeli population decide who they want to lead them through this crisis. It was a courageous act, the kind of thing a great stateman committed to responsible governing does. Moreover, he was correct. Netanyahu is as toxic to the future of Israel as Trump is to the future of the United Staes.