I generally like for my writings to be carefully organized and polished reasonably smooth. Some of my op/eds go through ten sets of changes, or even more.
(I hope you’ll consider reading the first piece in the series named A BETTER HUMAN STORY I’ll be posting at noon (Eastern) this Saturday. Titled A BETTER HUMAN STORY #1, The Fateful Step, that piece will make its case in a measured, systematic way, regarding the source of our problems as the civilization-creating species.)
This week, however, I’ve twice had the impulse to just sit down and let the thoughts flow. Improvisational writing. (More like what I can imagine doing if I made a YouTube video and thought out loud.) Two such improvisations.)
In both these instances, for reasons unbeknownst to me, the subject has been my pondering the terribly difficult decisions the Israeli leadership is having to make about how to respond to the horrible events and horrible trauma that has befallen their nation.
Anyway, the first one was posted here last Monday with the title “The Israeli Response: A Consequentialist Perspective on the Pros and Cons of Revenge.”
The second one I am posting here now. Hoping it will be worth your while despite the lack of tight organization and polished wording.
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Since 1956 (Suez Crisis, Hungarian Revolt), I’ve put myself in the position of decision-makers on the world stage. Habitually, I’d ask myself, “What would I do if I were President in this situation?” (I’d have loved to have been some good President’s National Security Advisor.)
But never has any situation been more challenging to contemplate than the one that the government of Israel finds itself in now, in the aftermath of their suffering a blow so devastating as the one that Hamas just inflicted on it.
One thing seems pretty clear, at least in principle: it seems crystal clear that the Israelis simply must strike back, in some meaningful way.
I don’t know what range of options the Israelis can see. But in some way, for a whole variety of reasons the Israelis must Hit Back and Hit Back hard enough to address the legitimate needs of their nation.
(I won’t bother to make that case here and now. Suffice it to say I don’t imagine any sovereign nation not hitting back in fairly dramatic ways. And Israel in particular, which has the distinction that it has never existed in a moment when there weren’t any nations that wanted to destroy it.)
But at the same time, as Timothy Snyder so brilliantly pointed out, when the Israelis do that, they will be doing precisely what Hamas wanted them to do. They’d be fulfilling the purposes of the people who butchered Jews on Israeli territory. Understanding that should at least give one pause, lest one be drawn into helping the enemy rather than oneself. (Just as, Snyder said, the American response to 9/11 played into the hands of the terrorists, and greatly weakened America.)
So what does it mean that what the Israelis must do and what the Hamas terrorists deliberately provoked them to do greatly overlap? Is it possible that what’s best for the Israelis is still best even if that’s what their hateful enemies want to have happen?
(Like cause so many deaths in Gaza City, despite taking all possible precautions, because there is no way to Hit Back meaningfully without inflicting a terrible level of civilian casualties.
The Israeli decision-maker should understand that Hamas’s aim is to inflame the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so that Peace cannot break out leaving a Jewish state securely and legitimately on the ground. They achieve that goal with an attack that leaves the deepest of pain and hate and rage in the hearts of Israelis who then turn around and Hit Back leaving a profound new injection of pain and hate and rage in the hearts of the Palestinians.
If Hamas’s aim is “No Peace with the Jews,” “Death to Israel,” what is the Jewish decision-maker to do that will deal with the event in terms of maintaining what needs to be maintained for the nation’s security, while having no options regarding the conflict over the Hamas Atrocity that doesn’t hand Hamas the Middle East they want in order to perpetuate their war to destroy the Jewish state?
Damned if I know. (Though I did write up one idea that seems to me worth considering, published here as XXX.)
If that weren’t complication enough, there are the hostages. The Israeli decision-makers are compelled to do something that at the same time they perhaps “can’t” do because of the hostages. Ali Velshi reported on the feelings of Israelis, and differentiated between the bulk of the population that want the IDF to “level Gaza,” and the families of the hostages. But it seems in Israel, in contrast with their image of great toughness, the feeling about getting their people back is exceptionally intense.
(To get back one Israeli soldier, in the hands of the Palestinians for years, during which the Nation of Israel practically obsessed, the Israelis handed back over 1200 Palestinian prisoners, some of them serving life-sentences.)
I find myself thinking, with such decision-making, one must be more rational than that. Hostages are important, but one must keep a sense of proportion when weighing the life of a hostage against Big Picture National Interests.
How much should the Israeli decision-makers alter the course they take in order to protect the hostages?
The idea of “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” has always seemed to make a cold but important point: if the terrorists benefit from the taking of hostages, the message that sends will mean that more terrorists will take more hostages in the future.
Particular lives should not be weighted out of proportion to the overall stakes for what kind of world we’ll have.
A rational-calculative perspective would say that if we are willing to expend the lives of soldiers to protect our vital interests, why should the hostage’s life be treated as something altogether outweighing the reasons a nation sent its soldiers to fight and die?
In general, what I’ve observed governments doing in hostage situations as having costs more than they’ve benefitted. But it is so searing at a human level to think of people we love undergoing torments and being slaughtered by cruel and hateful people!
The rational-calculating function doesn’t have the primitive power of the system with grief and guilt in it, and so it is not surprising that governments assign more weight to hostages than the Big Picture would warrant.
Because Leaders are people who have taken on responsibility for the Big Picture, it is incumbent on them to develop the rational-calculative function that’s required to see things in bigger perspective.
But with Israel, it seems unlikely — given these circumstances — that much can be done for the hostages. Efforts are being made, apparently, but I can’t envision how anything good will have happened with the hostages at the end. Not looking at the total situation with respect to Gaza City, where the hostages are presumably stashed away where they’d not easily be found.
My guess is that the Israeli-decision makers see no way to do much for the hostages, consistent with their deepest obligations.
Which means another increment of trauma likely awaits the Israeli people. The nation that felt so strongly about that one soldier that they emptied their prisons to get him back will have to absorb one more serious gash in the heart to go along with the profound injuries the Israelis have suffered because of the Hamas Atrocity has seared images of such horror in the minds of Israelis (the beheading of babies) and that represents in terms of the number of people killed, a catastrophe a great many times more people killed than 9/11 was for Americans. (And remember how traumatized the nation was after that.)
So, if I were the Israeli decision-makers, I’d want them to explore every appropriate avenue to getting the hostages released (I cannot imagine any succeeding*), while also seeking ways of mitigating the trauma.
But whatever they do about the hostages, most of all they have to do whatever best serves the security — and survival — of a nation state that continues to face enemies who are bent on destroying them.
That goal is easily stated, but it could hardly be more difficult to know what course of action would be best. The decision-makers also have to take into account the possible consequences of a war against Hamas spreading. They’ve got to consider what the West Back Palestinians, Hezbollah forces in Lebanon to the North, and behind the scenes Iran (which explicitly wants to wipe Israel off the map).
[* UPDATE: I just saw a report that indicated that the Israelis are saying that they will keep blocking water, food, fuel, energy to Gaza City until the hostages are released. This move has the strength that it turns the situation into a mutual hostage-taking, with the Israelis taking hostage Hamas’s masses, while giving Hamas the off-and-on switch that can save both sets of hostages. It does put a spotlight, therefore, on Hamas’s moral character, where either it exposes its terrible immorality by sacrificing people from both sides of this conflict, rather than undoing this two-side monstrosity of threatening innocent people’s lives to extract concessions.
But it has so many times been said that Hamas shows indifference to the well-being of the people of Gaza that I don’t see this Israeli gambit helping either set of hostages, just a good move for PR purposes. (Would love to be wrong.) And in particular, in this instance, Hamas may still be hoping that the hostages would protect them by inhibiting the Israelis from utilizing their full strength.
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Digression: BTW, none of this means that I don’t find profound fault with how the Israelis have dealt with the Palestinians. I see the Palestinians as having blown opportunities to achieve peace, but I also see Israelis falling far short of dealing with this difficult situation in a way that best help build such a peace. The Israeli responsibility for feeding what I called a “cycle of vengeance” was a central part of that piece, three days ago, where I proposed a piece of strategy for the Israeli decision-makers.
What I am asserting — and this is addressed to those on the left who are pretty antagonistic toward Israel — is that one part of the agreed foundation for talking about who should do what should be that Israel has a right to exist, as a Jewish state, in peace and security, within acceptable boundaries there in the land.
(Land that the United Nations divided to provide “two-state solution” right at the start. The Arab world as a whole rejected Israel’s right to exist, and that issue has been there throughout, in one form or another.)
A state that has a right to exist, and that continues to have enemies that want their destruction, not peace, has national security interests it has to defend to make it more secure and to enhance its chances of survival.
This meditation on the complexity of the situation that Israeli decision-makers now confront is addressed to people who are willing to grant the Israelis the same rights that they grant to every other sovereign nation on the planet.
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But just what would be the best designed decision — or set of decisions — for the Israeli government to make? The problems boggle my mind.
I wish I felt more confidence that Netanyahu was someone who could give all the considerations their proper weight.
Netanyahu is very smart, very articulate, and has shown a good strategic sense. But he and his coalition have shown such an ugly, narrow, inhumane way of dealing with everything, that I fear they will be too reflexive and primitive in their thinking.
Netanyahu turns out to be something of a sociopath. He has no vision of peace and harmony in the human world. That’s not the kind of person I’d like deciding on how much weight to give, say, civilian casualties in Gaza City or to the way the rest of the world is perceiving the ugly things happening between Israel and Hamas:
The Ugliness started with Hamas showing the face of Evil. Israel would want to avoid having the world forget the Ugliness of Hamas’s
Would Israel doing whatever it should do have the result of the world forgetting the ugliness it saw with this ,and focusing thereafter on the new Ugliness, visible in Gaza City because the Israelis chose to launch some kind of non-trivial attack?
As an Israeli decisionmaker, I’d somehow come up with an answer to the question, “What is the best — including most defensible — thing that we can do?”
And then along with that I’d launch the best messaging campaign I could, the most powerful and persuasive for helping the world to see that this was the best of the choices available to you.
Either the Israelis should not invade Gaza, or they should be able to persuade the world that they are the Good Guys, and are doing what needs doing to make the world a better place. They should help the world to see that what Hamas represents is something it’s in everybody’s interest to strip something like what did these evils from exercising power in the world.
If the Israelis actually can destroy this political — like destroying Hitler’s regime — that has value to a world that is witnessing a disturbing rise in barbarism. (Think Putin’s attack on Ukraine.) It would be good for the Israelis to see that everyone has some stake in getting actors like this Hamas group off the stage.
A case could be made that the Americans and the British were doing what the world needed them to do in their determination to destroy the Nazi regime, and waged a war in which there were hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by Allied bombers.
Likewise, perhaps a case can be made that the Israelis would be doing what should be done in attempting to do the same with the Hamas force that did the atrocities they did. Despite the problem of Hamas marbled through Gaza City (Hamas having always used the people of the city as their human shields).
Not only must the leaders figure out — and then do -- what’s justified*, they also need to provide persuasive justifications to the wider world.
(I think that this kind of national PR has been a general weakness in Israeli PR for decades, And that Netanyahu in particular — though articulate — is clumsy at it. I think it’s because he’s a bit of a thug, and the issue of justice just isn’t his thing.)
[* The powerful statements from President Biden has been powerfully supportive of what he evidently assumes will be powerful action from Israel. The leader of the free world bolstered Israel, as it is about to engage in morally difficult action. The one element besides support was Biden’s bringing up -- publicly but also subtly -- the Law of War and the Geneva Conventions. He was signaling Netanyahu and the Israelis that respect for those civilizing rules for how wars are conducted is one of the criteria for what “justified.”]
So many things they should be considering, weighing. But here’s one more factor the decision-makers ought to bear in mind when they map out their plans for Hamas:
This is a time of rising anti-Semitism — in the United States (including in some surprising places, like America academia), and in other nations around the world. This is a moment where that rising tide of an ancient hate could either be fed by what Israel does in response to the Hamas Atrocity, or this horrific event could move the world toward Israel, just the way — perhaps — that the decision of the United Nations to create a Jewish state expressed a global reaction to the Holocaust that the Jews of Europe had suffered.
How the Israelis conduct and present themselves in this crisis with Hamas could either accelerate the rise of anti-Semitism in the world, or it could help garner support from the outside world. So far, it has brought support from most of the important parts of the world.
One more challenge in the mix for the Israeli decision-makers: can we avoid boosting anti-Semitism? and can we bring more of the world into a positive, sympathetic relationship with Israel?