Israel, Palestine, and the Sub-Rational

A liberal solution is still a possibility.

(Photo by Amir Levy via Getty Images.)

Yesterday, Donald Trump was found guilty on all counts by a Manhattan jury. We will have William Galston of the Brookings Institution on The Good Fight podcast tomorrow to discuss the verdict’s implications for the presidential elections, and much else besides. Today, we are publishing an essay from our editorial partner The UnPopulist about how liberals can make sense of the horrific events in the Middle East.

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– Yascha and the editorial team.

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One thing critics of Israel misunderstand when they accuse it of colonialism is the Jewish concept of exile. The desire to return—to the land, to the Temple, to the Davidic kingdom, to the Garden of Eden—is a theological through-line that encapsulates pragmatic needs like escaping antisemitism, achieving physical security, and regaining political agency. Return from exile is both pragmatic and symbolic, and the violent, Jew-hating 20th century gave Jews only one way to achieve it: national statehood.

One thing critics of Palestinians misunderstand when they accuse them of terrorism is the Islamic concept of dishonor. Speaking as a student of the conflict, though not a Muslim insider, the obligation to avenge family dishonor, especially when family clans might include tens of thousands, is a central form of personal integrity. The dishonor wound is deep, carved by Ottoman corruption, British repression, the failed Palestinian Revolt of 1936-39, Arab military embarrassment during the Nakba, and the Jewish incursion into the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Like exile for the Jews, dishonor encapsulates and transcends real suffering—loss of land, restricted movement, indignities and checkpoints, stolen groundwater, retained taxes, denied permits for housing expansion, arrests on charges of terror, and military losses. And as this feeling escalates, violence and martyrdom become the only escape.

I refer to these concepts on each side because they are sub-rational, powerful forces lurking beneath the surface of the conflict and defy a resolution.

Liberalism Is the Only Way

The greatest tragedy of this entire conflict is that everyone knows the only rational outcome: Two groups of people who deeply distrust each other will need to be neighbors. Intelligent advocates can argue over the shape of that neighborhood—one structured with state borders, or one with the polite regulations of a homeowners’ association—but at the end of the day, all will have to follow the rules. For most of the modern world, liberalism—with its use of empirical evidence, free flow of information, fair rule of law, impartial institutions, governmental checks and balances, the protection of minority voices, and the deliberative systems of representative democracy—creates the rules, which provide the moral framework to protect human life and dignity. If Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and Bedouin (a messy quilt of overlapping identities) will ever live together peacefully under vines and fig trees, then some kind of liberal system will be necessary.

For decades, both sides sought to maximize their share of the neighborhood. Israel won that fight. Starting with land purchases from the Ottomans, working through Lord Balfour and the British, fighting with the Allies against the Nazis, lobbying in the early UN, engaging in warfare, negotiating treaties with sovereign nations, creating bureaucracies for occupation, and reacting to real security threats with force, Israel whittled away Palestinian power, land, and freedom. At each historical stage of this conflict, Palestinian violence provided Israel a legitimate argument to expand its security apparatus, which over the decades—as predicted by Israeli critics like Amos Oz and David Grossman—surpassed its liberal intent, making it more illiberal.

The Oslo process of the 1990s was flawed but it was supposed to end the zero-sum rivalry with a gradual, structured settlement. To some extent, it worked. On the Israeli side, Oslo restrained the religious nationalists and real-estate developers from gobbling up every square inch of Palestinian land. On the Palestinian side, Oslo created the Palestinian Authority, which protested Israeli encroachment (however meekly), and represented the shadow of an autonomous state government (however corrupt). Violence was reduced (albeit not eliminated). Oslo was liberalism in action.

After Oslo, the Whirlwind

But Oslo’s demise released the sub-rational on both sides. Israelis saw exile in the constant terror attacks of the Second Intifada, and the Palestinians saw dishonor when statehood became a mirage. Co-existence became anathema. The fig trees had to burn. Illiberalism was on the march in both societies.

First, in Israel, without a realistic two-state solution, a Palestinian-inclusive democratic (one state) framework became a threat to the Jewish state’s existence. Israel understood it would not be able to remain both Jewish and democratic. In the summer of 2021, I interviewed a range of activists, thinkers, and journalists and all said that in the Israeli political establishment the Hebrew word democratia had, in this context, become equivalent with anti-Zionist.  

Second, some religious nationalists began a territorial free-for-all in the West Bank. Based on a May 1967 sermon by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, son of Israel’s first Chief Rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, they believe Jews have a messianic religious obligation to hold onto every square inch of Greater Israel (including parts of modern Jordan). Their power has grown through state subsidies, real estate development of stolen Palestinian land, and the Knesset multi-party negotiation process.

Third, Oslo’s collapse, combined with the U.S.-Iraq war, contributed to the rise of Iran, ever a cynical sponsor of the Palestinian cause because of the way it destabilizes Sunni rivals. The combination of Hezbollah, Hamas, a potentially nuclear Iran, Iraqi-Shiite militias, and Houthi rebels in Yemen encircled Israel with existential threat. This became the political foundation stone of the never-ending Netanyahu regime.

Similar dynamics apply to what we know of Gazan society leading up to October 7.

First, Oslo’s collapse left the Palestinian Authority in power, but only as a hollow shell of a government, led by thoroughly corrupt leaders. Mahmoud Abbas’ personal net worth is estimated at over $100 million, graft surpassed only by Hamas, whose leaders have amassed fortunes in the billions.

Second, Hamas proudly identifies as a religious autocracy. Since the time it took political control in the elections of 2006 and the subsequent violence against the Palestinian Authority, every aspect of society has operated only with Hamas’ approval. Free media coverage is an illusion, as reporters and editors carefully tiptoe up to Hamas’ censorious boundaries. Minority rights are laughable.

Third, for almost 20 years, Hamas’ rocket attacks against Israel—followed by IDF aerial bombardments—created a gruesome pattern. Every few years some kind of flare-up, usually a confrontation on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, provoked a tactically pointless barrage of rockets haphazardly aimed at Israeli population centers. Rather than dissuade Hamas’ attacks, the pattern of IDF retaliation, dramatic Gazan civilian death tolls, and worldwide condemnation of Israel only fueled them.

I share this background not in comparison, but rather as a combined portrait of two societies progressing along the path to illiberalism leading up to October 7. Since then, the twin horrors of tens of thousands of Gazan civilian deaths and the ongoing suffering of Israeli hostages have pushed this conflict firmly into the sub-rational dimensions of exile and honor. The kind of rational thinking that undergirds liberalism’s slow, unsexy, boring, yet durable, robust, resilient, and fair systems is impossible during this grotesquerie of horror.

Everyone is delusional in their pursuit of justice. Jews will not be forced back into exile. Palestinians can stomach no more dishonor. As rational thought dissolves, liberal systems die.

This is the bad news.

Liberalism’s Way Forward

The good news is that as international observers and advocates, we have the benefit and, frankly, the privilege, of distance. While many Jews and Palestinians have direct connections to the conflict, most of us are removed by a degree or two or more. That means we have greater distance from the exile/dishonor impulse. Our distance may give liberalism a chance.

For Israel’s advocates, consider that while Israel has a right to defend itself, doing so with such a flawed government undermines their moral case for just war. As Iraq War veteran Elliot Ackerman teaches, “War is state-sanctioned murder.” A government led by a prime minister avoiding criminal prosecution, dependent upon religious extremists, bent on destroying judicial independence and checks-and-balances, and shutting down freedom of the press lacks the moral legitimacy to “sanction murder.” Durable Jewish safety comes only through liberal systems like treaties, stable democratic government, and morally legitimate leadership. By contrast, Israel’s anti-liberal nationalists favor more force.

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What Justice Requires in Gaza

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For Palestinian advocates, consider that while the long cause rejecting Palestinian displacement, land expropriation, occupation, and suffering may be just, continued justifications of extreme violence against Israeli civilians, and continued silence about the cause of the Israeli hostages, is a moral stain and strategic mistake that only reinforces the Jewish exile instinct. Contrary to the oft-evoked historical analogy, Israel is not a France-like power occupying a distant foreign country like Algeria and denying it statehood. And anti-colonial philosopher Franz Fanon’s gospel of violence that Palestinian sympathizers are increasingly invoking has moral and practical limits. When protestors pursue a self-gratifying agenda of justice “by any means necessary,” anti-liberalism is empowered, which will only lead to more death, and thus more exile and dishonor.

Dangerous Utopias

Lastly, postmodern, anti-liberal utopians also talk about a world beyond statehood, often couching this in the argument that Palestinians are the truly indigenous people in the land (an idea that the local Bedouin—who are largely sympathetic with Israel—would dispute). These activists use rhetoric describing the overturning of the existing world order.

Israeli thinker Amos Oz described such a world in his book In the Land of Israel in 1983:

I would be more than happy to live in a world composed of dozens of civilizations, each developing in accordance with its own internal rhythm, all cross-pollinating one another, without any one emerging as a nation-state: no flag, no emblem, no passport, no anthem. No nothing. Only spiritual civilizations tied somehow to their lands, without the tools of statehood and without the instruments of war.

But the Jewish people has already staged a long-running one-man show of that sort. The international audience sometimes applauded, sometimes threw stones, and occasionally slaughtered the actor. No one joined us; no one copied the model the Jews were forced to sustain for two thousand years, the model of a civilization without the “tools of statehood.” For me this drama ended with the murder of Europe’s Jews by Hitler.

Such post-statehood dreams are lovely, but when applied first to the Jewish state, the Jew in me wants to scream, “Start somewhere else! Anywhere else!” And when this idealism is applied in the wake of October 7, after Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad said on October 24, “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” such idealism is morally outrageous, and frankly, antisemitic.

Their alternative dream is creating a secular democracy “from the river to the sea.” This is simply unpragmatic. Such a creation imposed from the outside is not only impossible, but it would be a bloodbath. Israelis (including the million or so Arab citizens of Israel who Hamas considers collaborators) and Palestinians need a secure border between them, for at least a generation or two. Borders are structures of states, states have governments, governments rest on laws and regulations, laws depend on a population dedicated to fairness, reason, and truth. All of this stands on liberalism’s commitment to human dignity. Anyone who wants to save lives—Palestinian, Israeli, it doesn’t matter—should be arguing for liberalism, statehood, structure, democracy, and borders. Liberalism suppresses the sub-rational urges. The end of dishonor for Palestinians and the end of exile for Jews must follow the creation of a border between them.

I am reminded of this every time I hike along the Virginian side of the Potomac river, and remember that if my toe touches the water, it is in Maryland. This is the only U.S. river where the border is not in the center, and that is because the North took the whole thing at the end of the Civil War. Once upon a time that border between two sides—both of whom firmly believed, rationally and sub-rationally, in the justice of their cause—saw hundreds of thousands of deaths. Today that state border is an annoying cause for traffic. One day, let that be the border between Israel and Palestine.

Inshallah (With God’s help), Keyn Y’hi Ratzon (May this be God’s will).

Michael G. Holzman is a rabbi, writer, creator of the American Scripture Project, and spiritual leader of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation.

A version of this article was originally published by The UnPopulist, our editorial partner.

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