The Year of Moral Loss

 

By David K. Shipler             

              The deep paradox in the Arab-Israeli conflict is the immorality of each side’s moral certitude. Each is convinced of its righteousness.

But the high ground of righteousness has been completely flattened in the last year, beginning with the intimate atrocities of October 7 by the Palestinian movement Hamas, then with the remotely inflicted atrocities by Israel. The only shred of morality left is whatever attaches to victimhood.

              Not that wars are moral enterprises. Not that this conflict has ever been ethical or conducted within Queensberry rules. Since modern Israel’s founding in 1948, the struggle has been nasty, grinding, and brutalizing. Still, it respected certain boundaries. Forty years ago, the Palestinians had not yet adopted suicide bombers as a standard weapon against Israeli civilians, nor had they sexually assaulted and tormented young Israeli women. Israel had not sent tanks and fighter jets against Palestinian residents of Gaza and the West Bank, nor had Jewish settlers so systematically driven Palestinians from their West Bank villages. And non-Arab actors such as Iran had not directly attacked Israel.

              But now, as Tom Friedman has said, so many red lines have been crossed that “you kind of get used to it. And at the end of the day, there are no more red lines. And when that happens, watch out.”

              Both Israeli and Palestinian societies are diverse and fluid. Neither is monolithic; both contain moderate citizens embracing coexistence. Yet the most radical and hateful among them have been propelled into power by decades of strife. Palestinian leaders see all Israelis, including children, as potential soldiers. Israeli leaders in the current government—the most extreme in Israel’s history—conflate all Palestinians in Gaza with Hamas, one reason that Israel is willing to bomb whole buildings and kill many civilians to get one commander. On both sides, those at the top seem to have no moral brakes.

              Their military tactics have been devastating to non-combatants. Abhorrent methods of warfare have been normalized: sadistic killings and hostage-taking, food deprivation and massive bombings, indiscriminate rocketing, assassinations, exploding pagers designed to murder and maim even while innocent bystanders suffer. Hamas has embedded its fighters among civilians in their homes and schools and hospitals, using innocents as human shields. Undeterred, the Israelis have fought through those so-called shields, mostly with air strikes and artillery, killing and wounding tens of thousands, impeding food supplies, and shattering medical facilities.

Everything is hurtling backwards. The slender areas of common ground have been eroded. More than thirty years after Israel finally considered the possibility of a Palestinian state, current Israeli leaders are making every effort to slam that door and lock it—a hardline position popular among Israelis now that the Hamas attack has demonstrated what Palestinians would do with statehood. More than thirty years after the Palestine Liberation Organization finally recognized the Jewish state’s right to exist, Hamas in Gaza wants Israel obliterated.

So does Iran—or, at least, Iranians with keys to the weapons—so it has armed Sunni Palestinian Muslims through Hamas, and Shia Muslims through Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen. And twice in the last six months, Iran has attacked with hundreds of missiles, nearly all successfully intercepted by advanced defense systems but setting the stage for Israeli retaliation.

It’s hard to take seriously Iran’s claims to be supporting the Palestinians. It has invented its   animosity toward Israel to drive an absolutist Islamic ideology, a religio-nationalist thrust to dominate the region.

By contrast, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is real and largely secular, founded on an actual clash of claims to the same narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Religion is a thread in this tapestry, more prominent than decades ago, but polls show no more than 10 to 12 percent of Palestinians endorsing Hamas’s goal of rule by Muslim religious law.

Hamas nonetheless ran Gaza following Israel’s voluntary military withdrawal in 2006. Israel sealed it into that small territory with high-tech fences and cameras and other monitoring equipment, then--despite occasional rocket attacks--grew complacent that the hostility was caged and contained. In an astonishing breakdown more than a year ago, Israel’s intelligence and military hierarchy ignored alarming reports by young women soldiers assigned as field observers that Hamas seemed to be training and maneuvering for an assault. They were not taken seriously by male superiors. When fighters crossed into Israel, the army was almost nowhere to be seen as some 1200 people were killed and about 250 taken hostage, including seven women from that intelligence unit. (The Washington Post reports the same disrespect currently for unarmed female observers on the border with Lebanon.)

The failure traumatized Israelis who thought their security apparatus kept them safe. It reactivated the sense of vulnerability in a Jewish population burdened by its history of persecution.

If there is any lesson here, it is fairly simple: Trauma does not usually encourage risk-taking. The key to getting Israel to compromise is getting Israel to feel safe. Insecurity will never induce accommodation. So the Hamas attack and now Iran’s entry into the order of battle have hardened the country and removed restraint. A fear has infected Israel that its very existence is at stake. The response has not been compromise, but ruthlessness.

Last October 8, even before Israel began its devastating destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attack, Hezbollah in Lebanon began peppering northern Israel with rockets, driving 60,000 to 70,000 Israelis from their homes, making them internal refugees. For a year, the border area has been an array of ghost towns, according to a friend of mine living about 80 kilometers away, with farmers venturing in and out hastily to tend their orchards.

Consider this striking fact: If an equivalent percentage of the US population were run out of swaths of our southern border, the displaced would total nearly 2.5 million. Imagine the American reaction if areas were depopulated so thoroughly for so long. Would we have any moral brakes?

 We should, but we are hardly a model. Nor are the Palestinians or the Lebanese or the Iranians. The whirlwind of Israel’s forever war spins on.