Thoughts on the Latest War on Terrorism: Compassion, Uncertainty, and the Cruel Lessons of History

As those of you who read this column know, I’ve spent the last several months recovering from an acute health crisis which led to me nearly dying.  Once I was able to write again, I chose the subjects of my columns well in advance to give myself more than ample time to write and edit them.  Thus, I have not responded immediately to the events unfolding in the Middle East but have been observing everything carefully when I do my daily news survey and reflecting more deeply than an instantaneous column on breaking news allows.  

By now, a couple weeks into the latest war, so much ink has been spilled that a comprehensive overview and analysis would be impossible in the space of even a longer column like the one that follows.  What I will offer here instead are merely some observations about where we are now.

It must be said that consuming the initial rush of TV, print, Internet, and social media coverage of first the slaughter of innocent Israeli citizens and the subsequent killing of innocent Palestinian civilians is like having a bad acid trip, over and over.  When I am not convalescing, I teach about both Judaism and Islam in a Humanities class at City College and have worked over the years to try to get students out of their preconceived notions about different faiths, cultures, and practices, and attempt to take the imaginative leap of seeing things from a standpoint that might not be their own.  This involves a degree of negative capability that many find challenging.  

So, when I saw the young people at a music festival in Israel horribly murdered and/or taken captive by Hamas militants, I couldn’t help but see my own son and students, just as I did when I saw the bodies of Palestinian children in Gaza who were the collateral damage of Israel’s bombing campaign in preparation for a ground invasion in response to the mass murder of their citizens.  Say what you may, dear readers, but my first thoughts were not political but simply, “that could be me, that could be my family.”

Compassion does not dictate a preordained position; it challenges you to have the courage to imagine yourself as the other.  As Charles Blow eloquently put it last week, “When our empathies have boundaries — when they stop at borders, races, ethnicities — when one group is freely granted them while another is wholly deprived, then our empathies are false. They have been weaponized. They are instruments in an argument.”

In addition to feeling for those in the grips of unspeakable horror, I was struck by an overwhelming sense of grief, dread, and déjà vu.  We’ve seen this movie before.  

As the great Modernist writer Virginia Woolf wrote in her suicide note after witnessing the carnage of the First World War and dreading being on the cusp of the second one, “I feel certain I am going mad again.  I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times.  And I shant recover this time.” 

The rest of her note is directed to her husband, Leonard, but most scholars think that the beginning lines refer to the rise of Fascism and the impending slaughter of millions of more humans in the good war that came in the wake of the war to save democracy and preceded the Cold War and decades of proxy wars around the globe before the War on Terrorism emerged in 2001 to save civilization from barbarism yet again.  

So it goes.

Every war is the war to prevent the next one or avenge the latest atrocity.  It never ends.  

As Chris Hedges noted in the New York Times back in 2003: 

• Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history. 

• How many people have died in war? 

• At least 108 million people were killed in wars in the twentieth century. Estimates for the total number killed in wars throughout all of human history range from 150 million to 1 billion.

And the numbers of dead have only swollen in the twenty years since that was written.  The United States fought a war in Iraq sold to the American public with documented falsehoods and bad intelligence at the same time the carnage in Afghanistan continued.  

Today, the Taliban are back in power, and global terrorism has morphed into even more virulent and inhumane forms despite the hundreds of billions of dollars thrown away in the service of freeing the world from terror with the disproportionate use of state sanctioned violence across the globe.  Out of the ashes of one terror threat another emerges, time and time again.  

Indeed, coming face to face with this reality, last week a State Department official, Josh Paul, resigned from his position in protest saying that, “I fear we are repeating the same mistakes we have made these past decades, and I decline to be a part of it for longer.” More specifically, Paul notes that, “This administration’s response—and much of Congress’ as well—is an impulsive reaction based on confirmation bias, political convenience, intellectual bankruptcy, and bureaucratic inertia.  That is to say, it is immensely disappointing, and entirely unsurprising.”

The bottom line: We failed and have not learned from it.  Hence, though I am not counseling despair, I remember Woolf’s agony at both her personal and the collective madness of the world and think, “that could be me.”  

But all such talk was almost instantly bum-rushed off stage in the virtual world, which is where most Americans get their siloed blasts of prepackaged information.  

As Elizabeth Spiers puts it in a recent column in the New York Times:

• Sitting with uncertainty is hard, especially when social media has primed us to expect perfect real-time information during traumatic events and to want instantaneous answers and resolution. Moral certainty is an anchor we cling to when factual certainty is not possible. And the faster we express it, the more certain we appear. The most righteous among us post — and do it immediately.

The profound uncertainty that Modernist writers, artists, and intellectuals pondered during a century of mass killing has been banished in favor of various forms of anti-modernist reactionary positions by fundamentalists of various flavors from the Middle East to the United States.  

Whether it was curing the United States of “Vietnam syndrome,” as the Bush administration’s talking heads labeled any doubt or questioning of American foreign policy, or the birth of a myriad of global ideologies that rejected the Modernist challenge to religious certainty, nationalism, and the meaning of human existence, we have seen a global recoil from the growing uncertainty and complexity of our world in favor of simple answers, reactionary nationalism, and a full scale rejection of a demythologizing current that accompanied the social and scientific advances of the twentieth century.  

This is too big a subject to adequately cover here, but suffice to say, the leap from Al Qaeda to QAnon is not a long one, intellectually speaking.  Neither is the fact-free, xenophobic, anti-science, authoritarian strain of the American right much different in character from a host of murderous ideologies abroad.  

Thus, in the United States, the discussion of Netanyahu’s policy decisions has been much less critical than it has been in the Israeli media, where, despite attempts to silence criticism, many are taking him to task for the disaster they face, even as most stand by the military response as they continue to roil in reaction to the horrors of the Hamas attack.  

In contrast, here in the U.S., we are seeing the rebirth of the “you better watch what you say” ethos of the Bush years in the euphoric early days of terror war, before the futile reality set in, and American public opinion shifted against more foreign entanglements. Recently, in response to progressives in Congress who condemned Hamas’ attacks but also called for restraint in Israel’s military campaign, rather than respectfully disagreeing with them, White House spokesperson, Lee Summers, called such sentiments “repugnant” and “disgraceful.”  Dick Cheney could not have done any better.  

The disciplining of any view expressing support not for Hamas but for Palestinian rights has quickly become pervasive as the Guardian reported on Saturday:

• Widespread attempts to suppress pro-Palestinian views in the US after the Hamas attack on Israel have forced the cancellation of major conferences, prompted demands for the dismissal of workers who express support for Palestinians and led to intimidation campaigns against Arab American voices critical of Israeli policies.

This campaign backed by business interests and rightwing organizations has gone after Starbucks workers, authors at book fairs, commentators on the cable news networks, and more.  Sometimes the sin is as simple as providing a larger context in which to consider the current war between Hamas and Israel or writing a book that shows empathy for Palestinians.  

Of course, it is not surprising for the left to be targeted in the United States given our history of McCarthyism, but the range of opinion on the left, it should be noted, is far more diverse than the cartoon version one sees presented in the corporate media.  In fact, the debate on the left has been fierce and complicated and threatens to tear it apart, just as domestic divisions do in the general public as the conflict persists. 

The eminent Harold Meyerson, a longtime member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and champion of the left, wrote in the wake of a New York City rally that:

• Liberals and leftists who have long championed Palestinian statehood and Israel’s total withdrawal from the West Bank, and who now oppose the obliteration of Gaza that Israel is threatening, found DSA’s promotion of what was effectively a pro-Hamas rally in Times Square to be outrageous. They found the initial failure of DSA’s national political committee to condemn Hamas correspondingly repugnant.

Meyerson then explains the divisions within DSA that led to this fissure:

• The current tumult reflects a larger division that besets DSA. In one camp, there are members who believe the Democratic Party is an arena in which, given the limits of the American electoral system, socialists must be active, that socialists should work in coalition with other progressive groups and constituencies, and that DSA members in public office should have the same freedom of action as other elected progressives. The fact that DSA grew tenfold only when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ran in Democratic primaries, and have thrived in office while promoting socialist programs but also while taking positions at odds with DSA’s leadership (both explicitly and forcefully condemned Hamas), bolsters this camp’s case.

• The other camp has a more sectarian outlook. It contains some longtime members of small, largely defunct left groups who only joined DSA because it had suddenly grown larger than any socialist grouping since the days of Gene Debs (ironically, because of the anti-sectarian campaigns of Bernie and AOC). A few years ago, some of these sectarians actually sought to expel one DSA member of Congress, New York’s Jamaal Bowman, from the organization for his failure to toe their line on Palestine, though they did not succeed.

• The vast majority of DSA members are many decades too young to have come to the organization from either its founding groups or one of those now-defunct sects. Most are fresh off America’s college campuses. They bring to DSA both the blessings and curses of youth: boundless energy and discomfort with complication and nuance. Many have done heroic work on behalf of tenants and striking workers; many also seem impervious to the tactical necessities that DSA’s elected officials heed, or to the strategic importance of campaigning for non-DSA progressives, or even to the moral and political necessity of linking ends with means (which led to American Communists’ support for Stalin and some current DSAers’ knee-jerk refusal to condemn Hamas).

Meyerson goes on to say that he has decided to leave DSA.  The best outcome here would be that the younger folks who stay in DSA learn from this incident and keep it from turning into a more sectarian and, consequently, politically irrelevant organization.  

In Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made a clear statement that: 

• “It should not be hard to shut down hatred and antisemitism where we see it. That is a core tenet of solidarity,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement obtained by The Hill.

• “The bigotry and callousness expressed in Times Square on Sunday were unacceptable and harmful in this devastating moment. It also did not speak for the thousands of New Yorkers who are capable of rejecting both Hamas’ horrifying attacks against innocent civilians as well as the grave injustices and violence Palestinians face under occupation,” she said.

Others, such as Peter Beinart, have done solid work trying to chart a way forward for a left that can share a common language on this issue to prevent us from “falling apart.”  

Thus, one should view the recent condemnation of “progressives'' in some Democratic circles with more than a grain of salt and remember with humility that close to half of the United States is still willing to vote for a party that voices support for Israel while simultaneously flirting with authoritarianism and the antisemitic rightwing.  The same moneyed interests that are in line with the Republican right are also funding some of the more public attacks on colleges and progressive organizations in an effort to silence the left as a whole.   

Nothing about this is new. It’s just more fuel for the culture war fires.  And while those on the right will never support a Democratic administration come election time, the party is at risk of losing others who could, whether that be Arab Americans in swing states or younger or anti-war voters who might just stay home.

In Israel, rage has led some to totally dehumanize all Palestinians.  In an excellent column, Michelle Goldberg looks at the rhetoric of the Israeli right and is disturbed by what she sees there:

• Watching from afar as people race toward an abyss, I find it hard to know what to write except “no,” over and over. In the face of massacres that for Jews around the world brought back memories of genocide, the language of some Israeli leaders has, in turn, become murderous . . . a mostly Hebrew-language Telegram group with over 82,000 subscribers in which people had posted celebratory photographs of dead and injured Palestinians. “The people of Gaza are not innocent!” said an introductory message for English speakers. If and when those who believe this act on it, we can’t pretend we weren’t warned.

Indeed, it may also be true that this reaction is precisely what Hamas is looking for as Hussein Ibish argues in this insightful analysis in The Atlantic: 

• It’s a trap. Hamas’s ruthless and spectacular attack on southern Israel last Saturday was many things: an atrocity, a display of militant ingenuity, and a demonstration of the weakness of Israeli intelligence and defenses. Israel and the Palestinians have a long history of brutality against each other, but the Hamas killing spree outdoes anything since Israeli-controlled Christian militias massacred unarmed Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside of Beirut in 1982. It may even have been the single most brutal act by either side in the 100-year-old conflict. But above all, it was intended as a trap—one that Israel appears about to fall into.

As of this writing, Israel is claiming that it is not planning on a long-term occupation of Gaza, and Biden is advising the Israeli government not to repeat America’s mistakes after 9/11 as he requests billions of dollars of military support for them, so time will tell.  A trickle of aid has begun to arrive in Gaza, but international human rights organizations are warning that it may be too little too late to prevent a humanitarian disaster in a region that was like hell on earth even before this war began.  

One can only hope that the worst-case scenario of a long, endlessly bloody, protracted war doesn’t materialize, and we live to see a two-state solution that honors the humanity and dignity of both Israelis and Palestinians, however naïve that appears at present.  Along with this we should also reject the impulses to stifle debate and move the conversation about America’s foreign policy from history to mythology.  That way peril lies.  

We are not faced with a simple choice between good and evil; we are faced with a series of very complex, key decisions about how to spend billions of American taxpayer dollars and what role the United States should play on the global stage.  And, as recent history shows, we have made a host of bad decisions over the last several decades that have cost us much blood and treasure while not making the world any safer or more just.  Hence, principled skepticism and a strict insistence on necessity that all parties value basic human rights are merited.  Leaning into compassion rather than rage is the only road out of this nightmare.  

It’s difficult not to be deeply pessimistic as long as Hamas maintains power, the hard right rules Israel, and America risks repeating its historical mistakes despite Biden’s protestations. But without resolution to this conflict AND the war in Ukraine, the only winners are the masters of war making billions on arms sales and the big oil companies profiteering in the midst of global conflict and impending planetary climate catastrophe.

Like Kurt Vonnegut who, in Slaughterhouse Five, pondered the futility of writing an anti-war novel in the wake of the horrors of World War II, I see the absurdity of writing a column about compassion amid an ongoing catastrophe.  Inevitably, Israel’s vastly superior firepower aided by the United States’ global hegemony will pound Gaza into a city of ruins.  There will likely be horrific responses by Hamas along the way, and the entire region and the world could erupt into deeper chaos and conflict.  And no one will win.  

What rough beast is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born?  

Nobody knows.  

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Editor’s note: As is true with all posts here at Words & Deeds, readers are welcome to comment (agreeing or not) on what is written here. Off-topic comments and personal attacks will not-so-magically disappear. I have zero tolerance for crap. —dp