A fuller response to your comments about Gaza and Israel (first of two parts)

(PART ONE OF TWO: OCT. 7 AND THE FALL OF THE LEFT)

Two quick stories:

First: Not long ago I was talking to an Israeli who lives in New York, a staunch defender of Israel. We were talking, of course, about Gaza and Israel.

Israel is a Middle Eastern country, that’s what people in the United States don’t get about it, she said. It looks rich, it looks Western, but it’s Middle Eastern.

Meaning: loud, emotional, but most of all tribal, from the inside out. Me against my brother, our family against yours, our block against yours… You get the idea.

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Second: New Yorker editor David Remnick, the archetype of rationalist, smart, liberal American Jewry, just published a despairing piece about Israel in his magazine.

Jews like Remnick once viewed Israel not as Middle Eastern but as New York on the Mediterranean, with fresher hummus! It was a partner of sorts. It was the state that they would have created if they’d lived there. Not anymore.1

As Remnick wrote, in the last 20 years:

[Israel’s] activist left has almost vanished. Labor, the party of Yitzhak Rabin [a former prime minister who pushed for peace with Palestinians], is a shell of what it was, holding just four seats of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty. The other left-leaning parties barely register.

Remnick blamed a “culture war” and the rise of “right-wing media” for Israel’s conservative tilt.

Of course he did. He blames right-wing media for Donald Trump’s rise too. The idea the legacy media might have swung so far left and become so divorced from reality that an entirely new structure arose to balance it escapes Remnick. Why? The obvious reason. he lives and has succeeded brilliantly inside the old one.

As those of us living outside the bubble know, Remnick has cause and effect reversed.

The left in Israel lost for the same reasons the Democrats have bled support for 15 years — because ordinary voters believed it was out of touch with reality. And, as in the United States, its control of the media and academia and culture worsened the disconnect as a secular elite talked mostly to itself.

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Of course, in Israel, the stakes are higher.

In Israel, the stakes are national survival. After Palestinians walked away from peace deals in 2000 and 2001 that gave them a clear path to statehood, Israeli attitudes toward the conflict hardened. Many Israelis concluded that Palestinians simply did not want peace. In 2008, the failure of another Israeli offer only fueled that view.

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(In happier news, hummus2 is delicious.)

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Crucially, Israel also tried to disengage from Palestinian labor following the second intifada, a Palestinian insurgency that began in 2000. The decision made sense as a security measure.

But as Israeli’s economy boomed, it widened the wealth gap between the countries. It also reduced day-to-day contact between Palestinians and Israelis, encouraging both sides to despite the other, to see each other as rival, barely human tribes.

In other words, to become more Middle Eastern.

But for a while the failure of the peace talks didn’t seem to change much. During the 2010s, the state of play was mostly static, benefitting Israel. Tel Aviv boomed, and Israel slowly expanded settlements in the West Bank — the territories between the Israeli border and the Jordan River, where most Palestinians live and where a Palestinian state would be centered.3

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Then, in 2020, the Abraham Accords normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and several other Arab nations.

The deal marked another win for Israel, of course — and further increased the power disparity between Israel and Palestine, by showing both sides Arab countries wouldn’t demand peace, a Palestinian state, or even a clear path to statehood before recognizing Israel’s existence and establishing diplomatic relationships.

In elections in 2022, the Israeli public signaled its satisfaction with this state of affairs. It moved right, decisively returning Bibi (Benjamin) Netanyahu to power despite allegations of corruption and criminal charges against him. Notably, the biggest gainer in 2022 was not Netanyahu’s Likud Party but an even harder-line group, the National Religious Party.

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This was the state of play on Oct. 7, 2023.

Oct. 7 could have looked different. It could have been different. It could have been a ragtag group of guerillas breaking through a chain-link, attacking Israel military bases, and fighting to the death against overwhelming odds.

That’s not the fight Hamas wanted.

Hamas wanted to show Israel couldn’t defend its own citizens — presumably in the hope of demonstrating Israel military prowess was overstated and drawing Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia, and maybe even Iran, into the conflict, and possibly out of simple rage and bloodlust.

Yet Hamas could not have expected to have done as much damage as it did, or to overrun the bases around Gaza within hours. Probably it expected to “only” kill a couple of hundred Israelis that day and “only” take a couple of dozen hostages.

But tactical surprise, a slow Israeli response, and the (insane) fact that a 3,000-person rave was happening practically on the Gaza border led to far higher casualties.

It also meant that many dead were young women who were sexually violated before (and in some cases after) being killed. Even the United Nations, no friend of Israel, acknowledged this reality.

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So Oct. 7 turned into a tactical success but a strategic disaster for Hamas.

Its barbarity and cruelty stunned the world’s governments, which rallied around Israel. The left’s efforts to justify the attack or equate the victims and victimizers were properly called out as immoral. Israel had free rein to retaliate.

But the impact within Israel was even greater. It put what remained of the Israeli peace movement into deep freeze. Even left-leaning Israelis — understandably — couldn’t stomach what they had heard and seen on Oct. 7.

Israel had faced more serious threats to its national survival during other wars.

But it had never faced a more visceral fight.

(FIRST OF TWO PARTS)