Edited by Sam Thielman
I SPENT MONDAY AND TUESDAY constantly refreshing the Haaretz and al-Jazeera liveblogs to see if there was finally an agreement for a brief pause in the Israeli bombing of Gaza in exchange for a hostage release. You’ve probably seen by now that there is one, and it will take effect Thursday, following a 24-hour period where apparently Israelis can register any objections they have in court.
For at least four days—possibly up to ten, depending on additional hostage releases, although Haaretz reports that the Israeli government doubts it will last that long—the bombs will stop destroying Gaza; Hamas will release 50 captive youths, mothers and women; Israel will release 150 Palestinian prisoners, and Sami al-Arian notes that there are hundreds of children in Israeli military captivity; and, according to Sky News reporting of Hamas’ understanding of the terms, an increase in trucks entering Gaza through Egypt carrying medical assistance and, crucially, fuel. (Haaretz is citing that same Hamas understanding, so I’m guessing Israel hasn’t confirmed the aid acceleration, but I don’t know.)
Doves don’t consider this deal sufficient. Hawks don’t consider this deal desirable. Benjamin Netanyahu is adamant that it won’t be the first step to ending the war. Arab foreign ministers and the peace blocs in America and Israel want to create momentum for exactly that. This could go either way. But as my friend Mohammad Alsaafin writes at The Nation, “Forty-six days into Israel’s war on Gaza, [it’s] a ray of hope.”
The knife’s edge upon which Palestinians, Israelis, and I suppose also the rest of us balance is a reminder that peace is something that has to be built. It is not the cessation of hostilities. The cessation of hostilities can build pressure for peace, or it can reset military conditions for war. Peace, especially in an atmosphere of supreme distrust, requires work – work through hardship, work through the inevitable setbacks, work at the bleakest of times.
There is a certain lazy expectation I’ve encountered in American media circles throughout the War on Terror that holds peace to be weak and indecisive, while war is the strenuous option that dares to settle intractable problems. But that doesn’t describe the real world. I’ve known peace-builders as much as I’ve known generals, and the peace-builders also campaign hard, if not harder. In Israel, the relatives of the hostages have been campaigning for peace and demonstrating nothing short of heroism.
It’s about to be the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. However you feel about the origins of the holiday, I enjoy the way people use it for what they value: to be around our loved ones (or for blessed solitude from them), to eat, to relax, to hope the Cowboys lose, and to feel grateful. May you feel that spirit of peacefulness. May it take hold in Gaza.
But before we break for the holiday, a couple things about the landscape of the war we have to note.
First, since we’ve been keeping a close eye on the reverberations of the war that implicate the U.S. military, U.S. Central Command announced Monday evening U.S. time that it had launched airstrikes on “two facilities” associated with Iran-backed militias that attacked U.S. bases. This time, U.S. airstrikes took place in Iraq, not in Syria. You’ll recall that there is a new coalition of Iran-sponsored armed groups operating in Iraq. What will they do now? How will the Iraqis handle their territory once again being used as an American battleground?
Pay attention as well to what Israel does in the West Bank during the pause. The pause applies only to Gaza, and the anger that Israeli hawks feel about the pause can be channeled into accelerated attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. Itamar Ben-Gvir, who as national-security minister has significant control over the apparatus of repression in the West Bank—and who, The New Yorker reports, “until recently” hung a photograph of the murderous Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein on his apartment wall in the seminal Kiryat Arba settlement outside Hebron—rejected the pause. This is the guy who’s arming settler militias with U.S. weapons. Will he seek to press the advantage in the West Bank? (Meanwhile, this relative of a Hamas victim told Ben-Gvir where to go.)
Finally, Haaretz reported on Monday that the influential Biden energy/Mideast advisor Amos Hochstein is in Israel SIZING up “potential economic revitalization plans for Gaza centered around undeveloped offshore natural gas fields.” Because what this war needs is resource extraction! With the Palestinian death toll so unspeakably high, and Israelis in positions of power talking about getting Gazans to “move out,” it’s beyond ghoulish to portray something that will primarily benefit U.S. oil companies and bespoil the Mediterranean waters near Gaza as a “revitalization plan.” The historical record does not suggest this revenue will substantially end up in the hands of Palestinians. Hochstein is using terms like “on behalf of the Palestinians.”
The Biden administration’s portrayal of itself as managing the crisis, a fallback position if there ever was one, has manifested in the past two weeks as planning for a “post-war” scenario, as Alsaafin has written and debunked. (Haaretz, citing a Hochstein quote to Emirati newspaper The National: “as soon as we get to the day after and this horrible war ends, there are companies willing to develop those fields.”) Jordan’s foreign minister and others have been adamant that the U.S. cannot simply plan for a postwar whose contours will be shaped by an open-ended Israeli war that the U.S. is still supporting. And it is conspicuous that Palestinians are not in the driver’s seat of this great-power “post-war” planning, considering Biden’s declaration that “the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza” in no less a forum than the opinion page of Saturday’s Washington Post. Another ghoulish quote, given to Politico by an anonymous administration official, makes it seem like this is all political management for a domestic audience:
[T]here was some concern in the administration about an unintended consequence of the pause: that it would allow journalists broader access to Gaza and the opportunity to further illuminate the devastation there and turn public opinion on Israel.
The cynicism of that puts me at a loss for words, so I’ll go for understatement. Those who fear journalism’s ability to display the truth of a war are unlikely to steer events toward positive outcomes.
But as Alsaafin wrote, we have our first ray of hope in 46 bleak days. And, as it happens, one of the flowers of modern Jewish political history, the Jewish Labor Bund, is at this moment declaring itself back into existence. Its reemergence in this time of crisis feels like another ray of hope. This is how its declaration concludes:
We believe the future belongs to a 21st-century socialism, not a 19th-century nationalism. We cannot convince swords to become ploughshares; they must be beaten by our own hands. Peace is harder than war, and a sustainable, just peace is only winnable through our collective labor.
They must be beaten by our own hands.
SO AFTER Monday’s newsletter—obviously not because of Monday’s newsletter, but a hook is a hook—Greenblatt just admits it!
Greenblatt told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency he didn’t regret his praise for Musk. Praising people when they take what the ADL sees as the right steps, he said, is part of his job fighting antisemitism. Musk’s tweet and his own praise of it, Greenblatt told JTA, came following a private conversation between the two men in which Musk previewed his vow to suspend users who call for violence.
Even Abe Foxman thinks Greenblatt is acting shamefully!
EARLIER THIS WEEK, I realized I hadn’t ever gotten around to reading Edward Said’s seminal 1973 essay “Arabs And Jews.” When I rectified that it took my breath away. If you haven’t read it, make the time. It’s hard to choose a single excerpt, but I think this is the one.
Thus a major and dangerous consequence of this war [the 1973 Yom Kippur war, sigh] is that these reckonings of Arabs with Israelis and Jews might not take place. One reason, as I have said, is the hindering violence of war itself, which gives a combatant the sense that all is solved, or solvable, by war. A second is the setting of this war, which is not simply in the Middle East, but obviously in the media, on the world stage, amidst great power rivalry, and all up and down the great, even unlimited dimensions of history. In other words this war is dangerous not because it might spread to include other participants, but because it will spread to include more elements and perspectives that also obscure the vision, impede understanding, and finally blunt one’s humanity. I mean, quite frankly, that this war takes on the symmetry of a blood feud, one side retaliating for the evils of the other, while the roots of the struggle get forgotten and become unknown to those who struggle the hardest. An Arab becomes only a reaction to the Israeli, and the Israeli only a killer of Arabs.
May you have a restful holiday whose spirit of peace becomes an unstoppable force.
foreverwarscom.wordpress.com 
Leave a comment