In regards to scheduling (
@Thande @Meadow ) I don't have a problem with delaying it being shared around. I wouldn't want y'all to be the subject of abuse on my account.
As said in the article, my interest in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict started in the summer of 2019, with a particular interest in testing Lottem and Teitelbaum's assertion. I pitched and recorded the Israel-Palestine episode of Ben Kearns' Alternate History Show because of that interest, and the core idea for this article had manifested itself in my mind in December or January, I think. I submitted it to
@Gary Oswald last week, after Sheikh Jarrah but before the storming of Al-Aqsa.
Good lord, do I hate being a prophet; I always end up predicting bad things! (for the interested,
this was the first time)
For those of you who read my big article on dance, you may remember that there was a lot of meta-commentary therein. Due to length constraints, my meta-commentary for this article was not actually put in the article. This comment will contain that meta-commentary.
Subject-wise, I view this article as being in the vein of my articles on
The War in the Air or
The World Set Free, wherein I take old science fiction and compare it to reality.
The Old New Land is interesting because one could argue many steps were taken to actually bring its vision about; the actual result, we can see, is a land where Israelis live in fear of rockets and Palestinians live in fear of airstrikes. Furthermore I feel that
The Old New Land ought to be brought up more when discussing utopian fiction.
In writing this article, I tried to emulate a certain member of this forum:
@SenatorChickpea (as Gary said, he's our guiding light). I'd like to thank him personally for his postings on this forum as they gave my my model as to how to write about this rather sensitive subject.
What impresses me so much about Liam is that he combines wide-ranging knowledge about human events with a very strong empathy for the human beings caught in the crossfire. Read
his interview on the blog or
this post or
this post or
the series of posts that starts here. You can see how he both thinks about history, but also
feels it. It is that mixture that I have tried to emulate when writing this essay.
(incidentally I would love to hear Liam's thoughts on this essay)
It's that welding of intellect and emotion that I think a good deal of academic historical writing doesn't quite do as it should; off the top of my head, Timothy Snyder's
Bloodlands does it well, as does James M. Scott's
Rampage and Iris Chang's
The Rape of Nanking. It can feel like human beings are reduced to evidence to prove a thesis, even when the thesis is about massive suffering of real human beings. It's what I tried to resist in the dance article and it's what I tried to resist here. It's also why I like writing for this blog on historical topics; I get to engage with human beings in the past in a way I just couldn't when I was at William & Mary.
In history that is so divided on sectarian lines, like that about that land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, that synthesis of emotion and intellect is needed more than ever, and it is needed for
all involved. If you empathize with only the Israelis, the conflict becomes a story of a people who had barely escaped from the maw of Auschwitz and Treblinka finally receiving a place where they can be safe; this reduces the Palestinians to squatters at best and a uniform bloc of terrorists at worst. If you empathize with only the Palestinians, it becomes a story of valiant anti-colonial resistance with the Israelis as malevolent Pied-Noirs or Afrikaners, willing to lie, cheat, steal, bulldoze, and kill in the name of what they view as their birthright. Both have elements of truth, but neither does its due diligence to the real human suffering that has happened to those on both sides of the Green Line.
I'm going to make a bit of a personal digression for a bit to explain how I process a lot of this. Some of you may remember that I've mentioned growing up in an abusive family, and still having to live it. As such, I think a lot about how people process trauma, myself and others. In abuse survivor circles, there's a saying: "hurt people hurt people." That saying is a pithy way of expressing the truth that many people who have lived trauma end up inflicting trauma on others; I'm ashamed to say that I fear that I may have replicated that in my own life, and it's something of which I try to be very mindful.
I've never seen a better demonstration of the truth of the saying "hurt people hurt people" than the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister who started a savage war of peace in Lebanon but also made peace with the Egyptians, founded the hard-right Likud party to which Benjamin Netanyahu belongs. He grew up in Poland, where he was a local Zionist leader, later tortured by the Soviets when he fled to Vilnius after the Nazis invaded. He was then released to fight in the army of Wladislaw Anders, and then deserted that army to join the Irgun, the Zionist insurgent organization in Mandatory Palestine. Begin was a man who was haunted by the Holocaust and the history of Jewish persecution, and this was a very strong influence on his political views.
In his tenure as Prime Minister, he had a major hand in turning Lebanon into what David Hirst called "a land of Hobbesian chaos." Under his watch, Maronite militias allied with the Israelis slaughtered Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. He referred to Yasser Arafat as a Hitler-like figure.
Amos Oz, the Israeli writer, said that Begin had a “weird urge to resurrect Hitler from the dead just so that you [Begin] may kill him over and over again each day.”
(it's worth noting that Oz's daughter told the public after his death that he was brutally abusive to her. It's something that weighs on me as I quote him)
This is how, in my opinion, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict is hard to wrangle with not just because of the intense and vicious sectarian divide, but also that it says things about human psychology that most people don't like to admit. In my first semester at William & Mary, I took a class called 'Writing and the Holocaust,' and one of the things the professor repeated over and over again is that a victim does not always become the paragon of empathy that we want them to be. The example that sticks out in my mind is in Art Spiegelman's
Maus, where Holocaust survivor Wladek is viciously racist to an African-American hitchhiker. In retrospect, it's surprising we didn't mention Israel at all in that class.
That notion, of the abused becoming the ever-kind, is something that so many of us are very deeply emotionally invested in. Unfortunately, it is not always true. It is
damning of our species that a government intended to protect an entire ethnic group from annihilation turned Gaza into a massive open-air prison, and it is
damning of our species that groups intended to free a people from something so kafkaesque as a decades-long military occupation end up butchering children in synagogues.
One of the uncomfortable realizations when doing the reading for all this was that very few people involved here are deranged. The motivations of both sides are very understandable, and that's what makes it excruciating.
That, ultimately, is what makes writing about Israel and Palestine so difficult. This conflict forces you to see humanity as it is, in all its insularity and its viciousness, its stubbornness and its suboptimal ability to deal with trauma, and not as how we desperately wish it were.
I don't trust myself to offer a solution to that.