Is It Possible to Support Something Better for Palestinians and Support the Elimination of Hamas
American Eclectic posts articles twice a month, on the 1st and 15th. This is the second year of publication; previously published articles can be found on my site.
November 1, 2023
The statement that was released by a group of kids at Harvard University condemning Israel and supporting the Palestinians, with no mention of Hamas and the attack it carried out leading to the deaths of more than 1,200 people, was more than just foolish and insensitive. One problem was this statement came out of a group at Harvard University, so, naturally, because it was Harvard it received a great deal of attention. That Lawrence Summers, former Harvard president and former Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, loudly criticized the school for remaining silent about the statement the students released, only heightened public awareness. After years of university teaching, I often thought that some percentage each year of my students were not university students as much as they were in 13th and 14th grades in high school, not freshmen or sophomores in college—children who do not often think of consequences. That can apply regardless of which university they attend. The statement by these students showed what one should expect from true believers who see things through visors with limited vision.
A University of California, Davis professor posted an idiotic statement online:
One group of people we have easy access to in the US is all these Zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation.
They have houses with addresses, kids in school.
They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.
A Cornell University professor calling the Hamas attack “exhilarating” and “energizing” sounded as out of touch as the California professor. His apology afterwards saying, “I recognize that some of the language I used was reprehensible,” probably came out of embarrassment rather than sincerity.
One must wonder what was going through the mind of one professor as she showed a lack of maturity regarding targeting people and another professor with his judgment seriously lacking regarding how he described the events that unfolded leading to so many deaths.
Politics tends toward the either/or, the attitude of you-are-either-with-us-or-against-us. The Harvard students and the university professors showed this type of limited thinking capability.
Dorit Rabinyan published a novel, All the Rivers (originally titled Borderlife), which addressed a love that developed between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian artist who meet in New York City—and showed the complexity and lack of simple superficial us versus them thinking that was on full display by university students and two professors. In 2015, the Israeli Ministry of Education pulled the book from a list of approved books for high school students. The reaction was that it led to a doubling of book sales, where Israelis posted pictures of themselves holding copies of the book. This showed a part of an Israeli public that thought beyond a simple reasoning in how to look at Israeli-Palestinian relations. Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress known for Wonder Woman, has a film adaptation in the works. It may be difficult now to wonder what type of reception this movie could receive in Israel. As the author stated about her main character, Liat:
She takes him out of the multitude and acknowledges his humanity, her humanity. He’s not the Palestinian people. He’s one person.
The humanity this novelist addressed a decade before Hamas’s recent attack on Israel seems like a distant past. Naomi Klein, another novelist, addressed the emotions of the present:
Israel is ordering a mass relocation of more than a million people in Gaza. It’s happening in the context of an unprecedented bombing campaign, while Israeli leaders talk about how these are ‘human animals’. This is why we have a Genocide Convention, to prevent exactly this. And I think that people [on social media] are acting from a place of deep fear. Palestinians and their supporters are fearful of annihilation, and I think even supporters of [the genocide] are fearful of what they are supporting, so have to project all the evil onto the other. This is what doppelganger politics is, where we project and perform our own purity, and then project everything that is negative onto the hated other. That’s what I see happening online, and I think it’s exacerbated – but not created – by platforms on which we don’t believe each other to be human.
War tends to reduce emotions to simple, definable sides. An Israeli ground invasion has begun, although the impression created by the government is that what is currently taking place is less than a full ground offensive. Aerial bombing has been ongoing as these strikes prepared the way for the ground invasion. The hope is that some type of justice will be administrated, that those captured by Hamas will be found alive, and Hamas eliminated. At the same time, however, out of all that death and destruction will a different way of politically thinking emerge regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations. The aerial bombing together with a limited ground operation so far, has led to estimates that the dead in Gaza surpass the death toll from Hamas’s attack on Israel by more than four times the number. Measuring death toll differences creates a horrendous image of the death still to come: The greater the contrast in the numbers killed, the more there will be a focus that military action somehow has to open the way to political solutions. Simple statements out of the Israeli government that Hamas will be eliminated do not carry any indication of how they are thinking about life after the fighting stops. Military talk of strategy or tactics eventually give way to what comes next—to a political solution. Can Israel expect to return to whatever was there before in how its deals with Palestinians?
Previous fighting either between Israel and Hamas or even Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon may not provide much insight of what happens next. The mere statement that Hamas will be eliminated indicates that this time something is different. A war goal of elimination is different than previous goals of retribution. I think that with Saudi Arabia having begun to move toward some type of normalized relationship between the two countries, that will hang over the outcome of this conflict. In addition, if any attacks by Israel are aimed at Iran, if it is determined their role in the Hamas attacks was much more involved than may appear at the current time, then this could be a conflict, a war, that leads to unintended consequences—at least from the point of view of the Israeli government.
Normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia, is an important step toward maybe creating some degree of peace in the Middle East. That may temporarily be put on hold, but whether it has a future at all will depend on what Israel does to look beyond the war itself. A Gaza Strip, as it was before, minus the elimination (if possible) of Hamas seems like an odd scenario to envision. The improvement in relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia is more than just two countries moving on from their pasts, in this situation it has the potential to impact in positive ways Israeli relations with a number of countries in the Middle East—regional impact. One of the reasons proposed why Hamas decided to mount the attack it did inside Israel, was to disrupt and hopefully prevent any improvement in relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. If that is the case, Hamas was probably looking at the regional cascade effect that might come out of rapprochement between the two countries.
War goals can change, I addressed this in a previous essay regarding the Ukraine War (War Goals and the Ukraine War: Seeing this War in a Different Way May Happen, but it Has to be Part of a Broader Way of Dealing with Russia), and the same is possible here. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, may have believed that Hamas might have remained, at best, a threat and irritant to Israel in the Gaza Strip on a much lower level, their coordinated attack proved him wrong. But then who could have predicted Hamas’s attack and its rampant slaughter. His call to now eliminate the existence of Hamas is understandable. But the destruction which will come with moving to achieve that goal, will require the Israeli government to not fight with its own set of visors on where they narrowly look at the future.
The stupidity of some university students and two professors with questionable thinking skills should not receive the attention they have received. It is possible to look with mixed feelings at what is to come. To condemn Hamas for its actions, to realize they brought destruction on themselves and many innocent Palestinians, to support their elimination and understand the misery that carries, and yet still want something better for Palestinians than they have now are all emotions that run together at the same time.
Anticipating the amount of suffering that will, no doubt, mount as the next several months unfold, may carry with it a belief that after it is all over, Israel and possibly the Gaza Strip will be better off. Wishful thinking may provide a rationale for what is to come. A recent movie, The Engineer (2023, starring Emile Hirsch) is loosely based on Israeli operations to take down Yahya Abd-al-Latif Ayyash, who was seen as the main bombmaker for Hamas during a period in the 1990s. The suicide vests he made led to the deaths of more than 90 people and he was killed in 1996. There is a scene in the movie where what appears to be a high-ranking Israeli government official, tells those hunting Ayyash, “Hamas is a snake with many heads. We cut off these heads and the beast will fall!” After he is killed, however, the final scene has a woman stand up on a bus and detonate a suicide vest, killing herself and those on the bus: If he was one of the heads of the snake, his death changed nothing. This war hopefully leads to something better for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Notes
Ian Fisher, “It’s Complicated: The Path of an Israeli-Palestinian Love Story,” New York Times (May 3, 2017): https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/05/03/books/its-complicated-the-path-of-an-israeli-palestinian-love-story.html
“Gal Gadot to produce film adaptation of novel banned in Israeli schools,” ynet news.com (December 25, 2019): htrtps://www.ynetnews.com/culture/article/SJG9uz11JU
J Sellers Hill and Nia L. Orakwue, “Harvard Student Groups Face Intense Backlash for Statement Calling Israel ‘Entirely Responsible’ for Hamas Attack,” The Harvard Crimson (October 10, 2023): https:// www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/10/psc-statement-backlash/
Ken Kurson, “UC Davis Professor Threatens Journalists and Their Kids with Cleaver, Ax,” California Globe (October 19, 2023): https:// californiaglobe.com/fl/uc-davis-professor-threatens-journalists-and-their-kids-with-cleaver-ax/
Natalie Musumeci, “A Cornell history professor apologized for calling Hamas' attacks 'exhilarating' and 'energizing.' His actions are under review by the school,” Insider (October 20, 2023): https://www.businessinsider.com/cornell-professor-apologizes-called-hamas-attacks-exhilarating-2023-10
Dominque Sisley, “Naomi Klein: ‘I’m Trying to Have a Little Compassion for Myself,’” AnOther Magazine (October 17, 2023): https://www.anothermag.com/design-living/15184/naomi-klein-doppelganger-2023-interview-israel-palestine
Andrew Zhang, “Lawrence Summers, Ted Cruz criticize Harvard for student statement blaming Israel,” Politico (October 9, 2023): https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/09/harvard-students-israel-hamas-attacks-00120624