A Year of Anguish and Self-Delusion

On October 7th one year after, and the difficulty of hope.

Photo by Ray in Manila

It has been a year of multiplying horrors.

It is tempting to say Israelis couldn’t imagine what would occur on October 7, but in fact many of them imagined it all the time; given the chance, they would say, our enemies would kill every last one of us, in the most unspeakable ways. They imagined it, but they believed that their technology and their military and the punishments they inflicted on Palestinians would protect them. Of course, they were wrong. In the cruelest of ironies, it was the leftist peace activists who lived in kibbutzim near Gaza who believed most strongly that Israelis and Palestinians can live alongside each other; one of them, Shachar Zemach of Kibbutz Be’eri, shouted “Please, I am not your enemy” before he was killed.

In the year since, here in America there has been more debate and argument and rage about Israel and Palestine than at any time in my lifetime, perhaps ever. Though I make my living thinking and writing and arguing, at times I have felt almost paralyzed with hopelessness, not only because of the foolishness and cruelty of political leaders but because of what I see in my fellow citizens. I have been staggered by the amount of time and energy that is spent on denying the humanity of others and insisting that today’s crimes are justified by yesterday’s, that some people’s suffering can be ignored or dismissed as meaningless while other people’s suffering excuses the most monstrous savagery.

It is not both-sidesism or facile moral equivalency to see these tendencies from both Israelis and Palestinians, and advocates for both. On this anniversary one can’t ignore how many treat the pogrom of October 7 — 1,200 people killed, hundreds taken hostage, families murdered in their homes, butchery to rival the worst of history’s massacres — as trivial or excusable or even cause for celebration, an act of resistance granted righteousness by what came before and after, without any need to consider what it actually consisted of. People tear down posters of the hostages held by Hamas, lest anyone see them and consider their humanity.

But because I am Jewish and have deep ties to Israel, I am more intimately familiar with the way my people perform their own ritual of self-absolution. It requires turning 90 degrees from certain realities, so while they remain in your peripheral vision they can be easily ignored. This is how too many Israeli and American Jews have accommodated themselves to the pre-October 7 situation in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. Most of the time they kept it at that 90 degrees, blurry and indistinct. If forced to turn and look at it they will search for some reason why it’s understandable or temporarily necessary or justified by Palestinian terrorism, past or future. There is always a reason. We are still moral, people tell themselves; what is done by us or in our name must be understood by the way we have been victimized in the past. 

I should say that not all Israelis feel this need to convince themselves that the occupation is not a festering moral wound to their country and themselves. The far right has liberated themselves from moral considerations altogether. They believe only in tribalism, that God has given Jews the land, Palestinians are subhuman interlopers, and therefore they must be crushed. It is a coherent set of ideas, one that produces no cognitive dissonance to resolve (and it is shared by many of Israel’s defenders on the American right). And while those deeply repugnant extremists may not be a numerical majority in Israel, they grow stronger all the time and their perspective is embodied in its government’s policies, before October 7 and after. 

So now, with the destruction of Gaza, Israel has successfully created the next generation of enemies, people whose personal traumas of watching loved ones killed with bullets and bombs and starvation and disease will become a poison that festers inside of them as long as they live. When they come of age, some portion of them will justify their own acts of murder and brutality by pointing back to this time. They will say “Yes, I sent out a young man with a bomb strapped to his chest to blow up a cafe; yes, I killed entire families in their homes; yes, I want nothing more than to see Jews suffer and die. You ask whether this is right? Did you not see what happened in Gaza? Do you not know what they did to us?” The violent actions of those Palestinians will become the rationale for further oppression, which will in turn create more hate and rage, and on and on. The destruction of Gaza will live on in Palestinian hearts for decades, as October 7 will live on in Israeli hearts, producing only more pain and anger to be called upon as justification for the infliction of more suffering.

The self-defeating rationale

Few Israelis would be foolish enough to put into words the unspoken theory behind their government’s policy, that if they kill enough Palestinians, humiliate them enough, and destroy their lives and communities to a sufficient degree, then those Palestinians will abandon all hope of self-determination and decide to live peacefully beside those whose government mistreats them in so many ways. I’ve tried in vain to find anyone who can offer a plausible path to a peaceful future for Israel that begins with what is happening now. As Israeli philosopher Oded Na’aman writes, “Of course, even if the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip were possible it would be abhorrent, but at this moment it is important to understand that many Israelis support the immense use of force for the sake of a goal that upon reflection they themselves admit is unachievable. There is simply no available vision of a tolerable future.”

Without that, no one on either side can see beyond the next round of revenge. They did that to us; we’ll do this to them. And when asked why this is morally defensible, they’ll say “Why aren’t you talking about that?” 

This is not unique to Israel and Palestine, or to the Middle East. People everywhere throughout history have found justification for their own brutality in the brutality of others. But the most dangerous thing Israel can do to itself is to convince Palestinians that they have no future. That is what Hamas tells them: We cannot offer you the hope of a good life, but we can offer you revenge. Join us, and you will see your enemies weep. You may even have the opportunity to kill some of them with your own hands. 

When forced to address the long term, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar each offer their people a preposterous fantasy. Sinwar claims that if enough blood is shed on both sides, one day Israel will be vanquished and cease to exist; Netanyahu claims that Israel’s security may be purchased with enough destruction and death. From here in America we may struggle to understand why anyone would be naïve enough to believe either of them. But many do believe, and so the misery multiplies. I would like to think that a year from now when we mark the second anniversary of October 7 we’ll be able to say things have changed for the better. But it’s awfully hard to imagine.