What did you believe before October 7 that you no longer believe?
Jewish Review of Books Winter 2024
Michael Walzer - an American political theorist and public intellectual who is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Like everyone else, I believed in the military strength of Israel and in the competence of its intelligence organizations. Now I worry about both—again, like everyone else. But maybe there is a deeper issue. I thought that Israelis were very smart, and now I don’t. Perhaps this is a sign of Zionism’s triumph: we aimed at normality, we wanted a state like all the others, and now we have a state that is indeed like all the others. And what that means is that we have a state that will be run, not all the time, but many times, by people who are really dumb. I used to think that Israeli policy over the past several decades was dangerously wrongheaded, but I see now that in many ways it was simply clueless.
Consider just a few examples:
- Israel has pursued policies of occupation and settlement on the West Bank without thinking or caring about the possible response of Palestinians to those policies.
- It challenged the status quo in Jerusalem without thinking or caring about the possible response of Palestinians to those policies.
- It believed that Hamas could be used to weaken the Palestinian Authority and thereby justify continued occupation and settlement—without thinking or caring about… well, you know.
- It also learned about Hamas’s financial capacity and its radical plans and continued to believe that Hamas posed no military danger and still could be used to weaken the PA etc.
- It relied on technocratic means of containing Hamas, ignoring the lessons of asymmetric wars in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan—where the high-tech army could not defeat a low-tech insurgency.
Enough. Many of my friends in Israel believe that much of this was the result of very bad ideological commitments—and so did I. Maybe ideological blindness was partly or even largely to blame. But to be blinded by ideology is one of the ways that people become stupid. So we have to acknowledge that sheer brainlessness was a major factor in shaping Israel’s situation in the years before October 7.
For much of our long exilic history, Jews had to be smart to survive. It turns out that we need those smarts even when we have a state. Now I pray for a smart war and a smart politics afterward.
Anita Shapira - professor emerita of Jewish history at Tel Aviv University and the former head of its Weizmann Institute for the Study of Zionism and Israel.
Before October 7, I thought that it would be possible to contain the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Admittedly, the Palestinian Authority didn’t develop into an embryonic state as the Jewish Yishuv had. Admittedly, the Palestinians missed opportunities to arrive at an agreement with Israel. Admittedly, the settlers sought to undermine any possible agreement, and, together with the prime minister of Israel, did everything they could to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state. But I thought that we could live alongside one another and eventually hammer out a sort of coexistence. Before October 7, I believed that a rise in the Palestinian standard of living, partly as a result of the possibility of working in Israel, would improve the situation on the ground. Today it is clear to me that we have to separate from the Palestinians.
The idea of Jewish domination of all of the western Land of Israel and rule over a people of millions that seeks self-rule is a twisted idea. The idea of partition was always the right idea. If you ask me now whether the Palestinians will reconcile themselves to Jewish rule over part of the Land of Israel, I am not sure. But to rule over millions of people who hate us—this is a blueprint for disaster. On the eve of October 7, battalions of soldiers were transferred from the Gaza Envelope to the West Bank to protect settlers’ Simchat Torah celebrations. The marginal became the essential, the border was neglected, and the disaster took place. A border is something that must always be guarded.
Before October 7, I never imagined that the most terrible slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust would inspire a wave of antisemitism. The demonstrations calling for the destruction of the State of Israel and denying the atrocious deeds of Hamas in the United States, Great Britain, and France reflected the revival of the old hatred. No longer is it a question of borders but of the very right to exist of the Jewish state, the only state in the world whose right to exist is placed in doubt. After October 7, we learned that the vision of Herzl—that the establishment of a normal Jewish state would bring about the end of antisemitism—was illusory.
On the other hand, before October 7 we thought that a gap was opening up between Israel and the diaspora, but the disaster and the antisemitism that followed showed that Jewish solidarity still exists and that our fate as Jews in Israel and the diaspora is shared.
David N. Myers is a Distinguished Professor of History and holds the Kahn Chair in Jewish History. He directs the UCLA Luskin Center for History and Policy and the UCLA Initiative to Study Hate.
Excerpt from: We must move beyond zero-sum thinking in Israel-Palestine
Our campus has been riven by sharply opposing perspectives on the unfolding disaster in Israel-Palestine. Recent gatherings by supporters of Israel and supporters of Palestinian liberation point to a chasm that will only widen and become ever more combustible.
Sadly, the current moment is not one in which the two sides can productively sit down and talk through their differences; emotions are too raw. At the same time, it is possible, in my view, to achieve a position of moral clarity that resists the zero-sum thinking all too common in debates over Israel-Palestine.
This stance of clarity rests on two propositions. First, the massacre of 1,300 Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7 must be condemned by all people of conscience. One cannot equivocate about or explain away the staggering brutality of the murderers as they butchered infants and the elderly, women and men for hours on end.
Hamas’ killing frenzy calls to mind the unforgettable images offered by the great Hebrew poet, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, who wrote in the wake of the horrific – albeit far smaller – pogrom against Jews in the Russian city of Kishinev in 1903.
“Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay / The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead,” wrote Bialik in his poem titled “The City of Slaughter.”
It taps into the darkest traumas of the Jews, especially during the Holocaust. If this kind of liberatory violence be a necessary ingredient in the project of decolonization – as argued by theorist Frantz Fanon – then that project lacks all moral validity.
Full stop. There can be no justification whatsoever for what took place last week – not decolonization, not Israel’s dehumanizing occupation, and not previous acts of violence by Israel toward Palestinians. Failure to condemn is a total abdication of ethical responsibility.
The second proposition is that it is incumbent on all people of conscience to insist that Israel prevent the already massive humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza from expanding further. It is neither reasonable nor legal to demand, as Israel has, that 1.1 million Palestinians leave their homes in northern Gaza immediately.
Rabbi Noa Kushner is the founding rabbi of The Kitchen.
Excerpt from a d'var torah delivered on May 3, 2024
I imagine if the protests here were connected with Israeli protesters in Tel Aviv and the Palestinian protestors who dare to protest in Israel or those in Gaza who dare to speak out against Hamas and if, together, we demanded a vision of co-existence for two peoples?
I can imagine how, immediately, some Israelis would say it was far too dangerous, how this agenda would be sanctioning 10.7, and rewarding Hamas for its massacre with a state — the very last thing they can afford to do now, that it would endanger the population.
And I can imagine how, immediately, some Palestinians would say it was far too dangerous, how this agenda would reward decades and decades of occupation and oppression with a state and international approval, and it would be far too dangerous, how it would be a massive mistake.
And then there would be, of course, the almost impossible questions that would follow, the terms of these states, boundaries, military structure and so on...
I won’t pretend it is easy or that I know the way — And yes, I realize it is easier for me to say this from the US and I know there would have to be major concessions and it would rely on our ability to risk losing a great deal no matter where we sit on these issues
I just think the only answer to "?אִם־כֵּ֔ן לָ֥מָּה זֶּ֖ה אָנֹ֑כִנֹ֑ו — If it is this way, why do I exist? Why am I here?” — Is revealed in Rebecca’s second question, at the end of our story:
לָמָ֥ה אֶשְׁכַּ֛ל גַּם־שְׁנֵיכֶ֖ם י֥וֹם אֶחָֽד — Why should I lose you both in one day?”
In other words: “Why am I here as you both struggle and threaten to rip each other and
me and everything around us apart? What is the meaning of all this pain? Why am I here?”
It is, as Rebecca says, in the end, only to ensure you do not destroy one another.
To stop participating in these cycles of destruction! To raise the possibility, no matter how remote, no matter how complicit I am and we all are! That you and we don’t have to keep killing each other.
To raise the possibility that neither of you will be lost to me. That I refuse to lose you both in one day. Why am I here? Because someone has to say, again and again, that the only way out of this is together.
Yehuda Kurtzer is President of the Shalom Hartman Institute and co-editor of The New Jewish Canon.
Excerpt from: Torah for a Time of War: A Moral Map for an Impossible Present
Zionism’s most significant transformation of the Jewish condition was not the migration of Jews from one part of the world to another, but that the establishment of the State of Israel gave Jews control of the tools of statecraft and membership in the family of nations. Diaspora existence had been rooted in ambiguous otherness: at times Jews could be proximate to the halls of power and could benefit from its privileges, and at other times not. Sovereignty reversed the dynamic. To be sovereign is to be in charge, and thus to be responsible for whatever transpires within one’s borders. The reality of the Jewish state demands a shift in mindset.
Tal Becker often describes this as the challenge for Israel to operate with “a sovereign state of mind.” It is easy, when you face existential threats and when you are the bearer of a traumatic memory of past existential threats, to relinquish responsibility and to capitulate to fear. The harder challenge for Zionism, and a pre-condition for its fulfillment, is accepting that every single aspect of what takes place in Israel’s sovereign borders takes place under the auspices of the state. Jews must accept that as a normative reality, and Israel must govern accordingly.
It has been astonishing and horrifying, as Israel fights an essential war on its southern border and fortifies its northern border, to see the collapse of Israeli police and military responsibility in the West Bank and the rise of settler vigilantism against Palestinians, as well as the relentless fearmongering and seeding of suspicion—not to mention violence, either with state sanction or in the state’s absence—against Palestinian citizens of Israel. There can be no rationalization of the state’s failure to protect its citizens or the people it is responsible for under occupation. I personally support pursuing an end to occupation in the West Bank. A commitment to peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians, who I see as interdependent, is essential to my Zionism, but even for those who are willing to abide the status quo in the West Bank, the failure to protect its inhabitants must be understood as a source of shame. What is the point of leading a state if you are willing to abdicate the core responsibility of protecting the people under your
watch?...
Hamas’ act of war violated Israeli sovereignty, and Israel’s response is consistent with the rights granted internationally to sovereign countries. No country in the world could abide Hamas’ invasion and maintain credibility as a protector of its citizens. By the same token, no country can tolerate vigilantism and structural racism within its borders and maintain credibility that it understands the responsibilities of sovereignty. Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza is intertwined with its responsibilities for Palestinians within its borders.
Zionists must not look away from the ways in which Israel’s extreme right is leveraging the Hamas invasion to change the status quo for Palestinians in Israel and in the West Bank. Israel’s just cause for war around the world is compromised when extremists turn an Israel-Hamas war into a war between Israelis and Palestinians or, even worse, between Jews and Muslims. An overreach by Israel’s extremists will, in the long run, compromise the moral credibility of Israel’s claims to sovereignty as recognized in the international community. And we must not look away because an Israeli failure to govern morally becomes a referendum on our Zionist aspirations to be in charge of our own destiny