A couple months ago, I posted a blog titled "Don't kill the people of Gaza," in which I tried to make the case that there are both moral and practical reasons for Israel not to retaliate militarily for the October 7th Hamas attack, that the killing of civilians in Gaza is wrong. I felt this conviction pretty strongly, and considered taking the posting down the next day, because it was too obvious to be arguing about.
A few days ago, I tuned in to a Spiegel interview with two prominent German thinkers, on German television, and got another perspective. That perspective has not exactly turned me around, but it gave me some heavy stuff to consider which I want to share with you. I now feel less certainty when I argue the Israelis are only making things worse by continuing the violence. It's still true that two wrongs don't make a right, but what if the second "wrong" isn't really wrong?
One of the interviewees is Düzen Tekkal, a TV journalist of Kurdish and Yazidi background. She makes a strong appeal for keeping both sides of the conflict in focus. The other is Michael Wolffsohn, a German historian born in Israel but raised in Berlin. His German-Jewish parents fled Hitler in 1939, but returned after the war. Wolffsohn went back to serve in the Israeli army, and clearly feels at home in both Germany and Israel. It's Wolffsohn's argument that is troubling me.
I've spoken about this elsewhere, but at the risk of being repetitive, there is a line in the movie Munich, which I come back to again and again. The line is "It isn't Jewish."
The screenplay for Munich was written by Tony Kushner and Eric Roth. I've admired Tony Kushner's work since the first time I saw Angels in America, which I think of as the great morality play of the LGBT liberation movement. The clarity of his moral values comes out again in Munich, which deals with the Israeli retaliation against the Palestinian group Black September, responsible for the killing of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. In the film, Golda Meir sets up a clandestine team of Mossad agents to take down the eleven Palestinian killers. Each killer is assigned an agent to take him out, and they all succeed, save one. The one who can't go through with his task hears his grandmother's voice in a dream. "It's not Jewish," she says to him.
Israel is a democracy, and that means it lives with multiple conflicting values. Some Israelis have no trouble resorting to assassination to dispose of their enemies. Others hear their grandmother's voice and remember one of Judaism's gifts to the world is its sense of justice. And that's what's going on here, in the debate over whether and how to retaliate for the October 7th attack. The majority of its Jewish population found the attack so barbaric that they are willing to go along with their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, despite blaming him in large part for working with Hamas and for choosing to send troops to the West Bank to protect settlers harassing the Palestinian locals instead of keeping an eye on Gaza. They are willing to let loose on Hamas, despite the fact it entails the killing of thousands of supposedly innocent Gazans, half of whom are children.
And that brings me back to the German historian, Michael Wolffsohn. He sides with the Israelis calling for swift and certain retaliation. Hamas must go, they say. But listen to Wolffsohn's reasoning:
If you think back to 1945, when Germany gave in to the demand for unconditional surrender, there was no serious argument that Germany should not have been bombed into submission. Hitler had been elected chancellor and become an authoritarian who, once in office, could not be dislodged from power. Bombing his country was the right thing to do, and even today, coming up on a century later, most people see the way the war played out in that light, the killing of innocent Germans as a necessary evil. And ditto for Japan, by the way, although there is no shortage of debate over whether use of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was overkill.
Wolffsohn puts Hamas in the same category as Hitler, a political entity originally elected but now so thoroughly entrenched that few dare (or want to?) speak out against this power dedicated to the total destruction of Israel and the killing of every Jew on the planet. Not somebody you can make deals with. And the proof of that is their willingness to use their own people as shields or as cannon fodder, to store their munitions in schools and hospitals and effectively dare the Israelis to bomb them, counting on the Kushner-type Jews with their grandmother's voice in their heads, to restrain the Israeli army on the grounds that "it isn't Jewish" to kill. Grandma knew her Ten Commandments.
It isn't Jewish to kill children. Nobody will argue that. But what are we to do with the fact that Palestinians are used as shields? Just go on saying "it isn't Jewish" as Hamas sends rockets to bomb Israel day after day? Surrender? Turn Tel Aviv back into olive groves?
Wolffsohn maintains that just as Germany needed to be brought to its knees in 1945 at the cost of countless thousands of lives for modern-day Germany to come alive as a modern democracy Gaza has to be brought down in like fashion. In years to come, the Gazans of today will be recognized as innocent bystanders, and their deaths will be understood as a tragedy, but future historians will recognize what is an unavoidable necessity. Germans died from Allied bombs, but if Hitler had not invaded Poland in September 1939 and much of the rest of Europe in time, if he and his fascist thugs had not set the Holocaust in motion, there would have been no Allied bombs. It was in Germany's long-term interest that Hitler be brought down. If those opposed to fighting Hitler had had their way, their "peace now" arguments would only have extended the misery. You've got to know who you're fighting and be able to separate those who will negotiate from those who won't.
Note that Mahatma Gandhi, when faced with this dilemma, first urged that the Jews should have "offered themselves to the butcher's knife." But in time he also urged India to support the British in their war effort. Practical reasons trumped moral ones; he wanted the British to offer India independence in return. But that doesn't change the fact he supported the military takedown of Adolf Hitler.
We are talking about maybe the greatest dilemma of our lifetime. One part of me wants to take the pacifist position: killing is wrong, no matter who does it; two wrongs don't make a right; there's got to be another way, a diplomatic way and we just have to keep searching till we find it. And another part of me finds Wolffsohn's argument persuasive. There is evil in the world. Hitler killed for Lebensraum and to eliminate people he saw as Untermenschen. Hamas kills people for being Jewish and has promised to keep fighting till the State of Israel is wiped off the map. Hitler continued sending 16- and 17-year-old boys to the front even when it was clear the war was lost. Hamas openly boasts of rape, beheading and torture as tools of war. Negotiations are the way to go only if you can get your opponent to the table, and trust that they will honor peace agreements.
Ultimately, I come down on the side of the peaceniks. I can't handle the killing of children, and Realpolitik and I have never been the best of friends. I keep thinking there has got to be a way short of bullets and bombs to stop the killing. I realize my plan to kick the settlers out of the West Bank and throw Netanyahu in jail for life won't fly, and I don't have any better suggestions. I know the arguments against both a two-state and a one-state solution are currently both overpowering. And I can't imagine having to bear the political responsibility of choosing between delaying the war and dreaming of a magic solution on the one hand, and continuing to bomb Gaza to dust, on the other.
So I post these feeble "think-pieces" on my blog, hoping they might inspire somebody reading them to point out things everybody has been missing so far.
I don't believe in divine intercession or in knights in shining armor coming to the rescue.
My only comfort is that dilemmas sometimes do - magically - get resolved.
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