A day of massacre leads to a year of carnage.
It is profoundly depressing to hear the level of demonization directed at Isrel by partisans of the Palestinians and at Palestinians by partisans of Israel. No, the Palestinians are not a pack of murderous hateful savages. No, the Israelis are not a gang of racist colonialist oppressors and tools of capitalist imperialism. Both sides betray a profound ignorance of the complex history of the region and a stunning blindness to the humanity of those whom they oppose. They distort and blame and call names, all in order to justify their own hysteria and passion and vengefulness. They overlook the copious historical record establishing that there is plenty of blame to go around. All in the cause of self justification.
But there is NO moral justification for the massacre of October 7, even if the Palestinian partisans' claims were true that it was no more than a response to a lengthy history of oppression. There is NO moral justification for the carnage and oppression to which millions of innocent Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and now also the Lebanese are being subjected, even if it were true that Israel's war aim of destroying Hamas is militarily achievable, that no other course of military action could overcome Hamas' use of civilian shields, and that Netanyahu's strategy and tactics were not chosen primarily to preserve his own grip on power. Gandhi's saying that "an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind" is apposite, even more so now that the toll is 36 eyes for an eye and counting.
Neither is "a plague on both your houses" a morally defensible position. This cycle of war will continue as long as an audience and respect are given the people on either side whose vision is focused on vilification of the other. In lieu of that, the focus needs to be on the millions of people NOW experiencing violence, directly or indirectly, Jewish and Arab. In place of the misguided and unachievable "two state solution," we must recognize that there is in fact only one state, that of the innocents caught between the implacables. The innocents far outnumber the implacables, and they are the only parties to this conflict who are morally entitled to our hearing and support.
When this war ends, as all wars do, I hope that Palestinians and Israelis alike can escape the gyre of self-justification, can acknowledge their own guilt and shame as thoroughly as did the Germans after World war II, and can construct a polity whose borders, no less arbitary and artificial than any other nation's borders, contain peoples fully committed to the ancient moral precept common to them all that "thou shalt not kill." I hope this, but I am aware that it most likely will take generations.
