Still Seeking Peace on Earth
Terry H. Schwadron
Dec. 26, 2023
The year’s ending is marked by intractable divisions at home and overseas, with heightened concern about our collective loss of humanity and our ability to see beyond our personal needs, wants, and preferences.
Indeed, we show daily now a severe inhospitality even for news or information that runs counter to our perceived take on the world, as if all the data is already in and our position locked. Instead, Blame for The Other has once again replaced any openness to taking in new information that just might prompt a second opinion about all that we believe is set.
We even seem to have created special public hell zones for those who would step in as intermediaries attempting to bridge the gaps.
It’s true in our poisoned partisan politics in our dwindling respect for learning and institutional knowledge, and in our view towards the aggressive wars between Israel and Hamas, now three months old, and between Russia’s invading armies and the resistance by Ukrainians, now moving into a third year — conflicts in which all side yell about “genocide” from the enemy, and no one is focused on how to set up for a better condition tomorrow.
We apparently have passed the point where a court ruling on any legal challenge can be viewed as anything by partisans seeking to weaponize justice systems for political advantage; there is no guilt or innocence left in the law, just findings that promote one version or its opposite in the culture wars. We have rejected the idea of independently collected “news” for insistence on labeling as “hit jobs” or propaganda if the information is not helpful to our “side.” We’ve seemingly even lost the ability to worry about an individual exception if the case for abortion or treatment of a trans student might run afoul of preconceived notions.
In Israel and Gaza
There was no holiday break in Ukraine or in Israel and Gaza. The obvious strains of retaliation to brutal Oct. 7 terrorism by Hamas fighters dedicated to eliminating Israel find that they continued to draw a devastating military response from Israel that yes, has put the Palestinian question again in the forefront — but has caused unending humanitarian nightmares for their own people.
The wreck of the response is obvious to the world: More than 130 hostages from Israel and other countries are still being held to no apparent continuing advantage, there are upwards of 20,000 Palestinians dead by Gazan estimate, and a half-million Palestinians homeless and facing disease and hunger. Perhaps 2,000 Hamas fighters have been killed, says Israel, but Hamas’ ranks are said to number as many as 30,000, and 10 civilians have been killed for every Hamas member. The numbers are guesses, of course, but even Sunday, Israel hit more than 200 targeted areas.
Yet, ceasefires and humanitarian trade-offs are hard to come by. Even with Israeli concessions, Hamas has said it will not participate, and, in fact, would do it all again. That, in turn, prompts Israel to re-commit to wiping out Hamas, even if getting to the tunnels has meant dropping more heavy bombs than in World War II or Vietnam on an area the size of Massachusetts.
Worse, however humanitarian the concern for both sides, the ripples of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are running amok in this country and globally with verbal and physical attacks against individuals who have nothing to do with the actual conflict.
Families far from the conflict are wracked by generational difference over identifying the most egregious oppressors, and annoying ignorance of street protest and the reaction it draws ignores much of the history and complexity that got us here. Firing a college president for “allowing” free speech that is hateful eliminates neither the hate nor the perception of threat on campuses but does seem mostly to serve Republican partisan interests in undermining campuses as a general supporter of diversity and inclusion policies.
Worsening Complexity, Not Solving it
Indeed, the more we learn — at least those of us open to taking in new information in a way that may adjust our sense of what we know or believe — the more we find that the increasingly radical right Israeli government coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu has proved a long-time supporter of Hamas to keep Gazan interests from joining with those in the West Bank.
The obvious solution of two states with supervised security arrangements turns out not to be obvious to Netanyahu who now is fighting even with Joe Biden and American military backers, as well as with the United Nations, independent humanitarian groups, and, of course, Arab neighbor nations.
In sequential journalistic reviews, we have learned that the Israeli government allowed for billions of Qatari dollars to continue to flow to Hamas, even understanding that much would go to military efforts we now call terrorism, that security units were moved from the Gazan border to the West Bank in support of continuing expansion of Jewish settlements that are grabbing land from Palestinians, that Israeli Defense Forces bombed areas where they had herded Palestinian civilians, and that the government itself seems more focused on its survival than that of its hostages.
Every bomb, every death will mean more recruits for a rebuilt Hamas still bent on Israeli destruction, and the U.S. responsibility to bankroll and provide weapons to ensure Israeli defense. And with provocation from Iran and its militias, the war continues to threaten expansion to Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and the Red Sea shipping lanes.
Meanwhile, Republicans, who insist they are pro-Israel, have bollixed up continuing aid in the partisan insistence on changes in U.S. border policies — without showing much sign of talking about how to do that either.
The U.S. succeeded in so watering down a United Nations Security Council resolution to authorize more humanitarian aid that it has little practical effect on continued fighting, and there is no plan for what happens when the fighting eventually ends other than promised Israeli occupation into an endless future. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is no better placed than Hamas to take over in Gaza, guaranteeing Israeli occupation to forestall more terror attacks.
It is a very vicious cycle.
Peace on Earth, the message of the season, was canceled in Bethlehem this weekend, to allow for public consoling over both the Oct. 7 and the devastation of the response. Upon reflection this week, we should be recommitting ourselves to a better world than the one we are serving up.
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