Tortured Loyalties
Terry H. Schwadron
Oct. 31, 2023
Somehow in all the yelling about Israeli retribution, Gaza’s resistance, and the role that U.S. politics plays in all of it, the world has managed to get itself quite tangled in conflicting and tortured loyalties that just make the already awful effects of war worse.
The easy answers increasingly don’t fully apply, the demands of the warring parties seem intractable and beyond our control, and we are watching in alarm as the possibilities heighten for a yet wider morass that is spilling over into blatant violence aimed at Jews and Muslims far from the battlefield. A hostage is found dead, families trying to flee are stopped by Hamas at the Rafah gate, a bomb has gone off next to an area believed safe — it is all stomach-turning.
Everyone I know, with or without family and friends from the region, talks of feeling real emotional pain from the daily onslaught of death and destruction — and now from reports of attacks on campuses, at mosques and synagogues, even at an airport in Russia where a mob appeared hunting for Jews to lynch from an airplane landing from Tel Aviv in the heavily Muslim Dagestan area. The Wall Street Journal reports that anti-Semitic comments are flooding Chinese social media.
The violence of the retribution in Gaza is confusing traditional loyalties for Israel among American Jews; the continuing use of hostages and civilians as human shields or the apparent hostility of Hamas to let foreign civilians out of the territory is baffling American Muslims. What do our loyalties even mean when hospitals strapped for supplies are targets because Hamas appears to be hiding its headquarters beneath.
Beyond the obvious, we’re seeing Americans — the same is true in Europe and elsewhere — turn on Jews or Muslims in individual attacks or group protests. Or we’re seeing protest barred if it abridges a singular story line.
We’re confusing government military policies with religion and ethnicity, with Semitic rivalries over land rights claimed back thousands of years. And we are encouraging — no, insisting — that questions about foreign aid and international security are central to our own domestic politics.
Where’s the Agreement?
As son of a Holocaust survivor, I grew up with apprehensions and vigilance about a world that would allow destruction of Jewish lives. A lifetime later, I also am moved by the realities for Palestinian civilians being rousted, bombed, and starved that are resulting from unbridled military reaction even to the horrors of Oct. 7.
What seems so strange is that there should be more agreement — though, as seems to be always now — the insistence to put labels and blame on what has occurred outruns any desire for understanding.
We should all be able to see that the Oct. 7 attacks by up to 2,500 masked and armed Hamas killers and kidnappers bent on erasing Israel and Jews fit the very definition of international terrorism. We ought to be able to recognize that Hamas, a militant group and the titular autocratic governor of the 2.2 million-person territory of Gaza, reflect those who want to head a separate state but live by a tribal code that puts missile launchers by hospitals.
We also can agree that the attack followed decades of increasingly aggressive policies from Israeli coalition governments that have talked peace but pursued policies of grabbing Palestinian land for yet more Jewish settlements. Along the way, the policies of those minority governments have gotten more provocative, more restrictive of Palestinian rights. We can agree that this rightward turn away from a separate Palestinian state continues to contribute to a pressure cooker in the open prison that is Gaza.
We can agree both that Israel can defend itself, seek to eliminating the Hamas threat, and that civilian populations on both sides of fences and walls should be treated humanely. We should agree that hostages should be returned, that trapped civilians in Gaza be given safe passage out, and that if fighting must happen, it should be among military rivals rather than not among children. Killing journalists who try to tell the story or doctors and nurses trying to care for the thousands of wounded or bakers trying to feed people or children helps no one.
Enter the U.S. forces to try to keep a wider lid on this crisis, backing Israel’s right to exist, negotiating for hostage release and more humanitarian aid, but seemingly unable or unwilling to dictate to Israel and Arab neighbors in the endless maze of who depends on whom.
In the twisted logic at work here, “ceasefire” has become tainted word used to stand for something less than resoluteness on the one hand or approved brutality through bombing and tanks on the other.
The Questions Mount
How have we allowed issues around how Israel responds to brutal terror attacks to result in questions now about Joe Biden’s support for re-election — especially when opponent Donald Trump and all the Republicans are lined up on the same side as Biden in backing Israel to the fullest? Those who think Biden is making policy mistakes as too pro-Israel are not going to get satisfaction from his political opponents.
How are we talking about defending the only democracy in the Middle East — our ally Israel — while trashing the very free speech tradition that allows us to raise questions about U.S. policy?
Everything about Israel, Hamas, dashed Palestinian hope and dreams, walls and occupations, and the hidden and open objectives of Arab counties, regional instigators like Iran, and superpower chess players is complicated. Why do we assume the answers to decades of strife are easy?
How is a solution here even possible unless there is international trust? How would two states side by side provide security when Gaza is led by a Hamas committed to destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews globally? How is an Israel that sees a series of governments that puts land ownership based on Biblical claims first ever going to end up an occupier of persecuted masses ignored by Arab neighbors?
After Hamas, there is armed resentment in the West Bank, there is a Hezbollah, and then Iranian-backed groups in Syria, Iraq, and militant rebel groups in other Arab countries all bent on a desire to attack Jews. At the same time, Saudi Arabia was about to join Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, and the UAE in finding ways to live with Israel. How committed is the world to changing this narrative?
We hear lots about the rise of anti-Jew and anti-Muslim attacks in this country, but not about who is behind them. We thought it was neo-Nazi, white supremacist groups, the same groups we have seen dangerously merging with MAGA forces, only now to find that it is Republican leaders who think liberals are too easy on anti-Semites. It’s Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis who is banning “pro-Palestinian” student protests on campus and Rep, Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who invented “Jewish space lasers” as wildfire igniters, who now attacks colleague Rep. Rashid Tlaib, D-Mich., for leading calls for ceasefire.
No wonder we’re finding ourselves in an emotional eddy over Israel and Gaza. What we think we understand is too often upside-down and inside-out.
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