"Given what Hamas did on October 7, Israel is completely justified in its actions, and the harm to those human shields is Hamas’ responsibility."
Yesterday's post described a dilemma facing Israel. Cameras are watching Gaza be destroyed.
In today's post Michael Trigoboff offers a solution to Israel's dilemma: Start with the premise that you shouldn't let your enemies kill you.
Is Israel's current policy good for Israel and Jews worldwide? Trigoboff argues that the policy is thought so by the people with the most at stake, the Jews in Israel. Michael Trigoboff is a retired professor of computer science at Portland Community College. He has posted here in the past, arguing for rigor and accountability in teaching and grading his students. He lives in the Portland, Oregon area.
Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff
I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, in the same kind of argumentative Jewish family that Jane Collins describes.
Writing from the relative safety of America, Ms. Collins expressed yesterday what one might think of as a set of “luxury beliefs.” Her life is not on the line if it turns out she’s wrong. Jews living in Israel had no such luxury. They were wrong about Hamas/Gaza, and over 1,000 of them died in the most hideous way possible.
Ms. Collins represents attitudes that were held by many Israelis on the left in the 1990s. Under the Oslo Accords, it looked like a two-state solution was possible and was going to happen. Israel offered a plan to implement a two-state solution in 2000. The Palestinians under Yasser Arafat rejected that plan. In a normal negotiation, if a proposal from the other side displeases you, you respond with a counteroffer. The Palestinian “counteroffer" was a wave of 140 suicide bombings targeting passenger buses, cafés, and pizza places called the Second Intifada.
This proved to most Israelis, and to many of us Jews in the diaspora, that the only peace the Palestinians were interested in was the “peace” that would come with the eradication of Jews from the Middle East. This Palestinian terrorist response killed the peace movement in Israel. It also killed the political left. The Labor Party used to be a strong force in Israeli politics and was often in charge of the country; it currently has no members of Parliament.
The current wave of antisemitism on college campuses and in cities across this country started on October 8, three weeks before Israel started its military campaign in Gaza. Within days, 30 student organizations at Harvard signed a letter stating that Israel was solely to blame for the October 7 atrocities committed by Hamas. The Black Lives Matter chapter in Chicago tweeted “We stand with Palestine” under the image of a Hamas paraglider trailing a Palestinian flag. Jewish students were mobbed and attacked on many college campuses.
And all of this occurred before a single Israeli soldier had entered Gaza.
Ms. Collins mentions “75 years.” Let’s remember what happened 75 years ago: Israel was established by a UN resolution and was immediately attacked by armies from the surrounding Arab states. Is Ms. Collins implying that Israel should not have been established at all?
As a result of that war in 1948, around 700,000 Arabs became refugees from the new Israeli state. Some were expelled; some were told by the Arab armies to get out of the way so that they wouldn’t be hurt while those armies killed the Jews. This was obviously a catastrophe for those Arab refugees. But never mentioned in this context is what happened afterwards: A wave of antisemitism rose up in the Arab countries so severe that every Jew in those countries was forced to flee. There were more than 700,000 of those Jewish refugees, many of whom came to Israel and are now called the Mizrahi Jews.
The Israelis took in their Jewish refugees and made them part of Israeli society. The Arabs kept their refugees in horrible concentration camps for generations and transformed them into a weapon against Israel.
The Mizrahi now make up more than half of the Jewish population of Israel. They are the backbone of the political right in Israel. Their ancestors knew the Arabs up close and personal, and they are under no illusions about the extent and severity of Arab antisemitism.
Ms. Collins quotes statistics from Hamas (not exactly a disinterested source) about the number of civilian casualties in Gaza, and how they are “mostly women and children.” She neglects to mention how many of them are Hamas fighters. Can a woman be a Hamas fighter? Is a 15-year-old Hamas fighter carrying a Kalashnikov a “child?"
Hamas has chosen to hide behind human shields in its tunnels. Given what Hamas did on October 7, Israel is completely justified in its actions, and the harm to those human shields is Hamas’ responsibility.
October 7 demonstrated to Israelis that it is no longer possible to live next door to Hamas. Since Israelis are determined to live, Hamas must be eradicated, and Israel is in the process of doing so. Every poll taken in Israel since October 7 demonstrates overwhelming support for this war and the way it is being conducted.
Ms. Collins and I are both Jewish, and we both grew up in the aftermath of The Holocaust. But we take different lessons from that heritage. I take mine from the Babylonian Talmud, which tells us, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
I'm with Rabin.
“Enough of blood and tears. Enough. We have no desire for revenge. We harbor no hatred toward you. We, like you, are people. People who want to build a home, to plant a tree, to love, to live side by side with you in dignity, in empathy, as human beings, as free men. We are today giving peace a chance, and saying again to you, enough. Let us pray that a day will come when we all will say, ‘Farewell to the arms.’”
And, of course, his Nobel lecture. (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1994/rabin/lecture/).
Israel has a right to defend itself. Hamas ought to be destroyed. The IDF generally responds with laudable restraint (as was articulated by Rabin).
As Prof. Trigoboff states, there were two possible lessons for Jews to draw from the Holocaust: Never again for the Jews; or never again for anybody. Those who learned the first, as did Prof. Trigoboff, most Israelis, and many Diaspora Jews, have decided that Israel must survive as a Jewish state no matter the cost.
Speaking only for myself, and not for other Jews striving for peace, I do not believe that any state has the right to exist. Only people should have that right. We all need a safe place to live, and the way Britain and the other Great Powers set up both Jews and Palestinians 75 years ago, neither people has such a place. So long as violence is seen as the only option by both sides, the killing will continue.
The history of bad-faith negotiations is too long to go into here; for example, Prof. Trigoboff states that the Second Intifada was the Palestinian response to Israeli peace offers, and ignores the fact that it was triggered by Israeli (soon to be) Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's deliberately provocative visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, surrounded by armed soldiers. Now both Palestinians and Israelis have leaders who seem willing to kill (and sacrifice their people) indefinitely.
American Jews might have the "luxury" of being out of the direct line of fire (unless our synagogue happens to be a target) but we have made sure that the US gives Israel nearly $4 billion every year in military aid. Pressure from our lobbying organizations and major donors gets the US to look the other way while Israel kills 10 Palestinians for every dead Israeli. So we have a special responsibility for Israel's actions. More of us would be speaking out now but we are afraid of being called traitors to our people.