Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and journalist Nicholas Kristof have credibility to say things that some other people cannot.
Kristof is telling Israel to stop the killing in Gaza.
Schumer is calling for both Israeli and Palestinian leadership to leave.
The U.S. has been trying for decades to influence how Israel deals with its Palestinian problem. The dilemma is that both Jews and Muslims consider the same land a sacred homeland. Given bitter history, neither side wants to share the land or co-exist. Neither side trusts the other, and for good reason. Each side is led by leaders looking for a mix of victory and revenge. Each side believes it was badly treated by the other. Children on both sides learn that lesson.
Click here: "Gifted" New York Times article. No paywall.
Both Kristof and Schumer recognize that Israel has a grave security problem. It experienced a murderous invasion intended to be provocative. Hamas' attack on Israeli civilians was cruel, malicious, and cleverly strategic. It forced Israel's hand, requiring an armed response, which interrupted promising peace talks with Saudi Arabia. Hamas does not want peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Hamas wants war and division, so it acted as a proxy for Iran, a long-established culture and nation of Persians, not Arabs. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is part of a bigger rivalry within Muslim civilization. It is a dilemma squared. Or cubed, because the U.S., Europe, and Russia also have complicated relationships with countries in the Middle East themselves. They need its oil. Or maybe it is a dilemma to the fourth power, because the politics of Israel and Palestine are part of the politics of the U.S. Swing state Michigan has many first-and-second generation Muslims who sympathize with Palestinians. Young voters nationwide tell pollsters they see Israel as an aggressor, not a victim.
Hamas doubled down on its malicious cruelty by using their own people as human shields, positioning military equipment inside hospitals and schools. Israel must do something to protect itself, but everything they do inevitably kills Palestinian civilians. It has created a humanitarian crisis and a public relations nightmare. There is no way to sugarcoat images of Gazan toddlers killed.
This blog is about messages and messengers. In a theoretical world of logic, the identity of a person who advances an idea is irrelevant. The idea is the idea, and it rises or falls on its own merit. In the real world of politics, the message and messenger are intertwined. Some people have credibility to express disapproval and others do not.
Nicholas Kristof is an American Jew who has spent decades in and out of the Middle East observing and writing. He writes that Israel needs to stop bombing Gaza and it needs to stop blocking American humanitarian aid. I link to his article above. No one who urges restraint on Israel is exempt from charges of being unrealistic, and maybe antisemitic, even observant Jews. There is a term for Jewish critics of Israel and fellow-Jews: "self-hating Jews." Moreover, Kristof is an outsider, an American, able to return to New York and a farm in Oregon, thousands of miles from Hamas. His critics note that it is easy for him to call for restraint. He isn't living it, bearing the risk. Still, he has an argument, urging Biden to put pressure on Israel to stop the killing.
Chuck Schumer made a consequential speech this week with a message parallel to Kristof's. He said the status quo is intolerable. He urged changes within Israel that angered Israeli leaders and their supporters, plus right-wing supporters of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu here in the U.S.
Chuck Schumer, by coincidence a college classmate though not a reader of this blog, is an observant Jew, a U.S. senator from New York, and the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. He made a tough-love speech. His speech begins with paragraphs attempting to qualify himself as a friend of Israel. He said how he rejoiced at Israel's founding as a boy. He says he continues to believe Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. He said he has friends in Israel and has met with families of hostages. He knows Bibi. But then he says the hard part. The status quo must end. He outlined four obstacles to peace.
Click here: Times of Israel transcript
1. "Hamas, and the Palestinians who support and tolerate their evil ways" must go. The people of Gaza, with the cooperation of Arab states, need to remove them from power.
2. "Radical right-wing Israelis in government and society" must go. Schumer names names, Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. He adds the extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank. Schumer said Israeli voters need to elect a new coalition.
3. President Mahmoud Abbas must go. He is the current president of the State of Palestine and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). Schumer called him corrupt and a poor role model and spiritual leader.
4. Netanyahu must go. Schumer said he leads an extremist party. Schumer acknowledged that Israel is a democracy and the current coalition needs to be removed by Israelis, not Americans, but he said it must happen if there is to be peace.
Schumer said these changes will require pressure from two sides. The Arab countries surrounding Israel must push out Hamas and encourage new leadership for Palestinians. And the United States must leverage its power to push change within Israel.
Both Schumer and Kristof say there is no one-state solution that brings stable peace. Circumstances have made a two-state solution all there is, however difficult and currently unpopular it is on both sides. There is no good solution. Mass death or forced exile -- the solutions of earlier eras of conquest -- are neither good nor possible. Both peoples will continue to share that land. There is no solution other than a two-state solution, however difficult and however seemingly impossible.
You write at the start of today's blog, "The U.S. has been trying for decades to influence how Israel deals with its Palestinian problem. The dilemma is that both Jews and Muslims consider the same land a sacred homeland. Given bitter history, neither side wants to share the land or co-exist." This last statement isn't entirely true. Yes, Hamas never acknowledged Israel's right to exist, but Hamas has never represented a majority of the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority, which has for most of the time since Israel was founded, was open to a two-state solution. Likud never was. When it first assumed power in 1977 under Menachim Begin, it began to build settlements on the West Bank with the aim of "changing the facts on the ground" so that a two-state solution would be impossible. It succeeded. Netanyahu, long-time leader of Likud, even encoded the settlement policy into law in 2018. But it hasn't only be Likud. From the start of Zionism, its leaders wanted to possess all the land of "Eretz Israel," which includes all of present-day Israel and Palestine. What follows is documentation of an unbroken intention of ethnic cleansing.
"[We Zionists will] spirit the penniless population across the border [of the Jewish state] by denying it employment . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." Diary of Theodore Herzl, entry dated June 12, 1895. Herzl was the co-founder of Zionism.
“The Islamic soul must be broomed [ethnically cleansed] out of Eretz-Yisrael.” Also, "There is no choice: the Arabs must make room for the Jews of Eretz Israel. If it was possible to transfer the Baltic peoples, it is also possible to move the Palestinian Arabs.” Ze'ev Jabotinsky, spiritual father of the Likud Party, in a letter dated November 1939 to a Revisionist colleague in the U.S.
"There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries, all of them." Also, "Not one village, not one [Arab] tribe should be left.” Diary entries of Yosef Weitz, director of the Transfer Committee Israel created in 1948, the year of its founding.
"The compulsory transfer of the Arabs . . . could give us something which we never had [even in Biblical times].” Also, "With compulsory transfer we will have a vast area . . . I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel, quoted in Benny Morris, “Righteous Victims: A history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-1999.”
"It is not as though there was a Palestinian people . . . and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them . . . they did not exist." Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel 1969-1974, quoted in The Washington Post, June 16, 1969.
"There is no Zionism, colonization, or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands." Ariel Sharon, prime minister of Israel 2001-2006, quoted in the New York Times, 1998.
No issue leaves me feeling as conflicted as this one. My paternal grandparents both immigrated from Poland as young teens to escape being murdered by Nazis for the crime of being Jewish. Had they not fled Poland there would have not been my father and of course no me. I support a Jewish state. I despise antisemitism. But as your article clearly points out how can anyone support the mass murder of people who essentially live in the 'wrong' place?
I have no answers. But I absolutely believe this mass murder must stop. You have clearly pointed out how these conflicting opinions coexist. Thanks for a thoughtful article