Can we find a way out?
As we enter the new year, I keep thinking I should try to turn the page on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. How much more can I add to this global conversation? And as a non-Jew, how comfortable am I doing so?
My last two essays about this war focused on the rules of war and the exercise of free speech, respectively. Since then, following a brief ceasefire, the IDF accidentally shot dead three Israeli hostages, one of them waving a white flag, just a week after the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT performed miserably at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. Following the murder of 1,200 Israelis on October 7th, the war has now claimed more than 23,000 lives, including dozens of aid workers and journalists, and Israel prepares for a prolonged conflict. What is the way out of this?
This conflict is challenging us to consider — and reconsider — our core beliefs and how to bring them to bear on possible solutions. For me, liberalism is my core political and social construct. Not the narrow liberalism of US politics but the broad philosophical movement rooted in the natural rights of life, liberty, and property; the social contract, born in the Enlightenment, that sought to replace the medieval concepts of state religion, hereditary privilege, and the divine rights of kings with the liberal ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison.
In his opinion piece in The New York Times, Why I Am a Liberal, Cass Sunstein argues that liberals fundamentally believe in six things: freedom (of speech, religion, association, and assembly), liberty (human rights and civil rights), pluralism (diversity of opinion, conviction, culture, and lifestyle), security (freedom from fear, intimidation, and violence), the rule of law (due process, equality before the law), and democracy. A certain amount of republicanism, that is, a belief in the importance of civic virtue and the common good, is a unique — and valued — aspect of American liberalism, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental defense of liberalism, in my mind.
It’s not hard to see how each of these values of modern liberalism is under assault. Attacking media freedom and suppressing information, undermining the rule of law and judicial independence, and perverting elections with threats and intimidation are all blatantly illiberal attempts to undermine liberal democracy.
Anti-liberals seem to be masters at gaslighting and cynically deploying the instruments of liberal democracy to push anti-democratic measures. Freedom of religion is exploited to restrict the liberties of others. The boundaries of free speech are being tested to promote sedition. Pluralism, by its nature, tests social bonds and is fertilizer for populism. Unfortunately, progressives too are taking increasingly illiberal positions regarding speech, tolerance, race, and even democracy to the detriment of liberal values. Both progressives and populists tend to think freedom is overrated and less important than other things. Part of the challenge then is how to counter illiberalism while remaining true to our liberal values.
With illiberalism on the rise in numerous places around the world, including Israel, challenging what had appeared to be the inevitable march of democracy, how does liberalism fight back? And is there a liberal solution to the war in Palestine?
In November, Ezra Klein interviewed Rabbi Sharon Brous of Los Angeles’s IKAR synagogue. In his introduction to the interview, he cited the same statistics that I cited in my last essay, statistics revealing the deep generational divide among Americans’ support for Israel. He describes three generations of Americans with distinctly different views of what Israel is. First, there are older Americans, like Joe Biden, who saw Israel as the haven for the Jews and who also saw Israel when it was fragile and tenuous and when it really could have been wiped off the map by its neighbors.
Then there is the next generation, my generation, a straddle generation, who only ever knew a strong Israel. But we also knew an Israel that had a strong peace movement, where the society was openly conflicted about the ongoing occupation. We remember Rabin and Arafat impossibly shaking hands on the South Lawn.
And then, as the deadline for independence in the Oslo Accords passed, when Palestinian anger boiled over in the Second Intifada, the endless suicide bombings pushed Israel to the right and then further right. And so now, Klein observes, you have this generation that has only known Israel as a strong nation oppressing a weak people. They never knew a vulnerable Israel, an Israel whose leaders sought peace, who genuinely seemed to want something better.
“As it happens,” Klein says, “American politics right now is dominated by people over 65, but it won’t be forever. And there are many of us who warned of this exact thing happening, who said, if you lose moral legitimacy, you will not have the world’s good will when you need it most, who said it is a problem for the Jewish state to not be seen to … be a moral state.” Klein begins the interview with a clip from a sermon Brous delivered on Yom Kippur, only a few weeks prior to the Hamas attacks:
Telling the truth, very simply, is essential to healing. We must tell the truth about what is happening, where we are, and how we got here. I’m speaking right now, especially to those among us, who, like me, see in Israel a miraculous, national renaissance.
…Fifty-six years of too many people allowing our own trauma and fear to justify the denial of basic rights, dignities, and dreams for millions of Palestinian people living under Israeli rule. Decades of justifying an unjustifiable status quo as the only reasonable response to the failures and missteps of Palestinian leadership and the violence of Palestinian extremists.
Many of us have spent years trying not to look. We don’t know because we don’t want to know because the world is sometimes cruel and unfair to Jews, and yes, delivers to Israel disproportionate opprobrium among all the bad state actors. We don’t want to know because we don’t want to fuel antisemitism, because accepting the reality of Palestinian suffering under Israeli rule means accepting that the Jewish people can be not only victims, but also victimizers.
Brous is very cognizant of how difficult these conversations are and how divisive they can be, especially within the Jewish community. She believes the anti-democratic moves coming from the government are not only anti-democratic, but are “fundamentally un-Jewish” and antithetical to the values that are core to Jews’ self-understanding as their place in the world. Klein asks Brous how she can read the same texts and come to different conclusions from other more conservative rabbis about Jewish identity and moral responsibility.
Yeah, this is a really important question. Every person of faith is engaging in an act of interpretation and choosing what texts to prioritize and how to read and interpret those texts. And my choice is to read that the first and most important thing that we learn about human beings in the beginning of the Book of Genesis is that all human beings are created B’tzelem Elohim, “in God’s own image.”
And the way that our rabbis read that 2,000 years ago was that every single person has infinite worth, that all people are fundamentally equal, and that every single human life has something unique to contribute in this world. That is the core premise, the starting point for my faith and for my religious life. And I didn’t derive that from some 1990s feminist rereading of the tradition. That comes from the Book of Genesis, chapter 1.
She goes on specifically to openly criticize the illiberal and anti-democratic moves of the Netanyahu government, and also later in the interview to say, “I’m sorry, but we have lost our moral center. What we have to do is expand our scope of moral concern to find the humanity in one another again. That is the call of our time.” This brought me to tears. If this speaks to you at all, I encourage you to listen to the entire interview.
These views reflect so much about the liberal tradition that is so meaningful to me. Humanity over tribalism. Rigorous self-examination. Responsibility and accountability. Her words definitely don’t give all the answers to a way out of this crisis, but they certainly provide hope for a way through it.
Last week, I read Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing. The book is an epic sweep following two branches of a family tree through nine generations, beginning in the 18th century. The story is as compelling as it is improbable. It is also poignant and beautiful. As the story moves through time, we see the impacts of slavery and the slave trade on successive generations. Time is itself like a character in the story, necessary to see the full compounding effects of the trauma of slavery on Blacks today. Gyasi has said, “Everything has bearing on the present. And if you couldn’t feel time in that way — in how interconnected we all are — in the book, then you wouldn’t get that sense.”
The idea for the book began as a story focused on a mother and daughter, but Gyasi’s initial research in Ghana hadn’t provided sufficient material. Then a detour to the Cape Coast Castle turned up the inspiration she had been seeking. There she learned that British soldiers sometimes married local women, who then lived comfortable lives in the castle’s upper levels, while captives were holed in the building’s dungeons before they passed through the “door of no return” and endured the horrors of the Middle Passage. The book became much more ambitious than the one she had originally envisioned.
Gyasi avoids an easy portrayal of the slave traders as the only villains in the story. Capturing slaves, betraying them, trading them, owning them — the evil touches everyone in the story, whether they understood it or not. At one point, a character of mixed heritage has his role in the slave trade challenged by a local woman he meets. “Who was she to decide what a slaver was? … The Asante had power from capturing slaves. The Fante had protection from trading them. If the girl could not shake his hand, then surely she could never touch her own.”
Later in the novel, as another character is comforting her grandson, she reflects on the generations of the family and observes, “There are people who have done wrong because they could not see the result of the wrong…. Evil begets evil. It grows. It transmutes, so that sometimes you cannot see that the evil in the world began as the evil in your home.”
Sometimes it’s difficult to see that the evil began in our own home.
Conservatives — and fascists and populists — simply can’t accept this kind of self-critique. Progressives, on the other hand, might have it define us. Liberals, however, would have us confront the evil in us, understand its origin, evaluate the effect it’s had on the world around us, and ultimately challenge ourselves to live up to our values and our highest ideals. We’ve all played a role in getting us here. What role will we play in getting us out?
I don’t pretend to have the answers to this conflict, but I’m pretty certain that a deadly, prolonged war followed by an untenable occupation won’t lead to a stable, lasting peace. The only sustainable solution is one that recognizes the respective natural rights of Israelis and Palestinians to freedom, liberty, and security. And only the hard work of reflection, recognition, acknowledgement, negotiation, and compromise will get us anywhere close.
“Our history…informs the way that we treat people in the present. Every moment has a precedent and comes from this other moment, that comes from this other moment, that comes from this other moment.” — Yaa Gyasi
