The Palestine Collection: A Speech for the Future
So this is the final essay and video podcast of this Palestine collection that I intend on putting out. I may continue to engage with friends or on other platforms such as my friend Yasmine Mohammed’s show which I was just on. It was a pretty good conversation I thought and I got some excellent pushback and challenges. But I was reminded how much I dislike social media and why I left it by the comment section… but I do find even some of the mean comments to be helpful and at least point me in the right directions where people might have the strongest resistance or of course fierce disagreements with me. But yeah, being called self-loathing, not part of the Jewish family, Jewish by blood only, a liar, making people sick etc… I get it. I’ve been dealing with that garbage my whole life from my “fellow jews” who simultaneously won’t let me leave the tribe. This is what happens when you dare to question the Zionist narrative, people will say some truly vile things about you and understandably deny all of the history which might make them uncomfortable. I do understand that bit of comfort and solidarity that Gideon Levy expressed at the end of our conversation. It’s not fun being vilified and slandered, and there are very few of us trying to engage at all. But anyway, it is painful and distressing because it shows just how difficult this entire task is going to be. I’m going to address some of that in this final essay and then, and I know this might upset some of you, but I really have to try to step away from the issue again. It’s really not good for my health.
So, at the end of this essay as I promised I’m going to try to deliver the speech that I would write for an Israeli Prime Minister to deliver sometime in the next 6 months. I have very little hope that the speech that actually will be delivered will sound anything like mine, but still I found the exercise very useful.
So, I’m hoping the last 4 episodes really were seen as a genuine effort to retain our humanity in the face of such ugly, shocking, seemingly depraved human activity… I’m pointing to that activity in many places by many perpetrators of course. In a previous essay I explained what I really think dehumanizing is, and that is to deny a rational explanation for someone’s behavior, to deny that it be heard or written about or shared or believed. As you may have heard in the Richard English conversation the word “terrorism” really serves to unplug the rational explanation for violence. It casts it into the irrational categories of supernatural evil or unbridled hatred and bloodlust, it prevents further analysis, it outlaws questioning, it silences those who dare to look at yesterday.
I want to talk about 3 things here before I try to conclude with the promised speech.
The first point is about history and the individual. I’m getting a lot of hate and pushback at the moment for daring to make the kind of arguments that I’m making. A lot of it comes from Mizrahi Jews, these are the Jews of middle eastern origin. Many who ended up in Israel after their countries expelled them after 1948. They are mad at me for my “ashkenazi” perspective as a jew of european dissent and my stories of the holocaust and the zionist project which was birthed in collaboration with european colonizers… which of course feels very distant from the experience of the mizrahi jews. Well, okay. I get that to a degree. Because from an individual perspective imagine being one of these jews in say Iraq and being generally satisfied with your situation and then your kicked out of your home by the arabs in your country and then you end up in this newly recognized place called israel and there you find yourself at the other end of the violence and anger of more arabs. What a disaster. But I extend this to the european jews as well. imagine being Gideon Levy’s father washing ashore hungry and exhausted from the narrow escape from extermination efforts just to find yourself in a territory which is under threat and attack. But as I keep stressing in these historical arguments the Palestinian Arabs didn’t really care much who was uprooting them from their houses or engaging in massacres… Zionists enjoying favorable treatment from the British colonizers? Zionists who were going rogue and running afoul of the British colonizers? The British colonizers themselves? Or new immigrated jews who were expelled by the surrounding Arab nations themselves? To the Palestinian refugee, this looked and felt like displacement at the hands of powerful foreign entities with their own self interest (yes including those Arab nations reacting to 1948 with expulsions) I’m not sure what else to call that other than feeling the settler/colonizer dynamic at play.
So we have all these individual perspectives which are understandable from an emotional level, all these angry upset hurt and armed people full of different forms of psychological righteousness who are clashing at all these points. And just stay with this view for a moment, because that righteousness I’m talking about there can take different forms, religious forms is absolutely one of them of course. And an individual in any one of those moments would absolutely tell you that what is motivating them is god’s word and the belief in it may be so captivating and powerful as to only be able to detect it as a motivating force. They absolutely really “believe” in the metaphysics of those doctrines. This really raises the very difficult philosophical and neurobiological question of what a belief really is - how one would even define a belief. I don’t think it’s so simple. I think it's something like an idea which one consistently discovers when they are asked to explain their behavior - it is the conscious thought which we believe is governing the system. How did it get there and how did it form? That’s something that we really need to understand better. You know, for as much as this series has been a contrast to Sam Harris’s arguments at the moment, I would really recommend a show I produced and wrote for his channel on the subject of “belief and unbelief” which actually does get into this complexity in a way that I feel is often severely lacking in Sam’s analysis. In fact that episode featured a conversation he had with Yasmine which really explores the point.
Because the real point I'm making now is that yes, we’re all individuals with these beliefs and perspectives and experiences and emotions… i mean what else could we be. But the discipline of history is to try to broaden this picture. To understand how all these individual nodes which at some zoomed in level appear to be flying in all these wild directions and violently clashing are part of bigger waves of history. It is just like zooming into a wave in the ocean. If you get close enough you’ll only see the the hydrogen and oxygen wiggling around in all directions, chaos… self assured molecules doing their thing with the knowledge they know… they do not know they are part of something called a wave which exists at a different scale with different dynamics of forces and a causal history. This analogy I’m using is called emergence of course. And history is an emergent property and we are all stuck as pieces within it, trying to convince ourselves of the direction we are crashing.
But of course we are not water molecules. We are humans. And humans have the capacity to transcend our perspective and experience and micro positions to try to understand these things. And even step into the process itself from time to time to steer the wave.
So, when a letter written by a British colonizer to a wealthy Jewish banker in 1917 expresses how the British empire looks in favor on the project of something called Zionism, written by the way at a crucial junction in something called world war 1 when the Germans were just about to turn their immense power westward towards the British allies after having vanquished the eastern soviet and ottoman front in a partial effort to convince American jews to put pressure on American power to shift away from its isolationism and enter the war on their side and help defeat the Germans… what does that have to do with a family of jews living generally peacefully in Cyrene, Libya 31 years later? Well… nothing and everything. That’s how history works. We’re all victims of history in some ways, especially if we don’t attempt to understand it.
Is my experience of that of an Ashkenazi jew growing up in a Zionist environment in suburban America? Sure. What else could it be? But the effort of history is to step out of that to attempt to find other perspectives from which to view and understand the present. That could be jumping into the experiences of Mizrahi jews of course, and that could be jumping into European jews escaping persecution, that could be jumping into British governors of course, or German factory workers, or religious jews from holland who turn against the Zionists upon seeing it up close while studying the torah like I explored at the end of the last episode. And the list goes on and on. But clearly my effort in this series is to try to really highlight two perspectives which - one is that of the Palestinian Arab from 1897 onward who (at that zoomed in particle perspective) has seen a very persistent and relentless story of attack and displacement, and then, equally important I think, trying to find a perspective from outside of the way somehow, to project our lens to the view from nowhere that can look back and see these larger historical forces at play which, of course are the perspectives which are crucial to understanding where all the particles in the wave might be going. Good luck trying to do the math to predict where on the beach a wave might crash if all you have to work with is a few particles slamming into each other under a microscope. You’ll have much better success doing this kind of predictive analysis from a helicopter.
So I hope that provides some response to the hate that is coming my way from people who are eager to kick me out of the “Jewish family”. If you think my helicopter view of the history is faulty or mistaken, so be it, we all have plenty to read and learn and adjudicate in that regard. As I’ve mentioned all of my sources and readings are on my site. The nice part about a lot of this research is that it really does not need to extend further than 1897. I mean, you could always trace it further into the abyss of the past I suppose, but from 1897 onward we are lucky to have a ton of documentation and photographs and testimonials which have been retained to have a high degree of confidence about a lot of things.
But of course, the challenge is always to attempt to tell honest history and escape that individual experience bias. And I do not doubt this hurdle. For example an individual node or experience in that wave could be someone like the Grand Mufti of jerusalem amin al-husseni who was a palestinian political leader born coincidentally in 1897. If someone takes a snapshot of Amin in 1941 they’ll find him shaking hands with Adolf Hitler. Now, many jews in their molecule level experiences hear that sentence and see those photographs and know all they need to know forever about the palestinians. But the Amin molecule in this wave of course had been witnessing the threat and conquest of his homeland in palestine since his birth at the hands of the western colonial powers, principally the british and the zionists arriving in his country. He also had resentment towards other western allied powers for their colonial projects throughout other arab lands which he felt kinship for. So, he had been hoping for the downfall of the alliance since before the outbreak of world war 1 and had a deeply entrenched distrust for the british after their many revealed false promises and outright lies to the arab populations about their future prospects for nationhood. He was eager for the renewed hostilities of world war 2 after another couple decades of continued mistreatment, displacement, and problems in his homeland, which by now had turned into a steady cycle of violence with zionist attacks and arab retaliation within the British mandate or vice versa on the attack/retaliation experience because cycles are cycles… and that one has never ceased to this day. Of course he was rooting for the germans to defeat his enemies by the time world war 2 was ramping up. He said as much plainly when as historian Walter Laquer said “The Arabs are germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies namely the English, the jews, and the communists”
Now, did Amin know of the extermination camps? I don’t know. Yeah probably, or at least he didn’t renounce his support over the next few years when it was likely that he was aware. Again. This might be all anyone needs to hear about it. And I think there are real lessons here about retaining integrity even in the face of such desperately large power. Forming alliances based on mutual enemies and self interest is ripe with this kind of shame. I think what Mufti Amin failed to do was to pull himself out of the molecule level to notice and understand the wave of history which was forming at that moment, perhaps he could have recognized not just the strategic blunder of these handshakes but also the moral failing. But of course, perhaps it was too late for him. His individual experience and belief forming around the hatred for the British and the jews (which also had doctrinal support) may have already been too deeply rooted at this point. Mufti Amin was not a historian. But historians do have a duty to try to report on it as objectively as possible. And this is not always done in Arab retellings of his life, and as the brilliant author Robert Fisk pointed out, sometimes his lengthy biographies spend only a page or two on what they call the mufti’s “German years”. So yes, historians can give in to their consequential tribal political self sanitizing biases too. And that is exactly, of course, what has happened with Israeli and Zionist history as well… as they erase entire perspectives and vilify any efforts to escape the molecules and write about certain forces in the wave. And as peter Novick has pointed out the bias works the other way as well when there are tribal political enemy vilifying biases at play. Novick points out for example in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust devotes an article to the Mufti which is twice as long as the articles on Goebbels and Goring and longer than the articles on Himmler and Heydrich combined, longer than the article on Eichmann and only exceeded slightly the the entry for Hitler.
So that is my point about perspectives of history and the need to seek to escape the hyper zoomed in personal experience from which we can see almost nothing of interest other than our powerfully emotional self righteousness… unfortunately this is the place from which most of us spend our entire lives up until our sometimes violent deaths.
Okay the second point I want to address is on a definitional point. I’ve used the word Zionism a lot lately, and so have my guests. And its pretty obvious that this word has such a slippery definition and ignites such strong passions as to require more thought. I want to try to talk about 3 terms now so see if I can clarify my ideas a bit. So the three words are Zionism, Israel, and Judaism.
I do think that all 3 of these words have been tied up together to mean nearly the same thing and that has been a rather intentional strategy of certain groups. I’ve been witnessing that my entire life. It’s made it wildly difficult to discuss without being attacked. I think everyone has seen the absolutely infuriating debate topics of something like “is anti Zionism antisemitism”. This is really despicable stuff. The IHRA, that’s the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, put forward their bullet points for what antisemitism is and included holding Israel to behavior which is not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation and a bullet point about characterizing the state of Israel as a racist endeavor and using symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism… amongst others. That last one really bothers me because I absolutely love the tradition of political cartooning but the ADL goes after just about everyone who dares draw a political cartoon which aims to criticize the actions of the state of Israel, especially its relationship to America. They currently have a collection of cartoons which they claim are antisemitic on their website from around the world. It is utterly mind blowing. I issued this challenge a long time ago and no one took me up on it. But I dare you to draw a cartoon which uses symbols obviously that harshly criticizes israel’s actions in Gaza at the moment and points out their support and funding from an unpopular american president. I dare you to draw it and publish with an Arabic sounding name in a major newspaper and see what happens.
And that brings me to another really important point here as I approach these definitions, because this merger of the three terms is such a monumental problem.
So someone like Bill Maher has often in his history pointed out that something like Islam is like a mafia where if you criticize it enough, they might come kill you. Fair point. Drawing the prophet in certain ways can be absolutely deadly. And im not suggesting that you take me up on my challenge you might find yourself killed, but if you did that while in the west bank you definitely might. But probably not in california, okay, but you will be viciously attacked and slandered no doubt. And an analogy that Sam Harris has used often to make this point is the Book of Mormon broadway musical. He points out that this musical which pokes fun at the character and behavior of the mormon church does not result in massive protests but instead the church actually taking ad out in the playbill for the performance. And if you tried to put on a play called The Book of Islam you’d have a fatwah on your head the next day. Also fair enough… And yeah, if you put on a play called “The Book of Judaism” you’d probably be fine if you had jokes about strange kosher rules or complaining about walking in the desert or something. I mean you probably can hear the jokes already, there is plenty of that humor around. But… just try to make a farcical broadway musical called The Book of Zionism. Just try to have musical numbers which poke fun about Theorder Herzl and the Nakba and the cleansing of Deir Yassin and the expansion of settlements. Just try to have someone doing a funny dance about special settlements and what not. Just let me know how fast the ADL shows up at your door with an army of journalists labeling you as an anti-semite.
They might not kill you, sure. But they sure as hell are going to cancel you. And in that little thought experiment I think there are the first hints at a distinction between 2 of the words “Zionism” and “Judaism”.
I don’t know how you talk about Zionism without talking about its history. Because there are those who want to offer a completely innocuous definition of zionism simply being the belief that the Jews should have a safe area of land in the world which they will call home. And to be fair to the original outliner of modern zionism, theordor hertzl, he may have even signed up to this definition. He was not a religious jew at all, he even had a christmas tree in his house. And when the time came to vote on where this jewish homeland should be carved out of the menu of the british empire, he made a strong case for the Uganda plan seeing as how the favored Palestine land was already very populated with an entrenched nationality of Arabs. Palestine, of course, won the day as the target rather early on in the conversations as it was clear that the project was only going to gain steam if the Jews felt an emotional contact to the area… and frankly the real estate was pretty sweet. I’ve always pointed out that I dont think it’s any surprise that a whole bunch of people are sure that God told them that they were supposed to be in the ones that lives on the eastern shore of the mediterranean rather than say, the northern peninsula of michigan. (sorry michigan).
But anyway I think in any definition of zionism we have to be honest about the history and say that it is an ethno-nationalist project where Jews are seeking exclusive control of a specific stretch of land in the historic levant region (by whatever name). And the funny tension between judaism and zionism began really early in the project as exhibited by the story of Jacob Israel de Haan as I pointed out in the previous episode. The earliest zionists were really not the deeply religious jews who studied torah all day and held beliefs about the literal nature of the old testament. The earliest zionists really did seem to be committed to a project of national growth in Palestine and I don’t doubt that much of this motivation was due to the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe. The problem was from the very beginning that the land was already taken. The arguments that an indigenous people who left 2000 years ago were back to reclaim the soil are really pretty wild. But if zionists want to throw that justification in there, be my guest. So the term zionism to me really does mean that: an ethno-nationalist project which seeks to establish a jewish controlled and jewish majority state in historic palestine with borders that extend in both directions in such a way to establish safety. It is behaved in such a way as to make it clear that those borders will be from at least the jordan river to the sea and it has also behaved in such a way as to suggest that the majority jewish descriptor of the population must be an extreme majority and that it will be established as a state which favors jews as they have now added this stipulation to the loyalty oath in the past few years.
So, no I am not zionist. I think the term has a very ugly history. I know there are people who want to use the term to just mean “supporting israel’s right to exist” but that really has to be parsed from an expression that “israel does not have a right to exist in the way that it has envisioned itself”. And that brings up the second term I want to distinguish from the other 2, Israel.
What is israel? Well israel is a project. All nation-states are projects. And they’ll all eventually fail of course. Do you think the map with all these funny shapes and colors will look like this in a few thousand years? All nations states are projects which attempt to gather a group of people with shared histories, identities, languages, customs, beliefs, and values. And Israel is a project which is attempting to do that in a specific piece of land on earth. It is amorphous and hopefully dynamic and flexible and adaptive in that effort. But as I suggested, all nation-states also envision themselves to be growing towards something, whether that be a more perfect version of itself with universal rights, or more pious religious individuals, or expanded territory, or whatever. And Israel, since its founding has always operated in such a way as to give hints at how it envisions itself, and that certainly seems to be in a way which is closely aligned with the zionist project of jewish domination and safety at the expense of the former inhabitants. Now, this does not mean that Israel always has to be this way. This point of the essay is to show the necessity to separate these 3 ideas from each other in order to evaluate and pursue or discard or reverse them individually. So is there an Israel without zionism which could be defined and emerge as an honorable, beautiful and noble project? I think that is possible, though the branding of the word “israel” is likely so tied to the dark history of zionism at this point as to require a bit of fresh coat of paint. And I would contend that if Israel is going to survive and be morally defensible it has to enter this reimagining of itself very quickly… it can not remain simply to be the product of what the zionists are hoping to achieve, it has to become its own entity, free from that exclusionist, supremacist, and colonialist endeavor.
And then Judaism. This one is tough, and it really shouldn’t be. Judaism is a religion. It’s a religion which believes in one god who created the world and took a special interest in a particular tribe’s trials and tribulations on the planet. It has a god who was downright genocidal and moody and incoherent. It has a holy book which is full of slavery and animal sacrifice and war. And that book portends to be a kind of history account which also speaks about the conquest and relentless efforts to control a strip of land next to the mediterranean sea which went by many names including Israel. I am no fan of judaism. I think religion is false and taking any of its metaphysical or moral claims seriously is a way to miss out on the most interesting and meaningful pursuits of meaning and purpose as a conscious creature.
There are people who really do follow judaism. But… probably like most religions, they are in the minority of people who call themselves “jews”.
Because religious identity is weird. People like their religious identities for all kinds of reasons that are wrapped up in family traditions, and community togetherness, or connections to history, or friendships. The truth is most people probably don’t think about these things very much. They are born into a certain religion and they just kind of shrug and do some of the stuff and try not to think about being in the existential crisis of a chaotic and meaningless universe.
And Jews is a kind of weird one because people of course also use it as an ethnicity. Can I be a Jew who is not jewish? Can I be a jew who does not follow judaism? The fact that those sentences are semi-coherent is a strange fact of the way that Jewishness has played out on Earth. And this fact is probably no more obvious than in Israel itself where you have religious jews who show up at the western wall every day to pray and nod along to their prayers in a country where they are exempt from all kinds of public participation in what I had just previously pointed to as the zionist project.
I think its pretty important at this stage of things to let judaism be a religion for god’s sake (pun intended). Let the religious people have it. Stop trying to twist into some other kind of ridiculous thing. Its a religion, it always has been and it deserves criticism like all of the others… especially when it sets its sights on a particular piece of real estate and justifies all kinds of crimes against humanity. And now, like all religions it has varied interpretations there where plenty of impassioned jewish scholars make the case that zionism (as it has been expressed as a national jewish homeland on the land palestine) is specifically anti-jewish. While of course other rabbis make the opposite case. You can read the book yourself and be my guest to throw yourself in those silly debates if you choose.
But jews of course as an ethnicity, is a term that gets unhelpfully clouded up along with the other terms of Zionism and Israel.
So, my advice is to try to unbraid these 3 words to describe and define them for what they are. Zionism, with a full and clear eyed historical reading, is not a term or idea worth preserving. I agree with Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein that the political parties which were formed by self described zionists were “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.” And I know some good people who like to call themselves “proud zionists” who are irked by that, but I think what they need to do is peel those 3 things apart and then talk about Israel without zionism.
If you can separate Zionism from Israel perhaps you could talk about the Israel project in terms of what it could one day become in a radical redefinition from its pre-foundings and creation myths.
And then Judaism, I would suggest we could all finally feel more free to critique as a set of ideas with metaphysical claims and practices which I would argue would be ripe to challenge by most secular people concerned with advancing universal human rights.
And the last point is one that I think its really kind of tricky. If you’ve been listening to me and generally think of yourself as pro-palestinian you might find this one kind of difficult, or if you’ve hated what ive said as a “zionist” and have been waiting for me to finish to write me some nasty comments, chances are you already did actually and hit enter by this point, well you might find this one interesting. Because i want to talk about muslim deaths.
There is point people make sometimes, its a point someone like sam harris has made, where its pointed out that no one really seems to give a shit if muslims kill each other. And sometimes in huge numbers right. I mean even in the midst of this post october 7th onslaught of Gaza where so many have hit the streets in support of palestine and everyone is up arms about it, they might think that’s what motivating them is really all of the loss of innocent life and the horrible suffering and pain which is being experienced. But in the middle of all of that carnage, there was a bomb that went off back in January that killed 89 people who were attending a memorial service for Hossein Salami. An Islamic State Group Claimed responsibility. But no one marched and the international community did not hit the streets in solidarity. So why is that? Is it that no one cares about Muslim deaths really? Are the global marches and now deeply serious protest actions in solidarity with the palestinians disingenuous?
As my friend yasmine told me, ethnic cleaning and conquest and population moving happens all the time in the middle east and the arab world. It's brutal. But no one really cares about it until the Jews do it
So what’s going on here?
Well, for one, there is a ton of ignorance as to the politics and inner workings of something like a muslim on muslim bombing in Iran carried out by the islamic state. But really the difference is this, people honestly are not that animated by deaths of humans, even in these large numbers, regardless of their ethnicity. But what they are motivated by is acts of injustice. This has been proved time and time again in psychological studies. Injustice really upsets people, really angers people. Much more so than witnessing or hearing about pain and death.
The power dynamics at play in the relationship and the history of the Israel Palestine conflict is what really is igniting such wild passions. Understanding this is certainly why one needs to understand history. And particularly in the west, we are absolutely going through a moment of reckoning with history generally. One can see this dynamic even with the seemingly quiet outrage when blacks might be engaged in violence against one another, but the streets are full when the power dynamics of something like policing, particularly white policing, engages in that violence. That ignites the feelings and passions of injustice which is generated by knowing history.
This is not necessarily a defense of this human habit, it is merely an explanation. It is possible that if history were known and taught in a better and more comprehensive way, some of those scenes of mass death might spark an emotional global injustice response. There are certainly parts of the world where they don’t just see all muslims as a monolith and absolutely experience some of those bombings and attacks in precisely that way. The west, not so much. So, I wouldn’t get too caught up in this point that Sam Harris makes. It really is an obvious misunderstanding of what is animating people’s passions and rush to defense of the palestinians. And what is crucially important to understand there, is that the power dynamics are not merely ethnic here where you have a certain ethnic and religious tribe with extreme firepower killing another weaker browner one, though that certainly is part of the dynamic. But that one party to that exchange is closely allied with the largest western power on earth with the most powerful military and its history is one of collaboration with the largest european colonial power at the time going up against another which was consistently sidelined and disrespected by those entities, many times explicitly on the basis of the ethnicity.
So, the historical dynamics are ripe for this kind of response, it is almost a perfect storm of unfortunate events which has lead to this moment. Including, of course, the precursors of the rivalry over the land being illuminated in both holy books - taking back millennia on the judaism side and centuries on the Muslim one.
And yes, there is of course the moral dimension to death and suffering at play here too. It is not all injustice. When the power dynamics and ability to kill are so lopsided, there is an extra dimension of emotional outrage at its misuse and deliberate vengeful application. All of those arguments I illuminated in the first essay in this series, so I won’t repeat them now.
So, yes. Do I think there is something a bit off about the lack of emotional outrage when it comes to massive amount of muslim deaths that happen at the hands of other muslims? Sure I do. But when people spot such an obvious case of historical injustice as power imbalance with the extra dimensions of ethnic and religious tribal imbalances at play, then you have an obvious recipe for completely justified and understandable outrage and desperate protest. The first thing to understand about that to not be so surprised, is to educate oneself on the obviousness of that historical injustice and of course its long trail of a painful awful cycle of violence which was complicated and shrouded by the most emotionally derailing event of the last century during world war 2.
Okay and with that being said I’m going to try to do that. I’m going to try to propose a speech to end those cycles of violence which will conclude this series.
So the exercise I gave myself at first was to imagine a speech that I would write for an israeli prime minister to deliver on october 8th of 2023. But really that is not the right speech. That one I would have hoped would have been about sorrow and grief and mourning and patience before we make tactical and moral mistakes in response. It’s of course not the speech that was given, but I’m not sure how much one could really do on a day like that. So the speech I want to write is for now, before we go any further with this madness. Not “after the IDF invades rafah” not “after the IDF destroys hamas” not “after the west bank also explodes into anything like gaza, or lebanon, or yemen, or egypt, or syria, or iran for that matter” right now. I’m not going to imagine that Netanyahu himself could deliver this speech, but perhaps someone else in that nation who was ready to take the reins of the project of israel.
Okay… here is what it could potentially sound like… I tried to write it in a way in which it could feasibly be read… I’m you’ll be able to guess which certain phrases and ideas I might say differently in a essay such as the one just heard me read but… I tried my best… and if there are certain phrases or ideas expressed in the speech which you hear and think “oh man israel would never let him say that.” I probably agree. But anyway here we go…
People of Israel I pray for this speech to mark a moment of courage for our nation and I hope that our neighbors, our friends, our detractors, and even our ancestors wherever they may be may hear it was a renewed sense of hope. This land that we call Israel has had many names and many people have named her. It should be no surprise that she has been named so often. This land is beautiful, rich in resources, blessed with good soil, and charmed by its position at the fulcrum of historic trade routes. We Jews call it home, yes. And we can trace our lineage back to people who also tried to make it home. But we are not alone here on this land. And neither were they. Perhaps no one ever will be, and perhaps no one ever should be. Maybe we have been missing this lesson which has been drawing itself in the tortured and bloodied lines in the soil for a century, whispering and imploring us that we have been loving this place to death. Ours to be sure, but far too frequently the deaths of our neighbors.
I want to say that our intentions have been good and that we always hoped to fulfill a promise of equality, dignity, and security for all of those who equally loved this land. But I can not convince others of that intention. I can only, of course, speak for mine. And I think it is fair of those who doubt them. You see, the one piece of that promise of security has plagued our time as custodians of this special place. We Jews carry the scars and tattoos of well known extermination campaigns and this status has awarded us a certain type of opportunity to behave in the world - an opportunity, of course, to learn from those wounds and listen to those demons and grow into the unwilling experts of the dynamics of such evil capacities of man as to never exhibit them. But also an opportunity to give into those fears and construct an understandable shield from critique which we convince ourselves is a newfound posture of strength and resilience. I am not sure we have always wielded this position appropriately.
We Israelis both love and hate and fear our own history here on this land. We’re proud that we are still here despite some of the best efforts of the world's worst movements. We hate this definition too in some ways where we no longer want to be viewed as the helpless defenseless victims of history. But jewish history and Israeli history are different things… and this is what we fear. We fear what lays beyond the myths of israel’s history and I think for too long we have placed that fear behind walls and on other sides of blockades. This must change for us to live the opportunity of our position in history.
Our neighbors have become our enemies… and we have become theirs. We must repair this relationship if either of us are going to survive as worthy and honorable guests of this special place. We have not earned that right. But I believe there is time, for both of us.
Our neighbors have set their sights on our necks at times, quite literally. All of us know this all too well. We can not endure that situation. And I think most of our neighbors understand this. Our efforts since October 7th were an operation to remove this situation. We did not always do this with the appropriate restraint, carefulness, thoughtfulness, or intelligence. And for that, we must take responsibility and apologize. Forgiveness of course will be difficult. But we must all start somewhere. Let these words serve as a monument to a long list of martyrs on every side of this awful fight which might have helped us reach a day of genuine understanding and peace. I understand that the list is far longer on a certain side of this ugly entanglement.
We are stuck together. Doomed to share this land and condemned to the challenge of living up to the task of seeking peace and justice in a way which is worthy of the fruits of the land which we call Israel and others call Palestine. I believe we will only grow into this destiny when we cease to cling to the name of either of them, and instead cling to the ideas which we both share of love and justice.
At this moment we all have to rebuild what we have destroyed. I am speaking about much more than the ruins of Gaza and the destroyed kibbutzim. I am speaking about our shared humanity. We Israelis have been telling ourselves that we know with certainty why our neighbors wish us ill, but we know little about our own complicated founding stories beyond our myths. We can learn from our Palestinian neighbors. And our neighbors are sure that we hate them and wish for them to disappear. I know this thought has been expressed more and more as each awful spin of the blade of violence cuts deeper. But I trust in my fellow Israelis that we do not really want this. We can not if we do not wish to be haunted by the ghosts of what was once called Gaza. And our neighbors can learn from us about our pain and confusion as we exit a tumultuous and terrible century.
I know that this vision will take time. We must establish safety in a moment of deep anger and pain and mistrust. But we must not veer from the path, even if that security is not complete. There will be those within Israel who fear my words are a suicide note which is inviting the destruction of the Jewish people in this land. I have nothing to offer you except courage and peace and a reminder that we two people have done this before. This violence is not the norm, even though we are so bathed in it as to imagine nothing else. And one day soon this violence will be cast in memory as a painful chapter in which we all almost lost our precious home, jews and Arabs and all those who love her together. Let us keep her tight and start to bring down the walls.