An Endless Cycle of Tragedy: Israel, Palestine, and the Precipice of Something Larger

What I'm watching with the attacks in Israel

I woke yesterday morning in a hotel in Austin, Texas. I’ve been here since Thursday for a series of meetings regarding attacks on democracy and possibilities for building a better future. Saturday morning was my 42nd birthday. I opened my eyes, turned on the television, and took in the news of Hamas’s deadly attack in Israel.

All morning, while drinking my coffee and getting ready, I thought about June 29th, 1914. News of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was met differently in the disparate parts of the world. Some recognized its significance. Others probably passed over the coverage in their papers. History is strange like this.

The attacks are most definitely historic for a number of reasons. The question now is whether Israel will become a flashpoint for something larger and whether the shockwaves will turn into a gravity that pulls the rest of the world into its nexus. The story is already growing and twisting by the minute and, as I’ll get to in just a second, the pieces are possibly in place for a very strange confluence of events.

And, as is necessary, we must also pause from geopolitical forecasting and analysis to remember the very real human toll of these things. After all, innocent people have died, are suffering, and will suffer. States and groups like Israel and Hamas are easily used names and umbrellas, but underneath all of the competing banners are living, breathing people. And nobody, Israeli or Palestinian, should suffer like this. It is is abysmal shame that this cycle has continued and worsened. That we have allowed this situation to get to this point. That we are living in a world that was chosen rather than constructed with their fates in mind.

So now, let us get to the matters at hand.

Cooler Heads, etc etc

In researching my next book, I’ve spent a good deal of time studying collective and societal traumas. Obviously September 11th comes raging to the front of the mind and you would be hard pressed not to at least consider our response to that day as a precursor or at least catalyst to the awful circumstances we find ourselves in now. Time and time again nations that are struck by terrorism or acts of violence move quickly to respond with escalating violence. On one hand, it’s understandable. Theoretically defense is built on providing counterattacks as a deterrent to future attacks and situations like this demand swift retributive violence.

Already Israel has responded and will continue. “The enemy will pay an unprecedented price,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised as he declared war on Hamas. Nevermind, of course, that Netanyahu has embraced authoritarianism in his own right, that he has presided over a season of violence that has been unprecedented in its own right, and that, despite assurances that his extremism was necessary to protect Israel from its enemies, this attack still transpired on his watch.

Tragedies such as this one, and certainly 9/11, should be met with appropriate grieving and introspection. Quick and escalating violence originates from weakness and insecurity, and like George W. Bush before him, Netanyahu’s violence will largely be meted out as both a response and an aggressive changing of the subject. The United States, if it were to have avoided a world campaign that killed over 4 million people and largely ushered in our era of rising authoritarianism, would have been much better served if we were to have considered the actual origins of the attack and the failures of our leaders in preventing it before actually acting.

Netanyahu is incapable of this because his entire corrupt regime is based on reactionary violence and fearmongering that can, much like what has happened with Bush, Donald Trump, and a whole host of incompetent and destructive leaders, cover up failures and push agendas divorced from the situation at hand.

In a better world, none of this would have happened. The Palestinians would have justice. The Israeli people would have safety and just leaders. We would see the larger cycle and choose to stop the self-destruction and self-immolation.

Watching the discourse and coverage, I already feel echoes of incidents of the past. Our culture in the United States, and certainly around the world, is primed for escalatory violence and an embrace of inherent authoritarian drives. It isn’t difficult to see how this grows and worsens.

Speaking of the United States

When it comes to foreign affairs, Americans tend to flatten situations and issues and often coalesce into a lazy consensus. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sticks out, to an extent, because the GOP and its base have come to politically and culturally identify with Vladimir Putin, but for the most part citizens tend to embrace whatever foreign narrative is giftwrapped for them by our media and politicians. With the Israeli situation, this could have a whole host of consequences.

President Joe Biden and certainly both parties will support Israel in the wake of this tragedy, though already we are seeing Republicans attempt to lay the blame at Biden’s feet. The argument will likely revolve around variations of this narrative, but also see conflict over whether Democrats are “supporting Israel hard enough,” which will probably lead to an escalation within our domestic politics. The Democratic Party has, for decades, been drug to the right in times of crisis and war and sometimes even jumps ahead in almost an unconscious desire to get ahead of labels and criticisms. What Israel does will largely set the tone and considering Netanyahu’s troubling record, authoritarian impulses, and a whole host of other factors we’ll get to in a moment, that could get very weird very fast.

What I’m curious about is whether this manifests into a larger “crusader” mission that mirrors the War on Terror call that rose from the ruins of 9/11. Already we’re hearing of Iran’s support of Hamas in this attack, and you can get on Republicans of both neoconservative persuasions and the New Right, with its weaponized Islamaphobia, pushing the rhetoric to disturbing places. There likely will be little in the way of disagreement or argument and our politics and media, which react to the Right Wing response in these types of situations, will probably follow wherever these people wish to go.

The Chessboard

I hate to talk about this, but this situation is a nearly perfect and vexxing container for a lot of the world’s tensions to flow into. I have documented for years now how the international authoritarian movement has been creating a coalition of countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and Right Wing groups wrestling for control within Western Democracies, including the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere, have been attempting to topple the current global world order and replace it with a neo-feudal, illiberalism that is, to put it mildly, a nightmare.

Netanyahu has trafficked with these circles and his attacks on the institutions in Israel borrow from their tactics. The strange knottedness between the international authoritarian movement, in how it is seemingly contradictory in its alliances and in its embrace of several opposed nationalisms, creates an odd and chaotic field from which to forecast exactly what will happen. On one hand, white supremacy and authoritarian energies, fueled and in pursuit of rampant corruption and oppression, absolutely walk hand-in-hand, leaving an odd discomfort over exactly where that outfit lands in this battle. Who do you support? Or rather, what do you want to win?

Like a Syria, where a lot of these tensions have come to a slow, grueling, bloody slow boil, all flashpoints play a role as proxy battles. But this does have potential to get messy in a way that the Baltics served prior to World War I in which the old world order was pregnant with larger tensions that would erupt in a way that even the actors affected were largely left confused and shaken. Or, quietly, it could shift the battle between existing liberalism, emerging authortiarianism, and whatever components of the rising Left are busy being born in ways we couldn’t even hope to predict now. It could lead to a slide that carries the rest of us into something that is almost impossible to name.

This is the feeling of history not only not being at an end, but happening in fast forward. There is absolutely no way whatsoever that this doesn’t shift our present moment in some way, shape, or form. It is inevitable that, whatever happens with this world going forward, whether we win this battle and make a better future, or if we find ourselves digging out from our own brand of rubble, we will look at this moment and see that it played a significant role in getting to that moment in time.

Again, I want to stress something. Analysis is important. It prepares us. It gives us both a world that might happen and could not happen. It allows us to imagine a future we would like to reach and then plot the course. But it also can distract us from an incredibly important truth: there are people here. Israelis. Palestinians. People going about their days, just trying to live, just trying to get by. Many of them will die. Many of them will have their electricity, their water, their services cut off. They will suffer unbelievable traumas. Their lives, if they last beyond this, will be irrevocably changed. We owe it to them to remember they exist, but also to try and make that better world. So that we may live in it, but that they might live in it as well.

You’ll hear the word Israel, the word Hamas, and a whole lot of other proper nouns in the next few days and weeks. When you do, pause, and remember those people behind those names. Geopolitics can grow very large and very abstract. We have to will ourselves beyond that easy perception. We owe that to them.