No Exit from the Israel-Palestine Doom Loop?

Fresh polling suggests that the student protest movement is much smaller than portrayed, and that Israeli Jews are also moderating, but hyper-polarization now has its own self-reinforcing logic.

May 14, 2024

I’m keeping this week’s newsletter shorter than usual in order to urge you instead to watch this recording—or at least the first 15 minutes—of Sunday’s Joint Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony, which was organized by Combatants for Peace and the Families Forum. The annual event, which this year was kept small and mostly virtual for security reasons, and because Palestinian participants in the West Bank couldn’t travel to Tel Aviv, features heart-wrenching speeches by Palestinians and Israelis who have been directly hurt by the conflict who have come together in common purpose. “No more revenge, no more killing,” is the message. It has English, Hebrew and Arabic subtitles, as needed.

It’s high time we listened more to people closest to the conflict, especially those dedicated to co-existence, instead of the conflict entrepreneurs whipping up anger and polarization here. The opening statement, from a Palestinian living in Jericho who has lost 60 family members in Gaza since October 7, is quite moving, as is the one that follows from an Israeli woman who lost her son that day.

Unfortunately, the Israel-Palestine conflict in America has become a version of what my friend, the political scientist Lee Drutman, writing in a different context, has called the “two-party doom loop.” He coined that phrase to describe the current American political dynamic, where Republicans and Democrats have organized themselves into two warring camps driven by their most passionate adherents, and where each side’s extremes generates fuel for the other side, intensifying the conflict. No one listens in good faith to the other side, no one searches for consensus, people at the poles reap rewards while people in the middle get punished.

In the Israel-Palestine version of the doom loop, the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC announcing it will spend $100 million to take out Squad members helps Squad members raise money in response, and the pro-Palestine statements made by Squad members helps AIPAC raise more money. An anti-Zionist activist who posts a spreadsheet list of Zionist authors to boycott and anti-Zionist authors to support generates more evidence for the pro-Israel side of "rising antisemitism" as much as it adds energy to the boycott crowd. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Meanwhile, as the war grinds on because neither the leader of Israel nor the leader of Hamas wants it to stop, Dahlia Scheindlin, one of Israel’s top pollsters, reports an interesting trend (gift link). While the Israeli Jewish electorate is still tilted substantially towards the right, as it has been since the second intifada in the early 2000s undermined the pro-peace left, she sees some signs that changing. After trending as low as just 9% of the public this past January, now 18% say they identify as left-wing. She adds these notes: “nothing says ‘stop the fighting’ like 47 percent of all Israelis (Jews and Arabs) who want a complete end to the war in return for a full hostage release, in a survey by Kan News last week. An absolute majority of 52 percent of all Israelis, according to a Channel 13 survey, don't believe that a major Rafah operation can bring total victory; nearly two-thirds of Israelis don't believe Netanyahu when he says the country was just a step away from that victory, in the Kan poll. The change over time is extraordinary. In a survey commissioned by the Jewish People Policy Institute, conducted by the Madad, the portion of Israeli Jews who were certain of victory declined from 74 percent in October to just 38 percent today.”

Food for Thought

--Last week, I wrote about how all sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict here in the United States were exaggerating the scale and importance of the wave of campus protests that broke out in mid-April, because whether they are leftist anti-imperialists who imagine that an “uprising” is underway, rightwingers whose main interest is bashing elite universities, or professional hate-fighters like the ADL, magnifying the protests is good for business.

Now comes some new evidence that ought to take some more energy out of the “campuses on fire” panic. A new poll by Generation Lab of 1250 college students taken May 3-6 found that just a small sliver, eight percent, have participated in either side of the protests (7% in a protest of Israel’s action in Gaza, 1% in a pro-Israel protest). Tellingly, students ranked the conflict in the Middle East as the least important issue facing them, compared to issues like healthcare reform, education funding, economic opportunity, racial justice, climate change, gun safety, immigration and national security (they were given the option to choose up to three out of a list of ten).

This is not to say the Gaza solidarity encampments are fundamentally unpopular—45% of students said they supported them, compared to 24% opposed and 30% neutral. Eighty-three percent of students also said Israel has the right to exist. (And most amusing to me, when asked to identify the river and the sea in the now ubiquitous chant, 70% correctly said the Jordan River and 65% got the Mediterranean Sea.)

—Mark Rudd, one of the leaders of the Columbia University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, who got kicked out of school in 1968 for leading protests there and later participated in the violent Weather Underground, turning himself in to police in 1977, now speaks differently about campus radicalism. Interviewed recently by Ha’aretz’s Judy Maltz (gift link), he is both sympathetic and critical.

"The war in Vietnam and the racism in this country drove a lot of people crazy," he told her. "I was driven crazy by it, and I think the kids right now are being driven crazy by Gaza because they understand that it's our bombs that are doing it." He adds, “I fell for all that stuff. I fell for Black Power. I fell for 'by any means necessary.' I wanted to express my moral outrage, and I went overboard," he reflects. "Eventually, I went way overboard with the whole Weatherman craziness."

Rudd thinks Israel’s war in Gaza is a “mass murder” but suggests today’s student radicals are showing no compassion for Israelis. "I think the only way possible for 7 million Jews in Israel to live with 7 million Palestinians is if they're not scared and if they understand that their humanity will be respected. But while the students understand that nonviolence is a useful tactic, they don't really believe in nonviolence." So while he doesn’t seem them as supporting Hamas directly, he worries they are objectively hurting the Palestinian cause with one-sided rhetoric. "They're supporters of their own stupid ideas. They believe that Hamas is the oppressed, that the oppressed have the right to resist, and that those who are safe – for the most part white kids like themselves – have no right to tell the oppressed what to do. Trust me," he says, "I lived this, and friends of mine died because of this stupidity. They are painting themselves into a corner, just like I did."

He also is critical of older Jewish radicals in groups like the anti-Zionist Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which he used to belong to in Albuquerque, where he has lived for years. He explains, "The reason I'm not that active anymore is that I can't stand a lot of my fellow Jews. You know, like the story about the synagogue you wouldn't be found dead in? There are a lot of people in JVP who are traumatized by Israel, but it seems to me that they don't have any perspective. Like if I tell them that New Mexico is also a settler-colonial state, and the only difference between New Mexico and Israel is 100 years, they don't see the significance of that. In fact, many of my comrades in JVP are so traumatized by Israel that they think it's uniquely evil. But it's not. This is the world we live in and, unfortunately, mass murder, colonialism and genocide are extraordinarily common."

—Speaking of trying to give today’s campus protestors helpful advice, take a moment to listen to anti-Zionist historian Norman Finkelstein addressing student activists at the Columbia University encampment a few weeks ago. Mid-speech, he gently begs them to stop using the divisive slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” urging them to substitute the word “Palestinians” for Palestine, to reduce the chance the phrase will be maliciously interpreted to discredit their cause and to increase their chance of reaching more people. Moments after he finishes speaking, a young woman takes the mic and jumps right into the chant: “From the river to the sea…” she intones with a bit of a question at the end. The crowd repeats her words. And then, with glee, she answers, “Palestine will be free.” In other words, f--- you, professor.

One thing you can do

I’m passing along an urgent request from Daniela Tolchinsky, a professor of political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who is part of an network that has been raising money to help Palestinians in Gaza escape to Egypt. She writes:

I'm writing to you with a very urgent ask, which is to donate to help my friend Mohammed evacuate from Gaza with his family. You may have seen today that Israel is starting its ground invasion in Rafah, the southernmost part of the Gaza strip. This is where most Palestinian civilians are sheltering in tents with limited access to food and clean water. Now those sent to makeshift refugee camps - including my friend Muhammend's family - will be forced to flee again.
My dear friend Muhammed's family has moved in with two other families in a one bedroom apartment after evacuating Rafah. They are desperate to leave Gaza and get to safety in Egypt (and eventually move to Turkey, where Muhammed's brother Hassan lives). The only way to leave Gaza is to work with an Egyptian company called YaHala that facilitates evacuations in coordination with Egyptian and Israeli security. Unfortunately, this is a very expensive process. The border may close at any moment, and Muhammed's family, including his young siblings, are at risk of dying of malnourishment and disease.
Please, if you feel moved to do so and are able to, donate here to the GoFundMe to get Mohammed's family out. This money pays for them to register to leave Gaza and supports them for their first few weeks when they reach Egypt. These are kind, innocent people, and they deserve a better life. Mohammed was a teacher whose school was destroyed in an air strike earlier in the war, and many of his students were sheltering there and were tragically killed. This is just one of many tragedies this family has faced in recent months.
I have now worked on a few similar campaigns, and can guarantee that no money from this fundraiser will go into Gaza, and there is no risk of money falling into the wrong hands.

Here’s a link to five of the most urgent campaigns the Gaza Evacuation Solidarity Project is running right now if you're looking to do more.

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