Welcome to the Missile East, Where Alliances Matter More Than Border Fences

And while we wait at the brink of a wider regional war, a new coalition of US liberal and progressive groups shows that a saner approach to the conflict is possible.

For decades, there have been two overlapping camps in Israel pushing the argument that the Jewish state needed to hold onto the territories it occupied in the 1967 Six Day War: security hawks and religious fundamentalists. The security hawks were former generals like Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon, who as top ministers in the Labor-led governments of the late 1960s and early 1970s greenlighted the first Jewish settlements across the so-called Green Line (the 1949 armistice borders) in places like the Jordan river valley. For them, building settlements was partly a continuation of Israel’s pioneering ethos of “creating facts on the ground” but with the intention of adding “strategic depth” to its borders, particularly given how narrow the country was at its waist. Between the Israeli coastal city of Netanya and the Palestinian city of Tulkarem, pre-1967 Israel was just 12 miles wide.

The other camp, which makes up the heart of the settlement movement, were (and are) Jews motivated by their connection to Biblical Israel and convinced that, with the “miraculous victory” of the Six Day War, God had sent them a message, that He wanted them to return to those lands. While it is true that some of the roughly 750,000 Jewish settlers living across the Green Line in the West Bank and annexed East Jerusalem are secular Israelis taking advantage of government subsidized homes and highways, most are religious. The most dangerous are those who formed a “Jewish underground” in the early 1980s car-bombing and maiming Palestinian mayors, who planned to blow up the Al-Aqsa mosque, and who today carry out pogroms—often with Israeli military support—against Palestinian villages, with impunity. What they are doing right now risks setting off an explosive response from West Bankers.

Many of Israel’s security hawks, particularly those with the greatest experience dealing with Palestinian terrorism and the two intifadas, have come out as doves in recent years. As the 2012 film The Gatekeepers shows, six former heads of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, who all have blood on their hands, say that the only solution to the conflict is a political compromise, the two-state solution. And they are not alone. As Ami Ayalon, one of those former Shin Bet heads, says in his recent memoir Friendly Fire, “I could have paraded a hundred former Mossad and Shabak directors, retired, IDF generals, and other security experts in front of the press, all saying the same thing. If we continue to dish out humiliation and despair, the popularity of Hamas will grow. And if we manage to push Hamas from power, we’ll get al-Qaeda. And after al-Qaeda, ISIS, and after ISIS, God only knows.”

Why am I recounting this capsule history? Because after Iran’s attack on Israel this past weekend, it is clear—if it wasn’t already given everything that has happened in the last six months—that the old security paradigm for Israel, the one that argued for keeping land for “strategic depth,” is completely out-of-date. The Middle East is no longer a place where old-fashioned borders or high fences guarantee peace and quiet if it ever was. It is now the Missile East. In an age where multiple actors can fire long- and medium-range missiles as well as drones hundreds of miles, what clearly matters more are alliances based on shared interests and commitments than scraps of land, as well as peace agreements that aim to settle long-standing disputes with hard compromises.

Did you know, for example, that since the 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, the two countries have cooperated in clearing out most of the minefields along their shared border? (I only learned about this recently, when a friend shared a story about some kibbutz kids he knew who mistakenly wandered across the border in the south not long ago.) Jordan and Israel aren’t completely aligned—Jordan’s foreign minister has been very critical of the war on Gaza, and its government has made clear it would strongly oppose any formal annexation of more of the West Bank. But when it comes to regional cooperation against Iran or other radical Islamic groups, the two nations’ militaries are close partners.

This is why a tweet this Sunday from Peace Now in Israel, depicting King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin sharing a celebratory smoke at the White House after their peace deal, is so on point.

Right now, a lot of commentators in Israel and abroad are arguing that the de facto alliance that emerged to shoot down Iran’s missile attack shows that such a partnership could be expanded. But there’s one problem—pragmatic security hawks are not running Israel. Bibi Netanyahu, who clearly sees war as his only path to staying in power, and who has long been itching for an all-out war with Iran, is. And while his government desperately needs US support, it is also led by messianic expansionists whose greatest fear is the alliance of moderate Arab states offering Israel a regional peace deal if it agrees to Palestinian statehood. Because they want to keep the land more than anything else. Itamir Ben-Gvir, the far-right minister whose party’s 14 seats in the Knesset gives him tremendous leverage over Netanyahu, has demanded that Israel “go berserk” against Iran in the wake of last weekend’s missile strike.

While I was in Israel last month, I heard a fascinating story from Dr. Yehuda Melamed, who is a good friend of one of my cousins. He told me that back in the late 1990s, he was invited by his close friend Ami Ayalon to spend a day with him as he went about his duties running the Shin Bet. So early one morning Ayalon picked him up and they drove Kiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement next to Hebron. “We got out of the car and walked, unrecognized, through a park, until we got to the gravesite of Baruch Goldstein,” Melamed told me. Goldstein was an American Jewish immigrant and settler who opened fire on 800 Palestinian Muslims during Ramadan prayers on February 25, 1994, killing 29 and wounding another 125, before he was beaten to death by survivors. His gravesite now sits next in the obscenely named “Meir Kahane Memorial Park” and it has become a pilgrimage site for extremist Jewish settler. Melamed told me that he and Ayalon watched quietly as a young Jewish woman walked over to the grave with her young children on their way to school and then offered prayers to Goldstein’s memory. “These people are the gravest threat to Israel’s future,” Ayalon said to Melamed.

Itamir Ben-Gvir’s first date with his future wife Ayala was at this very place. In 2004, she told the Ynet newsite, “We wanted to meet in a special place, and what could be more special than the Meir Kahane Park in Kiryat Arba, next to the grave of Baruch Goldstein?”

The Stirring of a Peace Movement Here?

Before this weekend’s kinetic events, I thought the most important and least-remarked upon development of the past few days, in terms of the politics of Israel/Palestine in the United States, was a private letter sent to President Biden Thursday night by the leaders of the heart of the liberal-progressive ecosystem: 350.org, Center for American Progress, Center for International Policy, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Indivisible, the National Education Association, Next Gen America, MoveOn, the SEIU, Ultraviolet, Win Without War and the Working Families Party. Collectively these groups have tens of millions of members and probably spend more than a billion dollars a year on political organizing.

The New York Times’ Reid Epstein ran a short piece reporting on the letter, highlighting it for its call on Biden to halt military aid to Israel until it lifts restrictions on humanitarian aid to Gaza and pointing out that the coalition of signers weren’t just progressive outfits but some of the mainstays of the whole Democratic party. (I think the Times vastly downplayed the importance of this coalition’s letter, especially when you contrast Epstein’s little piece with the lengthy front-page story it published the same day about the pro-Palestine left in America, which has a lot of energy but far less political heft.) Epstein didn’t publish the coalition’s whole letter, however. Prem Thakker, a reporter with The Intercept, got ahold of a copy; I’ve confirmed that it is accurate.

Three things stand out for me about its contents. First, that with the exception of the Friends Committee and the Center for International Policy, none of these organizations are focused on US foreign policy. They don’t have to take a position on Gaza and US aid to Israel. While some of them have already waded into the debate, others, like Next Gen America and the NEA* have been reticent to weigh in. That all of them are is both a sign of how much these liberal and progressive groups are dealing with internal pressure to speak out, along with their leaders’ own sense that they must. The tectonic shift in US-Israel relations I wrote about three weeks ago is well underway.

[*Correction—in the email version of this post I mistakenly wrote AFT, which itself recently sponsored an event with Standing Together]

Second is what they don’t say. This letter doesn’t use any of the trigger words promoted either the pro-Palestine side or pro-Israel side of the binary. There’s no mention of apartheid, settler colonialism, genocide, or terrorism. There’s no stomping on frayed nerves or performance activism or neo-Marxist academic peacocking on display here.

And third is the artful wordsmithing that, at least to this reader, shows a maturity about the political reality in Israel/Palestine that is often missing in the many open letters and slogans brandished about the conflict over the last six months. Consider this phrase: “The US will not stand by while the war kills innocent Palestinians and continues to drive escalation throughout the region.” [Emphasis added by me.] It is not accidental that this doesn’t read “while Israel kills innocent Palestinians.” War is a violent process with (at least) two sides, after all, and Hamas’ defiant refusal to accept a ceasefire and insistence on continuing to fire rockets into Israel are part of the dynamic that keeps that process going. This statement recognizes that.

There’s one other piece of wordsmithing that impressed me. The letter doesn’t just argue that Biden should force Netanyahu to change course by suspending military aid until he does. It adds, “Doing so will not only ensure we can get more aid to people in Gaza who desperately need it, but will buttress the calls of over 100,000 Israelis in the streets this week demanding a cease-fire that will restore the hostages to their families and give people in Gaza a reprieve from this horrific war.” That’s a recognition that there’s a difference between the Israeli people and their current government, and that smart interventions by Americans here can work in alliance with political efforts for change there.

I have no real inside information on how this all came about, but I think two groups both deserve most of the credit for the result. One is Win Without War, which I noted last winter was already working behind the scenes to depolarize the debate and which has done a lot to emphasize the difference between the governments and peoples in the region. The other is Standing Together, whose Israeli and Palestinian leaders have made several recent trips through the US, bringing a sophisticated message and, I suspect, convincing many American progressive leaders that there are Israelis worth standing with.

If you recall my first post on this whole nightmare, back on October 10^th, one of my complaints about the anti-Zionist left’s rush to condemn Israel for “all the violence” of the last 75 years as well as the pro-Israel right’s mindless rush to “stand with Israel” was their failure to see or seek any common cause with the peace forces in Israel itself. Now, after months where the debate here in the US has been deliberately and destructively polarized around two pro-violence camps, the #FreePalestine crowd and the #IStandWithIsrael crowd, we are finally seeing the emergence of a real de-escalation-for-peace coalition. Let’s hope it can hang together through the challenges of the coming weeks and grow.

—Related: For contrast, this article by Allison Tombros Korman on why she resigned from her “dream job” at the DC Abortion Fund is another depressing example of how the pro-Palestine left is disrupting other progressive causes.

Also Worth Noting

—Speaking of neo-Marxist academic peacocking, Jodi Dean’s new piece on the leftist Verso Books site shows that the paraglider left is alive and kicking. She starts off with, “The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating.” Later in the piece she declares, “The struggle for Palestinian liberation today is led by the Islamic Resistance Movement — Hamas. Hamas is supported by the entirety of the organized Palestinian left. One might have expected that the left in the imperial core would follow the leadership of the Palestinian left in supporting Hamas. More often than not, though, left intellectuals echo the condemnations that imperialist states make the condition for speaking about Palestine. In so doing, they take a side against the Palestinian revolution, giving a progressive face to the repression of the Palestinian political project, and betraying the anti-imperialist aspirations of a previous generation.” Pardon me, I just threw up in my mouth. And not just a little bit.

On Facebook, Brooklyn College professor Corey Robin has decided to defend Dean, who has been suspended from her teaching post at Hobart and William Smith Colleges for writing this article. I agree with him that this is a violation of academic freedom and that teachers do need to be able to present the use of violence by oppressed peoples as a topic of study, even if it makes students uncomfortable. But Robin goes much further, seemingly agreeing with Dean about the “legitimacy of Hamas as a representative of the oppressed.” This is madness, and another sign that much of the “organized Palestinian left” has lost their minds.

—Speaking of people who have also lost their minds, the Anti-Defamation League’s new Campus Antisemitism Report Card on 85 top American colleges may represent a new low for the storied and controversial civil rights organization. Many Jewish leaders on campuses given failing grades by the ADL are pushing back publicly. Here, for example, is a snippet from an email sent out by Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, the executive director of Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life: “This report gives Princeton University an F score, with which I vehemently disagree. By assigning a failing grade to Princeton, the ADL report card is misleading with respect to the state of antisemitism on our campus. In truth, over the past two years of my deep engagement in Jewish life and leadership on Princeton’s campus, I can say very clearly that Princeton is a great place to be Jewish.” Jewish student leaders affiliated with J Street U also issued a statement condemning the report for being “overly simplistic” and “[adding] to division.” They also criticized the ADL for suggesting that human rights advocacy and protests of the Israeli government on campus were inherently antisemitic, stating, “In a moment of extreme division and hardship for Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Muslim and Arab students, conflating fair criticism of Israeli policies with acts of antisemitism appears designed to chill free speech and protect the interests of the Israeli government, not students.” Nice going, ADL.

—This is not to say all is copacetic on campus. This Politico interview with John Perez, a member of the Board of Regents for the University of California, is hair-raising. Two snippets:

“We’re not seeing on college campuses, attacks and questioning every student of Russian heritage because we take issue with the Putin administration, and what they’ve done in Ukraine and other places around the world. We’re not seeing where we’re attacking every Muslim student, because we take issue with what Hamas did on Oct. 7. One can debate the space between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. But one would have to have serious blinders not to recognize that what’s happening on college campuses, UCs included, is a series of activities that are targeting Jewish students because of their identities, making them feel unsafe and apart from the rest of the community in a way that really should have no place in our society and no place on our college campuses.”

And this:

“When somebody on a college campus targets a Muslim student for identity, targets a Muslim woman for wearing traditional garb, there is offense taken and a pushback. The same isn’t expressing itself when we’re seeing antisemitic acts. At the last Regents meeting, protesters erected an effigy, in violation of policy, of a bloody pig holding a cage, bags of money and [it] said “UC regents time is running out.” Protesters came and took over the Regents meeting and the room was cleared. I think three of us stayed in the room to listen. Nobody took the opportunity to speak to the three of us. It was just chants. And the chants weren’t about a policy, the chants were about Jews. They were about Jews. It wasn’t about this university policy or that university policy, it wasn’t even that the regents need to divest. It was about Jews. It was antisemitic. [What were the chants?] ‘We’ve got to go after these Jews.’ ‘We got to stop the Jewish lobby.’ It was very clear.”

—With the House Committee on Education and the Workforce holding another hearing about antisemitism on campus tomorrow, focused on Columbia University, get ready for another round of polarizing combat over the issue. This letter from 23 Jewish faculty at Columbia is a useful attempt to pre-empt some of the fireworks.

—Finally, if you aren’t already listening to Amira Mohammed and Ibrahim Abu Ahmad’s podcast “Upapologetic,” which offers what these two Palestinian Israelis call their “third narrative” about the conflict, this article (gift link) by Alison Kaplan Sommer about them in Haaretz should convince you. Every episode I’ve heard has been a refreshingly positive exploration of the path to co-existence.