Lost in Language

I try to resist the temptation to shut down. It happened just recently at a dinner with friends where, inevitably, we started to talk about Israel. I said all the things that I usually say about the problematics of excessive force, about the long-term peril of reputational damage, about the optics of Netanyahu leading Trump by the nose. My friend nodded and said that I was being too harsh, and that the problem was really on the other side. Israel had tried its best for decades, but Palestinians had no interest in peace. Who would you talk to propose a solution?

I am not a scholar of Mideast diplomacy and the nuances and fault lines in Palestinian opinion. But the fact that there are Israeli Palestinians—hundreds of thousands living all over the country—gives the lie to the idea that coexistence is impossible. If it were truly impossible, then it would not be happening and there would be no Palestinian representatives in the Knesset. No one would claim that this is an easy relationship, but it represents at least the whisper of a hope.

I would concede that peace is not around the corner. Apart from the Palestinians I have just described, there are a handful of organization who have opened themselves to dialogue, even in the fraught period after October 7. If you track these things carefully, you’ll see half a dozen initiatives. In a period marked by the decline of the Israeli left, that probably matches the number of organizations in Israel. There used to be a fairly robust peace camp, but nobody’s much in the mood for it now. My friend was right about both sides of the equation. Rabin is dead, and few have followed him. The politicians who will oppose Netanyahu in the upcoming elections have piled on to say that he is a tool of Donald Trump. If they are calling for anything, it is for still more force.

But even if the Messiah does not arrive soon, the readiness of Palestinians is not the issue for me. It’s the moral commitments of the Jewish people in America, in Israel, all over the world. We have lost ourselves in the semantics of the moment, in convoluted arguments about words like “genocide.” Whether the Netanyahu government is guilty or not, it must still account for tens of thousands of dead civilians, including thousands of Palestinian children. Same for the displacement of a million Lebanese and the destruction of their homes on the northern border of Israel. It seems clear that they will never be permitted to return. Along with many of you, I have seen the footage from the West Bank, and the situation continues to devolve into savagery. You cannot beat civilians into submission and expect to achieve any version of peace.

None of this is good for the soul of the Jewish people. No amount of wrangling about terminology and rhetoric will conceal the raw facts of “disproportionate” violence. The events of October 7 justified retaliation against Gaza, but there are valid alternatives to what continues to happen. Israel is capable of finding a way. Too much hangs in the balance to ignore the alternatives.