Ending the Conflict in Israel Will Require Dealing With the Sub-Rational Motives On Both Sides

Jewish fear of exile and Palestinian rage over dishonor is preventing the two from making a security-for-statehood deal

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Dear Readers:

We live in polarized times in which each party sees its side as entirely right and good—and the other as entirely wrong and bad. And as the polarization doom loop spirals downward, depicting one’s own side as the victim and the other as the victimizer, deserving of demonization and dehumanization, becomes not only acceptable but required to remain in good standing with one’s tribe. In-group moderates, in the parlance of social science, who want to call out their own side’s excesses—let alone express a willingness to reach out to the other—either get ejected or voluntarily leave, often turning against their “people.” It is rare to find individuals who can openly criticize their own side while remaining its advocate and at the same time approach the other with understanding and empathy. And it is rarer still to find individuals who can perform such a tough balancing act on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yet these are the voices needed most to pull back from the road to mutually assured destruction that these two bitter enemies are on. And we are fortunate to have found one on each side of this tragic war—Rabbi Michael G. Holzman, the spiritual leader of the Northern Virginia Hebrew Congregation and the founder of the Rebuilding Democracy Project, on the Jewish side, and Professor Khaled Al-Kassimi, professor at the American University of Emirates in Dubai, on the Palestinian one.

Each pulls no punches in taking the other side to task for its transgressions and cruelty—but also confronts his own side with bitter truths. They avoid easy platitudes and cliches about inter-faith harmony and yet hold out hope for an end to this horrendous conflict and a better future.

Today, we present to you Rabbi Holzman who unpacks the “sub-rational” urges that are powering each side and coming in the way of what everyone knows at some level is the only rational course, namely, that “two groups of people who deeply distrust each other will need to be neighbors.”

Next week, we’ll publish Prof. Al-Kassimi’s meditation.

Incidentally, we did not plan these as companion pieces. Prof. Al-Kassimi’s essay landed in our inbox as we were working on Rabbi Holzman’s wonderful submission. That shows that The UnPopulist, in a few short years, has established itself as the go-to place for sober and frank conversations about the most difficult issues of our day. That is gratifying.

Thank you for that and read on.

Shikha Dalmia,
Editor-in-Chief

One thing critics of Israel misunderstand when they accuse it of colonialism is the Jewish concept of exile. The desire to return—to the land, to the Temple, to the Davidic kingdom, to the Garden of Eden—is a theological through-line that encapsulates pragmatic needs like escaping antisemitism, achieving physical security, and regaining political agency. Return from exile is both pragmatic and symbolic, and the violent, Jew-hating 20th century gave Jews only one way to achieve it: national statehood.

One thing critics of Palestinians misunderstand when they accuse them of terrorism is the Islamic concept of dishonor. Speaking as a student of the conflict, though not a Muslim insider, the obligation to avenge family dishonor, especially when family clans might include tens of thousands, is a central form of personal integrity. The dishonor wound is deep, carved by Ottoman corruption, British repression, the failed Palestinian Revolt of 1936-39, Arab military embarrassment during the Nakba, and the Jewish incursion into the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. The enablement of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)—the only UN agency in the world set up to help a specific national group—simply perpetuates the feeling of ignominy. Like exile for the Jews, dishonor encapsulates and transcends real suffering—loss of land, restricted movement, indignities and checkpoints, stolen groundwater, retained taxes, denied permits for housing expansion, arrests on charges of terror, and military losses. And as this feeling escalates, violence and martyrdom become the only escape.

I refer to these concepts on each side because they are sub-rational, powerful forces lurking beneath the surface of the conflict and defy a resolution. Those who justify mass rapes, brutal killings, and the abductions of Oct. 7, or the Israeli Defense Forces’ enormous civilian destruction while turning a blind eye to humanitarian relief, are basically relying on the sub-rational to claim justice and rationalize away reasonable morality. For Jews, ending exile means attacking Hamas without limit. For Palestinians, regaining honor means excusing atrocities.

Liberalism Is the Only Way

The greatest tragedy of this entire conflict is that everyone knows the only rational outcome: two groups of people who deeply distrust each other will need to be neighbors. Intelligent advocates can argue over the shape of that neighborhood—one structured with state borders, or one with the polite regulations of a Home Owners Association—but at the end of the day, all will have to follow the rules. For most of the modern world, liberalism—with its use of empirical evidence, free flow of information, fair rule of law, impartial institutions, governmental checks and balances, the protection of minority voices, and the deliberative systems of representative democracy—creates the rules, which provide the moral framework to protect human life and dignity. If Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs, and Bedouin (a messy quilt of overlapping identities) will ever live together peacefully under vines and fig trees, then some kind of liberal system will be necessary.

For decades, both sides sought to maximize their share of the neighborhood. Israel won that fight. Starting with land purchases from the Ottomans, working through Lord Balfour and the British, fighting with the Allies and against the Nazis, lobbying in the early UN, engaging in warfare, negotiating treaties with sovereign nations, creating bureaucracies for occupation, and reacting to real security threats with force, Israel whittled away Palestinian power, land, and freedom. At each historical stage of this conflict, Palestinian violence provided Israel a legitimate argument to expand its security apparatus, which over the decades—as predicted by Israeli critics like Amos Oz and David Grossman—surpassed its liberal intent, making it more illiberal.

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The Oslo process of the 1990s was flawed but it was supposed to end the zero-sum rivalry with a gradual, structured settlement. To some extent, it worked. On the Israeli side, Oslo prevented the religious nationalists and real-estate developers from gobbling up every square inch of Palestinian land. To be sure, lots of gobbling continued during Oslo, but, still, it slowed down. Oslo also led to the peace with Jordan, adding to the existing peace with Egypt secured after the Camp David Accords in 1978. And, on the Palestinian side, Oslo created the Palestinian Authority, which protested Israeli encroachment (however meekly), and represented the shadow of an autonomous state government (however corrupt). Violence was reduced (albeit not eliminated). Oslo was liberalism in action.

After Oslo, the Whirlwind

But Oslo’s demise released the sub-rational on both sides. Israelis saw exile in the constant terror attacks of the Second Intifada, and the Palestinians saw dishonor when statehood became a mirage. Co-existence became anathema. The fig trees had to burn. Illiberalism was on the march in both societies.

First, in Israel, without a realistic two-state solution, a Palestinian-inclusive democratic framework became a threat to the Jewish state’s existence. Israel understood it would not be able to remain Jewish and democratic. In the summer of 2021, I interviewed a range of activists, thinkers, and journalists and all said that in the Israeli political establishment the Hebrew word democratzia had become equivalent with anti-Zionist.   

Second, religious nationalists began a territorial free-for-all in the West Bank. Based on a May 1967 sermon by Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, son of Israel’s first Chief Rabbi, Abraham Isaac Kook, they believe Jews have a messianic religious obligation to hold onto every square inch of Greater Israel (including parts of modern Jordan). Their power has grown through state subsidies, real estate development of stolen Palestinian land, and the Knesset multi-party negotiation process. One can trace a straight path of illiberalism from the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre of 1994, through the 1995 assassination Yitzhak Rabin, the resistance to Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, the 2016 Elor Azaria controversy, and the 2023 Huwara pogrom. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich rode this illiberal wave into power, and their effort to destroy judicial independence finally drove Israelis into the streets for nine months before Oct. 7, suddenly chanting democratzia in a last ditch effort to save liberalism, and their own rights.

Third, Oslo’s collapse, combined with the U.S.-Iraq war, contributed to the rise of Iran, ever a cynical sponsor of the Palestinian cause because of the way it destabilizes Sunni rivals. The combination of Hezbollah, Hamas, a potentially nuclear Iran, Iraqi-Shiite militias, and Houthi rebels in Yemen encircled Israel with existential threat. This became the political foundation stone of the never-ending Netanyahu regime.

The same is true from what we know of Gazan society leading up to Oct. 7. First, Oslo’s collapse left the Palestinian Authority in power, but only as a hollow shell of a government, led by thoroughly corrupt leaders. Mahmoud Abbas’ personal net worth is estimated at over $100 million, graft surpassed only by Hamas, whose leaders have amassed fortunes in the billions.

Second, Hamas proudly identifies as a religious autocracy. Since the time it took political control in the elections of 2006 and the subsequent violence against the Palestinian Authority, every aspect of society operates only with Hamas’ approval. Free media coverage is an illusion, as reporters and editors carefully tiptoe up to Hamas’ censorious boundaries. Minority rights are laughable.

Third, for almost 20 years, Hamas’ rocket attacks against Israel—followed by IDF aerial bombardments—created a gruesome pattern. Every few years some kind of flare up, usually a confrontation on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, provoked a tactically pointless barrage of rockets haphazardly aimed at Israeli population centers. IDF counter attacks would take out Hamas’ rocket launchers and Hamas commanders predictably would kill hundreds of unprotected Israeli civilians. Rather than dissuade Hamas’ attacks, the pattern of IDF retaliation only fueled them. We now know that before Oct. 7, Hamas had spent over a decade using its governing responsibility for Gaza (itself a feature of liberalism), and billions of dollars of foreign aid (collected on the cynical use of liberalism’s value for human dignity) to build tunnels beneath hospitals, mosques, and schools, set up its server farms (using the UN’s internet service), hoard food and fuel, all with the aim of unleashing unspeakable barbarism. With each round of violence, Hamas watched support for the Palestinian cause rise along with Gazan civilian casualties. So by 2023, the civilian toll had become a potent form of Palestinian strength. The possibility that a grand diplomatic bargain with the Saudis would legitimize the Israeli state and possibly redistribute power in the Middle East, all without bringing statehood to the Palestinians, likely drove Hamas to its Oct. 7 strategy, which sought not only to inflict violence on Israelis but to provoke a harsh enough response from Israel so that it could count on the resulting Palestinian civilian deaths to achieve its political aims.

I share this background not in comparison, but rather as a combined portrait of two societies progressing along the path to illiberalism leading up to Oct. 7.

On that day, the area around Gaza returned to the Middle Ages. Not only was the violence extreme in every form—especially the use of sexual violence—the very structures of statehood disappeared. The border was effectively erased. The IDF disappeared. The Israeli government was in total disarray. Even Hamas’ own semblance of command and control was overwhelmed by the success of the attack. The terrorists resorted to using any means necessary to transport hostages back to Gaza, even golf carts. One terrorist called his mother to brag about the number of Israelis he had killed. The perpetrators of that day eliminated liberalism’s core, human dignity, for both the victims and themselves.

Since then, the twin horrors of tens of thousands of Gazan civilian deaths and the ongoing suffering of Israeli hostages, have pushed this conflict firmly into the sub-rational dimensions of exile and honor. The kind of rational thinking that undergirds liberalism’s slow, unsexy, boring, yet durable, robust, resilient, and fair systems is impossible during this grotesquerie of horror. Israelis overwhelmingly support the expansion of the offensive into Rafah and show shockingly little concern for Palestinian civilian life. Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas, and thus also show shockingly little concern for Palestinian civilian life. Everyone is delusional in their pursuit of justice. Jews will not be forced back into exile. Palestinians can stomach no more dishonor. As rational thought dissolves, liberal systems die.

This is the bad news.

Liberalism’s Way Forward

The good news is that as international observers and advocates, we have the benefit and, frankly, the privilege, of distance. While many Jews and Palestinians have direct connections to the conflict, most of us are removed by a degree or two or more. That means we have greater distance from the exile/dishonor impulse. Our distance may give liberalism a chance.

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For Israel’s advocates, consider that while Israel has a right to defend itself, doing so with such a flawed government undermines their moral case for just war. As Iraq War veteran Elliot Ackerman teaches, “War is state-sanctioned murder.” A government led by a prime minister avoiding criminal prosecution, dependent upon religious extremists, bent on destroying judicial independence and checks-and-balances, and regularly voting to shut down freedom of the press lacks the moral legitimacy to “sanction murder.” This government is Exhibit A that mere elections are not sufficient to create a liberal democracy. While the organized Jewish community and its allies have a commitment to push for Israel’s security, and especially the return of the hostages, the centrist consensus in Israel is that the Netanyahu security-without-negotiations conceptzia opened Israel to the highest one-day Jewish death toll since the Holocaust. Durable Jewish safety comes only through liberal systems like treaties, stable democratic government, and morally legitimate leadership. By contrast, Israel’s anti-liberal nationalists favor more force.

For Palestinian advocates, consider that while the long cause of Palestinian displacement, land expropriation, occupation, and suffering may be just, continued justifications of extreme violence against Israeli civilians, and continued silence about the cause of the Israeli hostages, is a moral stain and strategic mistake that only reinforces the Jewish exile instinct. Contrary to the oft-evoked historical analogy, Israel is not a France-like power occupying a distant foreign country like Algeria and denying it statehood. And anti-colonial philosopher Franz Fanon’s gospel of violence that Palestinian sympathizers are increasingly invoking has moral and practical limits. When protestors pursue a self-gratifying agenda of justice “by any means necessary,” anti-liberalism is empowered, which will only lead to more death, and thus more exile and dishonor.

In late February, I signed a Jewish clergy letter calling for cease-fire sponsored by the left-leaning Jewish organization, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. I did so not because I believe this would be a prelude to the end of permanent hostilities. I have no delusion that the IDF will have to take military action against Hamas in the future. And I have no delusions that Hamas will stop attacking Israel in the future. I did so because only with a cease-fire will Israel possibly go to elections to replace this awful Israeli regime. I did so because only with a cease-fire can the work of building Palestinian civic institutions begin. And most importantly, I did so because only with a cease-fire can the Jewish people rightly demand that the entire world, including all the protestors on the college campuses, every department of the UN, every judge at the Hague, and conscientious human on the planet shout for Hamas to release the hostages.

Dangerous Utopias

Lastly, postmodern, anti-liberal utopians also talk about a world beyond statehood, often couching this in the argument that Palestinians are the truly indigenous people in the land (an idea that the local Bedouin—who are largely sympathetic with Israel—would dispute). These activists use rhetoric describing the overturning of the existing world order. Ironically, in their peace-loving idealism they share a messianism with the Jewish religious nationalists in the West Bank, and the apocalyptic worldview of Hamas which seeks not a Palestinian state but rather an Islamic Caliphate in the entire Middle East.

Israeli thinker Amos Oz described such a world in his book In the Land of Israel in 1983:

I would be more than happy to live in a world composed of dozens of civilizations, each developing in accordance with its own internal rhythm, all cross-pollinating one another, without any one emerging as a nation-state: no flag, no emblem, no Passport, no anthem. No nothing. Only spiritual civilizations tied somehow to their lands, without the tools of statehood and without the instruments of war.

But the Jewish people has already staged a long-running one-man show of that sort. The international audience sometimes applauded, sometimes threw stones, and occasionally slaughtered the actor. No one joined us; no one copied the model the Jews were forced to sustain for two thousand years, the model of a civilization without the “tools of statehood.” For me this drama ended with the murder of Europe’s Jews by Hitler.

Such post-statehood dreams are lovely, but when applied first to the Jewish state, the Jew in me wants to scream, “Start somewhere else! Anywhere else!” And when this idealism is applied in the wake of Oct. 7 after Hamas spokesman, Ghazi Hamad said on Oct. 24, “The Al-Aqsa Flood is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth,” such idealism is morally outrageous, and frankly, antisemitic.

Their alternative dream is creating a secular democracy “from the river to the sea.” This is simply unpragmatic. Such a creation imposed from the outside is not only impossible, but it would be a bloodbath. Israelis (including the million or so Arab citizens of Israel who Hamas considers collaborators) and Palestinians need a secure border between them, for at least a generation or two. Borders are structures of states, states have governments, governments rest on laws and regulations, laws depend on a population dedicated to fairness, reason, and truth. All of this stands on liberalism’s commitment to human dignity. Anyone who wants to save lives—Palestinian, Israeli, it doesn’t matter—should be arguing for liberalism, statehood, structure, democracy, and borders. Liberalism suppresses the sub-rational urges. The end of dishonor for Palestinians and the end of exile for Jews must follow the creation of a border between them.

I am reminded of this every time I hike along the Virginia side of the Potomac river, and remember that if my toe touches the water, it is in Maryland. This is the only U.S. river where the border is not in the center, and that is because the North took the whole thing at the end of the Civil War. Once upon a time that border between two sides—both of whom firmly believed, rationally and sub-rationally, in the justice of their cause—saw hundreds of thousands of deaths. Today that state border is an annoying cause for traffic. One day, let that be the border between Israel and Palestine.

Inshallah (With God’s help), Keyn Y’hi Ratzon (May this be God’s will)

© The UnPopulist 2024

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