White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on October 10 slammed statements from congressional members who suggested the Hamas attack on Israel should be considered in context with previous actions by Israel.
“I’ve seen some of those statements this weekend,” she said. “We’re going to continue to be very clear: We believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.
“Our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped hundreds — hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that. There are not two sides here.” — Reported by HuffPost, October 11.
“There are not two sides here.” When the press secretary uttered those words, every integralist within earshot should have snapped to attention. She was saying that the Biden administration, by declaring unconditional support for Israel’s attack on Gaza, that it was recognizing only one perspective in the conflict. Such single-perspective absolutism is not new for US administrations. When a designated enemy (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia) is seen to be acting badly, the US government and its loyal mainstream media, regularly ignores or denies any legitimacy in the enemy’s point of view. Still Jean-Pierre’s statement was shocking for its bluntness.
Integral Theory compels us to look at all significant perspectives on any major issue, and to include whatever is true or valid even in perspectives we do not like. That is what we must do in the present instance, transcend and include. (I think integralist intellectuals are sometimes better at including than they are at transcending.) Transcending partial views has two parts: first is negation, a word we don’t often see used in these contexts. That’s an unflinching rejection of whatever is false in a given view. The second part is incorporation into a larger view that contains more truth than the ones being transcended.
Let’s look at the current conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in light of these ideas. The press secretary’s no-two-sides claim has to be rejected out of hand (negation). No matter how awful the behavior of the Hamas invaders last week—and they were truly awful, serious war crimes—they have a story to tell, a perspective that must be taken seriously if there is ever to be peace in the region. At the very least, we integralists need to take their perspective seriously if we intend to achieve the best possible understanding of the situation for ourselves.
I will not review the historical root causes of the conflict here; there are plenty of sources available for that. I consider here only this question: is there any respect at all in which Hamas can justify its attack against Israel on October 6? The answer will require some nuanced analysis that you won’t find in the mainstream media. Yannis Varoufakis, formerly the Greek finance minister, shows how to do this in an interview he gave a few days ago. I paraphrase his remarks. He said he condemns absolutely the abuse, killing, and kidnapping of civilians perpetrated by Hamas fighters, but he would not condemn Hamas for invading Israel. That was an act of self-defense of Palestinians against the decades-long occupation and oppression of Palestinians in the Gaza strip.
I agree with him. If Israel has a right to defend itself, so do the Palestinians, a right rarely, if ever, acknowledged by any US administration. If the Hamas warriors had not committed war crimes, their invasion of Israel would have been completely legitimate.
Varoufakis may not be familiar with Integral epistemology, but he was nevertheless demonstrating good Integral thinking about this dreadful war. Contrary to Ms. Jean-Pierre’s claim, there definitely are two sides to the story of the current war in Palestine. The Palestinians will never give up their side of the story, and if the US is ever to get back on the right side of history, it needs to start listening and stop saying things like “there are not two sides here.”
Hi Charles, on your recommendation I believe, I’ve ordered this book:
It will take a couple days before the book arrives for me. But in the meantime, I’m wondering if you see how this framework might apply to the conflict in the Middle East?
Hi, Robert - I enjoyed meeting you yesterday-- for the first time outside of the IL Community site. As you will see, McIntosh’s book deals only with US politics and is not easily applied to the Middle East. As an alternative, I recommend the latest episode of The Daily Evolver with Jeff Salzman. He does a pretty good job of interpreting the current situation in Palestinian through an integral lens. Here is the link:
In taking a generous opinion of what the US is doing as reflected in the press secretary’s comments, it seems they are using a linear or hierarchical prioritization of what to address first in the conflict/war, based solely upon the means used to kill. Hamas is being equated with Isis as a terrorist organization so that’s their priority, to wipe them out; problem is, parts of the world never seem to get beyond that step. Some of us might think Israel’s past (and possibly recent, according to the Human Rights Watch) use of white phosphorous bombs is terrorizing too, and a war crime, and some us may think a more nuanced or “everything everywhere all at once” approach to the conflict might be more worthwhile, but that might be beyond the capacity of the primary players. A recent poll I read said the majority of Palestinians would re-elect Hamas to lead them, so one has to wonder what might sprout from the ashes if/when Hamas is destroyed, not just from the Palestinian ashes but elsewhere.
The McIntosh book is now in hand. I’ll post again later after getting much deeper into it. Thanks for the reference!
Quickly, on the Middle East - What would the Middle East region look like without US support for Israel and other nations in the region? Also, what would US politics look like without the Middle East as a factor? A bit of reflection on those questions should soon lead to the realization that US politics can scarcely be divorced from the Middle East, nor can the Middle East work through its own issues without the influence of US politics. In a word, there are systemic connections.
On p. 13 McIntosh rejects the notion that different cultural/civilizational parts of the world have different flavors of modernity. He offers no reasoning or evidence in support of this rejection. I beg to differ. For example:
This does not derail McIntosh’s central thesis about US politics and culture. I’ll circle back to that after completing the book. But it seems clear to me that China does fit easily into the classic Spiral Dynamics pattern. Nor does Islam, which is very pertinent when the discussion turns to the Middle East.
Difficult questions, defying short answers. But here’s an attempt. Without the kind of unconditional US support for Israel over the last 75 years, Israel would probably not have nuclear weapons, and a two-state solution to the Palestine question would have been implemented long ago. The US would not have vetoed UN Security Council resolutions condemning Israel for illegal military assaults on Gaza and might have brokered a lasting peace among Israel, Iran, and the Arab states in the region, as Jimmy Carter partially achieved. Israel might have become the liberal democracy it has always, disingenuously, claimed to be.
Without embracing your entire analysis in its details, you clearly grasp that the US-Israel relationship is systemic. So isolating solely on whatever Israel is up to would be missing some pretty essential factors. Of course, Hamas is systemic too. So there are quite a few different levels of analysis available. My thinking tends to escalate to the meta-, meta-, meta-picture pretty quickly. Then it comes back down. Not necessarily in the usual places.
Charles, unfortunately I must disagree. Being Israeli and American I was unimpressed with the program you mentioned and the superficial knowledge of the participants about what is going on in the Middle East left me more traumatized than I was before. Hamas is a terrorist organization whose aim is to destroy Israel not to create two states. Free Palestine for many means destroy Israel–not a two states solution. Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist.
Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005. Since then, Hamas has ruled Gaza using the moneys sent to relieve the hardship of Gaza citizens to obtain weapons to destroy Israel. Rockets have been sent to Israel during the entire time. You care about Palestinians? Free them from Hamas. Hamas only convinced Israelis that leaving the West Bank will not bring them peace but more Rockets.
Unfortunately, there is an unholy connections between governing powers on both side who are interested to maintain the status quo to maintain their power. Alas, Hamas attacks only strengthened the power to these parties in Israel. If you watched the news prior to October 7th, you could see thousands of Israeli demonstrating against the current government.
By the way, many interpret Hamas, supported by Iran to prevent Saudi Arabia to join the Arab states that recognize Israel, which I believe would have helped resolving the conflict and create a front against Iran and of course help removing Hamas stronghold on Gaza.
For the meantime, no real solution, just more misery on bot side.
All perspectives are welcome. Yours is the mainstream view of Hamas, unfortunately one-sided. Labeling them as only a terrorist organization is spitting distance from de-humanizing them altogether (“human animals”), not ok from any moral or integral point of view. Some facts to note:
Hamas is not just a terrorist organization, it is in fact the duly elected government of Gaza, never recognized by Israel or the United States. They governed with a tough hand, but under them the Gazans managed about as well as they could have under the Israeli occupation.
In 1947-48 Israel perpetrated the first Nakba on the Palestinians, driving more than 700,00 of them out of their homeland. Israel has been living on stolen land ever since.
Israel has now stated its intention to commit a second Nakba: destroy Hamas, which cannot be done without killing untold thousands of Palestinian civilians or driving them out of the territory altogether. Then, say the Israelis, we will wash our hands of Gaza. I leave to your imagination what that might mean.
Hamas’s 1988 charter states that Israel should not exist, but that doesn’t mean negotiation with them is impossible. (Vladmir Putin thinks Ukraine should not exist, but NATO negotiates with him.) In fact, in 2017, a new charter was issued by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal which accepted for the first time the idea of a Palestinian state within the borders that existed before 1967. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_Charter)
You say Hamas has used aid money to buy weapons? True, but obviously not all the money, because Gazans have been able to survive (barely) all these years, which requires money for food, shelter, clothing, education, hospitals, medicines, etc.
Israel has the right to defend itself; so do the Palestinians, although you won’t hear that mentioned by any US administration or in the mainstream media.
Finally, after living for decades in “the world’s largest open-air prison,” did you expect the Palestinians to do nothing? To endure the daily privations and humiliation forever? Remember when the American colonies were occupied by the British military and had to endure many indignities (although nothing like the Palestinians have had to endure)? I don’t know of any American history books that describe the revolutionaries as terrorists. Double standards abound in the current situation, along with massive confirmation bias.
I encourage you investigate seriously the Palestinian point of view, not just on what is happening now, but in the context of the last 75 years of conflict between the two peoples.
All perspectives are accepted, yours included. I’m not sure what mainstream is, but I think yours reflects the argument that the victim is always right and is not more integral than mine. When David wins over Goliath, you will root for poor Goliath. I believe that I see the situation from both perspectives as much as I can. In a nutshell, the essence of the conflict is both Jews and Arabs claim the same land. They have two options: Compromise and create a political solution where everybody can live in peace and dignity, or continue fighting and inflicting misery on each other. Unfortunately, the latter option prevails. There has been misery on both sides, but it’s amazing how many international organizations fail to recognize terrorism against Israel (bombs in busses, movie theatres, and more all these years at some points called Intifada) and always point to Israel when it defends itself. Antisemitism is alive and well. I am sure you didn’t read about Hamas sending rockets all the time or just low-tech balloons and drones that ignited the crops on the Israeli side, just on the damage to Gaza when Israel targeted the sources of the attack. The media and UN institutions were constantly pro-Arab. Think oil.
Hamas attacks from dense populations, and there is no way to destroy the source of the attack without hurting civilians. The difference is the intent. Israel wanted peace, not killing Arabs. I say wanted because sadly, whenever a moderate Israeli government attempted a peace agreement, the Palestinians torpedoed it. Ask Clinton. Which led to the rise of the Right and the ultra-religious, culminating in the terrible current government most Israelis are against.
Finally, the blaming game has never solved any problems. The question is how to negotiate peace and ensure that the negotiators will not be killed by their own people like Sadat and Rabin. Arafat didn’t want to join them. See more notes below.
All perspectives are welcome. Yours is the mainstream view of Hamas, unfortunately one-sided. Labeling them as only a terrorist organization is spitting distance from de-humanizing them altogether (“human animals”), not ok from any moral or integral point of view. Some facts to note:
**Human animals is your term not mine. I have never used it, and never will.
Hamas is not just a terrorist organization, it is in fact the duly elected government of Gaza, So was Hitler
never recognized by Israel or the United States.
Hamas did not recognize Israel and declared its goal to destroy it.
They governed with a tough hand, but under them the Gazans managed about as well as they could have under the Israeli occupation.
** Not really. Hamas has been the elected government of Gaza since 2005 after Israel disengagement. They didn’t govern under occupation. Had Hamas recognized Israel then instead of initiating acts of terror, we wouldn’t been where we are today. The entire world, including Israelis would have helped Gaza This was a missed opportunity** Unfortunately, currently the status quo is supported by both extremists in Hamas and in Israel fanatic. Both want it all and want to stay in power.
**If you knew more about Islam treatment of the infidel, you would understand why Israelis are in survival mode. The Arabs can lose many buttles. For Israel, one loss is another holocaust.
Hamas has indeed practiced terrorism against Israel, serious war crimes. Israel has inflicted far worse [state] terrorism on Gaza and the West Bank since 1948 to the present. Click here for a summary of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity
Check your facts. Between 1948 and 1967 (The 6 Days War), Gaza was under Egypt’s control, and the West Bank was under Jordan. They could create a Palestinian state. Why didn’t they? Instead, they kept the refugee camps. So much so that after 1967, Jordan was happy to get rid of them. How about war crimes of Palestinians against Israel?
For your information, the name Palestine or Palaestina was coined by the Romans after the Philistines (then extinct but had lived roughly where the current Gaza strip is) after conquering Judea in the first century CE. The name stayed, although for Jews, it has always been the land of Israel. I was born in Haifa in 1942, and on my birth certificate, the Nationality was Jewish; Arabs were Arabs–not Palestinians. They started to call themselves Palestinians in the 1960’s. Also about a third of the Jordanian population is Palestinian as well, including the king’s wife is. In 1948 it made more sense to annex the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza strip to Egypt. But they were kept in refugee camps and
people who live in refugee camps are understandably angry. Instead of inciting hate against Israel, it would have been better to help them restart a new life. More about it later.
1947-48 Israel perpetrated the first Nakba on the Palestinians, driving more than 700,00 of them out of their homeland. Israel has been living on stolen land ever since.
**Israel perpetrated? Right from Arab propaganda. In 1947 the UN decided about a partition of mandatory Palestine between Jews and Arabs based on population concentration of both nations. The jews accepted it but the surrounding Arab state started a war against Israel and lost.
I understand the Arab point of view more than you give me credit for. Nakba in Arabic means disaster. The disaster for them was the foundation of the the state of Israel–not the refugees.
In 1947-48 many jews who lived in Jerusalem, Hebron, and other places were evacuated from places that ended up being in Jordan. They lost all as well. They were called evacuees not refugees. The state helped them resettle. About 900,000 Jews escaped or immigrated to Israel from Moslem countries after 1948 including my late husband who was born in Baghdad. They lived in terrible conditions not unlike the Arab refugees. Nobody called them refugees either. It took time, but the state helped them resettle. Why couldn’t Arab state do the same? Because they didn’t want to.
Israel has now stated its intention to commit a second Nakba: destroy Hamas, which cannot be done without killing untold thousands of Palestinian civilians or driving them out of the territory altogether. Then, say the Israelis, we will wash our hands of Gaza.I leave to your imagination what that might mean.
**I live it to your imagination what will happen to Israeli if it does not. I wonder if you will show pictures of the destruction of Israel. Why not use your Integral imagination to find a better solution, such as international force ruling Gaza, rather than blame Israel? Easier said than done, of course.
Hamas’s 1988 charter states that Israel should not exist, but that doesn’t mean negotiation with them is impossible. (Vladmir Putin thinks Ukraine should not exist, but NATO negotiates with him.) In fact, in 2017, a new charter was issued by Hamas leader Khaled Mashal which accepted for the first time the idea of a Palestinian state within the borders that existed before 1967. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamas_Charter)
You say Hamas has used aid money to buy weapons? True, but obviously not all the money, because Gazans have been able to survive (barely) all these years, which requires money for food, shelter, clothing, education, hospitals, medicines, etc…
They would have lived much better If Hamas had used the money to build the economy and promote the welfare of the population. Israel was no risk for Gazans. It was the other way around
Israel has the right to defend itself; so do the Palestinians, although you won’t hear that mentioned by any US administration or in the mainstream media.
Finally, after living for decades in “the world’s largest open-air prison,” did you expect the Palestinians to do nothing? To endure the daily privations and humiliation forever? Remember when the American colonies were occupied by the British military and had to endure many indignities (although nothing like the Palestinians have had to endure)? I don’t know of any American history books that describe the revolutionaries as terrorists. Double standards abound in the current situation, along with massive confirmation bias.
Weren’t the revolutionaries terrorists? Ask the American Indians. You have no problem living on a land that belonged to them, but you have a problem with Jews who have always lived in the land of Israel, although as a minority, who returned to their homeland. Check your unconscious antisemitism. Where is the double standard? By the way, Israeli Arabs, about 20% of Israel’s population, despite a lot of problems, live much better than American Indians and Arabs in many Islamic countries. I wish the attempted peace agreement didn’t fail. Now, it’s more difficult to reach agreements on both sides.
I encourage you investigate seriously the Palestine point of view, not just on what is happening now, but in the context of the last 75 years of conflict between the two peoples.
And I suggest that you investigate seriously the Israeli point of view. I’ve been following the conflict all my life.
Perhaps some of the vocal Jewish minority across the globe (and others, including all countries within the UN with the exception of the US backing Israel) are exhibiting some healthy green-stage thinking by asking there be a cease-fire long enough to let things cool before next steps. (The US is now apparently asking Israel to wait before warring on Gaza, in order for humanitarian aid to enter the area). I read the below statement in another thread here by @ Leif-Conrad (who was not talking about the Israel-Palestine issue) which seems relevant and is worth quoting:
I also wanted to comment on the Daily Evolver episode re: Israel-Palestine. Jeff did a good job in the first part of presenting the basic Integral stages of development at play. The conversation in the second part with Ankur Delight was interesting, with Jeff identifying the tribalistic red stage as the problem, with its (unhealthy) aspects towards violence, vengeance, “barbarism.” Ankur disagreed, seeing the traditional amber/blue stage with its ethnocentrism, (unhealthy) us v. them mentality, and “othering” as the basic problem, given this stage has both red and (to some extent) orange-stage tools at its disposal. The red stage is the home of terrorism, whereas the amber/blue stage (assisted by orange) is the home of many if not most wars. (And actually, the unhealthy, disastrous sides of each stage, not just red or amber/blue, are a problem, probably most of us would agree).
I did some brief research on the number of deaths from terrorism vs. the number of deaths from wars. According to the UN, for the year 2017, globally there were 19,000 deaths attributed to terrorist attacks. There were 89,000 deaths that year attributed to state-based armed conflicts (wars). So four+ times as many deaths through legal wars as through terrorism. Of course, terrorism is the intentional “killing of innocents” (whereas in wars, the killing of innocents is considered “accidental,” or in military terms, “collateral damage”), plus terrorist attacks have the element of constant surprise, people not knowing when they might happen and thus living with fear; they are outside the rule of law (including international wartime laws) and are considered “crimes against humanity,” and can be “barbaric.” On the other hand, death by war is no picnic either, also kills innocents/civilians, destroys infrastructure, displaces people, and sometimes these “us vs. them” wars also have elements of vengeance in them, retribution rather than defense, and crimes against humanity are sometimes committed in legitimate wars.
There were 15.9 million global deaths in WW !!, and the number of deaths from state-based wars has been generally decreasing since, averaging less than 100,000 per year. However, in 2022, there were 237,000 + (numbers vary; and about 10,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine since the start of the war), due largely to the war against Ukraine and wars in Ethiopia. Terrorist attacks and deaths by same have also been decreasing.
(And all these figures pale when compared to the AIDS pandemic (21.8 million deaths through the year 2000), and the Covid pandemic (7 million deaths now globally, with 1/7 of them in the US). They also pale compared to the number of homicides globally, according to the UN, about 500,000 in 2017. These are deaths due to organized crime and urban and domestic violence; the US (not the US, rather, the Americas) accounts for 37% of those global deaths by homicide).
Perhaps some of us relate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a “transpersonal scream,” a phrase used by Cindy Wigglesworth during an Integral episode on climate change about and during the Australian fires. Or maybe we feel a simple ontological sorrow, a basic sadness at the state of affairs of human consciousness (our own and others’). As Ken Wilber said in the podcast linked to above in this post, it takes a great spaciousness of consciousness in which to hold all the suffering and death that is both acute and chronic in the world and on the planet, and to hold all the different perspectives, and working towards that spaciousness might be the best contribution any of us individually can make to the betterment of things in the Israel-Palestine conflict and elsewhere.
@Charles_Marxer - Just finished the McIntosh book. Worth the read, for sure. I have quite a few thoughts, but may break the book into its own thread. Modeling US politics in the first instance is an important step in understanding the US role in the Middle East.
Your post contains some excellent observations. (1) Demands for a cease-fire should be universal among people at the Green stage of development. I would add that a cease-fire is consistent with Orange values as well, e.g. just war principles, and perhaps even Amber values, e.g. compassionate Christian and Muslim responses. (2) Thanks for the useful statistics on worldwide deaths. (3) Your accurate comments on terrorism, collateral damage, and wars, regarding which I offer the following remarks.
You wrote:
*“Of course, terrorism is the intentional “killing of innocents” (whereas in wars, the killing of innocents is considered “accidental,” or in military terms, “collateral damage”), plus terrorist attacks have the element of constant surprise, people not knowing when they might happen and thus living with fear; they are outside the rule of law (including international wartime laws) and are considered “crimes against humanity,” and can be “barbaric.” On the other hand, death by war is no picnic either….” *
“Collateral damage” is the rhetorical term favored by governments when they practice state terrorism, the intentional killing of civilians by a state. To understand this, consider the Israeli explanation of what it does in Gaza. The Israeli security services (ISS) identifies a high-rise apartment building as a Hamas headquarters or hiding place and the military bombs the building. Dozens of civilians are killed. Israel says it was targeting Hamas, not Palestinian civilians; those were accidental, “collateral damage”—not intentional, therefore not morally or legally wrong.
Accidental? Give me a break. Accidental killing happens when, say, a police officer shoots a suspect and one of his bullets somehow kills an innocent bystander. The cop had no idea that would happen. That sometimes happens in war as well: a soldier flings a grenade toward an enemy position, unaware that a family of civilians is hiding there. That’s very different from many of the Israeli attacks on Gaza in the current conflict. Israel often knows there are civilians in the line of fire and chooses to shoot anyway.
There is an old saying, “Who wills the end wills the means.” The force of this aphorism is to reject the notion that ‘the end justifies the means.’ Consider, for example, a deliberate attack on an apartment building. The Israelis know they cannot quickly send a special ops squad to enter the basement of an apartment building and surgically take out the Hamas fighters. They know the only immediate option is to send a precision missile to take out the entire building. They know many, if not all, residents of the building will be killed or injured. Taking out the building along with its residents is the means of killing the Hamas fighters. The Israelis, therefore, will both the deaths of the Hamas fighters and the deaths of the inhabitants. Their stated intention not to kill civilians is meaningless. Who wills the end wills the means. They deliberately will the destruction of the building, knowing they will be killing civilians. Those killings were not accidental and are not sanitized by the term “collateral damage.” They are serious violations of international law and a moral crime as well (I know, morality doesn’t mean much in these kinds of conflicts).
The correct term for Israeli killings of this sort is not “collateral damage” but “state terrorism.”
Those of you who like to investigate the historical background to contemporary issues will find this documentary on the roots of the current Middle East war useful:
True. Compassionate (religious) Jewish responses as well. It’s heartening to read about Jews and Arabs in Israel working together to both protect one another and to promote steps towards peace.
Language, both reflecting and creating perceptions, perspectives, and realities, seems to be playing a significant role in the conflict, starting with the meaning of the word ‘Hamas’. It is an Arabic acronym for The Islamic Resistance Movement, and actually means in Arabic “zeal, strength, bravery.” In Hebrew, (c)hamas means “violence, cruelty, injustice, murder.”
Then there are the words “terrorist” and “freedom-fighter.” The US, EU, Israel and a few other nations (but not the UN as a whole) have designated Hamas as a terrorist organization, and yet Hamas defines itself as freedom-fighters. This of course stems from the very different contextual narratives of the two groups: many if not most Jews it seems see the actions of Hamas as the continuation through hundreds of years of anti-Semitic views and actions in the world and a threat to the dream of a Jewish homeland, while Hamas/Gazans and Palestinians in general see Israel as occupying their land, subjugating and ongoingly abusing them, and thwarting their dream of self-determination. It’s very much about land ownership, territory, as most wars are. If there isn’t some kind of mutually-beneficial resolution to the current war, these narratives/stories will pass to the next generations (which are bound to be smaller if so many children keep being killed) along with all the traumas, grudges, hypervigilance, rage and hatred, fight, etc. I just worked with a religious American Jewish person this past week around the recent trauma of her son’s accidental and horrendous death. At the end, we spoke briefly about the Israeli-Palestine war and she said when she hears snippets about it from others, she finds it painful, but she mostly has her “head buried in the sand,” not enough energy to deal with that on top of her personal trauma. I imagine there are many people like this in the world, in Israel and Gaza too, who simply can’t add another layer of trauma to what they are already experiencing.
One has to feel for Israel, it being the only independent Jewish state in the region, and as I’ve said before, the Holocaust isn’t that far in the past, there are still open wounds and vivid memories, and there has also been an uptick in anti-Semitic talk and actions across the globe in recent years, and the brutality and savagery of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas can’t be trivialized. One also has to feel for the Gazan Palestinians in their “open-air prison,” with all the poverty and not much of an economic base, just a few small industries and a little agricultural income and custom’s revenue between Israel and Palestine, and foreign aid. I read that Gaza has a few ground wells for water and a few small desalinization plants, but rely on Israel for their liquid fuel and about half of their electricity, so without that Israeli energy aid, their water plants won’t operate. They are in a dependent state for sure, for food as well. And as of this date have lost about five times as many lives as the Israelis with this new war, about 40 % of them children. The Israelis say Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.” But from what I’ve read, their territory is so small for their large population, they have little choice but to launch their fight from urban areas. But then again, I don’t really know.
People compare Hamas to ISIS, but from what I’ve read, it’s not a totally adequate comparison in that ISIS was founded on religious extremism and was anti-democracy and the Western world. Hamas, while linked to Islamic jihad and other militant movements, does have an interest in nationalism, wants Palestine to be its own nation-state, participate in the UN and such. From what I’ve read anyway.
Some other language touch-stones for this conflict: the “right to defend” one’s nation/territory, “double standards,” and when it comes to talk of cease-fire, we have “humanitarian pause” (to let aid into Gaza and address the hostage situation), and “humanitarian corridors” (for aid), and “delay” of the ground incursion (possibly to allow the US to prep its military resources, among other reasons), and now the UN General Assembly is calling for a non-binding “humanitarian truce.” The US was among 14 nations that voted against it. I don’t understand why. I read a statement from a top US national security official who said Hamas would be the only ones to benefit from a cease-fire. I’m sure there are things I do not know, but this seems on the surface an asinine statement. I also thought Biden’s initial somewhat strident statement around the attack and conflict lacked wisdom; I don’t think he was managing polarities very well. He has since been publicly more nuanced and presented himself with more sensitivity and empathy for the Gazans, seeing more of the Palestinian side of things, but speak of “delay…” I acknowledge I do not know all the ins and outs of the situation, but there has been so much media attention on conditions in Gaza and the West Bank in recent years, that to ignore the hurt and pain there in his initial statements seemed really insensitive; his statements to some extent seemed to be reactionary and to some extent, outdated old-school thinking. He is doing better, his speech to the nation was better, and as I say, I don’t know all the aspects of this, and am glad I’m not president!
Two things that have caught my eye re: regional (and further away) geopolitics, besides the US and Iran exchanging some fire, is Pakistan’s sympathies with the Palestinians, dealing as it is with its own territorial disputes with India over the Kashmir region; and the fact that Hamas officials visited Putin in Russia. Wow. This is far-flung. And we still have the war in Ukraine going on.
And of course, with people digging in on their perspectives and tempers hot, cancel culture and anti-free speech is having another hey-day. No surprise there, none whatsoever.
I sense that you are not entirely familiar with the historical background to the current war in Palestine. This video may help to fill in the blanks. There is lots of other helpful material on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLIBZ1Fewco