Devils in the Holy Land

We have a lot of goodhearted fools propping up the middle-east's real villains.

The phrase “useful idiot” has its origins in the rise of communism. Many good-natured new-deal Democrats were labeled as such by Western media when they spoke positively of communism. According to these propagandists, these useful idiots had come to fully identify with the communist propaganda that spoke of the equality of all peoples and worldwide liberation of the working class but hadn’t realized the depth of the cynicism that underpinned the movement(at least according to the propagandists who coined the term). Like the people in Star Wars delivering thunderous applause for Chancellor Palpatine as he declared himself Emperor, the useful idiots would clap like trained seals for the rise of communism and the demise of the liberty they treasured. Whether that was fair to them is a topic for another essay. I start here because the presence of an overwhelming number of useful idiots on both sides of this issue is one of the defining features of the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Let me be clear right up front that I do not think both sides are morally equal in this conflict. Israel, whatever its flaws(and we will get to Israel’s flaws), is a liberal democracy whose primary objective is to continue existing. The notion that they’re some apartheid state that oppresses anyone who isn’t Jewish is at best wildly overblown. 20% of the population of Israel is Arab and 70% of Israeli Arabs vote in Israeli elections. It is only within Palestine that Israel uses such violence against the Arab population. Many Arabs live healthy, productive lives in Israel. It is not a coincidence that politics in Palestine is dominated by organizations like HAMAS, whose repeatedly stated objective is to destroy the state of Israel and kill all the Jews in the name of their fundamentalist Interpretation of Islam, which demands international jihad against all nonbelievers. If you're a good-natured American liberal or leftist who stands on the side of Palestine, you are a useful idiot to the international jihad squad that rules Gaza. They do not try to follow the laws of war and they do not care how many of their people die, as long as Jews are also dying. There is no moral equivalence between these sides. However if the worst impulses in Israeli politics are allowed to run rampant in the coming months, we will be a lot closer to moral parity.

The attack on October 8th that HAMAS launched on Israel massacred around a thousand civilians with a senseless barbarian abandon reminiscent of Attila the Hun. It achieved nothing of strategic or political value, seeking instead to spread terror and fear in the Jewish population of Israel. Israel is now in the process of retaliating. The militants have been driven out of Israel and will now be destroyed through as much violence as Israel feels the need to use. Hamas has no hope of defeating Israel directly. Instead, they are hoping to trigger a much larger war. The armchair strategist in me almost admires the strategic calculus. Israel has been forced by this attack to directly occupy Gaza. The only way to achieve this will be to scour the entire region, house by house, block by block, looking for militants, through literally the most densely populated area on earth. This process will be long, bloody, and overflowing with individual outrages for anti-Israel news outlets to turn into sensational headlines. They will not talk about Hamas’ eagerness to hide behind civilians and turn residential neighborhoods into battlegrounds.

My only hope for peace at this point is that this won’t spiral into a third world war. There’s a reasonable chance it doesn’t. Few people in the region want peace, but even fewer seem to truly care about the plight of the people of Gaza. None of Israel’s Arab neighbors want to help Israel relocate the people in Gaza. Egypt(which shares a border with Gaza) doesn't want to annex and oversee the territory. Even Iran, which funds and supply Hamas to undermine Israel, doesn’t really care about them because of the Sunni/Shia split within Islam. The best case scenario for the next few months is that the leadership of Hamas will hem and haw about the carnage to Al Jazeera for a few months, safe from their penthouse suites in Qatar and Dubai. The young, brutalized people of Gaza, who have known nothing but chaos and violence for their entire life, will be used as cannon fodder; useful idiots for the international jihadi cabals that prop up the Hamas ‘government’.

Hamas might be the baddest guy in this story, but Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves no small amount of blame. Netanyahu is sometimes called “The Israeli Trump”, which is deeply reductive, but contains a grain of truth. Netanyahu is a hyper-competent professional politician who was once a commando, and Trump is a businessman and entertainer who got into politics on a lark, but they share a singular determination to stay in politics for the sake of their own political survival, no matter the cost to the nation’s social fabric. Both have faced extensive corruption charges, and both have shown a willingness to wink and nod at the racial supremacist elements of their society while leading the government. Both also have a rabid base of support that thinks they’re the savior of the nation.

In recent years, Netanyahu’s government has cracked down on free speech and non-Jewish religious practice in the name of security. They have built a surveillance state exceeding anything else in the democratic world on the promise that they would keep the people of Israel safe. The failure to anticipate the attack is not just an intelligence failure, but a fundamental violation of the Israeli social contract. While Israelis have rallied around the flag in response to the attack, the nation’s frustration with Netanyahu’s administration is boiling over at the same time. They are beginning to see the truth that Americans have long known but sometimes forget… those who sacrifice liberty for security will have neither. I favor continuing to support Israel, even through this upcoming horror show, but we need to put a lot more pressure on them to remain a secular, multiracial democracy.

Having grown up in the megachurch scene in Texas, I am intimately familiar with the opinion of American Evangelicals with regard to Israel. They are the useful idiots for the Netanyahu government’s lesser evil, just as infinitely traumatized Palestinian teenagers and secular leftists in American colleges are for Hamas’ greater evil. A few verses in the old testament that Isaiah prophesied in the 8th century BC to Israel’s Babylonian exiles have been ripped from their context and used to justify a religious demand for political support of the state of Israel at all times, pretending that God’s favor for non-Jews is predicated on their support for the not only their Jewish minorities but the modern state of Israel. The same Bible American evangelicals use to say we must support Israel at all times, no matter what they’re doing, shows that The Lord is willing to punish them severely when they neglect his commands. If American Christians love Israel(as I do), we must remind them of their obligation to bless the Gentiles, for the security and survival of the Jewish state.

In opposition to this, a tragic strain of unrepentant Nazism runs through Israeli politics. I make that comparison very specifically and deliberately, fully aware of its controversial historical implications. If hurt people hurt people(and they do), then it bears remembering that there is hardly a more traumatized country on Earth than the one born of Hitler’s holocaust. The same language that the Nazis once used to justify their atrocities about a plague composed of living, feeling people has become increasingly prevalent in Israeli politics, directed toward Palestinians. If God loves all people(and he does) anyone claiming the world would be perfect if we just got rid of some people is an enemy of God. Even his chosen people are not exempt from this.

There is no denying the politics of Palestinians are absolutely hideous. Teenagers who have been continuously bombed their entire lives are gonna be like that. When they attack Israel, they must be defeated, but the conditions in Gaza have left these people no escape from the misery of their daily existence but death. Imagine for a moment that you are an average citizen of Gaza. You are 18 and have spent your entire life minus one year in a city that is sealed off from the outside world, blockaded from the sea, and frequently the target of air strikes from people who live twenty miles away. You have received no real education except for Hamas propaganda, have no opportunities to better yourself or your station in life, and live in constant fear of your neighbors who drop airstrikes on you with impunity. How tolerant are your politics gonna be? This situation has been festering for nearly two decades, like an infected wound nobody has bothered to clean or dress. Netanyahu’s government seemed to think this was sustainable. The common people of Israel seemed willing to look the other way.

This attack is a primal scream of rage by the people of Gaza about the hopelessness of their condition. That rage is misguided and would be better turned on the Hamas leadership in their area, but the Netanyahu government has had zero interest in trying to defuse this rage, choosing instead to “cut the grass,” a phrase in Israeli security policy that means to regularly go into Gaza and air out anyone they can find. Based on the total failure of the Netanyahu government to detect this impending attack, Hamas militants have apparently become better at hiding than even the world’s most advanced surveillance state can keep up with. The thousand dead Jews this weekend are partly a result of his security policy that has made Israel less and less interested in rapprochement and more and more hostile to its neighbors.

I pray Israel will choose a better path once this present violence is done. I pray they will exorcise their Nazi trauma demons and stop voting for people willing to wink and nod at the idea that the Jews are some superior race chosen by God to rule the world. Israel has a beautiful people, with a beautiful culture. I urge, in whatever small way I can, for Israel to go to great, expensive lengths to share the bounty of their prosperity with their neighbors. They must bless those who curse them and in doing so, break the cycle of hatred and violence that demands blood for blood.

You can see that this approach will bear fruit in Israel’s current diplomatic relations with its Arab neighbors. Israel’s closest relationship with its Arab neighbors is Egypt, whom they have been by far the most charitable towards. After both the 1967 Six-day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis gave back any occupied Egyptian territory freely, most notably the Sinai peninsula. With everyone else, it’s varying degrees of hostility and varying degrees of territorial occupation, with Palestine being the most occupied and hate-filled.

O Israel, fight where you must. I have no illusions about the nature of your enemy. Every time you fight it is against an enemy that wants your state and people destroyed. However, of stick and carrot, you’ve tried more stick for nearly 20 years. This has been overseen by a hyper-competent ex-commando who has always achieved everything he set his mind to until now. You have built a nation that is indisputably the jewel of the Middle East; open, free, and filled with beauty and bounty. You lead the world in many sciences. Your military is the most terrifyingly efficient war machine in human history and if you had a population the size of France, even my most favored(for now) of Gentile nations would fear to face you in battle.

From where I’m sitting, as an enthusiastic amateur scholar of both Biblical and regular history, the fate of the Jewish people has hung by a thread for the entirety of the long arc of your history. This is how we know that Israel is chosen, instead of merely favored, as many gentile peoples have been through history. Where other cultures are obliterated and absorbed into their conquerors when they suffer great tragedy, you, Israel always endure. Your culture's survival is never entirely your own doing. You would have died in the desert if God had not parted the Red Sea. You were successful in war only when the Lord was with you in the days of the judges and kings. If Esther’s God-given beauty had not completely taken hold of Xerxes, Mordecai never could have outmaneuvered Haman. If I went through the 3000 years of Biblical and post-exile history with a fine-tooth comb, I could probably list a thousand examples of things working out for the Jews when everything in the world said it wouldn't. God’s favor is the true source of your security. More skill in war will not avail you in securing your state.

Be instead like the Kingdom of Solomon, with open gates and roads lined with free food for travelers. Bless your gentile neighbors. Go into the west bank and build the Arab population new homes, instead of bulldozing existing ones. Give your neighbors every reason not to hate you, instead of merely the many that already exist. Go into Gaza with worshipful caravans instead of commandos, feeding and clothing the neglected and abused orphans that make up a huge percentage of that population. Go out of your way to serve your enemies as the prophet Daniel once did for Nebuchadnezzar.

The Jewish people are eternally chosen by God, but his favor comes and goes to all nations based on our actions. He hears the cries of every one of Gaza’s brokenhearted orphans. I pray Israel will as well, rather than deciding their suffering is simply a necessary step along the path to a perfect world, exactly like Hitler did to them. If Israel continues to go down the path of ethnonationalism, God will someday turn the Jewish state over to her enemies. While I have no doubt he will preserve his chosen people, his favor will be removed. The tragedy of that day will far outstrip this last week.

Shalom Shalom, Israel. As-salam alaykum, Palestine.