Analyzing Patrick Lawrence

The article Undivided Loyalties by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post) starts off with this anecdote about Walter Lippmann.

“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann sat pointedly alone at the table—the ultimate in either indecision or a refusal to stand for one thing and against another.

“[…] since hearing or reading the story I have thought many times about Lippmann as he sat by himself at the dinner table. One could argue he was a pitiful waffler, refusing to take a stand on a critical question of the day. Of what use are such people, you might ask. On the other hand, you may have it that Lippmann did take a stand, this stand being that there are virtues in both of the social and economic systems at issue, and it was his right to defend his position, a constituency of one.”

Just sit this one out, if you can

Or perhaps Lippmann truly thought it was a stupid game, without nuance, played for and by children.

If you have the luxury of not being forced to swear allegiance to a side, then you should take it. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you don’t have to make that choice. If you’re faced with someone or many someones directly trying to kill you—kill or be killed—then you will have to commit yourself wholly to one “side”. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you should indulge in the luxury of nuance.

Is there something useful to capitalism? Of course. Ditto for socialism. If you could have only one of them, which would you choose? Silly question. Any conceivable socialist society contains capitalist elements, and vice versa. It’s like asking whether you’d rather keep your brain or your heart. Let’s talk about something substantial instead.

Nuance and facts, not loyalties

Lawrence continued,

“We live in an era of violence, viciousness, injustice and cruelty that, if not unprecedented by way of scale and magnitude, is down there with the worst for its craven immorality and inhumanity. This adds another to the numerous responsibilities we bear in exchange for some time on Earth. We are called upon to declare ourselves and what we stand for. We are obliged —whether or not we accept this obligation, and the majority of us don’t—to act on what we stand for. We ought to make clear to what we dedicate our loyalties.”

OK, Patrick, let’s move to the “dedicate your loyalties” topic of the day: Palestine and Israel. Both sides want Israel to stop bombing. Israelis and their supporters wish they were able to stop bombing, but they don’t feel safe yet. They feel that Hamas might spring—whack-a-mole-like—from the ground again at any moment and reap another 1200 Israelis.

Palestinians just want the bombing to stop. But they also want the occupation to stop. Israel’s proposed solution seems to be to move the Palestinians anywhere else but Israel. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

Palestinians can pinky-swear that they won’t attack again, but it’s an empty promise, one that they can’t really make. Because how can you promise your oppressor that you’ll never strike back without negating yourself? How can you promise that no-one among you will do so?

So there is no “sitting at the dinner table alone” in this question (calling back to Lawrence’s reference to the story about Lippmann), I suppose, but there is a requirement that we understand all sides and arguments—no matter how immoral we find them to be. We should be sure we understand before we decide.

If there are people on both sides who truly believe that the only solution is to eradicate the other … then we have to accept that as the starting point. Understanding will help illuminate potential solutions—escape routes, if you will—as well.

Determine the baseline

We also have to look the situation squarely in the eye and see it for what it is. As Lawrence puts it,

“[…] Israel began, with plentiful American support, its barbarous campaign to exterminate as many of the Palestinians of Gaza as it can before world opinion forces it to stop, while permanently displacing those it has not murdered. What we witness as the Israel Defense Forces attack Gaza is the exercise of power with[out] the merest pretense of decency, morality, or humaneness to veil it, to dress it up for the pitiful wafflers among us. It would take a Hannah Arendt to tell us if the deployment of power in this fashion is unprecedented in modern history, or in postwar history, or according to some other parameter. I would compare it, at a minimum, with America’s barbarity in Southeast Asia from the mid–1950s to the mid–1970s.”

Well, I think Israel has a long way to go in sheer numbers, but the indifference and single-mindedness—the arrogant presumption of infallibility—are very comparable.

So, the proposal is to get rid of unwanted people by slaughter and forced emigration. Hauptsach weg. We have to determine how large that group is, how intractable their opinion, and what solutions they would consider acceptable. If we’re honest, then we would have to plumb the depths of their solution space and determine how that affects our ability to plan a way for the future. Does the future contain them? Can it? If they’re made aware that they’re the problem and that the solution set being considered does not contain them, does their level of intractability change? If it does, if short-term self-preservation forces them to act against their own interests, to what degree is this a ruse from which they will retreat when the pressure is off?

Dealing with the plainly unreasonable

How much influence do voices like this one have?

“Simcha Rothman, a member of the Israeli parliament for the Religious Zionism party, part of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition told the BBC this week that the UN has kept Palestinian refugees in Gaza for 75 years in order to hurt Israel and that the Gazans should be relocated in other places.”

He’s a member of parliament. He believes that Palestinians are a disease from which Israelis need to be freed. It’s an uphill climb if you have to deal with that as a starting point, I’ll grant you that.

In the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is no easy solution. There is one side with the absolute plurality of power and an absolute deficit of ethical underpinning not only for their current methods but also for the ways forward proposed by their most unreasonable representatives.

The temptation there would be to round up to punishing the “criminal” en masse—collective punishment because they’re all so unreasonable. In this, one would become just like the Israelis, treating them just like they treat the Palestinians, in their feigned mad hunt for Hamas terrorists in every living room and hospital lobby.

No, the solution has to consider the damage that has been done to all citizens of that area, whether or not they happen to have an elected representation over which they purportedly hold sway. Just as Palestinians are not the worst of Hamas, Israelis are not the worst of their government. We have to offer everyone a way out, a way to be their best, most reasonable, and generous selves.

What does that mean? If Israelis continue to believe that there are only upsides to exterminating or exiling a population from their land, then they have to be disabused of that notion. If they think that they can just take the land, settle it, and grow as they have, without any real drawbacks to their standing in the international community, then it should be made clear that this is not the case. We have to be open to the idea that it is entirely possible that they will not care.

Like children who understand that their parents cannot stop taking care of them, they might just push to get whatever they want in the short term. Perhaps shame and appeals to justice won’t work. We have to try, because I kind of have to believe that it will work. The world just has to be firm that the other, easier avenues are no longer available. The world has to convince Israel that it needs the world. It’s not an easy job.

Right now, Israel feels that they’ve built a moral justification for ethnically cleansing Gaza first, then the West Bank. It is banking on its own people being OK with that. It is banking on the international community not daring to punish it in any way that would dissuade it. So far, it’s been right. Dead right.

A beaten, demoralized, and starved population

The Palestinians have no power and no leverage. They have to be convinced that we’re serious this time, that we’re really going to help them survive, get back on their own feet. It’s an uphill climb there, too. Just the sheer physical situation is already working against us. This is a population so traumatized and intellectually reduced by war and occupation that it may possibly already be too late.

A population of children who have only known occupation and trauma and malnutrition and war will not have developed any of the tools and nuance that they need in order to tread the narrow and winding path forward, avoiding the pitfalls that will deliver justification to an equally skittish Israel to leave the path. Just the malnutrition and dehydration alone, during their developmental years, are going to mean that the crop of the best and the brightest that they need for this endeavor is necessarily diminished. That’s just nature.

I’m not saying that they could never have done it! I’m saying that exigencies and deprivation of the sort these generations have experienced leave scars. They take primacy. It becomes all you know and you need a lot of breathing space and time to get to a place where you’re equipped to be diplomatic with the people who did that to you. That’s if, as outlined above, you haven’t been biologically diminished during formative years.

Any that manage to crop up anyway can be mown down with impunity. This serves to guarantee that only the least likely to struggle up past the ignorance imposed by occupation will survive. So, the Israelis target lawyers, scholars, doctors, journalists, and other thought leaders, until all that is left are exactly the slavering zombie-like hordes of haters they’ve been accusing all Palestinians of having been all along. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What about Hamas’s intolerance?

There is Hamas, which has, at various times, espoused their hatred of Jews and desire to eliminate them all. There are also more recent, official statements that are a good deal more moderate. There’s something to work with on both sides, if you deal with the more moderate parties. However, let’s round Hamas up to an intolerant organization that wants to eliminate anyone who isn’t cis-gendered, straight, male, Arab, and Muslim. That makes them the intellectual equivalents of Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz, Ben-Gvir, and the like on the Israel side. There is shocking intolerance everywhere.

I’ve heard people say that the youth in America who support LGBTQA, BLM, etc. should not support Palestine because Palestine is actually against them personally. Those people are relentless in their efforts to conflate concepts. They conflate Judaism with Zionism, and they conflate Palestine with Hamas and ISIS and Wahhabism. They see no distinction.

The simple fact is that there are thousands of people being murdered and millions being made to suffer depravity for no other reason that they’re in the wrong place, of the wrong ethnicity and the wrong religion, and espouse the wrong opinions: namely, that they wish to exist without being subjugated to the sovereignty of rulers they did not choose. It is this that people are responding to.

An unfair focus on Israel?

Netanyahu responds that it is antisemitic to focus on war crimes committed by Israel when there are so many other war crimes to choose from on this planet. The youth of Europe and the U.S. are focusing laser-like on what Israel is doing. It’s a cute point, actually. He admits to the atrocities, but then says its antisemitic to notice only those atrocities. His solution would be, of course, to not notice any atrocities or, at the very least, to ignore those of Israel.

Look, people have their political awakening at different times. They didn’t listen when Yemen was briefly a topic. Congo was never a topic. It is the right thing to do to get Israel to stop what it is doing. It is wrong to stop there. But let’s take one thing at a time.

An empathy toward the Palestinians is a good start for a generation we’d thought had lost that capacity.

You can also go ahead and express empathy for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who’ve been uprooted by their own government’s murderous policies. You can empathize with an Israeli population that is now suffering existential fear because of those selfsame policies. You can empathize with the families of those innocents killed on October 7th.

But you can’t do only that. You can’t just see the suffering on one side and not acknowledge the suffering on the other, not if you’re interested in a long-term solution. Short term, though? Yeah, Israel has to stop bombing. This is ridiculous. Nothing good can even begin to happen as long as that goes on. The protesters are right that there needs to be a longer-lasting ceasefire.