Hunger and Fear

 The New York Times reported yesterday that Israeli authorities have started to warn internally that Gaza is at imminent risk of starvation. This is, of course, no more than the easily-foreseeable consequence of the Israeli government deliberately shutting off all access to humanitarian aid in the enclave. And since the goal of this action is to put pressure on Hamas, it's pretty unmistakeable by this point that we are dealing here with an effort to collectively punish a civilian population—a war crime, in short. 

What excuse exactly could one make for Israel's actions? To be sure, Hamas shares in the guilt here. They have proven themselves willing time and again to sacrifice their own civilian population in order to cling to power. They can and should end this tomorrow by agreeing to release the remaining hostages. 

One can also observe that the surrounding Arab states are no better than Israel on this issue. Jordan has balked at following through on its pledge to evacuate thousands of Palestinians for medical treatment—out of fear that they might stay in the country. Israel, then, is not the only regional government imposing a blockade on Gaza. If the enclave has been treated for the last decade or more as an "open-air prison," the surrounding Arab states have also helped to make it such. 

But the crimes of others hardly excuse the behavior of Israel and its U.S. allies—particularly since the victims here are civilians who did nothing wrong—indeed, who have suffered under Hamas more than anyone, and who have even dared their lives in recent weeks to protest its rule. There is simply no excuse one can offer on heaven or earth for Israel deliberately punishing a civilian population. 

Watching Gaza slowly starve under this blockade—reading the reports of people confined to one low-nutrition meal a day and wandering the enclave for hours in search of life's necessities for their children—one feels indeed that we are witnessing a horror out of 1930s Spain. I say this not because the political analogy is perfect. Hamas is quite obviously no Spanish republic; indeed, if anything, they would be the Franco in this scenario—a bloodthirsty theocracy indifferent to civilian life. 

But the suffering of Gaza's civilians nonetheless sounds a great deal like what the civilians of Spain endured a little less than a century ago—it calls to mind David Siqueiros's haunting image of the conflict: "Echoes of a Scream." I've been reading Hugh MacDiarmid's book-length poem about Spain's conflict, The Battle Continues, and I couldn't help but think of conditions in Gaza when I came to these lines. Here, to be sure, are echoes of Israel's total blockade on humanitarian aid in the Strip: 

... one segment of humanity
Was passing through inhuman agonies of hunger and fear
While decent people the world over were prevented
From keeping that thinning stream of food flowing
To maintain life and proclaim
The continuity of simple human charity.
Where is the world that answered the call of Belgium?

I hear people say: But why criticize Israel when China is doing things just as evil to the Uighurs, or India to the Kashmiris? Well, so much the worse for China and India. We should indeed criticize their governments just as loudly. Shame on us if we don't. But let us level up—to defend human rights everywhere—rather than to shrug and say we don't care about them anywhere, just because there are places in the world where they continue to be violated with impunity. 

I hear people tell me: Israeli nationalism is no different from any other form of nationalism. And again, I whole-heartedly agree. So much the worse for nationalism. Where in all the world has nationalism ever shown itself to be a good idea? As Ernest Gellner pointed out in his classic monograph on the subject: nationalism everywhere tends toward violence, displacement, and dispossession, for the simple reason that political boundaries never, in practice, coincide with ethnic ones. 

I don't say that Israel has no right to exist as a sovereign state. Nor do I retract one iota of the support I have expressed—in principle—for their justified attempts to remove Hamas. Israel was entitled to the world's solidarity after the trauma of October 7. And they responded to this attack no worse than most industrialized states would respond to terrorism—which is to say, quite horribly, and with blatant disregard for human rights (viz. Russia in Chechnya, or the U.S. after 9/11). 

That, of course, is another Tu quoque one sometimes hears: "But Israel is just doing what the U.S. did in Iraq!" Okay, well, again—I don't disagree. So much the worse for our war in Iraq. 

I don't say, to repeat, that Israel needs to dissolve itself or somehow undo the project of Zionism. Quite to the contrary. To try to reverse this process of migration would itself be an ethnic cleansing, on an inhuman scale—once again in the name of the evil lie of territorial nationalism. 

Israel, then, has a right to exist—most of all because its existence as a state is already a fait accompli, and any effort to reverse the history that gave it birth would entail unjustifiable mass suffering for the innocent. What Israel doesn't have a right to do is to indefinitely occupy and exercise effective state control over large swathes of territory while at the same time denying the people of those territories any vote in the government that affects their lives. 

There are two ways, then, for Israel to resolve the situation—either one of which is consistent with democratic values. 

One: they could make the people of Gaza and the West Bank into citizens, and given them a vote in the Knesset. 

But we all know they don't want to do this. Because there is a real chance the Palestinians might actually win an election. 

So that brings us to option two: they can pull their settlements out of the West Bank and recognize Palestine as an independent country. 

But this, too, involves a population transfer on a large scale, which once again reeks of the kinds of ethnic cleansing, violence and forced displacement that we have already condemned as part of the evil of territorial nationalism. (Note here, then, that I am rejecting Palestinian Arab nationalism as well as Israeli nationalism. Both subscribe to the chimera of matching political borders to ethnic ones—a will-o'-the-wisp that has beguiled states all over the globe into the swamps of mass murder and atrocity.)

So there appears to be no ideal option. But Israel needs to pick one. I am more agnostic than I used to be as to which one they should choose. Both seem to be fraught with peril. So, indeed, I don't envy them the decision. But choose they must. 

They can go with either possibility—either leave the West Bank, or grant the Palestinians citizenship. 

What they cannot do—at least within the bounds of conscience and international law—is to indefinitely condemn a group of people to second-class citizenship under a military occupation that has no prospect of ever ending. That's what they've been doing in the West Bank for fifty years. And—particularly since there is no pretense at this point on the part of the Israeli government that they are even trying to end the situation—it truly does meet the definition of apartheid. 

It's time, then, to choose. "Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide," as James Russell Lowell once put it. This is Israel's. They can choose to remain a democratic state. But that requires either granting the Palestinians citizenship or ending the occupation of their land. 

Or, one supposes, they can choose neither, and remain an apartheid state indefinitely. But if that happens, they eventually lose any right to expect to remain an accepted member of the community of nations. They will have banished themselves by their own actions beyond the limits of democratic states. 

Once there, they are free to proclaim all they want: "Well, China does it too, to the Uighurs! Modi's India does it too, to the Kashmiris!" To which we say: precisely. All the worse for you, if you can claim no better company than that.