Complex and Simple

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is—it cannot be said too often—historically complicated. Too complicated to lend itself easily to being boiled down into signs or slogans—which makes the proliferation of signs and slogans in this conflict especially frustrating. 

But some things about this conflict are actually remarkably simple: such as that no one, on either side, can justify the killing or persecution of civilians. And we shouldn't let people invoke the complexity of the historical circumstances to disguise this truth—to cloak the indefensible. 

I was thinking about this because I was listening to the latest episode of the Ezra Klein podcast. His guest this week was an Israeli hawk close to the Netanyahu government. He advocates for a quasi-permanent Israeli occupation of parts of the Gaza Strip, so as to re-educate a new generation of Palestinians in "Western values"—beyond the reach of Hamas or PA control. 

When presented with this "educational reform" program as a comprehensive solution to the conflict—Klein gently asks whether the ideology they are taught in schools (abhorrent as it may be) is really the primary root of current Palestinian resentment against Israel. 

How much of this feeling comes from school—Klein asks—as opposed to "lived experience"? As in: things like having to pass through military checkpoints as a daily part of life under occupation; or the fact that almost everyone in Gaza at this point knows family members or friends who were killed in Israeli bombings over the two-year war stemming from October 7. 

As soon as he makes this point, his guest breathlessly interjects: "Perhaps it was a bad idea to massacre Jews." 

Klein—at this point in the conversation—is still just trying to get all the arguments and ideas on the table. So, he declines to take the bait of this provocative statement. Instead, he tries to find common ground. "It was a bad idea to massacre Jews," Klein says (roughly), "I don't disagree with you there. Not just strategically bad, but morally wrong as well." 

I understand why Klein didn't want to be drawn off at this preliminary stage of the discussion into a heated argument over civilian casualties in Gaza. He didn't want the whole podcast to be derailed before they'd even gotten to the substance of his guest's ideas. 

Still, it's regrettable he didn't push back at this stage; since his guest's statement—while inarguably true—completely misses the point. 

After all: the point is that many of the people killed in Gaza over the last two years had nothing to do with massacring Jews. While it was certainly a "bad idea"—indeed, an inhuman atrocity—it wasn't their idea, and they didn't do it. 

Indeed, many of them were children—infants—who didn't even live long enough to learn the meaning of words like "massacre" or "Jews," before they were burned to death in an explosion, or buried in a collapsing building and suffocated in rubble. 

I'd have exactly the same reaction, by the way, if Klein had had a pro-Palestinian activist on his show, and when Klein had said something about the horrors of October 7, the guest had leapt in to retort: "Perhaps it was a bad idea to have a fifty-year military occupation and build an apartheid state." 

To that argument (which plenty have made), I would also say: you can't collectively punish a civilian population for the actions of their leaders. 

You can't justify killing young people at an outdoor music festival, or families in their homes, or immigrant day laborers on a collective farm, just because you object to what their politicians or military officials decided to do—particularly when many of the victims were too young to have had the slightest knowledge or understanding of those decisions. 

As Thomas Hardy once put it, in Tess of the d'Urbervilles: "though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend the matter."

Of course—some pro-Palestinian activists—at least of the extreme fringe—would object at this point: but Israeli civilians aren't innocent. They voted and keep voting for politicians like Netanyahu. 

Klein's guest makes this same argument in reverse. Palestinians in Gaza can't wash their hands of what Hamas did, he says (or at least, strongly implies). They voted for them in the enclave's first open election after the Israeli withdrawal. 

The logic on both sides, then, is the same: there is no such thing as a civilian population on the other side. 

Each side has its long list of righteous grievances against the other, for which they consider them collectively responsible. 

On the Palestinian side, they say: there are five million people in the West Bank living under permanent military occupation right now, at the hands of a country in which they enjoy no rights of citizenship or political representation. That makes this system of government a dictatorship, not a democracy—at least as it applies to them. That makes this situation apartheid. 

They say: Israeli bombings killed at least thirty or forty people in Gaza over the last two years—mostly civilians—for every Israeli citizen who was killed on October 7. Where is the proportionality or justice in that? Where is the moral equivalence? 

They are not wrong. 

On the Israeli side, they say (and Klein's guest says): Israelis were ready for peace two decades ago—and Palestinian leadership—including the supposed "moderates" in the PA—brazenly sabotaged it. They green-lit suicide attacks on Israeli civilians at the very moment when the latter had been ready to embrace a two-state solution. To this day, the PA maintains a "pay to slay" system incentivizing terrorist attacks against Israel. 

And that's only in the "moderate" West Bank. Over in Gaza, the Israeli government—at great cost and sacrifice—deployed its own forces to voluntarily evacuate Jewish settlements in the enclave two decades ago—as a good faith overture to make peace and heal the conflict. Immediately afterwards, Hamas came to power. It has been firing rockets and trying to kill Israeli civilians ever since. That was the thanks the Israeli people got for pulling out settlements and leaving Gaza to its own people. 

They are not wrong either. 

Therein lies the "complexity" of the situation. There is essentially no faction left in the conflict at this point with clean hands. The Israeli peace movement is essentially dead at this point. The Palestinian Authority may be an improvement on Hamas, but they have their own history of killings civilians.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government is imposing a form of apartheid in the West Bank. When confronted with this fact, Klein's guest retorts that people might have viewed South Africa's apartheid struggle very differently if, after signing a peace agreement with de Klerk, Mandela had given the go-ahead to a campaign of suicide bombings targeting white civilians. 

In a sense, he has a point: Mandela would have been a much less sympathetic figure in that scenario. 

But in another sense, his point is irrelevant. No matter how unsympathetic Palestinian leadership may be (and they are, to me, quite unsympathetic, even on the PA side)—apartheid is still a crime under international law. It doesn't become legal and morally defensible merely because it happens to be inflicted against people whose political leaders make criminal decisions. (In other words, even in the alternative universe that Klein's guest described—my reaction wouldn't be: "okay, I guess South Africa gets to keep its apartheid regime forever.)

The reason apartheid is still a crime—regardless of the actions of PA leadership—is that it affects a civilian population, including children, who had nothing to do with the actions of their leaders. 

This is the part of the conflict that is not so "complex" after all—that is, indeed, remarkably simple. You can't kill, exile, starve, maim, permanently disenfranchise, or systematically discriminate against a whole group of people, based merely on a collective attribution of guilt to their whole ethnic, religious, or racial identity. 

That is a point that is not at all "complex." That is a point on which the "law," to borrow a phrase from Vachel Lindsay, is "clear as crystal." Targeting non-combatants is illegal. Apartheid is illegal. Forced expulsion, withholding of humanitarian aid, and the use of hunger as a weapon of war against a civilian population are illegal. 

Oh, both sides of this conflict are full of instances in which the other violated all these rules, of course. Each is happy to point out the crimes of the other, and thereby to say that their cause—and their cause alone—is just. 

They forget the timeless truth that the poet Stephen Spender affirmed: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent / As sacred trust."