Deluge by Jamie Stern-Weiner;

Author:Jamie Stern-Weiner;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: POL059000
ISBN: 9781682196205
Publisher: Lightning Source (Tier 4)
Published: 2024-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Mouin Rabbani is co-editor of Jadaliyya and host of its Connections podcast.

“Gaza has become a graveyard for children”

—UNICEF

10

Into the Abyss

Nathan J. Brown

Hamas’s dramatic and unexpected offensive on October 7 thrust Israel-Palestine rapidly forward—but less toward a clear outcome and more toward deepening conflict. The immediate effect on each individual actor was to retreat back into a bubble. Hamas showed that it could dominate the public sphere among Palestinians; it could also capture global attention but at the cost of exposing Palestinians to unprecedented levels of violence and isolation. Israelis endorsed any actions that responded harshly and abandoned efforts to link short-term tactics to a dispassionate calculation of long-term consequences. If each actor fell backward, however, the effect on the inhabitants of Israel-Palestine was to shove them onward into an abyss in which—to paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit—hell is other peoples.

Israelis and Palestinians rushed ahead not merely impulsively but with moral blindness as well. The moral blindness should be easy to see—except that blindness is about not being able to see. Hamas’s tactical brilliance was harnessed to a set of atrocities directed against civilians that were collectively far bloodier than Deir Yassin. For others, the immense cruelty of the Israeli closure of Gaza had long dropped from view—a closure whose origin predates Hamas’s control of the territory and was clearly far more effective at impoverishing two million people than making Hamas militarily incapable.

I make these observations not in an effort to draw up moral balance sheets or assign culpability, but simply to observe that very few observers and none of the participants are able to keep more than one party’s sins in view. No sense of shared humanity has driven either understanding or action. And indeed, it seems that nobody is driving events now—or rather that those driving events have no realistic path to follow that will deliver a better world to anyone.

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