Member Newsletter
November 13th marked our 23rd anniversary at TPM. During these past 23 years I’ve managed to write as much as I have because I kept to a simple approach, which was following whatever aspect of US politics and political culture interested me most. This worked because it combined the exertion and mental energy most put toward ‘work’ with the off-hours hobbies, life, downtime and, if possible, fun we do outside of work. One might also call this obsession. But it worked in terms of productivity, focus and drive. Indeed, for those who enjoy the Editors’ Blog one of the things that makes it compelling is following the idiosyncrasies of my interests and particular storylines I latch on to. Or, so many are saying …
But over the last couple months that pattern has shifted for me in that my mind has been heavily preoccupied by something that isn’t US politics. The Israel-Hamas war has a clear bearing on US politics. Some people think it could turn the 2024 presidential election, though I suspect its salience will decrease dramatically over the coming months, as most big news stories do. At the moment it’s the dominant national news story in the US and has been for weeks. But it’s not really a US story. More importantly my interest in it goes far beyond its bearings on US politics. So I’ve been aware that my focus has shifted from things at the heart of US politics toward subject matter that is, in many ways parochial, communal and personal. And that’s not what TPM is about, at least not in its current iteration.
And it’s not like we’re in a slow period in American politics. But there we are.
But let me complicate that a bit slightly. One point I’ve referenced a few times in writing about the Israel-Hamas war is that it’s tricky to differentiate what’s really about that war happening on another continent and what’s really about politics in the US. I don’t mean just questions about how this conflict might affect the 2024 election. But I’ve had a very strong and, in some ways, transformative reaction to the protest politics happening in reaction to this crisis within the US, about the nature of the conflict itself, about its history, about what’s possible moving forward.
But in a very real way that’s not what’s actually happening over there. This is a permutation of that conflict happening within the US, both literally and figuratively. It’s an argument among spectators. Certainly some people on both sides have personal connections to the conflict or ideological ones. But it’s still mostly an argument among spectators. And I certainly include myself in that as much as anyone else.
For me the dynamics of that debate have shifted pretty dramatically. For years I’ve been arguing that the solution to this conflict is partition, two states — a pretty conventional liberal Zionist viewpoint. That prospect has become increasingly elusive both because of ongoing settlement in the West Bank and also because support for the whole concept has fallen dramatically on both sides of the conflict. But what we’ve seen coming to the fore over the last six weeks is an argument in which that whole idea is basically irrelevant. It’s certainly not new but newly prominent in the public conversation. That’s one in which the entire 150 year story is poured into the construct of “settler colonialism.” in which Zionism and the population that formed the state of Israel isn’t really any different from the colonists in Rhodesia or French Indochina. There is the “indigenous” population and the “settler” population and the former has to drive out the latter at least in terms of political power, if not literally, to put things to right. In both much of the protest narrative in the United States and also Hamas’s own messaging, the clock must be set back to 1948. (I don’t equate the two. But they agree on this formulation.)
This is a highly ideological vision which compresses and distorts the entire history until it is all but unrecognizable. The history and identity of Jewish people — in the Middle East, in Europe and in Palestine — becomes basically irrelevant. Does it matter? It depends.
In any protracted national dispute such as this one, each side comes to the conflict with its own sets of narratives and aspirations. Neither side will convince the other, though they can perhaps understand the other side’s story on its own terms. It is also one of the most common attributes of such conflicts that the losing or weaker party often holds the most maximalist narratives and aspirations. It is almost part of communal identity. Deficiencies of power in the present are compensated with claims of grandeur and power in the future. This is one of the many reasons why the stronger power usually has to take the first step. Resolving things requires setting most of those narratives and aspirations to the side to arrive at some way to live together in the present. But if that’s the baseline set of assumptions then no resolution is really possible at all. And it throws someone like me back on what are really a set of absolutist formulations. It’s been remarkable to me, in discussions I’ve had in recent weeks, how some of the most ideologically “progressive” voices so easily find themselves endorsing the expulsion of about six or seven million people from the country they were born in.
One of the features of this variant of the “settler colonialism” construct is that any resistance by definition is justified. The purpose of this is to collapse any idea that the current round of violence began with or was triggered by the October 7th attacks. One side of the conflict (Israel) is incapable of acting in self-defense because they are inherently the aggressor — by definition and in all cases. The ubiquitous claims of “genocide” are fruit of the same totalizing ideology. As argued a few weeks ago, claims that what is happening today in Gaza is “genocide” not only conflict with the most basic definitions of the word and the relevant parts of international law. They amount to a premeditated slander, one among many examples of equating Zionism, for all its flaws, with some of the greatest tormentors and torments Jews faced in the 20th century. It is understandable that some people unfamiliar with the details and definitions may gullibly buy into that formulation given the now lopsided number of fatalities on each side. But it is worth noting that the “genocide” claims began in the first 48 hours after October 7th, when the distribution was reversed.
If these are the terms of the debate, if these are the stakes, then no settlement is possible. But this is also an illustrative example of a case in which some real grounding in history is indispensable to navigating the present. History doesn’t settle protracted conflicts. One side never convinces the other. We each prioritize different aspects of the past to make sense of it. This is inevitable. But grappling with history still complicates the enthusiasms and amnesia of sloganeering and propaganda and, in that way, cracks open spaces for, if not compromise, then moments of mutual understanding.
That’s far from where we are at the moment.