There’s a civil war, though not a very civil one, that’s been going on in the southern Levant at least since 1948. Let’s see if we can identify the combatants. But first a disclaimer. Any attempt to define the parties is going to invoke categories that will die the death of a thousand qualifications. Can this be avoided? No, because they’re all (what Ludwig Wittgenstein has called) cluster concepts. Not unlike “What is a woman?”, there are no necessary and sufficient conditions that will answer the question, What is an Israeli? Or a Palestinian, or a Jew, or a Zionist, or a settler, or a colonist, or a combatant, or occupation, or oppression, or genocide, or resistance … Still, we all have a sense of what we’re talking about or we couldn’t talk about it. So let’s. Talk about it, that is.

Let’s just say that by Palestine we mean the area of the Levant between the river and the sea in the east and west respectively, and between Lebanon to the north and Egypt to the southwest. And let’s just say that by the Palestinians we mean those who lived there prior to 1948, and those born to those who lived there prior to 1948. Well no, because that would include Jews. And to call Jews Palestinians would be just too confusing. So let’s make it those other than Jews who lived there prior to 1948 and those born to them.

By Israel, in turn, we mean the political jurisdiction that established itself in 1948 in the western parts of Palestine in the wake of the (to some degree proxy) war between Jews on the one side and Palestinians on the other. And so by an Israeli we mean a citizen of that jurisdiction. Well no, because that would include those Palestinians caught behind the ceasefire line. They’re Israeli citizens, to be sure, but just like in Animal Farm, where all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others, not all citizens enjoy the same privileges of citizenship. And Palestinians clearly do not. To be fair, the same was true under Jim Crow in America, and for centuries women weren’t enfranchised in most western democracies. So again, just to avoid confusion, let’s just say an Israeli is a citizen of Israel but is not a Palestinian.

Stipulating what’s a Jew is notoriously difficult. The best we can do – because it will have to do – is definition by enumeration. For example, I’m on the list. But I haven’t the faintest idea how I got there. Neither do any of us, insistences to the contrary notwithstanding. But whoever we are, all Jews are not on one side of this war any more than all Moslems or Arabs or Palestinians are on the other side of it. That said, there are few if any Jews on the Palestinian side, and there are few if any Palestinians on the Jewish side. This is because talk is cheap. Though we self-loathing Jews are on the side of the Palestinians, we’re not actually fighting on their side. And even though there are Palestinians who are not on the side of their brothers and sisters, it would be imprudent for the IDF to expect them to fight against their own brothers and sisters.

Israeli Palestinians aside, then, whereas every American has the right to bear arms, every Israeli has a duty to. And that means that the unconscionable targeting of non-combatants – or at least the Just War Tradition tells us it’s unconscionable – is much more difficult for the Palestinian side in this war, because – and this is especially true in a war that can never end – there really aren’t any. There aren’t any Israeli non-combatants, or at least there are precious few, because every Israeli toddler will have a machine gun slung on his back two decades hence. This is not so of every Palestinian toddler, though the IDF increases the number of which it will be true with every Palestinian woman and child it ‘collaterally’ targets now. But I digress.

Depending what counts as a Jew, and who’s doing the counting, there are about eighteen million of us in the world today, of which about six million live in Israel and the rest remain in diaspora. Of these eighteen million all told, most, though not all, are Zionists, if by a Zionist is meant someone who believes – and he believes this because of the Shoah – we Jews need a state of our own, presumably the state of Israel, to which we can look for protection come the next pogrom.

If on the other hand a Zionist is a Jew who lives in Israel and takes himself to have a right, perhaps even an obligation, to be there – and that anyone who is not a Jew does not – then whereas that used to be about 70% of the Israeli population, post-October 7th that’s risen to about 90%.

So who is the Palestinian resistance resisting? It’s not the Jews, at least as such. It’s not the Israelis, at least as such. It’s the Zionists. That’s why they call the IDF the Zionist armed forces. It’s because in their minds, and they’re probably right, the IDF has a blatantly Zionist agenda.

But if it’s the Zionists on the one side, who’s on the other? Certainly not all Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority that governs the West Bank is a Quisling, i.e. collaborationist administration. It’s been increasingly working with the IDF to combat the resistance in the West Bank. If the PA were ever overthrown its leaders would be hanging from lamp posts. So any genuine resistance has been confined to Hamas, the anything-but-collaborationist government in Gaza.

Gaza is an open-air concentration camp. How so? Because Israel controls who and what goes in and who and what comes out. And it enters and kills or arrests whom it wills at will.

It was Hamas that planned and carried out the prison break on October 7, 2023. To call the IDF’s response to that prison break a war is a bit of a misnomer. It’s been, for all intents and purposes, just another collective reprisal. Just another Ledice. Its stated objective has been the ‘surgical removal’ of Hamas. But it’s been known from the outset that, save by complete genocide, resistance to occupation is not the kind of thing that can be removed, surgically or otherwise. And in fact, as of this writing, Hamas has recruited more fighters than it’s lost in these fifteen months of ‘surgery’.

Not surprisingly. Given the chances of dying as a civilian and dying as a soldier, the smart money – not just the moral money but the smart money – goes with the latter. So no, the objective of the ‘war’ was never the eradication of Hamas. It was, it is, the targeting of the civilian population to bring pressure on its government to accede to the IDF’s demand. And what is that demand? That the resistance withdraw its demand to end the occupation. Which was, to be fair, mutatis mutandis, precisely what the October 7th prison break was all about. So now let’s see how each side fared.

Assuming the ceasefire goes ahead on Sunday, the resistance will have taken about 2000 Zionist lives, at a cost, between Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, of about 50,000 Palestinians, and another 110,000 permanently maimed. From the Israeli perspective, that’s an improvement over the kill ratio as averaged over the past several decades. And so some critics of Hamas might judge these 50,000 lives to have been squandered. But that may be too quick. The Zionist enterprise has taken a serious hit in public opinion over this Ledice, a hit which, in the long run – even if only the very long run – may prove to have been worth the sacrifice. Jews and Moslems alike believe that God works through history. And that He’s not a bean counter. He certainly wasn’t a bean counter in Auschwitz. So why would He be a bean counter in Gaza?

The Israelis are going to get a few corpses back, and a few dozen walking wounded, but at the cost of releasing about eighteen hundred of their hostages. Why isn’t this a victory for Hamas? Because these prisoners are going to be released into the West Bank, where they can be, and will be, re-captured and re-imprisoned at the occupier’s leisure. The wholesale slaughter of the lambs will stop, but it will continue in piecemeal just as it has for the last seventy-seven years. And the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank will carry on at its current accelerated pace, followed by the incremental annexations that have become routine since the war of ’67.

In every battle there are winners and losers. But more often than not what makes the winner the winner is not that it won what the other lost. It’s that it lost less than what the other lost. There are 50,000 pregnant women in Palestine today. Two decades from now half of the children born this year will be young men of fighting age. And the lion’s share of them will be itching for a fight to avenge the 50,000 that remain to be avenged.

For their part, the Israelis have lost the moral high ground. They lost some of it when they replaced ethnic cleansing with occupation in ’67. They thought they could claim some of it back after October 7th, but they squandered it, and then some, when they went Ledice. Hindsight is 20/20. But sometimes so is foresight. Ledice returned very poor dividends for the Germans. My crystal ball tells me It’s not going to pay any better for the Israelis.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: annexation, ethnic cleansing, Gaza, Hamas, IDF, Israel, Jews, Lavant, Ledice, occupation, October 7th, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Six Day War, West Bank, Zionists