[Israel’s insistence on “destroying Hamas” by causing mass
civilian casualties and dispossession in Gaza is rooted in this
longer-held desire to make “the Palestinian question” disappear.]
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‘LET US NOT HURRY TO OUR DOOM’  
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Seth Anziska
November 9, 2023
New York Review of Books
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*
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*
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*
*
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_ Israel’s insistence on “destroying Hamas” by causing mass
civilian casualties and dispossession in Gaza is rooted in this
longer-held desire to make “the Palestinian question” disappear. _


Residents of West Beirut crossing a street demolished by Israeli
shelling, Lebanon, July 24, 1982, (Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images)

 

In the aftermath of her country’s 1982 war in Lebanon, the Israeli
poet Dahlia Ravikovitch tried to represent the suffering it had
caused. For the past month, three lines from her poem “Get Out of
Beirut” have been ringing in my ears: 

How many children do you have?
How many children did you have?
It’s hard to keep the children safe in times like these.

It has been difficult to think deeply about the current war amid so
many competing expressions of communal rage, more difficult still to
hold multiple horrors at once—to grieve both the young people
slaughtered at the music festival near Kibbutz Re’im on October 7
and the entire families lying under rubble in Rimal and Khan Younis.
Like many people close to me, I have spent the past month struggling
to comprehend the enormity and speed of the moment: communing with
colleagues and friends who lost loved ones in Hamas’s gruesome
October 7 attacks, which killed over 1,400 Israeli soldiers and
civilians; worrying about the fate of the roughly 240 hostages and
clinging to the hope of their safe release; communing with colleagues
and friends as they lose loved ones to settler violence
[[link removed]] in
the West Bank and to the Israeli army’s relentless bombing campaign
in Gaza, which at the time of this writing has killed 10,328
Palestinians—including 4,237 children—and continues to kill more.

To work as a historian in a time of war comes with its own form of
fear and grief, especially writing about massacres while new massacres
are unfolding. In the days after presenting research on a book project
about Israel’s 1982 war in Lebanon—exploring how the overreach of
the invasion transformed regional politics, global perceptions of
Zionism, and the Palestinian struggle for rights—I sit in my office
and learn that Israel has inaugurated its ground operations in Gaza by
cutting all communications from the Strip. Days later I leave the
library after looking at archival photos of the bombing of the PLO
Research Center in Beirut by an Israeli-backed militant group and
glance at the news, which reports that Israel has bombed the Jabalia
refugee camp and Palestinian residents are pulling scores of bodies
from the wreckage. Historians are always trying to look backward to
make sense of the present, but when do we sound the alarm? What can
understanding the past achieve when there seems to be an insatiable
drive to repeat it?

*

Like many in my profession, I always wonder what people were thinking
in real time during moments of crisis. Over the last month that
curiosity has become sickening, visceral. In the history of the
encounter between Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, these have been
among the most significant weeks since Israel’s creation as a state
and the Nakba of 1948. Hamas’s attacks, which targeted military
bases, civilian towns, and kibbutzim, killed more Israelis in a single
day than were killed in the entire five years of the second intifada
or in most major Arab–Israeli wars. Their significance lay less in
their capacity, sophistication, or scale than in the fact that they
reversed—in a matter of hours—the underlying assumption of modern
political Zionism from the nineteenth century to the post-Oslo age:
that a Jewish state could offer protection for its citizens without
resolving the status of the non-Jewish population under the state’s
indefinite control.

The resulting panic and humiliation of Israel’s government and
military surely contributed to the ferocity of their response. The
scale and devastation of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza has been
staggering. Three weeks ago, over 1.1 million residents in the north
of Gaza were ordered to leave their homes and head south, with no way
out and nowhere to go. The World Health Organization has warned of an
“imminent public health catastrophe.” Israel’s leaders continue
to imply that cutting off electricity and fuel to more than two
million people will solve the “problem of Hamas,” that military
force will eliminate the political motives that undergird violence,
even in the abhorrent and illegal forms it took on October 7, and that
another mass ethnic cleansing will solve the problems instigated by
the partial ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians that accompanied
Israel’s creation.

Eliminationist language and false analogies: neither are in short
supply now. In Jewish circles close to me, far too close, I hear talk
of needing to wipe out all Palestinians, to level Gaza, to embrace
retribution and revenge. For these relatives and acquaintances,
Hamas’s attacks stand for a primordial Palestinian Jew-hatred and
the scourge of an age-old antisemitism. There is a straight line, in
this way of thinking, from the Kishinev Pogrom to the massacre at
Kibbutz Be’eri, from Nazi violence in Germany to the attacks on Kfar
Aza. On October 28, in his press conference laying out Israel’s
retaliatory intentions, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cited a
passage from Deuteronomy, urging the Israelites to “remember what
Amalek did to you.” Those of us who studied I Samuel in Jewish day
schools know that he was referring to the Biblical nation of Amalek,
the symbolic power of their merciless attack against the Israelites
wandering in the desert after their Exodus from Egypt, and God’s
commandment to King Saul to destroy everything they had: “Spare no
one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and
sheep, camels and donkeys!” These are analogies enlisted to justify
a thirst for vengeance not only against Hamas but against the
Palestinian people as a whole—an impulse to kill without end.

Hamas’s attack may have been no less enraging than such tales from
religious scripture or the state-sanctioned Cossack assaults against
defenseless Jews in the Pale of Settlement, but it was produced by
very different forces: it was an attack by a nationalist, Islamist
armed party against a powerful state that maintains control over the
fate of the Palestinian people. Scholars of Jewish history have worked
for decades to understand how the structural conditions of diasporic
life changed when Israel’s creation drew many Jewish people back
into modern history as agents of their own future, asserting sovereign
dominance, maintaining a monopoly of force with a strong and capable
army, controlling a state, occupying territory, and carrying out
violence of their own—and what those changes meant for the
collective rights of the state’s non-Jewish inhabitants.

After the conquest of 1967 in particular, redemptive Israeli rhetoric
stressed the messianic possibilities of territorial acquisition and
the sanctity of military power. The Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu
Leibowitz long ago recognized the danger of such ideas. “This is
latter-day Sabbateanism,” he remarked in a 1974 interview, “a
modern incarnation of false prophecy, a prostitution of the Jewish
religion in the interest of chauvinism and lust for power.” Soon
after Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip,
the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights, Leibowitz understood the
implications of the occupation: “The only concern of the monstrosity
called ‘the undivided land of Israel’ would be the maintenance of
its system of rule and administration.”

A great deal has been written about the Israeli “decision not to
decide” on the fate of these territories and the Palestinians living
there. Many diverse critics insisted that Israel’s extension of
military power would only serve to catalyze violence and lead to
further dehumanization, that it would be no substitute for political
engagement. The failed “peace process” of the 1990s and the
suicide bombings of the early 2000s—when several Palestinian
factions, including Hamas and Fatah, targeted civilians and soldiers
across Israel and the occupied territories—intensified the
country’s right-wing political turn. Living in the West Bank at the
time, I remember the fear unleashed by the attacks and the scale of
the mass incursions by the Israeli army that followed. But there was
also a deeper militarization of thinking, presaging wider trends in
the region and the world. In the Hebrew press after September 11,
commentators invoked the emerging American “war on terror” as
something Israelis had long been fighting. Hamas then was al-Qaeda; it
had to be neutralized; after its democratic election in 2006, the
movement had to be subject to measures of regime change, just like in
Iraq and Afghanistan.

During these years Israel’s leaders also refined strategies for
sidelining Palestinian national aspirations, quashing legal efforts in
international forums like the UN Security Council or the International
Criminal Court to instill accountability and suppressing alternative
forms of protest, including peaceful resistance like the longstanding
protests in the West Bank village of Bilin and the 2018 Great March of
Return in Gaza, where Israelis used live ammunition to kill hundreds
of largely unarmed
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and maim thousands. More recently, Netanyahu has been encouraged by a
new culture of international permissiveness, led by the United States.
The logic of the US-mediated Abraham Accords in 2020 was that Israel
could pursue normalization with various Arab states without any
meaningful movement on Palestinian self-determination.

Meanwhile the expansion of the settlements, the entrenchment of a
bureaucracy for controlling the Palestinian population, the corrosive
ramifications of dual legal systems for Jews and Palestinians, and the
explicit calls for further expulsions of Palestinians from their homes
have only accelerated. Before he took office as minister of finance,
the far-right settler leader Bezalel Smotrich wrote a startling,
detailed text
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“Israel’s Decisive Plan,” a blueprint for enacting a second
Nakba and vanquishing Palestinian national identity. “It’s a
mistake,” Smotrich told Palestinian members of the Knesset in 2021,
“that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out
in 1948.” Recently the Israeli news website _Local
Call_ published
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Israeli Ministry of Intelligence document from October 13 that it
reports “is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the
Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai
Peninsula.”

Israel’s insistence on “destroying Hamas” by causing mass
civilian casualties and dispossession in Gaza is rooted in this
longer-held desire to make “the Palestinian question” disappear.
The scholar Raz Segal has called
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currently being unleashed in Gaza a “textbook case of genocide,”
while the historian Omer Bartov has warned
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genocide is right there”—shocking turns of phrase for all of us
who made sense of that term through the experience of European Jewry
in the twentieth century. But Palestinian and Arab writers have long
warned against the current attempt to eviscerate the Palestinian
people, as have prophetic critics within the Jewish tradition and
dissenting voices inside Israel itself. By disavowing the moral
consequences of state power and sovereignty, Israel’s leaders and
many within Israeli society—as well as staunch supporters
abroad—refuse to admit that they can be both victims and
perpetrators. 

*

We might be better equipped to confront impoverished and lachrymose
narratives about the Israeli past if we make greater room for
contingency in our historical thinking. Moments of profound rupture
like this one have implications that take decades to see. In the years
that followed Israel’s creation, traditional Zionist historiography
shifted from focusing on Jewish powerlessness to thinking about the
responsibilities of a Jewish state and army; after a surprise attack
from Arab militaries in 1973, the state’s lack of preparedness
shifted revisionist scholarly attention toward Israel’s failures of
diplomatic imagination.

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Coastal buildings in West Beirut after being struck by Israeli bombs,
August 4, 1982  Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images

I have been thinking recently of another such moment. Last summer was
the fortieth anniversary of the first Lebanon War, which began in June
1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon with the stated aim of targeting
militants from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Even as it
promised a limited incursion, Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s
government had a far more ambitious plan to root out Palestinian
nationalism from Lebanese territory. Soon the army had laid siege to
Beirut as part of its ground invasion and bombing campaign, which in
the southern city of Sidon destroyed entire homes, at least one
hospital, and swathes of Ain al-Hilweh, the country’s largest
Palestinian refugee camp.

The 1982 Lebanon War became what some have called Israel’s Vietnam.
By the end of the first, ten-week phase of the war over 19,000
Lebanese and Palestinian combatants and civilians and 364 Israeli
combatants were dead. The PLO was expelled to Tunis, reconstituting
Palestinian politics both in the diaspora and on the ground in
Palestine, paving the way for the group’s greater international
recognition, including by the United States, and contributing to the
outbreak of the first intifada. South Lebanon was occupied by Israeli
forces and the South Lebanon Army (SLA), which remained there until
Israel withdrew its forces and the SLA collapsed in 2000. Local
opposition militias evolved into Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed
paramilitary organization that in the 1980s emerged as a central
player in the region.

Meanwhile a movement of military refusal emerged in Israel itself,
starting in the opening days of the war, when combat veterans founded
a group called Yesh Gvul (“There Is a Limit”) to advocate for
conscientious objection. The shocking accounts and images of
the Sabra and Shatila massacre
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September 1982—when IDF-backed Phalangist forces murdered between
eight hundred and three thousand Palestinian refugees, including
infants, children, and pregnant women—temporarily pierced support
for Israel within the Jewish diaspora and brought 10 percent of the
Israeli population into the streets. Many began questioning Israel’s
use of force and the eliminationist thinking about Palestinians that
had enabled the violence, while others charged Israel’s critics with
promoting antisemitic blood libels. Despite the PLO’s dispersal, the
Palestinian quest for self-determination intensified. As the CIA’s
National Intelligence Estimate argued in November 1982, “Israel has
been surprised to discover that its military victory has not produced
the expected political dividends and seems to have strengthened its
antagonists’ political hand.”

It was during the 1982 Lebanon War that Israel’s army made its first
entry into an Arab capital, fighting in city blocks and the narrow
streets of refugee camps. As the Hebrew writers Ilana Hammerman and
Irit Gal captured in _From Beirut to Jenin_,

 their slim volume of testimonies from soldiers across infantry,
armored corps, artillery, and the air force, the first Lebanon War was
full of gaping performance failures in the field, war crimes
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intelligence coverups that loosened the military’s ethics and
anticipated its current pervasive culture of impunity.  

The war also established the template for the Israeli saturation
bombing of cities without due regard for civilian life—a precedent
for the collective punishment of the civilian population in the West
Bank during the second intifada and in the Gaza Strip today. In early
August 1982 a young Thomas Friedman, then serving as the _New York
Times _bureau chief in Beirut, cabled his editors to rebuke them for
removing the word “indiscriminate” from a headline describing the
relentless shelling of the city’s western half: “You were afraid
to tell our readers and those who might complain to you that the
Israelis are capable of indiscriminately shelling an entire city.”
At the height of the second intifada, some of the pilots who refused
their orders to bomb schools and hospitals in 1982 invoked their
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in an open letter
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How many of the pilots who have been protesting the Netanyahu
government for months will make the same decision when asked to
destroy civilian targets now?

*

The saturation bombing of Beirut in the summer of 1982 was met with
widespread international condemnation and pointed criticism from the
United States. Among the critics was Ronald Reagan, who wrote in his
diary in late July about the US’s support for a UN ceasefire vote
(15–0) and the deployment of UN observers on the scene: “Israel
will scream about the latter but so be it. The slaughter must stop.”
In another diary entry from August 12, 1982, Reagan wrote:

Met with the news the Israelis delivered the most devastating bomb &
artillery attack on W. Beirut lasting 14 hours. Habib
cabled—desperate—has basic agreement from all parties but can’t
arrange details of P.L.O. withdrawal because of the barrage. King Fahd
called begging me to do something. I told him I was calling P.M. Begin
immediately. And I did—I was angry—I told him it had to stop or
our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word
holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of his war was becoming a
picture of a 7 month old baby with its arms blown off. He told me he
had ordered the bombing stopped—I asked about the artillery fire. He
claimed the P.L.O. had started that & Israeli forces had taken
casualties. End of call. Twenty mins. later he called to tell me
he’d ordered an end to the barrage and pled for our continued
friendship.

Forty years later, such a call would be considered treasonous. Instead
of calming the waters, in the past several weeks the White House,
Brussels, and 10 Downing Street have performed selective gestures of
grief and doubled down on their refusals to rein in Israel’s
actions.

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A survivor of an Israeli airstrike in West Beirut sitting among the
wreckage, August 20, 1982.  Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images

On October 13 the State Department issued directives to staff not to
use the phrases “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to
violence/bloodshed,” or “restoring calm.” The State
Department’s Office of Palestinian Affairs deleted
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tweet condemning the Hamas attack and urging “all sides to refrain
from violence and retaliatory attacks,” replacing it with a
statement of unequivocal condemnation alone. A ministerial aide was
sacked [[link removed]] from Prime
Minister Rishi Sunak’s government for calling for a ceasefire in
Gaza. The British home secretary, Suella Braverman, called
pro-Palestinian demonstrations
[[link removed]] in
London “hate marches,” only to be one-upped by President Biden’s
press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, who compared such protesters
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the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville.

During his visit to Israel and in his subsequent remarks, President
Biden has not only failed to meaningfully contend with Palestinian
death but outright questioned the number of casualties in Gaza, in
comments that ignited fury across the streets of Arab and Western
capitals. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the
truth about how many people are killed,” he told a reporter on
October 25. “I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the
price of waging a war.” On October 13 the President of the European
Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, shook the hand of Israel’s
president, Isaac Herzog, just as he finished saying that “it is an
entire nation out there that is responsible” for Hamas’s attack.
Hundreds of staff members of EU institutions excoriated von der Leyen
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a letter warning that the EU is “losing all credibility and the
position as a fair, equitable and humanist broker.”

It is hard to defend the Biden administration’s actions even on
strictly political grounds. Israel’s operations in Gaza could
provoke a regional war: aside from the dangerous skirmishes on the
Lebanese border, which could open a second military front with
Hezbollah, there have been escalations from other Iranian proxies
across the region, implicating Iraq, Syria, and Yemen; mounting
pressure on Egypt and Jordan to deal with the Palestinians massing at
the Gaza border and under threat of expulsion by Israeli settlers in
the West Bank; and the inevitable fallout across Jewish and Arab
communities outside the Middle East. Failing to prevent a conflict on
that scale would hardly protect Americans abroad and at home.

That members of the Biden administration seem not to see this reality,
or choose to ignore it in a bid to maintain some form of regional or
global hegemony, suggests that its officials lack a basic
understanding of the region’s history and politics. After October 7
the administration’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan,
made hasty post-publication edits
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his latest _Foreign Affairs _essay on US foreign policy, revising
unrealistic platitudes about Biden’s success in the Middle East. As
early as October 15, the US’s ability to act effectively in the
region was eroding
[[link removed]]:
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman kept Secretary of State Antony
Blinken waiting for hours; Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
dismissed any suggestion that his country would take in Palestinians
expelled from the Gaza Strip. In recent weeks scores of State
Department employees have launched
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of the White House in dissent memos, and on October 18 a senior State
Department official who signs off on arms sales resigned
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Biden’s policies. Americans tend to be short on historical thinking,
even given the country’s recent experience in Iraq, but many of them
may soon begin to understand the dangers of a new regional war.

*

In language replicated across Europe, several prominent US
spokespeople have underscored the extent of their support for Israel
by invoking Jewish history and the Holocaust. “I come before you not
only as the United States secretary of state but also as a Jew,”
Blinken told an audience
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to Tel Aviv, citing his stepfather’s experience in the Holocaust as
a reference point for the trauma of October 7. Israeli officials have
drawn the parallel still more sharply: the country’s representative
to the UN, Gilad Erdan, and his staff have started wearing yellow
stars of David to the chamber. But it is clear by now that the
violence being unleashed in Gaza is engendering further ethnic
cleansing, this time against a non-Jewish population. By greenlighting
it, the Biden administration has both linked the US to a new forever
war and enlisted the American public into what Leibowitz—writing in
1968 against religious arguments for annexing the occupied
territories—called the “transformation of Jewish religion into a
camouflage for Israeli nationalism.” It is a conflation that many of
us have studiously tried to untangle.

At minimum, there are discrete, immediate actions we can all take,
including calling for a ceasefire, the allowance of humanitarian aid
into Gaza, and the end of Israel’s threats to displace Palestinians
in Gaza and the West Bank en masse—all necessary measures to open a
diplomatic channel for the release of the captives still being held in
Gaza and the Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. Even these
basic principles are under attack: Israel’s ambassador
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slanderously charged the secretary general of the UN with expressing
“an understanding for terrorism and murder”; progressive
politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders have been unwilling to call
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more than a “humanitarian pause” to the fighting; the leader of
the British opposition
[[link removed]] defied members of his
own party who have urged a ceasefire. Perhaps this lack of courage is
to be expected, given that Israel’s own leadership has taken an
approach to bombing Gaza that many of its domestic critics have been
agonized to see does not prioritize the safety of the captives.

Under circumstances like these, it is hardly surprising that our
collective outrage and grief have left us begging politicians for an
end to the killing and the immediate distribution of sufficient
humanitarian aid. This instinct might be necessary, but it also
reiterates our faith in the status quo. In addition to contending with
the West’s sordid contributions to the violence in Palestine and
Israel, we need to imagine alternative political arrangements rooted
in values of equity and justice. The current crisis is as much a
failure of politics as it is a failure of imagination.

No amount of historical understanding can prevent people from
indulging their worst capacity for violence. But there is also the
capacity for love. If we are to learn anything in a time of war, we
must listen closely to members of the bereaved families: those just
burying their mothers, fathers, and children in the south of Israel,
and those still likely unable to find gravesites for theirs in Gaza.
Among them are some of the only truth-tellers worth paying any
attention to, those who call not for retribution but for a cessation
of rage
[[link removed]]. In
this frenzy of killing and death, we need to pause long enough to hear
their voices. During the first Lebanon War the late Lebanese American
artist and writer Etel Adnan wrote a poem called “Beirut 1982.” I
have been trying to listen closely to one of its verses now:

Let us not hurry to our
Doom
Let us stop and look at the Sea.

_Seth Anziska is the Mohamed S. Farsi-Lindenbaum Associate Professor
of Jewish-Muslim Relations at University College London and currently
a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and
Writers at the New York Public Library. He is the author
of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo.
(November 2023)._

* Gaza
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* Lebanon
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Hamas
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*
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*
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*
*
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