It’s Not Left and Right — or Israel and Palestine — But Top and Bottom
For peace to prevail, we must draw the line between the Israeli and Gazan people on one side, who want peace, and their governments — sometimes working in tandem — on the other.
A few months ago I got an email from Tim, a former student, who was in some distress:
I wanted to reach out to you to see if you’d have any time for a phone call….I am very struck by the need to have dialogue around Israel and Palestine. I am involved with one Jewish-based group in particular where it seems friendships and ties are shattering. Conversations I have with folks seem like they’re based on entirely different bases of reality, in ways that strikingly parallel the red/blue divide…this issue seems to be fracturing existing relationships overnight.
I would love your advice on how you’re handling these conversations. I want to advocate for my Palestinian friends and colleagues, but it seems I somehow cannot do that without being called some version of antisemitic and fracturing relationships with many Jewish friends. And I want to build conversations on how everyone, including with US influence, [can] advocate for a peace that benefits everyone.
I could relate. The initial shock have have passed — at Hamas’s mass slaughter of Jews (killing more on a single day than any day since the Holocaust, in which my grandmother was orphaned), and at the Israeli government’s inhuman retaliation — but the agony remains. It’s a constant dull pain, sitting helpless day after day as tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Palestinians are killed, maimed, starved, and orphaned, and knowing that these atrocities are being committed in my name, by opportunists who claim to represent all Jews.
Like Tim said, it’s not been easy to talk through all of this. Making of sense of the situation’s complexity and brutality has been hard enough, to say nothing of figuring out what (if anything) we can do about it. And it doesn’t take much to say the wrong thing and get called some combination of self-hating Jew, settler-colonist, a traitor, or apologist for genocide.
Tim and I talked a few days after he wrote me. I didn’t have any big grand advice to offer him. But as we talked things through together, we reached a few conclusions that I thought others might find helpful.
1. People can protect, and they can connect, but they can’t do both at the same time.
Tim facilitates dialogue among groups in conflict. He knew that’s what we needed, and he wanted to do it. But he couldn’t, because the Jews and Palestinians in his life were refusing to sit down and listen to each other. What was going on?
I told him to imagine a tiger was running at him, claws out, feet away from his throat. In that moment, could he sit down and try to understand the tiger’s perspective? Not likely. He would be spending every last drop of his energy doing anything he could to protect himself.
That’s where a lot of people have been at since October. In such a state, dialogue and mutual understanding are difficult, if not impossible. Physically speaking, we can’t reach out our hand while our guard is up. As an old teacher and colleague of ours used to say: People can protect, and they can connect, but they can’t do both at the same time.
Does that mean we stop trying? Of course not. It just means understanding that not everyone is ready yet, and making space for that.
It also means understanding that huge amounts of time and money have been invested in making us think the tiger is perpetually at our throats, to make us keep our guard up, to convince us we have to protect ourselves from our neighbors so we can’t connect with them. I’ve written before about gas companies in upstate New York setting residents against each other so they could take their land. In Palestine there are similar forces at work, ratcheted up to a greater extreme — literal walls, ongoing harassment by the military, government-sanctioned settler violence, enforced segregation in neighborhoods and schools — that make it very difficult for Israeli Jews and Palestinians to build relationships and trust to the point where they see each other as allies rather than as threats. (The founders of Combatants for Peace, which has done this successfully on a small scale, say it took years for participants to attend joint meetings without fearing for their lives.)
None of this is in any way okay. Our eventual goal must be to build enough power to change it. But for the moment, to make any progress toward that goal, we have to affirm and honor and meet people in whatever state they’re at — even when we don’t like it.
2. We have to meet people where they’re at, even when we don’t like where they’re at.
There once was a young man who came upon a shetl (village) in the middle of the woods. He approached an old man and asked: “Excuse me, can you tell me how I can get from here to Minsk?”
The old man replied with a grave smile: “I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.”
We’re not starting from a great place. Few of us behave well when we think the tiger is coming for our throats. We act hastily. We judge harshly. We reduce the world to friends and enemies, us and them, good guys and bad guys.
But it doesn’t do us, or our cause, any good to denounce people, or refuse to work with them, because they’re not sufficiently open to dialogue and listening. We lose a lot of potential allies that way. And there’s a certain irony about being close-minded toward the close-minded.
I struggle with this, myself. It’s happened to me several times over the past several months, when conservative-leaning Christians in my life have approached me and quietly told me they were so sorry about what was happening in Israel. I felt myself wanting to recoil, to lash out at them. Are you assuming that I support the Israeli government, just because I’m Jewish? Why don’t you care about all the innocent Palestinians who are getting killed? Are you saying their lives don’t matter to you, or that they shouldn’t matter to me?
Of course they didn’t say any of this. Nor, as far as I know, did they believe it. All they did was come up to me and offer sympathy, because they knew I was Jewish and they assumed — correctly — that I’d been having a rough time. Would it have been great if they had also acknowledged the suffering of Palestinians and the barbarism of the Israeli government? Sure. But that’s not where they’re at.
I took a moment to collect myself, and then I said, thank you. Yes, I agreed, it’s been a really hard and painful time. They nodded, understandingly.
3. It’s not left and right — or Israel and Palestine — but top and bottom.
But I didn’t stop there.
I told them I was angry. (They kept nodding; they could certainly understand that.)
I was angry that the Israeli and the Gazan people were being hurt by their opportunistic governments. (They kept nodding; yes, actually, this made sense.)
And I told them if the Israeli government wanted to protect people from Hamas, the least they could do was not fund them.
To my mild surprise, they did not flinch.
I had acknowledged and appreciated where they were coming from. I had kept my guard down. I had accepted their sympathy and returned their warmth. I did not, and would not ever, tell them to stop caring about the thousands of Israelis who had been captured, killed, injured, or otherwise harmed.
In return, they connected with me. To the point where they were ready to consider not only the plight of the Palestinians but also the shocking idea that Hamas, the mortal enemy of Israel, had in fact been funded — maybe even founded — by the Israeli government.
I first heard this back in 2018, while traveling with Combatants for Peace in the West Bank. “Everyone knows it,” a Palestinian man said, and others around him nodded. I was ready to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. But my partner looked it up and found extensive documentation — not just in left-leaning sources like The Intercept, but also in center-left publications like The Washington Post and even right-leaning papers like The Jerusalem Post and The Wall Street Journal.
The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The Israeli government’s motive was clear, simple, and nefarious: by strengthening an extremist terrorist organization that claimed to speak for all Palestinians, all the while ramping up a violent military occupation that would push people to the extremes, they could divide the Palestinian people and delegitimize the cause of Palestinian statehood. It’s a textbook case of how to divide a community.
(These two criteria, the existence of (1) reliable documentation and (2) a clear and simple motive, are what distinguish unfounded and often harmful conspiracy theories from what I call “conspiracy realism.” The Israeli government funding Hamas may be a conspiracy, but from all accounts it’s real.)
So I guess I shouldn’t have been so shocked that it made sense to my Christian conservative friends, too. After all, I’ve found that most people, when they feel secure enough to stop protecting and start connecting, share the basic belief that:
(1) Ordinary people of all kinds are usually good and decent.
(2) When people get hurt, the blame usually lies not with other ordinary people but with a relatively small elite that wants to keep “all the money and all the say-so,” that knows no boundaries of race or religion or nationality, and that does not wish any of us well.
Or as they used to put say the Occupy movement: It’s not left and right, but top and bottom.
I recently traveled with the Rural Assembly to meet with organizers in the impoverished colonias of Hildalgo County, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border. Their work is now at risk because some big national foundations, outraged at the recent awful behavior of the Texas government, are threatening to pull all their funding out of the state.
Such a decision, which would further increase the suffering of the people most affected by that government’s xenophobic and misogynist policies, only makes sense if you believe the government actually represents the people. Anyone who has ever lived under a government know how rarely this is true. In Texas, no less than in Gaza or in Israel, it is a fallacy to conflate ordinary people with the well-resourced opportunists who are oppressing them, all the while claiming to represent them. They are, in fact, on opposite sides of the struggle.
Working across divides doesn’t mean we never take sides. Refusing to take a side, as Florence Reece suggested back in the ‘30s, can mean defending an indefensible status quo. We just need to question the way the sides have been determined, the way the lines have been drawn.
An example: was southern culture in the 1950s and 60s racist? Certainly the elite thought so, both the southern segregationist elite (proudly) and the northern liberal elite (disdainfully). But Martin Luther King, Jr. disagreed. Southern culture, he maintained, was about love and hospitality and community. Segregation, he said, was a “betrayal of the southern heritage.”
The elite tried to draw a line between the civil rights movement on one side and southern culture on the other — a line that would have divided many ordinary people, Black and white, who were proud southerners and also sympathetic to the movement. King refused to go along with this. Instead, he insisted that the civil rights movement and the southern heritage were together on one side, and the segregationists — the betrayers of the southern heritage — were on the other.
We can apply this lesson to Palestine. For peace to prevail, we must refuse any argument that draws a line between the Israeli people and their government on one side and the Gazan people and their government on the other. We have to insist, instead, on drawing the line between the Israeli and Gazan people on one side and their corrupt and murderous governments — at least sometimes working in tandem — on the other. The governments want slaughter; the people want peace.
Is this…true? We can’t prove it conclusively. Of course some Israeli and Gazan people support their governments, just as more than a few ordinary southerners in the ‘60s supported segregation. On the other hand, there’s evidence to back it up. Both regimes appear to be using the war to hold on to dear life. Israeli polls suggest if new elections were held, Netanyahu would get voted out, and maybe go to jail. And Hamas hasn’t called an election in Gaza since they took power in 2006.
But prophetic work — what King was doing, and what we must do — is not a matter of empirical data. It is about appealing to what’s possible. “The contest,” writes theologian Walter Brueggemann in The Prophetic Imagination, “is not between imagination and the real, but between two types of imagination.”
The imagination of Netanyahu and Hamas is forever war, irreconcilable divides, eternal walls, beatings, bombings, and fear. “So long as we accept” such an imagination, Brueggemann suggests, “we’re finished.” But we don’t have to. We can imagine another reality that’s just as possible: ordinary Israelis and Palestinians joining forces, aided by allies around the world, to isolate and defeat their two murderous governments.
This may feel far-fetched. Then again I’m not convinced the end of southern segregation was any more visible seventy years ago than the end of Israeli occupation is now. Except to those, like King, who insisted on seeing it, and helping others see it, and building the necessary alliances to make it real. “We have to believe in the power of imagination,” concludes Brueggemann, “because it is all we have, and ours is stronger than theirs.”
Hi again, Ben. Your article has got me thinking about the complexity of this, so thank you for that. My first search was simply to determine how much was known about whether it was true that those further down the power/wealth spectrum wanted peace more than those further up, as I thought you were suggesting, and I could not find evidence of that. The articles I sent were about that (sorry for the paywall). But in reading your article again, I focused more on your description of the ways in which both axes of polarization (wealth-power disparity and political division) are, perhaps to a large degree, the result of designed exploitation by the wealthy and powerful. And yes, there is ample evidence of that. The wealthy and powerful make hatred to maintain control. So I realize I agree with your thesis in that regard. But I also want to be cautious about us v. them thinking overall. The powerful are able to exploit because they leverage aspects of human nature that make it so very possible: both the inclination to exploit and the seeming willingness to be exploited. I grew up among both working and professional-class folks and the former, with whom I related more most of the time, seemed more likely to opt for simple explanations and join ranks that demonized the "others." But even as I share that, I am asking myself how systemic (designed) pressures might have caused that behavior. Overall, there may be a chicken v. egg situation where the exploiters and the exploited are in a timeless dance in which both are complicit but which leaves the latter with meaning and identity, but beyond that, very little value and a lot of trauma. I think it's important, however to underline the power of human agency. It's hard to imagine anything that can save us from the fact that we can choose to exploit, and/or be exploited, or not. That said, I also think that the powerful have much more "head room" for making choices, and more of a responsibility to make them in a prosocial way. It's complicated, but we all need to use our agency wisely, and remember we have it.
Hi Ben,
Here are some links that might be interesting regarding this issue:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7732181/
https://theconversation.com/are-soaring-levels-of-income-inequality-making-us-a-more-polarized-nation-63418
https://link-springer-com.proxy-bc.researchport.umd.edu/article/10.1007/s10602-022-09368-8