Goliath Stoops to Conquer

I want to be clear about the only point I’m making right now, which is a limited one and has correspondingly limited consequences: in the United States, supporters of Israel are in an absolutely dominant position in almost every imaginable way; in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel and its army and its citizens are in an absolutely dominant position in almost every imaginable way. As many before me have pointed out, they are Goliath in this David vs Goliath story. And yet there is an absolutely dogged attachment, among Israel’s supporters, to the notion that they are powerless - powerless in an American context where rigid support for Israel has been a bipartisan certainty since the founding of the modern state, and powerless in an Israeli context where the IDF and Israeli government dominate the Palestinians in every practical way. Once again, I can’t help but wonder… why?

I will rush to point out what I’m sure many of you are rushing to point out: this reality certainly doesn’t settle the moral questions of the conflict, not at all. I don’t believe in the superior virtue of the most oppressed. I’m not deriving any conclusions about the various claims to land or rights or autonomy of either group from this dynamic. That’s not my purpose right now, although I explored some of these nuances before. And I’m not saying this as a backdoor to criticizing Israel and the occupation. (As the hundreds of subscribers who have canceled over my views on this topic know, I’m not shy about doing so.) Right now I’m just sincerely trying to figure out why underdog status is so coveted, by the pro-Israel crowd particularly but in American politics in general. Why does that matter, if I’m not drawing moral conclusions from who’s on top? Because to solve a crisis like this 80-year-old conflict, you have to have an honest reflection of what is happening. You can’t get there if the political fashion of your era compels you to think that the dominant side in a conflict is in fact a powerless victim.

The will to be the underdog, no matter how absurd, has become inescapable, seemingly universal. Once gleefully arrogant in their state of power and influence, default Republicans now never stop describing our entire society as a conspiracy to harm them; as a grad student in the 2010s I would routinely hear people who embraced intersectionality and cultural studies complain that academia was hostile to those politics, when there’s nowhere else on earth where they usually arise. Today, in Elon Musk’s America, with a Republican trifecta and a president totally unrestrained by law or shame, many conservatives still routinely describe themselves as a movement under siege. Pick a contentious issue in American politics at random and I’ll show you a debate that features both sides fighting to occupy underdog position. This odd pretense only sticks out with Israel and Palestine because the immense dominance of the pro-Israel side in Congress and of the Israeli military position makes the absurdity especially stark.

The response to the twitter user in the screenshot above should be obvious to anyone who’s willing to look around at what is actually happening: no one has spoken to Jewish students about ICE disappearing their peers for political reasons because ICE has not disappeared any Jewish students for political reasons. People are responding to the Mahmoud Khalil horror show because it has actually happened. If an Israeli international student was arrested expressly because of their political support of Israel, the controversy would engulf our entire country and result in prosecutions and the resignation of some Cabinet members, at minimum. It is unthinkable that any politician or party in American life would dare to do such a thing. That’s why no one is consoling any Jewish students, because nothing happened to them. It would not be very efficient to react to hypothetical oppression of Jewish or Israeli students as though actual oppression has occurred. And yet this is what we’re constantly asked to do with this issue, put imagined danger for Israelis ahead of real danger for Palestinians. Part of this is generational; the kid who tweeted that grew up in a world that taught him that there is simply nothing more to politics than to whine at authority that you’re being oppressed. The left is to blame for that. But at some point, somebody has to tell this kid that he has to stop living in underdog fantasy and accept his overdog reality. Out of self-respect if for nothing else.

The side in a conflict that can reliably inspire this sort of deranged behavior in mainstream politicians is not an underdog. The side in this conflict that’s cheerfully gutting Ivy League universities because their students had the temerity to oppose a horrific slaughter is not an underdog. The side that’s ruined the careers of people in politics because they simply said out loud that there is a pro-Israel lobby, that like all countries Israel has a lobby in the United States, is not an underdog. The country that’s currently occupying a large piece a Syria, contravening all manner of international laws with impunity because it knows its unique status in American politics makes it totally unaccountable, is not an underdog. I’ll again invoke someone I’ve brought up before, an Israeli reservist I once met who very calmly and directly said that moral considerations about the Palestinians made no difference to him and that he felt no obligation to defend moral indictments of Israeli actions. The Jews have often been powerless, now they are powerful, and so they now act as a powerful people do, he said. They take land because they want it, and they need no ethical or historical pretext for doing so. They make war because they think it is in the best interest of the Israeli people and their security, but either way, they make war when they want to and can be disciplined by no one. He said that the Jews have the whip hand now and they’ll use it as it was once used against them. And while I certainly find this attitude nihilistic and disturbing, it also reflects honesty and integrity.

If the response is simply that Jews have been oppressed throughout history and so have a right to act as though they still are, well, I find that very bold coming from the side that mocks the idea that the legacy of slavery plays a large role in the ongoing struggles of African Americans. If you think a history of oppression entitles people to grab land, I hope you’ll cheer if an Indian reservation decides to annex a few neighboring towns. Would only make sense, right? Here on Earth Prime, in anything like a reasonable timeframe, Israel enjoys greater safety and security than almost any country you can possibly name. Here in the United States, Jews flourish economically and academically and socially to such a degree that you can make a good case that they’re the most successful ethnic group on our planet, bar none. That will not change anytime soon, and good for them. I certainly think the long-term scenario for Israel, as in over the course of the next century, should be worrying to Israelis. With maybe ~315 millionish Muslims and less than 8 million Jews in MENA, and an American imperial decline that cannot be arrested, the security situation could gradually become stark. But this only points again to the moral solution that is also the practical and self-interested solution, for the Israelis: to make peace.