(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish / Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) October 6, 2025; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—On paper, officially, “legally,” both the West Bank and the United States have clear ways that security forces are to bound to be applied from any central governing authority in particular areas, deferring to local forces and limiting the roles of those coming from outside. But as both Israel and the U.S. implode politically on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the October 7 Hamas terrorist pogrom against Israel and the beginning of the even larger mass-killing of Israel’s Gaza campaign, it is important to understand how far from reality this description actually ends up being under the current crises both nation nations face.

Wrecking Boundaries in the West Bank

But in the West Bank, Israeli leaders have long ignored many of these supposed restrictions at will, none more so from the top than extremist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The West Bank is by far the largest of the three Palestinian territories forming the State of Palestine and occupied during the Six Day-War in June 1967 by the Israel Defense Forces (or IDF, i.e., the Israeli army) and still illegally occupied after all these years (the other Palestinian areas being the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem).  For decades, Israel has illegally colonized these lands and transferred some of its Jewish population illegally to form illegal Jewish settler communities—often of religious fanatics—on Palestinian land, sometimes ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities in the process.   Netanyahu, a champion of the settler movement often nicknamed “Bibi,” has served more time as prime minister than any Israeli, including Israeli founding father David Ben-Gurion; indeed, Netanyahu seems willing to do just about anything to maintain power, including repeatedly prolonging the current horrific “war” (a term loosely applied) in Gaza.  Since the 1993 Oslo peace process began, a three-tiered system is supposed to govern whether Israelis or Palestinians hold civil or security authority in the West Bank: Area A (Palestinian security and civil), Area B (Israeli security, Palestinian civil), and Area C (Israeli security and civil).  In reality, Israel treats all areas as if it can do whatever it pleases whenever it pleases: new illegal Israeli settlements in the middle of Palestinian land, abrupt arrests of Palestinian officials trying to exercise their duties, or raids deep into the heart of the most populous Palestinian cities care not what lines on the map say, and the Israeli political and military leaders have also long since stopped caring (Netanyahu himself bragged repeatedly over the years up through the present about killing the Oslo process that even brought these three Areas about).

Your Posse Is Not Legal, Mr. President

In the United States, possible tensions between the civil and military spheres preoccupied the Founding Fathers so much so that there was no official permanent standing army established by the Constitution and George Washington himself was lionized as a hero in the mold of Cincinnatus for stepping down from supreme military power when his duty was done (and as much for that as anything else he ever did, which says a lot).  There was a bold, idealistic, prescient experiment in Reconstruction (1865-1877)—really the last phase of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) over slavery—to bring about multiracial democracy that achieved much relying on the deployment and backing of federal troops before succumbing to white supremacist terrorist insurrections throughout the recalcitrant South.  Some dynamics during Reconstruction in the South in key ways resembled the West Bank in that whites in the South eventually used lawless means to establish control over security forces and courts to create a separate-and-unequal system, violating Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments and laws to instead impose a pre-apartheid apartheid system on newly-freed people in the South that would come to be known as the Jim Crow “legal” system and would take most of a century to dismantle.

Simultaneously, while Reconstruction wound down as a failed experiment, Americans were uneasy about the fact that the newly mighty U.S. military after the Civil War had been used so much in civil affairs in formerly rebel southern states, so the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 to more clearly define the U.S. civil-military divide, already quite strong without it.  The law further codified that the federal military cannot be used for domestic civilian law enforcement purposes with a few exceptions for special, unique, and extreme circumstances often as laid out in very specific laws.  This law was passed in 1878 shortly after Reconstruction ended by both the House and Senate with comfortable margins and signed into law by then-President Rutherford B. Hayes.  The exceptions allow the president to work around or go over the Act in times of severe emergencies.

While there are some issues of “ambiguity” in the Posse Comitatus Act, the long tradition of taking great care with the use of military forces on U.S. soil in non-war settings is clear and Trump’s domestic military deployments in 2025 are not ambiguous in that his premises for deploying them to begin with were flat-out-false or grotesquely unproven, unsubstantiated assertions (“untethered to the facts,” in federal Judge Karin Immergut’s words from her ruling after an emergency hearing in Oregon late yesterday; for this, permanent caricature and White House Deputy Chief Staff Stephen Miller irresponsibly and dangerously called her actions a “legal insurrection” that aids “an organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers,” yet another proclamation of open season on the judiciary).  The Trump Administration’s wild claims are contrary to existing publicly available information, with no serious attempts made to counter such information with a proper presentation of demonstrably better or updated information as would be expected under a normal, functioning government.  And though he has far more authority to deploy troops to the District of Columbia, of which I live just outside (so yes, I have seen these illegally deployed forces many times and spoken with them), false premises were still articulated for the DC deployment, so it was still, therefore, illegal before any other considerations are raised (despite raising concerns about the statistics for crime in DC, Trump authorized deployments to the District outside of any federal process to review, challenge, or improve crime statistics reporting in Washington, a common problem many cities confront, and the U.S. Department of Justice only initiated an investigation after Trump’s deployment; any effort to demonstrate any sort of adherence to proper procedure would have seen the investigation happen and conclude far before any military deployment, prove the statistics are clearly false, and demonstrate that officials in Washington were bad-faith and not cooperating or responding to good-faith efforts to obtain cooperation or improve said statistics).

Plenty of scholars have also pointed out that both the intent and context of Posse Comitatus Act and its related laws at the times they were enacted and the spirits with which they have been enforced since are incompatible with Trump’s machinations, not just legally but also constitutionally.  And the main exceptions allowed for and invoked under the 1807 Insurrection Act are for situations totally different than the country finds itself in today: it and precursor legislation saw thirty events in U.S. history result in invocation since 1792, the most recent occurrence for the 1992 L.A. riots. This was notably at the request of California’s governor at the time, the opposite of Trump’s baseless, illegal and unconstitutional deployments there now in 2025.

West Banking America

But the point is, whether in the West Bank of the United States, there are clear restrictions on a.) military forces being deployed in normal circumstances and, even in extraordinary circumstances, b.) when, c.) where, and d.) how they can be deployed.

Yet as noted, for years, Israel and especially Netanyahu have ignored these restrictions whenever they have felt like it and, indeed, have increasingly attacked the idea that these restrictions have any validity whatsoever.  In short, the law is treated as whim, and everyone knows the dirty truth deep down that even some Israelis can admit: the West Bank is an apartheid system, based on religion and ethnicity: ethnic and religious Jews with Israeli citizenship in the West Bank are accorded full Israeli civil rights in the face of Israeli authority, while, in practice, Palestinians (be they Muslim or Christian) have no rights at all and are totally subject to whatever whims and depredations the military rule of the Israeli state and its supporters mete out, up to and including mass vandalism, rampant property destruction, prodigious assaults, orchestrated ethnic cleansing, rarely-punished murders (even of Palestinian-Americans), and indefinite child detention, whether from official government security forces or any number of Jewish settlers engaging increasingly in terrorism with the state’s backing, sometimes far more than tacit.  Even before October 7 in 2023, that year was still the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank since the Second Intifada that ended in 2005, meaning the deliberate escalation in the West Bank by Israel has little to do with October 7, and settlers have even attacked positions of their own IDF in the West Bank when such settlers feel they are not being given enough impunity, showing their lawlessness knows no bounds.  Essentially, you have rights or not based on who Israeli authorities want to have rights there, and they award them to their side while denying them to the other.  Lines on maps, the law, human rights (for those they deemed unworthy) meant nothing, but rewarding their supporters and punishing their opponents is everything.

What has been the obvious “legal” reality for many years in the West Bank—only intensifying more and more over time both qualitatively and quantitatively and now exploding—is now something Trump wants to recreate for all America, turning the whole country into a Wild West Bank of Lawlessness.

But where for Israel, the divides are relatively simple and easy—Jewish vs. Palestinian—here it’s MAGA against everyone, even sometimes other MAGA (some Trump voters are now seeing friends, coworkers, and family members deported, detained, or arrested, even veterans).  If you are a U.S. citizen supporting what Trump is doing and your family and friends also match this description, you have little to worry about when it comes to this (for now…).  But if you are an immigrant who is undocumented/unauthorized who has no criminal record, a legal non-citizen resident—even one showing up for your own immigration hearing—or a U.S. citizen who is either ready to exercise your constitutional rights to ask questions, protest, and confront what is happening or is just at the wrong place at the wrong time, you are not necessarily protected by the law anymore.  Furthermore, by far the vast majority of the human beings being detained and deported are non-violent and non-criminal, whatever nonsense is claimed to the contrary by whomever in power.  And the masked, large, tattooed, angry individuals newly minted as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents in paramilitary style and other federal fun folks are here to make sure you do not feel safe.  Are you an elected official, including a sitting U.S. Senator, simply asking questions of federal officials?  It does not matter, you can be handcuffed or bodyslammed with the least-protected among us.

Like Netanyahu and too many Israeli leaders in years before, Trump and his similarly extreme, similarly-minded counterparts are hell-bent on erasing, de facto or de jure, the lines the Posse Comitatus Act solidified in the sand on the limits of the use of federal military in a civilian setting, lines for principles clearly enshrined by U.S. Constitution and over two centuries of precedent, principles the Trump Administration is shredding not just in the streets of American cities but even partly also in the waters off the coast of Venezuela.

In seeking to erase legal rules binding the authorization, deployment, and use of federal military forces on U.S. soil in civilian settings (leaving similar jurisdictional mission creep in Venezuela aside), Trump and his MAGA minions with illegal occupation in America are trying to recreate key aspects of the fascist nightmare of the illegally occupied West Bank.  But here in the U.S., this is not based on two warring and competing nationalities and one of those nationalities’ democratically elected leaders pursuing total subjugation at best or actual genocide of the other nationality at worst, broadcast daily for all the world to see and fueled by insane colonialist, imperialist, expansionist fever-dreams based on ancient fantasies and ancient maps, no.  Here in the U.S., Trump is trying to divide Americans on ideological, political, identity, and legal-status lines, lines he will use to award and protect rights for some, deny them to others, still dangle to yet others as ways of obtaining “obeying in advance” or to even explicitly threaten, say, ABC and Disney over a certain late-night host named Kimmy Kimmel.  As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois fighting back against Trump’s illegal military deployments to Chicago, noted during that drama: “Tyranny requires constant effort.  It breaks, it leaks.  Authority is brittle.  Oppression is the mask of fear.  Remember that,” quoting the amazing antifascist masterpiece that is the Star Wars show Andor.  Yet, we must also remember that, however much Trump and Netanyahu act out of fear of losing power, they are also clearly in the drivers’ seats, consolidating more and more power for themselves in ways the founder fathers of both the U.S. and Israel never intended.

And while there is hardly the level of violence between the sides as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict even as political violence in the U.S. may be on the rise, dynamics are between the two have been converging somewhat for some time and make no mistake about it, the key principle is the same: longstanding, binding legal distinctions are melting away in the face of determined illegality, such that the law disappears and factional whim reigns supreme so one side can enforce its will upon the other, tyranny replacing law as the very system.  In short, Trump seeks to create a political apartheid here in the U.S., a West Bank of Left and Right, “evil” and “good,” veering Manichaean and not dissimilar in legal nihilism to the separate and unequal system of Jew and Palestinian (or “Arab,” so much less specific…) in the West Bank’s Nablus but bringing it to New York.

Adding New Meaning to “Executing” the Law

To execute their plans, both Trump and Netanyahu have hosts of extremists willing to unquestioningly nakedly embrace the partisanship of their missions, from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, from U.S. Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth to Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (all of whom have had their own past issues with illegality or criminal probes well-before 2025: Ben-Gvir and Smotrich being convicted and arrested terrorists, respectively; Bondi in the center of a criminal bribery and obstruction scandal with Trump; and the brotastic Pete Hegseth, well, being brotastic Pete Hegseth…), just to name a few, with far, far too many others alongside.  And these allies have made it clear, sometimes as senior law enforcement officials: if we don’t like you, the law cannot protect you from us and we are coming for you, even for your children.  While in Israel, broadening this behavior to include Israeli Jewish citizens has been far milder than what has been done to Palestinians—even those in Israel with Israeli citizenship but especially those without Israeli citizenship outside of Israel in the actual territories of actual Palestine—Trump and his lawless allies are rapidly casting a far wider dragnet, or at least attempting to do so, advancing on several fronts even as I write this.

Yes, you are witnessing the MAGA Trump Administration’s attempts at illegal jurisdictional jumps dehumanizingly intending to target both directly and indirectly various large swaths of the population in America, illegal deployment by illegal deployment, related measure by related measure, until Trump has created a de facto national federalized police state he can use to prosecute and intimidate his opposition and others deemed undesirable, jurisdictional issues and the law be damned.  They have lost the program when it comes morality, cartoonishly celebrating their roles as oppressors (of certain people) and projecting so publicly for all to see.

Maybe a lot of this should not be surprising, since both men have no problem breaking the law: Trump is an insurrectionist and convicted felon and Netanyahu is currently on trial in three cases in Israel for damning corruption crimes (with Trump, unsurprisingly in true birds-of-a-feather mode, even very publicly pressuring Israel to stop Netanyahu’s trial) in addition to having the International Criminal Court issue a warrant for his arrest in 2024 for war crimes.  Both men are fascists remaking their countries in a fascist image of their former democracies, the actions mentioned herein just some of the examples (I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but carefully and specifically and with history in mind).

At this point, one really has to wonder if either the U.S. or Israel can still be fairly termed “democracies,” because in key ways, the rule of law is damaged, dying, or dead as both Israel and the U.S.—Bibi and Donnie—continue to feed, rather than restrain, each other’s worst tendencies.

But it is both too easy and too simple to blame just such leaders: voters in both countries could have easily set their countries on different paths—ones that respected the rule of law—and voters in both countries rejected, even if narrowly, the rule of law in favor of Trump, Netanyahu, and the fascism they represent, whether they realize it or not.  And perhaps nothing screams fascist more than violently taking away legal protections for the most vulnerable and defenseless and, in turn, their allies in order to expose the chosen to ever more deprivation and violence at the hands of the same people taking away their rights and protections.

In the current state of Israel’s short history, this could simply mean the end of Israeli democracy.  In the U.S. context, this would be like the success of white supremacist terrorists during Reconstruction in brutally taking away Freedmen’s rights throughout the south, except that Trump is engaging in this massive ripping away of rights not in one region but in the whole country.  2025 may yet be known a watershed year for America, Israel, and Palestine, but only for the most horrific, sad, pathetic, and—perhaps most importantly—most preventable of ways.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2025 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Thirteenth episode on the on the train wreck of insanity and depravity that is the 2024 Republican presidential nomination contest: focusing on the Iowa caucuses and the other early contests: the New Hampshire primary, the Nevada caucuses, and the South Carolina primary as well as how the rest of the race will unfold and why incumbent President Joe Biden will beat Trump.

Notes (more to come):

Title Screen photo credits: ABC/The Hill

The Republican 2024 presidential nomination primary/caucus calendar, per New York Times

All 2024 Republican presidential race polling, national and state, per FiveThirtyEight

On the details of Ron DeSantis’s catastrophic failure on COVID-19, with Florida having the 10^th highest per capita death rate after some very early advantages, see this Guardian article, this BMJ article about the DeSantis Administration lying about COVID statistics, this Washington Post article covering DeSantis’s debate with Gov. Gavin Newson of California

On Ramaswamy’s extremism: See this New Yorker article

On Haley’s history of problems with the Civil War and slavery, see this Washington Post article and this from WHYY/PBS/NPR

All the numbers behind the Selzer poll

On Ann Selzer’s legendary status as a pollster, see FiveThirtyEight

Des Moines Register writeup of the Selzer poll with Selzer’s commentary

On the weather in Iowa for this caucus, see the New York Times

Myself and the late legend Christopher Hitchens savaging the caucuses

When I said Jewish community, I was referring the one in then-Palestine, known as the Yishuv

A primary without a competing caucus in Nevada would be more representative, but since Trump is the leader of a cult there, Republicans might boycott the primary en masse, so it might not be more representative under these conditions, it will depend on If there is decent turnout.

My discussion with Rula Jebreal

On Biden’s frustrations with Netanyahu, see Barak Ravid in Axios and oh so many others and my discussion with Noga Tarnopolsky

My article on Trump, insurrection, and Gen. U.S. Grant

© 2023-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Twelfth episode on Palestine and Israel—history as well as the current violence—with Palestinian Journalist, Analyst, & Author Rula Jebreal (follow her on Twitter and Instagram and check out her Muck Rack profile here)

Even before October 7, Palestinians and Gazans in particular had been suffering from 3/4s of a century of displacement and oppression. Then, Hamas carried out the most most lethal attack against Jews since the Holocaust, killing some 1,200 Israelis who were mostly civilians and captured some 240 Israelis who Hamas took as hostages into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s reaction was to cut off nearly all supplies to the Gaza Strip, the enclave blocked and partly controlled by Israel that Hamas partly governs, and to launch the most intense military assault anywhere in decades. That history and the current assault are among the topics we discuss.

Rula is uniquely qualified to talk about this history: she has lived it. Born to an African Imam father who worked the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s Old City and a Palestinian mother, Rula lost her mother at 5 and her father gave her to an orphanage in East Jerusalem, and the remarkable woman who founded and ran the orphanage became a mother to Rula, who raised her as a Palestinian. Rula’s novel Miral tells the story of several generations of these women living through the tumultuous history of Israel and Palestine and was turned into a movie starring Freida Pinto, Willem Dafoe, and Vanessa Redgrave, the screenplay of which Rula wrote. She holds Israeli citizenship as well as Italian citizenship, as Italy was where lived and worked as a journalist for many years. Her journalism and analysis has taken her around the world, into war zones and the studios of some of the major news networks around the world. On top of all these achievements, she is also a college professor in Miami. The following is my discussion with her.

Notes:

Rula’s novel Miral and the movie based on it

Since I mentioned her unique Vogue profile and photoshoot shot by the legendary Annie Leibovitz:

Some of Rula’s coverage of the current situation:

CNN interview

Washington Post interview also featuring major Israeli opposition politician and former Foreign Minister and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni

France24 interview

Rula on the issues prior to Oct 7:

The awesome video of Ben Shapiro being trounced by Rula

Her New York Times op-ed on being a minority in Israel

Yahoo News profile of Rula

New York Times profile of Rula

Rula on the rise of global fascism on MSNBC

and my take on the same

My article on Israeli vs. American COIN (counterinsurgency)

My take on Israel’s apartheid system in the West Bank

My deep-dive on the 2014 Gaza war and the history of the conflict

The HBO and Israeli Channel 12 miniseries Our Boys I mentioned that highlights the Jewish anti-Palestinian incitement in Israeli society and based on true events from 2014 is discussed here in Time and in The New York Times in the context of Netanyahu accusing it of being “anti-Semitic;” more coverage of the miniseries in The New Yorker and The New York Times; reviews from Variety and CNN

DONATE TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

Palestine Red Crescent Society is basically the Red Cross in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.

IsraAID is Israel’s largest humanitarian organization.

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a deeply experienced organization, has provided emergency medical services for people in Gaza for many years.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the UN agency specifically tasked with helping Palestinians.  Several of its aid workers have already been killed in the current round of violence.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is one of the largest Jewish-focused philanthropic organizations in the world and is helping Israelis on the ground.

Save the Children is one of the premier international aid organizations and has long-operated in Gaza.

© 2023-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Tenth episode on Israel’s two wars, one vs. Hamas, one vs. Netanyahu, with independent journalist Noga Tarnopolsky (follow her on Twitter and Instagram and check out her Muck Rack profile here) (Apologize for my low lighting ,will address this for the next episode.

Even before October 7, Israel was facing a historic crisis, a self-inflicted deep wound from its own governing coalition led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, Hamas carried out the most most lethal attack against Jews since the Holocaust, killing some 1,200 Israelis who were mostly civilians and captured some 240 Israelis who Hamas took as hostages into the Gaza Strip. Israel’s reaction was to cut off nearly all supplies to the Gaza Strip, the enclave blocked and partly controlled by Israel that Hamas partly governs, and to launch the most intense military assault anywhere in decades. Noga is uniquely qualified to talk about both Israel’s domestic crisis as well as the war against Hamas, seeing each as a war yet both becoming more and more intertwined. The following is my discussion with her.

Notes

On the IDF’s killing of 3 Israeli hostages…

Some of Noga’s coverage of the war on MSNBC (examples here and here), New York Magazine (examples here and here), The Washington Post (examples here and here), and France 24, just to name a few.

Some of Noga’s work on the Israeli protest movement against Netanyahu’s parliamentary coup against Israel’s judiciary and checks and balances in Israel: Politico, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, just to name a few.

DONATE TO HELP THE PEOPLE OF PALESTINE AND ISRAEL

Palestine Red Crescent Society is basically the Red Cross in Gaza and the rest of Palestine.

IsraAID is Israel’s largest humanitarian organization.

Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), a deeply experienced organization, has provided emergency medical services for people in Gaza for many years.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is the UN agency specifically tasked with helping Palestinians.  Several of its aid workers have already been killed in the current round of violence.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee is one of the largest Jewish-focused philanthropic organizations in the world and is helping Israelis on the ground.

Save the Children is one of the premier international aid organizations and has long-operated in Gaza.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Consider donating if you appreciate this content. Also see Brian’s deep-dive on the 2014 Israel-Hamas war.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) October 18, 2023 (*UPDATE late evening October 18/early AM October 19: further analysis on hospital explosion); *UPDATE October 31: I had some massive technical issues on my site, and an update to the Hospital explosion story mysteriously disappeared, so I have redone that update to include even more information that has been coming out since then about the responsibility for the explosion); all casualty figures are according to respective local officials unless otherwise noted.

(Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית) The second article in a series of special reports about the 2023 Israel-Hamas-Middle East Crisis.

See related July 28, 2014 article The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

“How we choose to fight is just as important as what we fight for.”

—Ezra Bridger, Star Wars: Rebels

SILVER SPRING—As I wrote in my last piece, a level of violence has been perpetrated against the Jewish people not seen since the Holocaust and against Israelis like never before, a vile terrorist act by war criminals and legally constituting genocidal ethnic cleansing of an up-close-and-personal nature, in which an increasing toll of over 1,400 Israelis are now known to have been killed since October 7, the vast majority on that single day and defenseless civilians butchered in their homes or a at a peace-themed music and dance festival, in addition to over 4,200 wounded and some 200 hostages abducted into Gaza.

An Ugly Atmosphere but with Rays of Hope Thanks for Biden and Blinken

Obviously, emotions are running high and there are understandable calls for vengeance in the air in Israel.  But emotions and vengeance—and dehumanization—cannot be allowed to eclipse sensible policy that can bring about some of the best possible outcomes.  As America knows from its own “War on Terror,” in Israel’s current situation, counterproductive actions and mentalities will help no one, not Israelis, not Palestinians, not anyone else in the region except extremists who would bring about more death and destruction.  And keep in mind Gaza is one of the worst places anywhere to be conducting a military campaign as far as the 2.3 million local civilians are concerned: they cannot leave what has been called an “open-air prison” because of restrictions imposed by Israel—which, as I have noted in detail before, exercises much of the meaningful de facto sovereignty over the Gaza Strip—and Egypt, it is one of the most densely populated territories on earth, about half of the population is children, and the Palestinians in Gaza have been suffering from a humanitarian crisis for many years already.

Even considering, all this, Israel cannot tolerate a Hamas governing Gaza that is now trying to imitate ISIS, not after what Hamas did.

And so Israel must invade.

Unfortunately, already some 3,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed (before yesterday’s hospital bombing, discussed in measure 4), some 12,500 wounded, including whole families wiped out.  Those numbers are significantly increasing daily, with Israeli strikes still happening in the south of Gaza, right where Israel has told civilians to evacuate.  And while nobody knows how many Hamas members are included in those numbers, footage coming out of Gaza indicates most of the dead are civilians, especially as Hamas has access to its underground tunnel system that civilians do not and that many, perhaps most, Hamas dead would be buried underground in most strikes successfully targeting Hamas terrorists and fighters, therefore, many of them are likely not included in health officials’ body counts easily or quickly, if they even know there are tunnels underground in any given location, which they may not.

Yet even in this bleak atmosphere, I am heartened by U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy, President Joe Biden’s skilled behind-the-scenes engagement (as was the case with another Gaza flareup 2021), and other top Biden Administration officials’ diplomatic efforts.  In just days, they have already mitigated some of the worst: an initial, insane demand by Israel for all residents of the northern Gaza Strip—some 1.1 million people—to evacuate within twenty-four hours has seen that timeframe substantially extended (though it may still be a breach of international law, according to the United Nations), water service to Gaza has been partly restored by Israel (though from live interviews I saw on CNN two days ago, including with a senior United Nations humanitarian official, damage to the water infrastructure is so severe that only one of the main water pipes was functional, severely limiting the effect of the partial turning back on of the water supplied by Israel), and there is confused but progressing talks about opening the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt to get foreign nationals out, humanitarian supplies in (five United Nations fuel trucks two days ago were allowed through but that is it so far), and perhaps letting some other civilians out (in fact, just as I was wrapping parts of this article up Monday night in what may be a major diplomatic achievement, Blinken announced—after a marathon negotiation session with Netanyahu under Hamas rocket fire (such attacks being war crimes)—that Israel had agreed to the delivery of humanitarian aid, that safe zones for civilians were a major topic of discussion, and that Biden would be coming to Israel and Jordan today (the Jordan leg was canceled shortly after the hospital disaster, discussed in measure 4).  Biden’s trip may very well delay Israel’s near-inevitable assault on Gaza, giving more time for civilians to evacuate and supplies to be delivered to Gazans, saving many lives.

If you track the public statements of both Biden and Blinken, it is clear they have been and are emphasizing—will continue to emphasize—these concerns about protecting Palestinians in their discussions with Israeli leaders; clearly, Israel began on a harder line and clearly the U.S. has been pushing back behind the scenes against some of Israel’s worst impulses as in convulses in grief.  Biden specifically has been emphatic in repeatedly standing up for the vast majority of Gazan Palestinian civilians who are innocent and have nothing to do with Hamas and has even made clear on one of the flagship U.S. news programs, CBS’s 60 Minutes, that it would be a “mistake” for Israel to reoccupy Gaza in the long-term and right after reiterated U.S. support for a two-state solution, which would much displease Netanyahu as he has been against this his entire career in action whatever deceitful verbiage he has uttered to the contrary and still is.  There remain serious obstacles—especially after that hospital tragedy—but knowing Biden and Blinken leading Israel’s closest ally in America are clearly, forcefully, and consistently prioritizing saving Palestinian civilian lives in their private interactions with Israeli officials and their public comments on the crisis are a serious source of hope for me.

Hamas Must Be Neutralized, But Civilians in Gaza Must Be a Priority (and that Would HELP Israel)

Before proceeding, let us condemn Hamas and make it clear that for all their flaws, Israel and Israeli Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu and his extremist government of right-wing religious zealots and bigots—and I have been extremely critical of them, even examining Israel’s moral flaws in its military targeting and tactics in great detail—are not the moral equivalent of Hamas, a terrorist group that had for quite some time also functioned as something of a government in Gaza but that now has veered in its brutality into ISIS territory and is resembling ISIS in this brutality more than it resembles its own version of itself from five years ago.  And in recent polling, it is also clear that Hamas is not very popular with Palestinians.  During this latest violence, Hamas is even telling Gaza’s civilians not to evacuate, framing leaving as allowing Israel to push Palestinians from their homes, take more Palestinian land, and enact ethnic cleansing; Israel, the U.S., the UK, the EU, NATO, and others have long claimed that Hamas is cynically using innocent Palestinian civilians as human shields, purposefully putting them in harm’s way to get them killed to turn global opinion against Israel and/or lessen the intensity of Israel’s attacks (the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, claims Hamas is blocking civilians from evacuating, though despite this claim, at least some 600,000 Palestinians have evacuated from the north as of a few days ago).  While some prominent human rights organizations and other analysts argue the reality is complicated when it comes to whether or not Hamas uses civilians as human shields, what is fairly clear is Hamas cannot be trusted to look after the safety and welfare of the innocent civilians of Gaza, and it will certainly fail in its responsibilities to them.

But this does not mean that Israel can simply dump the entirety of the responsibility for the welfare of Palestinian civilians in Gaza on Hamas, shrug its shoulders, and do anything it feels like at this particularly emotional moment, with the consciousness of the global Jewish community, not just Israeli Jews, reeling in its worst collective moment in close to 80 years.

In short, the worst anti-Jewish pogrom since the Holocaust cannot be answered by one of the worst mass displacements in a generation: currently some 1.1 million Gazans being told to evacuate northern Gaza by Israel, without anywhere really safe to go.  Israel’s tragedy cannot be followed by cutting off food, water, fuel, and power to 2.3 million Gazans, including thousands of wounded, 50,000 pregnant women with 5,000 due to give birth in the coming month, and babies in incubators in hospitals who will surely die without power, water, fuel, and food.  One war crime atrocity, no matter how vile, cannot be answered by another war crime.  And while there is certainly legitimate concern as to Hamas appropriating some of any aid that would go into Gaza, the solution cannot be for Israelis to simply throw up their hands and block all aid.  And especially as the U.S. is the main guarantor of international law globally along with the United Nations and that Israel tries to sell itself to the world as abiding by international law in comparison to Hamas, both risk looking like gross hypocrites if the U.S. stands by Israel as commits war crimes.

This would play into arguments and/or propaganda and gaslighting from Russia, China, and others (sometimes rooted in legitimate concerns, many that do not hold up to scrutiny) that international law is a joke and that the West only applies international law to its enemies, not itself.  It is in time like this, though, that international law matters most as ultimately, no matter how horrific a terrorist attack a country might suffer, the response when there are credible accusations of serious violations of international law and war crimes being committed by the responding party cannot be “But look at these pictures of our dead babies!  Let us violate the rules!”  Such an emotional response suggests that international law can simply be set aside when rage and grief arise in response to barbarity on the part of one party, but the point of international law is to ensure fewer dead babies and civilians of all types overall.  Pictures of one side’s dead babies cannot be used to justify illegal war crimes leading to more dead babies on the other side: there may an inevitability to some dead babies on that other side, but international law is there to minimize the amount.  The laws of war must be upheld by all parties that profess to adhere to them regardless of how low another warring party may sink.  Sadly, we cannot expect much from Hamas but it is to Israel’s credit that compliance and conduct of a far highest caliber than Hamas is expected of it, not an unfair double standard.  Hamas’s failure, then, to honor its moral and legal obligations is not an invitation or an excuse for Israel to abandon its own moral and legal obligations.  Because once we view international law protecting the most vulnerable of innocent civilians in war time as something to be tossed aside when one side engages in atrocities, international law truly is meaningless can protect no one consistently.  The only solution is to follow international law even if those we are fighting do not, to have it protect some people some of the time, rather than nobody any of the time.

Unlike Hamas, Israel is a legally legitimate nation recognized within its 1967 borders by over 160 nations (with 165 total offering some form of recognition: the U.S. under Trump extended recognition beyond the 1967 borders and recognized Syria’s Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as Israeli territory, something of  a pariah move).  I know some people don’t like the reality that Israel has long-been a recognized legitimate state under international law but tough, and while people are free to and can even reasonably disagree over the justice and morality of establishing Israel as a state and the manner in which that happened, that Israeli is a recognized international state is history: that ship has sailed and there is no time machine going back to before Israel became a state in 1948.  But the privilege of having statehood as a legitimate nation and a democracy (at least within its proper borders if obviously not in the West Bank) that is a signatory to the major human rights conventions, that comes with the responsibility that it is rightly expected to follow international law, that it can and should be expected to follow all international laws regarding civilians in wars zones and to be held to those standards.  Sadly, while the international community and especially Hamas’s backers can and should press Hamas to do the same, Hamas is a terrorist organization that has a modus operandi of defying international law.

While Israel itself has a questionable track record on international law, there is not an equivalent record between the Israeli government and Hamas: they are not moral equals, and after what Hamas pulled off in its insane attack on October 7, Hamas has signed its own death warrant: the status quo is over and Israel simply cannot tolerate Hamas’s existence right at its border and near its communities any longer.  Israeli must neutralize Hamas (and its mini-me, Palestinian Islamic Jihad), whether destroying it, taking prisoners, some sort of exile, or otherwise demilitarizing (and destroying seems to be the most likely option given Hamas’s posture).  As is the situation with Ukraine’s fight against Russian colonialist imperialism, the “give peace a chance/there need to be negotiations to stop the war” crowd does not understand the reality of how Hamas on October 7 moved itself beyond the pale of what Israel can tolerate, let alone make peace with, and the Israeli voting public would absolutely not accept leaving Hamas in power in Gaza even is in some fantasy world the current government did: the coalition would collapse and voters would put in a new one that would continue with the campaign to remove Hamas.

But that last point only refers to Hamas.  Conversely, Netanyahu’s lack of willingness to engage in real negotiations with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party running the West Bank through the Palestinian Authority (PA): the de jure Palestinian government in the West Bank propped up by Israel’s much more sovereign de facto “governance” there through its military for well over half a century now.  Fatah has long renounced violence against Israel and cooperated with Israel to prevent terrorism against Israelis, making Netanyahu’s longtime willingness to boost Hamas as a way to undermine its rival Fatah even more shameful—Israel even helped to create Hamas decades ago to do just this—and, as I have noted before, Israel should be engaging with Fatah even now, should have been for years, and advancing Palestinian statehood.  By not doing this at all, Netanyahu has literally incentivized violence by punishing cooperation and nonviolence over many years, sending the message that occupation, dispossession, and privation are the makeup of Israel’s long-term plan “for” Palestinians, and making Abbas and the PA look like mere collaborators in the eyes of Palestinians.

While Israel has to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and that means there will be many innocent Palestinians killed in the crossfire, that does not mean “anything” goes as far as Israel’s conduct, that all safety for civilians is Hamas’s responsibility, or that there cannot be some sensible measures not currently being undertaken by Israel that will make the situation far better, save many Palestinian and some Israeli lives, and lead to a better outcome for Israel and Gaza.

With that in mind, here are my thoughts on some sensible, very possible, very practical steps that if adopted can minimize the worst of what is to come, keep international public opinion from turning even more against Israel than it would otherwise, and minimize the risk of protests in perhaps the West Bank other nearby countries like Jordan and Egypt from boiling over while also reducing the chance that actors like Hezbollah and Iran will enter the conflict in a major way.

My Six-Point-Plan for Mitigating the Horror that Is to Come

So my very first two recommendations are as follows: especially as Gaza is surrounded on three of four sides by Israel and is mostly dependent on Israel for water, electricity, fuel, and food by Israeli design, receiving those supplies at deeply insufficient levels for Gazans even before October 7 (since 2007, day-in, day-out, most Palestinians are malnourished and much of the day there is no power), 1.) the collective punishment of cutting off of water, power, fuel, and food to 2.3 million Gazan Palestinians must end.

Secondly, 2.) Israel must say loudly and unambiguously that the vast majority of noncombatant civilians who end up leaving northern Gaza or Gaza altogether will be allowed back into their homes in northern Gaza or Gaza overall (or what’s left what they left behind) shortly after the fighting stops, that there will be no mass expulsion of peaceful civilians, no ethnic cleansing, no mad pipe dreams that existed throughout Israeli history and in the mind of prominent rightist Israelis like former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon, among other prominent Israelis even still today, to expel Palestinians into the barren Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and create a “Palestine” there.  This is actually one major reason why Egypt is so reluctant to open the Rafah border crossing to outgoing civilians in Gaza: they fear new refugee camps that will become long-term fixtures, that, left unaddressed, festered instability, insurgencies, civil war, and even terrorism like so many camps set up for Palestinians after 1948 and 1967).

Frankly, given Israel’s track record, that this or subsequent Israeli governments can change their mind or break their word, and the composition of much of the current extremist Israeli government (especially before this unity government), Egypt and others would be justified in doubting whatever assurances Israel would give regarding allowing fleeing Gazans to return:  in what is still regarded as a deeply controversial and illegal move (though quite understandable from Israel’s perspective), Israel has allowed very, very few Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled in 1947-1949 and in 1967 to return, either to Israel or to the Palestinian territory Israel occupied in 1967.

That cannot be the situation with the current possible waves of flight within or out of Gaza.  I personally would not bet on most Gazans that might move into Sinai ever returning unless the U.S. can pressure Israel into agreeing beforehand that they would be allowed to return soon after the fighting stops (in a live CNN interview with the always-stellar Christiane Amanpour I saw two days ago while writing this, Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid declined to say whether Israel’s leadership would provide a guarantee that displaced Palestinians would be allowed to return to their homes of if he would support such a move).  And it may be temping for Israel to turn all of northern Gaza into a bulldozed buffer zone, but this, too, would be a war crime and illegal under international law, and would be cramming all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people—already in a Gaza that is one of the most densely populated places on earth—into roughly half the territory they were living in before.  This would turn an already intolerable living situation into one that would be catastrophic.

Related to the last measure, this is a conflict mainly between Israel and Hamas; Israeli is in no position, morally or legally, to impose the problem of Palestinian refugees on Egypt and dump the responsibility for accounting and planning for their welfare onto Egypt is a not a party directly involved in the conflict as a primary party but is one that has every right to suspect Israel will be wanting to permanently dump Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai.  Israel is deciding to clear out half of the Gaza Strip and to invade a Gaza from which they are not currently allowing anyone to exit from the three sides of Gaza it controls.  As a major party to the conflict and as the party forcing civilians out of their homes, Israel is just as responsible as Hamas for their welfare as one of the two major belligerent parties, and Hamas’s moral and legal failures do not absolve Israeli form its moral and legal responsibilities, nor are those responsibilities Egypt’s.

Yet I am only hearing that “Egypt should open the Rafah crossing” without any mention that Israel could open one or both of its crossings and set up temporary shelter in its territory.  The simple fact of the matter is the land and infrastructure in Israel surrounding Gaza is far more hospitable, connected, and resourced than the desolate Sinai peninsula near Rafah, that Israel is far more capable of hosting humanitarian operations and a series of temporary refugee camps, and—especially now that Hamas is boxed into Gaza—southern Israel near Gaza is far more secure that the anarchic Sinai Peninsula, which has for many years has been filled with untamed Islamic terrorist insurgents from al-Qaeda and more recently a branch of the Islamic State (ISIS, remember them?).  ISIS even famously used a soda-can bomb to take out a Russian civilian airliner over Sinai in 2015, killing 224 people.  Thus far, the Egyptian government has not been able to quell these insurgent terrorists, despite multiple attempts over the years.

Considering this, throwing a large number of Palestinians into refugee camps into the mix in Sinai would seem to be setting up a disaster for the future in an already volatile area, could lead to a destabilization of Egypt, and, should ISIS gain a presence in the camps and launch, say, rocket attacks into Israel with any frequency or intensity, could also lead to Israel striking into Egyptian territory in response in a repetitive cycle the like had developed in between Israel and Gaza up until this point, a disaster for the region that should be avoided at all costs by taking Sinai off the table as far as discussions of where to settle Gazan Palestinians, either temporarily or otherwise (indeed, the current ISIS franchise in the Sinai has fired rockets into southern Israel multiple times before, though to shruggable effect).

Israelis, ever lacking strategic thinking, would likely consider the problem more or less “solved” if they could pawn the Gazan Palestinian “problem” off onto Egypt, and be much happier worrying, but worrying less, about Palestinians in Egypt than Palestinians closer by in Gaza and would feel less incentive to move the refugees back into Gaza, perhaps playing the semantic games that come so easy to Netanyahu without ever getting to a point of moving Palestinians back into Gaza.  Tellingly, in an interview yesterday with the always-excellent Nic Robertson for CNN, an Israeli man living near Gaza in Sderot, hit hard by Hamas, called for transferring the Gazan Palestinians “into other Arab countries,” a view Robertson noted was “typical of many” there.

Conversely, if Palestinians were in camps in set up in southern Israel on the Gazan border, Israel would want to get the Palestinians there back into Gaza as soon as possible and not a day later.  The dynamics are far more likely to pressure parties into a far better result with the Israel camp option than the Sinai camp option, keeping the conflict and the bulk of responsibility for a competent, swift resolution with Israel and not dragging Egypt into it, which cannot even handle its own situation in the Sinai.  Therefore, 3.) Israel should allow several camps on its own territory neighboring Gaza for many of the civilians who want to exit Gaza, especially women and children (obviously military-age men are going to be more difficult to process but not impossible to at least partly screen).

And Israel does not need to deal with this alone: apart from the UN and NGOs that will certainly be willing to aid (and feel much more secure operating in Israel than the Sinai), Israel can and very much should bring in Abbas’s and Fatah’s PA.  There is obviously great concern about what is the plan is for Gaza after Hamas is defeated, as Israel clearly has none and is not shy about admitting this repeatedly publicly and privately, even to the Biden Administration despite U.S. pushback for not having such a plan.  After Netanyahu has spent so many years deliberately weakening and undermining the only major alternative to Hamas, allowing PA officials into these temporary camps can help the PA build credibility among Gazans up from its current crisis-low levels, allowing the idea of the PA moving into Gaza to govern after Hamas is defeated to actually be built in the hearts and minds of Gazans, bolstered by international and aid organizations (for all its issues, can anyone think of a better choice than the PA to fill this role?).

If a post-Hamas future for Gaza begins with Israel, the PA, and international partners working to the benefit of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza, that is about as good of a new start one can hope for.  Without Hamas as a player on the scene, the only good path forward that can lead to justice, safety, and freedom for large numbers of Israelis and Palestinians is one that immediately begins building up a new Palestinian partner in Gaza for self-rule and to restart life there.  And for this, the PA is the only realistic option in the here and now.  Flatly speaking, there cannot be a military solution to what is fundamentally a political problem, and such Israeli-PA political cooperation (as opposed to just security cooperation) is long overdue.  Gaza after Hamas is a good chance for this (along with the West Bank if restrictions are eased and settlers reigned in) and there is no sense in putting it off, which would risk a collapse of the PA while it and Abbas are at their nadir along with a radicalization of its members.

Quite nobly and bravely, some Palestinian doctors, nurses, and medical staff are pledging to stay in northern Gaza—in the hospitals there—dozens even paying with their lives, so as not to abandon their patients, including newborn babies, who will die if they leave.

Especially in light of this, quite sadly and horrifically, the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City in northern Gaza was struck by an explosive projectile in northern Gaza just as I was finishing this last night, with estimates in the dead ranging from roughly 300 to 500.  I’m not a weapons expert, but on the one hand, this confirmed video of the strike does not resemble other videos of misfired Palestinian rocket attacks, as the IDF claims caused the blast and deaths, and seems closer to resembling a video of an Israeli airstrike especially given the size of the explosion; but on the other hand, factors that can push the conclusion in the other direction are still being digested, such as a lack of a large impact crater, video footage of a Palestinian rocket exploding high above the hospital just before the explosion in question and showing the explosion from a distance immediately after, and that if it was a rocket that misfired, it would have had more fuel so early in its journey, resulting in a larger explosion than normal.  The fog of war is still enveloping this situation even if it has become a Rorschach test, with people expressing certainty before having the facts and the incident understandably inflaming the region, making Biden’s visit and diplomatic push far more challenging.  At first, I believed with strong confidence it was an Israeli airstrike, but most of the evidence put forth of the publicly verifiable type favors Israel’s explanation. Still, there is yet doubt and dispute about what happened as of the publishing of this article and I am not sure definitive proof has been presented.

*(UPDATE: Throughout the day more analysis has come through. Despite Israeli’s track record of being caught lying in prominent cases like this, as excellently discussed by CNN’s Christiane Amanpour here, the forensic evidence, from subsequent video to crater/blast analysis, points very strongly, perhaps overwhelmingly, to the conclusion that this explosion resulted from a misfired Palestinian rocket and was an accident. As for the audio presented by Israel purported to be Hamas, it may or may not be authentic; in our present age, this audio could very well be an edited or fabricated cherry that Israel is adorning to the top of its cake of evidence to help win the public relations war it is losing, and some experts have called the audio out as fake; so that and some other aspects of the Israeli narrative are far from perfect. The audio may possibly be a distortion or a lie, but the lack of a large crater and the confirmed video evidence is not. On the other side of things, there is no hard evidence that has been presented to be able to draw the conclusion that this was an Israeli airstrike. I have discussed Israel lying in the past myself, and indeed, a whole article could be written about that [Israel in the past lied about airstrikes, including an incident last year in which it claimed categorically as fact that a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket had killed 5 children, it being later reveled there were no rockets launched or falling near the children and they were actually killed by an Israeli airstrike; conversely, as documented by Amnesty International, both Hamas and Islamic Jihad lied and blamed Israel for two rocket misfires in a 2014 incident that killed 13 civilians—11 of them children—claiming they were killed by Israeli attacks; thus, it is wise to not take everything any of these parties to this conflict say at face value without scrutiny] but even if the audio is possibly not credible, the overall circumstantial evidence is credible and very strongly does not indicate an Israeli airstrike and does indicate a misfired Palestinian rocket, whether from Islamic Jihad or Hamas, was responsible, and without any substantive counterevidence, we must go in the direction of the existing evidence unless further substantive evidence changes the picture substantially.)

*(SECOND UPDATE) Since my last update, there have been multiple other independent investigations, most of which admit they can not make a definitive conclusion in the absence of an on-the-ground investigation.  Among the new investigations are ones from the AP and CNN, both of which concluded that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the most likely explanation behind the tragic explosion at the hospital.  The CNN investigation also allowed for the possibility of an IDF artillery round, but found that possibility less likely based on the available evidence.  I personally messaged the serially reliable CNN military analyst, Col. Cedric Leighton USAF (Ret.), to weigh in, and he echoed the CNN investigation in also offering his view that the available evidence strongly favored a misfired Palestinian rocket based on available evidence versus other explanations but also could not rule out an Israeli artillery shell.  The Washington Post’s own investigation corroborated Israel’s and the U.S. assessment that a failed Palestinian rocket was the best explanation.  Following up on its earlier investigation that also found a misfired Palestinian rocket the most likely explanation but cast doubt on details of both the official Palestinian and official Israeli narrative, the UK Channel 4’s more recent investigation found further evidence to discredit what seems to be doctored or altered audio released by Israel that it claimed to be of Hamas operatives and that also cate doubt on Israel’s account of the trajectory of what caused the explosion (likely exposing Israeli hasbara, Israel’s unique brand of information warfare trying to make Israel’s narrative more convincing than the evidence alone would make it).  A New York Times investigation disputed that videos that have been widely cited by other investigations as showing strong evidence that a misfired Palestinian rocket was responsible actually showed what those other investigators concluded, including the aforementioned; rather, it corroborated some other interpretations that stated the videos do not show a misfired Palestinian rocket, casting the situation into further confusion and intensifying the fog of war.  The UK-based Forensic Architecture presented its analysis conducted with partner organizations that presented seemingly decent analysis discrediting parts of the official Israeli narrative and favoring the theory that an Israeli artillery round caused the blast, but the organization also seemingly presents the problem of anti-Israeli bias in its presentation: it refers to the IDF as “IOF,” which stands for “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Israel Offense Forces,” or “Israel Offensive Forces;” IOF is a pejorative term that some critical of the IDF and Israeli policy towards Palestinians have taken upon themselves to use to replace IDF; I will simply say that I do not find North Korea, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and often referred to by the ensuing acronym DPRK, to be either democratic of belonging to the people; to use another Asian example, China’s army is named the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), but it is neither liberating anything, nor run by the people; in both cases, I do not invent cute if accurate pejorative terms based on my own views, I use the official terminology because that is how the world works in the realm of journalism and research organization, otherwise we could start renaming everything and retitling anyone based on how we personally feel about them; those that do rename based on personal views more than suggest the presence of bias.  Al Jazeera put forward its own investigation, but it comes off fairly propagandistic: it presents information it claims disproves that a Palestinian rocket was responsible, but it is not convincing or conclusive at all and does not actually provide any evidence it was an Israeli airstrike, not even addressing the issue of crater size.  For its part, Hamas has also not produced any evidence the blast was from an Israeli airstrike or Israeli artillery round.  Greatly adding to the confusion around this incident, there have also been glaring errors made by media outlets throughout this process, with few owning up to their errors and both governments and international organizations not adjusted their narratives to newly revealed facts.  And one independent analyst who has not received proper clarification after reaching out to multiple major outlets may have even exposed that the figure of 500 killed that supposedly came from the Hamas health ministry—a figure later seen as widely non-credible, though numbers coming out of Gaza from all the other violence are generally seen by aid organizations and the United Nations as largely credible—may have no specific confirmation or evidence supporting that such a claim was actually made. After reviewing all of these, my own view—given the preponderance of independent investigations’ conclusions and the indications of “high confidence” U.S. intelligence—is that a failed Palestinian rocket is still the most likely explanation, but I feel less confident in this conclusion given several other investigations that have different interpretations of video analysis and that it seems very likely both Hamas and the IDF are lying about certain aspects of this in addition to no definitive investigation having yet been conducted on the ground; thus, I went from being pretty convinced it was an Israeli airstrike, to being even more convinced it was a failed Palestinian rocket, to still favoring the Palestinian rocket theory with less confidence and more doubt/questions to be answered.

Your not-so-humble author here has little to add to this incredibly inspiring self-sacrifice of the medical staff or the horror of the still-staffed hospital being struck by some weapon to devastating effect.  With the staff, the concept of the Hippocratic Oath taken to such an extreme level will inspire long after this conflict.  The bottom line for the purposes of my article is that, hypothetically speaking, if it was an Israeli strike, such a situation is generally quite avoidable, especially given how large hospital complexes tend to be.  Yet it is far less avoidable with the current Israeli approach.

Their bravery and sacrifice of the medical staff and the helplessness of their patients mean that, despite the crimes of Hamas, these doctors and their patients deserve all the care Israel can take to save them.  Even if this situation was not the result of an Israeli strike—and I am not stating that is the case—the current approaches leave such a possibility wide open, even likely, to still happen.  To this end, 4.) I call on the IDF and other Israeli authorities to reach out directly to the administrators of the hospitals and to try to coordinate delivery of aid to the hospitals and to coordinate if possible the IDF securing the hospitals as safe zones for civilians and patients unable to be safely moved as well as for the medical staff tending to them.  To the degree that Hamas avoids using these hospital as defensive positions or staging areas, there is great opportunity for clear, careful, open coordination avoiding needless loss of life or IDF attacks at these hospitals.

Israel also has to be careful about provocations and incitement against Palestinians by leaders, politicians, settlers, police, soldiers, and perhaps even more normal civilians after such traumatizing events.  This has been a huge problem in Israeli society in recent years, with one of the most complex, top-of-society-to-the-bottom examples being the horrible events in 2014 leading to Palestinian teen Muhammad Abu Khdeir’s abduction and murder by being beaten and burned to death by Israeli settlers—a “price tag” revenge for the kidnapping and murder by Palestinians of three Israeli teens, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaar, and Eyal Yifrach—so heartbreakingly portrayed in the excellent HBO and Keshet (an Israeli TV station) joint-miniseries titled Our Boys.  The show was so revealing of the toxic and dangerous effects of Netanyahu’s style of politics and the warped ideology of many of his supporters that he even outrageously called the joint-Israeli production “anti-Semitic.”  This incident back in 2014 was part of the runup to the worst Israel-Hamas violence before the current fighting.

Yet there are many examples going back years before and years beyond that prolific one.  These include multiple acts of violence, terrorism, and murder against Palestinians by Israeli settlers acting with sheer impunity in the West Bank, including ambushing and killing a father and a son just days ago who were attending a funeral of four other Palestinians recently murdered by settlers.  Israel’s security forces had already been massively escalating the situation in the West Bank all year with provocative raids and arrests before October 7, too.  Overall, the violence earlier this year hit levels not seen in East Jerusalem and the West Bank—both occupied illegally by Israel from 1967 on—since 2005 and is only exploding further now after Hamas’s October 7 pogrom and Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza: 61 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, 1,250 wounded since October 7, destined to get worse especially after the Gaza City hospital horror. 

There are nonviolent issues that drive violence that must also be considered: just the additions to, expansions, and continued presence of illegal-under-international-law Israeli settlements in the West Bank on land that that is supposed to be Palestinian are themselves provocations, with the U.S. condemning Israeli settlement expansion moves multiple times just last month and also earlier this year repeatedly, a year that has seen Netanyahu’s unprecedented right-wing extremist government dramatically accelerate settlement expansion.  The recent eviction of Palestinians from their home in East Jerusalem so they can be replaced with Jews and even some recent displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank—textbook ethnic cleansing on a slow, small progression—also adds to the poisonous atmosphere and the feeling held by Palestinians that they are under constant siege and assault.  

Statements from too many Israelis are also incitement, even lawmakers and senior members of the current government, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—previously suspected and convicted, respectively, in Israeli legal cases of terrorism against Palestinians—Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and inciter-in-chief Netanyahu himself.  Such statements can even include denying the very identity of Palestinians as a distinct people and pushing for mass expulsion of Palestinians from their land or can surprisingly even recently come from Israel’s leftist figurehead president Isaac Herzog, and though he later walked back some of his worst remarks, he was clearly thinking what he said at the time. 

Additionally, the focus of Netanyahu’s multiple governments on normalization with Saudi Arabia and others while totally ignoring any political negotiations with the Palestinians, along with his recent predecessor Naftali Bennet pledging his government would literally do nothing to try to make political progress with Palestinians, were in themselves provocations because the clear subtext to Palestinians was that “You don’t matter and we don’t care about your political and nationalist aspirations at all,” an unsustainable illusion given false credence by a Trump-Kushner Abraham Accords that totally ignored Palestinian nationalist aspiration (I will be writing a whole article about this later).  And last but hardly least, the Israelis under Netanyahu’s new government have been provocative throughout the year at one of the holiest sites of Islam, the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem’s Old City, including in the days just before the Hamas pogrom on October 7.

Israel needs to put its best foot forward during its Gaza operation in regards to these incitements and provocations, which it is already failing to do, or risk blowback that will see more Israelis and Palestinians get killed and complicate what are already a complicated Gaza offensive and simmering, even now exploding, regional dynamics.

The key measures that must be taken here are that 5.) Israeli leaders must police and reign in officials engaging in hate-speech, the language of anti-Palestinian incitement, or ordering provocative security force deployments or actions at Al-Aqsa while prevent any settlement expansion in the West Bank or ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem during this fighting in Gaza.  And they must not only prevent terrorist settler violence against Palestinians but must also prosecute any settlers guilty of such terrorism against Palestinians.

These first five measures absolutely will help to stem criticisms of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” currently being leveled against Israel’s Gaza campaign, and they are prolific and not without meriting concern given some of the statements coming from Israeli quarters, discussed above (indeed, if the Palestinians leaving northern Gaza are not allowed to ever return, that would be the legal definitions of those accusations, and the damage to Israel for playing into the these legitimate criticisms would be considerable on the world stage).  Blunting such criticism with substantive action would not only be effective public relations and buttress Israel’s campaign against Hamas, it will actually save many innocent lives.

Finally, while there is rightly and emphatically condemnation of Hamas’s abduction of children among the hostages, there is an ugly truth that receives far too little attention: according to Save the Children (full in-depth report here), each year, Israel detains without civilian due process but through military authorities between roughly 500-1000 Palestinian children, most of whom are physically abused in custody, a large portion of whom are denied timely legal assistance access (often interrogated before any assistance), and many of whom are “denied a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves against allegations.”  Human Rights Watch also shows Israeli military authorities handling and detaining the children are regularly abusive and that they are often denied anything resembling an acceptable due process, with the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem showing more detailed figures and that Israeli authorities have not been transparent or forthcoming when it comes to inquiries about detained children. 

From various statements coming from official Israeli spokespeople, the rescue or exchange of the hostages taken by Hamas into Gaza seem to be taking a backseat to the desires of the Israeli government first and foremost to destroy Hamas, and, indeed, those two goals are largely incompatible; thus, it must be said this does not augur terribly well for the survival of the many Hamas hostages.  And while there is a current proposal that was just floated by Hamas offering to release all civilian hostages if Israel ceases airstrikes and would release all military hostages if Israel releases all Palestinian prisoners, this is ambitious and complicated and probably unlikely to be accepted.  Perhaps Israel offering to exchange the most vulnerable and least culpable prisoners in its custody—the children discussed above—in exchange for some or all the hostages in Gaza would put Hamas even more so on the defensive in the international arena for not acting on a legitimate, balanced, serious offer to exchange civilian life for civilian life, to free children and not all prisoners, including clear terrorists, from prison, so my last proposal is that 6.) Israel should offer to release all the children in its custody in exchange for at least the civilians held by Hamas.  It might not work but it doesn’t hurt as far as posturing and could put pressure on Hamas while showing that Israel is willing to explore ways to save hostages beyond military methods.  This would also be appreciated by many members of the Israeli public, who seem anecdotally in many, many interviews and from looking at social media posts of people I don’t know and people I know personally to at least seem to want Israel to prioritize getting the hostages free.

Conclusion: 6 High-Reward, Low-to-Moderate Risk Steps to Benefit Israelis and Palestinians Alike

As America’s Israel-whisperer, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, noted repeatedly and emphatically, if Israel does not take measures like the ones I am suggesting into consideration and just hurtles itself into Gaza with the sole consideration of destroying Hamas rapidly, then it will be playing into the dreams and interests of Iran, Hezbollah, and all who wish Israel ill in the Middle East and beyond.  Getting drawn into a bloodbath in Gaza in which very doable, practical, and eminently possible measures to minimize civilian casualties and keep civilians fed, hydrated, and overflowing hospitals powered up are simply not taken or only minimally implemented is exactly what Iran, Hezbollah, and all of Israel’s enemies want to see or believe Israeli will do.  Like Friedman writes, Israel should be asking itself, “What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?”  How can Israel prove the cynics and haters wrong?  Israel can hope to influence, but cannot control, the actions of other parties, but it can control its own.

The below picture is a of pair of twins who were just born in Gaza after their mother fled Israeli bombardment.  The world they grow up in—if they even survive—will be largely defined by what Israel and other states and factions decide and do in the coming days, weeks, and months.  If the measures I have suggested are adopted, there is a good chance worthy of a big bet that world will be less awful than if they are ignored, that the dynamics driving decades of conflict will be lessoned significantly by Israel in reducing its own contributions to them regardless of what its enemies do or do not do.  By seriously adopting these six measures, Israeli will serve its own interests and see the obstacles to peace weakened, the rays of hope largened and brightened, with a lot more people actually alive to see the improvement over time, not only many Palestinians, but also plenty of Israelis.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, my Linktree with all my public links/profiles) October 11, 2023 (slightly updated figures late afternoon)

(Arabic الترجمة العربية / Hebrew תרגום לעברית) The first article in a series of special reports about the 2023 Israel-Hamas-Middle East Crisis.

See related July 28, 2014 article The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death, October 26, 2015 article Blame Bibi Netanyahu for the Violence First, Then Blame Both the Israeli and Palestinian People; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—It is utterly inevitable: in conflict and war, comparisons are made to other conflicts.  They do not always even have to be from the real world: as I have discussed, Ukrainians regularly compare Russia to Mordor and Russian forces to orcs and have also seen themselves as the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars taking on a Russia embodying the Galactic Empire (Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has even partnered with Mark Hamill—Luke Skywalker himself—to help bolster Ukraine’s drone fleet and war effort).  Some pretty bad comparisons are being made about the current fighting in Israel and Palestine with the Russia-Ukraine war; as I have noted in even the right-leaning Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post, this is kind of ridiculous, because while Ukraine and Russia is virtually a one-sided, good-versus-evil issue, the behavior and context of Israel and the Palestinians (Hamas being one of two major Palestinian political factions and not particularly popular with or representative of Palestinians) is much more complicated, and I am not alone in making this point.

The 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks against the United States analogy being made by many, many people is both good and way off.

On the scale and psychological shock for both Israelis and Americans, the analogy holds: the Hamas attack is actually far worse proportionately, given Israel’s far smaller population and the still-increasing death toll (over 1,200 for Israelis conflicting reports of around 2,700 to 3,000 wounded as I am writing this; from a U.S. population in 2001 of about 285 million, 9/11 killed 2,977 people; Israel’s population is about 9.8 million today, with 73% being Jewish; if we lost the same portion of people as Israel has back in 2001, that would have been nearly 35,00 Americans killed and close to some 78,500-87,250 wounded.  For historical comparison, the bloodiest day in American history is the battle of Antietam, during the U.S. Civil War on September 17, 1862, in which there were nearly 20,946 killed and wounded—only 3,654 of those killed—with both combatant sides being American; Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, saw 3,581 total U.S. killed and wounded, with 2,403 of those killed).

Palestinians killed in Gaza are over 1,100 and 5,300 wounded, while Israeli forces have counted roughly 1,500 attacking Hamas terrorists and fighters killed inside Israel thus far.  Between Israel and Palestine, there are roughly an equal number of Palestinians/Arabs and Jews, though about of fifth of Israel’s citizens are Palestinians or Arabs, depending on how they identify (some with mixed feelings/loyalties and a thorny identity issue, as I have discussed recently), so there is trauma—deep, widespread trauma—being experienced now by everyone from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

But while terrorist flying large planes into major hubs and landmarks in America was novel, the idea of Hamas and other fighters or terrorists in Gaza breaking through the border barriers to strike out at Israeli forces and communities, including hunting down civilians on the streets and in their homes to target them for murder and kidnapping, is an eventuality and fear that has consumed the Israeli mindset for years.  What was novel was how “successful,” organized, large, and tactically proficient Hamas was in its effort, but that the effort would be undertaken was a given.  So the idea that this was not long-anticipated is false.  Conversely, the U.S. had key intelligence 9/11 on specific people and activities directly related to the 9/11 attacks passed up the chain in the months before 9/11, but the incompetence of the Bush Administration saw that it was not properly internalized and addressed.  Therefore, the comparison of both being major “intelligence failures” is inaccurate; this is far more applicable to Israel today.

Another dissimilarity: Israel’s conflict did not start on October 7, nor was it a cold or frozen conflict with just a few isolated flashpoints spread out over time, as was the case with the U.S. and al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11.  While the U.S. enraged many millions of Muslims and Arabs with controversial policies over decades, the U.S. was not engaged in any serious conflict directly with Al-Qaeda in the weeks and months prior to 9/11 and 9/11 was not carried out by people living in an enclave on the U.S. border with Mexico or Canada that the U.S. had been fighting and skirmishing on and off for years and in the days, weeks, and months before 9/11.  The opposite is true with Israel and the Palestinians, including Hamas in Gaza.  Especially since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s extremist right-wing government came to power in late December 2022, there has been a cycle of escalating violence, incitement, and deliberately provocative acts back and forth between the Israeli government and Israeli Jewish settlers on one end, and Palestinian terrorist groups (namely Hamas and Islamic Jihad) and small groups of Palestinians engaging in their own acts of resistance and/or violence of their own accord on the other.  This, even before Hamas’s stunningly “successful” (but entirely predictable in the attempt) attack and going back even before the ascent of Israel’s latest government for years, there has been a back-and-forth cycle of violence, dehumanization, and recrimination, one that erupted in 2023, leading to an explosion of violence that saw this year become most violent in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2005.  And then, Hamas dramatically and historically escalated things even further just a few fays ago.

Relatively speaking, then, 9/11 could be said to be unprovoked in a recent-time sense, but it is hard to claim that this Hamas attack was unprovoked and not directly part of a hot conflict already underway in the sense that Israelis and Palestinians were engaged in increasing violence all throughout 2023 in East Jerusalem and the West Bank mostly, but also some violence in Gaza, too.  To be clear, Israel and even some of its most extremist Jewish civilians engaging in actions that are deeply provocative to Palestinians month after month (and indeed, year after year, not that Palestinians do not do the same, they often do too) does not mean that, therefore, whatever reaction that comes from the Palestinians, including Hamas, is justified.  In other words, provoked does not necessarily mean justified, and, indeed, clearly Hamas’s overall attack is not “brave” “resistance” against an enemy military force but a slaughter of non-combatants (of over 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas, only 189 thus far are IDF, 45 are Israeli police, the rest and overwhelming majority being civilians, and that does not even deal with the at least 150 hostages taken by Hamas).  Indeed, Hamas has pivoted to becoming more like ISIS than the Hamas of even a few years ago as it is now responsible for the worst single day of lethal violence targeting Jewish civilians since the Nazi-led Holocaust during World War II.  Make no mistake, what Hamas perpetrated against the civilians of southern Israel near the Gaza Strip is a terroristic genocidal act of mass-murder and ethnic cleansing, an anti-Semitic pogrom that harkens back to a much darker era of humanity: in just one kibbutz of about 1,000 people called Be’eri, at least over 100 were killed—at least 10% of the population.

Another deep issue I will mention simply for the reader to consider without discussing: the U.S. had no solid, detailed exit strategy for its military interventions in which it engaged after 9/11 and the results were mostly counterproductive and with a massive human cost and the repercussions still very much being felt.  Given Israel’s track record in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon of not really having a political strategy but only tactical responses, it is deeply unlikely that Israel has any serious, mature, or realistic plan for what to do in Gaza once this war “ends,” so, quite likely, there is another for the similarities column. 

In the end, considering 9/11 is useful both in its similarities with and in its differences from the insane, tragic death-spiral currently unfolding Israel, Gaza, and beyond in trying to understand said death-spiral.

See all of Brian’s work on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content, Threads @bfchugginalong) September 20, 2023; see related July 28, 2014 article The Israel-Hamas Gaza High-Stakes Poker Game of Death, October 26, 2015 article Blame Bibi Netanyahu for the Violence First, Then Blame Both the Israeli and Palestinian People, and February 17, 2017 article: Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. Also, Brian is running for U.S. Senate for Maryland and you can learn about his campaign here.

SILVER SPRING—Tamir Pardo, a former chief of Israel’s famed foreign intelligence agency called the Mossad, recently flat-out explicitly labeled the Israel governance of the West Bank as apartheid.  Pardo’s use of the term apartheid goes significantly further than other former senior Israeli officials, who have warned of the possibility of Israel becoming apartheid but have not used the term so unequivocally to refer to anything in the here-and-now. 

Israel’s last prime minister to govern Israel from the left (over two decades ago), the Labor Party’s decorated general Ehud Barak, has been warning for over a decade that Israel faces a devolution into apartheid. Israel’s last centrist prime minister, Ehud Olmert of the now defunct Kadima Party, has echoed him.  But the latest Israeli titan to engage in these warnings is hardly a leader of some left-wing human rights-group and did not serve a leftist or centrist government.  Indeed, Pardo is no lefty: he was appointed by the right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself to run Mossad from 2011-2016.  Now, the unlikely Pardo is raising the alarm that some of Netanyahu’s current allies in power are “a lot worse” than even the U.S. Ku Klux Klan.

In Israel’s stunning victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, it ended up occupying the then-Jordanian-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Egypt-occupied Gaza Strip, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, and Syria’s Golan Heights; while Sinai has been returned since U.S. President Jimmy Carter brokered the Egypt-Israeli 1979 peace treaty, Israel illegally occupies East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights today and partially occupies and exercises most of the de facto sovereignty over Gaza still today.  While Egypt never formally tried to annex Gaza during its occupation of it from 1948-1967, its occupation was still not officially endorsed by the United Nations or most nations as a proper de jure authorized occupation.  Similarly, nearly every country in the world rejected as illegal Jordan’s 1950 annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

By the same principles applied to Egypt and Jordan that legally rejected any possibility of those countries unilaterally deciding to indefinitely take over and rule these territories in question that they occupied before they were driven out and defeated by Israel in 1967, today nearly the entire world rejects as illegal Israel’s (partial) annexation and decades-long de facto rule of the territories it still retains and/or controls from its occupations begun in 1967.

And this very much includes the West Bank.

Denying the Reality of or Maintaining Apartheid Occupation in the West Bank Does Not “Help” Israel

Those who claim to be “pro-Israel” or to support it who keep either turning a blind eye to, or outright campaigning for, Israeli colonial imperialism in Palestinian territory are neither “pro-Israel” nor true supporters of Israel but are akin to a friend buying methamphetamine for a meth-addict friend.  The Palestinian territory comprising the West Bank has been recognized by the overwhelming majority of nations since international recognition of Israel and Israel’s birth as a state in 1948 as well as after the territory’s occupation by Israel in 1967 as very much legally not Israel, and Palestinians have by far been the majority population for many centuries in the West Bank and still are in spite of illegal colonial demographic engineering on the part of Israel.  Despite ancient ancestral Jewish ties to the West Bank, as with ancient ancestral ties of many peoples around the world, such ties are not a legal basis for modern unilateral annexation or recolonization, nor the subjugation of current inhabitants; such revanchist claims could result in maps being rearranged all over the world and bloody wars, just as during World War II and the current case with Russia’s colonialist imperialist ambitions today in Ukraine. 

The powerful forces of hubris, power, revanchist expansionism, and cruelty of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank are noted in the words of even prominent now-more-conservative Jewish-Israeli historian Benny Morris:

Israeli thinking [after 1967] was to some degree governed by the notion that the Arabs of the territories, starved of land and resources (primarily water), and denied the possibility of industrial development, would gradually drift away.  Though never clearly enunciated, this was the government’s aim—especially after 1977.  And, indeed, over the decades, a steady trickle of West Bank and Gaza Arabs left their homes to find an easier life abroad…

There was a clear lesson for the inhabitants of the territories and the Palestinian diaspora in these events: Israel intended to stay in the West Bank, and its rule would not be overthrown or ended through civil disobedience and civil resistance, which were easily crushed. The only real option was armed struggle.

(Righteous Victims, 339, 341)

These powerful forces are proving addictive drugs to the very worst of Israeli society, elements who are not just the dregs but have become more mainstream and are firmly in the driver’s seat under Netanyahu’s unprecedented extremist right-wing government.  Those who think the inner turmoil and Israel’s domestic lurch towards extremism are wholly or even mostly separate from Israel’s more-than-a-half-century illegal military occupation and rule of Palestinians and Palestinian land (which I have discussed in detail before) are deluding themselves and their audience: the corrosion of the occupation is intimately intertwined with the corrosion of Israeli society and politics, the corruption of one becoming the corruption of the other.  As Morris writes:

Israelis liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an “enlightened” or “benign” occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen.  The truth was radically different. Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation…

Military administration, uncurbed by the civil rights considerations that applied in Israel, possessed ample measures to suppress dissidence and protest.  These included curfews; house arrest, with resulting loss of wages; judicial proceedings, ending in prison terms or fines—the work of the military courts in the territories, and the Supreme Court which backed them, will surely go down as a dark age in the annals of Israel’s judicial system—or expulsions; administrative detentions, or imprisonment without trial, for renewable six-month terms; and commercial and school shutdowns, usually in response to shopkeepers’ strikes or disturbances by students.  The Israelis could withhold or, alternatively, grant to collaborators, travel permits, commercial or building licenses, family reunion approvals, and marketing and work permits.  Such measures were often used selectively and, occasionally, collectively.  Sometimes whole towns were denied the right to receive visitors from the Arab states, such as Ramallah in the summer of 1968.

…[R]esistance met with quick and brutal repression.  Midnight sweeps and arrests; beatings, sensory deprivation measures, and simple, old – style torture to extract information and confessions; a system of military courts which bore no resemblance to the administration of justice in Western democracies (or, for that matter, in Israel proper); the demolition (or sealing) of suspects’ houses; long periods of administrative detention; and deportations—all were systematically employed.  Most of the measures had been introduced by the British during their suppression of the Arab rebellion of 1936–39 and were still on the statute books in the form of “emergency regulations.”

(341-342) [See my graduate school paper on the British Mandate of Palestine]

Such practices hardly ended then and continue today, as other well-documented sources cited below will amply confirm.

In so casually and harshly denying democracy, freedom, and human rights to the majority of a whole section of people de facto under their control for so long and lying to themselves about these very plain facts and the nature of their “benign” occupation, Israelis over time festered an inevitability that the quality of democracy, freedom, and human rights within their Israel—under international law established firmly behind 1967 lines and properly recognized as the Israeli state by nearly every other nation—would be dragged down and perhaps mortally threatened by the corrosive effects of the actions they have been undertaking for half-a-century so close by in the West Bank with generations of their conscripted citizen-army.  And thus, after more than five-and-a-half decades of militarized apartheid occupation, it is no wonder that the domestic situation within Israel is now unraveling once the people most zealously committed to these very policies in the West Bank came to be running Israel’s domestic affairs as key members of the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history after Israel’s most recent national elections.

A young Jewish Israeli leftist mother I know from my travels in Israel whom I checked in with just recently wrote to me: “My grandparents fled Germany and now I’m trying to get a German passport.  But now the Nazis are in Israel.  I mean, there are some in Germany, but not as many.”  I wouldn’t use the term “Nazi” myself, but fascist, as there is certainly now more than a whiff of fascism in the air there, just like in the U.S. and too many other places, but it is surprisingly common in Israeli political discourse for “Nazi” to be applied as a pejorative.

Palestinian Terrorism Is Not a Justification for What Is Over a Half-Century of Obvious Apartheid

I am sure some Israelis, some American Jews, and some others—including people I know—will not be pleased, will even be upset, at use of the term apartheid here.  To those people, I would state simply the fact that the millions of Palestinians living in Palestine’s West Bank will not be pleased, and are very upset, to a much higher degree, that their actually living under an apartheid legal, political, and social system—the very definition of separate and unequal that would also fit the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow U.S. South for close to a century until the implementation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—constitutes far, far greater actual injury than any perceived injury apologists for Israel feel at the use of the word apartheid to describe Israeli de facto rule of the West Bank. 

The U.S. analogy is particularly useful, because while there are important historical differences—we are talking about freed slaves after the Civil War, their descendants, Hispanic-Americans and other minorities the U.S. who were U.S. citizens but were denied equal rights in officially segregated areas until 1965 in one instance, and the Palestinian people living in the West Bank (and for a very long time and still in many ways in Gaza) who came under military occupation in 1967 and their descendants living there up through today on the other—the legal de facto similarities are undeniable and put them in much the same de facto category (in the West Bank city of Khalil/Hebron, I have seen whole sections of their own city that Palestinians are banned from entering, metal detectors for Palestinians entering the city’s most historic mosque but not for Jewish settlers who converted part of the mosque into a synagogue, and a street where one side is for Jews, the other for Palestinians, where I saw Palestinians—including children—inspected and harassed by Israeli soldiers while just going about their own business).  Israel’s apologists play a semantic and legalistic game that is wholly unconvincing.  Call it West Bank Jim Crow for all I care, but it’s the same kind of system in that two sets of people are defined on the basis of their ethnicity and ancestry as falling into two unequal legal sets of rights, rules, and punishments, the harsher one forced by one set of people upon the other set against their will  and without their consent, giving the people forcing the system on the unwilling far more rights than the unwilling and control over those unwilling, who are subject to brutal, arbitrary, and unfair violence enforcement of this inequality with the full might of security forces and paramilitary wings of the enforcing side’s civilian population, be they extremist Jewish Israeli settlers or the Ku Klux Klan, both of which existed to extragovernmentally enforce supremacist (Jewish or white) rule on the respective unwilling minorities the dominated through violence, intimidation, and terrorism.  These civilian extremists engaging in terrorist violence against the those unwilling to endure separate and unequal apartheid in both countries often have strong supporters and friends in senior levels of the government, as was the case throughout the Jim Crow era in the U.S. and has been the case with the rise and recent rapid expansion of the settler movement in Israel (which for decades has been colonizing illegally occupied Palestinian Arab land with illegal Israeli Jewish settlements and expanding existing ones).  Official support for these settler colonists and the violence some of them perpetuate is most egregiously present in the current Netanyahu-led coalition government filled with right-wing extremists.  Just this year and even in recent months, Israeli’s own security forces’ leaders—including the heads of Shin Bet, the military, and the police—have called recent settler attacks against Palestinians terrorism, as has the U.S. Department of State, yet extremist senior officials in Israel’s government—including National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—attacked those making this criticism and/or even praised this settler violence against Palestinians.  Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have themselves been linked in the past to supporting or planning terrorism against Arabs, so this is no surprise.

I can already hear apologists for Israel warming up.  “BUT THE PALESTINIANS”—just stop.  None of the problems with decades of illegal apartheid rule through military occupation—not temporary occupation—are fundamentally about Palestinians’ terrorism and incitement of extremism, which are obviously major problems and threats and legitimate concerns for the Israeli government, which has the right to respond to and act to prevent such violence, up to and including through the use of force, but those legitimate concerns does not give Israel the right to impose apartheid, de facto or de jure, on millions of people for over half a century.  And even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—Israel’s military—has cited Israeli settler violence against Palestinians as a cause of Palestinian violence against Israelis, just as Morris has made it clear that the occupation and displacement of Palestinians are themselves a breeding ground for violent Palestinian resistance:

The [1967] war and its aftermath of occupation, repression, and expansionism swiftly reignited the tinder of Palestinian nationalism, propelling thousands of young men, especially from among the dispossessed and hopeless of the refugee camps in East Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, into the burgeoning resistance organizations. At the same time, much as the Zionist enterprise had helped trigger early Palestinian nationalism, so the daily contact and friction with Israel and the Israeli authorities inside the territories now reawakened it.

(343)

Rather, these problems with Israel’s system of rule in the West Bank are about Israeli colonial expansionism the status of a people they have occupied and controlled for over fifty-six years now living under rule that is apartheid/Jim Crow—de jure and de facto before the now-failed and moribund Oslo Accords process that began in 1993 and was supposed to jumpstart a path to peace and a Palestinian state (and was sabotaged by Netanyahu, Hamas, and settlers, among others) and still very much de facto since—who are denied anything anywhere near-approximating the legal rights of the citizens backed by and backing the occupying power, which is imposing far inferior legal, political, social, and economic status on these occupied Palestinians without any consent or political representation in the system that is imposing it upon them.  Furthermore, this fifty-six-year occupation is no temporary measure: it has been fifteen years since any serious attempt at negotiations aimed at giving the Palestinians there their own state and sovereignty and since any indication the Israeli government is even willing to consider a change in the legal and political status of the millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank.  Between then and now, even after stretches of years of relatively little violence coming from Palestinians in the West Bank, there were still no responses from Israel indicating any serious rewards were being considered for this nonviolence other than more illegal Israeli settlements either expanding or being set up anew on Palestinian land in the West Bank.  In other words, nonviolence was met with more Israeli expansion at Palestinians’ expense, ipso facto discouraging nonviolence and encouraging violence.  This means that both Palestinian violence and Israeli violence is occurring in situation in which the de facto supreme end authority over the entire Palestinian West Bank is one of apartheid Israeli control giving Jews access to the benefits of Israeli civil law and Palestinian the harshness and arbitrariness of Israeli military rule whenever and wherever in the West Bank Israel chooses to implement it, regardless of any lines on a map left over from a broken Oslo system.

Specifically, this means that the violence occurring from the Palestinian side occurs in an atmosphere of Israelis in leadership making several things clear:

• That they will not hold Israeli settlers anywhere near accountable (if at all) for violence and terrorism as they do Palestinians
• That they have no plans to give up their rule or control of any of the West Bank, but, rather, to deepen and expand their presence and freedom of control and action there
• That they have no plans to change the legal or political status of the West Bank or Palestinians there (or are even considering either of these), plan to keep subjugating Palestinians under a deeply inferior status as part of its apartheid system with no attempt to find a way to alter those arrangements, and will defend those excusing this
• That to them the West Bank is simply part of Israel, period (not anything new from top Israeli officials)

The West Bank on official Israeli administrative and political maps is simply “Judea” and “Samaria,” just another two parts of Israel, with no border shown that would indicated that the West Bank is anything apart from the Israeli state.  To some this may seem trivial or moot, but it is not.  I have spoken myself with young Israelis that are not even familiar with the term “West Bank”—only “Judea” and “Samaria”—or even know that the territory is not legally Israel’s, that it is illegally occupying that land, and that virtually the entire rest of the world does not accept it as Israel.  When heart-of-Israeli-leftism Tel Aviv-Jaffa Municipality and its mayor defied the Israeli Education Ministry’s rules when it became the one school district in Israel to put up maps showing a border between Israel and the West Bank (the Green Line, from the 1949 Armistice ending the first Arab-Israeli war and regarded as Israel’s proper border) last August, this angered many Israelis and officials, with the Education Ministry ordering the roughly 2,000 revised maps in the district to be removed and replaced with maps not showing the border the rest of the world sees on virtually every other map (after checking with a local source, the maps showing the border are apparently still up in Tel Aviv-Jaffa classrooms).  Israel even just objected to the United Nations naming ancient ruins in the Palestinian city of Jericho as a World Heritage site explicitly as being located in Palestine (Palestine since late 2012 is a recognized “State” at the UN, just one with “non-member observer” status along with the Vatican’s Holy See) and objected very much because of that, just the latest that sign Israel intends to indefinitely illegally control all occupied Palestinian land forming all of the West Bank and expects the UN to ignore international law to recognize illegally occupied Palestinian lands as “Judea and Samaria,” as Israel’s and only Israel’s, as Israeli’s to do whatever they see fit with, which the UN will not.  The truth is that any hint at the lack of de jure sovereignty of Israel over the West Bank is met with swift and loud action from various corners of Israeli society and the government.

What this translates into collectively is a denial and blocking of any Palestinian nationalist aspirations in favor of perpetual apartheid.

In short, violence from some Palestinians some of the time cannot reasonably be a justification for fifty-six years of millions of Palestinians living in the legal equivalent of apartheid or Jim Cow, despite the absurd rationale that this should somehow be the case, a rationale Israelis would never accept were the situation reversed—Jewish history, from even before the Roman occupation (I have been to Masada myself and seen firsthand where some ancient Jews went to the most extreme lengths to fight for their freedom) to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, shows Jews are quite capable of violent resistance against abusive occupation—and therefore have no right to impose on anyone else.

Apartheid in the West Bank, but Not Inside Israel

To be clear, it’s no paradise being an Arab citizen within the proper borders recognized under international law and by almost every nation on earth as the territory of the Israeli state (many of them, increasingly by some—but not all—accounts, considering themselves Palestinians, though some not, the last part a dirty secret for many Palestinians that many adamantly refuse to admit).  These Palestinian citizens of Israel, Arab-Israelis, Israeli-Arabs, or Palestinian-Israelis (depending on their personal preference, not on what others would impose on them) suffer discrimination and racism akin to what, sadly, most minorities face in most countries in the world: serious discrimination, under-resourcing, unequal access to or deprivation of key resources, lack of integration, disparities, and even violence, but not apartheid.  That is not to deny the plight of Arab citizens of Israel, it is serious, just as is the case of African-Americans in the U.S. even today, Kurds in Turkey, Muslims in India, indigenous people in Mexico and Brazil, non-ethnic-Russians in Russia, black Africans in Sudan and Tunisia, or Patani Malays in Thailand, just to name a handful of cases.  All are filled with unique histories, but the discrimination is generally some degree of different treatment by the government and society on top of some sort of historical disenfranchisement.  But to label Israel as a state inside its own legitimate, international recognized borders as apartheid dilutes the meaning of that powerful word to the point of making it almost meaningless, such that all those countries I just mentioned would have to also be labeled apartheid, as would nearly every country I the world.  I have not found any country where there is perfect harmony and equality among the majority and minorities, or among the ruling factions and other factions not ruling, and anyone claiming their country does meet the ideal of equality in practices should be viewed with extreme caution as far as taking their understandings of the world seriously.

Apologists come in all forms, but apartheid does not: there are very few systems in recent decades that match with the extreme level of institutionalized, official discrimination that characterized apartheid in South Africa—where the term “apartheid” comes from—until the rise of Mandela (though that system’s legacy still is doing tremendous damage in South Africa today), and one of the only others out there is Israeli rule of the West Bank (I have not taken a deep-dive into this, and maybe I will, but some of the only other examples that come to mind are Myanmar/Burma against its Rohingya population, gender apartheid in Afghanistan, and perhaps approaching apartheid in India’s rule of Kashmir).  Racism is a serious and growing problem all over the world right now, but throwing around “apartheid” as a term casually does no one any favors.  It does not help that the 1973 United Apartheid Convention includes an overly-broad definition that would apply to many countries on the planet, similar to my earlier discussion.  As I have argued that “terrorism” as a word should not simply apply to just any violence or threats with which we do not agree, but specific and extreme forms, so, too, should “apartheid” not be applied to any form of racism or discrimination we do not like, but should only apply to specific and extreme forms.

In an atmosphere of rising bigotry, -isms and -ists worldwide—not least of all in anti-Semitism—there are those who just want to see an end to Israel as a state and any sort of Jewish power or Jewish rule.  These people are not the only one who seek to dismantle the Israeli Jewish-run state, as many Palestinians, understandably, want to see a single democratic State of Palestine run by a majority of Palestinians after refugees would hypothetically return, making Jews a minority in what would formerly have been the State of Israel but would become a democratic Palestine, a “one-state solution,” as opposed to a “two-state solution” of an Israel and a separate Palestine.  But this is an idealist but unrealistic dream that is, practically speaking, simply not going to happen anytime in the even pretty distant future beyond our lifetimes for many reasons I will not get into here.  And in their bias and anger (plenty of that on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides, as I have noted), they seek to undermine Israeli in any way possible and apply any negative terms they can to describe Israel, Israelis, and Israeli actions—up to an including “Nazi,” “Holocaust,” and “genocide”—even if they simply do not fit the reality of the situation and are blatant exaggerations (conversely, some Israelis—including Netanyahu himself—trying to link the Palestinian people to Hitler’s Nazis and to call Palestinians “Nazis” is somewhat similarly misguided).  Thus, members of this group wanting to reclaim their homeland and the people driven mostly by sheer ant-Semitism casually throw around the label apartheid for Israel as a state even within Israeli’s 1967 borders, seeking just to use the term to inflict maximum damage and delegitimization on Israel regardless of the facts.

Conclusion: Israel Needs Tough Love from Its Friends or Its Current Insane Trajectory May Doom It

So, while Israel is clearly not an apartheid state, its rule of the West Bank operates under an apartheid regime, to the benefit of illegal Jewish settlers and the detriment of Palestinians, with no end in sight, let alone one contemplated by Israel’s current political leaders.  That a former recent head of Mossad is willing to acknowledge the obvious reality when so many others from the government he was a part of, who are now running Israeli’s government today, and who are part of Israeli society refuse to means this man Tamir Pardo deserves respect for his moral courage, whatever else you think if his career and views.  Much like fascist Trumpists in America, who are hell-bent on maintaining power by gaslighting the public and undermining democracy—twisting or even overthrowing the U.S. constitutional system to support their minority rule and to persecute minorities—those in Israel and elsewhere denouncing Pardo and hell-bent on denying the reality in the West Bank are only propelling Israel further down the descent into fascism in an era that has for years now seen too many nations move in that ominous direction, something I have discussed at great length before.

A militarized apartheid rule of the West Bank continuing for decades more, in which Israelis delude themselves into thinking they are benevolent rulers of a backwards people not deserving equality but whatever is deigned to be thrown their way by Israeli authorities, will not decrease division or authoritarianism inside Israeli, nor will it decrease violence between Israelis and Palestinians, nor improve Israeli’s image around the world or help to reduce a troubling rise in anti-Semitism, nor make Israel safer, more prosperous, or more secure.  If you care about the future of Israel, regardless of how you feel about Palestinians (and I for one have wanted to see freedom, dignity, and a fully sovereign, separate Palestinian state for decades), call out Israel’s mistakes and misdeeds for what they are: call Israeli rule in the West Bank apartheid or Jim Crow.  Israel will not listen to its enemies.  But if enough friends and allies, inside Israel and outside, start calling a spade a spade and correctly use apartheid to describe Israeli rule of the West Bank, it might just jolt Israel from its self-destructive path.

If that does not happen, there may be no hope for saving Israel from undoing its nature as a democratic, Jewish state, from becoming a theocratic or fascist Jewish supremacist undemocratic state—a pariah state like apartheid South Africa before it—from far worse cycles of violence than what is occurring now.  And time is also not on Israel’s side, the self-set, self-destructive time-bombs of its own making primed and ready unless its friends and allies help it to see the light.  But if Israel and its leaders continue on their current course in the West Bank, one of the only things that is certain is that the situation overall will get a whole lot worse for Israelis, Palestinians, and much of the Middle East before there can be any hope, if that, of things getting better.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) January 1, 2023; see related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II

SILVER SPRING—Not even a full month after Trump’s inauguration, I published a massive two-part essay discussing what I called the rise of “democratic fascism,” with Trump’s victory and being sworn into office one of largest developments on this front.

This is not a democratic fascism as in the Democratic Party of the U.S., but in terms of fascists nonviolently and legally winning elections, using their resulting power to chip away enough at what I have called the four main pillars of democracy—1.) popular elections, 2.) a law enforcement and highly-independent judicial system that is applied relatively equally and not used as a political tool for aggrandizement or persecution (“rule of law”), 3.) a free press that can hold all parties accountable and provide an accurate picture of reality to the public, and 4.) a public free to express itself and not stupid enough to be manipulated too much by propaganda and demagogues, that can make at least somewhat informed decisions based on reality—to twist the system into unfairly favoring themselves and keeping themselves in power as they continue to enact illiberal policies that only further stack the political and societal deck in their favor.

The first part of the two-parter focused on definitions of important terms like “democracy,” “fascism,” and my conception of what I called “democratic fascism.”  In particular, the term “fascism” is highly overused and often poorly understood or defined, a lot like the word “terrorism,” an issue I have previously discussed in detail: as I argued some time ago, “terrorism” must mean more than simply violence or threats of violence from people and organizations we personally dislike, and, similarly, fascism must mean more than the politics of someone or something we personally dislike.  The first part also discussed the difference between political spin and outright lies and how fascism embraces outright lies, as fascism is, among its other horrendous characteristics, a war on truth and reality itself.

In the second part, I looked specifically at why Trump very much fit the definition of “democratic fascist” as I had defined it.  As the word fascist is so strongly associated with Nazis, the Holocaust, and mass arrests and mass executions, I felt separating the traditional conception of fascism from the current wave that was, at least for the time being then, eschewing violent means to achieve and maintain power was useful back in 2017.  But in the roughly five years since Trump’s democratic fascist movement emerged to take over the Republican Party—one of America’s two major parties—and transformed it into a cult of Trump, the leader himself and bulk of that Trumpist movement have clearly transitioned already to accepting and embracing violence and overthrowing the rule of law illegally in their quest to achieve and maintain power, as most notably demonstrated in the culmination of the Trump Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.  That coup attempt did not stop with its failure on that day, but has since continued through the present. 

Once their embrace of violence and their failure to repudiate Trump’s insurrection became clear, I have felt “fascist” became more appropriate label for them, as the Trumpists are now trying to use undemocratic and/or violent means to achieve power, the latest being MAGA Republican Kari Lake trying to use false lawsuits to overturn her clear defeat in the Arizona governor’s race (I think she is a favorite to be Trump’s vice presidential-nominee in what I think will be his highly successful quest to rewin the Republican Party’s nomination for president).

The rest of my second part detailed how Russia’s Vladimir Putin was leading a global fascist movement as part of his war on Western democracy and how all who opposed such fascism needed to put pettier differences aside to defeat it (a spirit recent political victories in France, the United States, and Brazil embody).

As fascism has very much become an important theme in global politics today—from the Trumpist movement to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, from multiple political parties in Europe to Putin’s Russia and its war on Ukrainian democracy, from Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel to the Narendra Modi’s India, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, I think it is important to revisit the definition of “fascism.”  In this spirit, I am reposting parts of part one of the two-part piece discussed above because I think they are deeply relevant to our current circumstances. Not all fascism will be as obvious and violent as Putin’s Russian fascism, so a common definition is essential to fight fascism in all its forms (and on a side note, please do see the 10/10 spectacular Andor television series for a beautiful meditation on the nature of fascism and of resisting it).

Excerpt begins:

Fascism comes in many forms; if Hitler and genocide can be one end of the spectrum, there’s plenty of room for fascism that falls far short of that standard, eschewing pogroms and other forms of mass violence, forms of fascism that include what we are seeing now: a democratic fascism (small “d” referring to democracy in general, as opposed to a capital “D” associated with America’s Democratic Party) empowered by populations, media, and elections that rewards and empowers those willing to feed off division and fear as it overwhelms norms, dissenting minorities, and even the law. As this democratic fascism rises, the losers are the liberal democratic governments that have been dominant since the end of WWII; in effect, it is no longer a question of if, as I posed nearly a year ago, but how fast we will see the unraveling of the post-WWII U.S.-led international order. What we do now will define the West and the world for decades to come, but the growing far left must grow up quickly and act within the clear choices of present reality if we are to have a good chance of stopping democratic fascism from destroying our societies, the West, and the international order as we know it.

“American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.”— Henry A. Wallace, 1944, Vice President of the United States 1941-1945

One can easily go back to the domestic tyranny of Athens’ democracy in ancient Greece, of the will of the demos often trampling over minority rights, to begin a long history of systems that were democratic in that a majority had power and chose leaders or voted on legislation, but with that being the extent of the democracy. In fact, as happens all too often, people—especially when consumed by fear and hate—will choose someone who merely reflects the base instincts of their majority, will use democracy to create a political culture of persecution, intolerance, and even brutalization of those who are not in the majority, will create a system designed to favor and perpetuate the rule of this majority, and will actively suppress those speaking, acting, and organizing against it. 

This is a Tocquevillian tyranny of the majority on steroids, a system where only the people in power and those who support them can even approach having the feeling they live in a democracy or that their opinions count in the public square, while everyone who feels differently is made to understand that even expressing their counternarrative, their dissent, their dissatisfaction will carry consequences for their level of freedom, or even their health, up to and including the lethal variety. Such “democracies” exist to empower the majority or the plurality of those supporting the current leader/government/system and only them; the rest of the population is made to feel that they are tolerated at best by the good graces of those in charge and to embrace their second-or-third-class status meekly and enthusiastically, to be deferential to their oppressors’ views and whims, or else…

Such a system uses democracy to destroy it. Such a system embraces limited (and the most salient) forms of democracy, mainly elections and the right of those winning the elections to rule (and in this case, rule uncontested)…

…the following quote illustrates, if in a slightly oversimplified way, some of the dynamics behind this as far as people and mentalities are concerned:

The following joke circulated in Italy in the 1920s. According to Mussolini, the ideal citizen is intelligent, honest, and Fascist. Unfortunately, no one is perfect, which explains why everyone you meet is either intelligent and Fascist but not honest, honest and Fascist but not intelligent, or honest and intelligent but not Fascist.—Maurice Herlihy and Nir Shavit, The Art of Multiprocessor Programming

Yes, as before, a cadre intelligent people willing to be extremely dishonest are leading a new move towards fascism that wins the hearts and minds of the unintelligent who are honest with their backwards beliefs, leaving a cadre of intelligent, honest, non-fascists to be in the unenviable positions of selling less attractive trusts juxtaposed to often more attractive fascist lies. Sure, there are rich exceptions, but you could do far worse as far as accuracy than categorize most people in politics these days into one of these three categories.

No, it’s not the 1930s, but today, the democracies of the world are collectively facing a cancer of populist, and, yes, democratic fascism that threatens to erase democratic norms, destroy liberal democratic values, and that seeks to remake many of the world’s leading democracies in the image of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its “democracy” that relies on an intolerant majority that understands democracy simply as the gratification of their emotional desires, with dissenters, minorities, and others who don’t agree with them be damned, their complaints of abuse at the hands of the state dismissed and ignored.

Yet terms like democracy and fascism are thrown about quite casually, and not necessarily in a way that is accurate; in fact, I earlier engaged in an exercise in defining the word “terrorism” usefully that amply demonstrates how important it is for a reasonable and universal definition of certain commonly-used-in-our-political-discourse terms to be sounded out so that the terms are spared from being bandied about in a way that virtually anyone can use to make any point, rendering them meaningless and their use pointless.

In his seminal 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell expressed his understanding of how slippery the uses of both “democracy” and “fascism” not only could be, but were when he wrote that

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.

Such tendencies that flourished in Orwell’s time still, sadly, flourish today, over 70 years both after Orwell penned those thoughts and after the defeat of fascism in Europe. We shall do our best to avoid such traps in the discussion below by discussing the definition…of…“fascism.”…

Defining Fascism

Which brings us to a discussion of what we should understand fascism to be…

“Fascism” as a word in English comes into English in the 1920s from the Italian fascismo, describing the movements (maybe gangs is a better word) that would eventually put Mussolini in power in Italy but a word also alluding to the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the fasces. The English definition of “fascism,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is mainly twofold: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization” and a subdefinition: “(in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practices;” both are useful, and, especially, the subdefinition is applicable here, but a further, less vague, and more detailed definition is needed for our discussion.

Like “terrorism” and “democracy,” “fascism” as a term can easily become overly and poorly used. Writing in 1944, Orwell noted how “there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist.” Still, even noting the sharp disagreements of the people of his day over who or what was fascist, he noted that “[b]y ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.”

The enthusiastic admirer of Orwell and recently (and very sadly) late Christopher Hitchens, unsurprisingly, echoes some of what his hero had to say, but goes farther; for Hitchens, “[h]istorically, fascism laid great emphasis on glorifying the nation-state and the corporate structure,” is “based on a cult of murderous violence that exalts death and destruction and despises the life of the mind…[and is] hostile to modernity (except when it comes to the pursuit of weapons).” He also describes fascism as “bitterly nostalgic for past empires and lost glories,” as “obsessed with real and imagined ‘humiliations’ and thirsty for revenge,” as “chronically infected with the toxin of anti-Jewish paranoia (interestingly, also, with its milder cousin, anti-Freemason paranoia),” as “inclined to leader worship,” and as a “threat…to civilization and civilized values;” perhaps Hitchens’ most pithy description is as follows: “[t]he historic essence of Fascism is the most retrograde people using the most revolutionary rhetoric.”

For Rebecca West, writing in 1935, “Fascism…is a headlong flight into fantasy from the necessity for political thought…persons supporting Fascism behave as if man were already in possession of principles which would enable him to deal with all our problems, and as if it were only a question of appointing a dictator to apply them.”

In his preface to the Third Edition of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism, written in 1942, Wilhelm Reich notes that:

In its pure form, fascism is the sum total of all irrational reactions of the average human character. To the narrow-minded sociologist who lacks the courage to recognize the enormous role played by the irrational in human history, the fascist race theory appears as nothing but an imperialistic interest or even a mere “prejudice.” The violence and the ubiquity of these “race prejudices” show their origin from the irrational part of the human character. The race theory is not a creation of fascism. No: fascism is a creation of race hatred and its politically organized expression.

For U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), one of the handful of men who can be said to have been a primary architect of the successful plan to defeat fascism in the 1940s, he felt that “the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself,” and what stood out for him was that “[t]hat, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” In other words, when one ruler/party/faction/group considers that it owns the state and that the state’s machinery, power, and largesse exist as personal tools for those in power, when that controlling entity does not feel it needs to share the state, and its machinery, power, and largesse with others different from themselves, we have fascism.

Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s Vice President before Truman, told The New York Times in 1944 that

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

Wallace notes how American fascism is different from Nazi German fascists in a way that is quite relevant today when we are attempting to discuss democratic fascism:

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

For Umberto Eco, whose own childhood took place in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, fascism was something that could be any combination of a number of key elements. Writing in 1995 in an incredibly prescient and far-too-underappreciated essay on what he termed “Ur-Fascism”—that eternal and incoherent fascist current within humanity—the Italian master saw fascism as something that espouses a “cult of tradition” in a way that was “syncretistic” and produced little if anything original (in this, Eco’s fascism resembles the evil forces in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, which is described here in The Lord of the Rings in a discussion of the nature of Sauron’s orc minions: “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them.”). He also saw it as a “rejection of modernism” and, in turn, an embodiment of “irrationalism.” For Eco, fascism values “action for action’s sake” in a sense that despised deliberation and intellectual discourse and the intellectual world in general; building upon this, he also noted how fascism is unable to “withstand analytical criticism” to such a degree that “disagreement is treason.” As a natural follow-up to this, he notes fascism’s hatred of diversity and its “exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference,” that (nascent) fascism’s “first appeal…is an appeal against intruders,” making fascism “racist by definition;” it feeds on “individual or social frustration” in a way that is an “appeal to a frustrated middle class” that is “frightened by the pressure of lower social groups;” Eco feared that “the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.” The psychology of fascism is obsessed with identity, particularly appealing to those lost and confused in a changing and challenging world, and offers them a crude way out based on nationalism (for Orwell, “power-hunger tempered by self-deception”), a nationalism defined by exclusion of “enemies” of the nation; this psychology is based on “the obsession with a plot” against them, domestically and internationally. Those subscribing to such a fascist movement “must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies” but also “be convinced that they can overwhelm” them (leaving them “constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.”) With such movements, “pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” and “life is permanent warfare” such that even in victory, there is still a pervasive sense of insecurity, unspoken inferiority, and anxiety. Eco’s fascism is also embodied by a “contempt for the weak” that is crucial for its “popular elitism:” the leaders of the movement convince their mass followers that they are the true elite, even as they thrive by exploiting the weaknesses of their captains and both, in turn, exploit the weaknesses of their mass followers, who feel superior to those not in the movement in a dynamic of trickle-down elitism (“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on,” as Sinclair Lewis writes in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, in which a man remarkably like Donald Trump becomes president running a campaign remarkably like Trump’s and ends up transforming America into a fascist dictatorship). Here, Eco continues, “everybody is educated to become a hero” in a sense that engenders a constant hero martyr-complex (often literally reached by death or sending “other people to death”). In fascism, Eco also finds a misogynistic, homophobic machismo that addresses its sexual inadequacy through the “ersatz phallic exercise” of “play[ing] with weapons.” He also finds fascism to be based on a “selective populism” that is “qualitative” not “quantitative” in nature; “the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction,” and “[t]here is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.” Fascism, then, is “against ‘rotten’ parliamentary [i.e.., democratic] governments,” and “[w]herever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

Pondering the reality of a fictional German Nazi and Imperial Japanese-occupied America in the 1960s in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle, a Nazi defector to Japan’s Pacific States of America defines the fascist system of insanity and its adherents as one explained by:

…something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, I intuit it. But—they are purposelessly cruel… is that it? No, God, he thought. I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans…Something frenzied and demented…

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time…

…They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.

For long-time New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik,

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true.

*****

From these writers, thinkers, and leaders, then, like democracy, we can approach a definition of fascism that avoids the pitfall of being too specific but is still meaningful past use as a simple pejorative, thus avoiding Orwell’s trap as well.

For a brief, poetic, and literary understanding of what we may now say about fascism, allow me to satirize Paul’s lovely passage on love from First Corinthians (by far “Saint” Paul’s best work when compared to the rest of his generally contemptible legacy):

Fascism is impatient, fascism is cruel. It is jealous, is pompous, it is inflated,it is rude, it seeks its own interests, it is quick-tempered, it broods over injury, it rejoices over wrongdoing but does not rejoice with the truth. It bears only itself, believes only itself, hopes only itself, endures only itself. Fascism always fails.

Furthermore, fascism is hateful, irrational, fearful, childishly boastful; it thrives and survives on misinformation and disinformation, lies and deceit; it brooks no criticism and is an eternal enemy of intellectual discourse, debate, diversity, inclusion, and being part of the wider world, relies on racism, bigotry, ignorance, misogyny, and brute bullying in all manners of ways, loves cultish leader-worship, lusts after a false imagined past and “tradition,” is corporatist, nationalistic, incoherent, and contradictory, and is all of these things not mildly but intensely; it takes more typical, offensive, intolerant, and reactionary right-wing politics to a far more elevated level, so that even liberals will wistfully miss their old right-wing nemeses with the advent of the new fascism. There may not be a clear line where it is absolutely obvious where one has passed the realm of the more banal, typical right-wing politics into the realm of the far more dreadful (but still banal) and less manageable fascism (democratic or otherwise), but when one is well past that ill-defined line there can be a sickening clarity, a retroactive realization of one’s fetid new surroundings and a sheer terror that there may not be any going back anytime soon…

Henry A. Wallace…was onto the same truth that Orwell would most masterfully present to the world in his masterpiece 1984 with its concept of Newspeak, a formal language of propaganda, deception, and control: “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the regime], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.” In his earlier-cited essay, Eco also identified Orwell’s Newspeak as the final enumerated element of fascism, noting how it makes “use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.” Eco also echoed Wallace when he noted that

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world.

End excerpt

It is my earnest hope that, with the above discussion perhaps shared widely and profusely, we can more easily combat fascism by agreeing on what fascism is, and I do believe that herein I have presented a useable and workable definition by citing minds far greater than my own. From our elections at home to the battlefields of Ukraine, nothing is more urgent than defeating this fascism and calling it out by name and agreeing on what that name means is a crucial step to defeating it.

See related articles from February 17, 2017: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies and Trump, the Global Democratic Fascist Movement, Putin’s War on the West, and a Choice for Liberals: Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part II and see all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

Brian’s Ukraine journalism has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 27, 2021; also published May 31, 2021, on The Times of Israel Blogs; see my related article: Death, Stupidity; Rinse, Repeat: What Is New, What Is Old in Latest Israeli-Palestinian Tragedy

SILVER SPRING—When horrible things start happening around the world—especially in the Middle East, and especially in Palestine and Israel—it often seems as if the U.S. cannot win when it comes to the cries of various mobs, both in the street and online, claiming—sometimes accurately, other times not—to represent various factions: “America, how come you don’t to more to stop X horrible thing by Y horrible people, do more to help Z people?” often concurrent not only with opposite cries switching X and Y but also “America, why don’t you just stay out of such-and-such conflict, all you do is make things worse” and even “America, why don’t you just completely stay out of the entire region?”

Practically Speaking

To be fair, it would be an understatement to note America has made grievous mistakes in the Middle East, from former disgraced President Donald Trump’s rapid betrayal of the Kurds in late 2019 to assisting the horrific Saudi-led war in Yemen and the cataclysmic 2003 invasion of Iraq.  But a fairly consistent, longer-term problem has been America’s unbalanced position in the Israeli-Palestinians conflict, in particular, not doing enough to stand up for Palestinians as a people and allowing certain Israeli abuses of Palestinians to continue with impunity (abuses that are also self-destructive for Israel and Israeli Jews).

With any of many outbreaks in violence (Israeli-Palestinian or otherwise), real-world practicality demands that the priority be bringing about a swift end to violence in an effort to save as many lives as possible.  There are some well-meaning but idealistically naïve or blinded folks who will demand, before we even talk about stopping the violence, that we settle the root causes—even calling for a complete surrender of one side on all core issues about which it is fighting—but this is an obscene waste of time while fighting is erupting and the focus needs to be on immediately prioritizing individual human life.  During longer wars, negotiations over longstanding core issues are, of course, to be encouraged, but with individual rounds of bombs falling or gunshots ringing around civilians, the exact same issues that have driven the conflicts of which they are a part will almost invariably be there when that particular round of violence stops.

The only serious exceptions to this are when overwhelming force can actually bring about a decisive end to most of a conflict, but this is rare and in the case of Israel and Palestine, no glorious Saladin-like armies from Arab states will destroy the Israeli state—certainly Hamas has no such capability—while Israel invading and occupying Gaza in a bid to totally wipe out Hamas would certainly not go as Israel would intend and would see such terrible level of casualties and an inflammation of tensions and violence in the region that pressure for it to stop short of such a goal would be unlike anything we have seen with any of Israel’s other major campaigns against Palestinians.  So Israel is not going to wipe out Hamas in Gaza and neither Hamas nor any Arab or Muslim state (let alone any other) is going to invade and dismantle the Israeli state, nor end by force Israel’s control over holy sites in Jerusalem, military occupation of the West Bank, or siege of Gaza.  Thus, the idea that violence is somehow going to address the root causes is absurd.

So, again, it is not that dealing with the root causes is not essential, is that they are going nowhere fast during any particular round of violence and ending the violence is, therefore, both the moral/ethical and practical consideration that must take precedence.  Having said that, once the violence has stopped, the imperative very much should be to then focus on the root causes to avoid further violence and achieve justice, security, and peace for the greatest number of people.

What Biden’s Critics Miss

I have followed President Joe Biden’s career for decades (I even interned in his Senate office in 2006), and I do not think any of this is lost on him.  My gut feelings on this are at least partly validated by the heartening conduct of his Administration throughout the eleven-day crisis between Israel and Hamas and its spillover conflicts between Israeli security forces and other Palestinians and between Arabs and Jews in Israel’s internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders.

A good chunk of the media coverage has framed Biden and his team as haplessly overcome by events in the Middle East, with some takes stating that he is all but ignoring the plight of Palestinians and is simply reflexively supporting Israel and still others that Biden’s supposedly weak support for Israel or even supposed hostility to it is to blame for the latest round of violence.  All of these are deeply myopic takes that cannot see the forest for the trees at best or are bad-faith propaganda and disinformation at worst.  In fact, Biden’s approach seemed relatively fairly balanced and nuanced in ways that, more important than anything else, yielded results and saved lives.

First, let us be clear about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: he has had no problem defying or embarrassing American presidents and senior officials in the past, including this one in the month before the recent hostilities, when he rejected repeated criticism from Biden Administration officials—including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan—for plans to dispossess Palestinians in East Jerusalem and expand and create Jewish settlements there and in the West Bank (the very day before Hamas began its rocket fire into Israel, Sullivan expressed to his Israeli counterpart that the White House had “serious concerns” about efforts to unjustly evict Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, part of a larger campaign of demographic engineering by Israeli right-wing nationalists).

With the reality that Netanyahu and his country have increasingly embraced right-wing nationalism, if Biden had publicly and loudly chastised Netanyahu and Israel, Netanyahu would have felt compelled to not look as if he was cowing to American pressure and would have only continued Israel’s military operations longer to demonstrate his independence and strength to his domestic audience (remember he is in the fight of his political life to hold onto power while he is simultaneously on trial for corruption).  This would have meant the Israel Defense Forces (Israel’s military, or IDF) killing and wounding many more people and possibly causing the conflict to both intensify and spread while also risking more Israeli lives, even if far fewer.  And Biden has known “Bibi,” as Netanyahu is often called, for decades, knows him relatively well, and has a far better sense than most politicians of how the embattled Israeli prime minister will and will not react to things, including public pressure.

Yet many foreign critics and those to Biden’s left vocal in their anger about his support for Israel—the left’s sometimes raucous “progressive” crowd (Progressive being a much older label for a far more productive historical movement)—seem not to understand this.  Their outrage that Biden was not more vocal in condemning Netanyahu betrays their lack of understanding of basic politics and diplomacy, missing how there is usually far more to politics than speeches and noise (that should not surprise considering that Bernie Sanders is essentially their spiritual mentor and the tactic of screaming at and shaming Democratic voters into nominating a “progressive” for president in 2016 and 2020 failed miserably; to Bernie’s credit, his crushing loss in 2020 seems to have humbled him into a more practical and productive approach).  After all, America is one of the few counties where public opinion favors Israel strongly, so even as support for Palestinians has increased significantly (especially on the left), there is not the political support for a sharp turn away from or reducing support for Israel and such a move could not only cost Democrats the House in midterm elections, but the White House two years later, rendering any major shifts by a Biden Administration moot as a new Republican administration would surely undo those changes and become even more pro-Israeli and less supportive of Palestinians, as was seen under Trump.

Speaking of, to his right, Biden’s critics insanely claim he and his policies are the reason for the outbreak of violence when Biden has done very little other than restore formal diplomatic relations and to reinstate some $235 million in humanitarian, economic, and development aid to Palestinians—aid that the Trump Administration, led by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, had cruelly, spitefully, and needlessly cut—while also separately adding COVID-19 aid.

If any American approach has failed recently, it is the incredibly one-sided “pro-Israel” policy of the Trump Administration—including Kushner’s “absurd” “peace” plan—that has deepened the anger, resentment, and helplessness already pervasive among Palestinians while letting Israel feel it could act against Palestinians with impunity, furthering overall division, which intensified and accelerated the dangerous dynamics that exploded over the past few weeks, as I noted just recently.

Biden’s Practicality and Early Results

If anything, critics to both Biden’s left and right seemed to not be aware of what was really happening behind the scenes even as they missed some very public cues.

Instead of starting a public feud with a longtime (if very problematic) ally, Biden refrained from antagonizing Netanyahu in ways that would have been counterproductive and resulted in more death and destruction and instead had himself and his administration act in ways that worked to preserve and exercise leverage over Israel while working intensely when they felt the time was right to rapidly bring about an end to the violence.  In doing so, they consciously tried avoiding what they now saw as a counterproductive approach taken by the Obama Administration during the last major Gaza conflict in 2014 (which I analyzed in detail at the time).

Early in this most recent flare-up, Biden publicly asserted that “Israel had a right to defend itself”—for all the flaws of any particular nation, virtually no nation would not respond with military force against a terrorist group firing rockets into its cities—even while he and top officials also early on expressed a desire for a quick end to the Israeli operation (Biden himself said “My expectation and hope is this will be closing down sooner than later)” and that it was their position to “urge…de-escalation of violence” (this from Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken) and to still pursue a state for Palestinians.

Top officials also early on framed the conflict as very much in part about the systemic issues faced by Palestinians, especially the evictions going on in East Jerusalem, which were raised in conversations throughout (in spite of the efforts of some Israelis to pretend or delude themselves into thinking that the structural issues had nothing to do with the latest round of violence).

As the conflict dragged on, other concerns about civilian casualties and the safety of journalists in Gaza were publicly aired by the Biden Administration, and specific calls for lessening Israeli restrictions on and increasing freedom for Palestinians were also made.  Eventually, calls for a cease-fire—at first gentle, then firmer—made clear that Biden and his people felt it was time for Israel to let up.  And Biden has long made clear he generally did not intend to air America’s dirty laundry with Israeli in public.  That there even were these milder public statements, then, made it clear there was serious pushback going on behind the scenes, and the softer public statements were concurrent with a series of calls—six between Biden and Netanyahu and many others between American and Israeli officials—that were the key parts of the more private pushback.  This was not unqualified support or one-sided; far from it, and throughout and after there were statements along the lines that Palestinians, too, deserved safety as well as dignity and freedom and that reiterated American commitment to the two-state solution (by far the most sane of the various “solutions” that are bandied about) that would result in a Palestinian state, a long-held U.S. position Trump, Kushner, and Blinken’s partisan-hack-predecessor Mike Pompeo had all but abandoned.

Having long made clear he would not lean towards slamming Israel in public, Biden effectively worked behind the scenes to pressure the right-wing Netanyahu—who has not shied away from crisis exploitation and punishing military operations with heavy civilian casualties—to wind down military strikes on the eleventh day when Netanyahu’s security cabinet voted unanimously to agree to a cease-fire; if you think Biden’s quiet but strong diplomacy did not play a major and leading role, consider two points here: one, that Israel’s government is pretty right-wing and anti-Arab in policy and sentiment, and two, that the a plurality to a vast majority of Israelis were against a cease-fire and wanted the IDF to continue operations against Hamas in Gaza (in three Israeli polls, Israelis opposed the cease-fire 72 to 24, 47 to 35, and 48 to 40 percent).  Taking all this into account—that Netanyahu and many of his people would not be generally inclined to keep the IDF operation as short as it ended up being, that stopping it as early as they did was actually a liability domestically when it came to public opinion, and that the cabinet vote was still unanimous—it is hard to argue that Biden Administration’s role in the timing of the cease-fire and shortening of the conflict was not decisive.

And since the cease-fire has taken hold, Biden and his top diplomat Blinken have continued to emphasize America’s commitment not simply to Israel but to “equal” treatment and respect for Palestinians.  As Biden noted in his address just after the cease-fire took hold:

“I believe the Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live safely and securely and to enjoy equal measures of freedom, prosperity, and democracy.  My administration will continue our quiet and relentless diplomacy toward that end.  I believe we have a genuine opportunity to make progress, and I’m committed to working for it.”

The next day, Biden was even more specific: “We still need a two-state solution.  It is the only answer. The only answer.”

Focused on rebuilding America after a devastatingly bungled pandemic response under the Trump Administration, Biden has not been keen in his first few months on the job to dive into dramatic foreign engagement on the part of the U.S., but now that America is beginning to hit its stride again amidst his administration’s exemplary handling of the pandemic and with a crisis erupting between Israelis and Palestinians, he and his competent people have shown themselves capable of addressing sudden crises and of recognizing that such crises demand U.S. engagement not only to calm the waters but to take serious if not rushed or frantic steps to try to address root causes.

Thus, just months into his presidency, Biden has passed his first major international security crisis with a deft yet subtle approach, the type of qualities that were utterly lacking in the White House for the entirety of Trump’s residence there.  And rather than treat the crisis as a distraction, he has, as noted, rightly recognized it as “a genuine opportunity to make progress,” dispatching to the region his top diplomat in Blinken, who is already working to restore a sense of balance after the clear failure of Trump’s gratuitous neglect of Palestinians.

As case in point: Netanyahu does not want to hear anything about the two-state solution, which he has worked for decades to undermine, but that is exactly what Blinken doubled down on after meeting with Netanyahu and in Israel and, later that day, Palestinians President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank:

“Ultimately, there’s a possibility of resuming the effort to achieve a two-state solution, which we continue to believe is the only way to truly assure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state, and of course to give the Palestinians the state they’re entitled to.”

He also made clear that America will seek “to address some of the underlying causes that could, if not addressed, spark another cycle of violence.”  Furthermore, Blinken met with Palestinian activists, pledged significant new aid to Palestinians, reiterated strong opposition to the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, and announced the reopening of a U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that had been closed by Trump and was a significant venue for separate engagement with Palestinians.  Few of these moves are welcome ones to Netanyahu or many other Israeli officials or citizens, so, despite claims to the contrary and accusations of being one-sided, the Biden Administration is sharply departing from the extremist approach of its predecessor and will do a lot more to stick up for Palestinians even if many Palestinians would desire further, more immediate, more dramatic action.

Too Early to Write off Biden’s Efforts; Cease-fire Orchestration Reason to Hope

Cynicism, understandably, abounds when it comes to the struggle between Israeli and Palestinians, but Biden’s critics miss the mark in failing to see his and his administration’s major role in shortening this latest round of fighting and in taking both symbolic and substantive steps away from Trump’s one-sided policy towards far more engagement with and support for Palestinians.  Additionally, the commentary that Biden will do little-to-nothing to address the deeper issues is wildly premature, just like the initial commentary on his involvement (or supposed lack thereof) during this latest round of fighting.

Both in clear public actions (if not dramatic or bombastic) and in even more “intense,” to use Blinken’s word, behind-the-scenes efforts, we are seeing Biden and his administration engage in this most intractable of issues and he may yet surprise us with far greater results over time regardless of the verbal gymnastics of critics to his right and left, of Palestinians and Israelis alike as well as their supporters unhappy with his approach.  For most of these critics, a lesson in how real diplomacy works has just been given by Biden and his team.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 14, 2021; also published by The Times of Israel Blogs May 30, 2021; see my relevant Twitter thread and follow-up article Wading into Israel and Palestine Quicksand, Biden Offers a Diplomacy 101 Class for All

SILVER SPRING—The more you become familiar with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more banal you realize it truly is.  One tribe with an extreme emotional attachment to a special religious site will become enraged and violent when another tribe with more control over that site and a competing extreme emotional attachment says or does something involving that site; then, a mob is ready to riot, with a countermob ready to riot back and various extremist government security forces and terrorist extremist actors ready to capitalize to further their maximalist positions.

Whether cavemen fighting over a sacred stone 20,000 years ago or Jews and Arabs fighting over the Western Wall/al-Aqsa Mosque/Dome of the rock compound in the Old City of Jerusalem, little changes: particular plots of land or certain building are weaponized and control of and access to them become tools of conflict between different competing ethnic/religious groups.  “Taking back” what is “ours” justifies all sorts of horrors, from suicide bombing and ethnic cleansing to war and genocide.  Without religion involved, there is still plenty to fight about in petty, repetitive ways, but research demonstrates that the viciousness of such conflict gets worse when religion is involved.

This is the utterly unoriginal politics of much of the world, which even explain many of the animating forces behind Trump’s recent Capitol insurrection in America, as I noted for The Jerusalem Report.  Even within specific conflicts, chapters can also be especially repetitive, and that is certainly the case here between Israel and the Palestinians: the current round of rapidly escalating violence began in ways remarkably similar to how the Second Intifada began in terms of the involvement of heavy-handed Israeli actions at al-Aqsa while also resembling in other key ways the outbreak of the 2014 round of violence even as it also thematically touches core issues that sparked conflicts going all the way back to the First Intifada and the major wars dating back to Israel’s founding.  The same holy sites, the same arguments over whose land it was, is, and will be—weaponizations of history for the present and future—the same arguments over occupation and settlements, equality and dignity, discrimination and freedom, security and sovereignty are always there with few variations and mostly played on the same tired notes.

So in important ways, there is nothing new here: the same unresolved issues, the same powers that be not even trying to advance or resolve them or even making them worse, the same systemic negative feedback loop producing the same outrage, fear, grievance, hatred, dehumanization, and violence that certain leaders on both sides keep capitalizing on to justify their extremist, exclusivist ideologies and policies.

And yet, we do have something terrifyingly new in this round of violence.

During this latest of the cycle, some Arab citizens of Israel—many considering themselves primarily Palestinians, some considering themselves primarily Israeli, some having nuanced, mixed views of their identities—have been both attacking Jews and been attacked by gangs and mobs of Jews as mixed communities in Israel are seeing an explosion of intercommunal violence.  In my own time in Israel, Palestine, and Jordan, I found these Arab citizens of Israel to have the most nuanced and least predictable views on the conflict.  Yet of Israeli Jews and Palestinians without Israeli citizenship (including the many Palestinians I met in Jordan), the vast majority were almost entirely one-sided in their views.

Throughout the other conflicts and wars of the past, Arab citizens of Israel have simply stayed out of the fights between Israel and Palestinians and/or Arab states.  Though discriminated against in many ways, Palestinians living in Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders have vastly more freedoms, rights, and opportunities than Palestinians in de-facto annexed East Jerusalem and especially the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (very few of those in East Jerusalem and none of the Gazans/West Bankers are Israeli citizens or can vote in Israeli national elections; those in the West Bank are subject to a military occupation and Israeli military law at any time Israel chooses to exercise it, and those in Gaza are also subject to intense Israeli restrictions in the something of a giant open-air prison Gaza has been for years).

As in the U.S. with the Black Lives Matter movement, an extraordinary coronavirus year fostered increased social media consumption and allowed for way too much time to stew with unpleasant thoughts, contributing to a tinderbox-like readiness to engage in street activism and releasing pent up rage, so that many who normally would not get involved in protests have become protesters, with protests becoming more violent.  Add to the equation that this is all after a rough month of reflection and fasting during the holy Islamic month of Ramadan in the time of COVID-19, after over a year during the era of peak social media activism during COVID-19 lockdowns (the pandemic medically and economically hitting discriminated populations harder all over the world, in this case Israeli Arabs), after years of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and conservative Israelis failing to address inequality and discrimination against Israeli Arabs while catering to Jewish right-wing extremists in continuing with discriminatory policies and racist rhetoric in Israel (the Israelis in power being perpetual sore winners and crowing loudly over symbolic wins like Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital).

So now these Israeli Arabs have seen their sense of identity drift more towards Palestinian and seen a hostility within them grow towards their right-wing Jewish antagonists.  In the face of sustained extremism and discrimination from Jewish extremist politicians and citizens, they are now responding in kind.  In the past, there has been violence between Palestinians and groups of Israeli settlers living in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and, earlier, Gaza; the run-up to the war in 2014 (which I analyzed in detail at the time) involved the kidnapping and murder by Palestinian terrorists three Israeli teens–Naftali Frenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah—and the kidnapping and murder by Jewish terrorists of a Palestinian teen from East Jerusalem, Mohammed Abu Khdeir.  But now, there is the worst intercommunal violence inside Israel proper in decades.  Much like some groups of Jews and Arabs began fighting each other in British Mandate Palestine in 1947 in the beginning of civil war, the current violence between Jews and Arab Israelis has senior Israeli officials and others in Israel worried about the prospect of a new civil war.

In a polarized society, when one side or faction becomes too extreme, over time it can often help generate an increase in extremism in other groups.  As an example, most factions in Syria’s current civil war have become radicalized competing with, or fighting against, the brutality of both terrorist ISIS and dictator Bashar al-Assad’s mass-murdering regime, which helped bring out the worst in other factions over time, as I discussed years ago.  After years of the radicalization of the right in the United States, elements of the left are also becoming more extreme (though still not coming close to the insanity of Republicans), as I have also discussed.  So this is hardly unique to Israel, but as Israel lurches rightward and many of its Jews become radicalized, it was only a matter of time before portions of Israel’s Arabs started down a similar path (anyone wanting to understand these dynamics should watch the singular Israeli/HBO miniseries “Our Boys,” about the aforementioned four murders of teens that led to the 2014 Gaza war).

The Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his exceptionally fair history of the “Zionist-Arab Conflict” titled Righteous Victims, includes as his epigram famous lines from W. H. Auden’s famous “September 1, 1939” World War II poem:

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

That to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

If anything, this epigram is all too fitting, for the world and for the tragedy unfolding in Israel and Palestine today.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s follow-up article Wading into Israel and Palestine Quicksand, Biden Offers a Diplomacy 101 Class for All and Twitter thread on the Natanz attack and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 15, 2021; see my relevant Twitter thread on the Natanz attack

Minor spoilers for Clone Wars, some moderate spoilers for the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Rogue One, and Original Trilogy

SILVER SPRING—They may not center on massive battles, lightsaber duels, or major developments for the most well-known Star Wars characters, but “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace,” episodes 10 and 11 in the Third Season of Clone Wars, bear some remarkable similarities to situation the world is still trying to understand surrounding the mysterious attack against Iran’s premier nuclear research and development facility at Natanz.

Real-World Background

On early Sunday local time, the power system within the secretive, isolated, and secure nuclear facility at Natanz in Iran was “completely destroyed” in an explosion both Israeli and American intelligence officials have confirmed Israel is at least partly (perhaps and probably mostly) behind, in what may not or may yet be determined to be a cyberattack.

Iran is asserting what it sees as its right to pursue nuclear technology, and Israel is pursuing what it sees as its right of self-defense against what it sees as an existential threat: a nuclear-weapons-armed Iran. 

Iran has claimed that its intentions are purely for civilian nuclear power, an explanation Israeli dismisses as a lie, and Iran has long been hostile to Israel, with the two having engaged in proxy conflict against each other among Palestinians and, currently, in Syria and Lebanon, which both border Israel (it should also be mentioned here that it is the worse kept secret in the Middle East that Israel is the only nuclear weapons power of all the countries in that region).  Even if Iran is lying about its nuclear intentions and fully plans to develop nuclear weapons, it is entirely possible that it wants them for purely defensive and deterrent reasons (every nuclear power since after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has refrained from offensive use, or any use in war, for that matter, and Iran’s enemies have openly debated military campaigns against it), yet Israel’s people and military have been targets of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the past.

Still, this concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions and ambitions is one shared by most world powers, to the degree that Iran and the five permanent-veto-wielding members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council—the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, and China—as well as Germany and the European Union (EU) all signed an agreement to severely limit nuclear activity on the part of Iran in exchange for partial relief of sanctions on Iran for much of Iran’s rogue activity involving military buildups, terrorism, and interference in the affairs of other countries in the Middle East.

Israel’s political leadership under long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing hawk with much in common with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership style (which I noted in detail several times) was bitterly opposed to this deal, seeking to undermine anything that could benefit Iran without a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.  Furthermore, Israel has in the past put the kibosh on hostile regional powers’ nuclear ambitions with airstrikes against then-under-construction nuclear reactors in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1981 (ironically with Iran’s help) and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in 2007.  To thwart Iran’s project, Israel has carried out a series of operations—including sabotage, assassinations, and cyberattacks—against Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear personnel, Sunday’s only being the latest.  And it has long sought, and failed, to push the U.S. into militarily attacking Iran and, especially, its nuclear program.

But Israel did get both the Bush and Obama Administration’s help in carrying out Operation Olympic Games’ Stuxnet cyberwarfare attack against Natanz, an attack that took out many of Iran’s centrifuges used to enrich material needed for nuclear advancements and set back Iran’s nuclear development as much as two years, and to get both American administrations to engaged in other cyberwarfare with Iran (those wanting to know about this and cyberwarfare in general should check out Nicole Perlroth’s indispensable recent book on cyberwarfare, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends).

With its nuclear program sabotaged after Stuxnet and facing increasing economic sanctions as part of intense pressure from the international community organized and led by the Obama Administration, Iran agreed to the aforementioned nuclear deal in 2015.  But after Obama’s successor Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 (even though Iran had been in full compliance according to the most intrusive nuclear inspections in the history of such nuclear monitoring agreements, and, I would argue, foolishly withdrew, as the agreement was the only realistic, logical option), Iran has since begun activities beyond the agreement that move it closer towards (though not close to) nuclear weapons capability.  Saturday it was poised to make serious advances along this path until its Natanz facility was devastated Sunday.

Complicated Clone Wars

“OK, Brian, what the HELL does this have to do with Star Wars?” you may be asking.  By now, you’ve probably heard of, hopefully even seen, the stellar show Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the final season of which dominated streaming during our pandemic summer and, as I have noted, involves some of the best Star Wars ever made including the best movies (and far better than any of the Disney Star Wars movies); if not, get to it (especially before Bad Batch premieres on May the Fourth)!

The series takes place during the Clone War(s), which begin at the end of 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and ends during 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and are mainly a series of confusing battles and campaigns between the Galactic Republic and its breakaway Separatist Alliance.  The Republic is served by a religious order known as the Jedi—including Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker—whose members operate traditionally as peacekeepers and now generals, while the Separatist Alliance in Star Wars is clearly the side of “the bad guys,” led by Count Dooku, an ex-Jedi turned Sith Lord (the Sith are the ancient enemy of the Jedi).

Dooku and key Separatist military leaders are clearly evil and clearly carry out war crimes and atrocities the Republic takes pains to avoid.  While most but hardly all of the soldiers for the Separatists are droids and, thus, not usually moral actors, it is very different for the political leaders and citizens of the planets that voted to leave the Republic and form the Separatist Alliance (a.k.a. Confederacy of Independent Systems), as noted by famous Republic Senator Padmé Amidala in Clone Wars’s “Heroes on Both Sides.”

Padmé is Naboo’s now former queen from 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and is thus one of the most famous senators of the Galactic Senate (her new role after stepping down as queen).  She is also secretly married to Anakin Skywalker as of the end of Attack of the Clones, a big no-no for a Jedi and a senator.

After a debate on the war’s politics in the Senate, Anakin suggests his secret wife Padmé teach Ashoka Tano—his padawan apprentice (and now a rising superstar in the Star Wars universe)—about politics.  Anakin keeps talking, and presents a black-and-white view of the conflict with the Separatists, with which Padmé expresses disagreement and then takes Ahsoka under her wing, take up Anakin on his earlier suggestion.

Shortly after, we hear Padmé tell Ahsoka that she has friends who are Separatists, that they are not simply evil “pawns” in Dooku’s war.  She complains that she is not able to talk or meet with them because the Senate has made any formal negotiations with the Separatists illegal for fear of legitimizing their secession and cause, noting Ashoka with her clearance as a Jedi could get Padmé to neutral Mandalore, from which they could travel to Raxus to see her old mentor and current Separatist Senator Mina Bonteri.  Up for breaking the rules to help Padmé initiate peace talks, Ahsoka travels undercover with Padmé to see Bonteri on the Separatist capital of Raxus while the Separatist Senate is in session.

In a discussion with Bonteri and Padmé, Ahsoka learns that many Separatists view the Republic (and the Jedi) as the bad guys and that far from being all mindless droids or heartless killers like General Grievous and Asajj Ventress, many Separatist are real people with families who fight—and die—to defend their families and their worlds as well as their right to separate from the Republic.  Among those who died fighting Republic forces were Mina’s husband and father to their son Lux, with whom Ahsoka has humanizing exchange: he and her mom are the first Separatists besides military officers like Grievous and Ventress Ahsoka has met, she the first Jedi he has met.

When Padmé reveals there are many Republic senators eager to explore peace, despite their sharp differences of opinion, Mina decides to introduce a motion to her Separatist Senate to begin formal peace negotiations with the Republic, a motion that easily passes, Dooku himself presiding remotely over the session.

Greedy members of the Trade Federation, Banking Clan, and Techno Union are distressed by this news, as an end to the war is bad for their business interests (in which they get to play both sides off of each other [SPOILERS: as the Sith are doing]), but Dooku assures them an attack is being planned against Coruscant, the Republic’s capital world where the Senate is located, that will derail the peace process and ensure the war will continue. 

In fact, it was even in motion before the possibility of peace talks, apparently timed to ensure a vote to allow deregulation of banks so that the Republic can obtain more funding to produce and purchase more clone troopers (the bulk of the Republic’s fighting forces) would pass after the obvious outrage and bloodlust such an attack would inspire.  The special droid units that will carry out the attack have been designed to look just like the Republic cleaning droids that service one of Coruscant’s main power generators, right by the Senate.  These droids also have been given security passes that will allow them to bypass security.  All in all, it’s a pretty sophisticated plan, utilizing information obtained from the inside and obviously planned long before we find out about it.

Shortly before the deregulation vote, when Padmé tells Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, the leader of the Republic (from her planet Naboo and a senator from there before becoming Chancellor, with Padmé’s help, at the end of The Phantom Menace), that they should give the Separatist offer to engage in peace talks a serious chance, he responds by saying “I can see why you would want so badly to believe that the Separatists. desire peace…In the past whenever we’ve reached out our hands in peace, they’ve been slapped away.  Can we believe that they’re ready to sue for peace so easily?” (such is a common refrain from many in the real world arguing against peace talks or diplomacy).

In response, Padmé confides to Palpatine that she knows the offer is genuine because she “been in contact” with her “old friend” Mina Bonteri and that Bonteri is the sponsor of the proposal.  The Chancellor takes special note of remembering it was Bonteri, (SPOILER) as he is secretly Dooku’s Sith Lord master, orchestrating the war from both sides so his power can rise and the Jedi can fall both in public opinion and from their position of power in the Republic, to be cute down and wiped out (we already see the war, from Lux’s point of view, has damaged the reputation of the Jedi for many regular Separatist citizens).

Just as voting begins in light of the new Separatist peace proposal, the Separatists droids, which have been smuggled into Coruscant and the nearby power station, change form from their cleaning droid disguises to instruments of death and destruction, killing the generator workers and then turning themselves into bombs for a “suicide bombing” (as the intro the next episode calls it) that destroys the power station, plunging that sector of the capital into chaos as the power goes off for millions (maybe even billions) of people and explosions rock the area, terrifying civilians.

Sirens wail inside the Senate as eerie red emergency lighting kicks in, and it doesn’t take long for some Senators realize (or are told?) it is a Separatist attack.  Outraged, they begin calling for revenge and to pass the bill to deregulate the banks so they can pay for more clones.  Padmé pleads with her fellow senators that the peace proposal is serious, an argument not well-received by the panicked and angry Senate.  “Obviously a tactic to lower our defenses and launch this attack,” responds Palpatine’s right-hand man.

On their way out of the main Senate chamber and still bathed in the emergency lighting, Ahsoka and Padmé are approached by Anakin in the hallway, scolding them for their unsanctioned diplomacy, but Ashoka closes out the episode by admitting that while maybe she had gone too far, “I did realize something: the politics of this war and not as black and white as I once thought they were.”

The next episode, “Pursuit of Peace,” we learn that the Senate in their anger has “overwhelmingly” passed the bill to deregulate the banks so they can move forward on new loans for more clones and an intensification of the war effort, but Padmé isn’t giving up on her pursuit of peace. 

But many of her colleagues feel differently.  A Senator (a Kaminoan, the species responsible for manufacturing the clones) proposes legislation to purchase five million more clones from the Kaminoan government and to raise the funds from the Banking Clan (now free to charge exorbitant interest that would bankrupt the Republic) to make the purchase.  When Padmé states she’d rather “stop the war, not escalate it,” the Senate erupts, many calling her a traitor and a Separatist.

The Naboo senator hardly backs down: “Whoever attacked the power grid wants us to continue the fight.  It’s a calculated attempt to destroy the peace process,” she pleads earnestly to the Senate.  Almost immediately after, a message is received and played from Count Dooku, informing the Senate that an apparent Republic attack has killed Mina Bonteri and that he is formally withdrawing the peace proposal as a result.

Padmé is crushed; the Chancellor tries to contain a smile.

Leaving the Senate chamber, her ally Senator Bail Organa (later the adoptive father of Anakin’s and Padmé daughter, Leia) approaches Padmé to let her know Republic spies found out that Dooku’s people were the ones who killed her friend, Mina, making Dooku’s message pure gaslighting (SOILERS: what many viewers will know but which probably only Dooku and Palpatine will know in the Star Wars universe is that Palpatine would have been the one to pass onto Dooku that Bonteri was responsible for the peace process on the Separatist side after Padmé confided this to Palpatine and Palpatine’s telling reaction to this information, such that Palpatine clearly instructed Dooku to silence Bonteri to derail the peace process on the Separatist side).

Aside from Senators who genuinely want to increase the war effort, Bonteri’s death—though she is a Separatist—has a chilling, intimidating effect on those in the Republic Senate who are undecided or wanting to vote against the proposed legislation.  Furthermore, Dooku has hired underworld elements to intimidate (even beat) key Senators wavering or against the bill, including Organa, and to eventually try to assassinate Padmé (and let us not forget that, in our own world, former President Trump clearly tried just a few months ago to incite a violent insurrectionist mob to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of an election he lost, members of whom wanted to assassinate Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and others).  This is a great episode where a lot of important things happen, but for our purposes we can end this review by noting Padmé, after just barely surviving an assassination attempt, ends up delivering on the Senate floor one of the best speeches of the whole series, preventing the passage of the bill that would bankrupt the Republic and escalate the war effort.  But the chance for peace has been dashed and the war will go on and on.

Real-World Debates and Another Attack on a Power System

Back to our own world.

The tactic to time an attack to derail diplomacy or undermine one or more factions, and the responses to those seeking peace that “we cannot take the other side seriously because diplomacy didn’t work last time” or that “negotiations themselves are a ploy meant to get us to let our guard down” are extremely common in real life; so is questioning the loyalty of those wanting peace, or calling them traitors who side with the enemy.

As far as the situation in the Middle East there is some important context to what very much seems to be the Israeli (or at least Israeli-led) attack on Natanz and its power station.  The day before, Iran had just introduced and announced putting into operation advanced centrifuges at Natanz.  Just a few days later would be Israel’s Independence Day.  And the week before, negotiations between the original nuclear deal signatories were beginning in Vienna.  Netanyahu has made no secret of his longstanding opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, opposition shared by most Israelis but that fails to recognize the constraints of reality.  Though it was a top priority of the Obama Administration, Netanyahu actively campaigned against it, even both challenging it in a direct address to the U.S. Congress in 2015 and claiming in 2018 to have convinced Trump to follow through on his pledged to scrap it. 

Apart from symbolically playing to a domestic audience just before Israel Independence Day and hitting Iran’s centrifuges just as Iran was celebrating their upgrades, then, there is the far more substantive timing-related goals of Netanyahu’s to derail the restart of the diplomatic process with Iran that Biden and many others hope will resurrect the nuclear deal Trump destroyed and to sabotage Iran’s program until it can be destroyed or ended.

Clearly, Netanyahu prefers confrontation and war (ideally, for him, led by the U.S.) that will rid Iran both of its nuclear program and its current regime entirely, a preference shared by his new Gulf friends in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have been brought together through their hatred of Iran and at Trump’s encouragement; in essence, a Sunni-Shiite Cold War led by Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other has merged into the longstanding hostilities between Israel and Iran and the U.S. and Iran, making for some strange yet enthusiastic bedfellows.

So, much like Dooku, Netanyahu seems to have launched an attack that hit a power station that was about more about attacking a power station.  Like the attack on Coruscant, a big part of the rationale for the attack on Natanz was derailing promising diplomatic negotiations, to destroy trust between the parties, and provoke a reaction that will make good-faith negotiations much, much harder.  As in Clone Wars with the Republic, Iran sees this as a terrorist attack.  Like the Separatists and the Republic, there are complicated factions and rivalries both on and under the surface: segments allied and in relationships with or part of the parties meeting in Vienna that are not fully on board with the negotiations and want them to fail whether or not they say so publicly, and who supported an attack and will want the other side to think those with whom they are negotiating supported the attack, too.

In fact, there is vigorous debate in both America and Iran, as we saw in the Republic and Separatist Senates, about pursuing war vs. diplomacy, with moderate and liberal camps in each emphasizing diplomacy and hardliners in both camps preferring confrontation.  To some degree, the U.S. as Israel’s closest ally is tainted by this attack regardless of whether it was for or against it or took part in it or not; at the same time, those in the Iranian diplomatic delegation know that they, too, may be painted by Iran’s response if it is deemed to go “too far.”

Still, unlike with the Separatists successfully derailing peace negotiations, it is very likely the nuclear negotiations will continue (indeed, they have already resumed with Iranian officials, as of today) and that a breakthrough will be reached eventually, as, unlike the Separatists, Iran has few friends and no massive Separatist Alliance spread throughout the galaxy, let alone a Sith Lord like Dooku to lead it; Iran, thus, is in a far weaker position than the Separatists, one only further weakened now that this attack is estimated to have set Iran’s nuclear program back around nine months, undermining its position for negotiations.

As Clone Wars teaches us, things are not “always as black and white” as we think or as straightforward as they seem, Natanz being a prime example.  As in “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can often be complex and multilayered, so we should look at the Natanz attack and its motivations and surrounding issues as complex and multilayered, and avoid simplistic criticism or reductionism in most cases.  Only then can we begin to truly understand the broader strategic and tactical calculations at work in the minds of the various parties here.

Padmé, Portman, Politics, and Blowback

I would also like to note that I remember seeing this pair of episodes for the first time and realizing how perfectly these roles for Padmé would suit Natalie Portman, who played Padmé in the live-action movies (nothing against the excellent Catherine Taber, who voices her in Clone Wars).

I say this because Portman as a young Jewish, Israeli-born adult became quite a vocal defender of Israel at a time when Israel became one of the centers of world politics as the Second Intifada (the second main grassroots rebellion of Palestinians against Israeli occupation and their own ineffective leaders) raged.  And yet, in more recent years, she has not shied away from criticizing the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu for their right-wing (in her words, “racist”) policies, to the degree that she even refused to accept an the Israeli Genesis Award, often referred to as Israel’s version of the Nobel Peace Prize.  For this, an Israeli government minister said that “Natalie Portman’s actions border on anti-Semitism,” that she “played into the hands of the haters of Israel and those who aspire to destroy the State of Israel,” sounding an awful lot like Padmé’s fellow senators’ criticism of her in the “Pursuit of Peace” episode. 

The politically active and passionate Portman, then, is someone who could appreciate both sides of a conflict and would have appreciated her character’s role in these Clone Wars episodes that mirror not only the Natanz attack today but other issues that were fairly common in the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Portman’s own life perhaps influencing at least a little the showrunners’ interpretation of Padmé in Clone Wars.

(Minor SPOILERS next two paragraphs) It is also worth noting that, in the following season, we find Lux Bonteri has become radicalized after the death of his mother and seeks out an alliance with an extremist Mandalorian terrorist group—the Death Watch—to plot revenge against Dooku for ordering his mother to be murdered… kind of like happens so many times in war or counterterrorism operations, when collateral damage turns family and friends of the wounded and dead into violent extremists who support and/or join terrorist or insurgent movements all around the world.

In the following season, Lux has joined a rebel movement to overthrow a Separatist-controlled government on his homeworld of Onderon.  A key member of this rebel group is Saw Gerrera, who is radicalized further in this fight after the death of his sister, Steela, and would be instrumental in the future in helping the Rebel Alliance from the Original Trilogy get off its feet and, in particular, in the events that led to the Rebels discovering the secret weakness of the Empire’s first Death Star in Rogue One, a discovery that allowed Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star at the end of the very first Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  The willingness of Palpatine and Dooku to use Lux’s mother and the people of Onderon as pawns in their game would end up leading, over many years, to the Sith’s undoing.

The lesson here?  It’s always worth considering the less-anticipated potential effects of any particular action.  In our present, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. may find their actions will come to haunt them in unimaginable ways for years to come if they are not careful.

Dooku Disclaimers

I want to be clear: I am not claiming the Israelis are just like the Separatists or that Netanyahu is an evil Sith Lord (nor, for that matter, am I claiming that Iran is like the Republic in any general, overall sense).  I am in no way claiming the Jewish people or Israelis are like “the bad guys” in Star Wars, just simply noting how specific plot and thematic elements from these Clone Wars episodes fit illustratively into the current events discussed (and even in Clone Wars, we can see that most of the civilian Separatists dislike the Republic, understandably, for its very real corruption on display in these episodes more than usual and that they take their ideals and independence seriously).

Count Dooku and Chancellor Palpatine could in part certainly fit the descriptions in longstanding anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories—shadowy, big-nosed, behind-the-scenes manipulators in dark robes practicing the occult and controlling financial interests—but that is not the at all the intent of George Lucas or the showrunner Dave Filoni, nor the producers, cast, and staff of Clone Wars, nor is that how we should read into any of this.  And yes, the Banking Clan is led by the Muun species that has big noses, but it’s a stretch to claim they are supposed to represent or denigrate Jewish people: they are aliens who look like… aliens. 

At a time of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, it is crucial to note that there is no serious hint at Dooku, Palpatine, or the Muuns being Jewish or that the intent of portraying the Sith Lords or Muuns in these ways is to try to equate them with or make them resemble Jews or associate their factions with the real-world Jewish state of Israel.  Anyone who really thinks this is what Star Wars is getting at simply does not understand the true spirit of Star Wars or the artists’ intent, though it’s understandable some would interpret this differently in our hyper-politicized, hyper-racialized times.  At its heart, Star Wars celebrates diversity, with waking carpets, humans of different colors and genders, and even robots coming together to fight for freedom and justice throughout the galaxy.

Yet as “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can get ugly and complicated, whether in Star Wars or our current Earth, including the attack at Natanz.  I lived for over five years in the Middle East, from 2014-2019, studied abroad there briefly in 2011, studied the region from afar for many other years.  And I can tell you that, while, yes, some things are pretty black-and-white—say, ISIS is terrible—other things are a lot more complicated.  As examples:

• Iran is seen by many as a bad-guy pariah in the region, yet the current pretty awful government only came to power in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 after, and in reaction to, the U.S. and British orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a 1953 coup that saw a far more monarchical and repressive government put in its place, and while expanding its power through supporting various Shiite Islamic militias throughout the Middle East that many view as terrorists, it is important to remember that Iran is only serious Shiite Muslim power and that Shiite Islam has been oppressed by Sunni Muslim leaders throughout the region for centuries (Sunnis are by far the largest bloc of Muslims, Shiites being the one major minority), to the degree that, without Shiite militias and Iran’s support for them in places like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, often few if any people stick up for the rights and dignity of Shiite Muslims.
• Saudi Arabia is one of America’s oldest allies in the Middle East and supplies much of the world with oil, but has a terrible human rights record and when it comes to Islamic extremism, the Saudis are, to quote Brookings scholar William McCants from an amazing article by the amazing journalist Scott Shane, “both the arsonists and the firefighters.”
• Israel and Turkey are two other longtime regional allies of the U.S., Israel a fellow democracy and Turkey a longtime member of the de-facto-U.S.-led NATO Alliance, but both have been veering hard to the right under right-wing leaders (Turkey into dictatorship territory) and actively oppressing the region’s Palestinians and Kurds, respectively. 
• And while America promotes human rights throughout the Middle East—even saving Yazidis from Genocide in 2014 with anti-ISIS airstrikes and coordination with Kurdish forces on the ground ordered by Obama—it has often supported oppressive dictators and kings, such as Saddam Hussein when he was willing to fight Iran (until we didn’t, eventually overthrowing him in a disastrous war launched in 2003), even as it still confronts its own domestic injustices in the present. 

I could go on, but the point is, there are a lot of complicated motivations and behaviors going on, often many good and many bad acts being committed by the same leader or country, and even many of the more destabilizing and violent actors have their own very legitimate grievances while some of the actors with the best of intentions inflict incredible amounts of harm.  There is often plenty of blame to go around.  As just one example, Israel deserves a lot of the criticism directed at it, while at the same time, a lot of the criticism direct at Israel is outlandishly unfair and anti-Semitic; the context and specifics of each specific criticism need to be evaluated separately. 

This is hardly to claim that all the parties involved in this Natanz drama are morally equal or moral equivalents (far from it), but we’re not going to focus on such questions (which I have dealt with elsewhere) here; the main takeaway is that Ahsoka’s lesson from “Heroes on Both Sides” is quite applicable to our current drama.

In the end, I am simply noting the similarities in details and context between some events from two great episodes of Clone Wars and our own reality, how pondering the fictional galaxy from a long time ago and far, far away can shed light on our real world, how a Star Wars cartoon can surprisingly teach us lessons about nuclear intrigue and Middle East diplomacy in 2021 as well as about our past and even our future.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s Twitter thread on the Natanz attack and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 5, 2020

Here is the unedited version of an article published today by Al Bawaba where major edits drastically changing the focus of the piece were made without consultation or my approval. The editorial line felt discussing Trump’s unfitness for office and the Cuban Missile Crisis were “asides” that were “highly subjective” (Game of Thrones? Maybe, but the points are well-accented by that reference, too), but since such considerations are objectively important and specifically central to this article I felt the need to publish in full here.

“The truest cause (alêthestatê prophasis) I consider to be the one that was least evident in public discussion (logos). I believe that the Athenians, because they had grown in power and terrified the Spartans, made war inevitable (anankasai).” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23

WASHINGTON—The past week has been a week of incredibly dramatic and historic escalations between Iran and the U.S. in the Middle East—specifically in Iraq—that have put both countries dramatically closer to war than at any time in years, possibly decades.

Climate of Escalation in an Increasingly Unstable Arena

After some relatively banal but escalating tit-for-tat, first came what were dramatic attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, involving pro-Iranian militias and almost certainly orchestrated by Iran.  This was a very bold move on the part of Iran, to say the least.  They may or may not have been inspired in part by Trump being under siege from the U.S. House of Representatives and its impeachment of him, and with Trump, we know domestic concerns are rarely far from his foreign policy moves (hell, that’s exactly why Trump has been impeached).

Just as dramatic an escalation, perhaps even more so, was American President Donald Trump’s ordering a strike to kill one of Iran’s top generals and almost certainly a man involved in orchestrating the attacks against the U.S. Embassy: Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force and the mastermind behind Iran’s military adventures abroad, especially in Iraq and Syria.  Over many years, he at times targeted American military personnel (killing hundreds and injuring thousands), other times he targeted ISIS.

Make no mistake about it: not only is the entire region from Yemen and Saudi Arabia through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Afghanistan all ripe like tinder before a conflagration, that conflagration may have already started and there may be little to no chance of putting it out before it spreads and consumes much.  In fact, it is hard to see how things do not erupt.

Before these latest developments, things were already terrible in the region:

• Yemen was a horror-show of a mess.
• Israel’s political leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing an existential domestic politics crisis even as escalation between Israeli forces on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other had been occurring all throughout 2019; throughout the same period, Palestinian areas simmered with opposition to the status quo of Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank along with the siege of Gaza.
• Lebanon is facing historic protests and frustration with its typically paralyzed government, of which Hezbollah—Iran’s primary proxy militia—is a part.
• Syria is still dealing with its long, brutal civil war, now seeming to wind down even as new intrigue has developed with a massive Turkish incursion and a dramatic, sudden, irresponsible partial U.S. withdrawal that betrayed key Kurdish allies who had been fighting ISIS, a withdrawal that may now allow a resurgence of ISIS.
• Iraq is reeling from major unrest and frustration from its own people directed at the government, forcing the recent resignation of its prime minister; key issues were corruption and many Iraqis feeling like their leaders were selling them out to Iran, and it seems Iranian-backed forces were behind much of the killing of hundreds of protesters.
• Iran has itself been in the midst of its largest violent protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979; the current round has seen some 1,500 people killed.  Iran is also enriching Uranium at high levels again since the collapse of the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal, a collapse irrationally instigated by the Trump Administration.
• In Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent and Trump has signaled he wants out of Afghanistan as major reporting from The Washington Post suggests U.S. officials for years may have been less than forthcoming about the level of progress being made there.

A Horrible Game of Chicken

In the context of the above Iraq situation, Iran was clearly hoping to drum up anti-American sentiment to counter anti-Iranian sentiment that had been boiling over.  Whatever Iranian leaders thought America might do in response, they probably figured that a senior government official like Soleimani was off limits; they are probably as surprised as anyone else.

Soleimani has been pretty much the only Iranian military official you would see with any regularity in news reports: in other words, Iran has no replacement of his stature, ability, and experience, and his death is a devastating blow to Iran’s senior leadership and its political, intelligence, and military objectives as Soleimani was perhaps the most effective operator in the Middle East.

We are in that Great Events of History realm where things tend to take on momentum and will of their own, where managing what happens becomes more difficult and far messier.  During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, we had serious minds with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exercising leadership and guiding events, each acting against pressure for further escalation from their own hardliners, a situation that still nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.  Before the dust on this current crisis settles, we must be prepared to be forced to watch as helpless bystanders watching powerful people make bad decision after bad decision (even a good decision taken in a vacuum often becomes a bad one).

The current U.S. Commander in Chief is facing his greatest test by far right now, and there is little in his acts as president prior to now that should reassure anyone in this moment: his public statements and the corroborated reporting that comes from sources within his own Administration (many of whom have parted ways with that Administration) speak for themselves and demolish the idea that the perception of the President of the United States as unfit for office has anything to do with partisanship.  The man whom his own top chosen advisors have repeatedly called him unfit for office is now in charge of managing a dangerous crisis he knows little about that may already be a war.

At the same time, the Iranian leadership has shown its willingness to gamble irresponsibly and increasingly so, behavior the nuclear deal Trump had abandoned was designed to mitigate.  After scrapping the deal, Trump and his Administration only offered threats to Iran, and Iran responded with its own increasing hostility, increasing its aggressiveness in Yemen and against U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (who knows where we would be if there had been sustained, robust engagement after that deal had been implemented, not to say necessarily crises would have been avoided, but better to try to avoid them than instigate them).

Thus, both American and Iranian leadership have shown predilections that shun de-escalation and opt for escalation and surprise.  But in the geopolitical situation just described, surprise is the last thing those hoping for peace and stability should want, and such sudden, dramatic escalations ring of the series of unfortunate events that escalated into World War I.  A year ago, I wrote for West Point’s Modern War Institute of the urgent lessons of WWI precisely with scenarios like our current one in mind, and I fear that the lessons I noted as urgent are going unheeded by leadership on both sides of this unfolding struggle.

Clear Acts, Unclear Consequences

The collateral damage will be severe and not geographically contained.

Like never before, Iraq is about to become (even more so) a battlefield between the U.S. and Iran, threatening to undermine everything that the U.S. has tried to build there since 2003.  There are places in Iraq where U.S. troops are vulnerable, and this is also true in the few places where U.S. troops remain in Syria.

Let us also not forget that Russia and Iran are allies, even if uneasy ones: Soleimani had briefed Russia’s leadership in Moscow before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to militarily intervene in Syria, the Iranian becoming an important factor in convincing the Russians to intervene and in planning their military support of the Assad regime, a close ally of both Iran and Russia; Soleimani even met personally with Putin and continued to coordinate with Russian military leaders after Russian forces began fighting in Syria.  Those Russian military forces are deployed throughout Syria, sometimes between spots where Iranian and Iranian-supported forces may try to take on U.S. forces and their remaining allies.  Russia—which is itself engaged in clearly hostile actions against the United States—could accidentally and/or deliberately be drawn into this fight explicitly and/or covertly, adding yet another perilous dimension to all this.

If this is good news for anyone, it’s ISIS.  The main fighters against ISIS were the U.S., the Kurds, and Iran.  The U.S. and Iran will now focus their attention on each other, and Trump’s sad withdrawal from northern Syria means the Kurds are reeling and trying to defend themselves from the Turks now more than ISIS.  The terrorist group will most certainly exploit this situation to further its comeback, a dimension that only makes this mess even messier.

Consider, too, that U.S., Israeli, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian leaders are all facing domestic political crises even (mostly) without war within their borders, and that, especially in the cases of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conflict with Iran would be desirable politically as each are facing concerted threats to remove them from office through extraelectoral means and they would be eager to rally their publics to focus on external threats, diverting attention from their own misconduct.

Iran, likewise, would love to quell its domestic unrest by focusing on a conflict with the U.S.

Conversely, the hapless leaders of Lebanon and Iraq are at this moment terrified of their countries being torn asunder as proxy battlegrounds and will very much be at the mercy of the decisions of Washington and Tehran.  Conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan (the latter on Iran’s border and with plenty of vulnerable U.S. troops) would also see further escalation and intervention as Iran and the U.S. will seek to harm each other wherever they can, and we have not even gotten to the global reach of Hezbollah.

After such a move as the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, it would be politically impossible for Iran not to respond massively.  And it will be politically impossible for the U.S. to not respond to that.  I have written of the general pressures of the anarchic interstate system before, and we have here a moment where pressure classically reduces the options of the belligerents.  We really may be in a Thucydides trap, where war is almost inevitable and takes on a mind and momentum of its own, a reference to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s opinion that the fear of one power (Sparta) concerning the rise in power of another (Athens) made war inevitable (1.23).

Another piece I wrote for the Modern War Institute at West Point looked at the chaos of the final season of Game of Thrones as instructive for reality, and we are certainly staring at chaos now even as we help to unleash it.  The question is, will leaders look at chaos as a “ladder,” as Lord “Littlefinger” Petyr Baelish did, or as something to be avoided, “a gaping pit,” as Lord Varys did?  The Varyses seem few and far between when it comes to those leaders driving current events.

A Gaping Pit

One would hope leaders on both sides are considering all these things, and have plans for how to deal with these multiple varied flashpoints.  History has shown that such hope is often misplaced, that the cooler heads of the Cuban Missile Crisis are more the exception than the norm.  The above axes I have mentioned are by no means all the fronts on which a regional conflict could quickly become a more widespread war and even a global one, one which may even involve Russia, Israel, Turkey, multiple terrorist groups, and crucial oil shipping routes, with leaders mixing domestic politics and foreign policy in ways not for the better of either.  From the 2020 election to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the security of Jordan and a further inflaming of the Sunni-Shiite conflict, there are a number of fronts beyond the direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran that could be consumed by the chaos unfolding before our very eyes, “swallowed” by its “gaping pit.”

Actions in the next days, weeks, and months could set the board for the next century, much in the way World War I did and, in many ways, set the map for many of the preexisting conflicts into which this American-Iranian conflict will play and which will play into it.  Every step, every act, every missile right now carries a weight that, if not properly respected (and it seems clear it will not be) risks throwing not just the Middle East, but the world into chaos, bloodshed, displacement, and recession that will make most recent conflicts seem quaint by comparison.

For all the talk of how the U.S. might fall into a Thucydides trap with  China, here it is in one now, with Iran.  Nothing was inevitable about coming to this point, but now that we are here, some disturbing events are now inevitable.  This is, of course, the most likely outcome from the beginning since the Trump Administration abandoned the nuclear deal that was stemming most if not all (but perhaps even all) of the current dynamics leading to this juncture.  One would hope a “lesson” to not casually abandon logical diplomacy would emerge, but then perhaps the bar is so low as to be meaningless?

In Trump, we have a brutal reminder about how history can be dangerously ignored at will to the peril of all.  He will not read this article, nor any of the countless others calling for reflection on the sheer weightiness of this moment.  Will we read thoughtful pieces?  Will our voting public?  Iran will now inevitably be front-and-center in the 2020 election, forcing voters to at least partly realize they are not just voting on Trump, but on the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want, the kind of world they want to help create.  How any of this turns out remains to be seen, but simply hoping for cooler heads to prevail, as was the case with the brink of nuclear war in 1962, seems today naïve at best and irresponsible at worst, with our current cast of characters misstepping from Mar-a-Lago to Persia and altogether too many other locations in a conflict that will refuse to be contained.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981 and on his news website, Real Context News.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) September 17th, 2019

CAMBRIDGE — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is far more experienced, capable, intelligent, articulate, and even respected (as reviled as he is) than U.S. President Donald Trump.  Why, then, one might wonder, would “Bibi” (as many of Netanyahu’s admirers and detractors refer to him) be putting on a show of political performance art imitating Trump?

This is no sudden Mad Queen turn, but, sadly, another in a long list of shrewd moves of Netanyahu’s designed to ensure his political survival.  With the exception of Filipinos, Israelis gave Trump the highest vote of confidence of any international population surveyed by Pew (69% of them), some 30% higher than his U.S. approval rating and far higher than Netanyahu’s 51% approval rating in Israel.  And, as I have noted in my post for The London School of Economics and Politics Middle East Centre, each is encouraging bad things in the other as they fan the flames of tribalism for their political purposes.

In the U.S., Trump pits whites against non-whites, the public against the media, his Administration against career professionals in the government, be they intelligence professionals investigating the Kremlin or law enforcement officials investigating his own misconduct or just lowly weather officials, and flirts with starting a war.  In Israel, Netanyahu of late has played a similar game; he, too, goes after the media, and, instead of non-whites, his targets are Arabs, though this has been the case with him for a while.  But now, he is also flirting with starting a war, even so far as to try to delay today’s election to do so.  Additionally, since he has been recommended for criminal prosecution by Israeli legal authorities (including Israel’s Attorney General), Netanyahu has also turned against Israeli authorities trying to hold him accountable for his misdeeds, deliberately echoing Trump’s language in accusing a “deep state” within his own government of trying to orchestrate something of a coup against him (the most accurate translation of “deep state” for the sane is “rule of law”).  Netanyahu and his allies are even pushing or have pushed for passing laws giving Netanyahu immunity from prosecution and limiting the ability of Israeli courts to curb political leaders, and is even pushing for the illegal annexation of large swaths of Palestinian land in the final run-up to today’s election (to stay focused, we won’t even go into Trump’s plethora of illegalities here).  Trump and his allies back up Netanyahu, especially close to elections, and Netanyahu and his people return the favor: Likud, Netanyahu’s party, even has huge posters of Trump and Netanyahu shaking hands up for the election.  And Trump is tweeting just before the election about a mysterious and vague defense treaty with Israel.  Even amid a scandal where the Israelis were apparently caught spying on Trump, Trump basically gave Netanyahu a win, dismissing the scandal because Netanyahu denied it, allowing Netanyahu to play up their relationship and its effectiveness just before Israelis vote, as I noted in my first television interview.

Beset by scandals and investigations, the two have doubled down on division and feeding off of each other, confident that fear will defeat hope.  With Trump, this may seem stupid if you assume he is focusing on Jewish votes, but for him this is less about winning Jewish votes—though Florida with its relatively large number of elderly Jews is surely a consideration—than Evangelical Christian ones, as Evangelicals support extremist right-wing Israeli policies and Netanyahu more than American Jews.  For Netanyahu, this is quite a smart move, since he can ride on Trump’s popularity in Israel and demonstrate to Israelis that he can personally play Trump in Israel’s favor.

Still, at a time when Israel seems more divided than ever, that Netanyahu has opted to imitate one of the most divisive leaders of a democracy in the world is a sign of the deteriorating health of Israeli democracy and Western Democracy in general.  From Rome to London, from Kashmir to Washington, the behavior of established democracies is not looking too good these days.  Israel’s degree of division is at historic levels: even in that Pew survey of the image people around the world have of the U.S., the Israeli divide between the right and the left is on deep display: 94% favorable vs 57% favorable impressions of the U.S., respectively, the largest of any national public surveyed, a thirty-seven point gap; it was 86% to 37% as far as confidence in Trump personally for the right and left, respectively, a forty-nine point gap and also the largest of the survey.  And the toxic Trump-Netanyahu relationship is also sharply dividing the global Jewish diaspora.

Netanyahu has had far too much fun reading his own premature political obituaries, so I will not contribute to such literature here.  But final polling showed neck-and-neck support between Netanyahu’s Likud-dominated right-wing bloc and the more centrist Blue and White coalition led by former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF: Israel’s military) Benny Gantz, indicating most-likely outcomes of either a second stalemate or a narrow win for Netanyahu.  That in both the U.S. and Israel, two men engaging in cheap division, fostering conflict, and known for cheating and breaking the law can be so strong and competitive is truly a sign of sickness; that the more competent, experienced of the two thinks imitating the less refined, more destabilizing of the two—even to the degree of attacking, along with his party, his own government’s core institutions and the rule of law in Israel—is perhaps even more appalling.

Neither the U.S. nor Israel reached their respective current situations overnight, but here they are.  In Israel’s case, one election this past May produced a stalemate, the first in Israel’s history where a government was not formed, prompting this historic second election just months later.  But like in the U.S., this second chance does not signify a healthy situation, rather, it shows the fundamental weakness of democracy: allowing choice means bad choices are made along with the good, and it seems, whether with Americans supporting Trump or Israelis supporting Netanyahu, hate wins and respect for institutions and the law does not.  Netanyahu has already just this past summer become Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister, arguably defining the state even more than the man whose record he passed, a Founding Father and Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.  And that does not even get to the U.S. and Trump’s possible staying power.

My gut (which I hope is wrong) tells me that, ever the cat with nine lives, Netanyahu will weather this storm, but even if Netanyahu loses, that it will have been so close is a testament to the erosion of democratic norms in the strongest democracy in the Middle East.  Perhaps most telling, Bibi is a very smart man, and he is not careless in betting on imitating Trump; rather, he is confident that it will help him and he is right.  Whatever this says about Israeli voters and the health of its democracy is not reassuring in the least.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 28, 2018

by Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) April 28th, 2018

Support Brian and his work by donating here

AMMAN — Israeli public opinion is, to quote The Economist, “a remarkably forgetful and fickle force.” The same can be said for Israeli politics in general. So it is hardly a stretch to say that measuring Israeli public opinion’s effects on Israeli policy is a significant challenge. And one of the most controversial of all of Israel’s policies over the years has been that of creating and expanding Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory over several decades. Especially given what a lightning-rod issue the settlements are and, in typical Israeli fashion, how complicated everything about them has become, this is a question worth asking.

Challenging Data for a Challenging Question

Almost as soon as I began this project, I knew there were many challenges that would make it impossible for any kind of definitive, clear, unqualified conclusions to emerge from this exploration, in the sense that public opinion cannot simply be said to be Variable A affecting settlement policy, Variable B, in such-and-such a way.

Such simplicity is as elusive as the “Two-State Solution” itself.

For one thing, Israel is a small country, and though it is powerful for its size, it is subject to a remarkable amount of factors from within and without, and its sensitive reactions to these factors are often intense, with Israel’s increasingly volatile neighborhood (and often volatile involvement in that neighborhood) only compounding these effects. Therefore, rather than look at public opinion and settlement policy as some sort of isolated factors, it is essential to account, at the very least, for some of the other major forces that can account for shifts in policy and opinion. Thus, when I was assembling my data points, I knew it would be essential to frame shifts in both Israeli public opinion and Israeli settlement policy against the backdrop of the more salient events affecting Israel, generally, those that could generally affect the feelings of Israelis and, specifically, those that could affect settlement policy. This approach should be more than obvious in the dataset I have uploaded here (this will be an ongoing project, so check back frequently for changes).

As time went on and I looked more and more at the different surveys, I also realized that measuring public opinion in Israel carries a unique set of challenges in contrast to studying similar subjects in the United States. 

The U.S. is a huge country, with hundreds of millions of people spread across a continent; Israel has far less than even ten million people squeezed into a tiny sliver of the Mediterranean coast. During major U.S. elections, political polls are ubiquitous, and even not during election cycles, major issues are polled often. Whatever the polls, there are usually long histories of polling by that firm and other major polling firms, asking relatively similar questions and often the same questions.

Israeli political polling is another beast entirely: there are far, far fewer pollsters, and there is little consistency in how questions are phrased between pollsters and, sometimes, even with the same polling outfit. Also, because there are far fewer data points the polling data must be taken with much more of a grain of salt than American polling.

We simply don’t have ten or even twelve years of data that says “Do you approve or disapprove of Israeli settlements?” What this means is that there is a broad array of approaches to categorizing the data and presenting it. The only agenda I pursued in my presentation was one of simplicity, and I take responsibility for the costs such an approach carries. For example, instead of a question asking “Are you for or against evacuating settlements?” a question might ask “Are you a.) for removing all settlements b.) for removing most settlements except major ones near the Green Line [i.e., 1967 borders] c.) for removing settlements from the Green Line and illegal outposts d.) for removing illegal outposts e.) against any removals?” In this case, I would (and basically did) combine a.), b.), and c.) to refer to serious support for full or partial settlement removal, ignored d.) as not really being conclusive of sentiment supporting settlement removal in general, and took e.) for being against removal. Other may have found it more beneficial to include all these nuances or created different categories and groupings. I opted for the ones I chose, again, for the sake of simplicity, but I welcome comments and suggestions.

Even with the limitations and subjective approach I took, I still feel there is value in looking at this data thus arrayed, and I can say with confidence that no one else has undertaken a similar effort as comprehensive as mine, at least not in English but also not likely in Hebrew, either. As imperfect as the data may be, it can still help to give a relative sense of the forces at work. See the dataset here (data does not include East Jerusalem)

The Inconsistent Effects of Public Opinion on Israeli Settlement Policy

Looking at my (provisional) compilation of the data, in the years just before the Palestinians’ First Intifada (uprising) at the end of 1987, over half of Israelis (as high as 57%) were inclined to annex Palestinian land in part or in full, therefore making many or all the settlements permanent Israeli communities, and support for “land for peace” initiatives was below 50% (as low as 39%). In reaction to the (relatively moderate-to-low-scale) violence of the Intifada, public opinion reversed: sentiment supporting “land for peace” began to steadily increase, and support for annexation dipped below 50% and continued to decline as the Intifada continued. By 1991, the positions has essentially reversed, with one poll showing 58% for “land for peace” style ideas and only 40% for annexation.

Yet with the exception of a small dip in 1989, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s hardline government continued with steady settlement population increases and construction expansion, with the highest settler population increases in 1987 and 1991, which also had dramatically higher percentage increases in settlement construction (over 144% and over 314%, respectively). Though the latter coincided with the peak years of the Soviet-Jewish Aliya (immigration) to Israel, U.S. president George H. W. Bush still felt that Shamir’s government was going far too far on settlements, and exerted heavy pressure on him and Israel to curtail settlement growth and construction. Along with changing public sentiment, this helped precipitate the rise of Yitzhak Rabin’s pro-peace Labor government in 1992, which would severely curtail settlement construction, though not so much settlement population growth. 

Here would be one of the times that Israeli public opinion on settlements seemed to lead and push Israel, its politicians, and its government on settlement policy. 

The year before and year of Rabin’s assassination were two of the deadliest years in all of the 1990s for Israelis in terms of Palestinian violence, and, according to one survey, sympathy for settlers among the Israeli public rose in the year after Rabin’s assassination, even as settlement activity was being curtailed. This same year was when Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud, pro-settlement forces pushed Labor out of power, and it is ironic that under Netanyahu’s three years in power, sentiment (with some vacillation) seemed to increase and remain high for “land for peace” (60s and high 50s) initiatives and for evacuating settlements (high 60s/low 70s), while support for annexation was far lower than before (mid-20s). Yet Netanyahu—who had himself hold the housing ministry responsible for settlement construction along with the office of prime minister for the entirety of his prime ministership—pushed ahead robustly with settlement expansion.

This may in part help to explain the rise of Labor and peace candidate Ehud Barak’s government in 1999, under whose watch public opinion in several surveys increased sharply against settlements and rise sharply for “land for peace.”

But this would be short-lived. Under the intense diplomatic efforts of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat engaged in intense U.S.-mediated negotiations in 2000, and settlement expansion activity by the Israeli government accordingly fell sharply. But these talks fell apart, with some encouragement by Barak’s rival, Likudnik Ariel Sharon, who could have been fairly said to have helped instigate the Second Intifada late in 2000. Amidst a dramatic rise in violence—far worse than anything during the First Intifada and the rest of the 1990s—Sharon, the famously harsh warrior, toppled Barak’s government amid plummeting support for “land for peace” and settlement evacuation, a pessimism that was only reinforced by the 9/11 attacks in America.

Previously, Labor had ridden waves of anti-settlement and pro-“land for peace” sentiment with Rabin and Barak, and Likud had tried (but failed) to lead public opinion with Netanyahu. Sharon, it seems, would succeed where Netanyahu had failed. But Sharon would have a unique and surprising agenda: even while crushing the Palestinian uprising with overwhelming force, Sharon would shepherd his people towards a historic disengagement, a sort of a “land for peace” led by an archconservative, much like strong anti-Communist Nixon would credibly able to normalize relations with Mao’s China.

Under Sharon, Arafat died and the settler population steadily if moderately expanded, even as Sharon withdrew all 8,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza in 2005 (even allowing for that, both the settler population and settlement construction saw a net increase that year), though Sharon’s government definitely curtailed construction of new units.

The pullout from Gaza caused a rift in the pro-settler Likud party, so much so that Sharon broke off and formed a new, centrist Kadima party, which led a new government that would significantly curtail support for settlement expansion. 

But the next year, Sharon would fall into a coma, while Hamas would win elections in the evacuated Gaza Strip and Israel would become embroiled in an embarrassing and controversial war in Lebanon. Amidst these developments, Israeli anti-settler and “land for peace” sentiment fell sharply, even as Sharon’s Kadima successor, Ehud Olmert, would risk major peace talks with Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas in 2008. When these fell apart, more conflict in Gaza ensued and set the stage for Netanyahu’s comeback as prime minister. Since then, opinion has been conflicted, with volatile opinions on whether settlements should be evacuated and a tightening of pro/con land-for-peace sentiment and an increase in pro-annexation sentiment up until the major conflict with Gaza in 2014. Sentiment on settlements under Netanyahu remained divided up through 2014, so it seems ironically fitting that in his right-wing, pro-settler government, a moderate has been giving the housing ministry. The major declines in government support for the settlers during this period coincided with Obama’s first-term pressure on Israel to freeze settlement activity and his second-term peace effort, led by John Kerry.

Conclusion: It’s Complicated

In summary, there is no overall consistent effect of public opinion on settlement policy. In the 90s, Labor seemed to chase public sentiment as it turned against settlements and for “land-for-peace,” but violence and an assassination meant this did not lead to any long-term peace deal or long-term change in settlement policy. Likud tried twice—first, failing, second, succeeding—to shape public opinion and succeeded, but that led to a strong-willed Sharon forming a new party, and his coma mirrored Rabin’s assassination attempt in seeing efforts fail before new leadership acted to halt new trends in government policy, in both cases, Netanyahu. Thus, it would seem public opinion is at best only as strong a factor as individual leadership, violence from Palestinians, American pressure, and other x-factor events, and that opinion is highly susceptible to all of these factors. It is public opinion that is more variable then, when compared with relatively consistent settlement policy, perhaps best exemplified in the net increases in settlement construction and population growth the same year Sharon took about 8,500 settlers out of Gaza. 

Thus, whether public opinion shapes settlement policy depends on a number of factors, and is hardly the most dominant of factors affecting that policy.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area currently based in Amman, Jordan. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse December 11, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) December 11th, 2017

Photo by author

AMMAN — More often than not, the situation whenever the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are involved in discussing their near-identity-defining, almost sickly-beloved conflict rapidly becomes a contest to see who can deny reality the most vehemently. In this conflict, you learn quickly that if one side has a choice between quietly enjoying some advantage or rising opportunity on one side and rubbing it in the faces of their rivals at the cost of sabotaging their own blessing on the other, the latter is almost always the choice; this makes you realize that spite, as much as anything else, is a motivating factor among too many in this struggle.

Photo by author

Typical Tribal Conflict… BUT GOD!

As a student, you read about this conflict and it fascinates you; as someone who has the opportunity to talk to the parties and live among them over an extended period of time, it depresses you and tires you out, even if you don’t have a vested interest in one side or another. You form a deeper respect for the suffering of both sides, even as you become exasperated by their stubbornness and unwillingness to acknowledge valid points made by the other side in a cycle of dehumanization that helps to explain the deadly and nasty nature of this conflict.

After enough time, you become good at asking people questions and getting them to talk, but this also results in your being accustomed to being usually disappointed in their answers. Occasionally, you hear voices of reason, then become even more depressed as you realize these are the minorities, often represented at pathetically low levels in the halls of political power, even when democratically elected.

Frequently, the more religious the individual, the less compromising they are in their views. And I have found that such people rarely consider things from the other perspective.

Should Jewish babies being born now in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or Haifa suffer because of the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers? No more than Palestinian babies born in Jerusalem or Ramallah or Hebron should suffer for the sins and/or failures of their fathers and grandfathers. And if your answer to those questions involves you saying that yes, innocent children being born in situations totally beyond their control do indeed deserve to suffer under occupation, legal inequality, or the constant threat or “retributive” violence and you somehow justify this response by citing your God or His holy texts, then your God is not worthy of worship and esteem but should instead be cast off into the obscurity and irreverence that has been the fate of most of the capricious and cruel deities of millennia past.

I confess I am not among those who would describe themselves as the faithful, and it is with increasingly robust pride that I describe myself as such in the face of more and more encounters with otherwise kind and generous souls who, when animated by discussion of this or that holy place they are told is to be their rightful inheritance by some ancient book of yesteryear, can and do find specific verses from said text that they claim (and they are hardly alone) justify some sort of violence to either take back what is “theirs” or prevent sharing sovereignty over what they now control.

God “gave” you this land? Funny, why don’t you control it now, then? Is it not His will that you lost it? Why not reserve your hostility for the God that allowed this to happen, rather than the people who are now in possession of what is supposedly “yours,” for are not those people instruments of His Will? Or are you claiming that these people are somehow successfully opposing the Will of God and that your all-powerful God needs you, a band of lowly primates, to somehow aid him in seeing His Will through? Or do you who now possess such holy places look at the mass of outside-your-tribe humanity that surrounds you and are also laying claim to said holy places believe that your God put these people here for you to displace, keep out, or even kill in large numbers just to maintain exclusive sovereignty? Am I to respect a God that is so tribal that He favors your possession and not sharing such sacred holy sites, that this God truly cares whether you or some other primates that are nearly identical in blood and DNA control some speck of a vast planet that is merely a piece of dust in the wider universe?

The truth of the matter is that there is no respectably serious answer that can be provided by any of the faithful who believe in divinely sanctioned violence to either maintain or retake such and such location. Believe me, I’ve tried to find one by personally asking many on both sides of this conflict, and the range and originality of the answers such a crowd can give you are narrow and hackneyed in the extreme.

It was extremely unfair to the Jews when the Romans slaughtered and expelled the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs in the first and second centuries C.E. amid vigorous Jewish revolts, and it was also extremely unfair to the Arabs who would become known as Palestinians the way first Ottoman Turkish and then British European colonial overlords oppressed them and also allowed the long-exiled Jews to return to their ancient homeland in a manner that did not consider asking or consulting those local Arabs how they felt about the matter and then, in the case of the British, wearily presented it as a fait accompli to the United Nations in 1947-1949. Wars were fought and won and lost, and, as is so often the case with such things, there is no full rewind button, try though many may to find it or claim they have.

It is also worth asking: by what right did the ancient Jews (at least in the Biblical telling) massacre and/or displace those who were in what is now Israel/Palestine when they arrived thousands of years ago? By what right did the seventh-century Arab conquerors take the land from the East Roman (Byzantine) Greco-Romans? The same questions about taking land can be asked of many others, including the Romans, Ottomans, Turks, British, and those who would become Israelis; the answer is the same for each of them: they and/or their leaders wanted to and they had the power to do so.

The biggest myth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that it is some sort of difficult to understand Gordian knot, singular among world conflicts in its uniqueness and intensity, inscrutable to all but those most studied in it or closest to it.

The reality is that the conflict is remarkably banal: two tribes want the same land and contest sites that are particularly holy to them. You know, like what happened many thousands of times in recorded history and innumerable times from prehistory when we were barely more than upright primates.

Perhaps most obnoxiously, both Israelis and Palestinians often speak as if they are the only people to have been in a predicament like theirs. While many people around the world are stuck in conflicts and occupations the world has long forgotten—Tibetans under the Chinese, Kashmiris, the long-suffering people of Somalia, Hutus in Central Africa, and today’s ignored Yemenis—it seems even the slightest provocation involving anything Palestinian-Israeli generates front page news, drowning out other, more intense conflicts that have killed and displaced far more people in recent decades.

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Jerusalem Is NOT the Center of the World

Before Trump delivered his ill-advised speech on Jerusalem, it finally seemed as if things had hit a critical mass of a point where the world might finally start paying attention to Yemen in the wake of the death of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president turned rebel leader. Before that event threatened to further destabilize an already incredibly unstable situation, Yemen was suffering from the worst cholera outbreak in modern human history, a man-made one wrought by Saudi incompetence and global indifference, with about one million cases and getting worse, and was also facing a food crisis that has put Yemen on the brink of the worst famine in the world in decades, with some seven million people at risk. It was thought that Saleh’s death might bring some much-needed attention to the neglected conflict, but two days later, Trump gave his speech on Jerusalem, and now Yemen’s war is at most an afterthought (if that) in much of the Arab/Muslim world and in global headlines, just as it has been for most of the war’s duration. In Jordan, where I reside, I haven’t seen a single mention of Yemen recently in social media among any of my regional contacts except from those who are Yemeni.

There is only so much oxygen to be shared among major stories during any given news cycle, and the tiny sliver of land on the Eastern Mediterranean coast know as Israel/Palestine consumes far more than its fair share of what is available. I was chatting with one Palestinian-Jordanian friend recently and complained about the disproportionate attention the subject got, but in her mind it was totally justified: “Jerusalem is very important to Muslims,” she said. “So a place is more important than millions who are on the brink of starvation in Yemen?” I asked? “Yes, of course!” she replied. I would cite here a piece I wrote a while back about how, on balance, religion intensifies conflict, not de-escalates it; religion may or may not “poison everything,” to cite Christopher Hitchens, but it more often than not certainly poisons conflicts, and quite irrationally so.

I will not excuse the many and severe misdeeds of Israel when it comes to its treatment of Palestinians under its control (and I have written about them extensively before, though that is not to suggest that Palestinians are blameless, either), but especially when it comes to white Europeans (and especially those from countries with backgrounds of strong anti-Semitism and fascist governments and/or fascistic leanings), one really does have to wonder why—when surrounded by conflicts in which human rights are being abused, from Western Sahara to northern Cyprus to Belarus to Crimea to Darfur to Syria to the Kurds to the Uighurs to the Rohingya to North Korea—so many of these Europeans are so virulently, almost obsessively focused on the misdeeds of Israel when it comes to human rights violations; some won’t even mention the word Israel, as if it’s a dirty word, and a good number come at their own expense to protest or document abuses in Palestinian communities.  After nearly two millennia of Christian anti-Semitism dominating Europe, perhaps the idea—after a mere few decades of progress (and well under a century since the Holocaust was hardly a just a German, but a collective European crime)—that some level of residual anti-Semitism is a factor in current European views on Israel and Israelis, and the intensity and frequency of criticism of them, is hardly unreasonable.

America, of course, is more complicated: it has the largest Jewish population in the world (even including Israel) and a far larger population of extreme white Christian Evangelicals who literally believe that the Jews must control all of the Biblical “Holy Land” in order for Jesus to return, prejudicing them wholly against the Palestinians in favor of Israeli Jews, even more so than American Jews. And among major powers, it is the nation most supportive of Israel, one of only a few nations around the world that don’t view Israel negatively.

I’ve seen a number of Europeans express solidarity with the Palestinians by posting a Facebook profile photo frame showing the Dome of the Rock and with Arabic stating “Jerusalem is the capital of Palestine,” almost as if to also deny that it is Israel’s capital. Is it so awful to post that Jerusalem is the capital of BOTH Israel AND Palestine? Few people I talked to here in Jordan wanted to admit that Israel has any claim to Jerusalem (Jordan controlled East Jerusalem until 1967, when Israel drove the Jordanians out), still fewer that it could or should be Israel’s capital. While more Israeli Jews had mixed views when I’ve spoken with them in the past, the ones that felt Jerusalem could be divided and shared were generally a minority of disillusioned hippies not well-represented in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament; those who were more mainstream politically—and therefore more empowered—were far less keen on the idea of a shared Jerusalem, let alone Palestine as a state.

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The Reality of Jerusalem

The obvious (if painful for some) reality is that Israel has controlled much of Jerusalem since 1948 and all of it since 1967, something which ISIS (of all groups) surprisingly and ironically pointed out after Trump’s speech. This reality means that, for all intents and purposes, Jerusalem has been the de facto capital of Israel’s state (a state recognized today by 158 nations, the vast majority of the world) since 1948, officially so in Israel’s view though unofficially so to the rest of the world. Because of the sensitive nature of the unresolved status of Jerusalem between two parties in conflict, the United States and the rest of the world have avoided recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s (or Palestine’s) capital. Yes, it practically is Israel’s capital, and everybody knows it, but Trump’s public acceptance of it violated basic principles of neutrality, and even while changing virtually nothing on the ground, it enraged millions of Arabs and Muslims worldwide.

If the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims were smart, they would abstain from any sort of violent reaction to a speech that changes nothing on the ground for anyone except people who work at or need the U.S. Embassy as it moves from one city to another. They could unite on a focused, organized plan to engage the world community now that sympathy is more intensely with them after Trump’s incompetent oration needlessly kicked a hornet’s nest. In fact, Trump’s address needlessly weakened U.S. standing and credibility on this issue, enough that it might even be possible for the Palestinians to achieve some results even if they bypass America.

Yet instead, mass protests and beginnings of violence are the response. Young men rush towards nervous Israeli and sometimes trigger-happy troops, throwing rocks. The only tangible result of such acts will be destruction, injury, and death, and fatalities have already occurred. Not a wise move at all or one that will accomplish anything or have any effect on the status of Jerusalem or how Trump feels about his decision. Such acts are the surest way to lose a moral high ground that has been handed to them on a silver platter by President Trump and may prevent more positive measures that would help advance the Palestinian cause on the part of the rest of the international community. The protesters’ chants offer no hint that they could share Jerusalem or historic Palestine with Israel. 

As for Israel, having received a major boost and gift from America, it would be in a perfect position to reach out to Palestinians with a real offer of compromise, buttressed from a newly stronger position after action by their closest ally. Instead, per usual, Israel seems content to play their hand to their maximum advantage and to the Palestinians’ maximum disadvantage, as Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governments are wont to do.

Too many on both sides talk as if the city will be their exclusive sovereign domain. Jerusalem is the de facto practical capital for Israel while simultaneously being the symbolic capital of Palestine in the heart of virtually every Palestinian. It is also the emotional heart and soul of Israel for most Israelis and a practical capital for Palestinians, more of whom live there than in any Palestinian city except for Gaza City and with Jerusalem as the heart of Palestinian spiritual life. Too many on both sides want to deny these realities, living in a fantasy world where such practical, emotional, and spiritual concerns can be ignored in pursuit of total victory. Trump’s blunder is an opportunity for both sides to move closer to compromise, but, as can be expected in this conflict, it has only hardened positions and made compromise that much harder. Sure, blame Trump, but Israelis and Palestinians are reacting in just the ways that can compound Trump’s folly, rather than mitigate it.

The Arab and Jewish residents of Jerusalem, while hardly brothers, demonstrate a functional coexistence to any who visit, as they have for me repeatedly. If only a clear majority of Palestinians and Israelis could build on this spirit, rather than once again throw practicality to the wind, one could begin to feel hope. Trump’s stupidity should not be an excuse for stupidity from either Israelis or Palestinians, yet these types of conflicts often fall into predictable, repetitive, unproductive patterns, and that, sadly, is the case here with Jerusalem, the shared capital of Israel and Palestine, whether officially recognized as such or not.

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© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article by same author: Victory in Alabama May Run Through Jerusalem: Moore Likely at Heart of Trump Decision

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