Diplomacy is difficult work. It’s a game of small victories and incremental change. I don’t have a secret recipe for unraveling the knot of religious, ethnic, and national violence that is taking place around the world. Israel exists and thrives in no small part due to the US’ good will and patronage. Foreign policy is about interests, not friendship. From the perspective of the US, Israel seems to be the exception to this. The State of Israel is like the little kid that gets mouthy with older kids because his big brother is standing next to him. I’ve been that kid, and my brother has stood up for me, but he also slapped me around when I was being annoying.
College students protesting on behalf of the Palestinian people are doing an important work. The Civil Rights movement in the 20th century was an extension of similar fights happening concurrently in India and South Africa. In the US, the traction from the fight for civil rights invigorated other nascent causes. Women’s rights, abortion access, anti-war protests, many of these causes intersecting with one another.
The protests against Israel’s siege of Gaza aren’t emerging from nowhere. And, contrary to the reporting from the right-wing media outlets, this isn’t being manufactured by George Soros, China, Marxists, or some other bogeymen. There are plenty of Arabs on college campuses whose families still live in places like Gaza who are at the foundation of these protests. Add to that American Jews who are tired of the violence in Israel, and you have a coalition of people who are deeply connected to the conflict and its impact on the people involved.
It's only my opinion, but I think the protests need to continue until the US government begins to take seriously the possibility that it is contributing to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza.
To my Christian friends who feel that they have a biblical mandate to support Israel at any cost, that’s a load of horseshit. You owe no such thing. The modern State of Israel is a secular entity that has, up to this point, acted according to the demands of modern statecraft. We are not allowed to despise Jews because of their religion or ethnicity. That is anti-semitism. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ requires us to be agents of peace. Jesus had tons to say about how we are supposed to treat outsiders. In fact, the Samaritans were the Palestinians of Jesus’ day, an ethnic group marginalized and persecuted by the first century Jews. Pray for the people of Israel. Pray for our Jewish brothers and sisters who are persecuted there. Pray for the Palestinians who are dying. But don’t neglect the prophetic work of speaking truth to power. The Israelite prophets didn’t shy away from holding the people of Israel to account for the way they treated the foreigners and other marginalized people in Israel. One of the chief causes of their exile to Babylon was the injustices they visited on the people in their land.
Perhaps this is made all the more uncomfortable for us while we are wrestling with what to do about the immigration issue here in the US. Some worry that immigrants flooding into the country are going to attempt to overthrow our country. All I can say about that is that this isn’t the first time Americans have beat that drum. A hundred years ago, when Eastern and Southern European immigrants began entering the US, there were groups of people who were sure Catholics from Italy or Jews from Poland were going to destroy our country. Predictably, they were wrong. And those people who fret today are wrong, too. Israel’s solution of apartheid has not worked to handle the Palestinian “problem,” and it won’t work here either. In a globalized society, these problems are never confined by national borders. The Gaza situation is our situation, and the Palestinians deserve our efforts at helping them survive.
Nearly a week ago, President Biden addressed the public with some comments on the college protests. From my perspective, the glaring hypocrisies were hard to miss. He said, “We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent.” We are, however, a nation that props up other authoritarian nations where the dissent of the people silenced using American-made munitions [See Saudi Arabia, Iran, Philippines, Cuba, Chile, et al.]. Sure, foreign policy is a tricky thing. We don’t have friends, we have “interests.” But the US has never shied away from turning a blind eye to human rights violations by governments with “shared interests.” The government of the United States, ignoring piles of evidence that war crimes are being committed by the State of Israel, encourages harsher consequences for protesting college students than actual war criminals.
Biden asserts, “Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law.” If only this were true. Every time the US flexes its considerable military muscle, some nation someplace suffers its effects. Since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been engaging in threats, intimidation, fear, and violence to build illegal settlements throughout the West Bank, a tactic it learned from its American patrons. And the US has feigned disgust, doing nothing to intervene.
I suppose my takeaway here is that we are complicit in the deaths of thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Full stop. We are interventionist in conflicts all over the world in the name of fighting human rights violations. We formed a coalition army to slap down al-Assad in Syria. We’re currently flexing on China regarding their threats against Taiwan. But make no mistake, our choices to intervene are bound up in US interests, not in some altruistic campaign to protect ALL people from human rights violations. This moral fluidity undercuts American rhetoric about stopping human rights abuse. If you’re Haitian, Uighur, or Palestinian, the words are empty.
We don’t have to intervene everywhere. Sometimes there are intractable conflicts that are just going to have to work themselves out. But in the case of Israel v. Gaza, we are using one hand to wag a finger at Israel and the other hand is supplying weapons to continue doing the naughty thing. I don’t think it is an unreasonable expectation that, in our dealings with allies, our words and actions are consistent. Integrity is as effective a motivator for change as any bomb.
I appreciate your voice in this thing. You are giving voice to lots of people, like me, who just don’t know how to think about this thing. It is definitely a clusterf**k! There are lots of people on both sides for whom I am heartbroken for.