Respecting Uncertainty

What We Think About Israel and Gaza Depends on Who We Are

Hank Kalet Oct 17 ∙ Preview

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Residential buildings 150 m from the Palestinian Tower, which were destroyed during the first week of intensive bombing by Israeli aircraft. SourceAl Araby . Creative Commons License.‏‏
It has been 10 days since Hamas breached the Israeli border and killed about 1,200 Israelis, many in their homes or at an outdoor music festival. Israel retaliated with air strikes on Gaza and, according to numerous reports, is readying a ground invasion. In its retaliatory zeal — what Raz Segal in Jewish Currents describes as a genocide — it has opted not to differentiate between civilians and soldiers, average Palestinians and Hamas, as if it wanted to out-savage Hamas and its depraved indifference for life.

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War crimes as response to war crimes. What have we become?

I feel like I have been writing the same essay for a week and a half, getting the same responses from each side, and then returning to the topic in a never-ending circular display of defat. We have lost all sense of proportion and humility, any sense that others might see things differently than we do.

Shadi Hamid makes just this point in The Washington Post. “The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity,” he says. We need to step away metaphorically, create distance, and attempt to understand why it is each of us might approach a set of facts with different interpretations.

We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate — our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them. My hope is that more Americans will understand this, considering how much we disagree with one another over our own founding as a nation.

Our certainties have caused us to retreat to camps. To become tribal, and we’ve lost sight of what matters most: The loss of thousands of innocent lives, all sacrificed to dueling ideologies. We forget that humanity matters. Life matters. We nod to it, stipulate to this as an underlying fact, but too often our discussions descend into the theoretical, into a critical framework that protects our analysis from the messiness of life on the ground, which itself has been weaponized in the ideological war.

And we are all feeling it.

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