I’m So Confused
In the last ten days we have all been inundated with more and more breaking news about the war in Israel and Gaza. I didn’t think anything, even the war in Ukraine, could displace the Trump legal drama unfolding in New York City, Atlanta, Washington D.C. and everywhere in between, but this Mideast crisis has done just that. Everything else in the news cycle is taking a way back seat. While there is no particular displeasure in not seeing Donald Trump’s daily ranting and raving over whatever twists and turns come his way, I do imagine that the Ukrainians and others in the world that are currently feeling put-upon by some combination of nature, circumstance or evil-doers, must be wondering why their plight is less newsworthy than those poor souls in Israel and Gaza. But the outpouring of grief, shock, awe and concern we are seeing for the Israeli/Gaza situation is rooted in so many mixed emotions that one can only say that the news cycle is a reflection of that collective angst more than the exploitation of it that we sometimes attribute to the media. These feeling are also getting conflated with just about every other issue and concern we have as individuals and interest groups and that is where the confusion starts to get too thick.
By this time we have almost all come to understand and believe that the Jewish population of the world has suffered unfathomably at the hands of multiple bigots around the world for the past millennia at least. Of course, the worst of that brutality happened only 80 years ago, which is always all the more shocking when we see actual video footage or watch recreated stories of the horror. It would be hard to deny that the world at large owes some form of reparation to this put-upon group of people who did no more than follow a harmless course of worship to an ancient and ancestral God, who most of the world also believes in. The apparent crux of the issue rests less in the events culminating on the Via Dolorosa in A.D. 33, than in these people’s unwillingness to accept the more prevalent belief that Jesus Christ was the incarnation of the son of God. There is something about fundamentalists that trouble modernists, but few if any of them have been so persecuted as have those of the Jewish faith. I cannot say for certain that the quid pro quo of the Holocaust was the establishment of the Jewish homeland in Israel, but I am fairly certain than most people believe that to be the case. The truth, of course, is that the formal reparation agreement with Germany for the 500,000 German Jews that repatriated to Israel after the war was the $1.5 billion settlement signed later in 1952. But Israel and its founding in 1948 (and the all-important recognition of it as a state by the United States that same day) was more than just about German Jews, it was about all of Judaism and the many years and locales of religious persecution these people had suffered.
Needless to say, the people who would question that global act of contrition more than anyone else would likely be the Palestinian people who say that they had taken from them over 4 million acres of land with a value that they say runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Hence the bitterness and confusion of ownership of something like land that few of us can truly claim to “own” in the grandest scheme. The obvious question in such an issue is how far back and with what righteousness does the ownership of land, especially land in such a storied and historically long-dated region as the Middle East, constitute possession or ownership. Let’s face it, none of this land we inhabit in the United States belonged to us before 1565 (the colonization of St. Augustine in Florida). We can’t even say that the indigenous Americans owned the land, because at least they were wise enough to not think that they were any more than mere stewards of the land during their lifetimes. So, as far as that little spit of 8,000 or so square miles that is called Israel, who owns it only God knows and even then it probably depends on who’s God you choose to ask. Few areas of the world are more confusing than that small corner where the continents meet.
What is less confusing in the here and now is the freshest brutalities of man, and at the moment that would seem to be the acts of Hamas inflicted on some 1,400 dead in the last two weeks. That is clear enough in this moment and with these technologies that so thoroughly record our every action, we have no difficulty imagining just how horrific it all was. But as the 360,000 Israeli troops, including scores of reservists that have been called home to serve in true Zionist fashion and are poised on the northern border of Gaza suggest, there is more confusion on the immediate horizon. Needless to say, everyone is posturing to carefully support the victimized Israeli citizenry, especially those who have already lost loved ones, or, worse yet if that is possible, have loved ones in limbo at the hands of Hamas terrorists. The strategic confusion is profound. Play nice to get back the hostages and risk emboldening Hamas and the other militants waiting for a signal that Israel has softened and that the time is ripe for more attacks and even more hostages. Play tough and risk getting censured by the world and perhaps even get designated a war criminal for breaching the rules of war as civilized nations consider it. And of course, Hamas is very good at putting its tunnels and armaments directly in harms way such that collateral damage to civilians is maximized. Hard to prove, but very easy to anticipate.
Today, as those troops finish their first week of readying themselves for the ultimate assault and plunge into the worst sort of urban warfare, a direct hit on a Gaza hospital kills 300. Oh, the outrage. Hamas immediately fingers the Israeli military, specifically a jet-delivered armament. But wait, Israeli intelligence, admittedly still on their heels from missing this entire onslaught, says that they think the hospital bombing was the result of a misguided Islamic Jihad rocket gone bad. Israeli intelligence does not have a perfect honest-injun record when it comes to such things, and third-party military analysts say that while misguided missiles are a specialty of the Islamic Jihad, the degree of death and destruction looks more like a jet-borne ordinance profile. At this point, who knows…more confusion.
As we wait for the next chess moves which include a dramatic visit tomorrow by Joe Biden himself to Ben Gurion Airport to meet with Netanyahu, and then to carry on to Amman to see the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and the Palestinian Authority (who has already backed out right on schedule after the first Hamas claim that the hospital was bombed by the IDF). Meanwhile, back on the home front things are equally confusing. I got an email from a fraternity brother (I am fifty years past caring about that fraternity) who is Jewish and pro-Israeli (no surprise there), but who is using the Cornell President’s milk toast and non-incendiary comments about the Israeli/Gaza attacks to rain hell fire and brimstone on her and the University, suggesting that this is a direct product of a DEI-controlled university system that has gone off the rails. DEI? Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? So, now we are supposed to believe that the DEI mob has captured the hearts and minds of the Cornell administration and made them anti-Israeli and in favor of Palestinians, Hamas and terrorism against Israel in general? That’s it! I’m out! I, like Howard Beale, am mad as hell and just can’t take this any more. Or like the affable grandpa in Moonstruck, I am just left rubbing my reddened eyes, saying “I’m so confused!”