By Hebraic Affairs Editor A.I. Cahan
with Middle East Correspondent Gertrude Bell in Beirut
The prospect of losing American democracy in an election in which its subverter has absolutely no chance of winning the popular vote was so depressing that we decided to look elsewhere for something cheerier to write about.
Good morning Beirut!
As the Jewish people prepare to usher in the New Year, it might be well to look back over the past year in the Middle East.
It's hard to think of a worse year for the Jews in the Middle East since about 70 CE.
Without trading charges about who did what 3,000 years ago (a staple of both sides' claims to a divine right to torment and kill the other), let's start on October 7, when the State of Israel suffered the worst military defeat and civilian massacre in its history at the hands of Hamas terrorists and cutthroats. Hundreds of Israelis were hunted down, tortured, and slaughtered; hundred more were violently abducted and stuffed in Gaza tunnels to languish. Over 70 are still there, although it's no longer clear how many are still alive.
You would that any Israeli Prime Minister who allowed this security collapse to occur would be shown the door at once. Especially when that same Prime Minister green-lit payments of billions of dollars to those same terrorists as part of his scheme to permanently divide and weaken Palestinian governance.
Not so much, goyishce kopf.
For the past year, the multiply-indicted Bibi Netanyahu has kept an iron grip on power, having offered his people a year of staggering war and violence, whose grisly toll has apparently entertained many furious Israelis but done nothing to return the hostages or bring true safety or security to his nation.
First, he unleashed a horrific military campaign against Hamas in Gaza, knowing full well that the unrelenting indiscriminate violence and bombing against a guerilla army operating in a heavily populated civilian area would lead to vast civilian death and suffering.
And so it did. Recent casualty figures from Gaza based on what the two sides report suggest that Israel has killed 17,000 Hamas combatants and 23,000 civilians in Gaza. Israel has also made essentially all 2 million civilians in Gaza homeless refugees, living precariously in tents and on beaches, forced to flee from place to place by Israeli bombings anywhere it thinks it can find a Hamas fighter – in other words, anyplace in Gaza.
What Israel has not done is either free the remaining 74 Israeli hostages or wiped out Hamas as a fighting force. According to Israel's own estimates, there remain 13,000 Hamas fighters skulking around the tunnels under Gaza, ready and able to strike.
Now the bad news.
Eager to bask in the reflected, um, glory of the butchers of Hamas, long-time adversary Hezbollah, a terrorist movement that occupies and runs much of Lebanon, decided it would weigh in by unleashing its own wave of terror against Israel, supposedly in support of Hamas.
As a result of the Hezbollah assault, large portions of the North of Israel adjacent to Lebanon have been rendered uninhabitable, including significant places like Qiryat Sh'mona. Its civilian population has been forced to flee south, a situation that Israelis properly regard as intolerable.
In response, as Israel has run out of targets in Gaza, it has unleashed its forces against Hezbollah, including blowing them up with sabotaged pagers and most recently dropping buildings on their leader, Nasrallah.
This escalation has resulted in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Lebanese civilians. It has also brought the Middle East to the brink of catastrophe:
What Netanyahu hasn't succeeded in doing though is (1) neutralize the threat of Hezbollah or (2) make the North of Israel safe for Israelis.
Hezbollah has said that it is willing to suspend its campaign and allow life to return to normal in the North if and when Israel enters into a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.
That's the last thing Netanyahu wants. He has brought the cease-fire negotiations to a standstill and insured that the hostages will be left to rot and die because he knows that a cease-fire would be the end of his regime:
Israelis now increasingly think that Netanyahu has reneged on withdrawal for two reasons: his self-serving (but effective) argument that political recriminations over the Oct. 7 debacle must be put aside during the fighting; and because the far-right parties that are key to his government have threatened to bring it down should he stop the war (they want, instead, to resettle Gaza with Jews).
There are only two beneficiaries of continued war in Gaza: Hamas and Netanyahu. Since those are parties that must agree to any cease-fire, it's not looking good. And with no cease fire, the war in the North will continue and the population of Qiryat Sh'mona will be left to languish in exile.
Those far-right parties propping up Netanyahu's 64-vote coalition also want the war to go on without end to further their goal of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza (where they hope that if Israel continues to make life unbearable for the 2,000,000 remaining living Gazans, they will magically pack up and go somewhere else, although no one on Earth is prepared to take them in and they show no interest in leaving) and the West Bank, where they intend to subjugate the native Palestinian population in support of their objective of total Israeli control “from the river to the sea.”
According to the liberal Zionist group J Street:
With all eyes on the war in Gaza, the Netanyahu government is taking actions in the West Bank that abet settler violence, advance annexation, weaken the Palestinian Authority, destabilize the territory, and fuel rising Palestinian extremism and support for armed struggle. Top Israeli military brass warn of the eruption of ‘a third Intifada,’ while Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar warned Netanyahu that “terrorism” committed by extremist settlers “will lead to bloodshed and will unrecognizably change the face of the State of Israel.”
The Biden Administration imposed sanctions on two settlers, but shows no appetite for going much further the month before the election. The settler atrocities continue pretty much unchecked by the Israeli authorities:
Which leaves Netanyahu exactly where he wants to be: immune from political and legal accountability and hoping his buddy the Tangerine-Faced Felon will back him up should he sneak back into the White House.
That's great for Bibi and his hard-right extremist annexationists, but very bad for tens of thousands of dead civilians, most in Gaza, and hundreds of thousands of others, most Palestinians, whose lives have been ruined and endangered by this endless pointless effusion of blood.
It's also not great for the remaining hostages and their families, who have little reason to expect anything but the worst, and for the civilian population of the North of Israel unable to return home.
There's one more victim here that should be not be overlooked amidst all the suffering: American Judaism, at least the non-frummie non-Likud variety.
Most American Jews do not cosplay as 17th Century Rumanian merchants; instead, they are part of movements like Reform, Conservative, or just unaffiliated but in the neighborhood. One of the animating principles of those movements was Zionism, understood as building a progressive democratic Jewish state living in peace amongst its Arab neighbors.
For generations American Jews have not only supported Israel; they have organized their communities around it. The arrival of an Israeli Prime Minister on these shores was once the occasion for huge dinners to raise money for Israel Bonds and express solidarity with the struggle of the Jewish State.
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| Those were the days |
Can you imagine mainstream American Jews renting the main ballroom of the New York Hilton to fete Bibi Netanyahu on one of his visits to the United States to variously lie to the word at the UN or interfere in U.S. politics by sucking up to Republican extremists?
It doesn't happen.
That's because Zionism was not understood by our parents as bombing civilians to retain political power, terrorize West Bank residents to expand illegal Jewish settlements, or driving the indigenous Palestinian populations of Gaza and the West Bank into exile.
Or at least not until the Likud achieved unchallenged power in Israel. Bibi's policies of unbridled expansionism and perpetual war are to put it modestly unpopular with American Jews, especially younger ones:
A recent study by the Jewish Identity Project of Reboot documented that on average, young Jews (35 and under) are considerably less attached to Israel, express less caring for Israel, less engaged with Israel, less supportive of Israel and score lower on overall scale of Israel attachment than Jews older than 35. Young Jewish Millennials and Gen Z increasingly see Israel as an occupying power oppressing Palestinians — a shock to their parents and grandparents, who tend to see it as an essential haven fighting for survival.
The frummie answer is to study more Torah, although you'd have to study it pretty hard before you found the part about bombing the civilian population of Gaza into oblivion. Actually, you could find it, but if you really regard Torah as a license to kill Palestinians, what kind of Torah do you have? Not the one whose paths are peace and pleasantness. Why should anyone care about the Torah of Mass Destruction more than say the Epic of Gilgamesh?
The answer that younger (and some older) Jews have arrived at it is they shouldn't.
The alienation of American Jews from their faith is yet another casualty of the Netanyahu/Likud campaign of perpetual war, brutality, and oppression. It may not be as terrible as the death of thousands of innocents in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, but on this Rosh Hashonah we mourn it nonetheless.
