Israel’s military action against Hamas is now in its sixth month. While numerical measures of its consequences are in constant dispute,[1] at least 100 people remain hostages of Hamas, some of them almost certainly undeclared dead, and Israel’s response has claimed over 33,000 civilian casualties and caused untold billions in damage to homes, buildings, and infrastructure.

In the US, discussion of the conflict has settled into predictable extremes, with Jews, Israeli sympathizers, and the political right tending to defend Israel’s actions as a necessary response to the fanatical jihadism of Hamas, while a more strident leftist contingent accuses Israel of settler-colonialism and Palestinian genocide. Most of us, when confronted with these rhetorically absolutist positions, maintain a respectful silence.

But absolutism will be the death of us, and silence allows the most extreme voices to dominate (as our own domestic politics has made all too clear). Any story as tortured as that of the Middle East in general, and of Israel in particular, is the awful result of a long, multi-sided history that most non-Jews and non-Palestinians (like me, to be clear) haven’t bothered to learn, but must if we have any hope of discussing the present crisis constructively, much less contributing to its resolution.

Some argue that historical context is a distraction from the inherent evil of the jihadism represented by Hamas’ actions on October 7.[2] But evil abstracted from its historical context becomes an invulnerable ghost that will haunt us forever. An awareness of its history is, I believe, the key to defeating it, or at least corralling it sufficiently that we can aspire to a civilized life.

The pro-Palestinian sympathizers running around college campuses chanting “from the river to the sea” are the products of the current ideological fashion of dividing humanity into oppressors and oppressed and sub-sorting those categories by skin color. I can remember being mystified when a Black female colleague at the law firm where we worked in the 1980’s expressed passionate support for the Palestinian cause, until I realized that it was understandable that she’d sympathize with a people she saw as disenfranchised by a more powerful political entity that was backed largely by white western nations.

A couple of generations later, the colonialist-imperialist lens largely defines how the current college kid sees the world.[3] But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a kernel of truth to the imperialist narrative. It’s just that it goes back much, much further than the problematic Israeli settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s useful to review that long history and bear it in mind when we make moral judgments about the current awful state of affairs.[4]

Israel is, after all, the product of two world wars waged by western powers. Following the Allied defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, the League of Nations awarded Britain the mandate to govern what was then Palestine, with the intent of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” What was to happen to the non-Jews in Palestine, many of whom had supported the Allies against the Ottomans, wasn’t mentioned. Arab and Christian factions in Palestine petitioned their British governors for self-determination and territorial rights, without result.

Then, in 1929, Palestinians revolted in Jerusalem and elsewhere, killing many Jews. As Hitler came to power and Jews fled Europe, Zionists called them to Palestine, further inciting Arab opposition. When WWII erupted, the British closed Palestine to further Jewish immigration in part to curry favor with the Arab nations they wanted as allies against the Nazis, preventing ships carrying Jews fleeing the Holocaust from reaching Palestine.

After the war, Zionists in Palestine revolted against the British, who finally concluded that their time as governors of the region had to end. The new United Nations took up “the problem of Palestine,” and created a special committee to find a solution. At this point, there were about 600,000 Jews and 1.2 million Palestinians in the region. After due deliberation, the committee recommended, and under pressure from the Truman administration, the UN decided, that the region be partitioned into Jewish and Palestinian states — the original “two-state solution.” And of course, before the British could fully withdraw, civil war broke out between Jews and Palestinians on the ground, at least in part because, while Palestinians outnumbered Jews in Palestine by almost two to one, the UN plan would give over half of the land to the Jews. Beginning in 1947, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either (depending on locality and whom you believe) fled or were forcibly expelled (the “Nakba”) from the parts of Palestine that had been awarded to the Jews.

In the spring of 1948, Israel declared itself a state, and was promptly attacked by a coalition of Arab nations, led by Egypt. They were soon defeated by the Zionist forces, and in the process, not only did Israel claim more land than it had originally been allocated under the UN plan, but hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the region, setting up future conflicts over their UN-granted “right of return” and transforming the demographic of the region into a mostly Jewish population. Israel continued to force the expulsion of Palestinians, in 1950 displacing 2500 residents of a city in southern Israel into Gaza. Following the Six Day War of 1967 (which I’m old enough to remember), Gaza came under Israeli military control, and it wasn’t till Ariel Sharon’s reversal, in 2005, of Menachem Begin’s program of occupying the region with militarily defended Jewish settlements that Gaza was returned to Palestinian hands.

Any summary of such a tumultuous history is inherently prone to objections of emphasis and selection. But suffice it to say, there are no innocent actors in this saga, no clean hands, no unilateral oppressors and uniquely oppressed. In the words of the newer of the Biblical testaments, let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Yet that’s exactly what all we sinners have been doing ever since.

The events of October 7 were pure evil and not justifiable by any of this history. And yes, the Israeli response has resulted in tens of thousands of civilian casualties, which we’re asked by Israel’s sympathizers to accept as the inevitable collateral damage of any war, just or otherwise.

But is what’s happening in Gaza a “war” in any normal sense? It’s no more a war than it is the genocide claimed by Palestinian sympathizers. The word “war” suggests a clash of organized armed forces. Even the “war” in Vietnam took place in a setting where the guerrilla tactics of the Viet Cong offset the overwhelming military superiority of the US Army. No such equivalence is apparent here. It’s an overwhelming punishment, it’s a ruthless retribution (as was promised by Netanyahu), but is it a war on Hamas, or simply a single-minded destruction of the entire environment that harbors Hamas, reminiscent, again, of Vietnam, where we notoriously claimed we had to destroy villages in order to “save” them? Reminiscent also of Hiroshima, where innocents were slaughtered with overwhelming force in the pursuit of immediate, ostensibly just ends. And reminiscent, finally, of our disproportionate and misdirected response to 9/11, when we invaded Iraq and declared “mission accomplished” when the underlying sickness of terrorist jihad went unaddressed and nations were left in political and social shambles.[5]

Would not a more targeted, surgical response have been possible after October 7? Could, for just one example, militarily escorted teams of SEAL-like commando units not have been sent into hospitals in Gaza to clear out Hamas fighters instead of razing those hospitals to the ground? Or does being a Hamas “sympathizer” — as arguably most Gazans are — make you a legitimate military target?

Some see the current outcry against the Israeli response as at best hypocritical and at worst antisemitic. That there are other perpetrators of conscious, systematic killing and destruction, not to say genocide (al-Assad, the Chinese, the Russians, the Burmese), who are arguably worse but haven’t been condemned by the left as forcibly as Israel has been, is only to confirm that, yes, hypocrisy is the very air in which modern discourse transpires, but also that we tend to hold our allies to higher standards than our ideological enemies.

Unfortunately it does come down to the messy question of the strategy and tactics being employed by Israel avowedly only to crush Hamas, and not utterly destroy the home of those who have “allowed” Hamas to exist.[6] What is the endgame, and how will Israel and we know when it’s been reached? Even by the crude logic of vengeance, the price in blood for Hamas’ atrocities would seem to have already been paid several fold. And once Hamas is sufficiently “crushed” (by whatever unspecified measure), who will govern Gaza? The Palestinian Authority? Israel? There are no answers. And so the cycle repeats itself.

To the disinterested, if appalled, outside observer, the only answer to the seemingly endless agony of Israel and the Palestinians is and always was a two-state solution, to which, of course, Netanyahu and his party are inalterably opposed and always have been, and which some Palestinians view as at best impractical and at worst a chimera that keeps Israel in power over the region.[7] Chuck Schumer was right, even though he shouldn’t have said it: Netanyahu has got to go for there to be any hope of mediating the current crisis. Meanwhile, Israel continues to hemorrhage goodwill across the globe, as the recent killing of World Central Kitchen workers exemplifies.

Is the endgame a continuation of the perpetual suffering of two ancient enemies locked in a demonic embrace, or, alternatively, mutual annihilation? And if not either of those, what is it? We think we know that the jihadists’ answer is more suffering and, ultimately, annihilation. The question is whether Israel has a better one.

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[1] See D. Adesnik, “Hamas’ Casualty Numbers Games,” Wall Street Journal (April 5, 2024).

[2] See S. Harris, The Bright Line Between Good and Evil, Free Inquiry (May, 2024).

[3] There’s a huge generational divide here. 46% of Americans ages 18 to 29 say the way Israel is carrying out its response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack is unacceptable, whereas over 80% of Americans over the age of 50 describe it as acceptable. Pew Research Center Report (March 21, 2024).

[4] For a much more detailed, multi-sided discussion of this history, see “The Road to 1948,” The New York Times Magazine (February 1, 2024).

[5] I’m cautiously prepared to believe the claim that Israel is doing “better” at minimizing civilian casualties than any other major military conflict in recent history, but the sources of such data are murky, and the claim presumes that the action in Gaza should be categorized as a major military conflict, as contrasted with a rather one-sided police action.

[6] In this rather overstated sense, the majority of the US voters that voted against Trump nonetheless “allowed” him to become president, and now allow him to try again.

[7] See, e.g., T. Baconi, “The Two-State Solution is an Unjust, Impossible Fantasy,” New York Times (April 7, 2024). The title says it all, though the author presents no alternatives.