Paying Attention to That Man Behind the Iron Dome
Middle Eastern Mechanics: If it's not fixed, why not break it?
“I always found it strange that people who ordinarily are not very interested in politics suddenly become very so when it comes to Israel.” The speaker was a Swiss Jew who had relocated to Berlin and was holding forth in a cafe. Slightly smiling, the implication was clear: when it comes to Jews…“suddenly” everyone is interested. His family originally escaped from Poland and Nazis to Switzerland. His later-in-life move to Berlin was purposeful, and political. So he’s been interested his whole life.
But George H.W. Bush during a press conference when he was President had been asked about the prospects for Middle Eastern peace, and out of all of the unmemorable things he managed to do, this one was much more than memorable. He started doing this distracted, half-hearted hand waving thing that could not have underscored what he said and much more clearly implied: we’re not going to get involved with all of that craziness.
However, we are, and remain, involved.
So, yeah, no suddenly about it. Not since 1947. Or before when it was largely British Palestine. Or after, on October 6, 1973, when Arab armies attacked.
It dawns on me that even if you were to remove Israel from the equation, there would be no peace in the Middle East.
I’m in Tel Aviv in a bar on Allenby — named after the Brit that led the forces that snatched Palestine away from the Ottoman Empire — one of the main strips that wends its way to the ocean. Thin kid, 25-year-old with tattoos, gauges in his ears, skinny jeans and a jet black goth cut befitting whatever post-punk cosplay he was pursuing.
“You an American?”
“I’m from America.” I’m unsure why I answered the way I did and how I was trying to parse that, but that’s what I said.
In the U.S, I would have been 100 percent sure of his sympathies, musical and more. In a bar on Allenby, all bets were off.
“Fuck Obama.”
“You a Republican?”
“Fuck them too. In fact, fuck America. You have no idea what’s happening here and you’re always here.” He didn’t want American foreign aid. Nor American “help”. Thought Israel would be just fine without America. And this former soldier’s solution for Middle Eastern agita? “Turn it all into glass. Bomb after bomb.”
I told him he was crazy. He shook his head and snorted, making it much more than clear that while one of us was crazy, it sure as hell wasn’t him.
“And so what’s your solution?”
“So now you want an American opinion?” This ended the conversation, which was just as well as I had no solution. Moreover, after two or three more trips to Israel, I was further away from one, and not closer. But I can smell a grift.
Five elections in, underscoring his inability to form a coalition government, and Bibi Netanyahu is the dope that’s roped. Facing corruption charges and having openly supported a seemingly more supportive Trump administration — because “fuck America” — he has availed himself of the traditionally best-played card in the strongman deck. He started blowing shit up.
But when it’s Hamas shit you’re blowing up, this is low hanging fruit. Online pundits posit that Hamas might have even provided a casus belli at his behest. “Given the history of my people on this planet if I have the choice between under-reacting and overreacting I will choose overreacting,” he once purportedly said, and me coming from Brooklyn laughed because I, largely, agree.
However, from him to Putin, Trump, Bashar al-Assad, and Ali Khamenei, there’s something always a skosh distasteful about staying on the shelves well past your sell-by date. No one wants anyone there as long as most of these anyones want to be there. And now Palestinian babies are being killed which, frankly, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority (like the pre-Sinn Fein, victim-sympathy seeking IRA did before them), would be fools to not play for global sympathy. And global dollars. Doesn’t mean anyone really cares about the dead kids.
But I put this to an earlier administration Undersecretary. I mean at least I check if I think I am pursuing something crazy.
[N]ow Black Lives Matter is making common cause with Palestine ignoring the fact that traditionally Arabs do not believe they are any kind of “Black”, while hardline right wing Trumpists are blaming Biden for being “soft”…
“Is this latest Middle East kerfuffle real? Or just a Bibi distraction?”
“Real,” he says from his spot at an East Coast conservative think tank.
“So it’s not just the tail wagging the dog? What do you make for a good solution here?”
“There’s no solution,” he says. “If Israel went in, in a ground incursion, it could wipe out Hamas easy enough. But then what? Occupy Gaza while an insurgency would start? Once Israel leaves, Hamas would sprout back. The left is now claiming that there’s some diplomatic formula that Israel can adopt that will soften Hamas, but that’s also wishful thinking. So we’re stuck with this terrible stand off.”
“Forever?”
“Dunno.”
Though a friend from high school’s brother was part of the group that gave birth to Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin. They were, and are, still unrepentant, he said. Rabin was selling Israel out and got what was coming to him. I had earlier put this to the 25-year-old goth soldier.
“He was,” and he took a long drink from the beer he had been drinking. That was it.
On a side trip to Amman, Jordan, I had wanted something to drink. Orange juice. Stopped into what in New York where I am from we would have called a bodega. The guy behind the counter hears me talk, pegs me for an American, and starts to chat. I ask him how close we are to the Jordan River.
“Very close. But it’s not much of a river.”
I ask what he means.
“There’s not much water in it anymore.”
I’m confused. “What happened to the water?”
“We know what happened to the water,” he says, his eyes narrowing conspiratorially, which sets an Israeli friend of mine OFF.
“We PAID FOR THAT WATER!”
And it was ON: Israeli farmers either BOUGHT the water, or Jews STOLE it. I grabbed my juice and went out front to drink it.
It dawns on me that even if you were to remove Israel from the equation, there would be no peace in the Middle East. Bernard Lewis, at least as I’ve read him, pegs it as a crisis of modernity where the Arab Middle East is shocked to find itself no longer the central seat of great and civilized power and acts out.
Others lay the blame on Israel’s version of Ashkenazi right wing, white nationalists who will pursue a bomb-to-glass outcome as the only “reasonable” one.
And now Black Lives Matter is making common cause with Palestine ignoring the fact that traditionally Arabs do not believe they are any kind of “Black”, while hardline right wing Trumpists are blaming Biden for being “soft” causing him to approve a $735 mil weapons sale of precision-guided weapons to Israel. Weapons that will not be precise enough to manage to not kill kids when next Hamas provokes and Bibi, who has still managed to avoid a much-needed jail sentence, responds.
I finish the juice and look for a place to throw away the empty. Not a garbage can but a recycling bin.
“What are you looking for?”
“A recycling bin.”
The guy behind the counter had followed my friend to the front and here they both laugh at me, and point to the garbage can.
I reluctantly toss it in. Because, you know, recycling is really the least I can do to try to save the planet.