Israelis are exposed to the complex layers of the Gaza war. In parallel, Jews in the West are being fed a constant diet of shallow information, partial information, and straight-out misinformation. Will this gap — let’s call it CNN disorientation syndrome — drive a wedge between the diaspora and Israeli Jews?
We had the privilege of getting a portion of our family together for Purim and a week earlier for the brit of our grandson. Talking to family, we see complexity. We see nuance.
My son-in-law (who was in the army for Purim, and is about to complete five consecutive months on the Northern border as an officer in a tank brigade), my nephew — a father of six young children — who had been hoping to get back to his hardware developer job but was called up for an additional 45 days starting Sunday after having just finished a 45-day stint a week earlier, and another nephew who is interrupting the last year of his medical residency to serve in the South all have a good grasp of what we are facing. They understand nuance.
What do you know about nuance?
A good friend of Israel, Senator Chuck Schumer, repeatedly asserts that “the only real and sustainable solution to this decades-old conflict is a negotiated two-state solution.” In the view of almost the entire spectrum of Israeli society, this shows a profound lack of nuance.
What do you know about the Palestinian end game?
After October 7th, we understand with total clarity that the Palestinian national dream is destruction, not construction.
The rapes, the beheadings, the mutilations, the abduction of children and old people, and the murder of captives in Gaza are not an aberration. They are the direct outgrowth of a belief system that has deep roots in the Islamic worldview, in a profound sense of Arab humiliation in its failed encounter with modernity and even more of Palestinian humiliation in more than a century of conflict with the most oppressed of all people.
Today we went to the shiva for Uriel Baruch — a hostage who was taken alive from the Supernova festival on October 7. The IDF found video footage in Shifa Hospital of his execution in captivity. To our Western minds, it makes no sense to execute a 35-year-old father of two who loved techno music rather than keep him alive as a bargaining chip. The Palestinians have a very different calculus.
How did we get here?
The Palestinian national project of destruction has been reinforced by 76 years of UNWRA and other organizations. Since 1948, they have subsidized indoctrination while freeing the Palestinian leadership and society from all normal human obligations to be productive and self-supporting.
It is UNWRA and other organizations that absolved Hamas from the responsibility to provide employment, education, healthcare, sewage treatment, and all the different needs of their population. Israel also bears some blame here. The government and the people of Israel provided Gaza with water, electricity, work opportunities, medical care in Israel, and more — assuming that the Gazans wanted a good life. We were wrong.
Where do we go next?
Imagine trying to rehabilitate a pyromaniac by giving them a supply of explosives. That’s precisely what calling for a Palestinian state is. The expectation that they will build a thriving society alongside Israel has absolutely no basis in reality.
Instead of pursuing an illusion that is likely to create more suffering for Israelis and Palestinians, a better idea might be to pursue “a less bad solution.” Searching for utopia led to the Jonestown disaster, millions of deaths in the Cultural Revolution, and a million or more ‘kulak’ families sent to forced labor camps by Stalin.
The next time that you hear a two-state solution touted as the solution to all of the problems of the Middle East, please pause. Take a drink of water. Get clear-headed and get away from CNN disorientation sydndrome.
