It's taken me rather a long time (as usual) to figure this out. But sometimes history doesn't seem to cooperate very well with us. Sometimes history in a given place - like, say, the Middle East - instead of moving properly forward, can seem to close round itself in a kind of loop: a loop that suggests that its God - assuming history has a god - is either sorely unimaginative, or suffering from one degree or another of incompetence, or simply one who rather desperately needs our help. And in particular our help in breaking that history out of whatever holding pattern, or pattern of unprogressive recurrence, it's somehow stupidly got itself into. But all the more so if our religion happens to be a once and final, never-to-be-replaced-or-revised monotheism, whose advanced purity and austerity are such as to make pretty much all its predecessors (e.g., Judaism, Christianity) retrograde and redundant. If not positively harmful.
So now imagine such a loop, if you can: A blatantly lesser monotheistic people (however ingeniously cunning and conniving) with a most primitive and unspiritual notion, both of God and of their own relation to God, who somehow manage to return to a place from which they'd been most disgracefully (not to mention deservedly) expelled many centuries ago. And most troubling of all - at least from the standpoint of your own rightful deserts - they somehow manage to make a go, and even a kind of success, of it. To the point where not only their own numbers, but those of your own people keep increasing as it were inexorably. And however much they may want to ensure for you the exact opposite result.
Then again, someone else might argue, what difference should it make even if they were to to do the exact reverse - to try to increase and prosper your people, as well as theirs - given that they have absolutely NO business being there in the first place?
Consider, then, what it is even to share that same sacred space - the second holiest place on earth, in fact, and so surely the sole rightful possession of the world's holiest religion? - with a manifestly unworthy nation, and faith. Think what it is to have to concede the lion's share of it to a people you don't just morally object to, but despise, loathe, perhaps even abominate. Isn't it true, that sometimes the hardest of such a people's offenses to forgive, among all the myriad inconsiderations, degradations, gross injustices they inflict, are not so much their cruelties as their kindnesses, not their failures (of course), but their successes, not their hardness and miserliness of heart so much as their bounty and generosity. Think what a triumph of self-vindication it would be, if only you could mark just the former to their credit, and not the latter! Indeed, given their larger, indeed their prior and comprehensive unworthiness - which of course can only testify to the gross insincerity and untrustworthiness of even their "worthiest" present acts - sometimes it isn't enough to "cancel," to bring into disrepute their physical presence in the sacred space. Sometimes the only thing that will relieve your humiliation - the disgrace of their continued prosperity, and your ongoing misery (even as you - or some of you - partake of and benefit from their good fortune?) - is to cancel, undo, eradicate even the memory of their physical existence in that space. Or if, for the time being, their physical annihilation eludes you, surely you can bring about a moral annihilation like no other in the history of the world? Surely, armed as you are with the right side of that history, you can enlist on your side such an overwhelming preponderance of world opinion as will make it just a matter of time before the entire globe vomits them out . . .
I can't pretend to know how far this is an accurate picture of the basic moral assumptions/quandaries of most Palestinians living in Gaza or elsewhere. But something tells me it's a pretty accurate, if broad-stroked, summary of the world-view of that infestation we call Hamas. And of those Palestinians, along with their apparently growing masses of supporters throughout the world, who have become more or less Hamasified. And as anyone, I suspect, who really knows the leadership of Hamas - whether pro or con, or from the inside or out - will tell you: It can never, ever be satisfied with even the most thorough and irrevocable extirpation of the Jewish state. Consider for a moment your fervently devout Hamas militant. As distinct from some more politically opportunistic supporter. For the true believer, Israel together with her allies, defenders, tolerators has arguably committed the great capital, and possibly unforgivable, sin against the (real) People of God. But even assuming the Jewish state's complete eradication, there remain those residual pockets of support and tolerance throughout the world to be dealt with. And even then, speaking just territorially, why stop there? Do not he and his comrades, or at any rate their closest co-religionists, have at least as good a claim to Cyprus and Crete and Greece and the greater part of the Balkans, to Sicily and Sardinia and most if not all of Spain? And those just for breakfast?
Yet even apart from questions of territory, why should your devoutly Hamas militant make Jews/Israelis the most blameworthy of his enemies? They almost can't help it: being who they are, and so far as they intend to remain Jews, they really have no choice but to fight to the death those who seek (at very least) their collective amnesia. In short, as unrepentant Jews bent on their own survival, they're all but congenitally incorrigible. But what about the rest of us, who sympathize with, or aren't wholly convinced of the blasphemous absurdity of Israel's right to exist? Don't at least we have free will? And doesn't that make us at least criminally complicit with, and so even more culpable and deplorable than, Jews themselves?
That is why I find myself more and more convinced that, whether we know it (yet) or not, under the self-appointedly "divine" judgment of Hamas we are all Jews nowadays. And above all those of us who have no intention of becoming even remotely Hamasified. In effect we are either with them or against them: either we are Jews in effect, or else we are those who, whether purposefully or not, have become complicit in the desire for (at very minimum) Jewish collective amnesia. Or other collective suicide. As indeed I frankly wonder if I haven't myself been complicit (and, yes, to my inestimable shame), because of my delayed response to October 7.
But now recall what I hinted at earlier, regarding both Jerusalem and Israel as a whole. As some might argue, surely it's only right that the holiest place on earth (or even the second holiest?) should be the exclusive possession of the holiest and most progressive monotheistic religion. In short, by rights it both belongs to and should be mainly inhabited by Sunni Muslims.* Yet within such a tight, uncompromising moral framework, it is hard to see how there could ever be room, much less legitimacy, for any Israel, any Jewish state, or even province or reservation or autonomous region, no matter how small or "humbled," compliant or acquiescent. And once again, why stop there - assuming the tables have been sufficiently and irreversibly turned? After all, now you're on a roll, and feeling more than ever unstoppable. "We have them on the run," as I believe one Hamas militant put it some years ago. And let no one underestimate the sheer momentum of outraged world opinion.
*I suspect Iran even in its Machiavellian stupidity will learn that soon enough.
Given, then, that iron framework of moral assumptions, along with its accompanying momentum, the real question as I see it becomes very simple. Even with respect to a "repentant," restitution-offering Israel: once you, her sworn enemy, are possessed of that degree of moral certitude and contempt, of that sense of almost cosmic injustice and outrage, may I suggest, it is no longer a matter of what vengeance, what sadism, what otherwise diabolic cruelty and atrocity you become (rightly) capable of. And against those who are, after all, Allah's own personal enemies. The question rather is what vengeance, etc, do you believe you're not entitled to?
