Peter Beinart
Peter Beinart é um jornalista e comentarista que escreve frequentemente sobre a política externa americana.
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| Créditos: Said Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
Em 1988, bombas explodiram em restaurantes, eventos desportivos e galerias na África do Sul. Em resposta, o Congresso Nacional Africano, então no seu 77º ano de luta para derrubar a dominação branca, fez algo notável: aceitou a responsabilidade e comprometeu-se a impedir que os seus combatentes conduzissem tais operações no futuro. A sua lógica era simples: visar civis é errado. "Nossa moralidade como revolucionários", declarou o ANC, "dita que respeitemos os valores que sustentam a conduta humana da guerra".
Historicamente, geográfica e moralmente, o ANC de 1988 está a um universo de distância do Hamas de 2023, tão remoto que o seu comportamento pode parecer irrelevante face ao horror que o Hamas desencadeou no fim-de-semana passado no sul de Israel. Mas a África do Sul oferece uma contra-história, um vislumbre de como funciona a resistência ética e de como pode ter sucesso. Não oferece um manual de instruções, mas um lugar - nesta época de agonia e raiva - para procurar esperança.
Não havia nada de inevitável na política do ANC, que, como documentou Jeff Goodwin, sociólogo da Universidade de Nova Iorque, ajudou a garantir que houvesse "tão pouco terrorismo na luta anti-apartheid". Então, por que o ANC levar a cabo o tipo de massacres horríveis pelos quais o Hamas se tornou famoso? Não há uma resposta simples. Mas dois fatores são claros. Em primeiro lugar, a estratégia do ANC para combater o apartheid estava intimamente ligada à sua visão do que deveria seguir-se ao apartheid. Recusou-se a aterrorizar e traumatizar os sul-africanos brancos porque não estava tentando forçá-los a sair. Estava tentando conquistá-los para uma visão de uma democracia multirracial.
Em segundo lugar, o ANC achou mais fácil manter a disciplina moral — o que exigia que se concentrasse na resistência popular e não violenta e usasse a força apenas contra instalações militares e locais industriais — porque a sua estratégia estava mostrando sinais de sucesso. Em 1988, quando o ANC expressou pesar pela morte de civis, mais de 150 universidades americanas tinham, pelo menos parcialmente, desinvestido em empresas que faziam negócios na África do Sul e o Congresso dos Estados Unidos impôs sanções ao regime do apartheid. O resultado foi um ciclo virtuoso: a resistência ética suscitou apoio internacional e o apoio internacional tornou a resistência ética mais fácil de sustentar.
Historicamente, geográfica e moralmente, o ANC de 1988 está a um universo de distância do Hamas de 2023, tão remoto que o seu comportamento pode parecer irrelevante face ao horror que o Hamas desencadeou no fim-de-semana passado no sul de Israel. Mas a África do Sul oferece uma contra-história, um vislumbre de como funciona a resistência ética e de como pode ter sucesso. Não oferece um manual de instruções, mas um lugar - nesta época de agonia e raiva - para procurar esperança.
Não havia nada de inevitável na política do ANC, que, como documentou Jeff Goodwin, sociólogo da Universidade de Nova Iorque, ajudou a garantir que houvesse "tão pouco terrorismo na luta anti-apartheid". Então, por que o ANC levar a cabo o tipo de massacres horríveis pelos quais o Hamas se tornou famoso? Não há uma resposta simples. Mas dois fatores são claros. Em primeiro lugar, a estratégia do ANC para combater o apartheid estava intimamente ligada à sua visão do que deveria seguir-se ao apartheid. Recusou-se a aterrorizar e traumatizar os sul-africanos brancos porque não estava tentando forçá-los a sair. Estava tentando conquistá-los para uma visão de uma democracia multirracial.
Em segundo lugar, o ANC achou mais fácil manter a disciplina moral — o que exigia que se concentrasse na resistência popular e não violenta e usasse a força apenas contra instalações militares e locais industriais — porque a sua estratégia estava mostrando sinais de sucesso. Em 1988, quando o ANC expressou pesar pela morte de civis, mais de 150 universidades americanas tinham, pelo menos parcialmente, desinvestido em empresas que faziam negócios na África do Sul e o Congresso dos Estados Unidos impôs sanções ao regime do apartheid. O resultado foi um ciclo virtuoso: a resistência ética suscitou apoio internacional e o apoio internacional tornou a resistência ética mais fácil de sustentar.
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| Na África do Sul, os manifestantes que se opunham à política de apartheid foram confrontados por agentes da polícia em 1960. Créditos: Fotos de Ian Berry/Magnum |
Hoje em Israel, a dinâmica é quase exatamente oposta. O Hamas, cuja ideologia autoritária e teocrática não poderia estar mais distante da do ANC, cometeu um horror indescritível que poderá prejudicar a causa palestina nas próximas décadas. No entanto, quando os palestinos resistem à sua opressão de forma ética - apelando a boicotes, sanções e à aplicação do direito internacional - os Estados Unidos e os seus aliados trabalham para garantir que esses esforços fracassam, o que convence muitos palestinos de que a resistência ética não funciona, o que capacita o Hamas.
A selvageria cometida pelo Hamas em 7 de outubro tornou muito mais difícil reverter este ciclo monstruoso. Poderia levar uma geração. Exigirá um compromisso partilhado para acabar com a opressão palestina de formas que respeitem o valor infinito de cada vida humana. Exigirá que os palestinos se oponham à força aos ataques contra civis judeus, e que os judeus apoiem os palestinos quando estes resistem à opressão de forma humana - embora os palestinos e os judeus que tomarem tais medidas corram o risco de se tornarem párias entre o seu próprio povo. Exigirá novas formas de comunidade política, em Israel-Palestina e em todo o mundo, construídas em torno de uma visão democrática suficientemente poderosa para transcender as divisões tribais. O esforço pode falhar. Já falhou antes. A alternativa é descer, com bandeiras agitadas, para o inferno.
Enquanto os judeus israelenses enterram os seus mortos e recitam salmos pelos seus capturados, poucos querem ouvir neste momento que milhões de palestinos carecem de direitos humanos básicos. Nem muitos judeus no exterior. Eu entendo; este ataque despertou os traumas mais profundos do nosso povo gravemente ferido. Mas a verdade permanece: a negação da liberdade palestina está no cerne deste conflito, que começou muito antes da criação do Hamas no final da década de 1980.
A selvageria cometida pelo Hamas em 7 de outubro tornou muito mais difícil reverter este ciclo monstruoso. Poderia levar uma geração. Exigirá um compromisso partilhado para acabar com a opressão palestina de formas que respeitem o valor infinito de cada vida humana. Exigirá que os palestinos se oponham à força aos ataques contra civis judeus, e que os judeus apoiem os palestinos quando estes resistem à opressão de forma humana - embora os palestinos e os judeus que tomarem tais medidas corram o risco de se tornarem párias entre o seu próprio povo. Exigirá novas formas de comunidade política, em Israel-Palestina e em todo o mundo, construídas em torno de uma visão democrática suficientemente poderosa para transcender as divisões tribais. O esforço pode falhar. Já falhou antes. A alternativa é descer, com bandeiras agitadas, para o inferno.
Enquanto os judeus israelenses enterram os seus mortos e recitam salmos pelos seus capturados, poucos querem ouvir neste momento que milhões de palestinos carecem de direitos humanos básicos. Nem muitos judeus no exterior. Eu entendo; este ataque despertou os traumas mais profundos do nosso povo gravemente ferido. Mas a verdade permanece: a negação da liberdade palestina está no cerne deste conflito, que começou muito antes da criação do Hamas no final da década de 1980.
A maioria dos residentes de Gaza não é de Gaza. Eles são descendentes de refugiados que foram expulsos, ou fugiram com medo, durante a guerra de independência de Israel em 1948. Eles vivem no que a Human Rights Watch chamou de “prisão ao ar livre”, encurralada por um Estado israelense que - com ajuda do Egito - raciona tudo o que entra e sai, desde tomates até os documentos de viagem de que as crianças precisam para obter cuidados médicos vitais. Desta jaula superlotada, que as Nações Unidas em 2017 declararam “inabitável” para muitos residentes, em parte porque lhe falta eletricidade e água potável, muitos palestinos em Gaza podem ver a terra que os seus pais e avós chamavam de lar, embora a maioria talvez nunca coloque os pés nele.
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Após a Conferência de Paz de Madrid de 1991, os palestinos na Cisjordânia manifestaram-se pela paz com ramos de oliveira perto dos guardas de fronteira israelenses. Créditos: A. Abbas/Magnum Photos |
Os palestinos na Cisjordânia estão apenas ligeiramente melhor. Durante mais de meio século, viveram sem o devido processo legal, a livre circulação, a cidadania ou a capacidade de votar no governo que controla as suas vidas. Indefesos contra um governo israelense que inclui ministros abertamente empenhados na limpeza étnica, muitos estão sendo expulsos das suas casas, em uma situação que os palestinos comparam às expulsões em massa de 1948. Os americanos e os judeus israelenses podem dar-se ao luxo de ignorar estas duras realidades. Os palestinos não. Na verdade, o comandante da ala militar do Hamas citou ataques aos palestinos na Cisjordânia para justificar a sua barbárie no fim de semana passado.
Tal como os sul-africanos negros resistiram ao apartheid, os palestinos resistem a um sistema que ganhou a mesma designação das principais organizações de direitos humanos do mundo e da própria Israel. Depois do fim de semana passado, alguns críticos podem alegar que os palestinos são incapazes de resistir de forma ética. Mas isso não é verdade. Em 1936, durante o mandato britânico, os palestinos iniciaram o que alguns consideram a mais longa greve geral anticolonial da história. Em 1976, naquele que ficou conhecido como Dia da Terra, milhares de cidadãos palestinos manifestaram-se contra a apreensão de propriedades palestinas pelo governo israelense no norte de Israel. A primeira intifada contra a ocupação israelense da Cisjordânia e da Faixa de Gaza, que durou aproximadamente de 1987 a 1993, consistiu principalmente em boicotes não violentos de produtos israelenses e na recusa de pagar impostos israelenses. Embora alguns palestinos tenham atirado pedras e cocktails molotov, os ataques armados eram raros, mesmo face à repressão israelense que custou a vida a mais de 1.000 palestinos. Em 2005, 173 organizações da sociedade civil palestina pediram a "pessoas de consciência em todo o mundo que impusessem amplos boicotes e implementassem iniciativas de desinvestimento contra Israel semelhantes às aplicadas à África do Sul na era do apartheid".
Mas nos Estados Unidos, os palestinos receberam pouco crédito por tentarem seguir o caminho largamente não violento dos sul-africanos negros. Em vez disso, o apelo do movimento Boicote, Desinvestimento e Sanções à plena igualdade, incluindo o direito dos refugiados palestinos a regressar a casa, foi amplamente considerado anti-semita porque entra em conflito com a ideia de um Estado que favorece os judeus.
It is true that these nonviolent efforts sit uncomfortably alongside an ugly history of civilian massacres: the murder of 67 Jews in Hebron in 1929 by local Palestinians after Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, claimed Jews were about to seize Al Aqsa Mosque; the airplane hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s carried out primarily by the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Yasir Arafat’s nationalist Fatah faction; the 1972 assassination of Israeli athletes in Munich carried out by the Palestinian organization Black September; and the suicide bombings of the 1990s and 2000s conducted by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, whose victims included a friend of mine in rabbinical school who I dreamed might one day officiate my wedding.
And yet it is essential to remember that some Palestinians courageously condemned this inhuman violence. In 1979, Edward Said, the famed literary critic, declared himself “horrified at the hijacking of planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels.” Rashid Khalidi, a Palestinian American historian, called the suicide bombings of the second intifada “a war crime.” After Hamas’s attack last weekend, a member of the Israeli parliament, Ayman Odeh, among the most prominent leaders of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, declared, “It is absolutely forbidden to accept any attacks on the innocent.”
Tragically, this vision of ethical resistance is being repudiated by some pro-Palestinian activists in the United States. In a statement last week, National Students for Justice in Palestine, which is affiliated with more than 250 Palestinian solidarity groups in North America, called Hamas’s attack “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance” that proves that “total return and liberation to Palestine is near” and added, “from Rhodesia to South Africa to Algeria, no settler colony can hold out forever.” One of its posters featured a paraglider that some Hamas fighters used to enter Israel.
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| Uma casa é destruída em Hebron, na Cisjordânia ocupada por Israel, em 28 de dezembro de 2021. Créditos: Mussa Issa Qawasma/Reuters |
The reference to Algeria reveals the delusion underlying this celebration of abduction and murder. After eight years of hideous war, Algeria’s settlers returned to France. But there will be no Algerian solution in Israel-Palestine. Israel is too militarily powerful to be conquered. More fundamentally, Israeli Jews have no home country to which to return. They are already home.
Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.
Mr. Said understood this. “The Israeli Jew is there in the Middle East,” he advised Palestinians in 1974, “and we cannot, I might even say that we must not, pretend that he will not be there tomorrow, after the struggle is over.” The Jewish “attachment to the land,” he added, “is something we must face.” Because Mr. Said saw Israeli Jews as something other than mere colonizers, he understood the futility — as well as the immorality — of trying to terrorize them into flight.
The failure of Hamas and its American defenders to recognize that will make it much harder for Jews and Palestinians to resist together in ethical ways. Before last Saturday, it was possible, with some imagination, to envision a joint Palestinian-Jewish struggle for the mutual liberation of both peoples. There were glimmers in the protest movement against Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul, through which more and more Israeli Jews grasped a connection between the denial of rights to Palestinians and the assault on their own. And there were signs in the United States, where almost 40 percent of American Jews under the age of 40 told the Jewish Electoral Institute in 2021 that they considered Israel an apartheid state. More Jews in the United States, and even Israel, were beginning to see Palestinian liberation as a form of Jewish liberation as well.
That potential alliance has now been gravely damaged. There are many Jews willing to join Palestinians in a movement to end apartheid, even if doing so alienates us from our communities, and in some cases, our families. But we will not lock arms with people who cheer the kidnapping or murder of a Jewish child.
The struggle to persuade Palestinian activists to repudiate Hamas’s crimes, affirm a vision of mutual coexistence and continue the spirit of Mr. Said and the A.N.C. will be waged inside the Palestinian camp. The role of non-Palestinians is different: to help create the conditions that allow ethical resistance to succeed.
Palestinians are not fundamentally different from other people facing oppression: When moral resistance doesn’t work, they try something else. In 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which was modeled on the civil rights movement in the United States, organized a march to oppose imprisonment without trial. Although some organizations, most notably the Provisional Irish Republican Army, had already embraced armed resistance, they grew stronger after British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians in what became known as Bloody Sunday. By the early 1980s, the Irish Republican Army had even detonated a bomb outside Harrods, the department store in London. As Kirssa Cline Ryckman, a political scientist, observed in a 2019 paper on why certain movements turn violent, a lack of progress in peaceful protest “can encourage the use of violence by convincing demonstrators that nonviolence will fail to achieve meaningful concessions.”
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| O funeral em Jerusalém, em 9 de outubro, do coronel Roi Levy, 44, assassinado por militantes combatentes do Hamas em Israel. |
Israel, with America’s help, has done exactly that. It has repeatedly undermined Palestinians who sought to end Israel’s occupation through negotiations or nonviolent pressure. As part of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestine Liberation Organization renounced violence and began working with Israel — albeit imperfectly — to prevent attacks on Israelis, something that revolutionary groups like the A.N.C. and the Irish Republican Army never did while their people remained under oppression. At first, as Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political scientist, has detailed, Palestinians supported cooperation with Israel because they thought it would deliver them a state. In early 1996, Palestinian support for the Oslo process reached 80 percent while support for violence against Israelis dropped to 20 percent.
The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.
After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”
As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.
Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
The 1996 election of Benjamin Netanyahu, and the failure of Israel and its American patron to stop settlement growth, however, curdled Palestinian sentiment. Many Jewish Israelis believe that Ehud Barak, who succeeded Mr. Netanyahu, offered Palestinians a generous deal in 2000. Most Palestinians, however, saw Mr. Barak’s offer as falling far short of a fully sovereign state along the 1967 lines. And their disillusionment with a peace process that allowed Israel to entrench its hold over the territory on which they hoped to build their new country ushered in the violence of the second intifada. In Mr. Shikaki’s words, “The loss of confidence in the ability of the peace process to deliver a permanent agreement on acceptable terms had a dramatic impact on the level of Palestinian support for violence against Israelis.” As Palestinians abandoned hope, Hamas gained power.
After the brutal years of the second intifada, in which Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups repeatedly targeted Israeli civilians, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority and Salam Fayyad, his prime minister from 2007 to 2013, worked to restore security cooperation and prevent anti-Israeli violence once again. Yet again, the strategy failed. The same Israeli leaders who applauded Mr. Fayyad undermined him in back rooms by funding the settlement growth that convinced Palestinians that security cooperation was bringing them only deepening occupation. Mr. Fayyad, in an interview with The Times’s Roger Cohen before he left office in 2013, admitted that because the “occupation regime is more entrenched,” Palestinians “question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened.”
As Palestinians lost faith that cooperation with Israel could end the occupation, many appealed to the world to hold Israel accountable for its violation of their rights. In response, both Democratic and Republican presidents have worked diligently to ensure that these nonviolent efforts fail. Since 1997, the United States has vetoed more than a dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel for its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. This February, even as Israel’s far-right government was beginning a huge settlement expansion, the Biden administration reportedly wielded a veto threat to drastically dilute a Security Council resolution that would have condemned settlement growth.
Washington’s response to the International Criminal Court’s efforts to investigate potential Israeli war crimes is equally hostile. Despite lifting sanctions that the Trump administration imposed on I.C.C. officials investigating the United States’s conduct in Afghanistan, the Biden team remains adamantly opposed to any I.C.C. investigation into Israel’s actions.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or B.D.S., which was founded in 2005 as a nonviolent alternative to the murderous second intifada and which speaks in the language of human rights and international law, has been similarly stymied, including by many of the same American politicians who celebrated the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction South Africa. Joe Biden, who is proud of his role in passing sanctions against South Africa, has condemned the B.D.S. movement, saying it “too often veers into antisemitism.” About 35 states — some of which once divested state funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa — have passed laws or issued executive orders punishing companies that boycott Israel. In many cases, those punishments apply even to businesses that boycott only Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
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| Uma visão de Gaza em meio a apagões generalizados, 11 de outubro. Crédito... Mohammed Salem/Reuters |
Palestinians have noticed. In the words of Dana El Kurd, a Palestinian American political scientist, “Palestinians have lost faith in the efficacy of nonviolent protest as well as the possible role of the international community.” Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, cited this disillusionment during last Saturday’s attack. “In light of the orgy of occupation and its denial of international laws and resolutions, and in light of American and Western support and international silence,” he declared, “we’ve decided to put an end to all this.”
Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.
Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.
From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.
Hamas — and no one else — bears the blame for its sadistic violence. But it can carry out such violence more easily, and with less backlash from ordinary Palestinians, because even many Palestinians who loathe the organization have lost hope that moral strategies can succeed. By treating Israel radically differently from how the United States treated South Africa in the 1980s, American politicians have made it harder for Palestinians to follow the A.N.C.’s ethical path. The Americans who claim to hate Hamas the most have empowered it again and again.
Israelis have just witnessed the greatest one-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. For Palestinians, especially in Gaza, where Israel has now ordered more than one million people in the north to leave their homes, the days to come are likely to bring dislocation and death on a scale that should haunt the conscience of the world. Never in my lifetime have the prospects for justice and peace looked more remote. Yet the work of moral rebuilding must begin. In Israel-Palestine and around the world, pockets of Palestinians and Jews, aided by people of conscience of all backgrounds, must slowly construct networks of trust based on the simple principle that the lives of both Palestinians and Jews are precious and inextricably intertwined.
Israel desperately needs a genuinely Jewish and Palestinian political party, not because it can win power but because it can model a politics based on common liberal democratic values, not tribe. American Jews who rightly hate Hamas but know, in their bones, that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is profoundly wrong must ask themselves a painful question: What nonviolent forms of Palestinian resistance to oppression will I support? More Palestinians and their supporters must express revulsion at the murder of innocent Israeli Jews and affirm that Palestinian liberation means living equally alongside them in safety and freedom.
From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. And perhaps one day, when it finally becomes hideously clear that Hamas cannot free Palestinians by murdering children and Israel cannot subdue Gaza, even by razing it to the ground, those communities may become the germ of a mass movement for freedom that astonishes the world, as Black and white South Africans did decades ago. I’m confident I won’t live to see it. No gambler would stake a bet on it happening at all. But what’s the alternative, for those of us whose lives and histories are bound up with that small, ghastly, sacred place?
Like many others who care about the lives of both Palestinians and Jews, I have felt in recent days the greatest despair I have ever known. On Wednesday, a Palestinian friend sent me a note of consolation. She ended it with the words “only together.” Maybe that can be our motto.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) é professor de jornalismo e ciência política na Newmark School of Journalism da City University of New York. Ele também é editor geral do Jewish Currents e escreve The Beinart Notebook, um boletim informativo semanal.
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