Israel will prevail not because of its might, but because it is right

Rockets over Tel Aviv, Kristallnacht in Lod, and the why Zionism matters more than ever

Have you been in a bomb shelter, or only read about them? Have you seen a rocket streak across the night sky, almost beautiful if it didn’t mean to kill?

In a world that is increasingly digital, it is sometimes startling to remember the wreck that metal and fire can inflict on bodies and concrete. Whatever ping pops up on a phone, it won’t rip you apart like a rocket if you hear the alarm too late.

The Middle East is once again burning.

Once again, Israel’s critics got the story wrong, motivated more by animus than analysis. The past days have seen the staging of a tragedy in three acts. Just as Shakespearean tragedy lays bare the bones of the human condition, so too have these events offered a lesson in the reality of the Palestinian cause.     

Act I. First came protests over the proposed eviction of Palestinians from the Old City neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah over more than four decades of unpaid rent, accompanied by jingoistic rhetoric from Jerusalem officials appealing to the Jewish character of the city. In Jerusalem, real estate is also history and destiny, memories of expulsion and presence layered on top of one another like poorly peeling paint. Riots and protests ensued, despite legal analysis that showed “the ethnicity of the owners is not legally relevant to the dispute, and does not serve as the basis of any legal rights in this case. The historical ownership is relevant only because it is part of the chain of title leading to the current owners’ title. What has been litigated is the current rights of current property owners.”

The legal outcome of the case seemed less compelling than the moral accounting that always has Israel deep in the red. The power of narrative is mighty: unfalsifiable, it tells you the story you always want to hear. It spares you the trouble of stubbing your ideological toe on inconvenient facts. Those who see the claw of colonialism in every Israeli action made Sheikh Jarrah into a hashtag, and Palestinian rioting turned it into something like a war zone.

Those American Jews whose support of Israel is a anguished and tender thing found another reason to gnash their teeth and worry about the Jewish soul, and the fate of Zionism, and the justness of it all. They grafted a morality play onto a tragedy, and weirdly sounded as if they were the victims, burdened with impossible moral choice. Twitter angst is the new catharsis.

Act II. Next came the riots on Al Aqsa, the Temple Mount. Images of Israeli police and soldiers trying to maintain order in the midst of rapidly deteriorating violence were yet another instance of Zionist oppression, this time with a religious charge. Soldiers storming a mosque, a Palestinian firecracker setting a tree ablaze on the Temple Mount, Israelis dancing in celebration of Jerusalem Day below: it all felt like footage from a movie about the end times.

The reality was much uglier. This was a full scale riot in one of the most sacred places on Earth. It was a match light in an ocean of oil. And yet, the narrative, so relentless and so sure of itself, gained steam: on this holiest night on the Muslim calendar, how dare Israel attempt to contain the situation? Who even remembers the second intifada, anyway?

Odes to peaceful protest omitted clear acts of violence and attempts to squeeze the Palestinian protests into an American frame keep getting frustrated by repeated declarations of holy war against the entire Jewish State and promises that blood will run in the streets of Jerusalem. Something here was snapping into focus, but it wasn’t Israel’s perfidy. It was the reality of the potential for mass Palestinian violence against Israel, something like another intifada merged with the worst of the last two Gaza wars: a hybrid of street and sky level carnage.

Act III. Now comes the inevitable third act: full scale rocket attacks from Gaza, clockwork-like escalation. Dozens of Palestinians and an escalating number ofIsraelis have already been killed, and the missile assisted demolition of an entire school in Ashdod suggests that even greater carnage might be imminent: it was empty this time, after all. Israel has killed a bevy of top level Hamas commanders, prompting promises of even more rockets. Hundreds have been launched at Israel’s major civilian populations, and its only international airport has been targeted. Abba Eban’s old chestnut is in need of an update: it is not that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity: it is that Hamas never misses an opportunity to exploit an opportunity.

What of the distinction between Hamas and everyone else, the difference between Sheikh Jarrah and Gaza? Increasingly, it is harder to see. Last week, the Palestinian Authority cancelled elections once again: election day and groundhog day improbably keep calendrical company. The smart money suggests that this was in order to forestall a Hamas electoral triumph, which would have united Gaza and the West Bank under the green flag of the genocidal terror organization. This interpretation seems plausible in light of mass chanting “We are all Hamas” on the Temple Mount. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.  Two days ago, a senior Hamas official urged Palestinians to “Buy a knife, sharpen it, put it there, and just cut off their heads (of the Jews). It costs just five shekels.” Simple enough.

Rather than the ‘good’ Palestinian rioting in Jerusalem that liberal Zionists support and the ‘bad’ barrage of rocket fire from Gaza that they don’t, perhaps the events of the last few days should be seen as a long simmering two front war on the Israeli State. The fact that Gaza is free of Jews and Sheikh Jarrah erupted because of the presence of Jews shows that tails it’s intifada, heads it’s war. The targeting of Jerusalem, Ashdod, and Ashkelon suggests that the distinction between 1948 and 1967 is one that primarily exists in the heads of those Israeli and American Jews who believe that Green Lines exist anywhere except in their rosy imaginations.

Perhaps the most terrifying indication of this new reality has been rioting between Jews and Arabs that has broken out across the country, especially in ‘mixed’ cities that have long served as wary models for a kind of co-existence. In Lod, Israeli Arabs burnt a synagogue, and one resident told an Israeli news channel, “gangs of Arab youths are going street to street, burning stores, smashing windows… Jewish families are huddled at home, terrified of going out… Their cars are being set alight outside… Police are nowhere to be seen.”

If you don’t hear echoes of Poland, you’re not listening hard enough. As the city’s mayor lamented: “This is Kristallnacht in Lod.”

Israel is a state not a saint, and as such it has its share of warts, both fresh and old. The rise of an ugly and barbed ultranationalism does not do credit to either its Jewish character or the humanist glories of its Zionist DNA. Its broken political system and Sisyphean efforts to move beyond Benjamin Netanyahu’s long reign hobble its ability to act decisively and with vision. The recent horror of a deadly stampede at Mt. Meron shakes confidence in the government’s competence. Reasonable minds can ask whether evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, regardless of their constitutionality, serve the broader aims of a thriving Israel. It has become clear that justifiable elation over the Abraham Accords is not shared closer to home. Photo ops in the Emirates cannot make Israelis safe from neighbors bent on driving them into the sea.

Nevertheless, the events of Sheikh Jarrah and its still unfolding aftermath should clarify that Israel has no partner for peace. The recourse to rioting, violence, and war suggest an inchoate Palestinian polity that possesses all the worst quality of a revolutionary regime with none of its virtues. Hamas and its tactics enjoy widespread support, and maximalist territorialist claims are the rule, not the exception. The violence in Jerusalem is a trailer for what a Palestinian controlled territory would look like on the West Bank. But in truth you’ve already seen it, in Gaza.

As Daniel Gordis writes, the reason why the fire this time is different than so many conflagrations and holocausts in Jewish history is simple: the Israeli Defense Forces, woven into the fabric of a thriving state of people with nowhere else to go, and nowhere else they’d rather be.

The next days and weeks will likely be awful, but Israel will prevail. This is not only because of its might, but because it is in the right. Within this larger tragedy, there are a million nested ones, Israeli and Palestinian. But to write a happy ending, the war on Israel must end.

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