366 — What Would Homo Amor Do in Response to Hamas? Moral Complexity Is a Sign of Homo Amor, Moral Equivalence Is the Failure of Homo Amor
Distinguish the structures of consciousness represented by different societies, across time and space
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 8, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
Summary: In order to even begin a conversation about Israel and Gaza today, we need to be able
to hold certainty and uncertainty, clarity and confusion — at the same time;
to fully reclaim from the attention economy our capacity for attention, and place our heart (which is our attention) on this story follow its plotlines and threads, with all its facts and in all its complexities (for example, how the possibility of a Palestinian state was rejected by Arabs five times over the course of the last hundred years).
to make clear moral distinctions (rather than taking the lazy way of moral equivalence), yet always remembering the voice of Abraham demanding justice for the few innocent civilians of Sodom and Gomorrah.
to distinguish the structures of consciousness represented by different societies, across time and space — the core messages of the stories they are telling,
to know a society not by it exceptional or aberrant moments, but by who are their heroes and anti-heroes,
and, ultimately, to hold the horror and impossibility faced by Israel, and not to pretend that there are simple solutions.
This is what this episode invites you to do, but its ultimate invitation is to really place your attention, to read — not short viral posts on social media, but serious, credible sources.
Certainties amidst uncertainty
We have to talk about Israel today, and we can’t wait because this is our responsibility at this moment.
We have to talk about Gaza now.
We have to talk about human beings.
We have to talk about what it means to be Homo Amor with our hearts ripped apart.
I am going to be disorganized today; we have to be disorganized.
I am going to hold enormous confusion today, because we need to be confused.
And I want to be completely clear today, because we need to be clear. We need to have clarity.
There is clarity in the confusion, so we need some radical certainties here. There are radical certainties at play — and we need to hold uncertainty.
We need to lead from our certainties, and we need to lead from our uncertainties.
Some 30 years ago, I wrote a book, a two-volume set. The first volume is called Certainty, and the second volume is called Uncertainty. We used to think that trust, or faith, or religion (which comes from religare ‘to connect the dots’) meant complete certainty — and religion, in its sacred forms, actually takes us into a world where there are certain core certainties. But they are not dogmatic certainties.
They are certainties that I am true.
They are certainties that the world is not just matter, it’s not merely a materialist field — but the world is what matters. It is a moral universe. One of the core understandings we have in CosmoErotic Humanism is that matter and what matters are not split. What matters — the moral universe, the world of ethos — doesn’t begin at the level of the human being.
The world of ethos lives already in the world of matter.
As we enter today, we have to enter from that place of radical certainty — but we also have to hold radical uncertainty.
Radical uncertainty: we don’t know. We have to live in what the Christian mystics called the cloud of Unknowing.
We need to distinguish between waking up and growing up
Sam Harris, a decade ago, courageously took on the confusion of some of culture, which basically said something like all religions are the same. That’s not true, all religions are not the same. Only someone who has never practiced in a tradition would say that.
All religions are not the same, they are fundamentally different.
Judaism and Christianity each have dimensions which need to be repudiated. There are voices that need to be taken on and repudiated.
For example, in the Hebrew wisdom tradition, there are voices that talk about entering Canaan and killing everyone in Canaan, which is what happened in the ancient world. Now, whatever that story was, immediately, the readers of those texts, called the Talmud, hundreds of years before Jesus, said: No, those texts need to be repudiated, and it needs to be very clear —
that we can never identify a person based on the place that they were born,
that every human being is Homo Imago Dei,
that every human being bleeds the blood of The Sacred,
and that there is no one outside of the circle.
That’s CosmoErotic Humanism. Every human being is the CosmoErotic Universe in-person. And so, Judaism repudiated those texts, correctly, over a couple of thousand years.
The Catholic Pope today has taken on some of the travesties of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church functioned for several hundred years, for a thousand years — and I’m going to say a hard sentence here — as a mixture of deep, profound goodness, and a criminal organization which was fundamentally corrupt, which extorted, and killed, and pillaged in the name of Christ.
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young got it right when they sang: How many people died in the name of Christ, I can’t believe it all! And Sinead O’Connor, when she ripped up the face of a pope, I think it was at Madison Square Garden, was protesting that. Sinead O’Connor said, this is not Christ. This pope, like Pope John in the late fifties, have stood and said, no, that vision of Christ is wrong, and we’ve made mistakes. Christianity has, over the last several hundred years since the Renaissance, worked hard at transforming itself. It is an incomplete transformation, like transformations always are, but both Judaism and Christianity have gone through a fundamental process of evolution — an evolution of love and evolution of consciousness.
Tragically, and this is Sam Harris’s point, Islam has not gone through that evolution. It has not met the experience of what my friend John Welwood called growing up. John wrote a book called Psychology of Awakening, and on page 7, he says we need to distinguish between waking up and growing up.
Waking up means you have a direct and clear experience of the God-Voice — a genuine experience of this intrinsic nature of Divinity that lives in the world, that lives and holds us, and perhaps even lives in us completely. Every great tradition has this genuine experience — Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism. They use different languages; they don’t agree with each other about an enormous amount, but as Huxley already pointed out in his book The Perennial Philosophy, there is a shared sense of waking up, of a meeting with a ground of meaning. That’s real.
However, John pointed out something that the Hebrew wisdom tradition, that Solomon understood very well: you can’t just wake up; you have to grow up. Your experience of the Divine is mediated through your psychological maturity: who you are as a person, your goodness or your badness, the clarification of your desire. Are you, in fact, a clear prism for that experience of waking up?
Lord of the Rings by Tolkien talks about how Sauron, the corrupt force of degraded power, seduces Saruman, Gandalf’s teacher. Saruman is seduced because of his own internal brutality, his own sense of brokenness — and Saruman is the one who creates armies of orcs, who are fundamentally expressions of the movement and the ontology of evil in the world. It’s a big deal.
John Welwood says in his beautiful book, Psychology of Awakening, you’ve got to grow up. You’ve got to go through it not just as a person, but as a collective, as a people. You have to go through a process of psychological maturity.
There is no one outside the circle
Just like not all religions are the same, not all peoples are the same.
Everyone is created in the image of She — everyone, no one is excluded from the circle — and societies are not the same in their development. That’s just true. There are actually different levels of development. That’s what we call the evolution of consciousness.
The evolution of consciousness means that the Christianity that went to kill Moors in the Middle Ages, waging the Crusades, was in violation of what we would, today, call love. They thought they were standing for love, but they were in violation of love. Consciousness needs to evolve.
Evolution is the evolution of love.
Evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies.
We used to think, in the medieval period, that there is someone outside the circle. I am in the circle; other people are outside. That’s what the Christians thought. That’s what the Muslims thought. The Jews had texts that suggested that (they were not in power, so they didn’t enact those texts). There was a notion that we are on the inside, they are on the outside.
There is no one outside the circle.
That’s the evolution of love. That’s the evolution of consciousness. That’s something that is central. Every human being is Homo Imago Dei — in potential, and in actuality.
Tragically, however, I can violate my Homo Imago Dei.
Hitler was born Homo Imago Dei, in the image of God. Hitler’s mother was born in the image of God, and yet something happened. Goebbels, and Hitler, and Himmler — they created gas chambers that gassed 12,000 people a day. Something happened, and the image of God got violated. Tragically, that does happen. The human being can be the most stunning and beautiful and unimaginably gorgeous expression of the Field of Eros — or the human being can become demonized.
Every individual and any individual human being can become demonized, from any group.
And there is also a fundamental distinction. The fundamental distinction — the fundamental moral distinction — is what is the basic teaching of the story that you are presenting in the world?
Sam Harris’s point was that the story Islam is presenting in the world is one in which there are basically two groups of people, Dar Al Harb, and Dar Al Islam: those who should be destroyed by the sword, and those who are of Islam.
You’ve had this experience of waking up, but you haven’t grown up.
You haven’t achieved psychological maturity, and your level of consciousness hasn’t evolved. You’ve remained psychologically distorted, and your consciousness hasn’t evolved. You are still ethnocentric. Not only are you ethnocentric, you think anyone outside of your ethnocentric circle isn’t a human being, and therefore shouldn’t be treated as a human being, and therefore should be eviscerated, raped, pillage, burn, decapitated for the sake of your God.
That’s tragic — and that thinking is written into the very covenant of Hamas.
The founding document of Hamas makes it very clear: there is no room for a two-state solution.
There is no room for two peoples who have competing claims in a land to create negotiation, to recognize each other’s humanity, and when there is a conflict, to work out possible solutions that honor the dignity and humanity of all. No, the covenant says, until the blood of the Jews spreads over all of the land, and we find the Jew hiding behind the rock and slaughter them, and the Jew hiding behind the tree and slaughter them — until that happens, Allah is not honored.
To do sensemaking is to be able to follow a storyline
We need to place our attention on it.
To love is to place your attention, and to place the attention, you have to be able to hold a storyline.
To hold a storyline, you can’t read short articles. You can’t watch five-minute clips.
You’ve got to know the story.
You’ve got to check the history, but check it carefully — not in a 15-minute clip that you see someplace. Read serious papers, serious books, on both sides. Find credible information, compare the information. Find credible sources. You can find them, they are out there — but you’ve got to read. You can’t troll around on social media and read legacy media.
You’ve got to go to the sources, to place your attention.
To be Homo amor is to do sensemaking.
To do sensemaking is to be able to follow a storyline.
Yes, there are multiple perspectives in a story. Yes, of course there are — but not an aperspectival madness.
There is a shared ground of fact, and that shared ground of fact is a shared ground of value that needs to enable us to create a shared grammar of value.
There is a reason that John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Republican and Democrat, radically opposed to each other, were good friends — because they shared a story of value, they shared a grammar of value. We need a universal grammar of value in the world that we can all share, whatever our position is in a story.
We can disagree — a couple can disagree. In a couple, we can have different visions of how we got to this conflict. But if you can’t have, in that couple, a larger shared story of value, then they polarize. And when they polarize, they are so shamed by their polarization that they split apart, and when they split apart, they try and destroy each other. That’s how so much of western divorce works.
We need to stay in relationship. We are on a globe in which no one can be out of relationship. There is nothing local. There is only one people, and one breath, and one love, and one heart, and no one can be out of the story. We can have different perspectives, we can have different instruments in the Unique Self Symphony — but there has to be a shared music. There has to be a capacity to articulate a shared story of value, even within our conflicts.
And that is absolutely possible if we have integrity. If we are honest, if we are authentic, that can be done.
But that’s not what’s happening today.
Islam needs to participate in the evolution of love
One of the things we need to say to begin with is: those people who are adherents of Islam, who are holding the beautiful versions of Islam — they need to be madly supported. We need to pour everything we can into them becoming the voices of Islam. But they need to have the courage — which is not easy — to repudiate major narratives of Islam.
Nicholas Kristof, who is a left-wing writer, writes in The New York Times:
“In my reporting in Gaza over the years, I’ve come to believe that one source is the incitement of Hamas and some other Palestinian groups, creating a culture that glorifies “martyrs” who die while killing Israelis. It is sadly common to talk to children in Gaza whose dream isn’t to become firefighters or doctors, but suicide bombers.”
But here’s the thing, and this is the point that Harris made (and I made it independently, but I want to cite Harris): this narrative in Islam is not a fringe narrative that’s hijacking a fundamental document, which is the vision of Isaiah, Ezekiel, or Christ’s sermon on the Mount that’s now being hijacked. No, you don’t have Christ Sermon on the Mount at the very center of Islam, you don’t have Isaiah at the center of Islam. There are voices, but those voices are side voices. They are tangential voices. Central to the narrative of Islam is a glorification of the martyr who slaughters the infidel — not as an original text that’s been repudiated, but as the current operative political text.
Read the Quran cover to cover.
Read the Torah cover to cover.
Read the New Testament cover to cover.
If you are not doing that, you are not placing your attention.
I have read the Quran cover to cover, and the New Testament cover to cover, and the Bible cover to cover — the Torah, the original Torah. They are not the same document. Then read the mainstream commentaries on each document. There is no moral equivalence.
Islam needs to evolve. Islam needs to participate in the evolution of love.
That’s what Rumi did — Rumi was part of the evolution of Islam. And Rumi wasn’t by himself, he was part of thousands of gorgeous men and women who participated in the evolution of Islam, who said it doesn’t matter whether I’m a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew — we are all God’s friend. Islam can evolve from within its own documents, it has the raw material. And on my knees, I beg those people who live in Islam, and anything we can do to support the voices of clarity in Islam, it has to be done.
Not all religions are the same. The major voices in every system are not the same, they differ from each other. It’s not that Hamas equals Islam. I am not saying Hamas equals Islam. Hamas is tragically emergent from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is from the late twenties in Egypt — and the Muslim Brotherhood is emergent not from tangential positions in Islam, but from mainstream positions in Islam that were never repudiated.
We need the Muslim Brotherhood to be repudiated.
We need Hamas to be repudiated.
We need to take that seriously.
We need Rumi and Hafez.
We need the Sufis.
We can’t tell Islam who should be at its center, but we need voices like the Sufis, like the Rumi’s, to begin to become central in Islam.
There is no international body to step in
What does it mean to be a mad lover at this time? We have to be Homo amor, we have to be clear.
We have to think about the whole, and be in relationship to the whole.
No one is outside the circle, and actions need to be taken.
We need clarity, and we need to hold uncertainty and clarity at the same time, and lead from both.
Anyone who tells you, I know exactly what Israel should do right now, do not believe them.
Really? You know exactly what Israel should do right now? Are you for real?
My son is in the army right now. I don’t know whether he is on his way to Gaza. I don’t know whether he is in Gaza, or whether he’s in another part of the country. My daughter rejoined her unit. My other son may or may not, unclear.
But it’s not about my son. Israel has a citizens’ army. Israel doesn’t have a standing army. When America went to Iraq, I think maybe there was one member of Congress who had a child in the armed service. It was a standing army doing the work in Iraq. That’s not Israel. Israel has a small standing army. Israel mobilizes the shopkeepers, and the dentists, and the lawyers, and the gardeners, and the kindergarten teachers — that’s who goes to fight. We are talking about the people who are in our hearts in Israel. Israel is not a jingoist war machine, which has some standing army that goes to fight its degraded wars. That’s not what’s happening here.
There is no clarity about what Israel should do now. There is not.
But here is what we know.
There has been this call, from some colleagues of mine, to have an international body intervene. Israel should step back, there will be an international body, an international police body that should step in and handle Gaza.
I think in the ideal and correct world, that’s actually correct. I think that terrorism in the world, of the kind that we saw in the last ten days, should not be policed by one nation state. When I was with the Dalai Lama in his back room in Dharamshala, he said to me, people say I’m a pacifist, ha-ha. We need an army in the world, and we talked about the possibility of there being one army. In the ideal world, that would be the right thing to do.
That is utterly not real right now however, and the people who are calling for it — again with mad love, friends — they know it’s not real. There is absolutely zero possibility of that happening in any kind of short-term. We don’t have a group that’s trained, that has international support, that has the capacity to respond, so to suggest that the response should be an international body that does not exist, is to essentially say that nothing should happen, that there should be no response of genuine measure to the horror.
I want to make that clear: people can take disingenuous public positions. Let’s have an international police body do this. There is no international police body. You know there isn’t an international police body. You know that we haven’t replaced the nation state yet.
Should we move beyond the nation state? Possibly, that’s a big conversation. Is the nation state critical to the functioning of the world? Possibly, that’s a very big conversation that you’ve got to place your attention and your heart on to begin to understand.
What’s the value of a world government?
What’s the shadow of a world government?
What’s the value of a nation state?
What’s the shadow of a nation state?
Those are very big and real questions, my friends. We are not being glib here. That’s a big conversation.
But there is zero question that, at this moment in time, there is no real possibility of this being handled by some other group. So for someone to posture in order to fulfill whatever they’re trying to fulfill, to call Hamas pure evil, as Marianne Williamson did, and she was correct — but then to say that only an international force can deal with it, and brute force is not the solution, and then make a moral equivalence between the two perspectives here, is beyond problematic.
Those positions are not real. That’s just true. That needs to be said, because there’s this position floating around about some international force that’s supposed to intervene — that is not a real option. The people who are suggesting it know it’s not real right now.
Having said that, that is where we should be going.
We should be going to a place where we have a shared language of value, and as long as we need an army, it would be a correct decision to have one army.
But if you have one army, then you have to deal with the shadows of that one army. How is that one army controlled, and who runs that one army? These are very real issues, which cannot be thrown around glibly, and short social media posts that pander to particular populations, to allow a person to hold all of their constituencies.
That is not moral courage.
Moral courage is to recognize right now in this moment, the UN counterterrorism force has no capacity to do this, whatsoever. That’s clear as day, there is no one who thinks that they do.
The voice of Abraham: will the judge of the whole world not do justice?
In the original text of Genesis, the divine voice says, these people are wicked — in Sodom and Gomorrah.
God says:
I am going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, because these people have violated every dimension of what it means to be human being. We’re going to destroy them.
That’s the God voice.
And Abraham says:
Fuck you God! No way!
And I stand with Abraham.
And God says:
Hello, Mr. Abraham! Hello! I am God, you’re Abraham, shut up.
And Abraham says:
I’m not shutting up, no!
God says:
Well, what do you mean? Make an argument.
And Abraham says:
ayesh cha mishem tzadikim ‘maybe there are 50 righteous people?’
Are there 50 righteous people in Gaza?
Of course there are.
Is Gaza as a whole merely held hostage by a rabid horrific Hamas?
Not exactly. That’s not exactly the situation at all, tragically. We’ll get there. But that’s not the point.
Are there innocent, beautiful, and good people in Gaza? Of course there are. Of course there are.
And so, Abraham says to God, how can you destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, there might be 50, righteous people?
And God says, go find them for me, and Abraham can’t find them, so Abraham says, well, there’s 40. Well, go find them for me. Well, there’s 30, says Abraham. Can’t find them. Abraham says, there’s 20, you can’t destroy it if there’s 20. God says there is no 20. Abraham says there is 10. Abraham can’t find the 10.
But Abraham doesn’t give up. He says, fuck that. There is a lot of cursing in the Bible, I apologize — no more cursing today. I apologize, I got caught up in the heat of the moment.
Abraham turns to God and says:
Okay, you won the argument, you are God. But I don’t care! Hashofet kal ha-arez lo yas-seh mishpat ‘Will the judge of the whole world not do justice?’
Will the judge of the whole world not do mishpat ‘justice’?
And then, three verses later, there is what’s called the election of Abraham, where Abraham is elected to become a moral force in the world. And the God voice, the literary God voice in the Genesis text, explains why Abraham is enrolled for this mission of becoming a moral force in the world. Why is he chosen as it were? And the text reads, and I want you to get just the last word. The text reads ki’yadativ le-mana asher yetzaveh banaw ve’et beto akharaiv la’asot tzedakah u’mishpat.
The divine voice says:
Because I know that Abraham is going to transmit to future generations, the doing of justice, mishpat.
But one second, what does Abraham have to do with mishpat ‘justice’? There’s only one place where Abraham is identified with this notion of mishpat — when he challenges God three verses earlier and he says, will the judge of the whole world not do justice?
Abraham becomes Abraham because he is going to teach the future generations to demand justice — and I am proud of the voices that have been central voices for decades, in the Hebrew wisdom community, that have created a thousand programs of Palestinian-Jewish coexistence, that have stood — and that today stand — against an Israeli invasion of Gaza.
I am proud of them. I don’t know whether they are right or wrong. They don’t know whether they’re right or wrong. Israel is faced with an impossibility. But I’m proud of voices that speak in the tradition of Abraham and say, what if there are 50 righteous people in the middle of the city?
Now it’s a different moment, and there are many reasons why those voices might be wrong, and there are counter voices that are equally powerful. But those voices, when they are clarified, when they come from our deepest heart’s desire, those voices are holy, even if they are wrong — and I’m not saying they’re right or wrong.
This is a place where we need to hold radical certainty and radical uncertainty.
But first, I just want to make place for those voices.
Those voices aren’t evil. Those voices are sacred, and I’m proud of a Hebrew wisdom community that can hold those multiple voices, and I’m proud of an Israel that’s a pluralistic democracy that has very, very, very different fierce contestations over what the right policy is. Because that’s what a democracy is.
There are no contestations of that kind in any one of the 21 countries surrounding Israel, and certainly not within Gaza. What Hamas does to its opponents is torture and kill them.
I am proud of those voices. I am proud of that Ibrahimic heritage, and may that heritage of Abraham, which is also the heritage of Ibrahim, may that Ibrahim voice become the dominant voice of Islam, which stands against the position of its governments, against the positions of its leadership, and stands as a powerful moral force.
We cannot begin without saying that.
But that’s not the end of the story, my friends. We have to be able to follow a story through. We’ve got to be able to follow a story through and understand what’s happening, we’ve got to take it step at a time.
There is no place for moral equivalence: two thought experiments
I’m going to give you two thought experiments. Tragic thought experiments, but absolutely true. I’ve articulated versions of these for 15 years, 20 years, 30 years. Other people have articulated parallel versions of them. They are just simply and tragically true.
They were even implicitly affirmed today in the Op Ed of The New York Times, which is a paper that has, in many ways, lost its way. But today, The New York Times didn’t get it all right, but everything I’m about to say is implicit and clear in the actual Op Ed of The New York Times, although they don’t frame it this way, obviously.
There is no place for moral equivalence. Moral equivalence means:
One, that you make an equivalence between the position of Hamas and the position of Israel today. That’s one kind of moral equivalence, one.
Two, you suggest that that which is driving Hamas is the “brutality of the occupation.” That is not true. It is not the force driving Hamas at its core.
Those are both forms of moral equivalence.
Let’s begin, two thought experiments. Are you ready?
This is a thought experiment, this is not a realpolitik reality. This is a thought experiment. It’s how you understand and make distinctions.
What would happen if Israel made a unilateral announcement:
We are laying down our arms. We will not pick up our arms. We’re going to lay down our arms, we’re done. Hamas, do what you will.
And Hamas is persuaded that Israel is laying down its arms. What would happen? An utter massacre of the most epic massacres in human history, with fierce and horrific brutality. That’s what would happen. It would be a bloodbath; bloodbath of Jewish blood. That’s what would happen, that’s clear.
Now, what would happen, if Hamas laid down its arms and said,
We are actually making peace. We want peace, we’re going to lay down our arms.
What would happen? There would not be a bloodbath, my friends, there would be peace.
That’s a fundamental distinction.
That’s one version of a thought experiment. In a certain sense, there is a simplicity to the incredible painful complexity of the Middle East.
One side wants the other side dead.
That’s true.
Now again, I’m going to talk about the history of this conflict. I know the history of this conflict very well. I’ve read the Palestinian books on it, the ones that are clear and the ones that are distortion. I’ve read the Israeli books. I’ve lived it. I know dozens, dozens of people on both sides. And I’d be the first person to fiercely critique any degradations in any Israeli position, and I have, and I’ll continue to. But there is not a moral equivalence between these two positions. It’s just not true.
I’ll give you just a second version of this thought experiment.
Imagine if Israel used its own women and children as human shields.
The first thing is, anyone listening for real knows that couldn’t be possible — because you understand that there is a different structure-stage of consciousness that’s running the center of gravity of the collective called Israel. Israel is not going to use its women and children as shields. But let’s say Israel did.
Of course it wouldn’t work, because Hamas would kill them. Hamas wouldn’t care.
But Hamas knows that when they use their women and children as shields, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hezbollah famously will create a crowd of children around an Israeli soldier, and then blow up the crowd of children to kill several Israeli soldiers.
Fact!
They literally place their missiles, machine guns, bazookas, on the backs of children. Because they know that the center of moral gravity of the Israeli soldiers is, they’re going to hesitate and not shoot.
Let’s just understand this.
There are two groups in the world: there are those people who use their children as human shields, and those people who think that using children as human shields, at this moment in time, is impossible, that consciousness has evolved. Yes, people historically did that, and we completely repudiate that, and we stand against it with every fiber of our being.
If you can’t make that moral distinction, you cannot engage in this conversation, and you cannot be Homo amor. Homo amor has the capacity to make those two distinctions.
Those are very elementary distinctions.
This is not talking about what policy should be. We’re not talking about policy. We’re not talking about what Israel should do or not do. We’re not talking about any of those things.
Three, the last moral distinction: You cannot equate a response to vicious, utterly degraded terror, you can’t equate the response to it with the act of terror.
For example, did the Allied Troops need to respond to Nazism in World War II? They did. That does not make their actions equivalent to Nazism. Did the Allied Troops need to bomb, in the best ways they could, during World War II? They did. Did the Allied Troops need to do their best to avoid civilian casualties? Yes, they did, and the Allies often did not do that, which was a travesty and a horror.
Does Israel need, possibly, to bomb? I’m not an Israeli commander. I’m not on the ground. I don’t have the arrogance or hubris to make military decisions from the basement in Portland, Maine, and nor should you from whatever basement you’re in. Let’s get real.
But does Israel need to respond, and is bombing possibly part of the response like it was for the Allied in World War II? Possibly.
Does Israel need to do everything it can to avoid civilian casualties? It absolutely does. It absolutely does. And what does Israel do when ambulances are used for Hamas terrorists, when hospitals are used as Hamas command centers, when schools are used as the central place where the Hamas terrorists gather?
Using the human shield as a population, both individually and the larger population, is the actual tactic of Hamas.
This is not about loving the land. That’s not what this is about at all.
When you understand the interior psychology of Hamas, this is not nationalism gone bad. This is a devastatingly tragic expression of humanity having lost its way, in which you use your own babies and your own children as fodder. Hamas kills its opponents. It kills gay commanders in its own ranks. Hamas is aligned with Iran, who has been killing teenage girls for the last year, after Mahsa Amini was killed. Iran has been killing teenage girls left and right, over a thousand probably in the last year. That’s Hamas’s major trainer.
They are not killing teenage girls, taking them out of schools, because of Gaza — but because of a fundamental, tragic, degraded understanding, which is not just ethnocentric, but more: we are the only real human beings, only our particular narrow slice, our own narrow Shiite or Sunni God understanding. We are the only ones who are actually human; no one else is a human being.
That’s not nationalism. Let’s just understand this. That distinction needs to be made. If we cannot make that distinction, we can’t even begin to have the conversation.
We have to scream truth, and we have to whisper truth
I am going to read you two things. These are not simple, and they are tragic. But if we turn away, if we can’t see this, if we don’t understand this, we can’t actually have a conversation. None of this is to lose the Abraham position, the Abraham and Ibrahim position with which I started. I’ve made that very, very clear. Don’t get lost, follow the thread with me.
I want to read you something. I first heard this story from Hannah Sarna. Hannah Sorna lived in Hebron. Her father was the dean of a seminary in Hebron, a seminary of Talmudic study, which had close relationships with the local Arab community.
It is 1929. There is no state. There are competing forces in the area that’s now called Israel, that the Romans called Palestine. It is 1929, and there’s this community in Hebron: some fifty Jews, men and women, had taken refuge outside. They were huddled in one room.
The Arabs were the soldiers of the Grand Mufti Husseini. The Grand Mufti Husseini was a leader allied with Hitler, who was a key force in the Palestinian world. This was a key force who slaughtered the leadership of the Palestinians who wanted to create a sharing of land, who wanted to create coexistence, who wanted to find a ground of shared value — the Nashashibi Clan. The Husseini Clan slaughtered, over a period of a decade, their opponents — killed, abused, raped their daughters and brutally slaughtered the Nashashibis. That’s actually what happened.
There were significant real voices within the local Arab population that realized: Wow, we have a claim to this land, and the Jews have a deep claim to this land. It’s not a case of an indigenous people versus an invader. There are two legitimate claims to this land. We can do this together and prosper, and create a new vision of how human beings live together. And all of those voices, who were madly committed to the best of Islam, were slaughtered, and they were slaughtered by the Husseini clan.
The agents of the same Husseini clan go to Hebron, and they arouse the most tragic parts of Islam in the local population.
It’s Saturday, August 24th, nine in the morning. After blowing open the door, they cut off hands, they cut off fingers, and they cut off testicles. They held heads over a stove. They gouged out eyes. They scalped the rabbi, they made off with his brains. On Mrs. Sokolov’s lap, one after the other, they sat six students from yeshiva, with her still alive, and slit their throats. They mutilated the men, cutting off their sexual organs. They shoved 13-year-old girls, mothers and grandmothers, into the blood, and raped them in unison. Mrs. X, I won’t say her name, is lying in a Jerusalem Hospital. They killed her husband at her feet, then slaughtered her child in her arms. But you will remain alive, these 20th century men told her.
If you want to read this account, read a book by a British man named Albert Londres, who was an eyewitness (from 1884 to 1932). The name of the book is The Wandering Jew has Arrived. What I just read to you is from page 168.
This was 100 years ago. This horrific scene takes place 100 years ago, and it’s that scene, my friends, that just got reenacted.
This scene is not a result of Israel’s policy in Gaza (and we’ll get to Israel’s policy in Gaza).
You need to be able to follow a story. This exact scene from 1929 was just reenacted, and it’s been reenacted time and again. There is no moral equivalence here. One of the expressions of moral equivalence is when you say that what caused that which happened in Israel nine days ago, was actually anger and outrage at the occupation. That is not true.
We need to know that storyline. We haven’t even gotten to that storyline. We haven’t even gotten to what is the occupation — what does that even mean? Those words don’t even mean anything. How did we get here? What are the ten stages that led to this story? We haven’t gotten there.
I am engaged here not in politics. What I am going to do here is a mystical act of telling the truth.
I want to just take a second and read for you an account of what actually happened. And this is an account by Ma’or Shmei. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
We have to scream truth, and we have to whisper truth.
We’ve got to talk it softly, and we’ve got to talk it fiercely.
We’ve got to talk it tenderly, and we’ve got to talk it with agony. It’s all the same.
Just stay with the narrative. I just want to hear him, Ma’or Shmei. He writes:
“I want to share a message, it’s not easy to hear, please don’t play this message where children can hear.”
[And we are talking about a trance festival, where people are having these very deep medicine experiences, these very, very deep medicine journeys. It’s not left-wing and right-wing. There are Jews and non-Jews there, and they are there to go to that deep place where human beings are one. There are no political divisions, and they are in their purity, and they are in their Eros, and they are in their sacredness. There are 5,000 people there, and they’re on journeys. ]
Ma’or talks about the eyewitness accounts that came to him from his close friends:
“When the terrorists came in, they took young women, partners of our friends. They tied our friends up, and raped their women in front of them. They cut off the men’s sexual organs while the men were still alive, and then killed the women. They raped women on top of dead bodies of other women.”
Do you understand what we are talking about? The level of brutality and horror?
And this is just one piece of the story.
There is no moral equivalence
But here’s the thing. You can always have, in any group, an occasional aberrant horror — a person or a group of people who go berserk. Like the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War — when a My Lai massacre happened in the Vietnam War, those men were held accountable. They went to prison. They were viewed as violations of everything that the United States stood for. I want you to get the distinction.
Now, the United States has its own sins to atone for, and Israel has its sins to atone for. Of course they do. Of course they do.
But that’s not what we are saying. We are saying there is no moral equivalence.
Have Israeli soldiers done wrong things? Of course they have. And when an Israeli soldier does something wrong, which violates the code of ethics of the Israeli army, they are punished.
Read the code of ethics of the Israeli army, line after line. It talks about how we teach our soldiers to be moral when their lives are at stake every millisecond, and we talk about the soldiers’ moral obligation to protect innocent civilians, and how we forbid, categorically, any targeting of civilians, or any use of civilians to clear an area? It is one of the most sacred documents written by humanity ever.
Israel has done everything in its power to honor that code of ethics. And when it seems like soldiers have acted out of alignment with it, even when there wasn’t clear evidence on either side, soldiers have been severely, intensely punished. That’s the precise opposite to the basic ethos of Hamas and Gaza.
The worldwide community — editors on Teen Vogue, editors in the Washington Post — basically say, this is what decolonization looks like. We have voices all over the world in Sydney, and in London, exploding in joy. We have — all over the West Bank, and all over Gaza — spontaneous explosions of joy.
When I was driving through the West Bank, and there was an attempt to stop my car and kill my children in the backseat, that’s been a standard policy: to isolate an Israeli car on the road, parents and children killed. And then, those people become heroes. Read the founding documents of Hamas, read the founding documents of Fatah, the PLO — and read the founding documents of the Israeli army: you are going to find a completely different world, a completely different structure of consciousness. That was implicit in The New York Times editorial this morning. That’s a big deal.
Before we move forward to what to do, we need to make this distinction. This distinction is not clear. This distinction has been denied all over the world.
Let’s take a look at the response in London — and I could show you 50 scenes like this, in Manhattan, in Manhattan, in Sydney, Australia.
This is not one scene in the world. I could cite you now fifty comments — from the President of Harvard, his first comments, from student groups in Harvard, from a professor at Yale, from the leading universities in the world. The leading universities in the world said, in dozens and dozens of statements, knowing full well what happened, they said, this is what decolonization looks like.
That’s not okay. That’s not right. Just understand this in your body. If Israel would use its children and women as human shields (which is utterly absurd, we know Israel wouldn’t do it), they’d just be mowed down by Hamas. Hamas uses its population as human shields, because it knows the moral distinction. And yet, the editor of Teen Vogue cannot work out that moral distinction, and the crowd in Manhattan, after knowing the savagery and the butchery, dances and rejoices.
The massacre in Hebron that I talked about — that wasn’t a response to the Israeli occupation in Gaza. That was the fundamental force in Islam that has taken Islam over, which was represented by Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who slaughtered the other Arab voices.
I lived in the West Bank of Israel, I lived in a house with a beautiful Arab family in Jaffa. I spoke out in Israel, not once and not twice, for the utter need to have the greatest possible humanity we can have at checkpoints. Israel should always be — just like the United States should be — held accountable to the highest standard of possibility. And we cannot make a moral equivalence.
If we make a moral equivalence, we actually misunderstand something.
Who is your hero?
Let’s look at the video from Gaza, speaking to Gaza children. This is a tragic thread. There is no jingoism, there is no kind of joy in showing you this thread. This thread breaks my heart. Nicholas Kristof points to this. He basically says the same thing in his column two days ago — and he is a complete opponent of the Israeli government, but makes the same point.
That’s tragic. These kids were born innocent. It’s horrific. I want to read you a piece by Nicholas Kristof, and I am specifically reading pieces that are fundamentally from the liberal and left world, so you understand.
Kristof writes:
“On a reporting trip to Gaza two decades ago, I interrupted some high school boys playing soccer and asked them about their lives and hopes. The conversation veered to Israel and terrorism, so I quizzed them about whether they believed it would be morally acceptable for a Palestinian to bomb a group of Israeli women.
“That’s OK,” said Motaz Abuleilah, then 15, as I wrote at the time. “They all fight in their army.”
I pushed harder. Would it be reasonable to set off a bomb in an Israeli high school for girls?
More nods. “Fine, fine,” said Ibrahim Abudaya, then 18. “God knows, the girls will become fighters.”
What about blowing up the American Embassy?
“Excellent!”
I asked, what about blowing up an Israeli nursery school?
“No, no, no.” They had found their limit and prided themselves on their compassion. In recent days, as I’ve thought about the people I’ve met in Gaza while reporting there over the years, I’ve wondered if some of those boys — sweet and friendly to me — had grown up to be among the terrorists participating in the savagery in Israel last weekend.”
Oh, my God! Oh, my God!
Nicholas Kristof is not, in any sense, a kind of right wing Israeli sympathizer. Quite the opposite, if you look at who he is. And this is not just one piece of evidence. There are tens of thousands. Are there exceptional voices of fury in Israel that could sound similar? Extremely exceptional, and they are completely castigated by the mainstream Israeli society.
The question is not the exceptional voices. The question is, who is your hero?
In the world of Hamas, the hero is the butcher of innocent women and children. The hero in Israel, is not that. That’s an anti-hero. Even at Israel’s worst time, when it’s been horrible, it’s still an anti-hero. The notion that Israel could or should do anything like targeting civilians, and cutting off the phalluses of men as they rape the women on the dead bodies of their friends — no, no, those are not heroes. That is considered to be sick, and a violation of the fundamental Homo Imago Dei.
It’s not a racial distinction, but it is a distinction in the consciousness of two different societies:
Who are your heroes?
What is your ethos?
What do your founding documents say?
This is essential. Who’s your hero?
I don’t know what Israel should do right now. I’m speaking and leading and teaching and sharing and crying from the certainty and the uncertainty together. But what I do know is that I am asking again, to hold the story in the center here: who is my hero?
This notion of levels of consciousness, it’s hard to get. And I am not suggesting what Israel should do or not do, what I am suggesting is that Israel is trying to discriminate.
Now, what should Israel do? Hard. Hard. I’m not going to go there now. We will get there.
But first, I need just to understand where we are, but let me just say something before:
We can never lose the voice of Abraham.
And would the voice of Abraham cut off food and water?
No, of course the voice of Abram wouldn’t cut off food and water. There’s this argument in the Book of Genesis, when Sodom and Gomorrah — that kind of archetype is destroyed in the end — and Lot is saved.
When Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defense Minister, with his heart broken, says that they become animals, and we’re going to treat them like animals, he has to make a distinction. He has to say that we’re going to do everything that we can, within every possibility of our power, to protect innocent lives. And Hamas needs to be held accountable for placing their command centers in the very center of innocent lives.
Now, what should Israel do in that situation? I don’t know yet, but I want you to just be willing to stay with me in the uncertainty. Hold the uncertainty before you jump. Let’s follow the story.
This is hard. This is hard, it’s impossible. So let’s stay in the impossibility together.
Hamas is a degraded ethnocentric horror
There are four levels of consciousness (so we can talk about just one model).
There is egocentric, where my care and love is for me and my survival clan.
The second level is ethnocentric, where my circle of intimacy is me and my tribe, whoever my tribe is, and only my tribe is chosen, only my tribe is human, and anyone outside of my tribe essentially is not human. That’s the actual ethnocentric experience. That’s the Hamas’ version of a tragic ethnocentric.
Not all ethnocentric is tragic. You can be an American patriot. You can be a Belgian patriot. You can be an Israeli Patriot. You can be an Arab patriot and an Egyptian patriot, a West Bank patriot. You can be a patriot and not be that kind of degraded, ethnocentric horror. Hamas is a degraded ethnocentric horror. It’s the degraded version of the ethnocentric moment.
Then you have world-centric: in my circle of intimacy is every human being. We are the world (1985, Freddie Mercury, Live Aid concert, We Are The World). But even when you are world-centric, stay close, you’re not yet cosmo-centric.
Cosmo-centric means: I have a sense of felt care and love and intimacy and concern, not only with human beings, but — in a different way — with animals.
I don’t eat lamb chops from factory farms, because I am cosmo-centric. But when I am world-centric, I can’t even imagine that I would care about those animals. I’m going to have as many steaks as I want. I don’t care if animals were tortured on factory farms, I’m going to eat it anyway. Because I’m world-centric, and I cannot see beyond my circle of intimacy.
Let’s try and go slow here and feel this.
The ethnocentric brutal moment, which says only my people are human, actually sees and feels that, beyond my circle of intimacy, the people aren’t human, they are animals. All of them, not just the ones that behave like animals. In the most demonic expressions of Nazism, human beings did become beasts.
Human beings can become animals. But when I call a group of human beings animals, meaning those who are outside of my circle of intimacy, then I am engaged in the horrific crime of ethnocentric racism, which itself is a tragic violation of what it means to be a human being.
A thousand years ago, that’s where all of humanity was, with some rare exceptions. One of the exceptions was the early text in Genesis, which said that every human being is created in the image of God. That was a rare exceptional text, but the center of gravity of most of human culture was: outside of my people, they are not even human. That’s tragic, but you’ve got to get that.
The experience is not about loving or not loving my land. We have to actually have this feeling and knowing: what is the ethnocentric tragedy that says only my people are human? The ethnocentric person says, in the tragic form, that you can’t commit murder — but murder means only killing some of my people. Killing someone else isn’t murder.
Let’s feel this, every human being is in the circle (let’s just start there, before I even get to the animal world, which in the end does need to be included, for sure). But let’s just start with every human being: there is no one outside the circle.
There are two competing claims on the same land
Here, I’m going to go the next step. This is the next step, and I want to just be in the story with you for a second. How did this all happen?
Let’s understand this very, very clearly. Let’s feel each other. Let’s try and understand what we really mean. Let’s get out of slogans, let’s talk about what we are really talking about here.
You’ve got to be able to track a story, and there should be a possibility of creating a shared story of value in which the entire population of this tragically disputed territory should be able to agree on. If we are not willing to place attention on the story, then again, we are not Homo amor. The Hebrew word for placing attention is sim-lev: let me place my attention.
So let’s place our attention.
In the beginning, I can already tell you my conclusion. I think there are two legitimate competing claims on the same land. That’s a big thing to say. I want to say it again, there are two legitimate competing claims on the same land. Hold that with me.
Now, what do I do when that’s the case?
That’s the question.
But first, let me just tell you a little bit of the story.
The Ottoman Empire controlled what is now the space where there are 22 Arab states, covering vast amounts of territory with more than four hundred million people. Then there is this tiny sliver that’s today called Israel, which has nine million people. How did we get here, what happened?
Let me just walk you through — just very, very, very simply — what actually happened in this story. How did we get here?
When the Ottoman Empire collapses, Britain takes over the primary mandate for all of the territory in the Middle East. All of the countries — Egypt and Iraq and Jordan and Libya and Israel — everything that was established in this area was not established because they operated independently. It’s not like there used to be a Palestinian state that got conquered. Never happened. There were only three independent political Commonwealths in this area ever in human history, and those were three Jewish Commonwealths that lived there over history. That’s just factually true. There were never any other independent sovereign governments in this place, other than three Jewish Commonwealths.
When the destruction of the second Jewish Commonwealth happens, some short amount of time after Jesus, the Roman governor of the area calls it Palestina, in order to break its connection to Jewish people. And then, for 1700–1800 years, there are local indigenous populations (this is even before there’s an Arab world), and there are many, many stages of local populations in this huge mass of land in the Arabian Peninsula. One of the populations that’s there is a Jewish population, which maintains a steady, small Jewish presence all through the last couple of thousand years, and the Jewish communities that are exiled and massacred all over the world, all look to Israel as their home. These are just facts.
During the time of the Ottoman Empire, this land, this fertile crescent, was occupied by local populations, which we now call Arab populations. Britain then takes over after World War I. Within this Arabian Peninsula, Britain makes a decision and establishes some — depending how you count — 19, 20, 21, 22 independent sovereign Arab states.
In one part of the land, which is now called Israel-Palestine, there is an infusion of Jewish settlers who come from Europe, wanting to return to what their native history — the biblical history — has told them is the Jewish homeland. When they start coming — in the late 1880s, 1890s, 1900, 1910, 1920 — there are very, very deep relationships that are established with the local Arab community. The local Arab community is obviously filled with many, many beautiful people, and there are mutually productive relationships started, which are quite beautiful and deep.
Let’s split the land: first attempts at a two-state solution
Within the Arab world, there are two major strains, major expressions of the Arabic voice.
One, enormously powerful, a huge powerful major mainstream Arab position, is expressed by the Nashashibi family. It’s the name of one central Arab clan. Emir Faisal, earlier on, is another expression of it. He has a deep relationship with Chaim Weizmann, who was later to become the first Jewish President of the Israeli state. There is this enormous possibility that we could actually share this land in some way, whatever that means.
There is a second voice — which is incarnate in history most dramatically by the Mufti Husseini, whose agents and whose family is at play for several decades, and who aligned with Hitler in World War II — who basically say, no. They adopt a position similar to that of Hamas today, which says, there cannot be any two competing claims in this land. This land must be purely — not just Arab land, but a particular kind of Islamic land for a particular militant brand of Islam, which basically says that the rest of the world is subject to the Islamic sword. If there is any presence in the Arabian Peninsula of anything other than this particular brand of Islam, then it’s a violation of the honor of the Prophet, and blood must soak the land.
Those are the two basic positions, and Husseini won, tragically. Tragically, Husseini carries the day. The Nashashibis are slaughtered. This is a long history that’s been talked about. Let me try and walk through it a little bit here, a little more carefully.
In 1919, there is a conversation between Emir Faisal, who is a major Arab leader, and Weizmann, and they talk about a possibility of genuine Jewish-Arab coexistence.
In 1920 and 1921, huge massacres take place within the Arab world, where people aligned with creating a shared ground of value with the Jews are murdered. They say that can’t be done. That’s a violation of the honor of the Prophet. There is an extreme explosion of murders in 1920 to 1921. There is what’s called the Arab Revolt. The Arab Revolt is fundamentally Husseini-inspired. This is where the massacre of the Nashashibis and of all the other voices for a shared ground value in the Arab world are decimated.
In response, the Peel Commission is set up by Great Britain, and it recommends a division of the territory, with 80% of the territory going to the Arab population, and with 20% of the territory going to the Jews. And the Husseini-led, Hamas-like position says absolute no. It’s completely rejected. That’s actually what happened.
Fast forward, ten years later, there is this development of the situation. There are more Jewish settlements. There are more massacres on the Arab side. There’s this incitement to a brand of Arab nationalism, which is not classical nationalism, but a Husseini-inspired racist nationalism of the worst kind, which says that those outside of my ethnocentric circle aren’t actually human in the same way, and the Prophet’s honor is violated. There are these ten years of enormous, enormous pain.
In 1947, Great Britain says, we don’t know what the fuck to do. They turn to the United Nations. The United Nation says, again, let’s partition the land, let’s split the land in two, with most of the land going to Arabs, less going to the Jews. The Jews say we accept it. We’ll accept this partition. The Arabs say, categorically, no.
And on the first day, when in response to this United Nations offer, Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, declares independence, on that day, five Arab armies, which outgun Israel in every way, in terms of troops, guns, munitions, attack Israel. The world thinks the Jews won’t survive it.
They do survive.
The Independence war
And in that war — that’s called the Independence war — a couple of things happened.
One — and the Prime Minister of Syria writes about this in his memoir — the Arab leaders tell the Arab populations of the disputed territories to leave, and then they’ll return after the Jews have been wiped out, after the Jews have been massacred. Literally, those were the words used. Hitler’s job will be completed, then you’ll return to your liberated lands. There is an entire group of Arabs who leave for that reason, several hundred thousands.
Then there is another group who are actually evicted in the war, with intention, by the Israeli side, because they feel that otherwise we’re not going to be able to actually hold a secure new Israel, so there is an actual forced transfer of population. That’s actually true.
There is this big argument: Did the Arabs who left at that moment leave voluntarily, or were they forced? Both are true, actually. About 800,000 total of local Arabs left their land, that’s true. At the same time, there are about 800,000 of Jews who had been in Arab lands for thousands of years, who were also forced out of their lands. There was this actual population transfer on both sides. The Arab populations that left their lands became refugees.
Now, I want you to get this.
In 1949, after the war, the United Nations established UNRWA (The United Nations Relief Works Association), to handle those 800,000 refugees, which the Arab leadership intentionally refused to integrate in any of the 22 larger Arab states, in order to keep them as refugees, as a linchpin for the eventual destruction and annihilation of Israel. That was a policy. I am not even saying whether it was right or wrong, I am saying that was a policy. That’s a fact. And in fact, the UNRWA still exists today, it’s 70 years later, and it has a budget of a billion dollars a year. That’s just true.
The 800,000 refugees of Jews from Arab lands — some of them left voluntarily and others were forced out — were all absorbed in Israel and became part of the fabric and structure of Israel.
Now, I’m not even saying now what’s right, what’s wrong. I’m just giving you the objective facts of the situation.
Now, did Israel behave brutally during the Independence War? The answer to that question is almost unambiguously no. You can read very, very carefully, accounts of what actually happened. There was an enormous attempt to behave as morally as any army can.
There is a famous account of one massacre that’s called The Deir Yassin massacre. What actually happened there is hotly contested. Shmuel Katz, an intensely moral man that I met at the end of his life, wrote an account of what actually happened there, in his book called Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine. There are opposing accounts that are circulated by the Palestinian leadership, and that’s a hotly contested account. I happen to believe Shmuel Katz’s account, but I wasn’t there. But that was an exception. Whatever happened there was a dramatic exception that was condemned by the entire Jewish world. The claim that there were somehow dozens of massacres is just not true.
Was there a part of the population during Israel’s Independence War that was forcibly transferred? Yes, there was.
Was there a part of the Jewish population that was forcibly transferred from Arab lands? Yes, there was. And virtually every nation state in the world is built on the transfer of indigenous populations, which is tragic. That’s absolutely true. I want to be really clear about that.
Land for peace: Five rejected possibilities of a Palestinian state
But what’s also true is that there are very clear competing claims here.
There is a very, very legitimate Arab claim, and there is a very, very legitimate Jewish claim, which is why, if we have a shared ground of value and we recognize that —
we are all human beings,
and we don’t want to kill and destroy each other,
and we recognize that we’re all created Homo Imago Dei —
— then we should be able to create a new possibility together. That new possibility should be some version of what’s called today a two-state solution. That’s legitimate, that’s honest, that’s holy.
The overwhelming majority of Israel — not everyone — has always held that as a real possibility. I’ve lived through five or six successive Israeli governments — and they’ve never been able to create a two-state solution, because it was impossible to create — tragically, tragically, I just want to get the tragedy of it — on the Arab side of the street, a buy-in for the two-state solution. There was an utter refusal to accept that possibility.
And again, this is not to say that Jews got it all right.
This is not to say we shouldn’t critique Israel.
This is not to say any of those things.
But it is to say that if you understand and track what actually happened here, there was a suggestion in 1936 by the Peel Commission for a two-state solution, which was utterly rejected by the local Arab population, infused with Husseini-like diabolic hatred.
And then in 1947, again, there was a two-state solution offered, and again, the Husseini-infused, Hamas-like leadership, the tragic leadership, rejected it out of hand.
Now, it’s hard to actually trace the story. But here’s where it gets really important to place your attention, friends.
1967. Until this point, there is no Gaza or West Bank. The West Bank is part of Jordan, one of the new states established by Great Britain’s mandate. Gaza is part of Egypt. And Nasser, who’s the leader of Egypt, picks up that Husseini energy and mantel, and says, we are going to complete Hitler’s job and we are going to wipe out the Jewish people. Israel launches, for its survival, a preemptive strike, which is called the Six-Day War. Israel begs Jordan not to get involved in the war, but Egypt attacks, and Syria attacks, and Jordan attacks. In that war, Israel takes the West Bank. It’s the west bank of the Jordan River, that’s what it is. Israel also takes the Gaza Strip. The West Bank is taken from Jordan, in the preemptive strike war of survival by Israel, and the Gaza Strip is taken from Egypt.
Now, that Six-Day War is over. What should happen now?
There is a great debate in Israel about what should happen. There is an overwhelmingly strong position that says let’s trade land for peace.
And what land are we talking about now?
We are talking about the West Bank and Gaza. Both of those could be a ground for a Palestinian state. But the Arab League gathers a few months later in Khartoum, and issues its famous three No’s: No recognition, No negotiation, No peace.
That’s what they say: No recognition, No negotiation, No peace.
This is the third rejection of the possibility of a Palestinian state, unless there is no Israel. The solution to the conflict has to be that Israel is gone. That’s the third rejection.
That’s in 1967. Those are the famous three 3 No’s of Khartoum.
And then in 2000, Ehud Barak meets Arafat with Clinton, at Camp David. And Barak, who’s the Prime Minister of Israel, offers Arafat a Palestinian state, again, with 94% of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, with Gaza. And as Clinton said, we were there for 14 days, and Arafat just said no. There was an utter rejection — that’s the fourth rejection (although Arafat did, in the end, sign the Oslo Accord, this possibility was swiftly blown up in a wave of terror attacks against Israel).
And finally, number five, in 2008, Ehud Olmert, who I went jogging with in Jerusalem, who was the Prime Minister of Israel, goes even farther than Barak, adds land to the deal, and meets with Abbas, who is Arafat’s successor. And Abbas cannot muster support for this, he says no. He turns it down again.
I just want you to get this:
Five times there’s been the possibility of a two-state solution, and five times — five times, five times — there’s been an utter dramatic no.
And I’m praying that the people who were here in the beginning had enough attention and heart to stay in. Stay in here, actually follow the story.
Now, in the middle of this, between 2006 and 2008, Israel actually unilaterally withdraws from Gaza — and it’s before Olmert, in 2008, offers the fifth possible land-for-peace deal. Israel unilaterally withdraws from Gaza.
Egypt doesn’t want to take Gaza back. Egypt says no. Hamas comes to rule Gaza. Hamas could have turned Gaza into a flowering state. There was more aid offered to Gaza from around the world — for education, for infrastructure, for building, for creativity. There were a thousand programs to create bridges of peace of every kind. And Hamas made a decision, in the tradition of the Husseini tradition: in the name of the Prophet Allah, Palestine must be soaked with the blood of every Jew. No distinction between Israeli and Jew, every Jew — because their very existence here is an affront.
The horror and the impossibility
Let’s understand this. I am completely in favor of a two-state solution. I would fucking give up Jerusalem itself to make peace. If I thought we could have an Israeli state without Jerusalem as its capital, I’d give it up for the sake of peace. That’s not the situation.
Can you hear that, my friends? That’s not the situation.
Does that mean Israel has gotten it right all the time?
Of course Israel hasn’t gotten it right all the time.
But can I state as an absolute fact that the overwhelming majority of the Israeli population would make peace?
I absolutely can.
Is there a sector of the Israeli population that says we have to keep every inch of Judea and Samaria, no matter what? Yes, there is a sector like that. I believe that sector is wrong. And even within that sector, within which I lived, if there was a possibility for peace, Israel would have gone for it.
Now, I want you to get this really, really straight. This is a story that’s not told. We talked about the West Bank. There is this sense, oh, the West Bank, there was a Palestinian nation that was conquered. No, no, the West Bank was part of Jordan. It was taken by Israel in a preemptive war for its survival in 1967. Jordan didn’t want to take the West Bank back.
Let’s just understand this.
If you remove the West Bank from Israel in its current structure, if you turn the West Bank into an independent state today, that means that the center of Israel will be nine miles wide.
If you give the West Bank — you can’t give it back to Jordan, they don’t want it — so if you you allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank, which I’ve been in favor of, but what’s the problem?
Two problems, and I want you to get both problems really clearly.
One, that means that Israel’s waist, the center of the country, the most populated parts of Israel, is literally nine miles wide. How long does it take to drive nine miles, my friends, how long does it take? 20 minutes. Meaning, you can cut the country in half in a surprise attack, like that which happened a few days ago, in a period of a half hour. If you cut the country in half, Israel can’t mobilize to defend itself, because Israel has a very small standing army, it can’t afford to keep a large standing army. Its army is of shopkeepers, and shoemakers, and doctors, and kindergarten teachers. You have to mobilize the army like Israel just did, and mobilizing that army takes several days. But if you cut the country in half, you can’t mobilize the army. That’s the security reason for keeping the West Bank. That’s one.
But here is two. If there was any ground to believe that Israel could support the creation on the West Bank as an independent Palestinian state, which would be a democracy, and live next to Israel, and support universal human rights, and the rights of the feminine, and the rights of girls, and the rights of the basic notion of the integrity and decency of every human being, Israel would say, fuck it, create an independent Palestinian state, we’re going to trust that state, and we’ll live together in peace. But there is zero indication that that can happen. In fact, in all likelihood, if a state was established on the West Bank, it would become a terrorist state like Gaza.
So, what is Israel supposed to do, my friends?
Does anyone understand why I didn’t begin by: Okay, what should Israel do?
Does everyone understand how absurd that conversation would be?
Let’s place our attention. Let’s love each other. Let’s unfold this story step at a time.
Now you tell me, my friends, what is Israel supposed to do?
Does everyone get the horror and the impossibility?
Oh my God, the horror and the impossibility!
There is not a moral equivalence.
There is only one people, and one breath, and one humanity
I want to just say something about the feminine, about women.
How you treat women goes the world.
Now, that doesn’t mean that women are always right. Women can make false complaints, women can be brutal. It’s not that the feminine is good, and the masculine is bad. That’s not what I mean. But how we treat innocent women and children is how the world goes.
Iran and Hamas are the people who are brutalizing the feminine, brutalizing women, worse than any other force in the world today. And they are joined by Al-Qaeda, they are joined by Hezbollah, they’re joined by the current rulers of Afghanistan, who are all expressions of the same Khomeini strain. The same very narrow strain that’s basically been infused in some of the mainstream tenets of Islam, that didn’t go the Rumi way, didn’t go the Hafez way — that went the debased and horrific way.
And their view of the feminine is horrific.
They all endorse what’s called honor killing: if a woman is suspected of somehow expressing herself sexually outside marriage, proof doesn’t need to be brought. She can be brutally killed by her family, and the family is generally let off the hook because it’s an understandable honor killing.
Let’s just understand what we are talking about here. That’s what we are going to support? We’re going to create a moral equivalence between this and Israel or the United States (which are flawed), really?
Yes, nation states might not be our future. It’s a big conversation.
Yes, there may be those profiting from war. That may well be true, which is tragic, and the global capitalist structure is tragic that profits from war. Yes, that’s also true. That needs to be taken into account in a very real way.
And yes, yes, there undoubtedly have been tragic mistakes by Israel, without question.
But who is your hero, what is the story from which you are generating Reality?
Those distinctions are essential.
What is your narrative of desire?
How do you go into a trance festival, where people are at their most pure, their most open — there’s no left, there’s no right, no Jew, no non-Jew, just human beings dancing as She — and violate and mutilate, in the most horrific way possible?
And then kill a child in front of parents and parents in front of a child, kill a grandmother and upload her murder to her own Facebook site?
All that, as the children in Gaza said, is an expression of some version of a twisted and insane form of tragic human ideology.
So you ask me, what should Israel do now? I don’t know.
I do think that Israel cannot cut off food and water, and Israel correctly opens the water in Gaza South, that was the right thing to do.
And Israel has been desperately looking for routes of escape — and Egypt has shut the door, and Jordan has shut the door.
I want to understand the tragic impossibility of this, but we can only begin this conversation if we are willing to stay in. I cannot be Homo amor unless I place my attention.
And I want to invite everyone to read. Read. If you want to read, I’m going to give you a mainstream centrist position. Read a book by Daniel Gordis, who’s a colleague of mine. I haven’t spoken to him in 20 years, we don’t know each other well, but he wrote a book on the history of Israel. It is a balanced book that critiques the Israeli government on multiple accounts. But it’s worth reading.
As goes Israel, goes Europe.
As goes Israel, goes the United States.
As goes Israel, goes Africa.
There is no local.
There is only one people, and one breath, and one humanity.
No one is outside the circle, and it’s all a holy and a broken Hallelujah.
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