At the precipice - escalations and international mobilization

Hello all,

I sent an update yesterday attempting to deal with and take jabs at some of the absurdities, contradictions, and tensions, with humor. Humor is the most effective tool I have to process and explore some deeply felt tensions, and I know I’m not alone there so I shared it here.  However, as friends pointed out, Change.org is not the right forum for comic relief, so I removed the post (and look forward to finding an opportunity to find humor through other forums).

The realities of course are beyond tragic and offer no relief. Last night, some 700 Palestinians were killed in Khan Younis, in the southern part of Gaza, when the Israeli military ordered inhabitants of Gaza’s northern areas to move south. The body count keeps growing: since the Hamas attacks killing some 1,400 Israelis, Israel’s military attacks in Gaza have killed 5,000 Palestinians, 60% of whom are women and children.

“In war, truth is the first casualty”. The cognitive dissonance we experience when we are told and asked to believe in something that is not consistent with our fundamental beliefs or understanding of realities is enormously taxing. As the stakes rise, people generally are depleted of the capacity to constantly question messaging that comes from sources of authority.

We know from the Milgram experiments and follow-up research on those experiments that most of us (mere mortals) don’t disobey or meaningfully resist instructions from a higher authority when we are told that performing that task is necessary for something greater, even when the task involves delivering nearly fatal shocks to an innocent person. When we are overcome by fear and anxiety, we’re most vulnerable to exploitation.

One of the most famous Cold War historians, John Lewis Gaddis, started the seminal book on the Cold War with a Groucho Marx quote: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read”. The point is that it only became possible to fully understand the dynamics at work during the Cold War after it ended.

The main idea is the same: for those caught in the fog of war, rationality and truth dies fast, masses look for clear, definitive solutions, and in extreme cases, as we know from history, absolutist and totalitarian thinking paves the way to genocidal rhetoric and action.

Right now, Israel’s government is arguing that it must eradicate Hamas and all the evidence suggests that it has most of the Israeli Jewish public’s backing in that position. The challenge with that position is that it is entirely unachievable. Hamas represents a political ideology that had growing appeal amongst discontented Palestinians over several decades. There is no way to “eliminate Hamas”. The way to weaken and contain its influence is by creating a path where Palestinian public opinion turns firmly against its ideology and by challenging the coherence of the vision it has of itself as a resistance movement. That in turn happens when Palestinians are free, live in dignity and exercise self-determination.

Hamas’s military capability could be eroded, but as long as non-violent means of protest don’t yield results, there will be a 20-year-old Palestinian somewhere who will decide that his life isn’t worth living and that his options are to either be a victim or be a martyr.  There’s no way to deter a person who reached that conclusion. That goal of any comprehensive agreement is to create the space where that same person begins to see an Israeli Jew as a neighbor and person also deserving of dignity and respect and security. It would be no small feat.

The immediate step now is to secure a ceasefire. The day after is what all stakeholders have to think about: the best answer I see immediately is introducing and scaling an international presence in Gaza (and even potentially parts of the West Bank) to administer and rebuild and preserve some level of security and stability for Palestinians and Israelis alike, while a comprehensive peace agreement is negotiated by the parties under clear terms of reference.

If we don’t get a ceasefire soon, there's enormous scope for more escalation (also in the West Bank, Lebanon and possibly Syria). That would cause trauma and psychological damage that could set back the clock for a comprehensive regional peace by decades.  There’d be no putting that genie back in the bottle.

For now, thank you for all those who've been calling representatives. For your convenience, a list is here below. The main immediate asks now are ceasefire (includes reopening of Gaza for humanitarian assistance and release of hostages), and a UNSC authorization of a peacekeeping presence in Gaza.

President Biden: https://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/  

Stefphane Dujarric spokesman for UN Secretary General: dujarric@un.org

Palestinian Authority (NY office): palestine@un.int

Israel Embassy: info@washington.mfa.gov.il

Israel Consulate: consular.services@newyork.mfa.gov.il

Egypt embassy: consulate@egyptembassy.net

Jordan embassy outreach@jordanembassyus.org

Saudi embassy: https://saudiembassy.net/contact-us

US Mission to the UN https://usun.usmission.gov/mission/contact-us/