That small, ghastly, sacred place ...

Revenge Is Like Drinking Poison And Waiting For The Other Person To Die. Nelson Mandela

Professor Peter Beinart, a Jewish activist and honest man, writes in the New York Times: 

... 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.”

... 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.

... From those reckonings, small, beloved communities can be born, and grow. ... 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.

Though Beinart lives and works in New York City, he's not some ivory tower pundit. His parents were Jewish immigrants from South Africa. He made the moral and intellectual mistake of endorsing George W. Bush's Iraq campaign and since has remade himself as a skeptical and humble observer of conventional wisdom.

If you read once source on Israel/Palestine, I highly recommend his substack: The Beinart Notebook.