Cycle of pain

I didn't want to comment today about Israel/Palestine, but how can I not? Watching this horror happening on the other side of the world distracts from everything else.

Last night I heard a Palestinian American say that the widespread Black Lives Matter eruption in the U.S. last summer had changed something in how people in this country see the news: "there's a higher level of intuitive awareness" of colonial oppression; more of us, more easily, watch Israel pounding Gaza through that lens. The Times confirms something is changing, probably underplaying the magnitude of the attitudinal shift.

Peter Beinart explains why denouncing Hamas is not an ethically adequate response for foreign observers -- or for Israelis. 

It’s not Hamas’s Islamism that keeps it from recognizing Israel. It’s simply good politics. In the eyes of most Palestinians, Fatah’s strategy of recognizing Israel has failed. It has led not to Palestinian statehood but to deepened occupation. That creates a market for a more hardline alternative. Eliminate Islamism from Palestinian politics and some leftist or nationalist faction would fill that same hardline niche and become America’s new bogeyman.

... whether Hamas exists or not, some Palestinians will continue responding to the violence of state oppression with violence of their own. There’s nothing unusual about this. Nelson Mandela supported violence—in the 1960s he helped turn the African National Congress from a nonviolent organization into one that employed armed struggle. The Irish Republican Army planted bombs across England. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers said Black Americans needed guns. The American revolutionaries used violence. Some of the activists opposed to Myanmar’s brutal military regime are taking up arms as we speak.

My point isn’t normative: Nothing justifies Hamas’ rockets against Israeli civilians, which may constitute a war crime.

It’s descriptive. Eliminating Hamas won’t eliminate Palestinian violence any more than eliminating the ANC or IRA would have eliminated Black South African or Irish Catholic violence in the 1980s. The only way to stop oppressed people from responding to the violence of oppression with violence of their own is to end their oppression. ...

Fundamentally, Israel doesn’t have a Hamas problem. It has a Palestinian problem. It dominates and brutalizes another people. Until that domination and brutalization ends, every cease-fire will be merely an interval until the next war, regardless of which parties lead the Palestinian struggle.

This cartoon dates from a previous round of Palestinian/Israeli hostilities. That's appropriate. The atrocity just circles back around. The United States could stop funding Israel and that might help, but Israelis and Palestinians will have to figure out how to end the cycle.