Grieving Choices Not Made

The big diplomatic news of the week is the rush of longtime Israel-supporting countries -- Canada,  France, Australia, and the UK among them -- announcing their formal recognition of Palestine as a state. Israel and its supporters have sought to discredit this move as "rewarding" Hamas for its 10/7 terror initiative. To that, my semi-sardonic response has been to say that it is indeed very important that initiatives like these not be presented as "rewarding Hamas" -- they must instead be framed as "punishing Israel". Punishing Israel for its intransigence, for its hyper-aggressiveness, and for its brazen acts of sabotage towards the possibility of a two-state solution.

In all seriousness, I think that is a more plausible description of what is going on. These countries have no interest in elevating Hamas -- indeed, they've presented their recognition as in explicit opposition to Hamas (and the PA, for admittedly self-centered reasons, affirms the same). What has motivated them to action is a complete (and completely justified) collapse in any faith that Israel is operating in good faith -- that it harbors any serious commitment to securing a just peace with the Palestinians, that its campaign in Gaza is remotely compatible with the laws of war or even is (at the point) significantly motivated by a desire to see the hostages return, and that the far-right racist extremists in Netanyahu's government aren't entirely running the show. This collapse in confidence is reflected here too -- a dramatic shift in public opinion against Israel, not just amongst Democrats but (younger) Republicans as well, that threatens to leave Israel as a super-Sparta Hermit Kingdom.

I think there are a lot of Jews who look at these developments, look at how they are the bitter harvest of Israel's own choices, and think "I wish they would have chosen differently." Why did they have to go down this route? Why did they have to choose the path of the most bloodshed, the most extremism, the most intransigence, the most of everything awful?

And "choose" is critical here. Anyone who has spent time in Zionist circles is familiar with the old complaint that the world acts if the Palestinians lack agency -- as if none of the current situation is the result of their decisions, it's all just thrust upon them by the big bad Israel. Yet right now, I think it is the Israel apologists who are refusing to reckon with the concept of agency -- they act as if there was nothing (or only the most marginal tweaks) that Israel could have done differently post-10/7: it had to fight Hamas this way, it had to use starvation as a weapon of war, it had to kowtow to settler extremists launching pogroms, it had to publicly announce that blocking the formation of a free Palestinian state was the government's raison d'etre.

No. It did not have to do anything of these things. It chose them, and what we are seeing is the consequence of choices that could have been made differently.

"Choose" critical here. The very first post I wrote after 10/7 was titled "Ghouls, Failure, Fatalism, and Responsibility." The "fatalism" portion of that post read as follows.

Finally, there is almost no chance that the fallout from this assault has any consequence other than catastrophe for innocent Israelis and Palestinians alike. And yet, we must resist the sort of fatalism about that seeming inevitability that leads to an abdication of responsibility. Too many voices I've seen today have, in one way or another, expressed sentiments to the effect that the events of today and/or those to come are the inevitable consequence of history's weave. How could you expect Hamas wouldn't seize an opportunity to massacre Israeli civilians en masse? How could you expect Israel won't respond with zero regard for Palestinian life?

No. There is agency here. The word of the day I'm already growing to hate is "(un)provoked", as in an emergent discourse which wants to be absolutely sure we all know that whatever hideous crime Hamas just committed or whatever overwhelming military incursion Israel may be about to launch, there is a reason behind it -- it didn't just happen out of air. Which -- no kidding. In the context of a conflict that's resulted in a half dozen international wars in the space of less than century, nothing is ever "unprovoked". But that doesn't absolve anyone of agency. Hamas made a choice to launch this attack -- a brutal, violent, targeted assault on a civilian population whose only tactical objective was the sowing of terror. They are not the passive receptacles of historical forces beyond their ken. And Israel's choices too (both those that preceded today's events and those that will follow) are choices -- they are not the inevitable consequence of some immutable historical arc.

And what I want to say right now is, it's okay to grieve the choices not made. One need not and one should not indulge in the fatalism of those who said that this was all inevitable -- a fatalism that is ultimately identical regardless of whether it speaks in critical or exculpatory language. In fact, I feel incandescent rage towards those who portray any of this as an inevitability -- that the bloodshed and the massacres and the abuses and the torture and the kidnappings had to happen. They did not have to happen, people chose for them to happen, and different choices could have and should have been made. It is okay to grieve the choices not made.

It is okay to grieve the choices not made. But one still has to acknowledge the choices that were made. Israel made choices that caused it to lose the confidence of erstwhile stalwart defenders, that made large swaths of Americans view it as foe rather than friend, that made not just the "usual suspect" critics but very sober observers take seriously the most serious and severe charges against it as a brutalizer, ethnic cleanser, even genocidaire. We can wish that it made different choices. But it didn't, and for all our grief we must still live in the world that was made by the choices that were made.