The charge of selfishness might be — after that of hypocrisy — the cheapest form of criticism. Journalists are masters of it. Of course the government of Benjamin Netanyahu stands to gain from thrashing Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Hamas. So what? I’m counting on it. Would you rather that the interests of the sovereign did not coincide with those of his polity?
Much obliged to the journalists and literary lights who have pointed out that they do. Joshua Leifer in the New York Times goes on about Netanyahu’s coalitional calculations. Pankaj Mishra, in a tastelessly titled cover story for the London Review of Books, turns academic-grade artillery on the influence that domestic politicking and national soul-searching have had on Israel’s foreign conduct. Their stuff is mostly plausible. It’s also predictable, easy, tired, obvious, boring, and irrelevant. Whether the obliteration of Hamas is good policy is independent of and prior to any adjunct benefit Israeli statesmen might derive from it.
The reason: the unpardonable injury inflicted on Israel. Also the resurgence of a mortal threat. If one recognizes this pair of facts, whatever personal motives Netanyahu or Yoav Gallant or Itamar Ben-Gvir might have are tertiary. If one doesn’t, parallel purposes seem magnified. Mishra speaks his mind: Israel has a “survivalist psychosis” long trained to “pre-emptively crush” her “perceived enemies” (emphasis and exasperation mine). There you have it. Leifer names what happened in Israel last autumn an “incursion.” The word has a territorial character; it describes what I do to my neighbor when my dog takes a liking to his front lawn. Hamas’s act was medieval: ultima causa belli.
Notice one other thing. The writerly class, in the main, treats signs of Israeli inter-party unity with suspicion; evidence that some voice of justice has been repressed, a cue for the rise of some ennobling “movement.” But, to enlist Dr. Johnson, war concentrates the mind wonderfully. Total war does so totally, and it tends not to be unilateral: It requires a total foe. (There was, after all, a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas until last October, when one side decided to cease it.) Expect good citizens to subdue partisan affinities when their very being is at issue.
An Israeli acquaintance, who has served in the IDF, directs her animus exclusively at her country’s “crime minister.” We’ll see a lot more of this sort of Netanyahu-fault-finding as the war progresses. Don’t dismiss it, but keep in mind the question that determines everything: How high do you think are the stakes for Israel? Mishra calls on Ezra Klein, who asks: “I’m a Jewish person. Do I feel safer? Do I feel like there’s less antisemitism in the world right now because of what’s happening” in Gaza? I’m sorry to be blunt, but Klein doesn’t live in Tel Aviv or Kibbutz Kfar Aza. Those who do shouldn’t feel safe until Hamas has been eradicated. And dispatching theocratic homicidal antisemites would reduce antisemitism. May Israel, by whomever she happens to be led, keep at it.