The Right Side of a Wrong War

One of the strangest aspects of war is the awful ambiguity. When it's innocent civilians dying on both sides, morality often blurs. For the outsiders who watch chaos unfold through TV screens, rights and wrongs can fall into a muddled wayside. 

Israelis will tell you that whatever reckoning Gaza now faces is entirely at the hands of Hamas. They will say that the children who die within those besieged borders are the unfortunate casualties of war. They will say that October 7th brought with it the brutal slaughtering of the largest number of Jewish people since The Holocaust - that brothers and daughters and genocide survivors alike were killed and taken hostage by terrorists with a senseless disregard for human life.

Palestinians will tell you that it's blameless children who are dying in Israel's fiery bombardments. They'll tell you that it isn't their fault that Hamas uses their homes and hospitals to house their rockets. They'll say that they've been bombed in their settlements only to be bombed again in the places to which they're told to flee. 

And the truth is… both the Israelis and the Palestinians are right. Those lurching through the dilapidated squalor of Gaza Strip will feel one set of facts. The undiluted truth of all the lives they've lost is etched into their collective consciousness with a searing burn. 

Those on the other side of the border, mourning children, friends, and family members of their own - hoping for the return of their loved ones among the hostages - they feel another set of facts. And both sides bear the brunt of these divergent realities with a comparably grating heat. But their sufferings are incommensurate. Because these truths are ones that transcend textbooks and cut deep into the lived experiences of warring masses, empathy between those disputed borders is scarce and quickly-fleeting. Compromise remains a lofty and far away dream floating cruelly out of reach. 

There's no reconciling the realities and histories of these two embattled peoples. No one can tell Israel that they haven't earned the right to retaliate; to Israelis these words are hollow. They're weightless in the face of their losses. Nor can anyone tell the Palestinians that they haven't endured horrible tragedies of their own. The indignation is on both sides, and in both cases it's as righteous as can be. 

To see representatives of either side of the issue address the world is to see people blinded by a dire, godly fury. Israelis and Palestinians alike stare with resolute and unflinching eyes down the barrel of an endless war. As Gaza is turned to rubble and bombs continue to fall, maniacal leaders of the Middle East watch with locked focus and issue thinly veiled threats. 

"If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel," Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated. It's an unskirtable truth that many Muslims want no less than the total annihilation of the Israeli state. But to say that peace is as straight forward as lowered arms is to grossly oversimplify the inhumane conditions under which the Palestinian people now live. Problems were always going to emerge within those walls, and the Israeli government bears some responsibility for the flames that stoked this conflict.

Even in times of peace Palestinian citizens have been murdered and victimized. But there's hardly a claim of injustice that can be leveled by one side that can't be plainly turned upon the other. Though I can't say my limited time in Israel has given me much insight into its thousands of years of war-torn history, I believe the politics of my own country offer a microcosmic glimpse into the same dynamic. 

In recent years, the political landscape in the United States has grown more and more plagued by flagrant hypocrisies. Our presidential elections have woefully devolved into competitions between the lesser of two aged evils. And as members of each party have drifted to further extremes of ideology, the room for reasoned conversation between the opposite sides of the aisle has disappeared into a sea of dissension. Democrats and Republicans live in separate worlds.

Prior to 2016, civil debate with an opponent was a prospect that still felt possible. But ever since then, the middle ground to be found between liberals and conservatives has dwindled into something nearly non-existent. Social media, conspiracies, and deep-fakes have pried open ideological divides so wide that the country risks falling head first into a fissure of its very own creation. No issues remain on which the other side can't pull a loaded "what about" card. In the age of algorithms and AI, whether the cards were summoned from a spurious deck loses its relevance.

But in this Israel/Palestine conflict that stretches back whole millennia, the cards fill entire textbooks. And on every face of every heart, club, diamond, and spade is another blood-stained conflict. The further back the pages, the more obscured they grow. The suits, kings, queens, and empires meld into a daunting and macabre tale of violent days gone by.

Where these trying times first began is a place of faded legend. The records of that unapproachable past have been eroded, distorted, redacted, revised, repurposed, and reinterpreted. Some of the records are no more than stories - unwitting pawns being whispered ever-forward through the annals of time to tear a modern world asunder. 

In our past, there are few territories so profoundly entrenched in battle and controversy as Israel. The sad reality is that there are no viable paths forward where the battle ceases completely. There's no one state or two state solution that's been proposed to which there's not an armed group of extremist opposition. 

Israel's stated mission is one that the world can plainly see is futile. It wants to destroy an ideology through a campaign of bombs, tanks and rockets. It wants to erase each member of Hamas, as though their erasure would mark a swift end to anti-semitism across the globe. It's fighting an unwinnable war with an unwavering determination. Israel's opponents stretch well beyond the Gaza borders, and they're prepared for a war that spans entire decades - even if it means engulfing the Middle East in interminable hellfire. 

There are few paths forward that don't result in mass death. I'm not sure that there are any at all. In these wars hinging on religious disputes, there are few compromises that can be reached. As long as there are factions on both sides of this who believe they've been granted the same land by the same god, the conversation of compromise isn't one that leads anywhere new. And that's one of the great dangers of religion. It closes the door to rational debate. Israelis and Palestinians can keep warring in vain until the world stops spinning, but as long as the creator of the universe is taking sides in their land disputes, the only peace we can hope for will be shaky and short-lived.

Disagreements over territory should be matters of politics. It's one of the great arguments for the separation of church and state. 

There's enough space on earth for both Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and prosperity, but it's in holding onto the crumbling sites of bygone times that they find themselves fighting the same bloody battles over and over ad crushing infinitum. All attempts at compromise will succumb to grim and sisyphean fates as long as both parties continue clinging with clenched fists to the murky remnants of a distant past.

I can't trivialize the importance of these historic places, but I can say with a sober-hearted certainty that there's no building, temple, palace, or artifact on earth that's worth the price of the 10,000 innocent lives humanity has paid for this conflict since only October. Maybe one day, both sides can find a way to live without being chained to their histories. But the stranglehold of faith-based thinking is a cloud that forever looms over this conflict. Until the shackles fall, or a hope for peace emerges through this stifling, stifling fog, this struggle will continue claiming victims like numbing clockwork.