What's at stake in Israel right now

Cutting through the maddening spin

Welcome to a Saturday night edition of Progress Report.

It’s now been a week since Hamas attacked Israeli civilians and triggered an explosive and brutal new chapter in the long-running war in Gaza. It has dominated the news and consumed our politics, and threatens to only grow more urgent and dire.

I’ve got a bunch of original reporting to publish here, on voting rights and new state laws and legal battles that are still ongoing, and I’ll roll out those stories for sure over the next few days. But tonight, given how the Israel-Gaza conflict has animated our own politics and will play a large role going forward, I want to share a fact-driven piece on what is happening and the choices that will determine the future.

Back to the normal Progress Report tomorrow!

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It wasn’t long after the world learned about Hamas’s horrifying military assault on civilians outside the Gaza Strip that people began to call it Israel’s 9/11. At first, I rolled my eyes at what felt like a reductive and dishonest comparison that ignored the very different context informing the respective terrorist attacks — there’s no justification for such evil, but there’s a reason why Hamas only had to break through a fence to begin its rampage.

Now that a week has passed since the surprise offensive shocked Israel and the western world, I’m starting to see the parallels, just not in the ways that those who originally made the comparison intended.

Like al-Qaeda’s coordinated acts of terror on September 11th, Hamas’s massacre of innocent civilians has tempted the worst of our impulses and unlocked a callous barbarism rooted in racism, opportunism, and misinformation.

Context of Carnage

Between the historically charged nature of the conflict and the cesspool of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the misinformation bit is more challenging than ever before. The only way to talk rationally about this is to ground it in facts and context. Here’s where the situation stands as of Saturday evening:

The brutality inflicted by Hamas on innocent Israelis continues to shock with every new image and revelation; 1300 Israelis have been killed, each and everyone of them a tragedy, whether or not the method of murder matches the rumors on social media.

Meanwhile, the destruction being rained down on innocent civilians in Gaza continues kill indiscriminately. When an Israeli defense minister promised a campaign that would prioritize “damage over accuracy,” it confirmed that the IDF does not ultimately see a distinction between Palestinian civilians and Hamas terrorists, a dishonest conceit that opens the door to genocide.

Here is Israeli President Isaac Herzog blaming Palestinians civilians for Hamas’s attack, armed with misleading statements that cover up his government’s past support for the terrorist regime:

As of Friday, more than 6000 bombs had been dropped on Gaza, devastating communities that no longer have functioning hospitals, medicine, or even electricity. More than 2200 Palestinian civilians have been killed, including 725 children. Of the more than 8700 Palestinians to sustain injuries during the bombing, more than 2000 of them have been children.

Israel warned a million Palestinians to flee Gaza before they level the place, knowing full well that the military’s blockade made it impossible to leave; human rights organizations, including the UN itself, have called it illegal and urged the military to reverse course, in part because even trying to comply has been deadly: Several trucks filled civilians who were attempting to follow the exit orders were wiped out by the Israeli military.

Bombings will resume Sunday, and a ground war may be next.

Never Forget

What would a rational response to the initial Hamas attacks have looked like? It would not have been difficult to show both strength and sobriety, and nobody would have looked sideways at a statement that called for eliminating the perpetrators of terror, ensuring the security of civilians, and forging a solution to the situation that underpins the entire conflict.

Naturally, the United States has done the opposite.

Instead, American politicians and leading media alike have gone all-in on total war with a performative gusto. From the outset, the elite political class has backed a deeply unpopular far-right government that’s run by fringe ideological leaders who have spent years thirsting for this opportunity, allowed the attacks to happen, and have no viable response plan beyond weaponizing trauma and maximizing carnage. It’s sidelined Muslim journalists, and spread falsehoods about larger conspiracies intended to provoke further conflict.

Sounds familiar, right?

It has been a bipartisan affair in the US, just as it was 22 years ago.

Lawmakers like Democratic Reps. Ritchie Torres and Josh Gottenheimer spent days unleashing dehumanizing rhetoric about Palestinian civilians, whether on Twitter or in the faces of their colleagues.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (The Worst Democratic Governor in the Country) offered zero words of comfort for constituents whose families were stuck in Gaza.

The State Department has urged officials and spokespeople to not use language that encourages Israel to show restraint in its brutal response.

The White House said it was “repugnant” for progressive members of Congress to call for a ceasefire or acknowledge Israel’s history of mistreatment of Palestinians.

Ed Markey got booed by an audience for suggesting a “deescalation of violence on both sides,” a sign that Democratic leaders’ rhetoric has rubbed off on voters.

In prostrating themselves for donors and indulging their own personal bigotries, many Democrats were barely distinguishable from Republicans, who are permitted to cater to local neo-Nazis while also pretending to be offended by the mass murder of Jews.

Republicans, meanwhile, have taken advantage of the assault on nuance to push for a war with Iran, despite no evidence that it had anything to do with the terrorist attacks. Republicans are the most cynical actors here, as they continue to capitalize on death and destruction to further their own hateful, war-hungry foreign policy.

Again, sound familiar?

Actually, the response here has been in some ways even more dismal than what followed 9/11. The War on Terror was sold as a noble necessity, while this time, there has been no pretense about wanting to solve a geopolitical emergency, no commitment to winning freedom for an oppressed populace governed by Arab terrorists.

Not In Our Name

Though they’ve very publicly promised their full support to Israel and the Jewish community, most American politicians have actually done nothing of the sort.

Israel’s largest newspapers say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears responsibility for Hamas’s massacres, and voters overwhelmingly agree. His approval rating, already suffering after his efforts to weaken Israel’s democracy, plummeted to an all-time low this week. Protests are growing, and it seems as if he believes that the only way out is through, even if a majority of Israelis want him out of office.

Here is the son of a missing Israeli peace activist:

Questioning the wisdom and humanity of an all-out war has been called anti-semitic here in the United States, a stance taken by cynical conservatives, hardliner Orthodox Jews, and centrist Democrats who want to take out the progressive left. It would be hard to accuse Israeli civilians of antisemitism, yet the twisted sentiment has preyed on the emotions and deep-seated vulnerabilities of Jewish Americans, as I can tell you first-hand.

Persecution, from biblical times through the Holocaust, has been the primary force that has shaped the history of the Jewish people, and it remains central to our religious education and self-perception. It’s not a victim complex, but instead a “never again” covenant, and just how that promise is kept is increasingly hard to square.

Israel has taken great pains to assume the mantle of representing Jews all over the world over the past few decades. It has received so much help from the United States that Israel has become all but synonymous with a people that are far more diverse, ethnically and ideologically, than the far-right regime currently in place.

It is not antisemitic to disagree with Israel, and it’s my hope that soon logic will win out. The war that Netanyahu seems hell-bent on prosecuting with the help of his far-right defense ministers is not only a morally misguided one, it’s a tactically short-sighted one, too.

The story linked above lays out all the possibilities, most of them incredibly grim. Mass death, flattened cities, millions of refugees, additional nations drafted into the battle, further geopolitical conflict, generations of new terrorists, economic turmoil, crumbling relations with other superpowers, and no actual security achieved.

Sound familiar?

It’s hard to write about the Israel-Gaza conflict without immediately triggering deeply held emotions. Misinformation is rife, agendas are murky, and entire identities are intertwined with the land and its history.

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