THE SEA WE SWIM IN
I've heard and seen some wild shit this week. (Though I probably shouldn't, I'll leave out the most insane anti-Semitic noise and conspiracy and the details of the most disgusting videos ever posted to the internet and instead focus on some fact-based claims that keep arising from, seemingly, otherwise sensible people. I say "probably shouldn't" because context is always, always, ALWAYS critical; but I just don't have it in me at the moment...)
We all have gaps in our knowledge. And I like finding out that what I thought was so was really misperception or bias or ignorance, or all of the above. So, when I hear something I'm not sure about or that sounds fishy I'm pretty eager to go and investigate as best I can. (And “as best I can” always includes sources as varied as possible while also always excluding, where possible, anything produced in the moment, to try and avoid the worst errors and propaganda out there.) This week, like so many in recent memory, provided plenty to look into. Weirdly, though these claims form the basis of serious arguments, public-facing political stances, and even worldviews, the facts surrounding the matter are commonly neither hard to come by nor highly controversial. Here, I want to talk about the membership of Hamas, prison, apartheid and ethnic cleansing, a two-state solution and land claims.
MEMBERSHIP
One weird thing I heard in many places this week was how insignificant Hamas is. Folks highlight that these militants number so few, maybe 5,000 or 10,000 (or one person: “it's like 3,000 out of a population of millions.”) They offer this as an argument against a full-scale military response, or occasionally any response, by Israel. With regard to Hamas, folks seem to be suggesting that, as a result of their small numbers, Hamas is not meaningfully different from a handful of kids in a park playing with sticks, or knocking off a Louis Vuitton in their free block between Calculus and Strings. Of course, this arrives in the context of everyone’s perfect awareness of the organization’s billions in annual external funding, their long history of using diverse weapons, tools, and tactics for the most brutal violence, their kidnapping and murder operations stretching out across decades, Palestinian/Hamas supporters around the globe continually endorsing and enacting similar violence, oh and just having perpetrated the most indiscriminate acts of barbarism humans are capable of (killing and kidnapping young and old, Jew and non-Jew, and people of all nationalities; in this instance: Thais, Cambodians, Nepalis, Sri Lankans, Tanzanians, South Africans, Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentinians, Russians, Germans, Americans, Canadians and more, as well as Israelis...) So, aside from the above argument making no sense and being unethical, what's wrong with this assessment?
Well, firstly, even if you believe Hamas is an organization so tiny as to be inconsequential, the West Bank is full, chocked full, of terrorist groups in addition to Hamas. To name a few: Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Palestine Liberation Front, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. And the situation in Gaza is similar. Gaza hosts Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Army of Islam, Abdallah Azzam Brigades, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, ISIS - Sinai Province, Mujahidin Shura Council in the Environs of Jerusalem, Palestine Islamic Jihad, Palestine Liberation Front, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command, and likely others. These groups are not book clubs or knitting circles. They all have similar motives and aims to Hamas. Their members are numerous and they are inclined to share images of themselves masked and in camouflage, posing with rocket launchers. (This is so while people assert that the Israeli blockade, like a strong weld, prevents even ideas from permeating. Right, but truckloads of rockets, heavy arms, and ammunition are getting in from their friends in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and elsewhere. Those are, what, falling from the sky, are they?) And, no, contrary to the unethical noise your anthro instructor infects your mind with, the beliefs and goals of these groups and their members are not just as valid as any other and sit among the plethora of mutually compatible ideas found among a diverse world community. They include but are not limited to the extermination of anyone who doesn't look or think like them. And you need not take my word for it. Nor do you need to interpret or assume anything. Just go read what Hamas and their jihadist brethren say they're up to in official publications and statements as well as school textbooks and children's cartoons. You’ll find their more pedestrian grievances (and those that folks in California and Ontario want to highlight or impose on them) all take a back seat to their intent to commit genocide (and kill indiscriminately on their way there, with theologically grounded assurances of immortality and merely following the example of the last and greatest of all role models.) Extermination and/or death in that quest is their primary motivation.
So if the area controlled by Hamas was twice the size of any borders drawn over the region in the last century, with Israel sequestered in a corner of the Negev, Hamas would still be directing all their resources and energy toward genocide. And, as we all know, many of these groups wish to bring their passions to the world, far beyond the region. Which is to say that being, or having ever been, under the boot of the Israeli military in Gaza is neither their reference point nor the substance of what animates them. Again, if you doubt this just go look at their stated aims and pair that with their actions in the world. To my horror, folks flatly deny that militant Islam is a prism through which millions of Palestinians perceive, interpret, and operate. So much so that, like the membership numbers for Hamas, these folks will also claim Palestinians didn't really elect Hamas or, if they did, Hamas didn't have broad support. This, despite the propaganda wing calling the win a "landslide". What can be made of such noise? Sure, if you reside in left-leaning circles in the English-speaking world, you may be shocked to discover these folks are not secretly pining for free-trade agreements with New Zealand or Singapore, trying to innovate in the desalination or quantum computing spaces, nor are they seeking Olympic gold in javelin or equestrian. And, if that is so, you may find it difficult to imagine that their worldly aims are not about "ending apartheid" either (more on that in a moment...) Further, if you think like this, you'll never believe that Hamas is less motivated to feed and house the Palestinian population or make peace than they are preoccupied with converting billions in international aid into arms and offensive infrastructure. Right. So, to those folks I would like to ask what they feel Jane Jacobs would say is the ideal saturation of murderous psychopaths (found endlessly pushing out messaging that attempts to outdo all other death cults) is per neighbourhood? I'm going to suggest that Gaza is far closer to being lethally over-saturated than innocuously dilute.
Secondly, all the estimates I can find for the membership of Hamas, this one organization alone, are FAR higher than what is offered. Like, at least ten times. And if you go looking, even Hamas offers numbers in that range. So why would someone in London, New York, or Vancouver, who isn't a militant jihadist and is happy to argue that they are pro-Palestinian, and most definitely not pro-Hamas, and, presumably, also oppose every idea held by everyone in or adjacent to Hamas, then go and defend Hamas on grounds its membership and leadership do not — suggesting their support, scale, reach, and propensity for violence are limited in ways they simply are not and have never been? Why argue they and a dozen other like groups are not comprised of and don't represent the Palestinian people, when they themselves and a majority of Palestinians say they do? Why would an American intellectual or activist in the street happily acknowledge that it was ordinary Germans or Rwandans who committed the most heinous acts — not those drugged, suffering an aneurysm, intensely brainwashed their whole lives, under a long and terrible duress or just burning with hate — but still find themselves unable to accept the ordinariness of Palestinian atrocities? Why would we pretend that when the barriers were smashed down that it was only the elite elements of those card carrying members of this death cult who crossed over to behead Thai citizens and beat to death Tanzanians? What would we pretend it was not regular, ordinary Palestinians who, the day before dragging their screaming and bloodied captives back home through a taunting mob of their friends and neighbours, were at the mall buying a new cell phone and tending the tomatoes in their garden? Have you seen the footage, their own footage? My best attempt at trying to see what took place was to find photographers based in Gaza and look what they were putting out when all of this was going down. And how many pictures do you need of folks in soccer jerseys, jeans, and flip-flops celebrating atop Israeli equipment (within the '67 borders of Israel!) before you admit that this wasn't a military operation or carried out by "Hamas militants"? It was a full-scale invasion by Gazans, generally. Gazans finally pulled off what was continually attempted for two years during the March of Return...
All this to say I don't know what folks are looking at or talking about. But to me one thing is crystal clear: all of this deflection and downplaying appears indistinguishable from the behaviour we would expect of people who are very much pro-Hamas; most certainly not anti-Hamas, of all things. And if you want some quotes or sources for these numbers I’m offering:
"He said the group had a military academy training a range of specialisations including cyber security, and boasts a naval commando unit among its 40,000-strong military wing."
“In 2003, Hamas leaders estimated the number of troops in the Qassam Brigade’s ranks at around 20,000. However, some observers believe it is closer to 40,000. One reason for this is because after Hamas won elections in Gaza in 2006, the limit on military recruitment was extended by the Hamas-led government. The group is also aligned with other factions that each have a few thousand fighters.”
“Additionally, the Brigades have an estimated 30,000 operatives 'of varying degrees of skill and professionalism' ... Other sources estimate their strength at 30,000-50,000.”
Okay, now, thirdly, recognize that those numbers also don't cover other critical actors within this one organization nor their supporters. And it doesn't cover their global network of donors and fundraisers or arms dealers including entire nations such as Turkey, Egypt, Sudan, Qatar, and Iran, of course but just those Hamas considers its footsoldiers. (Not those who would take up arms in a war to fight against another army or carry out a targeted attack against armed combatants who’ve attacked them but to indiscriminately execute as many unarmed civilians as possible [even Nepali students or Mexican vegetable pickers] — and do so in the most gruesome manner possible; but not merely in some kind of momentary, drug-induced orgy of blood but having premeditated this while also recording and sharing videos of the worst bits to social media, as if it were wedding or concert footage, and not so much as a tactic to terrorize Israelis as with the knowledge that the images are certain to solicit sympathy and support [and propaganda] from other sadists the world over. Apparently, the psychopath cohort includes thousands of student groups at elite universities all across the West — even dozens of such groups at just one of its most revered and celebrated schools. We won't get into the spontaneous rallies that sprung up all over Canada, the US, UK, Germany, South Africa, Australia and more in the immediate aftermath, not in support of the victims of the most gruesome attack anyone can remember but in support of Hamas. And they don't just tell us, as clearly as they are able, that they love what happened and that the victims are to blame [with a thousand gathered at the Sydney Opera House chanting "Fuck the Jews!", and synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses targeted across Europe], but even MPs stand at the steps of parliament belching over loudspeakers to a cheering crowd that the Israeli embassy is "no longer welcome" and that all South Africans "stand side-by-side with Hamas ... and will fight side-by-side with them.") Right.
And, if all that isn't enough, then let’s talk about scale. Canada is the nation with the largest coastline on earth, bordering three oceans. It also has a population eight times that of Palestine. And how many active members does Canada’s Navy maintain? Just 8,000. Right, just 20% the size of just the Kalashnikov-carrying wing of Hamas. So in what sense is this figure on offer a "small" one? To my mind, if there are only 3,000 happy to post to Tiktok videos of themselves beheading your niece or grandfather and then desecrating their corpse, and would do so as their version of a marketing campaign or school car wash fundraising project, I would suggest that’s more than enough. Bold, I know.
PRISON, APARTHEID, AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
I also heard and read this week, so many times, from folks using the terms "occupation and ethnic cleansing." Others regurgitated a slightly more moderate line about the situation in Gaza being tantamount to apartheid. “Well, what’s the problem with that?” they ask when your eyebrows shoot into your forehead with such velocity you almost fall over backwards. "Well, my dear," you might offer in response, "the problem is that words have meanings. And if words have meanings, both of these offerings are silly. In fact, they may even stoop to the level of stupid."
What would it mean for Israel to be engaged in ethnic cleansing against Palestinians (that is to say: a program aimed at rendering the entire region ethnically homogeneous)? Ignoring that the Jewish community itself is hugely diverse, isn't the nation of Israel a multi-ethnic state? Not only do they gladly issue visas and accept as citizens folks who identify as Palestinian (or Arab or Muslim... or anything else) but folks with such identities sit in its highest offices, as senior educators and administrators in the nation's institutions of higher education, as judges, and in government. Right. To be specific, the citizenship of people who identify as something other than Jewish in Israel is roughly at the level of those identifying as Asian in British Columbia: about 25-30% of the population. Which is to say, not a token or invisible minority but a very significant contribution. And all of this exists alongside Israel maintaining the religious and cultural sites of others (or creating space for others to do so, such as the Jordanian administration of the al-Aqsa mosque and other important sites.) Right. So how do these realities comport with any of the expulsion or extermination campaigns of which we know so well? They don’t. Right. Because nothing of the sort is happening.
Does it need to be said that, if this was actually their aim, they could have carried this out on any weekend in living memory or tomorrow? That should be enough to cause folks to look for other motivations for Israeli actions. And yet, of course, it never does. One might ask themselves why?
Thinking about this more critically, it occurred to me to look into life expectancy. (Life expectancy really is an interesting metric and not some cold detached figure because everything from contraception and childhood vaccination to international trade and religious beliefs and more all complexly factor in...) The figures here were surprising to me. The life expectancy for Palestinians in 1950 was 45, in 1980 it was 61, and today it is 74. For context, over this same period life expectancy for Canadians grew at half the rate, moving up just 15 years. To look globally, this current number for Palestinians exceeds the global average of 71 and the Asian average of 72 while far surpassing the African average of 61; however, it is the same as the average for the Americas and three years lower than the European average life expectancy. This while some would propose Palestinians have experienced generations of unrelenting genocide, or at the very least brutal oppression including a campaign of starvation and indiscriminate violence. Still, if you’re wondering how their longevity compares with other nations in the region specifically, Palestine has a life expectancy only slightly below Lebanon, roughly the same as Morocco and Jordan, and above that of Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Tunisia, Libya, Oman, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Right. Palestine being the only place on the list said to be an “open-air prison” or "concentration camp" and experiencing a systematic, multi-generational "campaign of extermination" — all while life expectancy grows, generation after generation, as the population doubles and then doubles again just in my lifetime.
So what of apartheid? The term literally means apart-hood (or separateness). We use the word to describe a particularly deep form of institutionalized racism. It's really a civilization-deranging obsession with race that aims to eliminate diversity by maintaining racial segregation (including within housing, employment, and even personal relationships, preventing members of different races from dating, marrying, and especially reproducing.) Within the apartheid regime, not only was everyone formally labelled as a member of a particular race (whether that made any sense or not) and mixing made criminal (even a mingling so innocuous, non-existent really, as sitting on a vacant "white-only" park bench) but unnecessary interaction was deemed a kind of cosmic crime against God and Nature and said to be deeply immoral. Is that or any part of this what the state of Israel is up to? Could that possibly be what they're up to given the demographics and how things appear on the streets of Tel Aviv or Haifa?
More than that, anecdotally, we also know Canadians of all stripes, for example, move to Palestine and that Palestinians immigrate to Canada, and do so all the time. Right. And they move their families back and forth, too. I've had friends and colleagues and professors who've done so and who are currently there, even. And we know many can return to Canada at any time but don't wish to and would refuse to do so given the current conflict. These folks are even interviewed about their experience on CBC. Right. And if you go on social media you can easily track down and follow Palestinians and check out their delightful family vacation photos. You can watch them cruising around town in their cool cars, in their flashy clothes, fresh from the beauty shop, visiting resorts or sharing their trips to the newest cafes or taking in the sunset down at the beach. I highly recommend doing so for a real glimpse of Palestinian life. Does this sound anything like the internment or concentration camps you know about? You've seen photos from Buchenwald, Dachau, and Treblinka, I assume. What about mere prisons? I think the above realities alone exposes the prison-like claims to be, at best, ludicrous.
A TWO-STATE SOLUTION AND LAND CLAIMS
Many people have said, over and over again this week, things along the lines of “Why won’t Israel accept the ‘two-state solution’ and peace with its neighbours?” Alternatively they argue that their version of a solution would be the acceptance of some previous border or framework. Right. Great. Go look at the outcome of those proposals.
There aren't insignificant factions on both sides with intractable positions who don't want the two-state scenario or would only accept such with some unreasonable amendments, as is commonly framed. Different proportions of the Arab population at different times, but always an influential group, have considered the existence of Israel in any form as an intolerable civilizational violation. So many folks in the region, most vociferously Palestinians, have made explicit their determination to never permit any part of the region taken in the Muslim Conquest, "from the river to the sea", to be controlled, or in some cases even resided upon, by non-Muslims. An opportunity for statehood was available and acted upon by Israel and also a two-state proposal accepted by the region's Jewish population, but it has always been rejected by Palestinians. We all know this. Of course, Palestinian Arabs (and occasionally in coordination with all of Israel’s other neighbours) have preferred to respond to these realities and gestures by attempting to wipe Israel and all Jews in the region off the Earth. And we all know that just such a declared war of extermination by seven armies was the crucible out of which Israel was truly born. And we know this stance of annihilation on the part of too many Palestinians, of course, predated and continued in the aftermath of the Holocaust and really has not let up since then, largely pushed by Iran in the current moment.
This also gets to the notion of power imbalance and of Israel as being framed as the evil oppressor. What version of history could possibly make this so? The Arab world and the broader Muslim community (including Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria directly, with troop, arms, material, and funding contributions from Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, Indonesia and others at various times) has almost ceaselessly sought the removal of Jews from the region by any means possible (expelling anyone with Jewish ancestry from their borders, declaring war against them as a people, and killing them when possible.) But, of course, this is a territory which makes perfect sense for the Jewish population to call its homeland and does so by the very logic any of the folks pontificating about the situation on social media or podcasts or in the news would use to defend the territorial claims or human rights of any other people! Right. These same folks who bark slogans such as "No one is illegal" and who celebrate the arrival of millions on migrant ships from across the Mediterranean into Europe are weirdly passionate about Jewish refugees of the Holocaust heading to "the promised land" being illegal migrants or, most bizarrely, colonists. Right. And they know that we pull artifacts from the sand, now eons old, written in the resurrected language spoken by Israelis in modern times. And they know so many of the towns and cities in the region have Hebrew names that predate their Arabic ones or that their modern Arabic names are based upon. Still, those folks will go on and on about Israelis being recent settler-occupiers engaged in some kind of modern colonialist project. Like, how deep your anti-Semitism?
Really. What is the argument? What does it mean to know all the above and still forward the weird anti-Zionist claim that these people are from elsewhere and only recently so? And what does it mean to have knowledge of the millennia of well-documented expulsions and pogroms (and even recent attacks across the globe too numerous to name) and still claim this couldn’t possibly justify a safe-space (while simultaneously arguing that having once experienced a microaggression in a sociology class justifies not just a safe-space but special protections, pre-emptive warnings, the transformation of language and culture, and the nerfing our entire collective world)? Or is it that you feel Uganda, Argentina, or British Columbia are better and more easily explained locations for the Jewish homeland the Arabs of Palestine keep convincing us is so essential? What exactly is the argument, the whole argument, fleshed out in detail, accounting for even some of the known history? As far as I can tell, there isn't one.
Perhaps worse than all of the above is that these same people, the most progressive among us, with all the above bizarre offerings (in parliament, on television, in social media posts and more) have also spent the better part of a decade demanding America’s government or university students or professors (who are often barely Centrist), or Canadian truckers (protesting what they saw as draconian government policies) or the police (merely responding to violent criminal activity) are, in fact, definitional Nazis. And they may have joined ANTIFA (that group that claims not to be a group while brandishing a logo and flag, enforcing a dress-code and forwarding slogans and a strict code of conduct to their members on their social media group pages) and participated in a riot (or just three hundred) or merely attended one of countless so-called anti-Fascist protests against any of the above in San Diego or Portland or Victoria. And they may have adopted the slogan “punch a Nazi” — while also understanding a Nazi to be anyone who disagrees with them on anything, anything at all. (And they may even work as a professor of ethics and also choose not to punch but to crush with a bike lock the skulls not of Nazis but of folks who committed the crime of defending the First Amendment or voting differently than they did or who they simply feel are insufficiently anti-authoritarian by their own unique standards...) And, of course, these are the same people who will take delight in hunting down examples of and excoriating others for victim-blaming. And they'll do all of this while arguing that avowed white-supremacists in Ukraine do not exist (even ones who pose proudly for photos with their Nazi neck tattoos and badges, authoring Nazi blogs and filming their ultranationalist, race-obsessed military boot camps for aspiring Nazi children); or that celebrations of literal members of the SS in the Canadian Parliament is of no interest; or even that there are legitimate, or merely comprehensible, reasons for rounding up and executing Jews (and that you can drive around town or gather in parks celebrating this.) Oh, and then they'll spell out all the ways in which Israelis generally (or anyone living or working or going to school there) are responsible for their own rape and murder. All of this can only be a clear indication of the potency of the pervasive anti-Semitism we find ourselves swimming in and whose tide is rising.
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