An Editorial the Tone of Which May Not Be Sufficiently Angry

Having a hard time coming up with an opinion about the Crisis In The Middle East? Here are some suggestions! Hamas is a terrorist organization against which Israel is exercising its the-anarchy-of-international-relations-given right to self defense. Feeling more adventurous? The Israeli defense forces are guilt of war crimes, and Hamas is a living example of what happens when a group of people are pushed beyond their tolerance for Getting Fucked Over By Everyone Else And Not Going Murderously Insane. Feeling anti-Western? Organizations like Hamas are an inevitable side-effect of Israel’s controversial and violence-ridden history, so it should get over itself and stop murdering Palestinians in the name of some scary admixture of nationalism and religion. Still haven’t found the opinion that fits your needs? Just jumble up fragments of the foregoing examples to randomly generate more fun catchphrases. Ignore questions like whether a terrorist organization can be, well, a terrorist organization when it actually controls a territory, or whether terrorists can be guilty of war crimes, when by definition they can’t fight in wars, or whether the right to self-defense is actually a right and whether exercising what is nominally a right can not also lead to the commission of crimes.

That all might sound awfully insensitive, but it may as well be what most of us do. Because the whole affair is such a mess, a giant, enormous, ideology-riddled, historico-socio-politico-economic mess that is so hopelessly complex that you can’t form an opinion on it without tearing yourself into intellectual pieces. But it is just complex enough that you can say whatever you want to about it and get away with it, if everyone around you agrees not to think too hard.

Fortunately, there is a way out of this quagmire. All you have to do is look at some slide shows on the New York Times. There are those darn rockets. Israel, apparently, keeps all of them in the same place, and there are pictures of them stacked on top of one another. They’re nothing more than metal pipes, a few inches in diameter. Of course, the psychological damage that they produce is real, and sometimes they kill people. Let’s look at more pictures. There, arching through the sky like so many giant arrows loosed by medieval archers from within a besieged castle, are the rockets in flight. And there, sitting on tanks, or clamping their hands to their ears while their mortar fires, are the Israeli Defense Forces, looking for all the world like the army camped outside of the castle, equipped not with trebuchets but with ten-inch field artillery and tanks that could drive right over the moat whenever they damn well pleased.

Do you get the point? There is a hugehugehuge enormously large power differential between whatever form of resistance whatever interest group within the Gaza Strip can possibly cobble together and the titanic coercive power that Israel can unleash whenever and wherever it wants with a telephone call.

And this matters, and enables us to circumvent the whole stupid oh-my-god-what-is-my-opinion melodrama, because it’s all about the power, baby, despite those boring historico-socio-whateverial impliciations. And I don’t mean that sarcastically: it really, really, really is all about the power. Not the power to kill people, or the power to cripple infrastructure, or the power to psychologically mutilate a group of people, but about the power to shift the terms on which a conflict is fought. Israel is the sole possessor of this power, and it is not only its burden but in its own long-term self interest to use this power, even if it means that some pieces of what might have once been someone’s plumbing occasionally come hurtling towards its citizens, to radically alter the ways in which this conflict is fought.

By taking this position I am, of course, branding myself anti-Israel. And maybe it doesn’t get you out of the what-is-my-opinion problem; maybe it’s just another opinion. But I ask you this, I demand you this, I scream at you this: how inflammatory can I be, how anti-Israel can I be, when I speak not against Israel itself or against Israel's "right to exist," but against the vast gulf between the path it has chosen and the path it could have taken, against, in other words, what it has failed so miserably to become?