I met him midweek at Burning Man, a day before the first hint of rain. His name, along with his accent, was enough for me to ask where he was from. Israel, he said.
Although I myself am Jewish (not religiously, but…), I’ve met few Israelis — and never had a full-on political conversation with any. But that’s what we talked about. It was a bit surprising: politics isn’t much discussed on the playa.
It started with a negative comment about Donald Trump (it doesn’t take much for me to let non-Americans know I’m not one of those), then something like, “Maybe you feel my pain, what with Netanyahu….” It was a fairly safe bet. Arch-conservative fascist nationalists (in case you don’t know, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is basically a cross between Trump and Putin) ain’t flocking to Black Rock City.
We agreed on just about everything: Netanyahu is a despot. Israel is an apartheid state. The settlements are a criminal land-grab. He even concurred that Israel would be better off in the long run if U.S. support were partly tied to treatment of the Palestinians, because this would force Israel’s hand somewhat, which could only reduce tensions, which would be better for Israelis themselves, etc.
I might not have thought about him again but for the October 7 attack on his homeland. Now I can’t get him out of my mind. He’s the kind of guy who might have been at the Supernova music festival (“a journey of unity and love”) when Hamas militants showed up and started murdering everyone in sight.
The horrific irony of this particular prong of Hamas’s attack, which accounted for a full 20% of the total number of deaths in Israel during the first week of what is now a full-on war, is that they were killing off exactly the kind of people the Palestinians need as neighbors.
But of course these fuckers weren’t stopping to survey their potential victims on the Palestinian problem any more than on 9/11 the Al-Qaeda hijackers were interested in knowing whether the Americans they were killing supported U.S. Mideast policy. This attack — and the overall incursion — has been about inflicting as much wanton suffering on their neighbors as possible.
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There’s no telling what kind of damage suffering will do to a person — or a people. And both the Jews and the Palestinians have had more than their fair share. For the Jews, the Shoah (Hebrew, “catastrophe”) — more commonly known as the Holocaust — was merely the exclamation point on millennia of persecution. Then came living under constant threat from surrounding countries since the formation of the State of Israel in 1948.
That birth of a nation was, of course, part of the Palestinians’ collective suffering. Although the history of Palestinians as a single people is vaguer — prior to the 20th century CE “Palestinian” was only an adjective used to refer to anyone living in the region (“Palestinian Arabs,” “Palestinian Jews”) — the noun “Palestinian” came into usage more or less contemporaneously with the birth of the modern Zionist movement. For Palestinians, the formation of the State of Israel, which resulted in the displacement of 700,000 people from their Palestine homeland, is known as the Nakba (Arabic, “catastrophe”).
But it was the Six-Day War of 1967, during which Israel resoundingly repelled a joint attack by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, that set the stage for what’s happening right now, because that’s when Israel took/occupied the territory known as the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
Wading into the putrid mire of Israeli-Palestinian relations during the half-century since then — let’s just say both sides have suffered from incomprehensibly poor leadership (says the guy whose homeland made Trump president and continues to populate Congress with active supporters of treason) — is outside the scope of this article. For our purposes, it’s enough to note that Israel’s retention and administration of Gaza and the West Bank has continually heaped suffering on both the Israelis and Palestinians, suffering that they are causing each other in a literally vicious cycle.
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The moral of the Burning Man article I wrote upon my return to the default world, before I had cause to revisit the conversation I had with an Israeli in the dust, boils down to: It’s in your own self-interest to reduce the suffering around you. And the Tupac Shakur quote I used to illustrate the point seems doubly apt today:
If I know in this hotel room they have food every day, and I’m knocking on the door every day to eat, and they open the door and let me see the party, let me see, like, them […] throwing food around but they’re telling me there’s no food in there, [… and] I’m standing outside trying to sing my way in, [like] ‘We are hungry, please let us in,’ after about a week that song is gonna change to ‘We hungry, we need some food.’ After two, three weeks it’s like, ‘Gimme [food] or I’m breaking down the door!’ After a year […] I’m picking the lock and coming through the door blasting, you know what I’m saying?
This is the same point a Haaretz columnist (whose name I didn’t catch) made to a BBC News interviewer on October 8, which I paraphrase here close to verbatim: If you lock 2 million people in a cage to endure 16 years (i.e., the amount of time Gaza has been blockaded by Israel) with inhuman conditions, you can pretty well expect they’re going to lash out in a big way eventually. He certainly wasn’t justifying Hamas’s indiscriminate carnage, but….
The other side is just as obvious: If you launch thousands of missiles against your powerful next-door neighbor, gun down hundreds of people gathered simply to listen to music and promote peace, take dozens of hostages, commit atrocity after atrocity on individuals who never did you any harm, what do you think is going to result? As Palestinian journalist Amjad Iraqi notes,
[F]or the far-right government, this massacre, as atrocious as it is, is for them a historic opportunity. It is, for them, reinforcing this idea that the only solution to what they regard as ‘the Gaza problem’ is either the complete mass destruction of the Strip or to try to eliminate, rather than merely contain, Hamas’s political and military apparatus, and, if possible — and this is really one of the most horrific potentials — is the potential that this moment could be used to try to expel masses of Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip. [… R]ight now we are seeing this complete desire to inflict total revenge on the Gaza Strip, from the political establishment to the media, all the way down.
The Israel-Palestinian relationship is nuanced, tortuous, and warped by religious fanaticism and bigotry on both sides. Built into Hamas’s very foundations is a call for “Islam to obliterate” the State of Israel. Meanwhile, results of a 2014–‘15 Pew Research Center survey indicate that over 60% of Israelis believe “God gave Israel to the Jewish people,” with 79% feeling “Jews deserve preferential treatment in Israel” and nearly 50% agreeing that “Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.”
But chauvinism and fanaticism take root more easily in soil tilled by suffering. And more suffering now can only mean more chauvinism and fanaticism going forward. Hamas’s terrorism will bring more suffering upon the Palestinians today, just as what Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem calls Israel’s “criminal policy of revenge” will bring more suffering upon Israelis in the long run, who will retaliate against the Palestinians, who will retaliate against the Israelis, who will…
In our lives we may never be presented with a clearer, more terribly dramatic object lesson on the wages of inflicting suffering upon our neighbors. May God grant us the wisdom to know it is no less true in our cities and neighborhoods here on the other side of the world than it is in Israel/Palestine. Inshallah, all of us will act in accord with that truth. If you cannot love thy neighbor as thyself, at least love thyself enough not to make him the blight of your existence.