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Future of Conflict #1: Love Israel, Support Palestine

This week I read “Love Israel, Support Palestine” by Nir Avishai Cohen. Nir grew up in small Israeli moshav, excelled in the military (a family tradition), and eventually discovered that the society he loved was based on systematic immoral treatment of half of the population (the Palestinians).

Since that discovery, he’s dedicated his life to increasing Israeli security by ending the Occupation in various ways, including working in the Knesset, running for Parliament, appearing on a reality-TV show, and writing this book.

His goal is to get young Israelis to question the narratives they are presented with, which he never did.

Our goal in this series is to learn what can help us turn chaos and division into Beloved Community. I got two major insights from this book (in addition to a deep love and respect for the author) I want to share with you:

  1. The Primacy of Nuance.
  2. The Fear-Force-Fear Cycle

The Primacy of Nuance

The Primacy of Nuance is an insight regarding an individual’s personal developmental path. Nir grew up in a society that made his Arab neighbors, who were just a few kilometers away, invisible:

The Arab neighbors we obviously never mentioned. We’d never go there, I never met anyone from there. Giant invisible walls were built and nurtured between the Jews and the neighboring Arab settlements.

He did everything he was told, joined an elite unit of the Israeli army, and began serving his country with zeal and dedication. But after three years of service, he was shattered by the moral contradiction between the values he was taught explicitly and the actions he was asked to do as part of his service.

While serving in the Territories, he was taught to “practice” military operations on civilians and use civilians as human shields during actual operations. He witnessed soldiers beating civilians for fun, and was shocked at the words of their commander when Nir confronted him:

“You idiots, how did you get caught? How did you let him see you?”

During this entire process, he maintained his habitual excellence and rose in the ranks again and again. After his initial 3-year stint, he took his PTSD to South America (as is common practice) to reflect.

From Nir’s journal at the time:

I have no doubt I’ll have to live my entire life with the terrible things I’ve done there, in the Occupied Territories, in places that weren’t ours. I was a complete and active participant in the oppression of a population, a poor and weak population suffering for many years, on a daily basis, living without hope. And whose fault is that? The Jewish people, who suffered so much, who dreamt of freedom and independence, of their own country, for so many years. Look and see, my Jewish brothers, what this people have become. We’ve become an occupying, oppressing people for whom mercy and compassion are foreign concepts, and all for the sake of a damned piece of land which in the end – however far down the road – won’t be ours anyway.

What I love most about Nir’s story is that he never turns his back on his upbringing. His Judaism, his pride, even his military involvement. His Awakening regarding Israeli political reality is targeted to the Occupation. He even goes back and continues to serve in the Army Reserves!

This is the essence of nuance.

As a counter-example, years later he participated in an Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and found himself on the Palestinian “side” of most of the debates.

As I was explaining why I thought the Palestinians were right and deserved liberty and their own state, and why Israel is mistaken in imposing martial law on a civilian population for so many years, a young woman interrupted me. She said that my words were meaningless, since I served and still serve in the IDF. She all but shouted that I couldn’t occupy as a soldier and then argue against it as a civilian: “You’re an officer in the enemy’s army, I’m sure you’ve done unspeakable things in the Territories, you are the worst.”

At that moment, the young woman couldn’t handle the nuance of both things being true: that he had to argue against the Occupation precisely because he had done unspeakable things.

(Don’t worry, they kiss and make up in the end!)

Nir’s life experiences seem to be specifically targeted for nuance. He can’t reject Jewish or Israeli society because he’s deeply enmeshed in it. He can’t sustain racist anti-Arab narratives because he spends a lot of time with them. He has deep political rifts with right-wing Settlers, but serves alongside them and blesses their children.

In a way, he’s an empiricist upon whom ideological conditioning just failed. And his question is how to engender the same cracks in the rest of us.

How do we dissect The Other into all its subcomponents, so we can accurately evaluate which ones we want to be associated with and which ones we don’t?

The Fear-Force-Fear Cycle

The other advantage Nir has, as a professional solder, is to be obsessed with security. Even after refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories, he continues to command security missions along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Jordan.

From his professional opinion, Israeli Settlements are the root of Israeli insecurity:

We have to face reality and honestly admit that the settlements damage Israel’s security: as long as they exist, we cannot form a real border between Israelis and Palestinians. An army can protect a territory best when there’s a clear border, the opposite of what’s happening in the West Bank.

As a soldier, this reality is clear to him. What’s confusing is why everyone who criticizes the occupation is denounced as a traitor, while everyone who promotes the Settlements are proclaimed to be patriots. A lot of the book is spent wrestling with this question. He eventually determines:

A messianic, religious minority has been dragging us into this quagmire for the past 55 years, and we’re seemingly following this minority like it’s the Pied Piper of Hamelin. They’ve managed to convince us that all the Palestinians want is to murder us. It’s a propaganda machine of scare tactics that’s been running here for years, on high.

Therefore, the only path to security is more and more settlements.

This is probably the biggest lie in the history and narratives of Israeli society. As I’ve mentioned before, the settlements are doing the exact opposite, endangering the State of Israel, and furthermore, the settlers are endangering IDF soldiers. Our military and civilian cemeteries are full of soldiers and civilians who died at the altar of this lie. As long as settlements exist, we cannot form a clear border between us and the Palestinians, thus it’s impossible to allow the security forces to properly defend against terrorists trying to infiltrate the sovereignty of the State of Israel.

What I abstract from his perspective is the cycle of Fear -> Force -> Fear.

  1. People Fear for their safety.
  2. They use Force to guarantee their safety.
  3. The usage of force ends up undermining their safety, screwing somebody else, and increasing Fear.

(There’s usually some helpful racist or xenophobic bits in there, but they’re non-essential.)

Nir doesn’t get into ​intergenerational trauma​ (I’ll write to him about it), which can help explain some of the Why behind the cycle. He’s more concerned with what the hell to do about it, and ends up on all kinds of adventures in politics and TV in order to achieve that goal.

Ultimately, he’s trying to break the fear-force-fear cycle with objective information that increased Force (oppression/brutality/apartheid) has a negative impact on safety.

In order to do that, the people listening have to start the same process he went on — to crack their own worldviews and assumptions about the world. Ideally (in Nir’s eyes) before they get sent to military operations in the Occupied Territories.

For Nir, a successful lecture or interaction is one where someone tells him afterwards:

I still don’t know if I agree with you, but it’s the first time I’ve heard that perspective. You’ve given me food for thought.

He’s trying to open young minds to Nuance, so they can see through propaganda and act in the interests of their own security and survival.

It’s probably no surprise that the main way Nir thinks this can happen is through the establishment of a Jewish-Arab party.

It’s not just the future of the left but the future of the entire Israeli democracy that lies in the sociopolitical unification of Jews and Arabs. A party that gives equal representation to both Jews and Arabs, that serves as a political representation for those who believe in cohabitation within the State of Israel, could lead to a significant change in the country.

(I was actually shocked such a party didn’t exist at the time of the writing (2023))

Experiments

This is probably pretty obvious at this point. What kind of experiments can build our sense of nuance and allow us to replace generalizing the Other with specifying the Beloved? Ideally without participating in actions that our against our moral code and which we’ll later regret!

I have been doing a practice of this with many of Donald Trump’s executive actions. The un-nuanced attitude is usually blind support or recoiling in horror (I’m on the horror side).

And that’s part of the point — part of the branding, part of what sells in the soundbite economy, and part of how the powerful like to divide us. But when I think about it, I appreciate some of the intentions of the policies. I don’t think government is as efficient as it could be. I was never on board with the neoliberal NAFTA/WTO consensus.

So: What could they do that I would actually support? How could they do things in a way I could get behind?

Understanding the answers to those questions — which are hopefully different for all of us — can break down the political “tribalism” we are pushed towards (and susceptible to!).

I think of Nir courageously writing this book and then going back to fight for the IDF after the attacks a few months later. I imagine his hope for a Free and Democratic Israel, how the Occupation gets in the way of that, and how all that nuance is lost in a world of hashtags (#freepalestine, #istandwithisrael).

I’ll end with a message of hope from the end of Nir’s book. ​For the full list of quotes I found valuable, check out this post​.

I love my country and always will, but it’s been too long since I was proud of being an Israeli. I don’t sing the anthem because I’m not proud of the hideous crimes of the occupation, not proud of marginalizing the Palestinian minority that lives in this country, and not proud of the racism. I love my country, but I’m not proud of it. I long for that moment when I’ll be proud of Israel, when I can walk the world and proudly say I’m Israeli. I believe this day will come; good will ultimately prevail.

Together,

~Ankur

PS Here are two links Nir recommended for those interested in the specifics of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process: