How does the cur­rent fight­ing between, on the one hand, Israel and Hamas and, on the other hand, Israel and Hezbol­lah, not make one sick with grief and rage? Actu­ally, to call what is hap­pen­ing in the north “fight­ing between Israel and Hezbol­lah” is to make what is actu­ally going on there invis­i­ble, because what is actu­ally going on is a cam­paign of airstrikes against Lebanon that, accord­ing to Louise Arbour, the UN’s high com­mis­sioner of human rights, is quoted in today’s times as say­ing could, because of “the scale of killings in the region, and their predictability…engage the per­sonal crim­i­nal respon­si­bil­ity of those involved, par­tic­u­larly those in a posi­tion of com­mand and con­trol.” In other words, they could qual­ify as war crimes. Doesn’t mat­ter how wrong Hezbol­lah was to cross over into Israeli ter­ri­tory — and make no mis­take; it was wrong — Israel’s response is far out of pro­por­tion to that act, and the argu­ments I have heard to the con­trary do not con­vince me otherwise.

Such argu­ments include the one that I heard Israeli offi­cials giv­ing on BBC yes­ter­day, in which they rea­son that they are, by destroy­ing Hezbol­lah — and they are, of course, arrogant enough not to see that what they are doing might actu­ally increase sup­port for that orga­ni­za­tion — is cre­at­ing an oppor­tu­nity for the Lebanese gov­ern­ment to step in and take charge of its own coun­try. As if, when the bomb­ing is over, and assum­ing that Hezbol­lah has indeed been wiped or suf­fi­ciently crip­pled as to be unable to operate, the Lebanese gov­ern­ment might actu­ally turn to Israel and say, “Thanks for tak­ing our coun­try back more than twenty years and for killing how­ever many inno­cent civil­ians; you’ve really done us a favor.” The rea­son­ing is not much dif­fer­ent from the one we heard when the US invaded Iraq, that the peo­ple would be out on the streets wel­com­ing our sol­diers with flow­ers, and we have seen how accu­rate that pre­dic­tion was.

The other response I have heard — or read; I don’t remem­ber which — from Israel to accu­sa­tions that their response to Hezbollah’s incur­sion has not been pro­por­tional is that the response is in pro­por­tion not to the spe­cific act, but rather to the risk posed to Israel by Hezbollah’s pres­ence on its norther bor­der. I don’t know if I can say this with­out seem­ing to jus­tify what Israel is doing — because I am adamantly opposed to what Israel is doing — but this is a response I have some sym­pa­thy for. What­ever one wants to say about the his­tory of Israel’s found­ing (and, let’s be hon­est, that his­tory is the his­tory of one peo­ple sys­tem­at­i­cally appro­pri­at­ing — some­times legally; some­times not; some­times peace­fully; some­times not — the land of another peo­ple), the fact is that Israel exists now as a sov­er­eign nation and it is no small thing for any sov­er­eign nation to have on its bor­ders even one, and Israel has two, enti­ties sworn to its destruc­tion. More to the point, at least one of those enti­ties, Hezbol­lah, has the strong enough back­ing of at least two nations to the point where it can func­tion almost as a sep­a­rate gov­ern­ment within the sover­iegn nation of Lebanon. In other words, Hezbol­lah is set up such that it can claim the pro­tec­tions afforded by, and gains the “shield­ing ben­e­fits” of being in another sov­er­eign nation, even as it oper­ates inde­pen­dently, or can oper­ate independently, of that nation’s government.

Given that sit­u­a­tion, and the fact of an Hamas-led Pales­tin­ian gov­ern­ment, how should Israel have responded to what, in almost any other cir­cum­stance, would have been inter­preted as an act of war? (And I am talk­ing here only about Hezbollah’s incur­sion. Hamas is the elected lead­er­ship of an occu­pied peo­ple; their sit­u­a­tion is, for me, very dif­fer­ent.) Let me say this again: I do not mean that I think Israel should have responded as it did. I am hon­estly ask­ing what Israel should have done. Nego­ti­ate indi­rectly, as Hezbol­lah demanded?

July 21^st

I started this post yes­ter­day and then got inter­rupted and so I don’t remem­ber pre­cisely what I was going to say next about Hezbollah’s demand that the only way the two sol­diers they hold would be returned would be through indi­rect nego­ti­a­tions for an exchange for pris­on­ers in Israeli jails, but I do know that part of the gen­eral point I wanted to make was this: At some point, Hezbol­lah needs to bear some respon­si­bil­ity for its refusal to rec­og­nize Israel and for the behav­ior in which it engages as it pur­sues its goal of Israel’s destruc­tion. Still, I write this after read­ing yes­ter­day that Israel has hinted there might be a full-scale inva­sion of Lebanon, though in today’s paper, Israeli offi­cials are talk­ing about “pin­point” oper­a­tions to “clean up Hezbol­lah posts on the ground.” Either way, the real­ity of what that inva­sion will mean for the peo­ple of Lebanon seems to make any­thing else I might have had in mind to write seem self-indulgent and point­less. (And I haven’t even said any­thing about what is going on in Gaza yet.) How dare I, it seems to me I have to ask, pose ques­tions about Hezbollah’s respon­si­bil­ity when Israel is clearly doing far more dam­age to Lebanon than Hezbol­lah has ever done to Israel? But I have to admit such ques­tions keep com­ing back to me, not because, I will say it again, I think Israel is right to have responded the way it did, but because it seems to me that Hezbol­lah invited this kind of sit­u­a­tion by set­ting itself up in such a way that it is woven inti­mately into the daily lives of the peo­ple who live in south­ern Lebanon. In other words, if there is such a thing as national sov­er­eignty, and if Israel pos­sesses it, and if Hezbol­lah, an orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cated to the destruc­tion of the State of Israel, violated that sov­er­eignty, and if Israel, as a sov­er­eign nation, has the right to respond to such vio­la­tion (indeed, given the fact that some sort of mil­i­tary response on Israel’s part was at some point almost cer­tainly pre­dictable), who bears respon­si­bil­ity for the fact that, in order to attack Hezbol­lah, even the most restrained attack one could imag­ine, Israel would likely have to attack areas where there would almost cer­tainly be sig­nif­i­cant civil­ian casu­al­ties? Should Israel there­fore not attack, ever, at all? Does Hezbol­lah get to keep doing what it does, being who it is, on Israel’s bor­der in per­pe­tu­ity and with impunity?

Israel should have, as the US should have with both its bomb­ing of Afghanistan and its inva­sion of Iraq, gone first to the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity and not acted uni­lat­er­ally, even though it is arguable that, as a sov­er­eign nation, uni­lat­eral action was their right. Whether or not the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity could have secured the release of the two kid­napped sol­diers, such a move would have given any actions the Israeli’s decided to take against Hezbol­lah a good deal more legit­i­macy. Not that it would have jus­ti­fied the car­nage Israel is now inflict­ing on Lebanon; I don’t think any­thing jus­ti­fies that. Instead, though, Israel has cho­sen to act in a way that is con­sis­tent with its sta­tus as an occu­py­ing power, even though it was not occu­py­ing south­ern Lebanon, and the real­ity is that, next to this fact, my ques­tions pale, because even if Hezbol­lah is respon­si­ble for what it has done, for where it is and for how it has set up its oper­a­tions, that respon­si­bil­ity should not be used to obscure what Israel has done and how it has set up its operations.

I have great sym­pa­thy for the bind that Hamas and Hezbol­lah put Israel in: How do you live at peace when your neigh­bors have sworn them­selves to your destruc­tion? How often do you allow those neigh­bors to hurt you, to dam­age you, before you are left with no choice but to fight back? And how, once you decide to fight back, do you not make the destruc­tion of those who would destroy you one of your goals? But here’s the prob­lem, once you start ask­ing those ques­tions, you have almost no choice but to start talk­ing about this his­tory of Israel’s found­ing, and once you start talk­ing about that, the com­pet­ing his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives and claims of atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted and so on of the Israelis and the Pales­tini­ans – not to men­tion of those who, in the rest of the world, sup­port whichever side they sup­pot – make it impos­si­ble to see how any res­o­lu­tion can ever be reached.

I don’t know. Some­times I get so frus­trated that I think they should all just fight each other into obliv­ion; nei­ther side seems will­ing to do what it needs to do to achieve a real and last­ing peace. But that also is not an answer, and so I go back and forth between and among anger and rage and, most of all right now, deep, deep sad­ness. Because I don’t see a way out. Because whether or not Israel destroys Hezbol­lah, this war will not have the effect Israel hopes it will have. Because if Hezbol­lah and Hamas suc­ceed in destroy­ing Israel, it will be for the Israelis what the cur­rent war in Lebanon and Gaza is for the Lebanese and the Pales­tini­ans, and it will be the vic­tory of a cer­tain kind of reli­gious and polit­i­cal extrem­ism, of reli­gious impe­ri­al­ism, and, on the other hand, it will be hard not to read as yet one more exam­ple of why the Jews need a coun­try of their own (even though I per­son­ally do not agree with that posi­tion). Because, because, because, because, because.…. It all makes me think of a poem by Saadi, a 13^th cen­tury Per­sian poet selec­tions of whose works I have trans­lated. This is from his Gulis­tan. He wrote it at a time when it was the Mus­lims who held real power, but the point of the poem, I think, is well taken today. It’s from the last sec­tion of the book, called, in my trans­la­tion, “Prin­ci­ples of Social Conduct.”

Every­one thinks his own think­ing is per­fect and that his child is the most beautiful.

I watched a Mus­lim and a Jew debate
and shook with laugh­ter at their child­ish­ness.
The Mus­lim swore, “If what I’ve done is wrong,
may God cause me to die a Jew.” The Jew
swore as well, “If what I’ve said is false,
I swear by the holy Torah that I will die
a Mus­lim, like you.” If tomor­row the earth
fell sud­denly void of all wis­dom
no one would admit that it was gone.