In Gaza, Violence Degrades Everyone

On Israel, Palestine and Ancestral Memory

Violence degrades everyone. We like to think that being a victim of violence and oppression is ennobling, that the abused emerge from their experience like Nelson Mandela from prison, enlightened and benevolent. 

But the truth is being a victim of violence will degrade your moral compass, especially on a generational or cultural scale. Our worldview shrinks into tunnel vision, withdrawing to a reptile brain programmed for self-preservation. Caring for the value of the lives of those not in your immediate group isn’t hardwired into humans. Rather, it's the hard-won result of thousands of years of moral discovery. 

Notions like aversion to cruelty or the suffering of innocents are modern inventions, like space flight or electricity, part of mankind’s upward moral trajectory as a species. The experience or threatened experience of violence robs its victims of this moral enlightenment, and sends them tumbling back to the tribal warmongering of darker chapters of human history. It produces people more willing to inflict the same pain on others.

But the reactions from people living safely in the first world are largely ignorant of this fundamental truth. Instead, they cheer on their chosen side like soccer fans and turn a blind eye to its crimes, or slyly dog-whistle for escalation and ethnic cleansing. These people would holler, hoot, and retweet our way back to a more brutal age.

Brutalized People Brutalize Others

The people who founded Israel had been deeply traumatized, by millenia of oppression in Europe, by a spate of unbelievably violent pogroms—that saw participants literally tear apart Jewish babies in the street—and then by the Holocaust. This reoriented their moral compass. When you see your people nearly wiped out of existence, your family members murdered en masse, it is very easy to lose your ability to care about anything other than immediate survival for you and yours. In turn, they and their descendants have inflicted dire brutality on the Palestinians, who, warped by 70 years of brutal oppression, now use their own children as suicide bombers and human shields.

I think often about the story of Israeli Defense Force General Meir Dagan. Dagan was born in Poland, on a train fleeing the Holocaust. He would go on to be the head of Mossad and a general in the IDF, a man known for his ability to “separate an Arab from his head.” He was one of the cohort of traumatized men who would midwife the bloody birth of the modern state of Israel.

In his tenure at Mossad and at the IDF, Dagan kept a picture on his desk of his grandfather, a Polish Jew, taken in the moments before his death. In the image, Ber Erlich Sloshny is on his knees. He’s surrounded by grinning Nazi soldiers who would soon shoot him into a hole in the ground, standing around him and a huddle of other Polish Jews like hunters posing with a prize buck. He’s wearing a prayer shawl and, if you look at his face, you can see that he’s terrified. Presumably, shortly after the picture was taken, Meir Dagan’s grandfather was pushed into a mass grave and shot.

Try and put yourself in the shoes of a man like Meir Dagan. Imagine the murder and humiliation of your people, the members of your family. Try to imagine that was your grandfather, kneeling on the ground, his eyes fixed forward in terror, in the moments before his death. How would that change you? Rage, horror, nauseating humiliation. And behind those emotions, a thrumming, fear-driven desire to never, ever, let this happen to you again. “Never again” became the post-Holocaust motto.

So in turn, the Jews who arrived in their long-ago homeland of Palestine inflicted terrible suffering on the Palestinian Arabs, in a breathless desire to carve out a place of safety. No one with more than a glancing familiarity with the history of Israel can honestly deny that the Jews who arrived there perpetrated a great wrong against the Palestinians.

Early Zionists like Moshe Sharett, who would become the second Prime Minister of the State of Israel, were explicit that the establishment of the country was a colonial project. “We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture,” wrote Sharett.

A Kingdom Out of Time

As troubled as I am by what came after, there is a fundamental thread that, paradoxically, makes my heart sing with pride. My kinsmen, my people, were exiled from our kingdom thousands of years ago. Our temples were torn down and we were scattered across the world, to be abused at the whim of our host nations. From Granada to Moscow, when crops failed or diseases spread, Jews were murdered en masse.

But at the turn of the 19th century, we had enough. Somewhere, in between the hammer of oppression and the ancient book that we’d carried with us for all that time, and in the way we’d clung to our identity, lighting candles and singing atonal prayers, an identity was reforged.

A violent rash of pogroms in Eastern Europe, and outpourings of antisemitism in supposedly tolerant nations like France were the straws it took to break the camel's back. Men like Meir Dagan or first Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, born Meir Huberman and David Grün respectively, took on the names of historical people from the ancient kingdom of Jerusalem, a la Muhammad Ali or Asata Shakur, and formed compacts with other Jews across Europe, with the goal of resurrecting our ancient nation. 

Jews in positions of influence with the English government worked to extract from them a promise that our traditional homelands would be restored to us, in the form of the Balfour Declaration. A modern language was recrafted out of the snatches of religious Hebrew, to tie together a multitude of disparate peoples who had long lived apart, but now flooded into the lands we’d lost thousands of years before. Unbelievably, they succeeded.

There is no historical parallel for what happened in 1948, when Israel was formally established. A kingdom that two thousand years ago had been crushed to dust was reborn, inhabited by people who spoke the same language and bore the same names. The nations contemporary to ancient Judea—the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Romans, who had enslaved and murdered and exiled us in ancient times—were all dust. But the Hebrews were still here. What other people could claim that?

Through political machinations and by the barrel of a gun we had reclaimed our ancient lands, given to us by the god of the Old Testament. It’s hard not to feel a certain pride there. When will the Hittites raise their ancient palaces in Turkey? 

Chaim Weizmann, the Jewish biochemist whose work for the English government during WWI had been instrumental in obtaining the Balfour Declaration, had this to say as he arrived in Palestine for the first time: "I may have been light headed from the sudden change in climate, but as I stood there I suddenly had the feeling that 3000 years had vanished and become as nothing.” 

Reproducing Trauma 

Another fundamental truism of history: no one oppresses harder than the formerly oppressed. In Gaza and the West Bank, the Israelis have assembled a remarkable factory for producing an endless stream of Palestinian Arabs whose stories of humiliation and carnage have ignited a righteous murder in their hearts—one that would be instantly familiar to Meir Dagan and Ber Erlich Sloshny.

Early Israelis like Ben Gurion understood what they were doing psychologically to the Palestinian Arabs. “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country,” said Ben Gurion. “They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?” 

So the early Zionists knowingly inflicted terrible traumas onto the Palestinians, and worked to rob them of political rights. They murdered them and robbed them, and in an unsettling parallel to an old trope that had helped drive anti-semitic violence in Europe, secretly poisoned Palestinian wells during the 1948 war. 

Now many of those Palestinians have been chased into the cramped urban quarter of Gaza. Half the population of Gaza is starving, says the UN. I remember reading that during the Second World War, Jewish doctors imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto performed what was then one of the deepest and largest scale studies of the physiological effects of hunger on the human body, using the hundreds of thousands of suffering Jews crammed into less than two square miles around them as a sample population. 

To see the violence inflicted on the Palestinians by the modern IDF pains me, but this is the intrinsic nature of violence. Centuries of violence and fear didn’t enlighten men like Ben Gurion, who helped orchestrate the terrorization and deprivation of the Palestinians. If those men were educated in anything, it was in a brutally Hobbesian worldview, one that put self-preservation above all. 

Might they have wondered if the hurts they were putting on the Palestinians rhymed darkly with the horrors done to their forefathers for generations?

This is the intrinsic nature of violence: brutalized people brutalize others. The men and women who founded the state of Israel were degraded by violence and in turn degraded the Palestinians. This same kind of civilizational corrosion now spreads its insidious tendrils on sites like TikTok, with ByteDance employees presumably pressing the “accelerate” button from an office in smog-shrouded Beijing. It unlocks a fear-driven bloodlust that hides in some ancient and primitive part of our brain. It threatens to send us tumbling back into the brutal darkness of our past. 

Now, the Palestinians, their hearts burning with the righteous fire of their oppression and the murder of their families and tribesmen, vote en masse for Hamas, a brutal death cult that engages in regular human sacrifice when it hides militia targets behind human shields, keeping the blood in Gaza flowing.

On Ancestral Memories

For ethnic Jews like me, with centuries of pogroms embedded somewhere in our epigenetic memory, the images that came out of October 7th were a dark reflection of our historical trauma. When we saw women being paraded around in the streets by soldiers in front of jeering crowds or thrown into the back of a pickup truck like game animals, their clothing torn and bloodstained, it sent us back to a place we’d thought we left behind.

Every single one of us has generations of humiliated and brutalized ancestors like Erich Ben Sloshny in our family tree. Whether we keep pictures of them on our desks or not, we keep this trauma close, and it’s a key part of our identity. It is likely that media-savvy Hamas understood well that the images of bloodied Jewish captives paraded before jeering crowds would strike at a deep place in our collective soul, and elicit a brutal response.

I’d grown up a secular Jew in Brooklyn, where being Jewish is so unremarkable you might as well be Italian. The extent to which I identified as Jewish was limited to my sensitive stomach and a few muttered prayers once a year during the holidays.

But as I watched the footage of the woman in bloodied pants being grabbed by the hair and hauled into the back of a jeep, it didn’t feel like a stranger from across the world. These were members of my tribe, bound to me by blood and culture that stretches back to before the pyramids. This wasn’t just happening to women, it was happening our women, to our people. My heart boiled with rage, and I wished for a violent and swift retribution, which in light of the carnage in Gaza now embarrasses me.

The simple objective of Hamas’s October 7th operation was to draw a violent and disproportionate response from Israel, to be absorbed mostly by the bodies of innocent Palestinian men, women, and children. Israel was happy to oblige. Now Palestinian civilian casualties outnumber Israel’s by a factor of about around 30. Everything is going to plan, at least for Hamas. Hamas and the Israeli right-wing party the Likud worship the same nameless god of carnage and are uninterested in a two-state solution where the two groups live side by side.

In dark parallel, I suspect that the images now coming out of Gaza, of mutilated and murdered children, of fathers wailing for their dead sons and daughters as they hold their dust-covered bodies, surrounded by the flattened wreckage of their neighborhoods, strikes a similarly deep place of ancestral memory for many members of ethnic minorities with colonial genocide in their past. A sense that the rest of the world simply does not care about the brutality being inflicted on these people, that it will be allowed because they are somehow less human. A feeling, ironically, familiar to many Jews.

So where does that leave us? The rest of the world watches the storm of violence in Gaza through our phones. We identify our side: Republicans, older white people, and many Jews align with Israelis; young people and minorities overwhelmingly root for the Palestinians; and all turn a blind eye to the atrocities committed by the other side. This trend is exacerbated by a cloud of misinformation and algorithms designed to stoke a fanatical partisanship that mirrors our chronic lack of nuance in every other facet of modern debate. 

Hold on to Your Humanity. 

Tribal bloodlust isn’t just easy to slip into—it’s intoxicating. My reading of history also indicates that it's our natural condition. Our high-mindedness is a privilege and a luxury derived from our civilization. So when you tear down a poster of a teenage hostage, or when the only tears you shed for dead little kids are for the ones who look like you, you are being drawn into your most ancient and terrible instinct. 

I draw no moral equivalencies between the two sides. The history of this conflict is far more complex than I can explain in a Substack post, and each side has unique brutalities and kindnesses that could take a whole career to unpack. But I urge all of us, especially those baying for blood through their social media feeds and shouting threats at each other in the streets, to try to hold on to our civilization. The paranoiac in me wonders if our enemies in Russia and China are rooting for us to fall this way.

The only thing I can think to do is to urge others to recognize the simultaneous and difficult truths here, that Israel was established by people who were trying to save themselves and their families, and that the modern state of Israel has elements of a modern Rhodesia. That the Palestinians are unambiguous victims here of double-dealing by the British Empire and by brutality by the Israelis, and that the modern incarnation of Palestinian resistance, featuring mentally handicapped women and children as suicide bombers, human shields, and reportedly rape as a weapon of war, is horrifying. That if you can’t condemn it, you’ve become morally confused.

Ultimately, what exists in Israel and Palestine is a perpetual motion machine, where generationally traumatized people hurl violence back and forth over the decades and enmesh each emerging generation into a blood vendetta. What exists on our side of the screen, as we watch this bloodletting, is another version of that machine, both sides feeding the certainty in the worldview of the other with fashionably edgy rhetoric that winks and nudges at genocide.

These partisans, howling for blood like Romans at the arena, cheer for a backward slide into a darker period of human history. No matter which side of this you are on, I can guarantee that you don’t want to live in a world ruled by that savage law. Hold on to your civilization. Hold on to your humanity.