2008: Prologue…

(2008 Update: 11/17/23+)—To recount, in the now: Rockets are launched, walls are breached, tunnels defenestrated—buildings, infrastructure leveled. Existential warfare meets hostility from river to sea. The world bears witness in horror and rage, taking fevered sides all around.

One thousand Hamas militants and countless militia minions take Israeli border towns, camps and kibbutzim by terror storm, slaughtering at least 1,200 Israeli, taking hostage 240 more. Brutality, butchery, the heinous, horrendous annihilation—largest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust: October 7 comes on the high Jewish holiday, 50^thanniversary of the Yom Kippur War—and is Israel’s deadliest day going back to the nation’s birth in 1948, widely being seen as Israel’s 9/11.

Border incursions, borderline insanity: Festivals are ravaged, innocents massacred and mutilated, homes decimated, random persons attacked in the streets—blowing up the status quo without notice, regard or recourse. Meanwhile Dagestan airport’s flash mob headhunters summon European pogrom flashbacks; Britain, France and Germany recoil in red-line deja vu. Afflicted Israelis decry the vicious attacks, the country’s lack of timely assistance, failure of security and preparedness—some laying blame on politicized Judicial Reform distraction and divisiveness, left and right.

Palestinian Authority ineptitude and Hamas’s fear of losing out to Abraham Accorded Arab-Israel detente collide with an Israeli PM riding his perfervid religio-settler wave for fear of facing corruption charges, caught with his vaunted ‘Mr. Security’ defenses down. Feeding Palestinian slow burn even more are settler aggression in the West Bank territory and far-right transgressions about the Al Aqsa Mosque.

In any event, anger, admonishments: terror rampages spark total retaliation, massive violence begets mighty vengeance, mortal enemy hones moral clarity. Eternal Jewish sympathy for downtrodden others suddenly shifts to feeling safe no more. Pro-Israel rallies take to the streets worldwide as Jewish communities coalesce around tribal vulnerability and unspeakable horrors past—to where the diaspora ‘de-aspora’ to Israel in the fight for a national/ancestral homeland under threat. Extremist polarity aside, existential peril galvanizes the domestic mind.

Therein the dilemmas and dichotomies arise…

Fright to Fight.

Traumatized by slaughter, Israel’s reshuffled coalition government girds for the dire, declared war ahead and the perilous price to be paid. Effecting a hostage rescue or exacting a hostile response? Would it entail a measured response or massive retaliation, to minimize casualties or maximize carnage—requiring pinpoint targeting or protracted battles? Quick strikes or quagmire, carpet bombing or precision tunnel targeting, missile fusillades or combat hand to hand?

First one, then the other—as militants’ rockets continue pelting Israel north and south, even Ashdod and Tel Aviv—Israel jets pummel Gaza, IDF ground forces enter the Strip, Gaza City centered in the crosshairs. Palestinians forewarned, evacuate to southern Gaza along refugee road, fleeing a ‘dead zone’ and ‘children’s graveyard’. Those able to escape clot and camp sans essentials toward a tightfisted Rafah double Crossing/Terminal under random attack—women, children and elderly faring worst, begging for their bloody lives. While anguished Israelis wait for the release and/or more news on the fate of their loved ones.

Palestinian civilians left behind face constant shelling as Gaza City is essentially leveled, IDF troops penetrating the rubble in search of Hamas terrorists, aiming to destroy the militants’ reputed underground network, wherever the miles-long labyrinth might lead. That includes hitting schools and hospitals, beneath which Hamas is said to locate its command-and-control centers—in a relentless counter-offensive that Israel maintains will persist until all its hostages are safely freed.

Witness further Hamas inhumanity, using Palestinian civilians as human shields: This Israel asserts, leaving it little choice but to ‘minimize’ collateral damage at it seeks to flush out the enemy, end Hamas’s 16-year terror stranglehold for tiny Gaza’s good, once and for all. Think Jihadi injustice gravely suffered, Israeli justice morally served—lex talionis, for better or far worse…hence the Gazan bloodbath soon begins in earnest.

Narrow War Zone, Worldwide Wrath?

Namely Gaza’s civilian body count piles up to well over 12,000 (4,500+ children) and quickly counting, as tormented Palestinian survivors dodge IDF missile/rocket/drone fire to dig through massive debris in search of the dead and/or injured buried alive—being bombarded by land, air and sea. Medical facilities are hobbled; power, water, food, clothing and shelter blown away—mortal outrage, incipient moral deficits that don’t go unnoticed in this hyper connected world. Politicians pander, protesters mobilize—neighboring Arab nations slow the roll on Abraham and lean in with growing concern. The innocent Palestinian displacement and brutal decimation rapidly spreads, northern Gaza to IDF-targeted refugee camps south.

As Biden administration’s no-daylight stance and bear-hug diplomacy continues to nudge Israel toward a pause or hudna in the fighting, Hamas releases precious few of the hostages. But Prime Minister Netanyahu rejects such a ceasefire until all captives are freed, nonetheless soon agreeing (under POTUS pressure) to a partial release and four-day halt in the fighting, in exchange for Palestinian prisoner swaps and Gaza civilians’ southbound displacement, along with limited passage of aid/supply trucks—dire humanitarian crisis or no.

War footing, anti kicking and screaming: Protesters pro and con take to the streets all the more—’Never Again’ vs. ‘Free From the River to the Sea’. Campuses erupt and cleave in cross-flag demonstrations, students balk, walking out of classes, shouting one another down, taking tribal sides. Anti-colonial and oppressed peoples are jihad ‘justified’, sanctified in mobilized chapter and verse. Innocent Jewish students are threatened (e.g., Cornell), with Palestinian/Arab protests badgered and abruptly campus banned. American Jews gather by the tens of thousands on Capitol Mall in solid Israel and hostage support.

Universal indignation, university indecision: Critical faculties are shamed into right-thinking capitulation, dithering docs are doxxed, everybody calling one another out. Big bucks alumni close their donor spigots over ‘uninformed’ university policies regarding Israel and the Palestinians. First Amendment, third rail: dissent and discourse are chilled, job offers withdrawn—as the likes of Harvard, Penn, Columbia, west to Arizona and California, scramble to ‘come correct’.

Empathy to antipathy: Islamophobia spikes to 9/11 levels, a Palestinian-American child being stabbed to death near Chicago. While anti-Israel harassment metastasizes globally, yarmulkas are tucked away, synagogues besieged. Drilling down, some 60% of the harrying incidents reported target Jewish American citizens, who constitute barely 2.4% of the US population.

Capitol Hill staffers question their Stand-with-Israel Congressional elders. Dueling media think pieces and tombstone ads debate Hamas preoccupations and Gaza re-occupation, castigate terrorism apologists and disproportionate military response; abet terrorists or liberators, sling crutches and cudgels—charge war crimes and ethnic cleansing—argue corrective measures or collective punishment, false equivalency versus facts on the ground ad infinitum.

At any rate, a Jewish mayday is met with widespread meh. Moreover, mounting anti-Israel sentiment hews to anti-Zionism—which invariably redounds to antisemitism writ large—the world’s oldest hatred. To where animus toward Israel and/or its policies is tantamount to hatred of Jewish people, whether promulgated by sworn enemies or critics within the Jewish community like ‘Jewish Voices For Peace’ or ‘Not In Our Name’. But more on that in the chapters to follow…

Comparing Watermelons and Pomegranates?

Meantime, the Israel-Gaza War rages on, but to what end, and what next—where does it go from here? Are there grounds for a durable cease-fire, out-and-out hostage release, is there any common ground at all besides Dartmouth’s collegial efforts? Does total IDF victory trigger a tightening of a regional vise? Beyond Hamas ashes do Hezbollah militants draw aim? Will Israel be party to post-war Gaza governance— fully in control or even be allowed at all?

Is Israel genuinely intent on driving Palestinians out of a shredded Gaza Strip altogether—not to mention the West Bank—as feared by Egypt and Jordan? How do the Palestinian people survive this and revive, Gaza to the West Bank, settlers or no? Two-state or too late? What will ultimately color foreign relations and media spheres: Promised Land under God or Palestine Free; olive crescents or Blue Squares; exculpated or pariah?

Be that as it may, what if a couple of other somebodies try to talk, suss out this Middle East muddle eye to eye, set against an earlier, yet pertinent place and time? Why in blazes not? What can it hurt about now? 

Prelogue (2/22/24)—Turns out this tale is particularly timely in the wake of President Joe Biden’s campaign fundraising trip to San Francisco two days ago. His coptered-in appearance drew large dueling rallies of Pro-Israel and Pro-Palestinian protesters—ganged up by Alta Plaza Park, just a block or two uphill from the President’s Pacific Heights reception, merely three  blocks away from where this story begins…

So at the risk of taking lumps and tweaking ‘anti’ grumps, here comes one humble attempt to narrow, if not bridge some of these precursor schisms and dead-end gaps, giving Gaza and its broader manifestations a fresh, fair, hopefully fruitful scan within a rather novel narrative—this, as Rendezvous Two ensues…