“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
First and most importantly, Camus asks us to think. In a world that seems even more a charnel house, one even more defined by victims and executioners, he asks us to think about those distinctions.
Israelis are not the enemy. On October 7, they were victims of a pogrom by Hamas, a group intent upon genocide. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is the chant of either killers or useful idiots –apologists for murder and rape. On October 7, Hamas has made it very clear what is to become of 7 million Jews in Israel. “Palestine will be free.” Indeed.
Palestinians and Arabs are not the enemy. They are victims of a corrupt Palestinian Authority, of a murderous Hamas, of Netanyahu and an eliminationist right wing Settlers’ movement and now of Israeli bombs.
The middle way between these is granular – to see the complexity of humanity and to completely reject the ideological poison of Ismail Haniya of Hamas and Hasan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and that of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich of Likud.
Thomas Friedman (who may be the best sourced journalist working the Middle East) understands the complexity of the relationships that bind Palestinians and Arabs to Israelis. Please read Wednesday’s column in full. This is how he begins:
“I confess that as a longtime observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I aggressively avoid both the “From the river to the sea” activists on the pro-Palestinian left and the similarly partisan zealots on the “Greater Israel” Zionist right — not just because I find their exclusivist visions for the future abhorrent but also because the reporter in me finds them so blind to the complexities of the present.
They aren’t thinking about the Jewish mother in Jerusalem who told me in one breath how she just got a gun license to protect her kids from Hamas, and in the next about how much she trusted her kids’ Palestinian Arab teacher, who rushed her children to the school bomb shelter during a recent Hamas air raid. They aren’t thinking about Alaa Amara, the Israeli Arab shop owner from Taibe, who donated 50 bicycles to Jewish kids who survived the Hamas attack on their border communities on Oct. 7, only to see his shop torched, apparently by hardline nationalist Israeli Arab youth, a few days later, only to see a crowdfunding campaign in Hebrew and English raise more than $200,000 to help him rebuild that same shop just a few days after that.”
From there, his column builds in its description of the human complexity of this conflict.
I have no idea how this ends – whether in a two-state settlement, an Israeli civil war, an uprising against Hamas, Netanyahu’s downfall, more walls, more bitterness and hatred, more war. I only know that “thinking people” must reject ideology and vengeance and the dehumanization of Jews and Palestinians.
