Ned Lazarus in The Atlantic: "I Don't See a Better Way Out."

 

For those who are unable to read the whole piece due to The Atlantic's paywall, here is the whole text. I agree it is well-worth reading. Lazarus does not come up with an easy prescription, either. Just the least awful of the alternatives we can imagine at this point. That is the agony we all face.

I Don’t See a Better Way Out

I envy those who know exactly how Hamas can be stopped without any more killing, because I don’t.

By Ned Lazarus

There are those who see a nonviolent way forward in Gaza right now: A cease-fire, an exchange of prisoners for hostages, a UN protectorate. I envy them, whatever clear answer they might have to how Israel should respond to the massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis and the kidnapping of more than 200 others by a fundamentalist terrorist organization that rules over and hides among an impoverished civilian population of 2 million people. I envy those who know exactly how Hamas can be stopped without any more killing, any more suffering, for any more people in Israel and Gaza.

Because I don’t.

I have dedicated much of my professional life to seeking peaceful change in this conflict, trying to listen to and understand Israelis and Palestinians and find ways to work toward peace or justice or coexistence or mutual understanding or anything better than what there is now. For eight years, starting in 1996, I worked for Seeds of Peace in Jerusalem, promoting peaceful conflict resolution with hundreds of young Palestinians and Israelis, their families, and their communities. I’ve spent the years since researching, writing, and teaching about Israeli-Palestinian peace-building. So many people whom I love and admire are now caught in this nightmare, including Vivian Silver, a 74-year-old Israeli peace activist who disappeared from Kibbutz Be’eri on October 7 and is presumed to have been kidnapped, and the families of numerous friends in Gaza. I see no way out of the nightmare so long as Hamas continues to rule the Gaza Strip, and no viable way to remove it from power without an Israeli ground offensive.

I’ve read some thoughtful pieces explaining why a ground offensive is a terrible idea. I agree. A ground offensive will inevitably add more dead and wounded and bereaved Israelis and Palestinians to the already unbearable tallies of the unspeakable Hamas killing spree and the Israeli bombardment of Gaza that has killed more than 3,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health. Even if Israel takes every possible precaution to protect civilian lives in Gaza—and the U.S. government must continue to pressure the Israeli government to that end—more innocent people there will be killed, harmed, and displaced. Hamas has no doubt prepared fortifications, traps, ambushes—it has had years to plan for its chance to capture and kill IDF soldiers on its territory. Hezbollah may use an Israeli ground offensive as a pretext to widen the circle of death and destruction to northern Israel and southern Lebanon, if not beyond.

I’ve read thoughtful pieces demanding an immediate cease-fire. I share the values of those who are calling for it. I do not think and have never thought that killing innocent people, deliberately or inadvertently, is a way to achieve justice or peace. On a visceral level, I want my friends and family and their friends and families to survive, to be protected, to be safe—in Gaza, in the West Bank, and in Israel. All of the violence and suffering and abuse that Israelis and Palestinians have inflicted on each other over generations has led only to more hatred, more violence, and more suffering. All I have ever dreamed of, prayed for, worked for, in this context, is an end to it all.

And that’s the problem. I don’t see how the cycle of hatred, killing, and suffering ends while there is a fundamentalist terrorist organization explicitly dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews—read its 1988 founding charter; the message is not subtle—equipped with legions of fighters ready to kill and die to achieve its goals, an arsenal of missiles, and a powerful state sponsor, Iran, that enables its violence and shares its explicitly genocidal agenda.

Neither the organization, its ruthlessness, nor its agenda is new. Hamas used terrorist violence to undermine every round of peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization since the early 1990s—and succeeded, with the assistance of Israel’s oppressive occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories and the terrorism of Israeli extremists. But Hamas has just demonstrated an upgraded capacity for murder and mayhem, developed across 16 years of territorial control over Gaza—notwithstanding Israel’s blockade, multiple devastating wars, and the suffering Hamas has inflicted on the population it claims to represent.

October 7 was not a run-of-the-mill terror attack committed by a secretive cell; it was a sophisticated militarized assault by several thousand heavily armed men seeking to kill and kidnap as many Israelis as possible before dying as martyrs, as 1,500 of them reportedly did. That attack was accompanied by the launching of hundreds of missiles into Israel (some falling short and leading to Palestinian deaths that Hamas must consider “collateral damage”).

To be clear, it was also not a conventional military assault. Once Hamas cadres breached Israel’s defenses, they had complete freedom of choice. They could have sought out exclusively military targets. Instead, they did the opposite, murdering and kidnapping entire families of defenseless civilians, continuing the carnage over hours and days, until they fled back to Gaza, were captured, or were killed.

Hamas views its attack as a historic achievement, and that means it is only a matter of time before it will attack again. Israel’s strategies of containment (“quiet for quiet”), suitcases of cash from Qatar, and deterrence all failed. Hamas has no interest in peace negotiations, despite the wishful thinking that has afflicted some analysts in the past. The only way to prevent further attacks of this kind is to render Hamas physically incapable of executing them.

As President Joe Biden and many others have rightly cautioned, the U.S. made grave mistakes in its response to 9/11, including the invasion of Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attack, and an ill-fated 20-year attempt to build a democracy in Afghanistan without committing the necessary resources. But the original U.S. military response to the murder of 3,000 people—the invasion of Afghanistan, the reduction of al-Qaeda’s capacity to mount operations, and the removal of the Taliban government from power—was no mistake. It was the definition of military necessity. Israel faces a situation that is, if anything, more acute, because Hamas’s fighters are located not on a different continent but right next door.

There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A responsible Israeli government would prepare a political strategy for the day after this war, one that empowers Palestinians who wish to end the conflict by creating a path to dignity, security, and self-determination for their nation—and the U.S. government should demand no less of its ally. Of course, the current Israeli government is no “partner for peace,” but Israel’s voters are likely to punish the politicians responsible for the debacle of October 7, 2023, just as they did after the Yom Kippur War, 50 years before. Unfortunately, though, no one can vote Hamas out of power.

The only way to avoid a ground offensive is to provide a realistic strategy for removing Hamas’s ability to attack Israel on this scale again. That alternative must be convincing not to liberal observers in the West, but to the actual decision makers in Israel, who disastrously failed to protect their citizens on October 7. If anything is clear in hindsight, it is that cease-fires do not provide sustainable security: Hamas used the years since the 2021 cease-fire to prepare its 2023 assault.

An Israeli ground offensive is a grim prospect, which will cost even more Israeli and Palestinian lives, with no guarantee of success. I say this with deep sorrow—but I have yet to hear any credible, effective alternative.

ReplyForward

"We Don't Hunt" story

 Leonard Fein's "We Don't Hunt" story, which I first heard him tell in the mid-1980s.

The Energizing Power of a Dreamt Tomorrow

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By Leonard FeinMay 15, 2008

Here’s a true story I made up more than 30 years ago. (Remember, stories do not have to have happened in order to be true.) Later, I will explain why I offer it here, now.

It was 1860, or maybe 1861, in Minsk, or possibly in Pinsk. Wherever, whenever, there were a dozen Jews who used to get together every Tuesday evening for some good talk.

What did the Jews talk about? Why, about what it would be like one day — what, that is, Jerusalem would be like. In exquisite detail, they would imagine Jerusalem: its climate and its curriculum, its cuisine and its culture. Their elaborate conversation had long since developed a near-ritual character, including its periodic interruption by the one skeptic in the group, a fellow named Berl.

Every few months, Berl would say, “Can’t we please, just this once, change the topic of conversation? Really, it’s quite tedious by now. If we’re really that interested in what it’s like in Jerusalem, why don’t we pack up and go? If we like it, we’ll stay. And if we don’t like it, we’ll also stay, and make it into something we like.”

To which the others would inevitably respond, “Berl, Berl, don’t be so naive. Don’t you realize how much easier, and how very much safer, it is to sit in Minsk [or Pinsk] and talk about what it might be like than to go and confront the reality?”

And Berl, because he was a sociable fellow, would again drop his complaint and join in the talk.

This was, for those times and places, a rather sophisticated group; indeed, they had some non-Jewish friends. Once upon a Tuesday, they invited one of their non-Jewish friends to join with them, and together they talked until the wee hours of the morning, until, in fact, their guest stood and said, “Fellows, I’ve enjoyed the evening enormously, but I really must get going. Thanks so much for inviting me, and good night.”

“Thank you for coming,” they replied. “But before you go, we have just one question we’d like to ask.”

“Please, anything at all,” said their guest.

“Our question is…” — here there was an awkward pause, and much clearing of throats — “what we’d like to know is, what do, oh dear, how shall we ask it? What do people like you, if you know what we mean, think of people like us, if you know what we mean?”

“Oh,” said their guest, “you want to know how we feel about Jews.”

“Yes, that’s right, you have it. You see, we are usually so isolated, and we have so little opportunity for feedback. You don’t mind telling us?”

“No, not at all. I think you’re a wonderful people — passionate, generous, literate. I have only one problem with you.”

“A problem? What kind of problem?”

“Well,” replied the guest, “there is one aspect of Jewish behavior that really annoys me. You people seem to believe — why, I can’t imagine — that you’re morally superior to everyone else. Don’t get me wrong — I don’t think you’re any worse than average. But I can’t understand your moral conceit, and I find it frightfully annoying.”

To their credit, for they knew it was so, his hosts did not deny the accusation; they sought instead to explain their “conceit.”

“As you yourself observed, it’s very late, so we can’t give you the whole etiology of our sense of moral superiority. We’ll explain it instead by way of a metaphor. We do indeed think we are your moral betters, and the reason we do is that we don’t hunt. You people hunt, and we don’t hunt, and that makes us better than you.”

Their guest guffawed, and then stormed at them: “You silly, trivial people; of course you don’t hunt! We don’t permit you to own guns! It’s easy to be virtuous if you’re impotent.”

Whereupon the 11 turned to Berl, the skeptic, and said, “Tomorrow we pack, then go up to the land, to Jerusalem, and there we shall prove that even with guns we will not become hunters.”

There are those who will read this story today and shake their heads: Is it not clear that Berl and his friends failed, that they, the more so their children and children’s children, did indeed become hunters?

No, it is not clear. I prefer to adapt the words ascribed to Martin Buber, who once said that “the kibbutz is an experiment that has not yet failed.” And a non-hunting Israel is an experiment that has not yet succeeded.

Is that simply a case of stubborn clinging to a dream that says more about the dreamer than about the real world? Has it come time to sigh in resignation, nice try and all that but it’s over?

There are at least two powerful reasons not to abandon the dream: First, there are so many people — not enough, but very many — whose lives are purposefully lived in order to breathe life into the dream. They deserve support, not dismissal. And then there’s also the special meaning of dreams and dreaming to the Jewish people: Though Jewish history has been a cruel teacher, it has not been our only teacher. We have not only history but also memory; our memory contains both our history and our dreams.

We remember tomorrow. And because the tomorrow we remember is a different and better tomorrow, it calls us back to a promise we made long before there was a political right or a political left. It calls us to mend the world.

It is not possible to contemplate the mystery of the Jewish experience, to fathom how the Jews have lasted this long, without acknowledging the energizing power of our dreamt tomorrow. The wakeful dream of a world made whole is who we are, and why.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” The unfortunate case of Michael McCaul

Congressman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.  He has never bought into he lie that the 2020 election was "stolen" and has been a strong, forthright supporter of Ukraine's struggle against Putin  His national security credentials are impeccable.  In other words, on the issues that appear to be the most important to him, he has been the polar opposite of Jim Jordan.

As a Republican member of Congress who actually seems to believe in democracy, one might think that he would be part of a faction of non-crazy Republicans to ally with Democrats in a Speaker vote, electing one of those Republicans (or even being Speaker himself).  

Yet, earlier today, based apparently on a tepid assurance from Jim Jordan that he would include Ukraine in an Israeli supplemental national security bill and that he "would look at the details of that," Chairman McCaul voted to make Jordan Speaker of the House.  (At this writing, Jordan still does not have enough votes.)

Chairman McCaul is the fifth richest person in Congress  and, presumably is not beholden to other money-laden interests.   He has carved a path so different from Jordan's, so it is breathtaking to see him cave so easily based on such inchoate assurances as to the protection of the most beleaguered democracy in Europe (nothing apparently was said about the dollar value of such inclusion).

He appears to have been been a competent and, certainly compared to most of his current colleagues, a “reasonable” member of the Republican caucus. He voted to accept the 2020 election results. He has been respected for his consistent support for Ukraine and Taiwan, and his support of Trump always has been tepid. I had hoped he would have the spine to block the ascent of likely insurrection conspirator and liar Jim Jordan’s ascent to the Speakership.

My hope turned out to be unfounded. As Edmund Burke is said to have taught us 250 years ago, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Sadly, when the chips were down, McCaul chose to do nothing to impede the rise of this evil.  

Failure to heed Burke's famous admonition is the operative basis of the current Republican Party.  

(Full Disclosure:  For several years late in the last century, I supervised and worked with Mike McCaul at the Department of Justice. He was a conscientious and effective attorney, and a very pleasant person. That makes my disappointment even greater.) 

The Chaos Created by Trump Gets More and More Profound: 14th Amendment Edition

Much, probably too much, has been written about whether Donald Trump should be kept off the primary and/or November 2024 ballots because, under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, he is not eligible to hold governmental office given his involvement with -- indeed, instigation of -- the January 6, 2021, insurrection. 

While I agree with today's Washington Post editorial that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment will not save the country from Donald Trump or Trumpism, it misses some salient factors about implementation of Section 3.  

First, the Post's concern about whether there is sufficient adjudication of Trump’s status as an insurrectionist to be within the Section 3 prohibition is satisfied by the February 2021 Senate vote at the end of the impeachment trial, in which the Senators voted to convict by a 57-43 margin.  While not enough to reach the 2/3 threshold to convict, it certainly is sufficient to establish Trump’s current status.  

Second, Section 3 does not, by its terms, bar insurrectionists from being on ballots. Rather, it bars insurrectionists who have “previously taken an oath [of office] to support the Constitution of the United States” from “hold[ing] any, civil or military, office under the United States.”  This is significant because Section 3 also provides that Congress, by a 2/3 vote in each house, may remove an insurrectionist’s disability.  So Congress could act to permit an elected insurrectionist to take office. 

But anyone voting for Trump should be aware that the Constitution bars him from taking office unless Congress, by overwhelming votes, waives the disability. Absent such a waiver, the Constitution counsels that the Electoral College not elect Trump, even if his pledged electors constituted a majority. Presumably, Trump electors could choose to vote for Trump’s running mate. But what if the majority of electors choose Trump anyway -- probably in the hope that somehow 2/3 of each house of Congress would clear the path for Trump before Inauguration Day.  If that did not happen by the appointed day in January for the Electoral Votes to be counted in the Senate, Vice President Harris, following the Constitution (which supersedes any conflicting requirement in the Electoral Count Act), could refuse to accept those ballots because (in the absence of a waiver) Trump would be ineligible to hold office.  

If, as a result of the disability, there was no Electoral College majority, the Constitution’s 12th Amendment mandates that the House of Representatives choose among the top three electoral vote getters, with each state delegation having one vote. But absent a 2/3 vote in both houses to remove Trump’s disability, Trump could not be one of those candidates because he could not hold office. If the House still elected Trump, it would be unconstitutional for him to take office.  Or if a Republican elector abandoned Trump and voted for the VP nominee, or someone else, that person could be on the House ballot.  And there is no guaranty that any eligible candidate would have a majority of the state delegations, since some states might be evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.

So what would happen next if no eligible candidate secured a majority of state delegations?  Assuming Vice President Harris accepted the Electoral College votes for Trump’s running mate, then that person would be elected Vice President.  If she could not or would not accept those votes because they were tied to Trump, then, under the 12th Amendment, the Senate would vote on the top two electoral vote getters.  But if there were no accepted electoral votes for the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, then the only candidate would be the Democratic VP nominee.  And even if the Republican VP nominee were deemed eligible to be on the Senate ballot (that could happen if a Republican elector voted for someone other than Trump) the decision in the Senate would turn on who who controlled the Senate after the 2024 election.  That could easily be the Democrat.  Or no one if there was a 50-50 split (with no Vice President to cast the tie-splitting vote -- unless the vote were taken before the end of Vice President Harris' term, which expires on January 20, 2025).

In any event, under Section 3 of the 20th Amendment, a new Vice President would become acting President “until a President shall have qualified.” Trump would not be "qualified" unless 2/3 of the House and 2/3 of the Senate removed his disability or the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, somehow, he was not part of the January 2021 Insurrection, notwithstanding the Senate’s 57-43 vote for conviction following Trump’s second impeachment.  Just imagine the chaos if, for example, a House with a plurality -- but not a majority -- of state delegations in Republican hands were unable to "elect" Trump, and the Democratic Vice President (whether Harris or someone else) were acting President, or there is no Vice President at all because there is a 50-50 split in the Senate after the 2024 election?  

The 20th Amendment states that "Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified."  I suspect, but do not know, that the only present law that would be applicable would be the Presidential Succession Act, which would mean that the Speaker of the House would be acting President.  Of course, as close as the House margin is now, we have no idea who the Speaker would be after the 2024 elections:  Hakim Jeffries?  Kevin McCarthy?  Or a Republican-controlled House could try to make Trump the Speaker (the Speaker need not be a member of the House) -- but Trump still would not be qualified due to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.  Or maybe it would be the ultimate Steve Bannon coup?

This situation would be even more fraught if the Democrat, as in 2020, won an overwhelming majority of the popular vote, but, as in 2016, not a majority of the Electoral votes.  

Best way to avoid this mess created by Donald Trump’s insurrectionist behavior?  Overwhelmingly elect the Democratic ticket in November 2024. 

PS:  There was a time when winning the popular vote was a bedrock of governmental legitimacy.  In the long or even medium run, we need to restore that basis for legitimacy.  See https://davidfishback.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-republic-we-may-not-be-able-to-keep.html