[Content Warning: graphic discussions of ongoing international war crimes]
Context is crucial for critical thinking. Possibly even the most important part of the whole process. It can turn facts upside down by reshaping the very soil they stand on. Putting forward an argument while averting our gaze from the contextual landscape that surrounds us is simply reasoning within a vacuum.
Context can be inconvenient, of course. Many prefer to do without it. And making a perfectly rational, logically sound argument within a total historical vacuum is, in my view, entirely possible. Such an endeavour, though, can hardly be said to assist meaningfully in the pursuit of truth. Or, at least, the whole truth. Without due reference to an ever-relevant political background, and a wider awareness of an increasing scholarly consensus, even our best critical thinking tools can be rendered purposeless – sharper than ever, but slicing through thin air.
In a recent article for this magazine, Sophia Schultz made the case for the importance of critical thinking tools when it comes to ‘emotionally-charged subjects like Gaza’. She writes at great length about the differences between deductive and inductive reasoning, valid and invalid inferences, logical fallacies and cognitive biases. She argues that the scientific virtues of open-mindedness, positive skepticism, curiosity, diligence and humility are made all the more crucial when discussing issues we may have an emotional investment in. Using herself as an example, she writes:
Today, I can acknowledge that as a consequence of my personal experience and family ties in Palestine, I have a bias on the conflict going on today, but just because I have a bias does not mean I should only follow pieces of information that satisfy my sentiment. There are always two sides to a story, whether we like it or not, and it is essential to acknowledge that and act accordingly.
I happen to share Schultz’s stated political ‘bias’, as I too am an activist for Palestinian liberation. I have lost count of the number of actions, protests, vigils and marches I have attended, particularly in recent months. Moreover, it seems to me that the essential allegation of Schultz’s thesis is, in and of itself, hard to find fault with. Critical thinking tools are indeed distinctly warranted when emotional stakes are high.
So too, though, is context. So too is starting our stories at the beginning.
So too is taking caution not to sequester individual acts of violence from the antecedent conditions that created them.
Regrettably, over the course of her piece, Schultz happens to omit a sizeable amount of vital contextual information that pertains not only to the particular incidents she touches on, but to the broader history of the crisis itself and the material conditions that structure it. Despite claiming to be ‘biased’ in favour of Palestine, her analysis unfortunately falls prey to some of the most common, misleading, and even harmful narratives that Palestinian rights activists spend much of their time correcting.
It is worth bearing in mind, of course, that Schultz is using ‘Gaza’ here merely as one example to illustrate her call for rationality around emotionally-charged subjects. Gaza, in her piece, is simply the analytical backdrop against which she makes her case.
However, I would suggest that if an essay extolling the virtues of critical thinking tools ends up obscuring an issue rather than illuminating it – even if inadvertently – it might be worth revisiting those very tools to see just how watertight they really are. I believe that the absence of an accurate contextual backdrop in Schultz’s piece undermines her use of Gaza as an analytical backdrop. For critical thinking to be fully operational, it must be historically informed. In this way, my thesis affirms hers.
In addition to repeatedly framing the crisis in the very terms that scholars, historians and generations of activists have substantively disputed for decades, Schultz’s piece leaves out many of the core geopolitical asymmetries essential to achieving even a basic understanding of the situation. These include the enormous imbalance of power, the vastly different levels of harm being inflicted, and the overwhelming and undeniable media bias shaping the international discourse. Most importantly, core historical facts about the issue are absent entirely from her analysis even though they inform and explain, crucially, the violence occurring at present.
I write under the assumption that Schultz’s omissions were made in good faith, as I have no reason to assume they were not. After all, she writes from personal experience. She has visited Palestine and has family ties to the region – claims I certainly cannot make. However, holding personal connections to a particular issue is no guarantee of immunity against promoting misleading narratives about them, even if accidentally. Each of us is susceptible to misconception and oversight, despite our best efforts. Nevertheless, obscuring reality unintentionally doesn’t make it harmless.
What is happening in Gaza right now represents a fundamental civil rights issue of our time. The scale of the violence that the State of Israel is meting out to Palestinians surpasses every single major conflict in the 21st century.
Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced – most of whom are refugees, half of whom are children. Those still alive are being starved. The killing of international aid workers by the Israeli military is prompting other food charities to halt aid to the region out of fear that they too will be killed. Famine is looming. Not a single university on the strip has survived the Israeli military onslaught. Every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed or out of service due to lack of fuel, with only ten left even partially functional by the Israeli bombardment – at a time when former Israeli Major Generals talk openly in the Israeli press of the need to cause ‘severe epidemics’ in Gaza to help ‘bring victory closer’.
With weapons provided enthusiastically by the United States and the United Kingdom, Israel is bombing areas that it told innocent civilians to flee to, as well as carrying out airstrikes against ambulances, healthcare workers, and journalists. Israel is bombing refugee camps and schools, while threatening, smearing, and spying on the legal bodies that are trying to investigate them. The highest court in the world believes that virtually every indicator appears to plausibly meet the legal definition of genocide, as does the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. At the time of writing, Israel’s carpet-bombing campaign has killed over 14,500 Palestinian children – whose shoes could fill an entire city square.
The task of ensuring that our critical thinking tools are connected to the real world simply could not be more urgent. If we can’t make meaningful use of such skills now, then when?
Starting at the beginning. Beginning at the Nakba.
‘There is no serious dispute among Israeli, Palestinian, or other historians about the central facts of the Nakba.’
Jerome Slater, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Between 1947–1949, over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their native lands and violently driven from their homes by the new Israeli army in order to facilitate the creation of the State of Israel. This number constituted two-thirds of the Arab population of the country at the time, most of whom had lived there for generations. Roughly 500 villages and towns were completely destroyed or depopulated, 62,000 homes were demolished, and approximately 15,000 Palestinians were killed in close to 100 massacres. Israeli militias took part in widespread looting of property and belongings, and the total losses of destroyed or confiscated Palestinian property is estimated at 209,000,000,000 US Dollars.
This deliberate and systematic act of brutal mass expulsion was authorised and executed by Israeli forces, postulated by early architects of the Zionist movement, and enabled by the direct, militarised sponsorship of Britain. According to pro-Israel historians, ‘the less Arabs remained, the better’. The Israeli national narrative celebrates this period as the War of Independence that established their national sovereignty. The indigenous natives, and their descendants all over the world, remember it less fondly.
Over the years, this act of expropriation and dispossession has been named and theorised by its victims as the ‘Nakba’. Translated as the catastrophe, it pinpoints a time in Palestinian history that has come to represent the cultural and material shattering of the Palestinian society, the erasure of its national identity, and the obliteration of its political aspirations and statehood. It is the primary locus of collective trauma in the Palestinian memory, with many of the 7 million Palestinian refugees that exist today being directly descended from survivors of the Nakba. This includes 80% of the inhabitants of Gaza.
However, scholars, historians, experts and victims of the Nakba often stress the importance of rendering it not as a single event, but as an ongoing process that continues to this day. In the years that followed, Israel went on to establish a full-blown military Occupation of all of the remaining Palestinian territories that it was unable to capture in 1948; the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem – with Israel fully annexing the latter in 1980. This entailed razing many villages to the ground, and the further displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
Much to the chagrin of their ideological detractors, pro-Palestine activists today often insist on beginning their analysis here – at the Nakba and the facts of Occupation. There is a reason for this. It is not merely because Israeli Ministers are openly calling for ‘Gaza’s Nakba’. Nor is it due to Israeli soldiers spraying the words ‘Nakba 2023’ onto buildings in Gaza. Nor is it due to Israel’s decades-long record of attempting to bury evidence of the Nakba, or their efforts to remove the word from school textbooks and ban events that commemorate it – an activity echoed by its allies overseas, who are locked in similar battles against their own history.
It is because, in general, we believe it is a good idea to start our stories at the beginning. We believe that rendering geopolitical conflicts accurately, fully and honestly is the only way to understand them. In reality – whether Western journalists want to acknowledge it or not – Palestinians are not one ‘side’ in a ‘conflict’. Rather, they are the largest group of stateless refugees on the planet, over which a powerful, Western-backed country in the Middle East exerts an almost-total control of their lives and their deaths with impunity.
The Nakba itself provides context for why Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Its residents are not from there, but rather are penned in there – having fled other areas in the region due to the repercussions of the Nakba. Having stolen and expelled them from their homes, Israel now interns them in Gaza.
Today, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), Palestinians are deprived of the kinds of rights many readers might consider basic. In the Occupied West Bank, there are certain roads that Palestinians are not permitted to walk on. In some areas, Palestinians have been forbidden from collecting rain water, due to rain being considered “property of the Israeli authorities”. Millions of Palestinians are not permitted to vote in elections that determine their lives, due to a separate and unequal citizenship structure. Indeed, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert once said that State of Israel would be finished if the concept of ‘one-person-one-vote’ ever gained too much popularity:
If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.
Palestinians face severe restrictions on movement, rendering daily travel perilous and full of military checkpoints rife with harassment. Israel arms its own settlers, and seldom prosecutes, investigates or punishes their violence against Palestinians. It is even illegal for families to live together in Israel when one spouse is an Israeli citizen and the other is a resident of the OPT – a policy that Israel’s Interior Minister admitted had “demographic reasons”. To be abundantly clear, these are state-sanctioned measures of segregation that – according to international human rights organisations – we have an entirely appropriate word for.
Israel technically withdrew from Gaza in 2005, which is why it claims to no longer occupy it. However, Israel soon placed the territory under a land, air and sea blockade, which UN experts call illegal. This is why human rights organisations, aid organisations and think-tanks still refer to Gaza as an ‘occupied territory’, and why scholars on the subject refer to Gaza as the largest ‘open-air prison’ in the world. Two-thirds of the population are food insecure, due to the blockade. A senior Israeli official explained the purpose of this policy as being “to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger”.
Many readers of this magazine might not be too familiar with what it feels like to have every single aspect of your existence – your water, your food, your future, your history – owned and controlled by a violent occupying power, whose soldiers refer to you as ‘cockroaches’.
I certainly am not. I was born in the US and grew up in Britain – both places that have tended, historically, to be the ones doing the violent colonising. It is for this precise reason I feel that absolutely nobody should be writing or speaking about Israel/Palestine unless they are willing to foreground these foundational facts of disenfranchisement and dispossession. They are central. They must be established before we even begin, because they are where the story begins.
If we care at all about ‘the pursuit of truth’, as Schultz writes, we must constantly stress that one ‘side’ in this crisis is composed nominally of ethnically cleansed refugees dying of starvation, and the other ‘side’ is a highly militarised state that controls their food, stole their homes, and can shut off their water at will.
Aspiring to paint as full a picture as possible ought not to be controversial to anyone who claims to care about reaching evidence-based conclusions. Choosing to begin instead at individual, isolated incidents – shorn entirely of their origins and their contextual significance – is seldom a fruitful endeavour, and will serve only to veil the realities of Occupation.
The bombing of Al-Ahli hospital
On 17 October 2023 at 6:59pm, a large explosion took place in the courtyard of Gaza’s only cancer hospital. Hundreds of displaced Gazans were sheltering there, and hundreds were killed. Schultz writes:
When I woke up one morning, I scrolled through social media as I usually do, and came across a ton of stories on an apparent bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City. My first reaction was to be sad, but then I started asking myself questions about the situation. I wanted to know what had happened and who did this. Some sources blamed the Israeli government and their airstrike, and others blamed it on a rocket malfunction from the Hamas terrorist group. More and more questions came to me, and I kept searching for answers, but no source seemed reasonable.
On assessing evidence from both sides, she continues:
I initially believed the Israeli government was responsible for the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital, but I reflected on the limitations of my knowledge. After extensive research from both points of view, I find myself in a position of uncertainty regarding what really happened to Al-Ahli Hospital. Rather than hastily adopting a definitive stance, I embrace the [sic] humility, and acknowledge that there is much I still do not know and may never know.
I prioritise the pursuit of truth over unwarranted certainty, recognising that the situation’s complexities demand an ongoing commitment to understanding… To this day, I do not know who bombed the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, because there is a lack of evidence on which to make a thorough conclusion. However, I know that I will continue searching for an answer, and we should continue to do so for all that matters, striving for a deeper understanding of our complex world.
Schultz’s principled ambivalence about the origins of the blast was shared by much Western commentary in the days that followed the strike – including by supposed members of the British Left. Unfortunately, in this case, it is an ambivalence that is somewhat undermined by the fact that Israel did strike Al-Ahli hospital. Twice. Mere days beforehand, and then again in December.
On 14 October at 7:30pm, Israeli rocket fire severely damaged the upper two floors of Al-Ahli’s cancer treatment centre and injured several medical staff, according to the Anglican management that oversees the hospital. The Israeli military has been known to call such procedures ‘roof knocking’ – firing smaller, low-yield weapons at structures to indicate that a bigger strike is on the way. This is a technique that has itself resulted in civilian deaths, and that a United Nations fact-finding Mission concluded was “not effective as a warning, and constitutes a form of attack against the civilians inhabiting the building.”
Indeed, warning civilians that you are going to bomb them – by bombing them – isn’t much of a warning at all. Then, on the 18 December, the Israeli military attacked the hospital again. They destroyed part of the building’s grounds, killing at least four people, and arrested doctors, medical staff and patients.
Crucially, this is far from the first time that Israel has targeted health infrastructure. They did so in 2021, 2020, 2014, 2012, 2009, 2006, in 2002. They bombed a children’s hospital in 1982. In the ten days alone that followed October 7th, the WHO reported 51 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza, which have killed dozens and left more injured. This is to say nothing of the harm caused by bombing major roads near hospitals, making them much more difficult to reach. Lest we forget, an Occupying Power is actually responsible under international humanitarian law for protecting and providing for the medical needs of the people it is occupying – not bombarding and besieging the very facilities that are there to help them.
Of course, in and of itself, the fact that Israel has a patent record of attacking healthcare facilities doesn’t tell us definitively whether or not they chose to attack this particular healthcare facility on this particular occasion. However, what we do know is that Israel has targeted hospitals, they have targeted this hospital twice, and they have continued to target hospitals in the months that followed. I believe that a single incident contains much less information than the broader, historical pattern in which it sits, and this is self-evidently crucial to include in our analysis if we care about the ‘prioritising of the pursuit of truth’.
If I were to wake up one morning and discover the story of the apparent bombing of a hospital in Gaza, as Schultz did, I might find it helpful firstly to remind myself exactly what happened, and in what order it happened – so as to establish a preliminary contextual baseline right from the outset:
- On the 13 October, Israel ordered 22 hospitals to evacuate prior to commencing their ‘complete siege’ on Gaza. To be clear, this is a warning, from Israel, that Israel might attack those hospitals.
- The WHO referred to this order unequivocally as a ‘death sentence’ for patients who were unable to leave due to relying on life support. This includes dialysis patients, babies in incubators, and women with complications in pregnancy – all of whom would have been left to die. The evacuation orders were widely criticised as ‘impossible’ to comply with.
- One of the hospitals that Israel told to evacuate was Al-Ahli hospital.
- On the 14 October, Al-Ahli hospital was hit with an Israeli rocket, after which the hospital’s director claimed to have received a call from the Israeli army in which he had been told: “We warned you yesterday with two shells”.
- On the 17 October, Al-Ahli hospital was bombed.
- Benjamin Netanyahu’s social media advisor immediately issued a tweet celebrating the strike, writing that “Israeli Air Force [had] struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” Not long afterwards, he deleted the tweet, reiterating that Israel doesn’t bomb hospitals.
- The Israeli military tweeted video evidence purporting to show that the strike came from a Palestinian rocket that had misfired. Journalists and media outlets pointed out that the video showed an explosion that had occurred 40 minutes after the bombing of Al-Ahli. The Israeli military quickly removed the video from their tweet.
Israel claims that the explosion came from a misfired ‘enemy rocket’. Most of the weapons used by Palestinian groups tend to be unsophisticated, homemade rockets incapable of inflicting the vast scale of damage that occurred at Al-Ahli hospital. Typically, that level of damage is far more consonant with the kinds of weapons that the US supplies to Israel, it must be said. Therefore, Israel’s explanation requires us to believe two things. Not only did Hamas acquire an uncharacteristically large hi-tech weapon with phenomenal velocity, but they also managed to sneak this weapon past an Israeli embargo that even blocks food from reaching civilians – an embargo whose primary stated purpose was to prevent the smuggling of weapons into Gaza.
Examining the forensic evidence that Israel is using to buttress their account, as Schultz does, is appropriate and important. However, I believe another, equally important way of treating Israel’s claim with the weight it deserves would be to examine the historical precedent for such a claim in the first place. Has this ever happened before? Has Israel ever made this claim before? What has Israel’s immediate reaction been to similar atrocities in the past?
Is there perhaps a pattern within which a response like this might sit?
- In 2022, Israel carried out an airstrike that killed five children in Gaza. Initially, Israel denied responsibility for the strike, claiming that it was the result of a misfired rocket launched by ‘Islamic Jihad militants’. It wasn’t true.
- In 2022, the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli sniper, despite wearing a blue ‘press’ vest. Initially, Israeli officials denied responsibility and blamed ‘armed Palestinians’ for the attack. It wasn’t true.
- In 2018, a 21-year-old Palestinian medic was fatally shot by an Israeli soldier. In order to combat the ensuing international outcry, Israeli officials circulated a video in which she appeared to proudly declare that she was acting as a ‘human shield’ for Hamas. The video was revealed to have been doctored by the Israeli army in an attempt to smear her.
- In 2014, two Palestinian teenagers were murdered by Israeli soldiers during a protest in the Occupied West Bank. Israeli military officials denied using live ammunition. This wasn’t true.
- In 2009, Israel denied using white phosphorus munitions – a chemical weapon whose burns can penetrate bone – in its assault on Gaza. It wasn’t true.
- In 2006, Israel carried out an airstrike on a three-story building near the village of Qana in Lebanon, killing 28 civilians, 16 of whom were children. Israeli forces initially denied that the explosion was the result of their airstrike, claiming that the explosion could have come from a device planted by Hezbollah. It wasn’t true.
- In 1996, Israel shelled a UN compound in South Lebanon, killing 106 civilians. Israeli officials claimed they were unaware that the compound contained refugees. It wasn’t true. Israeli officials denied having operated a remotely piloted drone overhead before and during the massacre, which would have shown the presence of civilian refugees clearly. It wasn’t true.
I argue simply that precedent matters. History matters. Israel’s record of denying responsibility, attempting to blame others, and even fabricating evidence – as has been alleged in the case of Al-Ahli hospital – is essential to bear in mind when assessing incidents like this one.
It is indeed the case, as Schultz writes, that independent investigations have found the cause of the 17 October bombing of Al-Ahli hospital to be officially inconclusive. And while I agree with Schultz that continuing the search for a conclusive answer to that question is undeniably important work, I believe that taking care to observe the contextual landscape underneath, around and behind that question is just as important. Perhaps even more so. Otherwise, overtures of principled impartiality might well serve to obscure the bigger picture, rather than illuminate it.
There is nothing to be gained – and much to lose – by adopting instead a ‘blank slate’ approach, in which our examinations of current atrocities are dislocated entirely from the patterns of the past.
A ‘conflict’ as ‘complex’
Among the many interacting narratives that continue to structure Western discourse around Israel/Palestine, none seem more prevalent than the following:
- The situation constitutes a ‘conflict’
- The ‘conflict’ is incredibly ‘complicated’.
These refrains are so widespread across Western political life – finding voice through political figures and media outlets for decades – that they can be seen almost as a prerequisite for engaging in public commentary on the issue at all. An ‘occupational hazard’, you might say.
It is unsurprising, then, that they would appear in Schultz’s essay, too, given that this is very much the water we are swimming in. However, it is worth mentioning that these are narratives that Palestinian rights activists resist, scholars dispute, and experts repudiate.
Two ‘sides’
Many have warned how the language of ‘conflict’ conjures a foundationally spurious image of Israelis and Palestinians as ‘equal participants’ engaging in ‘clashes’ – as opposed to a heavily militarised, Western-backed state having complete control over the food, water, fuel, and movement of a large population of refugees whose homes they stole 76 years ago. As the Israeli historian Avi Shlaim writes:
This is not a conflict between two equal sides but between an occupying power and a subjugated population.
Indeed, there is absolutely no symmetry between Israel and Palestine in terms of the scale of the violence being inflicted, their respective military capabilities, or in the media coverage of the crisis – around which an overwhelming bias has been observed. When the balance of power is overwhelmingly in favour of one ‘side’, the language of ‘conflict’ serves only to sustain the illusion of parity in an asymmetric landscape. The suggestion of a level playing field between those living under military Occupation and those doing the occupying is plainly absurd. It is nonsensical to imply equal footing between David and Goliath, when the former is armed nominally with a stone.
Similarly, we should take extreme diligence not to buy into false equivalencies in talking about violence on ‘both sides’ of Israel/Palestine. The Hamas attack on October 7th was an act of armed resistance that claimed the lives of over 1,000 Israelis, hundreds of whom were civilians. Their deaths are devastating and tragic. Loss of life, any life, is never a good thing.
Unfortunately, history demonstrates that such violence is all but guaranteed by the continuation of a status quo built on the oppression of others. Indeed, when Palestinians attempted to march in protest peacefully, Israel shot and killed them. When Palestinian rights advocates called for a nonviolent boycott of the Israeli State, Israel criminalised boycotting.
Israel even funded Hamas for years as a way to weaken the secular Palestinian Liberation Organisation – the dominant political force at the time – and undermine the prospect of a united Palestinian front. Unfortunately, if you leave millions of disenfranchised people with no negotiation process and few regional allies – all while funding a fringe militant religious group trying to represent them politically – the risk of violent resistance is likely to rise.
Injunctions to consider the violence of ‘both sides’ fundamentally miss the mark in acknowledging who those sides are in the first place. The violence that results from the armed-resistance struggle of the colonised is both tragic and not ours to condone or condemn so long as we keep funding the bombs that are killing them, and maintaining the cages that hold them. As former Israeli advisor Daniel Levy has said:
I personally believe that Israelis can never have security until Palestinians have security. The [idea] that you can impose a regime of structural violence on another people, you can deny another people their basic rights, and you will live with your own security – that equation never works… Because when you’re oppressing people, you know in the back of your mind that you are generating a desire for retribution. You can’t actually sleep securely at night if you know [that’s] what you’re doing.
In my view, there exists no conceivable universe in which a malnourished collection of dying, confined, displaced human beings could meaningfully constitute a ‘side’ in a war – any more than a prisoner could be said to be at war with their captors.
A ‘complex’ situation
Appeals to a nebulous ‘complexity’ are no less pervasive, and have been condemned time and time and time again. It is a discursive tactic whose logical flimsiness is revealed the second we entertain a thought experiment in which we reverse the roles of the ‘sides’ in question, as the late Michael Brooks famously demonstrated.
In their expansive work on the history and future of the civil rights crisis facing the Palestinian people, the scholar Noam Chomsky and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé write:
The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex story – hard to understand and even harder to solve… Israel succeeded, with the help of its allies everywhere, in building a multilayered explanation that is so complex that only Israel can understand it.
Palestinian rights activists do important work in reminding us of how, throughout history, calls to complexity were often made by those who attempted to defend, distract from, and ultimately prolong grave social iniquities. It was a common response made by white South Africans during the height of Apartheid, for example – as it was during slavery in the US. Although Western media often attempts to separate these struggles, their victims are often happy to connect them, and have done for many years.
Indeed, Israel prevents foreign correspondents from reaching and reporting on Gaza, which ought to ring alarm bells. Due to the retroactive moral clarity that temporal distance from injustice confers, we mustn’t forget that in the late 1960s, people certainly spoke about Martin Luther King Jr in the way that many speak about movements for social justice today. While it is true that the full, detailed, granular history of these freedom struggles might be complicated, the basic moral assertions are not.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates has said of the time he spent in the Occupied West Bank:
It became very, very clear to me what was going on there… I was in a territory where your mobility is inhibited. Where your voting rights are inhibited. Where your right to water is inhibited. Where your right to housing is inhibited. And it’s all inhibited based on ethnicity. And that sounded extremely, extremely familiar to me… And so the most shocking thing about my time over there was how uncomplicated it actually is.
Now I’m not saying the details of it aren’t complicated. History is always complicated… but the way that this is reported in the Western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights… It’s actually not that hard to understand.
It’s actually quite familiar to those of us [who remember] African-American history.
Many in the scientific-skeptic community might be familiar with appeals to greater complexity as little more than bids for nuance in a sorely lacking media ecosystem. It is entirely understandable, given our eponymous opposition to easy answers. However, history bears a terrifying precedent for how such injunctions can, in fact, work to dilute the moral urgency of ongoing geopolitical atrocities, and aim to blunt the momentum of movements that oppose them.
If we are not careful, the blanket labelling of an issue merely as ‘complex’ can have the troubling effect of ex-territorializing it from history – of sequestering it from the material conditions that once caused it, and now sustain it – and of rendering it unfathomable. Truly, it is difficult to overstate just how often, and for how long, Palestinians rights activists have warned against referring merely to this crisis ‘complicated.’
Regrettably, Schultz refers to Israel/Palestine as ‘complex’ a total of 12 times in her piece, yet the word ‘Occupation’ never appears once. This, in a nutshell, is my critique. Again, I have no reason to assume that Schultz’s omissions were not made in good faith, and the purpose of her piece was never to flesh out the entire history of the freedom struggle at hand. However, these narratives are harmful. And claims that there are always ‘two sides to every story’ are always undermined if progenitor facts about that story are not then rendered accurately and fully.
Edward Said reminds us that Zionism must be viewed from the standpoint of its victims. So, then, let us be unequivocal. Israel is, by definition, an ethnostate. It is a state premised on one ethnic group owning and controlling land that it acquired by chasing another ethnic group from it. Relying on bipartisan support from its Western allies, it has spent decades stripping that very ethnic group of their freedom, their dignity, their basic rights, and their ability to grieve their loved ones. It prevents them from voting, from moving, from eating. It is operationally incompatible with democracy, and racist to its core. Its war crimes are visible from space, but invisible to Western leaders.
Contextless critical thinking is neither critical nor thoughtful. The desire to dispense with unhelpful analytical mirages is entirely consonant with the remit of this magazine, and of our movement more broadly.
Starting our stories at the beginning – and telling them accurately – allows us to breathe real, historical meaning into ongoing struggles for civil rights. It might be tempting to characterise Israel/Palestine as an ancient, unsolvable, unfathomable clash between two equally intractable parties, and leave all notions of ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘settler colonialism’, and ‘stolen land’ at the door. Unfortunately, this reading is not grounded in reality, not supported by growing scholarly consensus, and only attainable by averting our gaze from the context that surrounds us.
Western verdicts of complexity are, ironically, grossly oversimplified, and risk rendering us professionally oblivious to structural iniquity.
Such narratives may be simpler to swallow, and may allow us a moment of imagined even-handedness, but they are not true. They are illusions only context can pierce. And skeptics ought to care about illusions.
‘If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them
Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian poet
Their oil would become tears’.
