A Month in Israel: Six Reflections

A primer on slow judgment, and on how to think about intractable conflicts.

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

- Viktor Frankl, Psychiatrist and Holocaust Survivor

“Which side are you on?”

I’ve been asked that question a lot of late, both here in Israel and by friends abroad. 

I’m a bit skeptical that I’ve given anyone a entirely compelling answer. My interest is in bearing useful witness and arming readers with useful context. But “useful” is subjective, and depends a great deal on one’s priors¹ and goals.

I’d been here for about a week when the weight of this subjectivity forced me into something between an epiphany and a panic attack. I was standing in a makeshift bomb shelter, less afraid and more bored, when thoughts that had been slowly percolating took the occasion to suddenly filter down in unwelcome clarity:

• I’m a small voice

• This is one of the world’s oldest, most complex, least soluble conflicts 

• Anything I write, no matter how nuanced, is going to make some folks very angry 

• Coming here was a mistake 

Perhaps luckily, I didn’t have to sit with these fears long before the pharmacy in whose shelter we’d crowded together against our will² released us. I was free to leave, along with my fears.

Momentum ultimately carried me from there. I’d already lined up interviews, and I was already here. So onward I went. And with each interview my resolve to publish grew stronger—less because I’d reached peace on any of those fears, and more because of the growing debt I felt to those who’d entrusted their perspectives to me. 

If all goes well, those interviews will form five pieces, the first of which I expect to drop later this week. What follows in this edition is just a collection of six general reflections from the past month—that taken together hopefully provide a set of useful considerations around how to parse what’s happening here.

Mostly, they sum up to “we should insert a lot more space between stimuli and our responses”. Because that’s where all the best human-ing is done.

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I. On Conflict Coverage

We rely on war journalists to solicit inputs from credible sources and cross-check them for accuracy—to filter the stream of facts that inform our understanding of events and our subsequent moral judgments. 

While this can break down on the obvious level—where claims just aren’t checked very well—my larger concern is a layer deeper. Whose job is it provide the context we need to understand any given update in its proper position and proportion?

Based on how newsrooms monetize their work, they can credibly claim “well that’s not really our thing beyond some minimum”. They’ll tell you what’s happening or what’s recently happened, often quite quickly. But understanding exactly how the new dovetails with the old is often (not always) left as an exercise to the reader. While I don’t blame any individual journalist for this, it creates predictable difficulties.

Case in point: “Israel shuts off water to Gaza.” This is simple to parse at a headline level. But does it really inform? Consider the web of related questions required for meaningful understanding: How much water was being sent? On which terms? Was it shut off everywhere in Gaza? For how long? Leaving what reserves? To what likely impacts? Under which assumptions? And what happened to all the money poured in over recent years to boost domestic capacity? It’s not that the full answers wholly justify turning the taps off. But they sure do lead to a more complicated picture.

For us to pull our levers of democracy well, getting to the bottom of these questions needs to be someone’s job. And both sides have an interest in this being done well.

Of course, it’s tricky work:

• This conflict has long been happening underneath thick clouds of propaganda

• Few of the people involved can be located on any simple ideological spectrum

• Getting comprehensive answers is a huge investment of time

Thankfully, there are real experts who’ve labored on questions like this with little fanfare—some of whom have been gracious enough to share their insights with me.

For the past month I’ve been working on five stories:

1. Infrastructure in Gaza. What exists, what doesn’t (and why), the recent history of dealmaking, and the logic and impact of Israeli restrictions.

2. The IDF and casualty minimization. Official policies, how they’re enforced, how they fit with humanitarian law, and how violations are/aren’t policed.

3. The settler issue. What happened when Israeli settlers were pulled out of Gaza in 2005, what’s happening now in the West Bank, and how locals (across both borders and the political spectrum) feel about the future.

4. The Christian question. A history of how and why western evangelicals support certain conceptions of Israel, and how this affects politics and policies today.

5. The helpers. A glimpse into the volunteer networks that have emerged within Israel to assist internal refugees—and what life looks like for the displaced.

Tackling this while managing my day work and ADHD has been tricky. But I’ll do my best to get all five out (in some order) over the next month.

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II. On Seeing Stereoscopically

Consider one of the great movie monologues, delivered by Jack Nicholson in character as a US Marines Colonel defending himself in court against charges brought by Tom Cruise’s young idealist prosecutor:

You can’t handle the truth! Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns... You have the luxury of not knowing what I know … My existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don’t want the truth, because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like “honor”, “code”, “loyalty”. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I suspect there are two wrong reactions we can have to this:

1. Thinking Jack Nicholson’s character is right

2. Thinking Tom Cruise’s character is right

I further suspect that part of ideological maturity is realizing that the prosecutor, while certainly right as to the specifics, failed to really consider the larger premise. And likewise that the colonel applied a valid argument to the wrong defense.

This in mind, let’s consider the Hamas playbook. What they did on 10/7 left Israel with two options:

1. No retaliation. Hamas understood this would be politically untenable, and reinforced this by later promising to do 10/7 again and again so long as still able.

2. Retaliation. Hamas made this impossible to do ethically via human shielding. To defang Hamas, Israel would need to accept unacceptable casualties to a mix of their own military and Gazan civilians. Whatever the mix, Hamas gains. (The backlash against civilian deaths is integral to their strategy.)

This is a truth we struggle to handle.

Some have made the prosecutor’s mistake and elected to ignore that no good solution was on the table that simultaneously: (1) addressed the security risk, (2) was perfectly ethical, (3) was sufficiently acceptable to a voting public rocked by a historic atrocity.

Even so, others—particularly in the Netanyahu government—have followed the colonel in asserting that to question their methods is to question the necessity of their aims; that we must wholly defer to them as the men on the wall bearing the horrible burden of doing what we down below the have the luxury of needing but not wanting.

A few thoughts:

• I still have yet to come across a compelling case for how Israel could have addressed their legitimate security concerns without some war

• While some specific hospitals or mosques may not have had quite the Hamas presence that the IDF claimed, the locations where Hamas forces have been found have largely been embedded within civilian populations and infrastructure

Even so:

• Officials within the Netanyahu government have said some morally horrific things about Palestinian civilians, and each such statement has undermined the work (sufficient or not) that the IDF is doing to minimize collateral casualties

• The restrictions on humanitarian aid seem to have been clearly disproportionate to reasonably expected war benefits

(More on both those last two points in coming pieces.)

Seen stereoscopically, one can believe that Hamas de facto sacrificed a great number of their own civilians on 10/7 while also believing that Israel’s response isn’t beyond scrutiny, informed criticism, or democratic pushback.

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III. On Surgical Weapons

I’m not an expert on munitions. But I’m a curious person, and as a rule I like to ask “why was this weapon created” before I pass judgment on its use. And sometimes this curiosity and a simple google search can get you a long way.

As just one sample case, consider the Hellfire R9X missile.

Quoting a now-private viral tweet:

Lockheed Martin made a weapon that shoots blades at humans like they are meat in a blender? And many scientists and engineers worked on this? I am going to be sick. Physically sick.

This weapon was widely claimed to have been used in a hospital attack in Gaza a few weeks ago. A representative take:

A few problems:

• The blades of a R9X don’t “shoot out” in the sense of separating from the missile, nor do they rotate independently of the missile’s own spin

• The blades are there instead of an explosive warhead

• Because of this, the R9X has an impact zone of just ~6 feet (though it can fragment somewhat just based on gravity, as with anything heavy falling)

• It was created specifically to allow more precise targeting (ie. the least possible collateral damage)—and has largely worked for just that

• Whatever fell on the Al Shifa courtyard that night wasn’t an R9X (it seems to have been a stray shell from an illumination round)

(To be clear, this is a separate incident from the explosion at the Al Alhi hospital in October.)

Anyway, cue a US Congressman:

In vague fairness, he did later delete his tweet and kinda apologized for rushed judgment. Many didn’t. But note too the public commentary around use of “JDAMs” (short / rhyming summary here). How do we get here time and time again?

It’s not even that we aren’t waiting for the evidence to roll in. It’s that “smarter” munitions kill fewer civilians than “dumber” ones. To the degree that some war is unavoidable, we ought to be pushing for the most precise weapons possible.

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IV. On Pragmatic Politics

(As an important caveat, what I say here is directed to allies and advocates—less to people with eg. dead family and friends.)

One great truth of democratic history: policies tend to be decided by the middle.

Put another way, lots of people don’t have strongly-held opinions on any given issue, at least on any fixed ideological level. Hardliners on either side can (mostly) only effect lasting change to the degree that they win over—and hold—voters in the middle.

Working backwards from this principle, we can observe a useful rule for political rhetoric: to the degree that we want our policies enacted, we ought to appeal to people whose votes are winnable, not to those already on our team.

Making this concrete, consider the utility of debates around the word “genocide” right now. It doesn’t really matter what a given dictionary or IHL panel says. You aren’t going to win many in the middle over this way—and certainly not in Israel.

Calling for a reduction in civilian casualties is noble and good. Calling for faster and wider deployment of humanitarian aid is good. These are things you can build winning coalitions around. Many Jews (in Israel and abroad) support both.

I’ve talked to a lot of people here. The majority have expressed criticisms (or at least strong reservations) about Israeli policy in Palestine—both in legacy and present terms. We do better to work with this grain and not against it.

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V. On Costless Moralism

Two resignation letters have widely made the rounds in the past month or so:

1. The UN’s Craig Mokhiber (“Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”)

2. NYT Poetry Editor Anne Boyer (“The Israeli state's U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. … Its only profit is the deadly profit of oil interests and weapon manufacturers.”)

Setting aside the wildly misinformed bit about oil interests³ (as a former Israeli PM once quipped, “Moses took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil”), both these letters share a hidden truth: they were published by people who were on their way out anyway.

• Mokhiber had hit has mandatory retirement age and made plans to step down back in March.

• Boyer was serving in a role that rotates every calendar year, meaning that she resigned some six weeks early.

A careful reader will note that neither letter mentions this.

Of course, this doesn’t ipso facto invalidate their points. Their letters were misguided because of their over-stated content, not just their high-ground presentation. But it seems to matter to me that we’re giving oxygen to them as if they were statements of costly moralism. They weren’t. And both have poisoned the well for many in the middle—whose support is vital for advancing the work of peace.

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VI. On Warzone Hotels

If a young war reporter were to be looking for an interesting and human-positive beat, I’d encourage them to spend a lot of time in hotels. But not the posh Intercontinentals of the world. The budget hotels housing the displaced and the volunteers—where many of the latter come in on their own dime compelled by a complex desire to help.

Should HBO’s White Lotus ever look for fresh themes, they could make some superbly compelling content by following the same tack. These hotels are where the most fascinating people are, who each give a rich view of the multitudes we contain.

One of my upcoming pieces started with a conversation at such a hotel—with an unlikely trio who’d found each other by chance, linked by a desire to fill their days seeing some light brought into the darkness.

I met others like them in Kyiv when reporting there over Xmas last year. One in particular stuck out—an engineer who came all the way from the US to volunteer on projects like improving helmet safety.

As we took a break from our curfew drinking to stand outside in the cold of the night, he broke up the silence with an observation. “Broken people are attracted to places like this,” he started before pausing to drag on his cigarette. “Because broken people are searching for redemption.”

I suspect he’s right.

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1. To sum my own biases: (A) I’ve always been a Zionist in a loose sense, in that Jews having a secure home state felt like the right answer to a long and brutal history of persecution. (B) Even so, (re)locating Zion into a region then already long populated by (mostly) Arabs seemed an especially fraught idea, whatever the ancestral claims. (C) Even so, too much time has passed for this to be adjudicable by modern standards. A two-state solution with appropriate reparations (eg. as proposed in Taba in 2001) seems the best solution to an otherwise insoluble set of claims. As with Northern Ireland, make the best peace you can and then help future generations get rich enough for local temperatures to drop to sub-crisis levels. Is that justice? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But peace is better than war, and trying to impose retroactive justice in any purist way has a long history of making things worse. 

2. Between my experience here and in Ukraine, I’d sort attitudes about bomb shelters into roughly three buckets. (1) Some people need to shelter every alert for employer policy reasons, and are generally annoyed by it. (2) Those who’ve been in real attacks before value shelters for what they are, and tend to take alerts seriously. (3) Lots of people have never had a close call, have long ago lost any compliance energy they once had, and just want to get on with their days. I can say subjectively that falling into the third category happens a lot faster than you’d think—which is more confession than endorsement.

3. Even if we imagine that “oil” was also intended to cover eg. natural gas, that’s not relevant here either. Israel voluntarily signed their rights away to Gaza’s offshore gas fields some time ago. More on this in a coming piece.