A Reminder From Eisenhower on Israel/Palestine

There’s a quote from President Eisenhower that I often turn to when examining anything political. Or, at least, my interpretation of the quote. “The middle of the road is all the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.” I don’t see this as a call for centrism, but as a recognition of who’s actually influential in a democracy.

On any issue in a functioning democracy, no matter how good your argument is, if you’re hesitant to put it up to a vote, you’ve lost. The closer an idea comes to consensus, the more it reflects the situation under which it was agreed upon. It isn’t necessarily a good idea, but it’s representative. That Eisenhower quote, to me, is a reminder to play ideas to the people.

But there’s an issue with this way of thinking. What happens when, from your perspective, the people choose wrong? Not a little wrong, either. The kind of wrong that brings only suffering, that every fiber of your being is disgusted by. I believe these wrong choices define almost everything about Israel/Palestine, an issue far too complicated for just a few pages. I will be making simplifications, and I ask you to forgive them for the sake of my point.

At its simplest, here’s the issue: Israel, a nation created as a homeland for Jewish people, is built on a contradiction. The idea of a Jewish nation began to take shape in the late 1800s. The idea of a Jewish nation gained in popularity following the ethnic cleansing of Jewish people in the Holocaust. However, the land sought to establish the nation for its historical significance wasn’t empty. Israeli settlers violently forced the Palestinians from their homes, taking the land for themselves. When massive amounts of Jewish refugees arrived following the Holocaust, the balance of power was tipped forever. Since then, Palestinians have lost more and more, many confined to Gaza and the West Bank. Recently, further encroachment from the Israeli Netanyahu administration was met with rocket strikes from Hamas, a terrorist group that is also Palestine’s ruling political party, which was then met with a rocket campaign against Gaza.

I want to examine, for the most part, that last sentence. To a reader unfamiliar with the situation, there’s a lot of red flags here on both sides. Why the Palestinians would elect a terrorist group is an obvious question. But to me, it’s not just obvious, but completely necessary. Why would a terrorist group win an election? That’s a pretty extreme measure, and that tells us a lot. Extreme measures come from extreme situations, and being a Palestinian today is perhaps the very definition of an extreme situation.

Ian Bremmer, my personal foreign policy guru, labeled the Palestinian experience today as “economic asymmetry.” That’s generous. You might recall the panic in our nation at the start of the pandemic, as unemployment reached 14.7% in April. In Palestine, the unemployment rate is 49.1%. Palestinians are restricted in movement, unable to cross into Israel without approval from border authorities. Anera, a refugee aid program in the Middle East, describes that “Palestinians must often line up at 3 or 4 a.m. to be able to pass through the checkpoints on time to make it to their jobs in Israel… women have given birth at checkpoints, and some people have died while waiting to cross the checkpoint to seek healthcare.”

History never exactly repeats itself. But sometimes, a keen-eyed observer can pick up on a hint of the past. There was a whiff of Weimar in the US last summer. Israel reeks of Apartheid.

That’s without even mentioning times when bombs are dropping. While rockets have been fired by both Hamas and the Netanyahu administration, Israel has the Iron Dome to shoot down rockets. Palestine has no such luck. Civilian centers in Palestine are consistently targeted with the explanation that Hamas shared the building. Maybe this is true in some cases, maybe it is not. But say, not reflective of real numbers, one in ten Palestinians qualified as Hamas members. When all Palestinians are forced into the same, small territory, it becomes very easy to use the Hamas defense.

Where this falls apart is when the Israeli Defense Force attempts to use the same logic on targets with more significance to the international community, as when the IDF destroyed a building housing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera, which they claimed also housed Hamas militants. You mean to tell me the AP wouldn’t check if the guy at the water cooler was a member of Hamas? As per usual, The Onion’s spin on this was glorious: “‘The Onion’ Calls On Israel To Bomb Our Offices In Case Any Hamas Agents Hiding Out There.”

Our response at home is about as bad as I’ve come to expect. There’s bipartisanship in Washington, on Israel’s side. The odd dissenter notwithstanding, Democrats and Republicans almost universally agree on “Israel’s right to defend itself,” which means far more than it lets on. A statement from many Democratic senators calling for a cease-fire came as a surprise.

So what does one do when the consensus of the powerful is unethical? The whole situation is one wrong near-consensus after another. The Israeli political system has gone through election after election in an attempt to form a government without Netanyahu at the helm. He is, of course, under investigation for various criminal charges, clinging to the role of prime minister to avoid them. Palestinians, unable to hold an election since 2006, are stuck with a corrupt government and a terrorist group that escalates the situation and whose actions are taken on the Palestinian’s behalf. The only winners are the extremists, the gutter-dwellers. In this case, Netanyahu and Hamas, whose electoral futures depend on chaos.

We are certainly in the gutters now, told all the while that it’s the middle of the road. So call your senators, call your representatives, but most of all remember that we’re in the gutters. Indifference cannot be seen as normal. And though it may not seem like it, refusing to cede empathy to an uncaring consensus is bravery. Your representatives serve you. Remind them.