Approximately a month after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, instigating the ongoing Israel-Gaza war, the Guardian published an opinion piece by Jason Stanley, the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, entitled, "My Life Has Been Defined By Genocide of Jewish People. I Look On Gaza With Concern." Though I had not had any interaction with Professor Stanley in a number of years, I felt inclined to share my immediate reaction with him. After all, we had enjoyed some acquaintance in the past, primarily spawned by my criticisms of his philosophical approach to know-how and his take on Gilbert Ryle. Unfortunately, our heated exchanges over the 2016 Democratic primary led us to lose contact. (Incidentally, I decided to break off contact first, though he might have been considering doing the same.)
Unsurprisingly, he did not respond to my initial thoughts on his recent Guardian piece except to tell me that he had already received over 200 replies, mostly by fellow Jews, and only three were negative. Mine, of course, was one of the select three. That was less than 48 hours after the piece's publication, so now--a month later--I am sure he has received many more responses, though perhaps still more positive than negative. In any case, and with little hope of his engagement, I have decided to write once more. This time my thoughts are a bit more organised and focused, and perhaps worthy of public attention. I share the complete email, which I sent today, below.
Hi again, Jason. I am contemplating attempting a semi-formal and more thorough essay on all of this (with little hope of any significant readership, unfortunately), since I am disheartened by how the ongoing conflict is persistently characterized across the board, though especially on the political left. I'm writing to you again because there are some points in your Guardian piece that are still bothering me, and if nothing else, this affords me a chance at a sort of rough draft at what I might one day attempt. Any response could be very helpful towards that end, and towards mutual understanding.
One issue I have is how you equate the suffering of children in Gaza to the suffering of children in Israel on Oct. 7. Considering that children were brutally tortured and raped in the midst of a massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, I wonder if you made your remark in ignorance. If not in ignorance, then how do you justify it? It is no easy matter to compare sufferings, but the horrors reported from Oct. 7 seem to be of a profoundly different order to anything witnessed in Gaza. Not only is the character of the suffering profoundly different, but the circumstances, as well. Unless you refuse to give Israel the benefit of any doubt, it is possible that all of the civilian casualties in Gaza--at least, those caused by the IDF--were the necessary result of actions aimed at disarming and ultimately destroying Hamas. If so, then they were plausibly justified under the principle of proportionality, in which case Israel is not clearly guilty of a war crime. In contrast, the horrors inflicted on children in Israel on Oct. 7 is clearly a war crime, as civilians were clearly targeted in an act of terrorism. In reality, we don't even know how many of the children killed in Gaza are civilians. While I do not want to minimize the horrors innocent children continue to experience because of the IDF's actions in Gaza, attempting to equate horrors of such different character and circumstance is more than disheartening. It is morally outrageous.
Another issue is your characterization of the exodus of Arabs from Israel in 1948-49. Some were forced out, yes, but many Arabs left willingly, hoping to wait out the war until Israel was destroyed. Those who were forced out were resistant to Israel's military efforts to secure itself against attack. In 1948, to prepare for the pending assault on all sides from Arab neighboring territories, Israel had to establish a geographical continuity between the north and south, and sought to only disrupt those Arab villages which opposed this defensive military effort. Those Arabs which were expelled were therefore either a direct or indirect military threat. That is the documented reason for their military expulsion, and it is why half of the Arab population remained and continued to thrive in Israel.
Instead of considering that perhaps Israel had a legitimate military aim, you use a name, "the Nakba," that many have used to equate the Arab exodus to the Holocaust. "Nakba" and "Shoah" are both translations for the English word "catastrophe," yet one has become a rallying call of the "Free Palestine" movement while the other refers to the genocide of millions of Jews. By hiding the truth of the Arab exodus behind such a word, you legitimize those who equate Jewish nationalism to Nazism. In addition, your rhetoric betrays a bias against the 900,000 Jews (and their descendents) who were forced to flee Arab- and Muslim-controlled territories during the same period. You apparently support an Arab claim to national heritage in the whole of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea--why else call attention to their historic displacement? Yet your rhetoric suggests no sympathy at all for any Jewish claim to the land--for you blame Jewish nationalism for the so-called catastrophe, as if the ideology were at fault. Why no sympathy for the Jewish side? Do you share Hannah Arendt's bias against Palestinian Jews, and believe that the state of Israel is an essentially European construct? While European powers and European Jews certainly played a defining role in the creation of Israel, I would not erase the role of indigenous Jews from history. If we could perhaps agree that no people has an *essential* right to any land, then we should also be able to agree that descendents of Egyptians or other Arabs who migrated to the areas now known as Gaza, Israel and the West Bank in the 19th century have no more of a right to that land than descendents of Jews who have lived there for thousands of years.
Perhaps you would like to see the land west of the Jordan to be governed without religious or ethnic considerations of any kind, where Jews and Muslims exist and congregate interchangeably, their differences a matter of cultural curiosity rather than political tension. As a long-term goal, I would be happy to agree with you. However, there is no short-term possibility of anything of that sort. I don't think even a two-state solution has any chance of stability for the foreseeable future. Your attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Israel can only serve, at best, to uproot and displace the entire Jewish population of Israel. At worst, you are indirectly supporting the massacre of all Israeli Jews. What else could you expect to happen if the so-called "Palestinian right to return" is institutionalized and Jews become a despised and demonized minority in the entire region? Who would you task with protecting Jewish lives?
Perhaps you intended your Guardian piece to have a modest aim: to rally liberals in the support of Palestinian civilians, to end what you believe is a bitter and unjust massacre against an entire people. Perhaps you sincerely believe that Israel faces no existential threats, that Israel should not be afraid of Hamas or any other groups. Perhaps you believe that Israel is attempting a genocide, and you believe that the terms "Nakba" and "Shoah" are not just linguistically, but also politically, equivalent. For such reasons, you must believe your rhetoric is justified. You believe you are supporting a righteous cause and fighting a false ideology which props up Israel as an unjust settler-colonial state. From where I'm standing, however, you are the one promoting a false ideology. You appeal to fears of antisemitism, claiming that Israel's attempts to quash Hamas will only make the world less safe for Jews, and yet you ignore--and tragically propagate--the antisemitism that persists throughout the discourse. You deny and diminish the threats Jews in Israel face. Your rhetoric undermines both democracy and freedom by calling for an end to any and all attempts to analyze and justify Israel's defensive actions; by erasing the historical and political complexity of Israel's existence as well as the demographics of the Levant; by undermining Jewish nationalism; by supporting a political movement (ironically dubbed "Free Palestine") which prioritizes the political aspirations of anti-democratic governments; and by equating proportional defensive actions with terrorist offenses. You know how this kind of propaganda works, which just goes to show--false ideology can lead even the educated and intelligent to do the damndest deeds.
It has been over a month since your piece was published in the Guardian. It has taken me this long to find the time and mental space to collect my thoughts in a more focused and, hopefully, effective manner. I would be honored if you had the time for engagement, but I expect nothing. I wish you and your family well.
Regards,
Jason
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