A "Soft Peace" for Gaza

The grotesque conduct of the war in Gaza that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has presided over has generated the most severe threat to Israel’s existence that it has ever faced.  Those old enough to remember the sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union may have some inkling of the power of the complete loss of international legitimacy to destroy a state.  Netanyahu and his allies appear to have no clue.

For all sympathetic outside actors, the central question is how we can help the Israeli people and the Palestinian people to find their way to a peace that both will consider, however inadequate, preferable to ongoing conflict.  The question for both peoples—as well as for all the institutions that constitute “their” political expressions—is do you want what you say is best for your peoples, or do you want domination?  You can only choose one and unless both sides choose to forsake the pursuit of domination (a choice which requires a “feminine” openness to vulnerability that all political entities, by their nature, shy away from), both sides will continue to lose and to suffer horrifically.  

Having suffered horrifically from Hamas’ attack of 7 October 2023—an attack far more destructive in proportional population terms than 9-11 was to the United States—the Israeli people have yet to share the experience of the years following 9-11 that led the American people to realize that their “preventative”/retaliatory war in Iraq was morally and politically bankrupt and strategically counterproductive.  Like the former American president, George W. Bush, Netanyahu and his allies are still operating within a hyper-“masculine” framework in which security is to be achieved through domination rather than through peace.  Far too many Israelis are still imagining that they do not need local allies on the ground in Gaza and can somehow dictate Gaza’s future without a single one.   

In preparing for the postwar peace with Gaza, there is much for the Israeli people to draw upon from the experience of the United States in its preparations for the postwar peace with Japan during WWII.  Both much to emulate and much to avoid.  

In November 1944, the Gallup poll asked this question to ascertain American attitudes toward Japan: “What do you think we should do with Japan as a country after the war?”  To this question a full forty-six percent recommended extreme brutality.  “These included: 33% who would destroy the country as a political entity or cut it up into small states, and 13% who would kill all Japanese left alive at the end of the war.”  Echoes of such dehumanization and hatred can be heard in the subsequent American war crimes of the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

And yet almost a year earlier, in December 1943, the former American Ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, had publicly sought to soften American attitudes.  He had urged the abandonment of any kind of vindictiveness in planning for the peace.  It was the same kind of blind prejudice which in the last war had been directed against the Germans, he told an audience in Chicago, that prevented Americans from admitting, “that there can be anything good in Japan or any good elements in the Japanese race.”  Without a postwar policy that would seek to strengthen these good elements and win their co-operation, he implied, the Japanese might simply follow the German example and wait a generation before trying again. There would be little lasting benefit to the United States, Grew warned President Harry S Truman in June 1945, “if we were to achieve merely a military victory and fail to pursue the victory into the field of ideas.”

Grew and his allies were known at the time—by their critics—as “the soft peace boys.” Their position has, however, been vindicated: in the interests of the United States—and especially in the interests of a lasting peace—a reformist occupation that would seek to raise the living standards of the mass of the Japanese people and improve the distribution of wealth in the country (by redistributing land to the peasantry, encouraging the growth of trade unions, and by vigorous antitrust measures) has been shown to be part of a viable path toward peace and toward the successful end of an occupation.  

The details of what a “soft peace” for Gaza would look like are best addressed by those closest to the situation although some measures such as a guarantee of clean water and good housing to every inhabitant of Gaza are obvious. Daniel Wolf’s Gaza 2050 plan (https://tinyurl.com/Gaza-2050-Plan) seeks to persuade the Arab world to take a leadership role on behalf of an effort to rebuild Gaza as the center of a Palestinian state that would ultimately include the West Bank but in which Gaza would first come to constitute “an Arab Barcelona on the Eastern Mediterranean and a metropole on the India—Middle East—Europe Economic Corridor.”  Within a system of security guarantees that would enable both sides to stand down as the plan was realized, the Arab world would provide major financial support and offer normal diplomatic relations and recognition of Israel in return for Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian state.  Arab world support for such a plan would attract many American Jews and other supporters of Israel in the United States, would divide that “unity” which serves as the foundation of AIPAC’s influence on American politics, and enable or perhaps—in the present context of Democratic Party politics—even compel the administration of President Joe Biden to put real pressure on the Israeli state to accept the plan.

Hamas must be similarly pressured by outside allies and sympathizers to look to the examples of Sinn Féin in Ireland, the ANC in South Africa, and the FMLN in El Salvador, and consider voluntarily withdrawing from the exercise of military and perhaps even political power in Gaza with an eye to later entering the political mainstream of a Palestinian state committed to peaceful relations with Israel.  As both sides accept more nuanced views of one another, and accept the impossibility of achieving security through domination, confidence in the framework specified in the Gaza 2050 plan (or something along similar lines) can be expected to increase.  The protests of Netanyahu and his allies that a “two state solution” is unacceptable can be expected to continue.  They should be ignored.  Once the moral and political and strategic costs of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza become apparent to the Israeli people, Israeli governmental opinion on this matter will surely change, particularly if a solid peace and securing freedom for the hostages can be obtained by such a course. 

It should be stressed that an intelligent occupying power may have to cooperate with former terrorists.  The success of the American occupation of Japan surely owes much to the cooperation that was provided by Emperor Hirohito, who even Grew at one point thought “ought to be tried as a war criminal.”  The overriding necessity must become what will serve both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples themselves—at the same time—and open a path to an outcome in which the safety and rights of each people are mutually respected.  There appears to be no other way to stop the genocide and move toward a lasting peace.

A lasting peace can only be built on the foundation of an end to foreign rule over all peoples in a world in which all peoples recognize all living beings as their kith and kin and accept their obligations to act with trustworthy, reciprocal, and consensual conduct towards all life. This requires recognizing the sovereignty—and the right to sovereignty—of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples. This is not, it must be stressed, a position resting on nationalism and its spurious principles. Such nationalism has infected the thinking of Jews and Muslims beginning, perhaps, with their expulsion from Spain in the fifteenth century. The eurochristian nationalism with which that expulsion was advocated—the alleged lack of limpieza de sangre—of “purity of blood”—that so many despots and would be despots harp upon—has been a cover for imperialist oppression and exploitation for centuries. In seeking to defend themselves, many Jews and Muslims (by no means all) have accepted the false claims of the nationalists: the claims that humanity is divided by nature into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate form of government is “national self-determination” (in the sense of a nation having a state of its “own”). This “defensive” nationalism on the part of those who have experienced domination at the hands of eurochristian imperialists has been associated with such horrors as the Partition of India and Pakistan, the Nakba of 1948, Hamas’ genocidal attack of 7 October 2023, and the current Israeli genocide in Gaza. It involves the false identification of nations with states or would-be states rather than with peoples (in the sense indicated above). In fact, peoples can be considered as true selves, nations as their minds, and states—systems of domination—as the “egos” of nations.

In seeking to overcome our egos—whether as individuals or as collectivities—there are two basic paths: an “external path” concerned with the development of ethical principles and benevolent authority that often degenerates into strident assertions of moral purity and impurity and an “internal path” concerned with our felt connections with all life as part of who we are.  The latter is a spiritual path concerned with our true selves as unique expressions of everything else in the universe—with the spiritual truth, in other words, that we are all kith and kin to all living beings, including the Earth, in a universe that is itself alive.  Such grandmother/grandfather teachings as those of the Anishinaabeg—the teachings surrounding love, truth, bravery, humility, wisdom, honesty, and respect—can be considered as conveying ethical principles, but they do much more than this.  They convey deeply felt responsibilities to pursue harmony and balance with the world and within one’s being.  It is to such wisdom that we must turn if all of us (including both Israelis and Palestinians) are to find a way out of our current predicament.

Steven J. Schwartzberg is adjunct faculty in political science at DePaul University in Chicago and the author of Arguments over Genocide: The War of Words in the Congress and the Supreme Court over Cherokee Removal (https://ethicspress.com/products/arguments-over-genocide/?INTEGRITY)