Agreed.
People say, "Ah, we'll get rid of Netanyahu as soon as the war is over." But as long as Netanyahu and his cohorts remain in power the war will never end.
With every Hamas member that Israel kills, and even more so, with every casualty of the inevitable civilian "collateral damage" that will accompany those deaths, more suicidal, nihilistic bombers will arise.
What needs to happen, but will not, is the excision, not of Hamas alone, but simultaneously, of the Netanyahu power base that created Hamas in the first place, and the Likud, who support that base. The roots of the Likud are easy to trace.
My grandfather's brother, my great-uncle Paul, was a part of the discussions regarding the political and logistical realities of a potential post-WWII Jewish homeland in Palestine, as far back as the mid-1920s. In 1943 he co-hosted an event in Manhattan attended by the various international leaders of a group he'd cofounded called the Jewish Distribution Committee, which had been formed as a refugee aid society after WWI.
The entire range of Zionist thought and action attended this 1943 event, from non-Zionists, like Paul, all the way to the extremes of the Menachem Begin group, who at that time was leading the Irgun, a paramilitary group in Palestine who were engaged in daily acts of what we would now call terrorism, but which under the hideous pressures of Nazism, British anti-semitism, the all-powerful petroleum cartels and the Nazi/Mahdi pacts were considered, and probably rightly so, resistance.
Paul and other Jewish non-Zionists like Albert Einstein and Joe 'Packy' Schwartz held the position that, 'yes, move to Palestine, but not as an occupying army. Live as neighbors. Create understanding. Build hospitals and schools and universities and water purification plants, not armies. Uplift the lives of everyone in the region. If we occupy Palestine by force, we will doom this new country to eternal war.'
Or words to that effect.
At the other end of the spectrum were Begin's people, who we now know as the Likud, who said in response, "No, we must re-establish Eretz Yisrael," (the historical empire of King David, which stretched from the Red Sea to Syria, and included Gaza, Golan, Jordan, and large bits of what we know now as Syria.) "We must avenge ourselves for the Diaspora, for the Nazis."
Things got very heated at this meeting. This was November 1943, after all. Death camps bristled in Hitler's Europe. The massacres in Poland were vast beyond imagining, three million dead.
The spectrum between Paul's position on Palestine and Begin's dream of Eretz Yisrael was large, but all shared the traumatic knowledge of Nazism. In the center of this debate was Chaim Weizmann, who had invented a fermentation process to create acetone from potatoes, which had provided England with much of the explosives used in World War I.
We know about the famous (or infamous, to some) Balfour Agreement. Less known is the story behind it.
(From Dr. Weizmann's wiki)
"Dr. Weizmann knew that his fermentation process yielded chemical compounds containing three and four carbon atoms and predicted that the same process could produce the substances that are the basis for modern petrochemical industries. He often articulated the need for countries — especially those with scarce natural oil — to replace a petroleum-based chemical industry with one based on fermentation. In fact, the acetone butanol-ethanol (ABE) fermentation process currently enjoying an industrial renaissance is based on Weizmann’s process.
As history has shown, the discovery had implications beyond science. When asked by UK Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour what he wished to receive in return for his contribution to the war effort, Dr. Weizmann boldly replied, “There is only one thing I want: a national home for my people.” Duly impressed, Lord Balfour issued the famous Balfour Declaration of 1917 committing the British government to the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in what was then Ottoman ruled Palestine. "
Ultimately, the British Mandate gave way to the modern State of Israel, and Dr. Chaim Weizmann became Israel’s first president.
Weizmann's position was very much in the center of the spectrum between the Einsteinian non-Zionists to the "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" traumatic rage of Menachem Begin. The specter of the camps and everything leading to the camps lay heavy on everyone. As president, he tried to thread that needle, supporting the Likudniks in building a formidable military, while also working with Albert Einstein to build the Hebrew University Jerusalem and founding the Weizmann Institute.
Paul Baerwald lent his two cents to this effort, and founded a school of social work at the University in Jerusalem (it's still there) with the intended purpose of creating understanding between the residents of Palestine and their new neighbors, the survivors of Hitler's Germany.
https://en.sw.huji.ac.il/book/history-school
But machismo and gangsterism have their appeal, particularly to the traumatized, and in 1978 Menachem Begin became Prime Minister of Israel. Begin actually started out ok, negotiating a peace treaty in 1979 with Egypt's Anwar Sadat, the Camp David Accords, under the benevolent gaze of Jimmy Carter. The Israeli Army withdrew from Sinai, which they had taken in the Six Day War with Egypt. Egypt recognized Israel as a nation, and guaranteed it access to the Suez Canal. Sadat was considered a traitor by most of the Arab nation's governments. The Arab League, a hard-line coalition of Arab leaders who were adamant that Israel should not exist, exiled Egypt from their ranks.
But Begin almost immediately betrayed the spirit of the Camp David Accord, and began promoting the "settlers" in the already settled Gaza and West Bank.
In 1981, fundamentalist fanatics in Egypt killed Anwar Sadat.
In 1982 Israel's Lebanese allies, the Christian Phalangists, acting under the protection of Begin's troops, massacred somewhere between 400 and 4000 Lebanese in the Sabra Shatila Massacre, causing international outrage. Israel bombed a nuclear power plant in Iraq and invaded Lebanon, and the Lebanon War began.
And now here we are. Hard liners will doom us all. At a moment when international cooperation is most needed to attempt to rescue humanity from the near-extinction promised by climate change, the hard-liners of the world would have us splintered and at war. A gibbering army of deluded American fundamentalists would have us turn the US to unabashed fascism. They may succeed in that.
And not to sound hyperbolic, but this would almost certainly be the end of this round of humanity. In five or six hundred years there would be little record of our once-proud civilization. We're out of options, besieged by climate change, nuclear weapons, lunatic levels of wealth inequity, religion, bigotry, ignorance, amusing ourselves to death.
Having said that, I'm sorry to say that I'm a bit of a hard liner myself, because I take a very hard line on hard liners. I am officially out of patience with them, the Trumps and the Pat Browns and Marcs and Richards and Dales of the world. (I've been thumbing through the archives.) They are killing us all, and the generations not to come.
Not with their guns, though those are bad enough, but with their hateful stupidity.
We all need to take a moment of silence, including me.
