Hope on October 7th

Today is the first anniversary of October 7, 2023, when Hamas fighters attacked Israeli civilians without warning.  They killed, raped, and took hostages.  Predictably, Israel retaliated, invading Gaza with great loss of life.  The world watched, weighed in, judged.  Hostilities spread to other fronts.  How far the violence will extend, and to what depth, is unclear as of this writing.  You know all this.

Many Jews and Muslims, even in the far-away United States, some friends of mine, are deeply angry, a few teetering on the edge of despair.  There is talk of millennial overreach, of counterattacks, of the extinction of the Jewish state.  There is talk of genocide.  Not so long ago, historically speaking, the word “genocide” was invented.  At the time, it seemed like progress.  Still does, for lots of people.  Now the word is everywhere, interwoven with the fears of migration.  Maybe history is largely the story of tribes bumping into one another, killing and fucking, and so re-forming the people.  Maybe.  There is apocalyptic talk of nuclear weapons, of autocratic leaders drunk with power, of blood feuds and religious differences and unavenged injustices older than precise memory, endlessly recited in ever hazier form, undergirding unwinnable (in the literal sense that logical defeat will not, cannot, be acknowledged, because it might somehow magically lead to biological defeat, killing) arguments.  Less dramatically but not unimportantly, the conflict is tearing at the fabric of US higher education, and much of our already frayed political discourse.  Jews wonder if they are safe in America.  Muslims wonder if anybody cares about their sorrow. You know all this, too.

Cards on the table.  I’m an American, a Southerner, a Christian however faltering, at least half German, materially privileged by most standards.  Make of that what you will, but I will say that in my tradition, despair is a sin.  Even when despair is justified.  Hence hope. Hence this note. 

I recently read a full-throated defense of Israeli violence in Gaza, more generally, of violence against Iran and its proxies.  The framing was apocalyptic.  Given Iran’s end-times style, it was argued, the response of the Jewish state is rational, and furthers the interests of Israel’s backers, meaning the U.S., more quietly, various Sunni nations.  Maybe.  I'm not sure it's wrong.  I only know what I read, as my grandmother used to say, to my youthful fury.   But at least the short term logic is clear.  Let us say we grant all that.  So many bodies.  Such suffering.  Surely more is possible, somehow?  But how?

I cannot speak to details here, not really.  I am not an expert, and who is an expert all round, convincingly so?  Even if such a person exists, I don’t think salvation lies in expertise.  Your erudition will neither persuade your enemies nor save you. 

What I want to suggest is that maybe we are not thinking well, and therefore not speaking or acting well.  Maybe part of our problem is that the tools we use to think, our conceptual apparatus, is already compromised.  While this is no doubt a failure, perhaps there is hope in failing, and turning to something new.  Surely what we are doing is not working.

After 9/11 especially, there was lots of defense/security talk about "non state actors" like al Qaeda.   Lots of people, mostly lefty, didn't like the US going to war with Afghanistan, etc., because war was the province of states.  I said no, if you kill a lot of people, you get to call it a war.  I wrote a piece called "Bin Laden's War."  The man had earned it, state or no state.  That was right, as far as it went, but it didn't go far enough.  To say something is "not a state" doesn't tell you much about what it is.

Now maybe we don't really know what a "state" is, either.  Surely federalism, corporations, the European Union, one could go on, raise problems.  Weber gave us a definition, but it was, to put it generally, overly schematic.  See Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.  But for now, when it comes to the state, we think we know, at least in an everyday if not necessarily philosophical sense.  When somebody says "France," nobody says "what do you mean, France?"

But what happens if our conceptual apparatus is not right, in flux, open for renegotiation?  Might that be an opportunity?  Relevantly, in the Middle East, Hamas matters.  Hamas kinda used to be Egyptian but isn't now, and has absorbed some Palestinians and controls much, "operates" in the Gaza strip, but denies that it governs. . . I could go on but you get the drift.  Similarly, there is this outfit called Hezbollah, which might be labeled “terrorist,” giving a license to kill perhaps, but that’s a rather negative understanding.  Of course, these entities (?) are "proxies" for Iran.   “Proxy” says something about the relationship to Iran, maybe, but doesn't tell us much about what the thing is that has that relationship.  Nor does it tell us what this thing called “Iran” is.  “Iran” must be more complicated than, say, Tolkien’s Sauron?

What I'm trying to say is that we (a very big “we” including all the governments in the area, regional actors that are not governments, governments that are not in the area, kids at Columbia, whatever) are attempting to think and sometimes do policy in a space where we don't have a decent political/institutional sociology, or even a typology.  We literally don't know what we are talking about.  The "social facts" are kind of brands, signifiers with ill-defined if sometimes well-armed referents.  To put it differently, the rules based liberal order was built on the assumption of the European, now nearly universal, nation-state.  An old point.  But what if "State" isn't the way to understand the actors involved in the Middle East? 

Maybe we are (God’s?) fools?  Maybe we can learn?  Maybe we can think differently?

In the Middle East, with its long history, the range of political discourse (arguments, political campaigns, legitimation, education, and so forth) is often framed historically. Both sides do it, for all sorts of pretty good reasons.   History matters.  Rhetorical resources abound.  The other guys are doing it.  Usw.  As has been amply demonstrated, however, none of these historical positions, phrasings really, lead to resolution, much less consensus.  Each act of violence is justified by a prior victimization, itself justified or contested . . .

How might one proceed, if not exactly start over?  We want to think in terms of state and non-state actors, but could we abandon that?  We want to think in terms of ancient history, but suppose we stopped?   If our conceptual tools are inapt, and so the effectiveness of our political thinking is compromised, how might we start thinking differently?

Suppose we all abandoned most of our vocabulary, and our obsession with history as justification for my team.  Suppose we tried for a socio/conceptual/structural analysis that looked at the Middle East after 1945 as the confluence of several really large term forces.  In no real order (hence confluence), we might want to consider at least:

·       decolonialization/border drawing/king making

·       the emergence of a global petroleum economy/great wealth.

·       the Cold War

·       the influx of Jews, especially from Europe (the consequences of the Holocaust) and more border drawing

·       the persistence of late 19^th century styles of nationalism (nothing like the European project, NAFTA, limited participation in global integration, see petroleum)

·       the rise of political Islam as radical (new, modern, cf Olivier Roy) force.

In sum, the constellation of forces that gave us the modern Middle East was pretty much in place by say 1955.  And not before let’s say 1945.  

From this perspective, the “Middle East,” in the tortured sense in which the phrase is commonly used, is a little older than I am, if.  The violence that has become numbingly familiar is not an expression of eternal feuds and intractable problems so much as the result of relatively recent historical, meaning great but also passing, forces in conflict.  While these are all “big” forces, they are not immutable.  And therein lies hope. 

In the nature of things, constellations like “the Post-War Middle East” have lifespans.  If a constellation has a beginning, it is likely to have an end.  So, for example, the petroleum economy seems on its way out, at least possibly.  The once European Jews are there, but a couple of generations on, no longer European.  The Cold War is sort of over.  None of this is precise, much could happen, but my point is the status quo is not eternal.  Things will change, and one may reasonably hope for the better, indeed, the political task is to bring about the better.

Again, I am not in a position to have such thoughts with much authority.  I am an intellectual, not at home in the Middle East, and certainly have no power to enforce my thinking.  But what I want to emphasize is that there are possibilities, even in the Middle East, even on this day.

Have mercy.

-- David A. Westbrook

An earlier response: Gaza and Imagination; Writing as Honor; Aging.