John Oliver joked on Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” that Israel is the riskiest thing you could bring up on a date. He’s right. Back around 2007, my then-boyfriend and I went on what started out as a cheerful lunch date on a Brooklyn cafe patio and ended in a heated argument about the Middle East. About five minutes in, I thought: Damn. He’s cute, he’s smart, he’s funny. I like him a lot. But this will never work. We’ll never agree about Israel-Palestine. Neither one of us lives in the Middle East, at least not anymore, but any relationship we could have will surely end up as collateral damage in the region’s endless wars.
I’m from Lebanon, a country that’s been devastated by Israeli attacks over the decades, and that’s had its own conflicts with Palestinians who’ve sought refuge in Lebanon after expulsion from Palestine. My family is mostly Lebanese-Christian, but on one side I have Palestinian relatives who lost their homes in Jerusalem in 1948 during the creation of Israel. My then-boyfriend’s relatives fled the pogroms against Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 20th century. He grew up in a Zionist Jewish family in Boston, going to Hebrew school and learning that another genocidal campaign against the Jews could easily happen again, that the Holocaust was not an anomaly. He grew up learning that Israel represents the only hope for a safe homeland for Jews after centuries of persecution and ongoing antisemitism.
We’d each grown up understanding the crisis in Israel-Palestine through the lens of our own family histories, our own sense of who was a victim and who was a perpetrator. One thing he and I could agree on at least is that the Palestinians didn’t cause the Holocaust—and that they’ve been paying a hefty price for Europe’s barbarism for more than seven decades. Beyond that, we couldn’t find our way to a shared view of the situation in Israel.
He’d argue the case for Israel’s right to defend itself, pointing out the violence committed against Jewish populations throughout history. I’d get frustrated having to hear anything that sounded like a justification for the butchery that Israel, underwritten by billions of U.S. dollars every year, repeatedly commits against the Palestinians—butchery that’s wildly out of proportion to violence committed by Hamas, let alone Palestinian rock-throwers. Butchery that even attacks non-violent attempts at resistance.
Over pints of beer in Brooklyn, our conversation would go something like this:
Me: Israel is a creation of Western imperialist powers who have no regard for Arab lives and who built a country right on top of them, running millions of Palestinians out of their homes if they were lucky, and murdering them if they weren’t.
Him: No one else would accept the millions of Jewish refugees who were fleeing a violently antisemitic Europe. Israel as an ancestral Jewish homeland was the only place where they could make a permanent home, a place where nothing like the Holocaust could happen again.
Me: What about the Arabs already living there? Why do their homes, their land, their country get taken away from them, and why are they “terrorists” or “antisemites” for fighting back?
Him: Palestinians should have a country of their own, and so should Jews.
Me: Two states defined by religion and identity? Ethno-nationalism on both sides—what kind of vision is that?
Him: It’s not ideal, but it’s an impossible situation no matter what.
Still, we kept hanging out. As the months went by, we couldn’t stop debating the Middle East. We also couldn’t stop arguing about bands we liked or hated. One date ended a few moments after I made a comment about the lameness of Led Zeppelin’s lyrics (awesome band, but the words? Come on). This didn’t go over well. Also, Tool? Really? Another time, I learned he thought The National, Pavement, and most indie rock bands were pathetically whiny poseurs who can’t play their instruments. I took it personally. I figured things between us would soon crash and burn.
Again, somehow, they didn’t. We’d always find an excuse to get back in touch, and soon we’d be talking over borscht at B&H in the East Village, or tapas at bars around the city, or drinks at friends’ parties. Still, I had a sinking feeling the Middle East would end our relationship sooner or later. Surely, it would happen the next time Israel bombed Lebanon again. Or it would happen the next time Israel found yet another excuse to massacre Palestinians.
Six years and multiple Middle East flare-ups later, we got married on a Friday morning in May at Manhattan’s City Hall. Now we have two kids ages 5 and 7. So what happened with the Middle East? We’ve kept on talking, conducting our own diplomacy from our apartment in Brooklyn. No government is about to fly us over as envoys to solve the crisis. But over the years, in our gradually less frequent but still long-as-ever discussions, we’ve each now reached a more visceral understanding of the trauma of our respective populations: the desperation of the Jews after the genocides over the centuries and the ongoing antisemitism in Europe, America and elsewhere; and the desperation of the Palestinians who are routinely slaughtered, victimized by anti-Arab racism, and denied basic rights by Israel and the U.S. (and in Lebanon too, but that’s another story).
Acknowledging the horrors our people have faced and continue to face—without resorting to disingenuous claims of moral equivocation— has moved us closer on the issue, albeit into a utopian vision we likely won’t see in our lifetime: that the only sustainable, defensible solution is for both populations to live together in one country. One state, with equal rights and equal humanity for all. We both believe in this now. Cease-fires won’t hold forever, and neither will a two-state “solution.”
We believe Arabs and Jews can and one day will live together peacefully in a shared country in Israel-Palestine. Rancor about territorial disputes aside, our instincts tell both of us that the mistrust between our peoples is mostly situational, its origin unrelated to the gut-level genocidal impulse that has animated antisemitic and anti-Arab movements in Europe.
Are we idealistic? Maybe, but the one-state solution is finally getting more traction in the American media. The idea of a multi-ethnic, multi-racial community that works to combat its own biases— whether that’s in the Middle East or in the U.S. or anywhere—is finally seeing daylight. While the one-state solution for Israel is still considered fringe in most quarters, and it continues to be a turn-off even for many Jewish leftists, it’s edging into mainstream conversations. It’s now even possible to say the word “apartheid” out loud to describe the Israeli occupation, at least in small corners of the U.S. media. Even John Oliver went there.
What isn’t yet part of the conversation, at least not as loudly, is an acknowledgment by either side of the profound fear, the sense of persecution, and the fundamental humanity on the other side. The entrenched Zionists and their apologists in the U.S. government in one camp— and the pro-Palestinian Arabs, progressive Jewish activists and other voices in the opposite camp—are still silo’ed, mostly yelling past each other in the media, in Congress, in Israel-Palestine. On it goes.
Even as Biden finally amplifies the urgent need for racial and social justice in the U.S., he remains so deeply loyal to the Zionist perspective that has held sway for his entire political career, he can’t see his way to anything other than an anemic suggestion to Netanyahu to hold back a bit on the Gaza pummeling. Whether or not the latest cease-fire holds—and it’s tragically bound to break again sooner or later—will Biden be willing to voice anything like a full-throated declaration of Arab humanity and civil rights? Of the need for social justice in Israel-Palestine? Apparently not yet. Just two weeks ago, he approved a $735 million weapons sale to Israel. So far, only a handful of Congress members, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) are speaking out about it.
So far, the silos are holding strong. But at least in our apartment here in Brooklyn, they’ve finally crumbled.
Maybe our kids will be the ones to solve this, once they’re old enough to understand they’ve been born to a pro-Palestinian Lebanese and a descendant of a conservative Jewish family with strong ties to Israel. I would say “God help them,” but I’m not religious.
So yeah, maybe John Oliver was right that Israel is the absolute worst topic to bring up on a date. Then again, maybe he wasn’t.
“Him: No one else would accept the millions of Jewish refugees who were fleeing a violently antisemitic Europe. Israel as an ancestral Jewish homeland was the only place where they could make a permanent home, a place where nothing like the Holocaust could happen again. “
Excuse me, every serious history of Israel shows that by 1905, if not earlier, the Zionists were planning on getting rid of the natives. Herzl may have had some idea that the immigrants could live in peace with the Palestinians but his ideas were drowned out by other voices.
“Him: No one else would accept the millions of Jewish refugees who were fleeing a violently antisemitic Europe. Israel as an ancestral Jewish homeland was the only place where they could make a permanent home, a place where nothing like the Holocaust could happen again. “
That’s as may be, but it still doesn’t give them a right to enter, live in, or set up a state in Palestine. Let alone a right to drive out the indigenous people.
There is indeed fear and a sense of persecution on both sides, but also an important element of asymmetry. Jewish fears are rooted in the past. They would have almost disappeared by now were it not for Zionism, which keeps them alive in generation after generation to be exploited for its own purposes. Palestinian fears are based in present as well as past experience. That makes them more justified. However, to the extent that Palestinians perceive their enemy not as Zionism but simply as “the Jews” (al-Yahud) they may act in ways that give Jewish fears a basis in the present that they otherwise would not have. We see this in such incidents as the assault on Jews at a Los Angeles restaurant reported in the press. Ultimately, of course, Zionism is to blame for reviving hatred of Jews and the Palestinian assailants in such incidents are its unwitting accomplices. So it is essential that Palestinians deepen their knowledge of the enemy that confronts them by studying not only Israeli society but also the Jewish history that gave rise to that society. Here anti-Zionist Jews have a crucial role to play.