Conversation with Suzanne Schneider
Israel, Palestine, and the ongoing crisis
Dear Reader,
After much contemplation, I have decided to transform my newsletter, Reflections, into an dialogue space, where I will be talking with people I love, admire, and disagree with about art, culture, politics, and philosophy. It’s a pleasure to offer this space as a platform for others to share ideas, inspiration, and reflections. I will also be sharing news of any events, essays, and books forthcoming. So, if there are any topics you would like me to address, please feel free to post suggestions in the comments below. Thank you for your continued support.
My first interview is with Suzanne Schneider. Suzanne is the author of two books, Mandatory Separation: Religion, Education, and Mass Politics in Palestine and The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism. Suzanne is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, n+1, and is currently writing a book about the use of risk as a social and political tool.
Suzanne is an historian and political theorist of the modern Middle East and I couldn’t think of a better person to talk to about what is unfolding in Israel and Palestine right now. I sent her two pages of questions asking for her reflections, expertise and knowledge about who Hamas is, what Netanyahu’s strategy might be, and how one might address antisemitism in this moment and build Jewish community.
Our conversation will be published in two parts.
Until soon,
Samantha
Part I
As a historian of Israel and Palestine, what was your immediate reaction to what happened on October 7th?
I felt grief and dread in almost equal parts.
Learning of the heinous nature of Hamas’s attacks on children, families, and the elderly, combined with the capture of over two hundred hostages, would have all been more than enough to keep many of us grieving for years on end.
I lost my father over the summer, and the physical sense of nausea and crippling sorrow I felt brought me immediately back to the days just after he died. But I felt other things too that made my grief complicated, many of them hard learned lessons from coming of political age in the shadow of 9/11. I knew how easy it was to weaponize grief in pursuit of a strategically hollow politics of vengeance. And I also knew that we were dealing with the most right-wing Israeli government to ever exist, one whose ministers use openly eliminationist language and have long dreamt of creating new ‘facts on the ground’ via expulsion of the Palestinians. I was horrified to see the Biden administration writing this government a blank check, knowing full well that the result would be A. unprecedented levels of civilian carnage among Palestinians in Gaza, and B. an unchanged, or even hardened, set of political realities. So, with all that in mind, I reached despair pretty quickly and have yet to depart for another destination.
Some argue that Hamas is a terrorist organization. Others point out it is the military arm of the Palestinian state. What is Hamas, structurally? What do they believe? What do they want?
Well, first I will say that anyone seriously interested in this organization should pick up a copy of Tareq Baconi’s Hamas Contained, which is the best in-depth study of the group that exists.
The long story very short is that Hamas emerged in the late 1980’s as a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated social welfare and piety organization, and was given license to operate in Gaza by the Israelis because they believed it would counter the strength of the PLO. In this miscalculation, the Israelis were merely continuing a long line of thought that regarded Islamist organizing as a bulwark against Palestinian national aspirations. I write about this extensively in my first book – it was a miscalculation tied to a particular understanding of religion as a conservative social force, and it has tripped up everyone from British colonial administrators to the Reagan administration.
Hamas took a militant turn during the first intifada, kidnapping and killing two Israeli soldiers in 1989. The group limited its attacks to Israeli military and police targets for several years but changed tactics in the mid-1990’s against the backdrop of the PLO’s recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, and signing the Oslo Accords. Hamas regards the Palestinian Authority, created as part of those accords, as the fruit of surrender and has positioned itself oppositionally as the standard-bearer of Palestinian liberation. Hamas’s leadership has also called attention to the massacre of 29 Muslims worshippers in Hebron in 1994 by Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish settler, as a force that compelled them to abandon any distinction between civilians and combatants. The resulting embrace of suicide bombing helped sink support for the two-state solution among Israeli Jews and propel Netanyahu to power; the latter, for his part, has overseen what Baconi calls a “violent equilibrium” of tacit support and cooperation with Hamas as a way of keeping the Palestinian leadership splintered and ineffective, the better to pursue annexationist policies in the West Bank. In this way, it’s impossible to narrate the history of Hamas without seeing it in this sort of bloody dialectical exchange with Israel’s own extremists.
In terms of their ideology, my understanding is that there has long been an internal debate as to whether Hamas should (in the wake of the 2006 elections, in which it achieved victory over the PA-aligned Fatah party) act more like a government or a militant insurgency.
While I do think it’s instructive to read Hamas’s founding charter—a deeply reactionary and antisemitic document that calls for an Islamist government over the whole of historic Palestine—it is also important to recognize that they have been more pragmatic at times as well. The 2017 statement of principles, for instance, eschewed the original charter’s more grandiose and bigoted language and indicated that Hamas would accept a two-state solution on 1967 borders as interim solution to the full liberation of historic Palestine. Now, some may argue that’s not good enough, but I think you have to read the document as Hamas trying to maintain its militant edge to appease its own hard-liners while also trying to indicate that some compromise may be possible. Basically, like any organization, there are competing factions and the leadership is trying to appease as many of them as possible.
Hamas brutally murdered over 1200 people. The sadistic leaders of Hamas have made it clear they will do it again if given a chance. What does an ethical response to this threat look like right now? How does Israel defend itself and move toward a more equitable and peaceful future?
It’s an almost impossible dilemma. Israel has a right to self-defense, but also a duty to provide security for its people. The problem comes when the way the state pursues #1 undermines any chance of achieving #2.
First, I think we need to back away from pathological treatments of Hamas as the embodiment of pure evil in order to understand the material conditions that fuel its militancy, and then start by undermining its bases of support. I am not one who thinks you can change people’s ‘hearts and minds’ without changing anything substantive about their lived experience. And here, we need to understand the existence and limited popularity of Hamas ultimately as stemming from the failure of the diplomatic path embraced by the PLO and Palestinian Authority to deliver any political goods.
If anything, Palestinians are worse off than they were when the Oslo Accords were signed thirty years ago. There is a lot of blame to go around in accounting for why that is the case: the fact that Oslo was a deeply flawed agreement, the corruption of the Arafat government and PA more broadly, and the fact that there was no mechanism to prevent Israel to continue settlement expansion on the land that was earmarked for the future Palestinian state. There are approximately five times as many Jewish settlers in the West Bank today as there were when Oslo was signed – and Israel has continued settlement expansion despite repeated warnings from the UN, EU, international organizations, the United States and even its own policy experts that they are an impediment to any lasting political settlement. I see Hamas as a symptom of these interlocking political failures.
The only way to undermine it would be to radically strengthen more moderate Palestinian factions – something that cannot be done while Israel continues to pursue its current policy priorities.
Remember that Netanyahu won the prime minister post in 1996 on a platform of preventing Palestinian statehood, and has since advanced the fiction that through ever more sophisticated forms of enclosure and securitization, Israelis can avoid with the existential reality of another people in ‘their’ land. My view is that October 7th should have shattered any sense that peace can be achieved and maintained through the denial of Palestinian dignity and legitimate demands for freedom. Those demands will never go away, so it’s really a question as to in what form they will be expressed.
In more immediate terms regarding how to respond to the attacks on October 7th, I think a more targeted operation and prioritization of the hostages would have been a better approach than the all-out war Israel is waging now. But again, the Israeli government in its present form is constitutionally incapable of making the sort of moves that are required, in my view, to generate real security – which can never come from the barrel of a gun.
What do you think Netanyahu’s endgame is here?
I know what they hope to do—completely eliminate Hamas and undermine its ability to launch further attacks—but I am at a loss as to how they think the current approach will achieve that.
The Israeli government seems to be making every textbook mistake that the US did after 9/11 but in an accelerated fashion. I mean, consider the mere statistic that Israel has already dropped more bombs on the tiny territory of Gaza than US forces did in the whole of Afghanistan in 2019, which was one of the most intense years of fighting. The appetite for vengeance is seemingly endless—I see it all over social media—and I do think that emotion is powering the government’s response.
What’s so appalling to me is that I don’t see any great strategic calculus behind it: no prioritization of the hostages, no plan for the day after, no attempt to grapple with the political realities that undergird the conflict. The recent indication that Israel will reoccupy Gaza will almost inevitably lead to a long and bloody insurrection, the loss of ever-more lives, etc., and will still not solve the basic dilemma. Short of expelling all Palestinians from Gaza or annihilating them—both of which have been floated by Israeli officials, but have so far proved beyond the pale—Israel will be have to find a political, not military, solution. To undertake the sort of carnage we are seeing in Gaza—with over 4000 children already killed—and not have any sort of workable strategy for the endgame is an abomination.
People are squabbling over the legal definition of what genocide means. What is gained and what is lost politically by framing Israel’s overwhelming show of military force as genocide?
In my opinion the terminology often hinders more than it helps.
I think many people understand what genocide is in terms of the Holocaust, and despite the horrors, what Israel is doing in Gaza is not that – ergo they end up thinking the scholars and activists are full of nonsense.
The latter groups, of course, have reasons for using this language because the legal definition of genocide is quite a bit broader than most people realize; the UN definition is “a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part,” which in truth could be applied to countless wars and massacres over the past two hundred years, and possibly to Gaza as well. But I honestly think the semantics of it are counterproductive: whatever you want to call it, it’s horrific and needs to stop. I don’t see the sense in arguing over whether it is or is not technically a genocide according to some criteria that most people don’t know when the overriding strategic goal should be building a coalition powerful enough to enforce a cease-fire.
Many writers are trying to understand what happened on October 7th through a decolonial lens. Some are comparing it to Algeria. Many on the left seem to be reaching for Frantz Fanon’s justifications for violence instead of Edward Said’s call for ethical non-violence. Some say non-violent resistance has never worked in this region. Can you talk about this framework for trying to understand what happened. Is there a better framework?
I am certainly a follower of Said on the question of violence, and have said from the outset that I regard Hamas’s attacks as both morally indefensible and strategically counterproductive.
Beyond the element of human suffering—which no one who claims to support equality and freedom should celebrate—I think that the defense of this reactionary group has robbed the left of much-needed moral capital at a precarious time and has fueled the dangerous idea that all expressions of solidarity with Palestinians are really endorsements of Hamas. At precisely the moment a united left was needed to exert pressure on the Biden administration, we instead had an internecine squabble about whether dead babies are actually a harbinger of freedom. I think this state of affairs reflects a number of things. First, there is a tendency to treat Fanon as gospel, rather than a figure who was writing about a particular time and place; second, and relatedly, there is a popular tendency to understand Zionism as just another settler-colonial movement that is interchangeable with any other. It is much harder to grapple with the sui generis nature of Israel, but quite necessary if we are interested in formulating solutions that aren’t bound to fail.
Take the Algeria comparison, for instance. The pied-noir population in Algeria at the outbreak of the War of Independence was about 15% of the total population, and they had a mother country that would take them back. But in Israel/Palestine you have rough population parity with most Israeli Jews having no other home country. This bears repeating at a time when self-proclaimed progressive educators pat themselves on the back for leading their first graders to wonder if Israelis can “just give the land back to Palestine and find somewhere else to live?”. Moreover, I think the idea of Israelis as generic European interlopers falls apart if you consider: A. The actual history of Jews in Europe, whose inability to be considered ‘real’ Europeans fueled antisemitism and thus Zionism as a solution for what to do with unwanted Jews; and B. the majority of Israeli Jews are now Mizrachi, i.e. descendants of Asian and African Jewish communities, many of which were driven from their homes after the creation of the state of Israel. We might also note the fascinating circularity of Fanon’s ideas regarding violence as a way for oppressed peoples to reclaim their sense of agency. These anticolonial ideas helped inspire black nationalism and militancy in the US, which in turn inspired Meir Kahane (as brilliantly documented by Shaul Magid) to embrace “Jewish Power” and call for the expulsion of Palestinians. All of this leaves me a bit skeptical that Fanon holds the skeleton key to freedom.
Another limitation of the settler-colonial frame is that Jews have actual historic, cultural, and theological ties to the land that are nothing like whites in South Africa, for instance, or whites in South Dakota where I was born (no one is praising the beauty of Sioux Falls in liturgical poems). To anyone regularly in synagogue, the idea that Jewish ties to land of Israel are mere Zionist propaganda rings patently absurd. Now of course, these theological and historical connections existed for centuries prior to the age of nationalism and were not linked to the idea of Jewish political sovereignty over the land until the 19th century. We need to recognize that Zionism represented a radical pivot within Jewish history rather than some natural telos and stress, as I have tried to do in my own work, how these religious sentiments have been mobilized for nationalist aims. And we need to keep this all in mind while also acknowledging Israel’s real embrace of colonial tactics of surveillance, domination, and dispossession. It’s a massive theoretical load to shoulder.
I will also mention that I think there are real limits to the language of indigeneity in the case of Palestine, because Zionists have long argued that they were there first and they have the archeological records to prove it! Here we can also look to the Hindu nationalist weaponization of indigeneity in India as a way of justifying anti-Muslim discrimination and violence. At a certain point, we need not to base access to human and political rights not on some sort of ontological, even mystified, connection to one’s ancestral territory but on the mere fact of existence. No one has the prerogative to tell a person they have no right to exist in the place they were born.
I think if we take all this history and context seriously, it mandates a shift away from Fanon’s playbook and toward something else – perhaps toward an approach like the A.N.C.’s (African National Congress), as Peter Beinart has recently suggested, or perhaps toward a platform that still needs articulation. It does seem to me that violence has proven disastrous for the Palestinian cause – a fact that was readily apparent after the Second Intifada, which only served to strengthen the hand of the far-right in Israel. Yet there seems to be little space at present to question whether violence is actually effective, and I find that very dispiriting.
I’ll also add that there is not nearly enough focus on what liberation should look like in very specific, boringly detailed terms.
Fanon was noteworthy for seeing that anti-colonial revolutions could easily devour their own and morph into racist, corrupt, and oppressive post-colonial regimes. Like Said, he saw nationalism not as good in itself, but as a stepping stone toward a new form of more humane and universalist politics that ultimately had to transcend colonial violence, not just mirror it. With that in mind I think we need to be having very serious, often very hard, conversations about the relationship between the means of struggle and the aspirational political future.
I keep thinking about Gershom Scholem’s response to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem where she dared to speak of Jewish complicity in the Holocaust. Scholem argued that was irresponsible and that the Jewish people in no way could be held accountable for what had happened. We are hearing similar arguments now. Avi Mayer, the Editor and Chief of the Jerusalem Post wrote an essay saying that those who are critical of Israel are no longer Jews. Some people are saying that Israel can in no way be blamed for October 7th, and others are pointing to a long history of Israel oppressing Palestine. What is the ethical response to these arguments?
The question of responsibility is tricky in situations that are characterized by massive asymmetries of power.
In the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians, the former has at every point since 1948 held the upper hand in both military and diplomatic terms, and common sense would dictate that the party with more power also possesses more responsibility.
I think that is generally true. But there is a tension here because these sorts of explanations end up denying the agency of the oppressed – this is what Arendt’s critics wanted in fact, because the denial of agency was far more palatable than the idea of complicity. When it comes to the Palestinians today, for instance, one hears from the exact same quarters that 1. Palestinians will be the ones who determine their future; and 2. Israel’s actions backed Hamas into a corner and left them no choice, thus Israel is to blame for its actions. These are actually incompatible positions.
For my own part, I try to understand the structural constraints that encourage a certain type of violence without justifying it and without falling into the fallacy that there was no choice. Hamas could have just attacked military positions for instance, but nearly 80% of its victims on October 7th were civilians. That’s a choice – one that even its spokesmen seem to recognize as a strategic blunder given their repeated, incredulous insistence that they did not attack civilians. It is really a topsy turvy world when Hamas is trying to deny these actions while their online cheerleaders continue to insist that attacking civilians is both necessary and just. But it’s also morally bankrupt to blame Gazans for the Israeli airstrikes that are killing them in unprecedented numbers, as if Hamas’s election victory seventeen years later constitutes a popular mandate to massacre Jews. Naomi Klein’s call to “stand with the child over the gun” is perhaps the best advice one could give.
I want to say something about the practice of internal criticism at times of crisis. On the one hand anti-Zionist Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace and IfNotNow claim that they are the ones truly upholding Jewish values, while to others, any Jew criticizing Israel right now is not a real Jew. The unsatisfying answer is that Jewishness, what it means and what it mandates, is a contested idea – and that is by no means something new. The truth is Judaism is too flexible an interpretive system to unambiguously support either position. Right now, Jews are really scared and hurting the world over. We hear this is not the time to express criticism of Zionism or Israel’s response. I struggled with the fact that there was no time to process the trauma of October 7th before the imperative came to mobilize on behalf of Palestinians in Gaza, and I think many people have simply not been able to turn on that emotional dime. I’ve tried the best I can to hold all this suffering, all this historical context and theoretical baggage together, and been rewarded with accusations of antisemitism. I won’t pretend it’s not painful or isolating, but I luckily have some excellent company on my little humanist island.
And finally, I’ll add that the two people who have done more than anyone else to popularize the Palestinian cause in the West—Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi—have both been unsparing in their criticism of choices made by Palestinian leaders over the years. Internal criticism is especially difficult when yours is the weaker party. It takes an enormous amount of moral courage, particularly right now, but I think it’s the path Arendt would encourage.
Part II will be published next week.
Thank you for sharing this and for this thoughtful and literate consideration of a wide range of issues.
I learned a lot and was provoked to think, and to read, more.
It does seem to me that the one point not discussed, and which I hope might be in part 2, is the oppression, even terrorisation, of the Palestinian civilians by Hamas since it came to power. There is good basis for the point made in the interview that a 45% vote in 2006 does not mean that all civilians agree with or are responsible for the al-Quassam Brigades, and there is a good point that not all parts of Hamas are militaristic. But by the same token, the state of the Gazan economy prior to Oct 7 (which is cited as a condition to take into consideration when analyzing the event and its consequences) had deterioriated siginificantly since 2006 due to actions attributable to the government itself or to actions of Hamas or Hamas-alligned paramilitary groups. The shutteirng of the agricultural greenhouses, the failure to manage the acquifer to preserve a supply of potable drinking water, the repression of many individual freedoms, physical repression of political or cultural opposition, the redirection of international aid and of basic supplies to military purposes, and the limitations on the mobility of people within and beyond the borders of the Strip are all actions of the government of the strip. Without accounting for that, I dont think we can seriously assess the viability of Hamas as a political actor in any post-war scenario. And I dont think we do justice to Palestinians if we ignore that they suffer from this oppression largely not of their own choosing.