Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I think there are, roughly, three generations in terms of American sentiment toward Israel. There are older Americans who knew Israel when it was young. They remember the impossibility and wonder of its creation. They remember the wars its neighbors launched to eradicate it and the seeming miracle of its survival and of all that it then built. This generation still feels Israel’s vulnerability. They still feel its possibility. This is Joe Biden’s generation. It is a great gift for Israel that it still, improbably, controls American politics.

Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.

Then there’s younger Americans. They know only Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong…

There was nothing inevitable about the seeming impossibility of peace. It was built out of political decisions on both sides. It was built by suicide bombers and Hamas leaders. It was built by messianic settlers and Benjamin Netanyahu. And it is not in America’s interest to support Netanyahu as long as that is the vision he is pursuing, which he freely admits, even now. Biden knows an Israel that Gen Z does not. But Gen Z sometimes seems to be listening more closely to what Israeli leaders are saying than Biden is.’ (from the New York Times)

I haven’t posted much about the current war in Gaza, but that doesn’t mean I am not following it and reading about it. I appreciate the way this is set out, even though, coming from outside the US, there are different perspectives at work for me. And I also know that all perspectives are limited, within which my sympathies usually lie with the underdog.