226 days into what I am still calling Israel’s war on babies, a trap set by Hamas that Israel blundered into, and what Moshe still sees as a necessary evil to make sure Israel isn’t wiped from the face of the earth, a fight against a group that exploits its own people for its own glory. When it comes to evaluating Israel’s ongoing operation our viewpoints couldn’t be more different. And yet we never throw the most popular words on X at each other. Moron. Idiot. Loser. You know the list of empty words that spring up when people are too lazy to have a serious discussion. Not to mention the ever effective: ‘Educate yourself!’ Which is often to be translated as: see the world the way I see it!

Today I opened a book on the history of Lebanon and this caught my eye:

‘In Palestine, where Israel eventually did arise, there was only a very small community of Jews, no more than six per cent of the total population, owning no more than two per cent of the land. Of those only a minority, natives born and bred, were as truly indigenous as the Arabs among whom they lived; the majority were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Nor did these immigrants possess any conceivable right, under international law or custom, to create an exclusively Jewish state, or any reasonable expectation that they ever could, given the seemingly insuperable obstacles which stood in their path, not just legal ones of course, but moral, diplomatic, political and demographic too. Yet not only did they achieve that – mainly, and inevitably, through force – within the space of thirty years, they eventually turned their state, militarily and diplomatically, into the most powerful in the region. No less inevitably, given the manner of its birth, this new-born state was from the outset predisposed to use its power in an aggressive, domineering and violent fashion. That was to be felt throughout the region, but – after Palestine itself – nowhere more than it was by the smallest and weakest of its neighbours, Lebanon. And when one speaks of Israeli power, one cannot but speak of the Western power that was always integral to it.’

I wasn’t expecting the book to bring up Israel this early. Even on the first page premiere Israel devotee Alan Dershowitz is mentioned.

It’s not like I went looking for a book that would be sure to criticize Israel. I bought this book when I was dating a half-Slovak, half-Lebanese woman. At the time I had other things on my mind then to actually sit down and read the book in order to understand her background better. Listening to her proved to be a more effective way in getting to know her than reading a book on the country she had spent part of her childhood in.

As I so often do I confront Moshe with what I have just read. I know these statemens run entirely counter to what he has repeatedly told me.

He shoots back that it’s impossible to find any instance of Israeli aggression between 1948 and 1967.

I immediately think of Israel’s participation in the invasion of Egypt in 1956.

To Moshe this is a clear cut example of Israel acting in defense and responding to an attack.

Since he does his best to be nuanced he says that the incident with the USS Liberty was indeed a baffling affair. Implying that yes, maybe Israel did willfully attack a US ship in 1967.

I tell him I really can’t be sure Israel was always acting defensively between 1948 and 1967. On X contributors to the discussions point out that Israel tried to organize a false flag operation inside Egypt in 1954, the Lavon affair. Egyptian Jews were recruited to blow up American, British and Egyptian targets.

I tell him:

‘Am not sure if that’s true. The problem is how aggressive those responses were. This also leaves out the killing of Palestinian leaders, the killing of Palestinians in small incidents that don’t make it into the history books.’

My idea is that, yes, Israel is surrounded by enemies and from time to time these do try to harm Israel, but then Israel’s policy is to strike back so hard, so violently that in the end it’s Israel who comes out looking like the maniac. This is also what we see today. Israel gets hurt, because of draconian policies that hurt Palestinians every day, and then strikes back with such force that Israel looks like the biggest evil of all. Violence merely perpetuates the cycle of violence.

Moshe’s argument is, and has been, for 226 days now, that if Israel doesn’t respond violently it will be overrun and the Mediteranean sea will run red with Jewish blood.

My argument is still that Hamas is not an existential threat to Israel and so Israel doesn’t need to try and eliminate Hamas knowing full well it’s going to kill and maim and starve and psychologically traumatize hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Moshe’s reaction:

Pro-Palestinian voices are exagerating the damage done inside Gaza.

The ratio dead Hamas fighters and dead civilians is much better than the statistics in the media let on.

If Israel doesn’t do this, its enemies will be emboldened and will see Israeli meekness and wilingness to negotiate as a green light to unleash hell. Players like Hezbollah and Iran, for example.

He’s convinced that Hamas would do October 7th every day of the week and twice on Sunday if it could.

I would be able to go along with this kind of reasoning if I was convinced Hezbollah and/or Iran were in fact all set to launch an all out war on Israel. But the fact remains that neither of those can pull something of like this. Iran’s rocket attack on Israel was mostly symbolical and closely coordinated with its other arch enemy, the US. That’s not just me saying that. That is also what professor Mearsheimer is saying. Iran doesn’t want a full out war with Israel and the US also doesn’t want to see things escalate.

An other thing that stands in the way of my accepting that Israel ever has good intentions are the settlements in the West Bank. Even Alan Dershowitz, fierce crusader for Israel otherwise, agrees that those are wrong. According to wikipedia 450,000 settlers are in the West Bank at the time of writing.

According to Moshe the land those settlers occupy does not technically belong to anyone. Officially it doesn’t belong to anyone, also not to the Palestinians. The Jordanians used to control it, but they gave it up and never incorporated it into Jordan and never created an independent state out of it.

To me this land does belong to the Palestinans or is at the very least reserved for a future Palestinian state. I think it’s obvious that the international community and pretty much any human rights organization in the world sees the West Bank as territory belonging to the Palestinians. To Moshe organisations like the UN and Amnesty International are extremely biased and not to be taken seriously. Their excessive reporting on Israel and the Palestinians, compared to other problems in the world, shows that, according to Moshe.

I often wonder why the Palestinians and the Israelis can’t agree on a one state solution and both could move into those areas with equal rights. Deep down am still a flower power hippie and a peacenik.

My answer is that the Jewish majority in Israel wants to stay a majority and doesn’t feel like growing its Arab population. Leading me to conclude that Israel must be a deeply racist society.

Where Moshe and I agree somewhat is that inside Israel I wouldn’t say there is a clear-cut Apartheid situation. I doubt Arab Israelis have the same opportunities as Jewish Israelis, but the label Apartheid could be too harsh. Where there definitely is Apartheid is in the Israeli treatment of Palestinians outside of its borders. I was there. Israeli settlers take the land, build roads and cut Palestinian communities off from each other, leading to a fragmented Palestinian land. With clusters of Palestinians surrounded by Israeli settlers who can terrorize their Palestinians neighbours with impunity. This is another point of contention with Moshe. He is convinced that Israeli settlers can’t get away with crimes commited against the Palestinians. Unfortunately the internet is exploding with videos where you can see Israeli settlers destroy olive trees, water tanks and even invading Palestinian homes. Just the other day I saw Jewish settlers break into a Palestinian home and defiantly take over a couch and smoke, as if to tell the Palestinians that they are powerless and have to roll over whenever an Israeli settler wishes to do something.

Moshe dismisses these videos as isolated incidents or situations taken out of context. Anti-Jewish propaganda in other words.

He does condemn the online behaviour of Israelis who mock the victims in Gaza. He has expressed empathy for the Palestinian kids being blown to bits. The difference with me there is that he trusts the IDF knows what it is doing and is trying hard to minimize civilian casualties.

There I agree with professor Mearsheimer and Professor Norman Finkelstein. I think the IDF is trying to maximize casualties among civilians, but in a gradual manner so as not to provoke the international community too much. So, no, they won’t shoot thousands a day, they will kill a few hundred a day. Above a certain limit they can’t claim the deaths are colateral anymore or that they die as human shields.

There are plenty of videos where you can see Hamas fighters target Israeli tanks. You never see them fire from behind a wall of women and kids. In fact, they seem to be fighting very bravely. You have to be rather commited to your cause if you are willing to run up to a modern tank and slam a bomb on it. The chance of that succeeding is rather low, but they are taking out tanks… They don’t have kids strapped around their waist during these combat operations. As many have pointed out on X, the IDF has been known to use Palestinian civilians as human shields. Moshe will dispute that.

The challenge remains to sift through our bias, to gather facts, and not to go cherry-picking or to outright make up stuff. I never tell Moshe something I am not entirely sure of and when in doubt I make that doubt clear. I have no reason to believe that Moshe has ever tried to convince me of something that he didn’t believe to be true. When I disagree I try to find out how he reached a entirely different conclusion than I did.

I have the bloody annoying tendency to constantly question my own beliefs. When someone challenges my beliefs, he or she is late to the game, because I question my own beliefs a hundred times a day. At times it’s frustrating to watch people pontificate with supreme self-confidence and arrogance on what they believe the facts are. The most ludicrous comments are the ones telling me how am unwilling to see things from a different perspective. At the same time I have people telling me am much too willing to see things from the Israeli perspective and shouldn’t even be talking to Moshe, since he is supporting a genocide! It’s a mistake of course to take X seriously.

Like one of my students said the other day: ‘The louder someone is on X the unhappier they are in their personal life.’

This happens to be true for me. My social media use goes up the unhappier I become about life in general.

Still, something in me keeps drawing me back to certain issues, such as the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and that something doesn’t allow me peace until I get to the bottom of it. I don’t see how I can do that without talking to someone who disagrees with me. Moshe is the first pro-Israeli who is willing to talk to me and carefully considers what I say without labeling me a complete moron and terrorist supporter, so I do treasure him.