Skeezix, Gaza, and Empathy

Here’s a cat cafe in Gaza
It seemed appropriate.

Those who know Curmie personally know that he and Beloved Spouse recently came to the awful but necessary decision to have their elder cat, Olivia (aka Skeezix), euthanized.  That sent him back to his “other,” seldom-used blog, to a post about when Skeezix was the younger cat in the family and her older “sister,” Helena (Catbert), was dying. 

As I wrote five years ago:

...seeing her sister’s lack of appetite, Olivia made sure that her sister had had first shot at anything she might want. It was more important to her that Helena eat than that she herself get the choicest food. She didn’t make a big deal of it; she just did it. And then, when it became clear that Catbert wasn’t going to be wanting any food [when we came home from the vet’s without her, clearly very sad], she calmly reverted to her normal behavior. 

It is a sad but ultimately ennobling fact for our species: our pets have better ethics than we do.

Olivia was always a great comfort to Curmie and Beloved Spouse; whenever we were ill or sad, she magically appeared on the scene to help us through the bad times.  She never got along quite as well with her younger sister, Hermione (Snippet) as she did with Helena, but in Skeezix’s last days, Snippet showed obvious concern for her sibling, touching noses in what was clearly a gesture of compassion, for example.  Her yielding of the choicest morsels to her elder sister wasn’t as obvious as Skeezix’s had been, but it was there.  Empathy is not merely a human quality; it is innate across much if not all of the animal kingdom.

It’s also worth noting that the outpouring of sympathy and support from friends (over 200 reactions on Facebook alone) to our loss has been both overwhelming and much appreciated.  Curmie has heard from more than a few former students he had no idea were still on Facebook, and from professional colleagues he’s never even met in person.  Current students (Curmie is back in the classroom as a sabbatical replacement this semester) who barely know me have been especially kind, and, no, I don’t think it’s to increase their chances of a good grade.  We are, in some way, hard-wired to care about others.

Well, most of us are.

In one of those coincidences that lead to blog posts from people like Curmie, I happened across an essay decrying the media’s presumed obsession with chronicling the suffering in Gaza.  The inhabitants asked for it, you see, by electing Hamas, and the Israeli military is just trying to protect their citizens from further attacks by a terrorist organization.

To this, Curmie responds in a manner familiar to his students, especially in his Asian theatre classes: yes and no.  I have no sympathy for Hamas, but of course they’re not the ones bearing the brunt of the Israeli attacks, because active belligerents make up only a small percentage of the residents.  It may indeed be true that the average Gazan now supports (as opposed to “joins”) Hamas, but it doesn’t take a strategic genius to figure out the idea that someone might be less likely to align with the folks who are bombing you than the ones opposing the bombers.  “The enemy of my enemy…” and all that.

It’s also more than a bit of a stretch to say that current Gazans elected Hamas.  Half of the people in Gaza weren’t even born the last time there was an election there.  Half of those who were hadn’t reached voting age.  Not everyone voted.  Oh, and Hamas got a plurality, not a majority, of the votes; they got a majority of the legislative seats, but not of the votes.  In other words, the number of Gazan residents who ever voted for Hamas is perhaps as high as 10%.

Is this relevant?  Sort of, to the extent that the pro-Israeli arguments are rendered less legitimate.  The overwhelming majority of those dying, starving, and otherwise in peril in Gaza have done nothing to warrant punishment.  They’re simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Of course, that is the way of war.  Those who make the decisions are seldom the ones who suffer most.  The citizens of Melos in the Peloponnesian War, of Antwerp in World War I, of Hiroshima in World War II (to name but three from literally hundreds of examples), were innocent, but that didn’t save them.  Those who perished in the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, were similarly targeted without cause.

It is certainly possible to view at least many of the untold deaths in similar circumstances over the last three millennia or so in primarily strategic terms: had this horrible thing not happened, then an even worse fate would inevitably have occurred.  

Sometimes.  But the key word in that sentence is “primarily.”  It is reasonable enough to argue that capitulation to tyranny is never acceptable.  Curmie is a native of New Hampshire, where the state motto is “live free or die.”  I get it.  And whereas it makes us uneasy to think in terms of how much “collateral damage” is acceptable, it is naïve to believe that such conversations are anything but commonplace… and necessary.  Military decisions are in a different category than what to watch on TV tonight.  There are significant real-world consequences, both positive and negative.

Getting into the weeds and weighing considerations like responsibility and proportionality is fraught with peril.  Everything becomes a matter of perspective, and decisions are likely to tell us more about the decision-maker than about the relative merits of opposing positions.  Curmie isn’t going to get involved in such disputes, as there is much to be said on both sides.  He’ll go only so far as he’s already gone, when he wrote “Are the Israelis the “good guys” here?  No.  They’re the less despicable guys.” 

All that said, Curmie just can’t wrap his head around the utter lack of even a modicum of sympathy for those caught in the proverbial crossfire through no fault of their own.  No, Gentle Reader, they didn’t fucking “ask for it.”  They’re just trying to survive a horrific set of circumstances that they had little if anything to do with creating.

Even if we don’t agree that politico-military decisions should override humanitarian concerns in at least some such cases, we can grant that there’s an argument to be made.  And concentrating exclusively on the suffering of one set of victims (in this case, innocent Gazans) while ignoring another set of victims (equally innocent Israelis) is at best sloppy journalism.

But anyone who insists that basic human compassion and empathy for those who suffer are unwarranted simply because of who they are and what a minority of their ancestors thought was a good idea… such a person is just a little too close to a monster for Curmie’s taste.  And Skeezix would not approve.

This But That: Musings on Israel and Palestine

Curmie’s personal Facebook page lists his political affiliation as “Contrarian,” or at least it used to do so; that piece of information seems to have vanished, and there are more important things to do than investigate further.  That self-description holds, whether it’s visible to others or not. 

I was never in my adult life more conservative than when living in the small Iowa town that hosts the largest Democratic caucus in the state; whereas there were significant right-wing voices among my colleagues on the faculty of the small college where I taught, they were definitely in the minority.  

Nor have I ever been more liberal than when living in an East Texas Congressional district that elected and kept re-electing Louie Gohmert, often by landslide margins. (He’d still be my Congresscritter except for an ill-fated run for Texas Attorney General).

What this suggests is that when surrounded by largely one-sided rhetoric, Curmie tends to see the flaws in that perspective magnified relative to its strengths.  Whether that’s an admirable exercise in critical thinking or merely a stubborn petulance at being told what to believe sort of doesn’t matter.  It is what it is.

Curmie is also, of course, trained in theatre, and has taught over two dozen sections of acting classes, most of them grounded in the Stanislavsky system of beginning with a character’s objective.  This approach is especially useful in playing antagonists or even villains: they aren’t evil (necessarily, at least), they just see the world a little differently.  The world is a complicated place, and pretending that it is otherwise leads to potentially dangerous oversimplification.

Context matters, in other words.  Always.  That doesn’t mean that context is all that matters, or that every rationale for an action (or inaction) is legitimate—logically, legally, morally, or ethically.  Nor does it mean that just because we agree with a perspective with respect to Issue X, we are unable to disagree about Issue Y.  It is possible, for example, to say that the Biden presidency has been largely unsuccessful and still think it’s better than any of the alternatives currently presenting themselves.  It’s possible to acknowledge that there is considerable corruption in Ukraine and still support them in their struggle against Russian aggression.  And so on.

It is also possible to grant that allegations that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians shares some similarities with apartheid have some merit (the fact that these screeds are generally overblown does not mean they’re entirely fabricated) while also condemning without the slightest hesitancy or reservation the recent attacks by Hamas against Israeli citizens (and those from other countries, including the US).  Rape, murder, and kidnapping of non-combatants, of children and the elderly, cannot be countenanced under any circumstances whatsoever.  Curmie won’t go into details here, Gentle Reader.  You’ve probably been following this story as closely as he has, and there comes a point at which the sheer horror of the situation defies description.

And then, of course, there was the reaction, or, rather, series of reactions.  The Israeli military launched a massive bombing attack on Gaza, dropping nearly as many bombs on that small area in less than a week as the US employed in the entirety of Operation Desert Storm.  They cut off electricity to the region.  They imposed a mass and immediate migration. 

The Israelis (both here and throughout this essay, Curmie uses this term to refer to the Israeli government, not the citizenry) claim with no little justification to be defending their territory and their citizenry.  Also (of course) they claimed to be attacking Hamas installations rather than Gaza in general.  That said, there has been no little death and destruction suffered by people who had no part in the attacks in Israel.  Are the Israelis the “good guys” here?  No.  They’re the less despicable guys. 

Another response, of a different kind, was that of both the international left and a bunch of unthinking post-adolescents.  Blaming the situation wholly on Israel is profoundly stupid, yet so many individuals and organizations have effectively become spokespeople for terrorism.  This is not, of course, a unanimous response of the left any more than suggesting that all Jews want Gaza obliterated.  As a friend of Curmie, a man well to Curmie’s left politically, posted on Facebook, “When the topic turns to Israel, I step away from the Left.”

One of the biggest sources of headlines comes from Harvard, where some 30+ student organizations signed off on a proclamation declaring Israel to be “entirely responsible” for the Hamas attack.  Making the obvious point that the Hamas attack “did not occur in a vacuum,” the statement then proclaims that “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame.”  Uh… no.

But here’s the thing: many members of those student organizations didn’t even know that such a statement was even being considered until after it had been signed in their name.  “We didn’t read or understand what we were signing” is a pretty lame excuse for an Ivy League student; “We didn’t even know it was happening,” on the other hand, is legitimate.

Some brief observations:

1. Sometimes things that appear simple are actually complex.  There’s a good and—from Curmie’s perspective, at least—balanced discussion of some of this over at TheConversation.com.

2. Does the mere presence of non-Muslim visitors at the Al-Aqsa Mosque constitute a “desecration”?  Curmie’s definition of the term would require a higher threshold, but he’s an agnostic of Christian heritage, so what does he know?

3. Policies of the Netanyahu regime in particular no doubt had a triggering effect, indirectly precipitating the Hamas attack. 

4.Sometimes things that appear complex are actually simple.  There is no excuse, none, for what Hamas did.  Context is one thing; excuses are another.

5.There’s a difference between collateral damage and specifically targeting civilians.  That does provide context (there’s that word again), but there’s also a point at which knowing in advance that the collateral damage will be catastrophic becomes relevant.

6. It is virtually certain that Hamas takes shelter among innocent civilians, so any attack on Gaza will have civilian casualties.  Both sides know this.  Neither seems much to care.

7. Hamas’s energy, indeed its very existence, is defined negatively.  It is focused exclusively on the elimination of Israel (and perhaps of Jews in general), not on improving the lives of Palestinians.  This is one of the few points on which Curmie will brook no denial.

8. Silence is not always complicity.  Taking some time to organize ours thoughts—for those of us privileged enough to not be directly affected, at least—would seem a better option than saying something you’ll regret.  Not having words is not a moral or ethical failing. 

9.The same people who (rightly) argued that criticism of Barack Obama wasn’t inherently racist or of Hilary Clinton inherently sexist are now suggesting that criticism of the Israeli government is, in fact, inherently anti-Semitic.  It isn’t.  Nor is criticism of Hamas inherently Islamophobic. 

10. Lots of people in Israel don’t support their government’s policies with respect to Palestine; lots of people in Gaza don’t support brutality against Jews.

11. Kids in Gaza are just as innocent as those in Israel.

12. You can be a member of a group without supporting everything that group does.  No elected officials in a real democracy are ever supported by all their constituents, or even without reservations by their supporters.  Any American who can’t or won’t acknowledge the failures of the candidate they voted for in a recent election is not worthy of consideration.  Anyone who merely parrots the party line—any party line—is unworthy of consideration. 

13. It is not merely illogical but unethical to blame (or praise, for that matter) all members of a group for something the majority or the power-mongers do.  American citizens aren’t responsible for what our military does just because a slight majority of voters (as opposed to citizens) elected the Commander-in-Chief.  The same logic applies both to Israeli citizens and to residents of Gaza.

14. Simply being a member of a group—a local chapter of Amnesty International or the Nepali Student Association, for example—which has hitherto not done anything stupid regarding Israel and Gaza should not lead to doxing.  People who make decisions are responsible for those decisions; people who don’t even know a decision is being made are not. 

15. We can count on some self-important CEO (the usual apologies for redundancy) to engage in preening twatwaffledom in any circumstance.  No one should accept a job with a boss who engages so freely and publicly in proclaiming guilt by association.  Curmie is looking at you, Bill Ackman.

16. We are placed in the unfortunate situation of having to believe news reports, which, given the sloth of most journalists and editors, are often misleading if not outright prevarications.  Skepticism is definitely in order.

17. To the extent that such poor journalism is the result of bias rather than garden variety incompetence, it tends to backfire.  The truth has a nasty way of finding its way to the light, and uncovering false allegations (e.g., of an Israeli attack on a Gaza hospital) tends to discredit subsequent, accurate, reporting from the same source.

18. The only hope for the situation not getting worse is the release of the hostages.  We can be shocked by Israel’s response, but we cannot reasonably condemn it out of hand.  Horrific and appropriate are not always contradictory terms.

19. Should this release occur and the assault on Gaza continue, the Israeli government bears the responsibility for the continued carnage.

20. Curmie doubts that the release mentioned in #19 is likely to happen.  Alas.

21. It is possible to support Palestinians and still condemn Hamas’s slaughter of innocent people.  How do I know?  The guy I see in the mirror does both.

Piracy is a bad idea.

Whereas the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico remains the dominant news story of the past week or so, events in the waters off the Gaza strip also command attention. There have been two separate rounds of Israeli attempts to thwart relief ships attempting to break the blockade on marine access to Gaza and deliver everything from medicine to toys to cement. The second round, involving the ship the Rachel Corrie, went more or less “as planned”—both sides emerge with some dignity, and it’s even possible that the relief materials will find their way to the suffering people of Gaza. Let’s consider that first encounter, however.

OK: background, caveats, and common ground. Can we all stipulate a few things?

1). The Israeli government has reason to be nervous that Hamas is in charge in Gaza.

2). Hamas is the democratically elected government of that region. (Remember, they defeated Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, so it’s not like there’s a lot of pro-Israeli sentiment in the area.)

3). Uncritical acceptance of the testimony of absolutely anyone associated with these events is folly.

4). As Jon Stewart put it, 

Whatever you may think of the respective leaderships, the Israelis or Hamas, whatever gods you pray to or whatever direction you may pray to them in, if you can’t even look at Gaza and agree that there is suffering there that needs to be alleviated, no matter who’s to blame for it, then your heart is so dead that tourists flock there to float their backs in it. 

(This in response to Charles Krauthammer’s commentary—described aptly by Stewart as “the stupidest f*ing thing anyone has ever said about the Middle East, ever”—that there is no humanitarian crisis being addressed by the flotilla: “there’s no one starving in Gaza.”)

5). No matter how sensible some parts of the blockade may be, you just look silly if you’re spending your time stopping shipments of wheelchairs and Pokemon toys. Indeed, the list of what is banned and what isn’t would strike most observers as more than a little arbitrary. Edmund Sanders of the Los Angeles Times, citing Gisha, an Israeli advocacy group which opposes the blockade, writes that “Cinnamon is allowed, but coriander is banned…. Oil is OK, but not vinegar. Canned fruit is prohibited, but not canned vegetables.” Perhaps there is some internal consistency here which I am too dim-witted to comprehend?

6). If you’re trying to run a military blockade, there’s likely to be trouble.

7). The people on the boats that comprised the flotilla included some pro-Hamas and/or anti-Israeli agitators.

8). The people on the boats that comprised the flotilla included some humanitarians who didn’t give a damn about who had done what to whom, only that people needed help.

9). The headline-making events of recent days occurred in international waters when Israeli commandos attempted to board the ships of the relief flotilla.

10). The loss of nine lives, however risky the behavior of the victims may have been, is indeed tragic. Even the Aristolelian in me is satisfied, as what transpired was completely within the realm of human agency—no “Act of God,” here.

N.B. I have tried, in the above descriptions, to avoid loaded language (with the exceptions of agreeing that Krauthammer’s comments were stupid even by his standards and questioning the rationale behind what is quarantined and what isn’t). I realize, however, that words like “humanitarians” and “victims” aren’t necessarily neutral.

Let me stipulate further that I think the blockade is more of a bad idea than a good one, in terms of both policy and politics. In policy terms, it aggravates an already bad situation. Isolation imposed from the outside—whether we’re talking about North Korea or Cuba or apartheid-era South Africa—tends to affect the have-nots more than the haves. Applying sanctions might make us feel good that we’re doing something, but such a strategy seldom succeeds in effecting the kind of change in policy positions it sets out to accomplish. What does happen, however, is that the general population suffers even more than they had previously.

Which brings us to the political realm… when Hamas first came to power, I wrote in my old blog that it was “put up or shut up time for them.” They were faced with two choices if they wanted to retain control: govern (and govern well) or renounce the allegedly democratic principles which brought them to power. Or so I thought at the time. I overlooked the possibility of an Israeli initiative which would allow Hamas to pass the blame—legitimately, or with at least a claim to legitimacy—to the very government they so vehemently oppose. One of the central claims of Hamas is that Israel is an oppressive regime relative to Palestinians; legitimizing those claims doesn’t strike me as a particularly shrewd political strategy on the part of the Israeli government.

Any problem in Gaza, especially in terms of infrastructure and social services, now can reasonably be ascribed to the effects of the blockade rather than to Hamas’s own failures to provide for their constituents. (I am reminded of one of my favorite plays, Largo Desolato by Václav Havel, who knew something of political repression: in that play the dissident intellectual protagonist is broken by the removal of the threat of being sent to the Czech equivalent of the Gulag.) So no, I don’t think the blockade is a good idea. But I do understand the rationale for it and the fact that similar policies have been adopted by other governments, including our own, on many occasions. In other words, reasonable people can disagree about the blockade per se.

And, as suggested by #3 above, we’re not likely to get a lot of clarity from either eye-witness testimony or heavily-edited videotape on many of the details of what, exactly, happened Monday, especially on the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, on which nine passengers were killed, allegedly for attacking Israeli commandos. The passengers were or weren’t armed, the soldiers did or did not start firing before even reaching the deck of the ship, and so on. Moreover, while it is possible that all those killed were actively confronting the Israeli soldiers, history suggests otherwise. Remember Kent State, where one of the victims was an ROTC cadet walking to class over 100 yards from the nearest National Guardsman? Not exactly an aggressive anti-war protester there.

But let’s accept, for the sake of argument, the essence of the Israeli government’s argument. The soldiers boarded the ship, were attacked by the passengers, and defended themselves with lethal force. All the dead were among those employing knives, projectiles, or whatever else, to prevent the IDF forces from taking control of the ship. Even with that spin, we are left with one very central question: SO FREAKING WHAT?

No one disputes that these events took place not in Israeli waters but in the open sea. What happened, then, is that armed men attempted to seize control of a legal vessel in international waters. Maybe the vocabulary changed when I wasn’t paying attention, but I seem to remember a term for that: piracy. Then, having shot up the joint when the passengers resisted, they claimed they were attacked. As MJ Rosenberg writes, “This is like a carjacker complaining to the police that the driver bashed him with a crowbar that was under the seat. Neither carjackers nor hijackers should expect their victims to acquiesce peacefully.” Note: had these events occurred in Israeli waters, they wouldn’t have been any more intelligent or less tragic, but they might at least have been construed as legal.

One of the dead turns out to be a young man with joint Turkish and American citizenship, Furkan Dogan, who was shot five times, four in the head. I can’t improve on James Wolcott’s commentary: “I'm not a trained commando, unlike so many others with blogs to their names, but four shots to the head strikes me as possibly a trifle de trop.”

The worst case scenario in real terms for Israel involves additional tension in its relationship with the US (its principal ally) and with Turkey (the closest thing it had to an ally in the region). Israel’s armed forces and the government that commands them are portrayed as trigger-happy ghouls. The policies of Prime Minister Netanyahu (in particular) with respect to Gaza stand to be condemned by the international community writ large rather than simply by those states already opposed to Israel. That Israel is often unjustly isolated internationally is no doubt true; that in this instance they deserve to be ostracized is, to me, equally undeniable.

I disagree—around the edges, at least—with Rosenberg, who says, 

the intention of the activists on board the ships was to break the Israeli blockade. Delivering the embargoed goods was incidental. In other words, the activists were like the civil rights demonstrators who sat down at segregated lunch counters throughout the South and refused to leave until they were served. Their goal was not really to get breakfast. It was to end segregation.

I think breaking (if by “breaking” we mean “ending” as opposed to “circumventing”) the blockade may indeed be the principal medium-term objective, but that doesn’t minimize the shorter-term intention of making sure relief aid does in fact reach its intended recipients, or indeed the longer-term goal of achieving both autonomy and some reasonable standard of living for the Palestinian people.

Even the best case scenario for the Israelis is a PR disaster, made worse rather than better by the excuse-making of Netanyahu and his minions in the media, especially in this country: because the arguments are so palpably fallacious. Look, mistakes happen. Sometimes they’re completely honest mistakes (that umpire’s call that cost a pitcher a perfect game, for example), sometimes they’re less innocent (e.g., the intervention of a school principal into the artistic qualities of a mural championing environmental issues) but reasonable people forgive human frailty in all its manifestations, even in situations like this, in which lives were lost. Provided, that is, that there’s an apology issued with some hint of actual remorse: someone was sorry for what s/he’d done, not just for being caught. This is why everyone is angry at BP right now: no rational person believes Tony Hayward or his minions give a crap about anything but their corporate profits.

But Netanyahu does Hayward one better: he doesn’t even bother with the insincere contrition; he actually defends the screw-up. And let’s be clear: the best case scenario from the Israeli perspective is that they sent out commando teams carrying military-grade weaponry, but provided the soldiers with neither the tactics nor the provisions to employ non-lethal force. Indeed, they apparently never even considered the possibility that people willing to run a blockade might be willing to resist an assault against them. In other words, this was not merely a public relations and political disaster, it was a catastrophe in military terms.

I find it curious (but not, alas, surprising), then, that so many in this country are willing to defend what to me is at best a variation on Kent State: an over-reaction perpetrated by under-trained kids with assault rifles. I know of literally no one in this country who defends everything our own government does—go ahead, name someone who endorses warrantless wiretaps, the bank bailout, Obama’s healthcare bill, and the federal government’s response to both Hurricane Katrina and the BP disaster. But there is a bizarre little alliance of many Republicans (especially but not exclusively the Religious Right) and some American Jews who are prepared to defend any action of the Israeli government, whichever party happens to be in charge there. 

Witness Shmuel Rosner, writing in Slate: “The soldiers were surprised by a mob; they saw their friends being lynched; they acted as any soldier would have and should have acted. To save their fellow soldiers, they opened fire.” Lynched?!? Give me a damned break. The guys with the assault rifles who attacked the ship were being “lynched” by civilians armed with… uh… jack-knives and hammers? Curiously enough, the victims of this “lynching” sustained two “moderate” injuries; the alleged perpetrators: nine dead and multiple injuries. Somewhere, perhaps, there is a parallel universe in which Mr. Rosner’s argument is coherent. I pray I never visit there.

But amidst the nattering and the silly condemnations of President Obama—not for an egregiously tepid response but for the temerity to suggest that the slaughter of civilians (including an American) is a “tragedy”—there is at least one voice of reason… Dennis Kucinich. I urge you to read his letter to President Obama in its entirety, but here’s the most important section: 

It is not acceptable to repeatedly violate international law. It is not acceptable to shoot and kill innocent civilians. It is not acceptable to commit an act of aggression against another U.S. ally. It is not acceptable to continue a blockade which denies humanitarian relief. It is not acceptable to heighten tensions in a region while the United States continues to put so much blood and treasure on the line.

Now, why is it that someone as ethically clear-headed, rhetorically skilled, and passionately humanitarian as Kucinich can’t attract votes even from Democrats at the national level? Oh, yeah, that’s right—he’s kind of funny-looking.