The person on the other side
Moshe Dayan, Palestinians, and empathy.
My friend and colleague Leila Fadel has done as well as any journalist in helping us to understand and feel different perspectives of the conflict in the Middle East. Soon after the October 7 attacks she walked the streets of a wrecked Israeli kibbutz. She’s been to the West Bank, talked with people in Gaza, and deployed her deep knowledge of the region to guide our reporting in Lebanon and beyond.
Today’s Morning Edition includes an especially powerful interview with Amir Tibon, who, Leila says, “lived in a community of about 400, a kibbutz, on the border with blockaded Gaza.” On October 7, 2023, he and his wife woke “to the whistling of mortars.”
The couple raced to their safe room, which was the same room where their two daughters slept. They covered the window with a metal plate, and unlike so many other Israelis that day, they survived.
Tibon talked with Leila after writing a book about his experience. What I want to share with you is a section of the interview in which this Israeli man does a very hard thing. He reflects on the point of view of the Palestinians who lived a short distance from his kibbutz in Gaza.
Tibon took his book title, The Gates of Gaza, from a 1956 speech by the Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan. The Israeli strategist, famous for his eye patch, had fought for Israel again and again. In 1956 he spoke at the funeral of a man who had been killed while on patrol at the Gaza border. “That speech by Dayan at Nahal Oz is one of the most important speeches in the history of the state of Israel and really in the history of Zionism,” Tibon said.
And Dayan stands there, he’s the chief of staff of the military, the most admired man in Israel. And he opens and he says something very controversial. He says we should not blame the Palestinians in Gaza for this murder that was committed the other day. Because it's been eight years since the war of 1948, when they lost their homes, they lost their territories. And they've been watching from the refugee camps of Gaza how we, the Israelis, are building homes there. Building communities. And it is natural and obvious that they want to take revenge. And that is a radical message that shows some deep understanding of the tragedy that the Palestinians went through. And you could almost feel for a second that it may be a speech that is a call for peace, but then it turns around, and Dayan says we should point the blame at ourselves for believing for even one second that they will not want to kill us. And he basically says because of what happened to them, if we lay down our sword for even one second, we will be killed. So it becomes a very dark and pessimistic speech.
FADEL: Do you agree with that?
TIBON: The young people who founded Kibbutz Nahal Oz… some of them are still with us. They did not like that speech because they always wanted to believe that one day, maybe in a distant future, there will be peace with the people on the other side. They did not want to come and live there for the sake of eternal war. But this is what Dayan had promised them. Now, was he right or wrong? Well, I can give you two arguments. Twenty years after this speech, Dayan was involved in the signing of the Israeli Egyptian peace agreement. So a man who said there could never be peace was involved in the creation of Israel's first peace agreement with one of its neighboring Arab countries. So maybe he was wrong, and the young, hopeful kibbutz members were right. But then you see October seven; you see maybe Dayan was right. Maybe we let down our guard. And I don't want to say who is right and who is wrong… But I can tell you that it's still the conversation we need to have.
What’s extraordinary about this event is Dayan’s empathy for the other side. I think often, and have written before, about something an American soldier told me once: it is vital to have empathy for others, even the enemy. “Not sympathy,” the American clarified, “but empathy.” Meaning that even if you do not support their cause, you should understand their point of view. It’s part of understanding reality so you can address it. Maybe you decide you can agree with them. Maybe you decide you must defeat them. Either way, you must understand them.
In the NPR interview, Leila referred to “the empathy gap.” By this she means “Israelis feel and understand the pain that they're living through, and Palestinians feel and understand the pain that they're living through, but that pain is not acknowledged or seen for the other.”
Somehow we will survive even the worst of what may ramify and mushroom out of the current Middle East horrors.
We will survive with an obligation to understand and build upon the empathy demonstrated by the likes of Moshe Dayan whose voice challenges us to interrogate the value, meaning, and usefulness of empathy.
Clearly, the STATE of Israel is an aftershock of (or is it a smoldering blaze lit by a spark from) the Nazi Holocaust. We must remember that while Hitler viewed Jews as parasites and pariahs, this was only a superficial aspect of his animus toward them. Hitler believed there was a fundamental (inescapable) fact about humanity: as biological organisms who are members of races we must struggle to dominate and control the scarce resources of the planet. There is only so much land, so much food, so much wealth. Eventually, the winners take all. The losers are enslaved and/or die. For Hitler to accept this “truth”, and to behave (beastly) in accordance with it, was good. His deeper objection to Jews was that they were deceivers in that they promulgated ideas about universality and a common humanity. Thus he saw Christianity and Communism as Jewish plots to dominate resources and control human minds through false appeals to sentiment. Capitalism, with its emphasis on rule of law and sanctity of contracts, was another obvious Jewish ruse. The same went for the idea of “the state.” Even science and rationality were distractions and entanglements that tempted us to forget what we must do to survive: kill or be killed, dominate or be dominated, humiliate or be humiliated, massacre or be massacred.
Maybe Hitler and the younger Dayan were correct? Maybe we are condemned to kill or be killed, enslave or be enslaved. Something about Dayan always made me feel like he hoped he was wrong. But maybe he and Adolf were right from the start?
Is empathy just a frivolous luxury, adding a bit of frisson, to the lives of the winners, the privileged, the self deceiving, the deceived, the prospective losers in a struggle without meaning or hope?
Right now, the answers do not lie in a crazed, traumatized Israel or in a battered and feverish Palestine. The focus for reform must be at the imperial centers of Washington and New York where too many believe that what is happening is part of a clash necessary to destroy the Islamic State of Iran even though such a conflagration would disrupt oil productions and flows in ways that would be sure to strengthen fascist imperial Russia though the ultimate beneficiary might well be China.
The college protesters are both factually correct and morally right to decry how our institutions are involved with the worst aspects of the STATE of Israel. What is the US (as a state, an empire, and a network of corporations) doing as it supports an illegal and immoral occupation that requires exponentially vaster holocausts of human sacrifice?
Perfect for today. Thank you Steve.