A humanitarian disaster of generational proportions is unfolding as I write this. At the same time that it started last Friday night, I came down hard with bronchitis. It was literally the same time that Hamas was crossing the barrier/containment fences out of Gaza to attack Israel. It’s the sickest I’ve been in a long time, and laid me up in bed for the entire week. Although I’ve had much to say, I’ve had little time or energy to say anything even on my personal social media accounts. But as I am hoping to put in a full day at work tomorrow, I am also very much wanting to put my voice out there on the current events in Israel & Palestine.
I want to find time to write a series, because there is so much lack of understanding and so much misunderstanding out there, and it is harmful. Ultimately, people die because of it. Most of us just don’t ever see it. I have loved ones who are Muslims, Jews, and Christians. I grieve for the loss of human life and the loss of humanity suffered by each of their brethren – and in the past eight days more so than ever. I hope you do as well, and that if you don’t, that perhaps the moral arguments in my writing will make you reconsider.
I will not always go out of my way to issue every possible disclaimer. That means, for example, that I am not going to say Hamas is bad! every. single. time. I mention Hamas. I’ve written countless words over the past 15 years about the evils of terrorism, mostly personal on social media accounts, and writing in a way that threads every single needle for every single person with an opinion on an issue is a *monumental* time suck and an *exhausting* mental burden I simply don’t have enough hours in the day to do. (This is the dynamic that trolls seek to exploit.) So I will say these two things instead: First, if I’ve written about it before, you can presume my view on it is the same unless I’ve said otherwise. And hand in hand with that, if I didn’t write it, don’t assume I think it. It’s rude and usually is the mark of someone not thinking critically. You’re almost certainly missing the point if you presume I am saying or thinking something I’ve not written. Concordantly, I will not “both sides” every aspect of every topic pertinent to this conflict. There is no “both sides” to war crimes. There is no “both sides” to the plain language of international law.
That said, in the coming weeks, I hope to be writing regularly. I’ll probably turn off comments, because I don’t have time to engage on them and because since I last wrote much, the country has gone halfway to hell in a handbasket, so it’s hard to imagine there’s anything productive in having them.
I expect to write about many of the same things I’ve talked about for years (mostly elsewhere, since I never really wrote much here after I set the blog up), and probably some new ones:
– The critical importance of international law – because people love whataboutism and making up their own (inconsistent) standards on the fly;
– Why our perceptions of the situation are often severely warped, leading us to adopt views that far fewer of us would if we knew better;
– How the widespread deception of half-truths is one of the most insidious problems in our dialogue about the situation;
– The importance of knowing what someone’s words mean to *them* AND what *your* words mean to them – words and phrases like terrorist, Zionist, occupation, “Free Palestine,” and “river to the sea” mean VERY different things to different people, and that fact is devastating to our ability as a society to coherently communicate on this topic;
– The role that religion does and does not play – and the role that you should not allow it to play;
– Why I treat certain news sources with greater respect and trust than others;
– Why nuances can be land mines in dialogue about the conflict, why it matters, and why you should stop trusting people who abuse nuance to advance their point of view;
– Why our treatment of the ultimate large-scale humanitarian issues matters;
– The rapidly growing problem of sophisticated disinformation;
– Why the indiscriminate and inaccurate use of legal language like “war crimes” causes problems; and
– How near total public ignorance of two international legal enactments in the late 1940s has fostered a widespread, obtuse, and inhumane view of human rights that directly contradicts what our military officers have been taught for decades at West Point, Annapolis, and the USAFA.
I hope you’ll find it valuable and insightful, and that you’ll share the posts you find valuable with others.
