Bad analogies for Israel-Palestine

Posts on this subject are obviously fraught, so a few things up front:

• the moral question is simple: Palestinian liberation is right & necessary
• the praxis is complicated: antisemitic entryism into the movement for liberation is subtle, pervasive, and unacceptable
• the history is complicated: I have a survey of it which addresses many common misunderstandings on all sides
• I keep an index of resources — my posts and others’

Stealing a sandwich?

Crypto-fascist grifter Caitlin Johnstone analogizes the conflict in Israel-Palestine with a sandwich.

I have heard a thousand variants of this sort of allegory. They drive me bats because despite Israel hardliners being thoroughly terrible, anti-Israel commentators reliably insist on overstating their strong case with disingenuous misrepresentations of the history of Israel-Palestine and pro-Israel arguments.

Israel supporter: [Walks up to a guy at a restaurant, grabs his sandwich, starts eating it.]

Guy: Hey!

Israel supporter: What?

Guy: That’s my sandwich!

Israel supporter [still eating]: Sandwich? What sandwich?

Guy: Right there! You’re eating it right now!

Israel supporter: No I’m not.

Guy: Oh my God! You’re standing right in front of me eating my sandwich! I can see you doing it with my own eyes!

Israel supporter [finishing sandwich]: Nope. Never happened.

Guy: You owe me another sandwich you prick! You stole from me!

Israel supporter: So you’re saying Jews steal? That’s an anti-semitic canard!

Guy: What?? I didn’t even know what religion you are! I’m just mad you stole my sandwich and ate it right in front of me!

Israel supporter: That never happened. Or if it did happen it wasn’t me. Or if it was me I had to do it because another guy did something that left me no choice, so you should blame him.

Guy: Gah!!

Israel supporter: Actually come to think of it I’m beginning to suspect maybe YOU ate MY sandwich.

Guy: How is this happening? This is ridiculous!

Israel supporter: Again with the Jew hating!

Guy: Why the hell do you keep babbling about Jews?? This has nothing to do with Jews! This is about you personally and the specific thing you just did!

Israel supporter: Okay Hitler. [Steals silverware on the table, exits.]

So here’s my attempt at a version which recognizes the injustices and power relationships without misrepresenting the arguments, history, or dynamics so badly.

I: [eating a sandwich]

P: You stole my sandwich.

I: Maybe my grandmother took your grandfather’s
     sandwich. Get over it.

P: Doesn’t make that sandwich yours.

I: She shared it with a starving Auschwitz survivor.

P: So? I’m starving, and you owe me my sandwich.
      [punches I]

I: Fine, I’ll share. Just stop that!
      [hands a small portion to P]
      [puts knee on P’s neck]

P: No compromises on what’s mine!
      Give me your whole sandwich!
      [punches I]

I: [leans on P’s neck]

I & P: This maniac hates me for no reason!

Of course what this most reveals is the inadequacy of a sandwich as a metaphor.

Stealing a house?

Over on Twitter, a friend objected to an earlier version of this reframing of the sandwich story, offering a different metaphor:

If the police illegally kicked you out of your home, gifted it to a random family, and then said, “we’ll give you the basement, but that’s all”, would you be okay with splitting your home with those illegally occupying it? Or would you only accept your home back as solely yours?

I replied:

I understand and respect why many Palestinians refuse to accept any legitimacy for Israel, or for Israelis’ presence in Israel.

If Ali bursts into Ben’s house and kills one of Ben’s children, because Ben’s grandparents stole the house from Ali’s grandparents, I also understand and respect why Ben is going to itch to have cops treat Ali roughly.

I am not drawing an equivalence between Both Sides here. Israel has perpetrated countless wrongs. It is simple to see that this newest round of horrors is unjustifiable. And a truly just way forward is not so simple.

It’s damn near impossible. Israel has actively provoked Palestinians, by continually encroaching on their land, allowing settler colonialists to violently displace more Palestinian families, claiming “iF i dOn’T sTeAl iT, sOmEoNe eLsE wiLl”. That “lOgiC” is insane.

---

You’re assuming Ben isn’t provoking Ali. Is Ben nested on top of his illegally acquired home, with a sniper rifle, taking shots at Ali & his family, permanently disabling Ali’s children in the process? Does this result in Ali seeking justice? Yes. Is that bad? No.

Frankly, accusing Israel of “actively provoking Palestinians” while thousands of Israelis have fresh memories of friends and family killed on 10/7 is poor form. Israel is wrong enough without this fantasy of Israeli insanity.

This is where the sandwich and house metaphors break down. If Ali and Ben represent The Nation Of All Palestinians and The Nation Of All Israelis, then treating them like a singular individual gets weird. Or do they represent a “Typical” Palestinian & Israeli?

IDF snipers gunning down Palestinian kids is wrong, but referring to it simply as a one-sided “provocation” elides the cycle of violence which produced it.

The Likudniks who have run Israel for almost two decades are callous numbskulls, not sadists. The snipers are doing military policing of the pseudo-sovereign PA, in response to attacks on Israel.

Some Palestinian fires a rocket at an IDF truck from an office building in Gaza, Israel responds with overwhelming force, shelling the office building.

Why is this disproportionate brutality Israel’s policy?

Because if I am a 45 year old Israeli voter, I remember how the Oslo Agreements seemed to have turned the corner on violent conflict. The creation of the PA ended the overt military occupation. But then Palestinian hard-liners rightly unsatisfied with the meagre territory and pseudo-sovereignty of the PA committed terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens a couple of times a week. So I heard bombs and gunfire, I knew people who lost daughters & brothers, and when the Likudniks said “there is no making peace with these animals”, I did not vote for them but I understood why so many of my friends & family did.

And then in the years after, I started voting for them too because the Likudnik “security” strategy seemed to work. The bombings of Israeli civilians stopped, turning into things like those less bloody (for Israelis) rocket attacks on the IDF, which mostly slowed down over time. The military policing of Gaza was brutal but it seemed to work.

Until 10/7, which was not quite as brutal as Israeli hardliners’ propaganda said, but that is damning it with the faintest imaginable praise.

All of this violence by Palestinians is a response to their oppression, yes. As are the cycles of violence which came before.

What measure and kind of violent Palestinian response is justified? Feh. I would rather focus on the need to end the current genocidal attack by Israel and to liberate Palestinians from dispossession and oppression.

But don’t insist that the story is nothing other than relentless violent “provocation” by Israel. That is a crock. This is a cycle of violence in which hardliners on both sides sabotage goodwill.

Israel bears the responsibility to end it because Israel has held the upper hand for my entire lifetime, because Israel’s violence has supported an unjust order.

We can hold Israel responsible without having to misrepresent the history with horseshit.

The Confederacy?

Over on Bluesky, someone challenged me over my insistence that “Zionism” means neither more nor less than wanting Israel to continue to exist in some form with a pointed analogy:

I think the states South of Mason-Dixon should be able to have the right to resist Federal imposition of human equality in some form. The only forms I materially support exactly conform to the Confederacy, but how dare you imply that I support the Confederacy!

I’m impatient with anti-Zionists offering bad metaphors for the Israel-Palestine conflict, but I have to admit that the challenge in that had real edge. I thought it was recoverable into a useful form.

But I was wrong; it is rotten at the core, and trying to reframe it into a better form only had me wading out into a revisionist history which is easily misread as apologetics for the Confederacy, which I certainly do not want to do. I should have remembered my own warning against analogizing the history of Israel to the history of the United States.

Retaining it here as an instructive example of how easy it is to stumble into saying bad, dumb things … and in particular, to keep myself accountable for having done it myself.

The alternate history

To try to really work the analogy, one must break the parallel between Israel and the Confederacy by first recognizing how the oppression of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and inside Green Line Israel are brutal, and the Nakba was a genocidal horror, but antebellum Southern slavery was even worse than that. We should be wary of mapping the oppression of Arab Palestinians inside Green Line Israel directly to Jim Crow (or to other inequities like South African apartheid), but it is similar enough to accept for the sake of the allegory. We must also register how the Confederacy was defined by its project to preserve that nightmare in a way that Zionism is not.

That blunts the analogy, but it still very sharp. Jim Crow was profoundly unjust. With that, we can conceive a loose dystopian alternate history parallel to the history of Israel-Palestine:

1862 — The Confederacy successfully secedes with Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida. Black people fleeing & driven from their homes escape to the Louisiana & Tennessee territories of Mexico and the USA.

Late 19^th century — Mexico & the US fight a series of wars trying to destroy the Confederacy. It is clear that if they win, they will genocide the Confederates.

1885 — The Confederacy seizes Louisiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia in one of those wars. They start establishing settlements and repress the Black people there even more brutally than in the CSA itself.

1890 — The wars end because the Confederacy hint that they have dynamite technology.

1900 — The USA & CSA sign a major peace treaty which ends their border conflicts. The USA gets North Carolina & Virginia back. The Confederacy retains Louisiana & Tennessee, under military occupation.

1915 — After lengthy, bitter negotiation, the Confederacy makes weak concessions to Black people in Louisiana & Tennessee, which become a pseudo-sovereign state of the South. Confederate settlements remain, and the South remains subject to military policing. But there are free elections, which leaders of the formerly-terrorist Southern Liberation Organization win.

1930 — Conditions have diverged between Tennessee and Lousiana.

In Tennessee the Confederacy has expanded their settlements, making it a fragmented mess under de facto Confederate control. They are still governed democratically, under a corrupt party which evolved from the SLO.

In Louisiana the Confederacy have retreated, sort of: they abandon their settlements but blockade the state, creating grinding poverty. They have elected the authoritarian, theocratic Nation Of Islam to power … who never allow another free election again.

“Liberal Confederates”?

Let’s stop in 1945, before the Nation Of Islam conducts a brutal attack on Confederate civilians which produces an immense, genocidal response by the Confederacy, so we can look across this long, terrible history without that final horror consuming the story.

This less bad alternate Confederacy is still very bad.

It has liberal Confederates who say, “For generations we have fought for full sovereignty for the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee, full equality for Black people inside the Confederacy, and reparations for Black people in recognition of the Confederate history. The CSA is guilty of countless wrongs which we oppose, but we still love our home and want it to be far better.”

Would I count myself a liberal Confederate? Heck no. I don’t want the legacy of the Confederate project. I would want a just, unified, liberal democratic South encompassing all of the Confederacy plus the Southern states of Louisiana & Tennessee.

Would I count myself an anti-Confederate? Not quite. I would grant that liberal Confederates held a legitimate position which I respectfully disagree with. It is good to dream of a better version of one’s country.

Would I respect people less sympathetic to liberal Confederates than I was? Of course. Especially I would cut a lot of slack for Black Southerners saying that liberal Confederates are only rationalizing the white supremacy of the CSA. They would have good reasons, and their analysis would have a lot of truth to it, with plenty of “liberal Confederates” unwilling to really face the depth of the injustices they have an obligation to correct. And I would insist that sincere liberal Confederates dedicated to justice really existed, even if I was pessimistic about how many there were and the viability of their dream.

I’d also pointedly wonder how anti-Confederates imagined a harmonious United South working if they found themselves unable to imagine sincere liberal Confederates.

Some people would argue that animosity between white Confederates and Black Southerners is so intense that a two-state resolution would be better than a United South. I would not agree that it was better, but I would grant that they had a good case that it was more achievable.

One last thing

To properly parallel the history of Israel-Palestine, we would also need to imagine a Confederacy founded not by white people but by Native Americans fleeing genocide in the USA & Mexico, populated mostly with more Native Americans who arrived in the decades after succession — to parallel the Shoah, the Jews already in Palestine before Zionism, and the migration of Mizrahi Jews unwelcome elsewhere in the Middle East.

Wait, this is all terrible

So. Ugh. So I end up recruiting the genocide of Native Americans into this analogy, inventing a Confederacy without slavery, inventing an ahistorical Nation Of Islam as an anti-Confederate equivalent to Hamas, and more which is bananas if not ten kinds of racist. That is awful. Let’s … not.

So to the original point: the Confederacy is not a good analogy for Israel.