Goldberg's Gaza Paralysis

Many a friend has asked me what I think of the Israeli invasion.  I have some private thoughts on the subject, but they're not particularly interesting. I've studied enough, prayed enough,  spent enough time in Israel to get the hang of why the conflict appears so tragic and  intractable; I remember looking through abandoned Syrian artillery bunkers overlooking the Golan Heights. And then, in the distance, the sounds of  Israeli shells husking into Lebanon.   Walking on the West Bank one afternoon, a young Palestinian boy picked up a rock and threw it in our general direction. A few of my tour-mates freaked out; our tour guide, it turned out, knew the boy's mother, walked the boy back to his house, and extracted an apology. Walking on the rooftops of the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem, about a stone's throw from the Western Wall, we spied an Orthodox Jew, in his tiny apartment, watching X-Files on a television set up to somehow ingeniously avoid Shabbos sanction.  For literally ten minutes, as our tour guide tried to explain the History of History to us, all we heard was the theme, which played on a loop. That's Israel.

So, as usual, I tried to borrow the brain of a person whose instincts on this issue I trust completely. 

But Jeff Goldberg is paralyzed. I found him sunk unto Andrew Sullivan's office sofa.

Here's my diagnosis:  Jeff has fed off its tendrils of this conflict; it is part of him; its hope, its cycle of despair, its tribal, ethnic and racial conflicts, the messy internal politics of Palestine and Israel. Read Jeff's work, and you know he has breathed in the space of his subjects. 

Writes JG:

The more complicated answer was provided by Marc Ambinder, who analyzed my personal situation correctly: Gaza has overdetermined me into paralysis. His point: I actually feel too close to this problem, a problem that symbolizes all problems. It's true: I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal; I've seen many people killed in Gaza; I've served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I've been kidnapped in Gaza; I've reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn't kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they'll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. Or, more to the point, might be murdered. I'm not a J Street moral-equivalence sort of guy. Yes, Israel makes constant mistakes, which I note rather frequently, but this conflict reminds me once again that Israel is up against an implacable force, namely, an interpretation of Islam that disallows the idea of Jewish national equality.
 
My paralysis isn't an analytical paralysis. It's the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there's no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.