Shany Mor
@ShMMor · Public intellectuals, authors & commentators
Shany Mor is a Reichman University lecturer and former NSC official whose essays dissect anti-Israel thought.
On the other hand the "hope" (or "optimism") hypothesis has solid grounding in both public statements and recovered documents from Gaza. And it had, like previous catastrophic Palestinian miscalculations in 47, 67, and 2000, a substantial international intellectual tailwind too.
There is no real evidence to back up either hypothesis, but plenty of obvious reasons why they make "sense" to many Israeli and most Western conceptions of Hamas' self-interest and strategy.
Just to be clear: "Despair" = the blockade, together with settlement expansion & impending Saudi peace deal left no choice but a desperate act to shatter the status quo "Trap" = a clever plan to lure Israel into a high casualty invasion that would turn the world against it
And while you might be wrong about what motivates suicide bombers & Nukhba fighters, and you might be wrong about what motivates the theological passions the LRB-Guardian crowd in their transparent antisemitism, that superiority never feels false—if anything, it's reassuring.
But time and again over three decades, the exact opposite happened. And no negative feedback ever caused this group of intellectuals to reconsider, because the whole pose was of moral superiority to Israeli Jews and, more subtly, all those grubby US/UK Jews right here.
Each new baseline became the new goal of what would break the fevered hatred of Israel in the western left (recast as "criticism"), and the implicit promise of where that criticism would turn to support and empathy if the other side still resorted to violence.
Every claimed Israeli action or offer that was supposed to moderate the other side and reduce violence (PLO recognition, autonomy, statehood, division of Jerusalem, unilateral withdrawal) failed to produce the expected results, so a new baseline was invented.
Because the entire tradition is focused on the moral fallenness of the Jews and their state and has not on the two parties it desperately wants to impress and cannot understand: the Palestinians in their rejection of Israel and the western left and its obsessive hatred of it.
An implausible sequence of events was edited in Haaretz, because in our shtetl there are those who want to believe that Bibi, and not Hamas, wanted the hostages held captive. And in that same shtetl there were also those who saw the desperate families of the hostages as objects of hatred and shame. It doesn't negate the solidarity that existed. But it still testifies to a sick society.
Translated from Hebrew5) If the presence of any Israeli citizen living east of the Green Line which briefly divided the city (1948-67) is normatively forbidden ("settlement"), shouldn't that at a minimum mean that the part west of the line can be recognized as sovereign Israeli territory?
4) If the entire discussion is merely about applying a general norm to Israel, why is it not applied to Moroccan settlers in Western Sahara, Turks in Northern Cyprus, or (until the 2023 exodus) Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh?
3) Is the demand for Israel to revoke its citizenship law and grant automatic residency to Palestinians who marry Israeli Arabs a violation of the same international law prohibiting transfer into or out of an occupied territory? Why or why not?
1) Are Israeli Arabs who buy apartments in the West Bank or move there to be with spouses considered settlers? Are they war criminals? Are authorities who don't stop them effecting a "population transfer"? Why or why not?
Some questions about what is often presented as a settled legal norm, and not heaven forbid an invented rule that applies to Jews and the Jewish state. https://t.co/03oJgtIF33
I wrote about the Gaza constitution back in 2024. Lots of bad elements (including pro-settlement Right in Israel) saw in it a net positive. It also had a certain inertia in its favor. But it is mostly a creature of a unique international moral investment. https://t.co/A90myNzOy1 https://t.co/85DYMDnSLo
A good explanation of what I have elsewhere called the "Gaza Constitution." No mystery regarding Hamas' motivations here, both the cynical self-serving ones and the ideological-theological ones. But what were the motivations of the various aid agencies, IO's, NGO's etc.?
Well said. I would add that if we examine why violence did not break out between Jews and Arabs immediately after 7.10 (as happened two years earlier), we will find that the courageous step by Mansour Abbas (and by Bennett and Lapid) to join the coalition was what proved that things could be different and that there was something to lose.
Translated from Hebrew