Fog of Complexity: A Critique of
"Between Hope and History:
An Integral View of Israel-Palestine"
A video podcast produced by Corey deVos and Mark Fischler
Integral Life, November 18, 2024
Commentary by Charles Marxer
[00:00:00] Corey deVos: All right, here we go. Mark Fischler. Good to see you. My friend
[00:00:04] Mark Fischler: Hey brother. I wish it was under other circumstance, like my Halloween party this weekend that my wife is throwing.
[00:00:16] Corey deVos: Yeah, I was, I was just about to say, I wish I could say I was looking forward to this conversation we’re about to have, but this is one of those conversations that is very much not fun to have, fairly uncomfortable to have. And you know, that said, I’m very, very fortunate to have access to your perspective as we sort of explore this issue.
And that issue today, of course, is gonna be the escalating conflict in Israel and Palestine. And more than anything, Mark, I really wanted to have an opportunity to check in with you, because I know you’ve been tracking this situation very, very closely.
And, you know, we were just talking pre-show about one of the reasons why these conversations are so difficult is because we’re sort of out of our depth here. And I don’t think that’s speaking just to us. I think that that speaks to virtually, if not everybody who is looking in on the situation. It is a situation that is just so exceptionally complex, politically, morally, ethically, spiritually and so forth ,that, um, well, it’s the blind man and the elephant problem. We have so many different perspectives out there, so many different people who are touching different parts of the elephant, and very, very, very few people, if any at all, who are actually capable of seeing the elephant. And, you know, in this case, again, I’m really grateful to be able to have you to talk to and to maybe sort through some of this just heartbreaking complexity that we’re seeing in the region right now. Your introduction suggests a new catchphrase: the fog of complexity. Despite the disclaimer, you and Mark proceed to create an analysis of the Israel/Gaza crisis that includes lots of truth claims and value judgments that, sadly and embarrassingly, do little to tease clarity out of the fog. The conversation has an ill-prepared, off-the-cuff feel to it that gets some things right, for sure, but leaves out important facts, distorts others, and misses the significance of some of the most important ones. As for those “very...very few people, if any at all, who are actually capable of seeing the elephant,” our presenters seem to have never heard of any of them, authorities like Walid Khalidi, Mustafa Barghouti, Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, Norman Finkelstein, Jeffrey Sachs, and many other scholars and journalists who do have a comprehensive grasp of this 75-year old unfolding catastrophe.
That said, you know, it’s difficult I think being in an integral chair looking onto this, because it’s one of those situations, Mark, where we see, again, so much complexity, and there’s a part of us intuitively that says, you know, really only an integral, like, fully mature teal to turquoise perspective is gonna be able to sort through all of this and find a more peaceful path forward that, generates less suffering in the world. And yet, as integralists, I don’t think we’ve seen anything like that kind of solution emerge. So we’re kind of in that uncomfortable position where it’s like we need an integral solution here, but I don’t think any of us knows what it actually is. But at the very least, you know, maybe there’s an integral heart that we can bring to this in the meantime. Sure, let’s bring our Integral heart into our deliberations, but no solution to the problem will emerge there. As I have explained on the Community forum there is no such thing as an Integral solution to a political problem and therefore no Integral solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. Which may partly explain your frustration with this issue and your failure to discover an Integral solution.
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[00:05:08] Mark Fischler: So it, you know, I was texting on Instagram with one of my cousins who was, you know, on October 7th and the bombs were going off and you couldn’t go to a shelter. you didn’t have one of those locked rooms, and they were just sitting on their stairs, and it wasn’t, you know, they weren’t trying to invoke sympathy, they were just giving me a pragmatic picture of their reality, living 15 minutes outside of Tel Aviv.
So I’m excited to talk about this with you, and explore this spectrum of consciousness, this epic tragedy of humanity, and the long history of tragedy for our brother, Palestinian citizens and our brother Israeli citizens. So let’s try to, you know, sensitively, with awareness… And also, you know, I think everyone listening should know we aren’t experts, I don’t have a degree in, you know, this conflict by any stretch of the imagination. you know, we’re, we’re integralists really first here, looking at this. So, uh, please forgive us if we get any of the exact facts wrong. But we’re attempting to kind of bring an integral picture to the situation, where I do believe some answers may emerge, in terms of where things may need to go. So let’s try to lay out the contours of the map here, of the situation, and see where we go, brother.
[00:06:53] Corey deVos: Yeah, no, that’s great. Thank you for that. And you know, maybe one of the places we’ll start, Mark, is I’ll ask you to, you know, sort of give a short synopsis of the events that we’ve seen over the last few weeks. And you know, before we do though, I just wanna mention, I’m so glad that you invoked the stages of development. my buddy Vince Horn, who some people who watch this show are familiar with, he’s the founder of Buddhist Geeks, and he’s been on a few programs in the past. you know, he said something on Twitter a couple days ago that I found really insightful, which is that, you know, this conflict really breaks the pluralist frame in a lot of ways. And what he means by that is, you know,, look for the victim. And you can’t, you can’t draw those kinds of clean lines when it in the pluralist frame, the green altitude frame, one of the things that we tend to do is look for the oppressor comes to this conflict, because the oppressors are also oppressed, and the victims are also…
[00:07:55] Mark Fischler: Also oppressing.
[00:07:56] Corey deVos: …engaging in tremendous violence.
[00:08:00] Mark Fischler: yeah that’s well said. With respect, that is not well said. It is not possible for a victim of oppression to oppress its oppressor; that’s a contradiction. Engaging in sporadic acts of violence, even terrorism, is not the same as oppression, which in the context of international relationships, means prolonged cruel and unjust control by one country or regime, the oppressor, of another country or population, the victim. The line between oppressor and oppressed in the 75 year history of the Israel-Palestine conflict is as “clean” as any you can draw anywhere in the last century. How about South Africa? Pretty clean line there defining what everyone recognized as an apartheid state. The line between Israeli oppression and Palestinian victimhood is just as clear, as the South African government itself has argued before the ICJ.
[00:08:01] Corey deVos: …not only does it break the sort of the green pluralist frame, but I think it breaks all of sort of those frames that we get from basically amber, from orange, from green. And that’s one of the things that, you know, I think pushes us towards integral consciousness, is we do need to take into account the sort of developmental spectrum that exists, not just within ourselves and, you know, that sort of guides our own responses and sometimes reactions to stories like this, but also, you know, the development that we see in the region itself. And you can’t just say "the region" because it’s a tangled web of different regions and different cultures and different beliefs and different sort of, you know, religious interpretations, not just between Judaism and Islam, for example, but within Islam itself. And you know, it really does, it breaks all of these different frames. We can’t easily take an amber frame of like, "oh, there’s good guys on this side who are a hundred percent good, and bad guys in that side who are a hundred percent bad." I mean, I think all of us can agree that Hamas is pretty much the bad guy here, but we also wanna look at the kinds of conditions that generate things like Hamas in the first place. Right? And that’s not easily sort of dismissible as, as you know, good and evil, for example. So it really does break all of these sort of developmental, you know, frames that we use to make sense of reality. Whatever “breaking frames” means, I agree that a rigid good guys/bad guys interpretation of the conflict is unacceptably crude. But then you decide that the black hats can be identified after all: “I think all of us can agree that Hamas is pretty much the bad guy here.” Can all of “us” agree then, by implication, that Israel is “pretty much the good guy here?” Not if you object to state terrorism, and not if you take a serious look “at the kinds of conditions that generate things like Hamas in the first place. Right?” Conditions like a 15-year old apartheid with all of its attendant evils. And also, not if you take an honest look at the grotesquely disproportionate military response to October 7, which by November 18 was already causing outrage across the globe and being condemned as genocide. The bias against Hamas here is obvious, and it’s unworthy of Integral thinkers who are supposed to bring nuance to any analysis and be guided by the axiom “everyone is right.” Here’s a just a bit of context-appropriate nuance: Hamas resistance fighters were entirely justified by the right of self-defense to invade Israel on Oct 7 and to kill any IDF personnel they could find but not to abuse and kill Israeli civilians.
And that gets especially pronounced, I think, Mark, because whenever we face something that is just so incredibly complicated and so incredibly heart wrenching, right, it’s difficult I think to hold that kind of complexity, for any of us to hold that kind of complexity. So what we often tend to do is sort of reconsolidate to prior stages, prior frames from earlier stages that sort of, you know push a sort of simplicity, a more simple narrative, or a more simple sort of sense of meaning that we can extract out of this. So a lot of people I think we’re seeing right now in social media and elsewhere are really sort of reconsolidating to an amber, you know, sort of, "we need to go in there and, you know, get rid of these filthy animals." And, you know, we’re actually starting to see a lot of dehumanizing rhetoric emerging on, on both sides of the conflict, and that’s, that’s precisely the direction we do not want to go.
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[00:11:10] Mark Fischler: So uh, to understand the life conditions that create the level of that invokes barbaric acts is absolutely important. The to understand why, know, Israel is a ethnocentric nation is important, and ultimately why we have to move to deeper stages of human development on all sides that the beautiful Palestinian people and the beautiful Israeli people and their cultures can be celebrated in a web of humanity. So, let’s get into a little bit about some of the facts, and then let’s keep moving through this.
So October 7th, Israel is completely unprepared for Hamas and their invasion from Gaza, essentially, and you murder and kill 1400, [revised to 1200 or so] uh, Israelis, mostly civilians, women and children murdered on the streets, at kibbutzes, on farms, at a music festival. Uh, 200 were taken kidnapped, you know, it was truly barbarism. you know, a son was calling his parents, talking about how he killed 10 Israelis, and you’re crying and celebrating and praying for his safety. Another Hamas person, you know, murdered, mowed down a grandmother, used her phone and, uploaded the video of her murder onto Facebook so that her grandchildren were the first to see that. Just true barbarism being played out. We now know that some (perhaps many) of the stories the Israeli government told about October 7 are lies, but I grant that some of the actions committed by the Palestinian invaders were atrocities, even “barbarism,” if you prefer. But as we now witness on a daily basis, there is plenty of barbarism still happening on a colossal scale, and it is almost 100% committed by IDF forces in Gaza and by Zionist settlers in the West Bank. Hostage taking? Since Oct 7 Israel has captured thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, subjected them to torture and degrading treatment, and detained them without due process. Israel is not to be outdone in the barbarism sweepstakes.
Now you get Israeli retaliation from a, you know, a very amber-led government of Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahu has been in leadership off and on for over 20 years, I 19 he’s been Prime Minister. Airstrikes have already killed, you know, Hamas said at least 1200 children, reports that I just saw said that over 7131 are already dead. Humanitarian aid trying to be delivered, but some being blocked into Gaza. We’re looking at an urban warfare, with 700,000 people packed in 20 square miles into Gaza’s largest city, and Israel is about to invade. you know, hospitals have been blow you know, this has all the makings to get uglier and uglier. A prediction sadly borne out with at least 33,000 killed as of April 5.
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[00:15:09] Mark Fischler: And there’s a history, right, that goes along with this. Why are we here, why are we in this situation that we’re in, that I think we should at least touch on a little bit, do a little history so that folks can at least understand. And then look at, you know, the situation today and where things maybe have to go. So maybe let me trace a little bit on that.
[00:15:37] Corey deVos: no, I think that’s great. Well, first off, I just wanna thank you for sort of giving that, that overview of recent events, you know, and, and one of the difficult things here that, one of the things I really want to impress upon our audience right now, is just how critical humility is right here, and being comfortable with uncertainty. Because I think one of the things that we’re seeing, and this is particularly true of warfare in the social media age, is that the cloud of war, the fog of war is so dense, and, you know, can be really, really difficult to see through, to the point where it’s hard for people to agree on what the facts are. And I think you did a really great job of sort of laying out the objective facts as we know them today. And, we need some humility here. Because, you know, for example, how trustworthy is Hamas when it comes to reporting its own casualties, right? The casualty figures from Gaza are reported by the Gaza Health Authority, not by Hamas – a source whose reports of deaths in Gaza have been trusted for many years, and no one as far as I know, is challenging their numbers today. As above, the bias here against Hamas is disturbing. How trustworthy is Israel when it comes to reporting its actions in Gaza? (It’s a rhetorical question.) We sort of need objective sort of neutral, you know, observers in order to ascertain, in order to answer questions like that. And unfortunately we don’t have that in place. It’s too dangerous for that kind of, you know, neutral perspective to be able to, you know, give us a more sort of sober perspective on what’s actually happening in the region. All of which is just to say that, you know, as we are sort of "doing our own research" to kind of figure out what the facts are, what the motivations are cetera, let’s hold it all, you know, sort of with the gravity and the lightness that is required here. the gravity is, I think, you know, sort of self-evident. I mean, we’re talking about just an absolutely massive loss of life, we’re talking about a tremendous amount of suffering being created today, every single day in the region. And yet the lightness comes from just sort of that recognition that, again, none of us have access to all of the facts here. All we have are sort of, you know, interpretations of interpretations of interpretations. Boilerplate postmodernism–true as far as it goes, which is not very far, as Ken Wilber and other critics have pointed out. Of course, none of us have all the facts, but we do have some of them, a lot in fact, many easily learned from the many in-person and online interviews with Palestinians and videos shot on the ground in Gaza, available from the Internet and from those journalists that can somehow evade the Israeli assassination program. A perfect example being the hospital bombing. you know, at first it was like, oh, Israel just intentionally, you know, bombed this hospital full of kids. And then it, you know, later came out that, no, that was either, you you know, that was most likely an unintentional sort of, you know misfire of a missile…. By Hamas –that was the Israeli claim, later proven to be false, just one of a constant stream of lies pushed by the Israeli spin machine and repeated almost word for word by the western media. It’s simply not true that no reliable reports on casualties and other important facts about this war exist. You have to make an effort to find independent sources you can trust, but that’s what real “research” requires. Israel bombed that hospital and is still attacking it. Israel has bombed all the hospitals. Those are facts. you don’t have to look beyond the mainstream media to get reports of the attacks (click here for a sample listing). And of course now someone’s like, well, how, you know, how intentional was it really? 100% intentional by the Israeli military. The photographic evidence is simply damning. you know, so again, I just want to hold ourselves to the idea that we need to question our own certainty when it comes to this.
And in fact, if we feel a perspective or sort of a response to any of this that feels high certainty, I would, you know, invite ourselves to sort of hold that and take a careful look at that and really try to, um, you know, figure out how much certainty is actually appropriate considering how much fog there is obscuring our view of, the actual events as you are on the ground.
[00:18:38] Mark Fischler: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I think about, you know, Ken’s ability to talk about context, it’s turtles all the way down, right? you know, like there’s context within context, within context. And as we said at the beginning of the show, we don’t have all the facts. And, this is, we really have to be, you know, as Pema Chodron’s great book I think is called Being Comfortable with Uncertainty. And as integralists, it’s absolutely necessary that we hold that, and we hold the space for, you know, truth to emerge, and to be comfortable with that truth as it emerges. So yeah, let’s let’s hold that. So thank you for your wisdom and insight as we kind of continue to kind of look at this and bring our insights to it.
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[00:19:30] Corey deVos: Y
So yeah, why don’t you take us into this and give us a little bit more, you know, sort of historic context. On multiple levels of scale, right? Because we can look at the last say 30 years, the last 50 years, the last a hundred years, the last 5,000 years.
[00:20:44] Mark Fischler: Yeah, yeah. And I’m gonna, I mean, that video that you sent was mind blowing about how the Arab nations were kind of created after the Ottoman- Turk takedown, and you can see the catastrophe of what the Brits and the French did and their map making and the division of territory. But I’m gonna try to just keep it close right now to the Israel, Israelis and Palestinians and talk about that context, as best I can. So if we trace back, right? you go, "what is Israel?" Right? It’s an ethnocentric nation, right? It’s like it was based on biblical prophecy, right? And so, you know, this is classic Amber expression that, you know, that the Jews were expected to return to the land of Israel. And that took 19 centuries, you know, for this biblical prophecy to hold. And we understand, you know, from a stage perspective that this is pre-modern notions. So this this idea of like Zionism, you know, it was like in the 1880s there was the rise of antisemitism, but I mean, go back even further, like the Diaspora of Jews, the excommunication, the expelling of Jews in Spain, and the massacres in like 1391 where half the Jews uh, became Catholic just to survive, and then like had to go elsewhere. And we have the Holocaust, and, you know, so many countries play a role, including the United States that turned boats back, as I watched when I went to the Holocaust Museum Summer in Washington DC.
So you get this kind of idea that, you know, there’s gonna be this Jewish state and that the Jewish people aren’t gonna get beaten anymore, and you’re gonna kind of maybe develop secular notions. And I think this guy named Theodore Herzl, who was an Austrian journalist, came up with Zionism. And so, you know, it didn’t really take off. But then the Ottoman-Turk takedown happens, that territory is called Palestine, and that’s a name you gave it. And the beautiful Palestinian people are living, you know, in this place, and some Jews have come back, have occupied some of it, or lived in part of it. But this guy from England kind of comes up with this declaration that Britain would be, after World War I, you’d be committed to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish state. And that doesn’t go over well with the Arab nations, and you kind of back off on that as you try to like, you know, hold power, realizing that you need to play a role in the Middle East for oil. And so you, you know, don’t know really where to go.
But after World War II, after 6 million Jews, and mind you, Jews were not the only population, that were murdered. 5 million others were murdered, you know, for extermination purposes uh, by the Nazis. And so, you know, Britain went to the United Nations and said, you know, you should have a Jewish state, united Nations agrees, you split Palestine, giving again, you know, I could see being pissed as Palestinians. I believe you gave 62% of that land to this new nation-state of Israel. And the Palestinians and the Arab nations weren’t having it. And they went to immediate war, taking on Israel. And somehow Israel survived, and they declared themselves independent in 1948. And again, war happened, and the Jews took more land, you know, after this next war. And during that, this next time, they kicked out 750,000 Palestinians, is called Al-Nakba, which is the catastrophe of the Palestinian people that they still carry in their souls, as they should, to this day.
Israel in ’67 launches a preemptive war to take more territory, because you were fearful of Jordan and Egypt and Syria, you know, coming back and taking more. So they seize the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Golden Heights, and West Bank, and East Jerusalem. And so that happens. So they take more territory, and you know, in ’64, the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat emerges. There’s various peace tries after that. There’s a ’73 Yom Kippur war where you try to take back the territory that you lost in ’67, the Arab nations.
And then we start to see a little movement where, you know, because at this point nobody’s acknowledging that Israel should be a state, that Jewish people deserve anything, uh, at least amongst this Arab world. But then you got Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and Menachem Begin of Israel, and you signed the first peace agreement. Jimmy Carter oversaw that. This was like, I remember, just a very momentous moment. And so Israel gives back land for the recognition of just being a people or having a nation. And what happens, Sadat, of course is murdered, you know? And uh, by his own people. And we see this, you know, where in ’93 you have the Oslo Accords with Yitchak Rabin, who was a warrior of the Jewish people, and Arafat shaking hands, aimed at, you know, giving the Palestinian people the right to self-determination. Neither side loved it, which probably from an integral perspective means it was probably good deal in some way. A good deal for whom? Look at the Accords and you will see that it did not promise the Palestinians a state. (Wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords#Criticism) That’s why the PLO rejected it.
[00:27:19] Corey deVos: If no one’s happy, you know it’s integral.
[00:27:22] Mark Fischler: Yeah, right? But the right of Israel led by Ariel Sharon, and a young Benjamin Netanyahu, totally say that this is a terrible thing, that Ariel Sharon is a Nazi, and Yitchak Rabin is murdered by, you know, right wing Jewish people, and Sharon’s wife, you know, for years maintained that their depiction of him in that way led to his murder. Clinton tried in 2000 to bring them together again, and you were so close. I just watched a documentary about that. But Hamas is and they don’t want peace. I mean, part of the Hamas decree is the ruination of Jewish people, and it’s written, literally written, uh, into them. This was once true but no longer. Read the new Hamas charter they published in 2017. You will see they are no longer calling for the eradication of the Jewish people. Their quarrel is with the “Zionist project.” And so you’ve got suicide bombs going off, (??) Netanyahu comes in, and again, you almost get it to work. But again, both sides, you’re seeing right wing Jews that aren’t for it, trying to create more settlements, take up more land of the Palestinians who have to scrounge into smaller and smaller spaces to actually live in existence. And it’s just awful. Just awful? Yes, I guess you could say that, but it hardly captures the significance of the facts you mention. The Israeli settler-colonial project is a violation of international laws prohibiting forced displacement of populations, ethnic cleansing, abuse of captives, murder, torture, rape, and theft of land and property.
And so finally it blows up. It doesn’t happen. 2006 in Gaza, Hamas beats Fatah in the election. And you still control the territory, there hasn’t been an election since. But you know, it’s been constant barbarism really from Hamas on the Jewish people. And Netanyahu, who is back in power, we’ll talk more about him in a bit, because I want to go to the Palestinian suffering next. But Netanyahu has always maintained, you know, he’ll never accept, at least now at this point, he’ll never accept a two-state solution. “Constant barbarism from Hamas?” Really? Constant stream of October 7 attacks – weekly, monthly? -- by Hamas over the last 17 years? Perhaps you refer to the sporadic random shelling of southern Israeli territory with dumb bombs, most of which are neutralized by Israel’s “Iron Dome.” Is that barbarism? Looks like semantic overkill to me. How about legitimate self-defense? Ok, let us not argue. Let’s compare Hamas’s one-day invasion with Israel’s vengeful response, now understood by almost the entire world as genocide, implemented by the most barbaric war crimes, seven months running now with no end in sight. I needn’t belabor this point. We see it every day in mainstream and independent news reports.
And so, you know, that’s how we created this Jewish nation, this ethnocentric-based, although it’s a democracy of sorts, and we can certainly criticize it and look at the apartheid aspects of it. But why it became a nation, how it became a nation, and why they chose to keep taking more and more territory, right or wrong, why they felt it was necessary to do that. So I will stop there, if you have any comments or questions as I gave my very amateur take on this.
[00:30:10] Corey deVos: No, that was a fantastic overview, Mark. Absolutely fantastic. No, it wasn’t fantastic. Mark was right, it was amateurish and, frankly, embarrassing. Rambling, sketchy, biased, often inaccurate, rhetorically clumsy. Good for him for doing it—many commentators don’t bother – but, instead of just winging it, he should have prepared a careful set of notes giving the chronology that he could read for the viewers. And you know, we keep mentioning that, you know, Israel is largely an ethnocentric nation. I mean, I think, to be fair, we would probably, you know, classify, if we had to make these kind of generalities, we would probably say that Israel is a, you know, Amber-to-Orange nation-state. And Palestine is probably red-to-amber. This is a shocking misuse of the Integral developmental spectrum. (1) It’s the kind of statement that critics of Integral use to attack the idea of healthy hierarchies. We say the developmental spectrum does not imply that higher stages are somehow ‘better’ than lower stages. And yet that’s exactly the suggestion we see in this comparison of Israel and Palestine. You may deny this, but the inference is hard to avoid. Palestine, a “red-to-amber” entity that practices terrorism and barbarism is obviously inferior to Israel, an “Amber-to-Orange nation-state,” which is merely “ethnocentric” (not, of course, what it actually is: a colonizing, occupying, brutal, oppressive, genocidal ethnocentric nation-state), clearly superior to the tribal warrior stage of Palestine.
(2) How did you arrive at these stage designations? By a careful survey of academic literature on the subject to determine the average center of gravity for the whole population of Gaza or even for Hamas? I doubt it. Did you take into consideration the fact that Palestinians, before Israel destroyed them all, had a modern K-12 education system, 14 universities, an open university for distance learning, 18 university colleges, and 20 community colleges that has produced numerous scholars working in academic institutions all over the world? That the rate of adult literacy is greater than 97%? That Gaza also had 60 hospitals and 750 primary healthcare centers across Palestine, including 603 clinics and health centers in the West Bank and 147 centers in the Gaza Strip? Do you think these facts might qualify Palestine for elevation to at least an Amber-to-Orange rating? This kind of careless use of the color stages undermines the credibility of the Integral model and again exposes the pro-Israeli bias in your conversation. And there’s a particular dynamic that emerges from that sort of, you know, the developmental differences that we see in those two regions. And, you know, this actually reminds me of a talk that I just published with Dr. Keith Witt just a few weeks ago, talking about, you know, with greater depth of consciousness, with greater developmental maturity comes, unavoidably, Greater responsibility.
If you are in conflict and you are the one who possesses the, you know, the deeper altitude, the more sophisticated stages, you have more responsibility in that conflict to move beyond that conflict, to find a way beyond that conflict. you know, which is maybe a little bit asymmetric when it comes to, you know, it’s one of many asymmetries that we see, I think, in this particular conflict. you know, the other one being that Palestine, you’re about to move, you know, give us more of the Palestinian perspective here, we need to remember that something like, what is it, 47% of Palestinians are under the age of 18, right?
[00:31:40] Mark Fischler: Yeah.
[00:31:41] Corey deVos: Hamas was voted in by Palestine in what, 2006? I think it was 2006. Which means many, a great, many of the people who, you know, voted Hamas in are no longer alive. 50% of the people that live in, you know, live in Palestine right now, were not alive when Hamas was put into a position of power. It’s frustrating that you often cite certain facts accurately but leave out other important facts. The election (free and fair according to international observers) that brought Hamas into power was brokered by the US and Israel but ignored and delegitemized by them when the outcome was not to their liking. Then Netanyahu cynically arranged through Qatar for financial support to Hamas so that the rift between that organization and the Palestine Authority would be permanent. Hamas used some of that money to buy weapons that were then used against Israel on October 7. A classic case of blowback.
[00:32:06] Mark Fischler: Yeah. And, and the fact that they haven’t had any elections since, right, doesn’t reflect necessarily the representation of the people. And the way that Israel became more of a democratic, or, you know, the Amber to Orange expression is certainly, you know, countries uh, providing financial support, infrastructure support, technological support, really kind of accelerated their progress. Because, you know, their immediate situation is they were farmers, you know, and developing an army that barely, barely beat back, and really for, again, contextual reasons that are beyond my knowledge base, but that, you know, they got lucky, for them to even survive when they did. But for them to grow, they got a lot of support. Which our brothers and sisters in Palestine, or in the Palestinian lands that are now, did not, they have not gotten the same, historically. We can talk about how Hamas has blown a lot of that money, that’s a different issue. But let me get into maybe some of that Palestinian suffering, the palestinian fight.
So, you know, like I said, in 1948, approximately 750,000 indigenous Palestinians were expelled after this war, where you took more land and just expelled. The passive voice is often used, as here, to obscure uncomfortable truths. The Nakba didn’t just happen. It was Zionist colonizers who expelled the Palestinians. Jewish terrorists (Irgun, Haganah, et al.) drove the Palestinians out of their homeland and stole their lands and property, committing many war crimes in the process. And you call that, like I said, Al-Nakba. which is the catastrophe of the Palestinian people, which they hold in their hearts. And a 150,000 stayed, but were displaced. As part of the Jewish majority created by that expulsion uh, of 1948, they’ve passed a series of laws over the years, to limit the growth of the Palestinian people. And mind you, not all Israelis support this. In fact, you know, they have elected more progressive prime ministers that want to create two nation states. you know, so it’s a real dichotomous situation, but nevertheless, these laws have gotten passed.
Um, So according to the Institute of Middle East Understanding, today there are more than 60 laws that discriminate against the Palestinian citizens, directly or indirectly. I’m not gonna go into them all, but basically based on their ethnicity, impacting every part of their lives, including housing, employment, education, healthcare, who you can marry. In 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the Jewish Nation State law as one of the nation’s basic laws, and states that the development of the Jewish settlements, segregated housing for Jews as a national value, that we value this and you can’t mess with this. And you will encourage it, all at the expense of the Palestinian people. Israelis basic laws, which we’ll talk about later, where you don’t have a constitution so you have these basic laws that are like kind of the bottom line that you can base other laws off of. But their basic law also bars political candidates and parties from advocating for a secular democracy in which all citizens are fully equal regardless of their religion or ethnicity. you can’t try to amend that and take away that Jewish privilege. So, you know, you’re dealing with that. And what “that” is, is an oxymoron: Jewish democracy. Um, In 2018, legislation calling for Israel to become a state based on full equality for all citizens, introduced by Palestinian citizens, was banned at the committee level. So, you know, since the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, just a little bit more, Israel’s government has established more than 900 localities for Jewish Israelis. Almost none, some, but almost none for Palestinians. You have pretty accurately summarized the legislation that created and maintains the apartheid State of Israel
So, you know, the history of when we see our progressive green brothers and sisters talking about the marginalization of the Palestinian people, and it’s complex. There are, you know, situations where you’ve gotten to thrive. But it’s limited. It’s hard. It’s a hard road. It’s a harder road for a Palestinian in Israel than it is for an And so, you know, we’ve gotta see how that kind of marginalization can lead to ethnocentric hatred of the other, and the willingness to be brutal to the other when you’re kind of dealing with this kind of constant kind of dripping of not letting you be a full citizen. And so it certainly doesn’t excuse barbarism, Uh, it certainly doesn’t excuse any of it at all. But we are here to understand. Well then, let us understand. It bears repeating: yes, Hamas committed atrocities on October 7, but the barbarism practiced by the Israelis since then exceeds the carnage of that day by a factor of 26 in terms of deaths alone. Now for the particulars: the IDF practices systematic murder of unarmed Palestinians, journalists, and medical and aid workers; torture; humiliating treatment of prisoners; bombing Gaza cities into rubble; destroying vital infrastructure, agriculture, and Palestinian cultural institutions; blocking aid; using starvation as a weapon of war; rape; forced displacement (ethnic cleansing); and plausibly genocide. Barbarism on an industrial scale. No excuse.
[00:37:42] Corey deVos: Exactly it. It doesn’t excuse it, but it helps us understand the violence. That’s a really important point I think. Not sure why it’s important, since your “understanding” does nothing to soften your unqualified condemnation of the Hamas attack and your pro-Israel bias.
[00:37:49] Mark Fischler: Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we’ve got that juxtaposition and you know, so we’ve got this historical juxtaposition of hatred of the Jewish people and hatred of the Palestinian people by Israelis (“human animals”), and we can see that I’ve mentioned just a few, but there are hundreds of more examples. And then we’ve got this situation here, and we’re only talking about, we’re not talking about Arab discrimination around the world, we’re just talking about the Palestinian plight and context to how this Jewish nation state started in their context with each other, and how it’s rubbing up against and creating this terrible conflict of pain and suffering.
[00:38:33] Corey deVos: Beautifully and Heartbreakingly said my friend.
[00:38:36] Mark Fischler: So moving with that, it’s interesting, right? you know, as we move to like the current situation and where this might go, and maybe what’s needed, if you think about a little bit, I was thinking about, I was reading The Economist about the Arab response to this war that has been started. And you know, as you say that, you know, it’s safe to say that of the 450 million Arab humans across 12 nations, that you’re gonna side with the Palestinians, you know, in this situation. But things are different. Things aren’t what they were in the 1970s, or even with the 1978, I think it was ’78 where Egypt and Israel created peace. Since 2020, four of Arab states, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have established relations with the Jewish people, with Israel. On hold now, thanks to Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine, too much apparently even for the cynical autocrats of the Middle East, fearful of the outrage of their own populations.
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So, you know, me the emerging answers are obviously in modern and postmodern Israel being a secure nation in that way, which honors… because if you’re at that stage, you’re gonna honor from what we said earlier, the cosmopolitan makeup of humanity. you’re gonna honor all sentient beings, you’re gonna honor all human beings, and see, like Abraham recognized so long ago, that these are your brothers and sisters. And like you said, Israel, because you are at the deeper stage of center of gravity, you bear a greater responsibility to help that emerge, and take on that to support their Palestinian brothers and sisters as you emerge to understand that reality. Not that some don’t, many do. But, you know, enough of a center of gravity so that I. you can pull back on the barbaric behaviors and the truly ethnocentric behaviors that say Israelis have no right to exist, and we only when they are all gone. you know, Nazi stuff. Nazi stuff? By now you may have noticed that the signature crime perpetrated by the Nazis-- a genocide against the Jews-- is now ironically being inflicted by Jews on the Palestinians. So whatever center of gravity Nazi Germany occupied is now the cosmic address also of the Jewish State of Israel.
[00:50:58] Corey deVos: Yeah, yeah. Well said brother. you know, it reminds me again of another one of Ken’s truisms, which is, you know, the goal is always to allow every stage to be itself and to govern from the highest stage available. Now, I think one of the issues that you’re outlining here is that when it comes to what is the highest stage available, that’s a little bit shaky in a nation like Israel, especially when we’re starting to see these kind of, you know, these regressive forces. And it’s not just Israel, right? We’re seeing this sort of pattern of regression back to amber all across the world, really. We’re seeing it just about everywhere, to the point where, you know, I have to wonder whether this is one of the inevitable consequences of the information age, the social media age as it exists today, right? We suddenly have full access to a massive number of perspectives that are other to us, and we don’t have an accompanying expansion of our circle of care to where we can extend compassion and empathy to all those new perspectives that are suddenly, you know, flooding into our information feeds. And when we have that kind of mismatch, we now are able to make each other "other", all across the globe.
Right. And this is I think one of the challenging things that we see in the region is, as we see a society, you know, at least in the short term, regressing back to an Amber sense of shared identity, it makes those higher, you know, modern to postmodern to hopefully integral solutions that much harder to find.
Which makes me wonder, Mark, like what is a realistic path forward here? I mean, will Israel and Palestine ever be able to manage this conflict themselves? Uh, part of me thinks probably not, it’s probably gonna require some superseding, you know, governance structure to intervene and to try to generate more peaceful solutions between them. I just don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know how that could possibly emerge. you know, it’s probably not gonna come from the UN, we’re probably not gonna see a EU European Union like emergence in the Middle East, for example. So I don’t know how that’s gonna come about. I don’t think American intervention is gonna do the trick, especially when we’re dealing with our own sort of regressive tendencies in our own society. So it’s not clear to me what the path forward is here, but I continue to have some kind of hope that, you know, I guess it’s just a basic sort of faith in emergence, knowing that there’s a very good chance things are gonna get worse before they get better. but damnit they’ve gotta get better.
We can hope, but the signs and portents are far worse seven months into this war than they were in November when you posted your discussion. A pessimist like me sees no sign that the Israeli government, with the full support of the Biden administration, will not achieve their stated goal of making Gaza unlivable and driving the remnants of the starving Palestinians into Egypt.
Conclusion
The inaccuracies and omissions in your conversation would not by themselves have prompted this critical response. What I find disturbing is the failure of two Integral luminaries, whom I respect, to apply the most basic principle of Integral thinking to your discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict: “Everyone is right.” The corollary of this dictum is that no one can be 100% wrong about a serious issue like this, and that we have a responsibility to look for the partial truths of all significant perspectives. Your bias against Hamas is so strong that it has blinded you to any possible justification for the attack of October 7. A nuanced judgment, of course, would not endorse everything Hamas fighters did on that day, but it would give serious moral consideration to Palestinians’ right of self-defense, Hamas’s use of proportionate violence, and even the taking of hostages. Incumbent on Integral thinkers also, as on every reasonable person, is to vigorously condemn the Israeli war on Palestinian civilians along with US complicity, and to demand an immediate permanent ceasefire.
Perhaps in November, feelings of shock and outrage were still running too high for a balanced, objective response to October 7. Now, after seven months of bloodbath, the fog of war can no longer hide the plain objective truth that Israel is in the process of destroying the Palestinian people. I hope in the near future you will revisit the issue and provide your followers with a proper Integral analysis.
