Recommended Reading on War, Bodies, and Israel-Palestine
There is no substitute for war, or, how massively can one out-injure the other side?
Many years ago I read Elaine Scarry’s important book, The Body in Pain, when I was suffering from a severe disc herniation of my L5-S1 vertebrae in my lower back; I could not sit without my right leg going numb, but neither could I stand comfortably, I was unable to sleep for more than three hours at a time, and only on my stomach. I was fighting with my health insurance to get approval in time to have much-needed surgery, and anyone who has experienced chronic pain knows the exhaustion and hopelessness of existing inside of a body in unrelenting pain. It’s all that exists.
But here is the thing about this masterpiece - it’s not about the body as a singular container, as you or I. It’s about the social, political, geographical, physical, linguistic, et al. dynamics and contributors to power that impact the body and all forms of the body as a word that gives form to some greater abstraction. Scarry presents the “Structure of Torture” and the “Structure of War,” and the “Structure of Belief and its Modulation into Material Making” (…religion!). I’m simplifying, clearly. What stood out to me, so strongly, and one important point in this incredibly tragic time, is her exploration into whether or not there can be a substitution for war:
What is most crucial to see is that so far nothing differentiates war from any other form of contest. Injuring has made it possible to arrive at a winner and a loser; but the work of arriving at a winner and a loser is an achievement common to every act and attribute on which a contest has ever been based as even, for example, the activity of roping calves makes it possible to arrive at a winner and loser in a calf-roping contest, or as the designing of a spectactular building makes it possible to differentiate a winner and a loser in an architectural competition, or as the number of baskets makes is possible to designate a winner and a loser in a basketball game. If, then, the only function of going to war is to provide the means for determining a winner and a loser, that work could be as easily accomplished by roping calves, imagining beautiful buildings, or lifting balls and letting them fall through rings in the air.
We must identify a second function accomplished by out-injuring, a function other than determining a winner and a loser, and so answer the question, Is there something that differentiates war from all other contests, is there something that differentiates injuring rom every other act or attribute on which a contest can be based? On of two possibilities is true: either there is nothing or there is something. If there is “nothing,” then another form of contest could perform the function of war just as well and far less painfully: though this would of course necessitate the heartsickening recognition that all previous wars might have had a substitute, so too would it entail the recognition that future wars might have a substitute. If, on the other hand, there is “something,” then in turn one of two things will be true. We may be required to conclude that wars, of the past and of the future, are necessary and must be accepted as performing a work that has and can have no equivalent in any other form of activity. Or, it may instead be the case that being able to identify and articulate that “something” could enable us to locate an equivalent that perhaps only at first appeared not to exist, or that it could enable us (once the “something” is precisely defined and understood) to invent its equivalent if none already exists. (p. 90-91)
My first point of reference is always books - and I immediately reached for this book when I first heard about Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. I also know that I read an inordinate amount - a lot more than many people, or so I’ve been told; and I know I cannot fully express everything myself. Therefore, I always want to pull out paragraphs and sentences from others that I think are truly THAT IMPORTANT - knowing you may not have enough time to read the whole piece that they wrote.
I encourage you to take the time to read these words.
A must-read: The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas by Yascha Mounk. I frequently think about the tessellation of Western lens of (and frequently American) social/political/racial constructs and schemas onto global views, where they are not wholly applicable - the history and power struggles at play are utterly different. “According to many progressives, what determines whether a movement should count as left-wing or right-wing is based on whether it claims to be fighting on behalf of those they believe to be marginalized.” Mounk concludes this piece:
Any humane outlook on the world must recognize that civilians never deserve to suffer due to the group into which they were born or because of actions committed by those who claim to speak on their behalf. I feel as much empathy for the Palestinian children who are dying in bombardments of Gaza as I do for the Jewish children who were killed in Hamas’ attack on Israel. Insinuations of collective responsibility are vile, even when voiced in response to a disgusting terrorist attack. Each civilian death is a tragedy on the same moral order.
While every civilian victim is in equal measure undeserving of their tragic fate, moral philosophers have for centuries recognized a key distinction governing the conduct of war. Military action that is directed against military targets may be legitimate; while some civilian deaths are foreseeable as a consequence of such attacks, soldiers must undertake to minimize them as far as possible. By contrast, military action is always illegitimate when the killing of innocents is the goal, not an unintended side effect.
This set of standards helps to explain how spectacularly Hamas, the organization that started the current war with a long-planned surprise attack that killed over a 1,000 men and women, toddlers and grandmothers, Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, Jews and non-Jews, Israelis and Thais and Americans and Canadians and Germans and Chinese, failed to obey the most basic moral rules. Now, it should also guide our assessment of Israel’s unfolding actions in Gaza.
This is a war Israel did not choose, and it has every right to defend itself. No democracy would tolerate on its borders the presence of a terrorist organization that has just demonstrated its willingness to engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of its civilian population; it would be the height of hypocrisy for people living in the safety of Berlin or Paris, of London or New York, to expect Israelis to do so.
But the military offensive against Hamas is extremely difficult because the terrorist organization has deliberately based so much of its military infrastructure in the midst of civilian settlements; because it is now doing what it can to stop its own people from moving away from military targets; and because Egypt, worried about the potential for Hamas fighters to destabilize the government or even perpetrate terrorist attacks within its own borders, has refused safe passage for most Gazans. All of this explains why it is so hard for Israel to accomplish its legitimate goals without causing numerous civilian casualties. But it does not constitute permission for Israel to adopt the logic of collective punishment by cutting off access to food and drinking water ahead of a full-scale invasion, or absolve the country’s armed forces from doing what they can to minimize the number of civilian casualties. As and when Israel fails to do so, full-throated criticism of its government is fully justified.
The left has the potential to speak powerfully to this moment. To do so, it needs to jettison the ideological jargon that has made so many supposed idealists fall for the ever-present temptation to contrive reasons why the suffering of one side is outrageous while the suffering of the other side is glorious. To retain our moral composure in the ugly days and weeks now on the horizon, we must recover a moral universalism that, even in the darkest hour, reminds us of our shared humanity—and unhesitatingly laments the death of innocents, irrespective of the group to which they belong.
I want to quote this whole opinion piece by Naomi Klein, In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun (Oct. 2023):
For Zionist believers (I’m not one of them), Jew-hatred is the central rationale for why Israel must exist as a nuclear-armed fortress. Within this worldview, antisemitism is cast as a primordial force that cannot be weakened or confronted. The world will always turn away from us in our hour of need, Zionism tells us, just as it did during the Holocaust, which is why force alone is presented as the only conceivable response to any and all threats.
The Israeli state’s current murderous leveling of Gaza is the latest, unspeakably horrific manifestation of this ideology, and there will be more in the coming days. The responsibility for these crimes of collective punishment rests solely with their perpetrators and their financial and military backers abroad. But we all have to figure out how to make it stop.
So how do we confront this violent ideology? For one thing, we can recognize that when Israeli Jews are killed in their homes and it is celebrated by people who claim to be anti-racists and anti-fascists, that is experienced as antisemitism by a great many Jews. And antisemitism (besides being hateful) is the rocket fuel of militant Zionism.
What could lessen its power, drain it of some of that fuel? True solidarity. Humanism that unites people across ethnic and religious lines. Fierce opposition to all forms of identity-based hatred, including antisemitism. An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.
In the London Review of Books, The Compass of Mourning: Judith Butler writes about violence and the condemnation of violence (Oct. 2023)
If we think that moral condemnation must be a clear, punctual act without reference to any context or knowledge, then we inevitably accept the terms in which that condemnation is made, the stage on which the alternatives are orchestrated. In this most recent context, to accept those terms means recapitulating forms of colonial racism which are part of the structural problem to be solved, the abiding injustice to be overcome. Thus, we cannot afford to look away from the history of injustice in the name of moral certitude, for that is to risk committing further injustice, and at some point our certitude will falter on that less than firm ground. Why can’t we condemn morally heinous acts without losing our powers to think, to know and to judge? Surely we can, and must, do both.
The acts of violence we are witnessing in the media are horrible. And in this moment of heightened media attention, the violence that we see is the only violence we know. To repeat: we are right to deplore that violence and to express our horror. I have been sick to my stomach for days. Everyone I know lives in fear of what the Israeli military machine will do next, whether Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric will materialise in the mass killing of Palestinians. I ask myself whether we can mourn, without qualification, for the lives lost in Israel as well as those lost in Gaza without getting bogged down in debates about relativism and equivalence. Perhaps the wider compass of mourning serves a more substantial ideal of equality, one that acknowledges the equal grievability of lives, and gives rise to an outrage that these lives should not have been lost, that the dead deserved more life and equal recognition for their lives.
If you have the time, I encourage you to read the full articles from which I excerpted the above paragraphs. My dear friend @alexewen is a psychiatrist in NYC doing amazing things… including helping to organize in Israel, where she has trained and worked in the medical field. Visit her IG page to learn about ways to support and donate to MADA (Israeli Red Cross) and essential needs products/donations.
If you’re browsing other article recommendations below, I was seriously drawn in by Evy Mages story in The New Yorker The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children, and new reflections on the oft-recommended book ‘The Body Keeps the Score.’
Books: The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
RECOMMENDED READING - Top of Mind - Israel-Hamas
The Deep Roots of the Left’s Deafening Silence on Hamas Yascha Mounk (Oct. 2023)
In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun - Naomi Klein (Oct. 2023)
The Compass of Mourning: Judith Butler writes about violence and the condemnation of violence (Oct. 2023)
Netanyahu Led Us to Catastrophe. He Must Go. - Gershom Gorenberg (Oct. 2023)
NEWS / LONG-FORM JOURNALISM
The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children - Margaret Talbot (Sept. 2023) As a girl in Austria, Evy Mages was confined to a mysterious institution in Innsbruck. Decades later, she learned why.
You Had Me At Meow: On the Hidden Language of Cats - Sarah Brown (Oct. 2023)
THE ABORTION ABSOLUTIST - Elaine Godfrey (May 2023) Warren Hern has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients as ever.
The Life and Death of a Community Fridge - Kim Foster (Oct. 2023) A kid got sick from eating donated ramen that expired in the ’90s. That was just the beginning.
The Unsettling Truth About the ‘Mostly Harmless’ Hiker - Nicholas Thompson (Jan. 2021)
The New Old Dating Trend - Faith Hill (Aug. 2023) Why is matchmaking having a renaissance?
BUSINESS / STARTUPS / INVESTING
Was Sam Bankman-Fried’s bean bag chair a lie too? Two of Bankman-Fried’s MIT roommates make a damning case for the prosecution. - Elizabeth Lopatto (Oct. 2023)
The FTX jury suffers through a code review: Gary Wang supervised the code that gave Alameda special privileges at FTX. But it’s hard to conclude anyone but Sam Bankman-Fried gave the orders. - Elizabeth Lopatto (Oct. 2023)
The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers - Noam Scheiber (Sept. 2023) When Francesca Gino, a rising academic star, was accused of falsifying data — about how to stop dishonesty — it didn’t just torch her career. It inflamed a crisis in behavioral science.
BRAIN / MIND / HEALTH
‘The Body Keeps the Score’ offers uncertain science in the name of self-help. It’s not alone. - Kristen Martin (Aug. 2023) Some best-selling books express great confidence in theories of the brain that are still in their unproven infancy. If you have ever picked ‘The Body Keeps the Score,’ Or have been recommended it, I want to highlight this section from this review:
"And yet books that tout the results of fMRI studies are still being marketed to everyday readers who aren’t up to date on issues of psychological science. These books propose that the findings of fMRI studies provide groundbreaking insight into human emotions and behaviors. These claims play into the motivations of everyone involved in the intersection of neuroscience and self-help, like the scientists who get to promote the real-world applicability of their work outside of the academy (and thus gain notoriety within it) and the publishers who are willing to shell out hefty advances for books that promise to meet readers’ endless appetite to understand why they feel bad — and promise solutions. At best, these books oversimplify and overstate the takeaways of neuroscientific research; at worst, they rehash neuroscientific ideas that are already outmoded…
"The more I learned about how much some of these books overplay what neuroscience can currently tell us about the brain and human behavior, the more I thought that the self-helpification of a relatively young and incredibly complex field of scientific study is not so helpful after all. We keep consulting neuroscience — even when its findings are disproven or overblown — to explain the human condition, and often to validate what we want to believe or what we already know. Tracing all of our messy emotions, reactions and habits to the workings of electrical currents and neurochemicals lets us off the hook."
Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? by Jia Tolentino (March 2023) A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices.
Music and Coffee May Boost Brain Power (Aug. 2023)
ART / LITERATURE
‘I can’t stress how much BookTok sells’: teen literary influencers swaying publishers - David Barnett (Aug. 2023) TikTok recommendations are driving sales and launching authors’ careers as the social media app continues to reshape the industry.
Real American life, in a series of (very) brief encounters - Benjamin Markovits (Sept. 2023) The first new collection of stories by Lydia Davis in nearly a decade boils big thoughts down to small, delicate observations.
OTHER / PERSONAL INTEREST / RANDOM
It's not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird. - Rob Price (Sept. 2023)
Personal sharing on LinkedIn is booming, people who use the platform say, because of tidal shifts in both social norms and the social-media marketplace.
Inside the Rich and Raucous Legacy of New York’s Borscht Belt - Vanita Salisbury (Sept. 2023) Born out of necessity, the Jewish resorts that once dotted the Catskill Mountains still have a lot to teach us.
Mount Fear Diary - Joshua Hunt (July 2023)
A Baker’s Secrets: Why Ted Odell abandoned his cult-favorite cookies - Dave Denison (Sept. 2023)
Dinner Theater and Loathing in Baptist Vegas - Amy McCarthy (Aug. 2023) Branson, Missouri, is touted as a wholesome, family-friendly tourist destination where dinner-and-a-show thrives. But here, everyone’s trying to sell you more than just a ticket.