Two-Sided

It's been interesting how much bandwidth the Israel-Hamas war, and by extension, the conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians more broadly, has been taking up here in the United States. I've listened to a number of podcasts on the events, even without doing anything to seek them out. And one thing that's occurred to me from listening to multiple people discuss both the current conflict and its history is the idea that both sides will appeal to other parties when it suits them, while denying their legitimacy when it doesn't.

One of the arguments that I'd heard from people supporting the Israeli side of the conflict was that Israel agreed to the terms of the United Nations partitioning of the former Mandatory Palestine, while the Palestinians (and other Arabs in the area) did not. The common Palestinian counter to this is that the United Nations had no legitimate right to hand over Palestinian land to the Jewish residents of the area. It makes sense for the Israelis to support the right of the United Nations to give them land, and for the Palestinians to dispute that right, but both positions are fundamentally self-serving.

Likewise, the Palestinians and their allies in the international community feel that the United Nations should be able to call for a binding cease-fire. For the Israelis, on the other hand, the only international voices that matter are those that support them, most notably the United States, who they rely on to block any criticism of them in the Security Council. Again, this is understandable, even though the positions are self-serving.

In the end, this will likely be one of those situations which has no good end. Both parties feel that they have the more legitimate grievance, and their historical views of the conflict tend to have starting points carefully chosen to support their specific viewpoints. Just as one man's war crime is another man's smart fighting, one man's justified reprisal attack is another man's atrocity. No one ever sees themselves as abusive or evil, and rarely, if ever, do they understand their reasoning as self-serving. That's left to the people they don't listen to.