You just can’t stop thinking about the war in Gaza. I gave my latest thoughts just a few days ago, and they haven’t changed. But there are always more ways to look at it. Today, I am thinking about conflation.

Israel is a country. Jews are not a country. (The question of what Jews are – a religious group, an ethnicity, a state of mind, etc. is for another day.) Yet so many people, including Jews, conflate the two. This is one of the reasons that Jewish kids on campuses across the country are coming in the crosshairs of those who are against Israeli policies and presence in Gaza. This is one of the reasons that antisemitic statistics have increased across the country and across much of the world since October 7.

Now, it seems clear that Israel’s official position would support conflation. Many pure Zionists would of course maintain that all Jews should live in Israel, and that that is the only way you can be truly Jewish. Several years ago, Israel’s Knesset passed a law that maintains that Israel is Jewish state, in effect belittling the 20+% of its population that is not Jewish at all, and it delisted Arabic as an official language, a status Arabic had held since 1948.

And groups such as the Anti-Defamation League conflate the two when adding up antisemitic incidents. If there is an pro-Palestinian demonstration on a campus which includes anti-Israel sloganeering, it is my understanding that this goes on the ADL’s list of antisemitic incidents, and that no separate list of anti-Israel incidents is kept.

The vast majority of American Jews are very much in opposition to the current Israeli government, but they are still identified with Israel (that is understandable in many ways) and therefore with Israeli policies that they may detest and therefore become fair game.

It is conflation. It is not accidental conflation. It is strategic conflation.

On the other side, there is another type of conflation. Those who are strongly against what Israel is doing in Gaza (and here I am not thinking primarily of Jews) have varying opinions about Israel. Some may be supportive of Israel generally and just want it to stay within its green-line borders. Some may think that Israel and the Palestinian territories should eventually become one multi-religious country. Some may want Israel, and all Jewish Israelis, expelled from the land they occupy, and either be driven to America (or its equivalent) or into the sea. But in the eyes of supporters of Israel, all of these people become conflated into a group which is out to destroy Israel and murder its citizens. And it is true that a surprisingly small number of strong Hamas supporters seem to even remember the October 7 attack, much less condemn it.

None of this helps, of course. It makes dialogue impossible. It makes it extremely hard to move to the next step. Especially when the leaders of Israel, and the leaders of Hamas and their supporters, are almost all conflaters.

As the song says, it is beyond time to “accentuate the positive”. But it can’t happen now because Israel’s leaders won’t stop until there is no Hamas, and Hamas leaders say “hit me again and again, and you still won’t hurt me”. They seem to be safe in their tunnels, and they don’t seem to care at all about what is going on at ground level.

So it’s a tangled web, as all wars are, but this one is more tangled than others. There are now ceasefire negotiations going on in Cairo – well, one day they are going on, and the next day, they aren’t. The international forces want the ceasefire to get food and aid to the Gazans. Israel is afraid that any ceasefire is just an opportunity for Hamas rearmament, and will take away pressure on Hamas to release the remaining 100 or so hostages. But Hamas doesn’t seem to feel that pressure. It won’t even give Israel a list of the living hostages it is now holding, much less talk about releasing them. Or talk about releasing them except for the return of much larger numbers of Israeli prisoners, most of whom are undoubtedly ready to join Hamas in destroying Israel is freed.

Hamas is afraid that any ceasefire will diminish anti-Israel protests; it seems to want the attacks to continue in a bizarre way, because Hamas leadership cares nothing for the people of Gaza today, but is thinking about a “river to see” Palestine tomorrow. Any number of martyrs seems acceptable as a means to that goal.

Of course, poor Joe Biden is caught in the middle, as he is in some many other places. He strongly supports Israel in defending itself against attacks by its neighbors, gaining the support of Jewish voters. He proposes millions of dollars of increased financial military support to Israel, losing the support of Arab (and many younger) voters, yet he condemns current Israel actions and future plans, which doesn’t seem to be getting anyone’s support, although he is correct in doing so.

And Donald Trump is the ReTrumpican Party? Trump will stop the war in Ukraine 24 hours after his inauguration, but what about in Gaza. I don’t think he has spoken about that, has he? And it was the ReTrumpicans who wanted a stand alone Israeli financial support bill. Do they still want that? I don’t know that, either. Maybe both Trump and his followers have pronounced on this – frankly, I have been ignoring a lot this week.

It’s almost 60 degrees outside and I am writing a blog? No longer. Time for a long walk. I will re-read this post later and see if I made any sense at all. Let me know what you think, if you got this far and would like to. Or, just go outside and take a walk.