Tragic Complexities and No Good Choices
In a podcast conversation released last week, I asked Wynton Marsalis:
What, to you, is the meaning and importance of cultural leadership?
In the sense that we mean it related to the arts, cultural leadership is concerned with your way of life and your mythology; how you interpret the meaning of your symbols and your traditions, as expressed in the art. And it means that you are willing to embrace changes to that tradition that bring you closer to [the] meaning and function of it. And in the times that is needed for you to maintain the line on some things, though it may be unpopular, you're willing to do that.
And to be any type of leader, I feel like you have to imagine the world a different way—but in relation to first knowing the world that you’re imagining. And then you have to have the courage to stand by some type of vision and . . . also the courage to be flexible enough to change. And then you [should] have the discipline to continue to study and question and to be rigorous. So, I think that ultimately, cultural leadership in relation to the arts is about your ability to interpret the symbolic language of the arts and what they mean to the experience of being who you are and where you are.
—Wynton Marsalis
This month, the aspect of leadership that has been most acute for me is the “discipline to continue to study and question and to be rigorous.”
Since the incursion of Israel on Oct. 7th by a murderous death cult, Hamas, I’ve gone deep into the shed of study about the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict and forces at play in the Middle East. I have had passionate exchanges with my family about it, listened to interviews, watched documentaries, and begun reading books by people of various ideological and scholarly perspectives, all to fill the huge gaps in my understanding of a complex, tragic history and current reality.
I deplore Hamas, yet I don’t conflate them with Palestinians overall. I’ve also learned about statements by and actions of Israeli politicians, settlers, and the military, even before this war, with which I strongly disagree while maintaining my allegiance with the Jewish people and their overall struggle.
That’s why I’m down with a sentiment I saw on X (formerly Twitter) expressed by economist Dina Pomeranz:
Of course, her list wasn’t good enough for everyone.
This exchange reminds me of a point in my conversation with Wynton in which we discuss the difficulty of nuance when certain topics or persons are mentioned, for instance, President Lyndon B. Johnson. If you praise his laudable support of the voting and civil rights bills of the mid-1960s, someone on the left will invariably mention his stance on the Vietnam War.
When either-or is the default norm, a diunital both/and perspective can and should expand our horizons.
Suggested Readings
My private “Israel-Palestine” YouTube playlist has dozens of videos, which I’m going through in bite-sized chunks. But rather than pointing to any of those, I’ll recommend two pieces that are excellent, parsing the complexities of the current situation while maintaining critical, ethical, and journalistic standards.
Opinion writer Andrew Sullivan’s Substack, The Weekly Dish, features an essay titled “For Israel, There Are No Good Options Now.” (Sullivan’s tagline for his blog, “biased and balanced” describes how I feel delving into this quagmire.) Though it’s behind a paywall, it’s worth doing a seven-day trial just to read this piece that defends free speech and excoriates those exercising cancel culture in defense of Israel, many of whom turn around and blast “wokeness” for the same sins. In partisan politics, I guess it’s okay to cancel the free speech of your enemies while taking umbrage when those enemies do the same to you.
For long-form reportage on the aftermath of the Hamas attack and the intense military response by Israel, I recommend an excellent piece by David Remnick of The New Yorker, “In the Cities of Killing: The Hamas massacre, the assaults on Gaza, and what comes after.” Remnick provides precise historical context and an on-the-ground perspective, affording a bird’s eye view of the situation. He recounts conversations—many with heart-breaking details—with Israeli and Gazan civilians directly affected by the war and its human cost, with government officials and military commanders, with a founder of Hamas and with Netanyahu in years past, with a scholar of Islamic philosophy and an Israeli novelist, among others.
Here’s a taste of Remnick in rumination after speaking with an American-born Palestinian who moved from Ohio to the West Bank after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s:
The task of holding in one’s head multiple thoughts—multiple facts—was nearly impossible, particularly in the face of sloganeering and the allure of militancy. There is the thought that Israeli settlers, many of them armed, have stepped up their daily violence against Palestinian villagers, egged on by ministers in the Netanyahu government. That, though Israel is well armed and has powerful allies, it is also the size of New Jersey and faces multiple enemies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran—whose leaders speak regularly of the elimination of “the Zionist entity.” That the unemployment rate in Gaza is forty-five per cent, the water barely potable, electricity and food in short supply, the health-care system in ruins. That antisemitism has, yet again, grown in breadth, intensity, and violence. That contempt for Palestinians is practically a norm in the current Israeli government, as when Smotrich, the finance minister, spoke at a memorial service in France and, standing in front of a map with Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan melded into “Greater Israel,” declared, “There is no Palestinian history,” or when Ben-Gvir, the national-security minister, told journalists, “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs.” That many thousands of Palestinians have already been killed in the recent air strikes and well over a million have been internally displaced. There will be no end to it anytime soon: the funerals, the recriminations, the threats, the fear, the assaults.
There was also the grim fact that Hamas had, in the most brutal fashion, shattered the illusion that a state could provide Israelis the guarantee of security. As Yonit Levi, the news anchor of Channel 12 put it to me, “Every single Jewish nightmare came true.’”And so what would come in return? The air strikes on Gaza were proceeding at an unprecedented pace every night—lethal and incessant—and a ground incursion could lead to a hellscape of urban warfare, another Fallujah. It was a familiar nightmare, reminiscent of what followed 9/11, in which a stronger nation pursues a policy that, while trying to defeat an enemy for carrying out an unspeakable massacre, kills countless civilians and ultimately inflicts untold and lasting damage on itself.
—David Remnick
The sentiment that the widespread killing of Palestinian civilians, 50% being children, will ultimately harm Israel and serve the very ends of Israel’s enemies is one that I find many thoughtful supporters of Israel and the Jewish people grappling with. I’m among their number. Yet, Hamas must be defeated. In such a tragic time, there seem to be no good choices.
Final Series episode with Dr. John Vervaeke
Another podcast released last week features me in conversation with Dr. John Vervaeke, the fourth in a series titled: “Deep Dive: Race, Culture, Jazz and Democracy.” I invite you to watch and listen to our dialogue here. We riff on many topics and themes, including my stance as a radical moderate, which infuses my approach to leadership and to the political issues in the post above. As in the other episodes in the series, we also discuss sapience and wisdom—which we need now more than ever.