My essay in Tablet Magazine on Israel & Palestine
And now a call for clarity, nuance, and humanity
I’ve long admired Tablet magazine as a publication that offers complex, nuanced pieces at the center of independent thought. I’m honored to have had the featured essay there yesterday. It was a piece on the war in Israel & Palestine, and the way in which it has exposed a perilous blind spot in Western progressive thinking. Welcome the many new readers who are now joining this community due to that article.
But first and foremost then, if you haven’t yet read it, please visit Tablet’s home and read the essay there:
In the past year, I’ve started writing about politics more explicitly. This is not something I ever wanted or planned on doing.
I’ve written extensively about the dangers of digital addiction, and how in our attention economy, disaster content can itself become its own type of drug. In our terminally online world, I believe we all need to practice harm reduction in terms of what we consume.
Social media is not the place to dish out # hot-takes on our world’s most complicated and enduring geo-political issue. You do not need have an opinion on every single global matter just because we are now confronted by it on our screens. If the war in Ukraine gave you a taste of the breakdown in sense-making that can pollute our digital commons, after Hamas’ attack on October 7th, we now know beyond a doubt just how bad things are when our world spends too much time online. How bad they are, not just on a personal level, but on a societal and cultural one too.
As to why I am wading deeper into the political fray, and potentially adding more noise to the madness—it’s because I feel I must. I also have, finally, overcome my fear of saying the ‘wrong thing’ and have come to understand that, as a writer with a platform (however modest), I have been censoring myself due to worry of being ‘canceled’ (more realistically: rejected).
What is the point of being a writer if I don’t say what I, in my marrow, feel must be heard? Witnessing the plethora of reductive, just truly awful takes out there has been almost as hard for me to witness as the footage pouring out of Gaza and southern Israel. Friends send me treatments that are supposed to be nuanced but are instead paltry, reductive rallying calls to one extreme of the political spectrum or the other.
In response to this, I can relate to Sam Harris, who, after achieving something like enlightenment and beginning consciousness research, bore witness to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He was consequently compelled to speak out against the dangers of radical jihadism, which led to his book The End of Faith. Not because he wanted to, but because he had to.
My views aren’t Harris’s, though I agree with much he says, and I imagine I feel similarly dismayed—so I hope you grant me some modesty in the comparison. Spirituality, which is both my primary interest and vocation, is unavoidably political. By that I mean, the road of Spirit leads, ultimately, to a place where you care, inevitably, about the interests of others like you do your own. As I’ve written before, in the West, we too often make the mistake of believing that our self-actualization journeys should be prioritized above all else—desperately typing the Next Great American Novel in the basement as the rest of the house burns.
I’ve also written extensively about metamodernism, which is the governing “cultural philosophy” of the information age we currently live in, incorporating and surpassing the interpretive lenses of the postmodernism and modernism that preceded it. One of metamodernism’s fundamental premises is the end of black-and-white, Manichean thinking. Binaries are dead; or at least woefully incomplete. We’ve seen this with gender, and just about everything else. From here on out, everything exists in a vibrating state of Grey. Including us.
(How do “progressives” not get this?!)
Let me be clear: I believe that Israel should be able to peacefully exist as an ethno-nationalist state. I firmly believe it is a consistent, and equally important moral assertion that—Palestine must also be free. I believe Hamas, like all forms of radical jihadism, to be a death cult akin to ISIS and Nazism. And I believe Benjamin Netanyahu to be like Trump and Cheney fused into something even more woefully destructive.
If your response to the horrors that are now happening in the Holy Land is simply “Go Israel!” or “Free Palestine now!”—you have been played. The algorithms and propaganda have baited you into reductionist thinking that simply cannot meet the demands of an increasingly complex, ever-connected world. No context begs nuance more than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If, in response to that, you, like a good activist, may claim “We have no time for both-side-isms”—you, too, have been captured by ideological dogma. I need to clarify: some acts are worse than others, but no bad action nullifies another.
Why am I saying this so directly, so fiercely, like I know what I am talking about?
Well, I don’t. My mind and body are nothing special. I am certain there are gaps in my thinking—I’m human. I’ve already received many beautiful letters in response to my essay, mostly validation that brings me to tears, along with many points of criticism. Some of which bring me to indignation, some to humility.
But what I can say, with full confidence, is that striving for nuance and depth is the only sane, ethical choice we have in a world facing meta-crises as a result of our addicted, deluded thinking. I can also say, in confidence, that I am not alone in this belief, and that there’s actually a silent majority of individuals who don’t bother posting anything online and believe in justice and what my friend Conlan calls “spiritual centrism.”
I named my business and this newsletter Deep Fix for many reasons—metaphorical and literal. Band-aid solutions and one-sided hot-takes will not quell the soul-wound in our collective consciousness. If we are going to get a fix, or a dope hit, of anything, I hope it is a deep breath of felt complexity, the grace that can only be found in the depths beneath the surface.
I hope you read the piece itself. And, if you’re interested, please write me to provide me with perspectives I may have failed to see.
We are in this dance together. With love for humanity and honesty,
Alex
Two suggested complimentary readings:
The work of human rights activist Yasmine Mohammed, including her book and especially her recent op-ed.
And this from Esther Perel:
I'm an Egyptian writer and I support this. The title misled me to think a certain way about your views but reading till the end I find that I agree with you and your prose that probes into the truth beyond the Go Israel and Free Palestine sentiments really hot home for me.
Great writing dude. Keep it up. Keep lighting the way. Keep asking for a deeper fix.
I'm a doctor as well and I totally resonate with the mission of your Substack and the need for us to go beyond the fucking bandaid.
Thanks for helping us heal with words. Looking forward to meeting you one day and having a long ass conversation.
Love your thoughtful response in both Deep Fix and Tablet. Can't agree more! I've encountered that deluded "progressive" thinking in my own family of origin. I can't even talk about Ukraine with my own sisters who believe Russia's invasion was Ukraine's fault due to its desire to join NATO. Talk about blaming the victim for the aggression! They think I'm naive for not perceiving the war as a conflict between the US and the Russian Federation with Ukraine caught in the middle. There are plenty of Israeli's and Jews around the world who have supported a two-state solution. What Hamas did is absolutely inexcusable. Hamas IS a death cult. But it does not represent all Palestinians. Nothing is more destructive in civic and political discourse than simplistic binary thinking that doesn't get to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately extreme crises tend to obfuscate the larger, more nuanced realities.