Thread by @Adderabbi

Some thoughts on the present situation, after a night of little sleep, interrupted by booms and sirens. A thread:

I'm not getting into the discussion of who is the bigger victim. There's no point. It's Twitter. Nobody changes their mind here.
1/n

Rather, I'm going to speculate on an aspect of this tragedy that is not really being discussed, as it's not about Israel vs. Hamas or even Israel against the Palestinians.
It's about divisions among Israel's own citizens, where we were a few weeks ago, and where we are now. 2/n

ICYMI, while @netanyahu was fighting to keep the premiership, he negotiated with Ra'am, an Islamist party, about joining his coalition. That was a huge breakthrough in the history of this state. Never has an Israeli government relied on the support of an Arab party. 3/n

Likud is denying the seriousness of the negotiations, but it doesn't matter. We have crossed the Rubicon. The taboo on forming political coalitions with Arab parties is broken. 4/n

This came on the heels of Israel's establishing of official ties with 4 Arab states in the past year, with other Arab and Muslim states in various stages of negotiation, including Oman and Saudi Arabia.
In other words, it has been a banner year for normalization. 5/n

Most people think that normalization is a good thing. Arab citizens of Israel certainly saw how Jewish Israelis beamed when representatives of the UAE wished them a Happy Pesach. 6/n

Palestinians certainly saw their leaders refusing Israel's offer of vaccines, and that the 100,000 Palestinians who work in Israel all got vaccinated.
We're not even close to being where we need to be, but there was real progress this year. 7/n

This allows us to understand Hamas's motive better. Hamas is built on anti-normalization. It's what distinguishes Hamas from Fatah, which accepts normalization, at least in theory. 8/n

Hamas has sympathy among Arab citizens of Israel, and I get that. You're talking about brothers and cousins, and we can't expect others to disavow kinship over political views any more than we do so ourselves. Especially when those brothers are dying. 9/n

We know what Hamas is. We are always at war with them. Sometimes the war is hot and sometimes it's in the shadows. This isn't the first round of that fight, and there's not much new in this round. We know how it will end, too. 10/n

What makes this round all the more tragic is that it forced two populations just starting to feel each other out back into their tribal shells. Negotiations with Ra'am have now stalled, as the depth of difference between Mansour Abbas and Naftali Bennett has come to the fore.11/n

There is unrest in every Israeli city with a mixed Jewish/Arab population. I suspect there are professional agitators fanning the flames - on which side? I don't know. Perhaps both - and undoing the little bits of progress that have been made. 12/13

This is all speculative. I could be totally off. It could be that all these things have been simmering below the surface the whole time, waiting for the first provocation. Maybe I imagined that we're getting somewhere. If that's the case, I doubt I'll feel any better. /end

Bonus tweet: I'm not interested in takes that say that Bibi engineered the whole thing to stay in power. That take actually makes no sense.

I just saw that @MattiFriedman is thinking along the same lines. Great minds, I suppose ;-)
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