The Dialectic of Destruction

ABSTRACT: "Truly, I live in dark times!" Bertolt Brecht exclaimed in his 1939 poem "To Those Born Later." "The man who laughs / Has simply not yet had / The terrible news." The same could be said for the current situation in Israel and Palestine—the most calamitous in my lifetime, and perhaps since 1948. Today, only a fool would write an optimistic book about the region, and Hussein Agha and Robert Malley's new work, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, is in fact bleak. But it is not hopeless. Amid a trauma-tized Israel and a Gaza in rubble, Agha and Malley posit a dialectic of destruction: out of the ruins, new possibilities might emerge. "A breakdown of this magnitude, so epic, a physical, human, and political wreckage this complete, can be redeeming," they write. "It purges falsehoods and unveils uncomfortable truths." They believe, or at least suggest, that new approaches, more honest ap-proaches—ones that should include settlers, religious Zionists, Palestinian refugees, and Islam-ists—might lead, slowly, to some sort of coexistence. "Do I think that Israelis and Palestinians can live together with peace? Yes, sir," Agha told the left Zionist magazine Fathom. "Do I think that 7 October and the war in Gaza showed that they cannot? No. What it did was to clarify and crystallise the nature of the conflict; a first step that has been often ignored.