Let Them Eat Cake: Gaza’s Cognitive Dissonance

“Let them eat cake” is a quote attributed to Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, and generally taken to reflect her poor understanding of the starving peasants’ plight that triggered the French Revolution. The phrase has come to describe a particular kind of elite cognitive dissonance: when privilege is absolute, people don’t just lack empathy — they lack the cognitive framework to understand scarcity. To someone who has never seen an empty pantry, “no food” is an impossible concept.

I can’t find a better description of the near-universal cognitive dissonance around who bears responsibility for Gaza. It has become an article of faith, among many of Israel’s harshest critics, but also among plenty of people who consider themselves sympathetic to Israel, that Gaza’s misery is a simple story with a single author.

The suffering in Gaza is indeed real, and the over two million civilians there are subject to unfeigned agony: scorching heat in the summer and bitter cold in the winter, with barely tolerable shelter, lack of food and water, no hospitals or schools. The Palestinians in Gaza, regardless of how much responsibility we believe may fairly be attributed to them for their own situation, most certainly deserve our empathy and every attempt to improve their horrible circumstances.

The cognitive dissonance begins when it comes to attributing ALL responsibility to Israel. The ticking bomb that Gaza has been for well over seventy years was created and kept explosive by Israel together with the rest of the world, including Arabs, Europeans, and Americans. Whether you believe Israel deserves the lion’s share of responsibility or the smallest share is, in a sense, beside the point. The key point is that it was created by all of the above, and couldn’t have become the disaster it has become without all of the above.

There was nothing unique or unusual, unfortunately, about the roughly 200,000 refugees who turned Gaza from a small town into a large refugee camp. Hundreds of millions of people were displaced around the world in the wake of WWII, including nearly a million Jewish refugees who arrived in nascent Israel. The only distinctive and unprecedented aspect of Gaza’s refugees is the UN’s decision not to resettle them, and its establishment of a special agency, UNRWA, to sustain them indefinitely. Sustaining stranded refugees who were forced to leave their homes and livelihoods is obviously a humanitarian act. But the humanitarianism ends after a few years, certainly after a decade, of leaving vulnerable people unable to get back on their feet and take care of themselves. That is precisely what took place in Gaza, in plain sight of the whole world, and to my knowledge no one ever stepped up to offer a solution or a path out of it.

While Jordan, which took in the majority of Palestinian refugees in 1948, offered them citizenship and allowed them to work and sustain themselves, Egypt, which controlled Gaza, did not. That was the genesis of Gaza’s aberrant situation, and it was maintained decade after decade through profound changes in circumstance. In 1967, Israel took control from Egypt. In 1982, Israel completed its withdrawal from Sinai, separating Gaza from Sinai for the first time. In 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza entirely, offering Gazans self-rule for the first time. Through all of these changes, the essential ingredients for an explosive situation were maintained by everyone. No one ever offered to resettle any number of Gaza’s refugees: not Israel, not Egypt, not the United States, no European country. No one.

For the last twenty years, the whole world watched Hamas turn Gaza into a killing field, digging hundreds of miles of tunnels — unprecedented in human history — under and into homes, schools, hospitals, and mosques, with the express intention of using them to attack and destroy Israel while using Gazans as human shields. And what did the world do? It continued to provide food, clothing, schools, and hospitals, thereby enabling Hamas to finance its enterprise.

Hamas never made a secret of its goals. Its leaders said repeatedly and proudly that their aim is to destroy Israel, and that they are more than happy to sacrifice as many Gazans as it takes to reach that goal.

That is why it seems to me that the same people now asking how Gaza became what it is are often the ones who spent decades treating its unraveling as someone else’s problem: Israel’s, Egypt’s, the UN’s, anyone’s but their own.

Like Marie Antoinette, unable to fathom an empty pantry, we’ve made ourselves unable to fathom our own complicity. It is far easier to assign a single villain than to sit with a shared one.

None of this is meant to justify or limit criticism of any particular action taken by anyone. We should all do our best to decipher reports and get as close as we can to what actually happened, and we should speak out in support of or opposition to what we believe is right or wrong. Just remember: none of us has a monopoly on the facts, or on what is right and wrong.

It seems appropriate to end with a quote from Wilson Kanadi: “Those who judge will never understand, and those who understand will never judge.”