1. This is a lonely period.
The last two years have been lonely a very particular way.
You really see who looks out for you in periods like this. When disasters hit, you need people in your corner who will support you, but also tell you exactly when you moved wrong. It's that dwelling in the ambiguity, the uncanny valley, the duality between love and challenge, where true friendship lies. When people are too supportive, there is always a chance that their frustrations explode and the friendship is over before you know what could have possibly happened to it. But when the air of frustration is let out just a little bit at a time, couched in the gentlest of terms, there is always room for deeper connections.
They say the personal is political. There is so much evidence that phrase isn't true. I have such ample experience of people with murderous politics who are warm, caring, dignified and principled in their personal lives, and so do you, dear reader. It's high time you got out of your state of denial about that fact, isn't it?
But in terms of possibilities and percentages, I would say, on average... a person of the 'too extreme' is just a little more likely to sell you down the river, to find you too reprehensible, contemptuous, evil, for human company. When they fulminate against those they hate, carnassials out, claws sharpened, telling us with raised voice how beneath contempt are those with whom they disagree--those who inevitably resemble us; there is always a chance they mean what they say and always a chance they'll put their beliefs into practice. This is particularly true in volatile times. Volatile times produce volatile communications with ever more variables to negotiate tricky relationships.
Judaism rejects this sort of certainty. At least my Judaism does. For two thousand years, Judaism is the weighing of balances to produce the proper course of action. It is astounding how deliberate and nuanced are the scholars of our ever so detailed tradition. How is it then that on this, the most important issue in the history of this people, nuance is thrown out the door? Greater Israel, Settlements, and even 'Jewish voices for peace'... their certainty is antithetical to the practice of our tradition.
There is only one certainty in Jewish history: certainty is the enemy of Judaism, certainty is the lethal enemy of Jewish survival. It may not be fair, but it was the absolutist pre-Talmudic certainty of Jews which produced the Bar Kochba Rebellion which threw Jews out of Israel for two-thousand years, it is the unremitting tribalism of Joshua and the Judges that produced evidence for the Adversus Judaeos which later allowed Christians to proclaim Christianity the faith of love while smiting us for being so hateful. Against the Midianites, Canaanites and Amalekites, we practiced unquestioned genocides: the result? Two generations of a glorious kingdom under David and Solomon, then a thousand years of division, conquest and exile. Chosen people indeed.
Being Jewish is unfair. Genocide was the general practice of the time, yet only we were held to it. We held off against the might of Rome as no other people did: it took 200 years to make Judea submit. Their only other 200-year war for conquest was for Spain, which Rome did long before it had the manpower of an all-powerful Empire. Yet Jews are punished for it. We pay for our sins seventy-sevenfold. Perhaps the only other choice would have been submission and assimilation: would that really have been worse than what Jewish history eventually became?
Jewish survival is perhaps the most miraculous story in world history, but we are punished for our survival. We were sustained by the inordinately grandiose proclamations of our books, but just as 2000 years of Christians were hypocritically hateful to us, people couldn't help but notice the hypocrisy of our books proclaiming ourselves the chosen of God yet acting in manners commensurate with the devil.
Judaism is the uncanny valley of human being: survival vs. annihilation, success vs. failure, disgraced exile vs. welcomed immigrant, community values vs. individual values, justice vs. mercy, spiritual vs. material, and Man vs. God as much as Man with God.
So therefore, let us make a very "Jewish" emendation to 'The Personal is Political":
The personal is just a little political.
Shrug as you say it.
2. If there is a God, then I believe He wants Jews to consider the ethical conundrum of the moment:
The very people who experienced the worst genocide in recorded history are now accused of genocide.
By the standard of the UN, what must be proven is the intent to destroy a national, religious, or ethnic group.
By this standard, it is unquestionably within the area of genocide. There is not proven intent to destroy the Palestinians as such, but there is basically proven intent to occupy them in perpetuity, make life for them so unbearable that they give up their national aspirations, and force them to submit to occupied governance by any means necessary in what now seems the very apartheid situation Israel's liberal allies have warned about for twenty years. So apartheid is no longer a question unless Netanyahu stops occupying the entirety of Gaza, and he won't. The threshold is now crossed and the Israeli government is beneath defense on this matter.
Is this intent to destroy them? That depends on the meaning of 'destroy.' Is it destruction with regard to annihilation? For the moment, I highly doubt it. I believe the dual intent is still to destroy Hamas and propagate Netanyahu as Israel's Prime Minister as a lifetime appointment. As a genocide, I believe the proof is extraordinarily insufficient, others fervently disagree. Most of those who hold this opinion have disqualified themselves for consideration by a deplorable lack of historical knowledge and context.
'Genocide' was termed in 1948 because no crime was sufficient to describe the mass murders of the 20th century: in the wake of Auschwitz (at least 1.1 million) and Treblinka (7-900,000), the Holomodor starvation in Ukraine (3.5-10 million), The Great Terror and Soviet show trials (750,000), Belgium's enslavement in the Free State of Congo (2-10 million), the Rape of Nanking (1-300,000) and the Bataan Death March (76,000 POWs), the military drives of the Chinese nationalists (about 1.1 million) and the deliberate flooding of the Yellow River (400,000-900,000), the Yangtzee-Fujian Soviet massacres (700,000) perpetrated by Chinese communists in 1930 and Mao's pre-leadership purges of the Communist party (total unknown but presumed many thousands), the Turkish massacre of the Armenians (I thought it was higher but google tells me 600,000 to 1.5 million), and yes, perhaps American actions in World War II count like Hiroshima. These totals would multiply after Mao Tse-Tun took over China.
The actions of war are collateral damage. Some of these might not have been genocide, but they were all deliberate, premeditated mass murder. These incidents were the intentional, purposive murder of millions.
This is the context under which the term was coined.
Think of the politicians during the Cold War which many of you hold in such contempt. The vast, vast majority of them had a vastly different standard of acceptable death. The death of thousands was simply assumed to be the price to prevent the death of millions.
Whether or not this is true, or morally right, the context under which you define genocide is not how genocide was meant to be defined. Genocide did not mean the death of some, genocide meant the death of all.
Genocide means annihilation.
2A. The future of this word is so clear.
The reason this word has such power, the reason people invoke it so passionately for the death of thousands, is that it is a word that the human unconscious has adapted to mean the death of millions. This conflict is not going to end any time soon. The best case scenario is that by the end of all this, a genocide is avoided, but even if it is, I'd bet the genocide canard will stick for generations.
I believe this word is either used as a slur against Jews or will quickly become one.
I hope those of you who use it choke on your own narcissistic rage.
...If enough of you did you'd call it a genocide.
3. But that doesn't mean it isn't an abomination before the world and God, and that doesn't mean genocide isn't a likely future.
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