1. Today is Tisha B'Av, commemorating the destruction of both of the Jerusalem Temples. Every day for 2000 years, Jews have prayed for their resurrection. I have no great desire to see the resumption of a practice that would make Jerusalem smell like shit and rotting meat, but to each their own I guess.
The meaning of Tisha B'Av is plain for all to see: destruction, desecration, humiliation, cataclysm.
For whom?
2. Being Jewish means many things, but as I've written a hundred times already, the primary fact of being Jewish means living in a state of ambiguity: We are a religion and also a race. We are native to the country of our origins and also foreign to it. We are the chosen people of God, yet God often loathes us and we often loathe him. Sustained as a community for millenia, yet history abounds with our inability to get along with each other. For 4000 years we never had our turn as the historic colossus that dominates an era, yet our people always seem to be the issue for Western powers that facilitates both their rise and their fall. We have the world's preeminent reputation for being capitalists, yet we also have the preeminent reputation for socialism. Being Jewish involves a gigantic reputation for disproportionate success, yet a large portion of us always seem on the verge of becoming refugees. When we rise in one country, we fall in another. To be Jewish is to know the interconnectedness of all states. One generation passes to the next, utterly unlike each other in every particular, yet from generation to generation the core of Judaism remains intact.
Tragedy and comedy is for the Greeks and all their progenitors. The Jewish way is irony. Irony in its proper definition: 'say one thing but really mean the other.' Klezmer music is happy music with a sad melody. Many of our sacred texts clearly originated as secular literature. Our two greatest Rabbis were a doctor and a winemaker. Our representative writer to the world is Franz Kafka, whose humor is so grim that most readers don't even realize it's humor. Our composer? Gustav Mahler, who combined the most sublime parts of Bach and Beethoven with street music. Our songwriter? Bob Dylan: ironist extraordinaire whose lyrics have so many potential meanings that some people aren't sure they mean anything at all. Our representative scientist? Albert Einstein, who said that the laws of the universe itself are relative. Our other representative thinkers? Siegmund Freud, who said that our motives are contradictory even to our thoughts. Karl Marx, who said that capitalism can't help but lead to communism simply by being itself. Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that since the existence of ethics can't be proved, anything you say about it is gibberish. And, most importantly, Baruch Spinoza, who defined God as 'the universe': in other words, God did not create the world, God created Himself/Itself. Therefore, we are all God and must treat each other as we would God, because we are all the same divinity. Got that?
Two of those four thinkers were not technically Jewish because their families converted before they were born, a third (Freud) considered religion to be a neurosis, and Spinoza didn't abandon Judaism; Judaism abandoned him. He was excommunicated for his heterodox ideas. But in each case, there is that Jewish weighing of opposites, combining ideas that should be paradoxes.
To me, this ambiguity is the burden of Jewish inheritance. 'Israel' means 'he who wrestles with God.' The whole point of being Jewish is that we are burdened with an infinite series of paradoxes no one would want to entertain. We think we've wrestled with them all and there couldn't possibly a deeper, more hurtful situation to wrestle with. Then, like a rabbi out of a hat, God forces us to deal with something even more terrible, even more personal, tailor made to make it still more difficult to live in this world.
3. From the moment I heard of October 7th, I knew we were headed toward the burden of exactly this moment. There was no way to avoid this level of destruction, no way to avoid the very personal feeling approbation from friends. This moment was always going to unmask the hypocrisy of progressives to Jews. It would always unmask the reactionary authoritarianism of modern Israel to every progressive not yet convinced of it. It was always going to make liberals impotent to stop the worst of Israel, it would always indulge conservatives their bloodlust for brown people. I didn't just fear what happened next, I knew what would happen in my bones. I wish to God I was wrong, but I know people. I know what they're like, and I certainly know how people react when it comes to Jews.
Maybe it's my own parochial vantage point but we can't see the world from any eyes but our own. My eyes told me this was the moment that would separate the liberal viewpoint from the progressive forever, squarely putting liberals on the side of anti-totalitarianism but progressives on the side of anti-colonialism, and the struggle would eliminate any bulwark preventing Republicans from imposing the worst angels of their nature on us all.
The decline of nations always seems tied to Jewish issues. In Greece it was the Maccabees, Rome it was the Jewish Wars, in the Holy Roman Empire it was the Crusades, at the end of the Spanish Golden Age it was the Alhambra Decree. At the subordination of Ukraine to Russia was Chmielnicki, at the precipce of Ottoman decline was Shabbatai Tzvi. In France it was Dreyfus, in Russia it was Kishinev, in Germany it was Rathenau, in Vienna it was Lueger, in Britain it was Palestine. Whether Judaism was the cause or only a symptom, decline's point of no return can be marked by an irreconcilable division of society on 'the Jewish question.'
The only part which surprised me was that the genocide canard began the very moment October 7th happened. The moment I saw it I got nauseous and thought to myself 'what the fuck did you expect?' Why? Because I didn't expect the genocide accusation to happen so immediately. I somehow thought even the people who believed it would have the good sense to wait a week.
It's almost two years later now, and people who gave Jews the benefit of the doubt are saying that these antisemites were right the whole time.
My reaction on October 7th was not to mourn the loss of Jews, but pre-emptively mourn the far greater death tolls that will happen in October 7th's wake: death tolls which my bones tell me will only increase hereafter around the world.
4. Here's the paradox of the genocide accusation, and why it's much more complicated than people seem to think.
By what's listed as the current standards of genocide, of course it's a genocide! What else can it possibly be?
But by that standard, so many countries have cleared the bar for what constitutes it that are never commented upon, and still do. What else can it be termed for what Russia's doing in Ukraine than genocide? What else can it be in Sudan, Burma, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and, of course, China? All of them perpetrate genocides right now even as Trump cuts Africa's humanitarian aid to nothing. From 1948 onward, how many genocides were perpetrated that drew no serious comment or commitment in the Western world? Thousands? For fifty years, the Communist Party steamrolled half of three continents yet somehow capitalism was the great enemy. China threatens world war if we don't acquiesce to their complete control of Taiwan and the South China Sea, yet everybody only talks about Israel's violations of international law.
When Jews see that only Israel gets condemned by nearly everyone we know, we don't just get furious at the double standard, we become terrified. When lots of political murders come for us here, and eventually they will, what will it take for them to condemn the murderers without knowing that our friends whisper the proviso to each other: 'well... they had justified grievances.'? Where was the acknowledgement after October 7th that we are scared out of our wits? When was that acknowledgement? Where and when was the sympathetic message? All your Jewish friends wanted was a simple recognition for you: I understand you're afraid, I understand your concerns for your safety, we'll be here for you, you matter.
More than 90% of you didn't do it, you couldn't do it. To do it would be to admit that even if Judaism and Zionism are separate things in your mind, they are not separate in the minds of billions, and, therefore, just maybe, Judaism and Zionism are the same thing. Quarter-Jews and atheists were Jewish enough for Hitler, and to be a Jew is automatically to be 'Zionist enough' for billions of antisemites.
People focused on Israel counter inevitably that the West has a unique level of involvement in Israel. Bullshit. Who makes your shirts? Who makes your computers and phones? Who makes your furniture, plastic and steel? The total trade between the US and China amounts to 750 billion dollars per year, EU-China trade amounts to a mere 650 billion. They would inevitably say the money with Israel only goes one way. Bullshit again. Israel sends the US 22 billion a year in exports, the US sends 14 billion. Even after you factor in the 5 billion a year loans, the trade deficit is the US's. This from a country the size of New Jersey with 1/30th the population even if you count the occupied.
And even with Russia, think about it... which head of state may the US and EU be involved with most intimately of all?...
4 1/2. Here's the paradox of the genocide accusation, and why it's much more complicated than people seem to think.
By what's listed as the current standards of genocide, of course it's a genocide! What else can it possibly be?
5. Whether or not the genocide accusation is true, genocide can be used to describe the death of a thousand so long as it's a very particular thousand, yet in the minds of the world, in the minds of so many I know, Israel perpetrated exactly what Hitler did. Such is the power of that word that once used, it can never be taken back. You might as well call us 'Christ-killer.'
I'm sure millions of Christians who invoked deicide throughout the centuries didn't care much about the Jewish question, they just invoked antisemitism when society deemed it appropriate, then went back to their lives, many of which involved living with, working with, and liking Jews in the closest proximity.
If a thousand people were killed in any other country in the world, if sixty thousand were killed, nobody would care. We'd all be vaguely annoyed at the only person who mentions it on social media for disrupting our day, then we'd all go about our business.
Why is that?
I don't think it's antisemitism, and I don't think it's because people want moral absolution for the Holocaust, the reason is much more dangerous.
The world hates an ungracious victim. We want the script with the happy ending that flatters our common humanity. The saved people forgive their oppressors, humanity becomes wiser, and by commemorating victims and trauma, progress inevitably marches onward. The script ends with us all learning from our experiences. The horrors that used to be very real become a nightmare of a distant past that feels as though it never happened.
But people don't want to be victims. They want to be free. They want to be secure. They want to be independent enough to fuck up in all the ways they see everybody else fuck up. They don't want to be a grateful dependent; they want their own self-respect.
That is what neither liberals nor conservatives understood about the race riots in the sixties. That's what liberals don't understand about Trumpers today. It's what Westerners never understood about Russians. It's what the most liberal administrators of the British and French empires never understood. And that's what everybody right and center doesn't understand about the world of woke.
And... that's what gentiles don't understand about Jews, even conservative Christians.
People want to be the heroes of their own story. Once they get their first taste of agency, the gain in self-esteem is so immediate that they will do everything they can to banish the humiliation of dependence; so they pick a fight wherever they see a threat that may take them back to the way things were; including against their ostensible liberators. Just as American whites see American blacks as ungrateful, that's how Western liberals view Jews.
Every time history presents us with a victim ungrateful to be rescued, we are reminded: we usually don't learn from other people's mistakes. The very people we're predisposed to love most for the trials they passed are the very people most likely to inflict their abuse on others, and therefore show that the world doesn't reform, the world doesn't evolve, and our future is the same horror as our past.
And therefore, when evidence is presented that Jews are committing the sin of Hitler, it's all too easy to believe. Trumpers hate Democrats because Democrats wanted to help them. Sixties African-Americans rioted nationwide in the five years after the biggest civil rights gains in their history. Inevitably, there are racists and classists telling the rioted against the worst conceivable things about the rioters: they are monsters, they're animals, they lack basic decency, they are killers. And it's made all the worse because in the back of everybody's mind, they know that the ungrateful victims have decent reasons to riot and kill.
Anyone who sells the least charitable interpretation of people who violently rebel against the world's expectations will get billions of buyers. So when people spread the lie that the Jewish nation commits the crimes of Hitler, billions are prepared to believe it, including the West: the same West who 20 years previously believed that in every assembly of Arabs was another potential bin-Laden.
6. Most people are not consciously antisemitic any more than they are consciously racist. We all have limbic system biases against people who are not us, and we all have attitudes that are historical vestiges from outmoded eras. Jews clearly have those outmoded attitudes toward Arabs, but it often seems that the entire world has outmoded attitudes toward Jews. It's 15 million of us vs. 8 billion of you.
We're not at war with the goyisher world, but existence for us was always a conflict in which huge swaths of us die. Israel is the first battle we've unequivocally won in two thousand years. All it takes is one victory, and you go back to sounding like your great-grandparents. Does it mean you're all antisemites? Only at the moments when you are, then you go back to being our friends as though all that never happened.
6.5 On the other hand...
7. At this point, 'ethnic cleansing' is 70-75% undeniable, and the eventual intent to commit ethnic cleansing is 100%, possibly higher... We keep moving the Gazans around their tiny area from mini-strip to mini-strip, as we reduce another area to rubble we'd reduced to rubble five times already. If there are takers for the Palestinians, who can possibly doubt the intent is to ship the Palestinians there? It'll be a second Naqba, and the crimes are already worse than the first. And even after all that, there are millions of Jews who want to perpetrate still much worse crimes.
At least there's reasonable doubt that the first Naqba happened the way the accusers say it did, there is no reasonable doubt about this one. Even if the death totals are not as high as the world thinks, even if the war practices are not as unethical as the world thinks, what's done to Gaza is undeniable and whenever this war is over, the visual evidence of it will pile higher than the Tower of Babel.
8. For every mass text of Gazan civilians to clear an area before a bombing starts, there's a report of a trigger happy Israeli soldier, fed propaganda about how all Palestinians are anima*s. For every report Israel gives Gazans multiple weeks to evacuate, there's a report that it's only 24 hours. For every assurance that every Israeli soldier is trained in minimizing the loss of human life, there's a report of orders to machine gun any group with too many people around an aid depot. For every likelihood that there's a Hamas killing made to look as though done by the IDF, there's an investigation in Haaretz exposing cold blooded mass murder.
It is so long since time we got rid of this notion that Israel spares the enemy more than any other country. Whether it was ever true, it's almost certainly a lie now, and there's a good chance it always was.
For many years, I bought this official line. including at least a year into this conflict. I was only biased in the sense that I was lazy and didn't look up the scholarly debate for myself. Once I looked it up, I believed that Israel is lying.
Why? Because Israel is telling the truth.
Israel currently claims that 50-60% of Gazans killed are civilians. International arbiters deemed that claim correct. What Israel lied about is that 80-90% of those killed in other urban wars are civilians. According to many war scholars, the true number of killed civilians is 40-70%.
How do we know that Israel is lying? Because Israel is always the side telling us hundreds of murdered civilians are actually combatants. This would contradict their own definition of who's a combatant.
It's clear as day that Israel is manipulating facts to serve their own claims, trusting that those well disposed for it will not check the claims of their propaganda.
Israel is a country like any other. Not special, not chosen. The only thing distinguishing it is its situation, to which it responds as awkwardly, lazily, and vengefully as any other country would.
8 1/2. But that's still a major accomplishment. Israel is not fighting a war where every civilian is a potential combatant, it is fighting a war where every citizen is a human shield. Everybody talks about the destruction of hospitals and schools with withering rage, yet the tactics of Hamas to put their tunnels in the most necessary areas to human life is their plan. Even this week, when it looked as though Gaza could lose another fifty thousand or more from famine, Hamas fed a picture to the Israeli press of a cadaverous Israeli hostage, digging a hole that might be his own grave. These are the people who on October 7th sent cellphone videos and photos to the parents of the young people they slaughtered.
Israel is now authoritarian, but Hamas is totalitarian. Israel dropped its guard on Hamas for just a few months, and the result wasn't a few suicide bombings, the result was an abbatoir of suffering, rape, and death. They are a party of death that can only thrive on death. They mean to secure their own power by getting as many of their subjects killed as they can. They want Israeli hearts as hardened as Pharoah's so they can isolate Israel and Jews from Westerners they eventually hope will look the other way as they slaughter us because we ostensibly had it coming.
We Jews are losing friends because on October 7th, that threat was proven real.
The fact that Israel can fight a war like any old country is its own accomplishment. It's an accomplishment the size of a normal country. Not a light unto nations blessed by God.
9. But at the same time as Hamas thrives, Hamas is dead. The idea that Hamas is any kind of military entity is now a joke. There is no reason to fight them like this. Hamas, or whatever party reconstitutes from its remains, will replenish the moment this war is over. Israel could reoccupy Gaza and a totalitarian Islamic party would still reconstitute itself. At least then, fighting this war would make sense, but right now, Gaza is just a place with nothing to eat but dust and pets.
But maybe they do have a way of destroying Hamas?
It took Israel twelve days to dispose of Hezbollah and the Iranian central command. They knew exactly how to destroy Hezbollah from the inside in a manner that decimated them forever: an operation that took ten years to plan and execute!
If they got through Lebanon and Iran in twelve days, how did they not have a similar operation in place for a much weaker group in a territory they controlled for forty years? It just doesn't make sense.
What has Netanyahu not used and why?
On one social media board of an acquaintance I saw someone allege that Israel knew October 7th would happen and deliberately didn't stop it. I lost my shit when I read that. I couldn't help it and I don't regret it. It was fucking incitement to hatred.
Yet when all this began, I had exactly the same thought and deliberately repressed it ever since. If the guy had said Netanyahu rather than 'Israel', maybe I'd have kept my cool.
...probably not.
10. When I pointed out on the same page that to call this a genocide when one one-hundredth of Palestinians died than Jews who died in the Holocaust is abominable, I read another justification on the same page in response, saying that we are calling it genocide to prevent the situation from becoming Hitler. Pre-emptive genocide I suppose...
I read other justifications when people were caught in exaggerations. That calling Israel to account for its sins is no different than it was in the nineteenth century to fight for the abolition of slavery, or to fight for civil rights in the sixties. In each case, it's to expose the world to a moral vision it finds inconvenient before its too late.
Well, maybe...
I didn't think much about this idiocy except annoyance until I read Omer Bartov do the same in the New York Times. Bartov is one of the world's great scholars on the Holocaust, and somehow, he did the same thing. Here's a quote from his recent essay:
"Some might describe this campaign as ethnic cleansing, not genocide. But there is a link between the crimes. When an ethnic group has nowhere to go and is constantly displaced from one so-called safe zone to another, relentlessly bombed and starved, ethnic cleansing can morph into genocide.
This was the case in several well-known genocides of the 20th century, such as that of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa, now Nambia, beginning in 1904; the Armenians in World War I; and, indeed, even the Holocaust, which began with the German attempt to expel the Jews and ended with their murder."
Fair enough, we'll call it ethnic cleansing. It's not too far a stretch at this point. Nevertheless there's a subtle sleight of hand at work: he said ethnic cleansing can move into genocide, but he never says how or why this instance has.
I firmly believe Israel is in danger of committing a genocide on the Palestinian people before too long. There's no sense in denying that now. All the ingredients are there: the mixture of Manichean self-esteem, ethnic segregation, territorial ambition, anti-Arab propaganda, of authoritarian dysfunction in the government, media blackouts as to what the army is doing in Gaza; this is the composition of a nation primed to commit the worst sort of act in the whole, dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime.
But a preemptive accusation of the lexicon's most sinister word does not strike me as wise. If the world already thinks the worst of Israel, how much lower can they sink? They might as well finish what the world says they started.
11. I've given the same spiel over and over again. It's kind of my thing. I've long planned a long series of novels about it that are never going to get written.
The spiel is this: What happens to the Jews happens soon to everybody else.
Over and over again in history, the destruction of Jewish communities spells the destruction of the communities which housed them. I could take you through thousands of years of examples. It's hardly a foolproof way to read history, even Jewish history, but it's hard for a Jew to read history and not notice a peculiar trend.
Donald Trump still has three and a half years in office. Or longer. But if his health doesn't make it through this term, JD Vance will succeed him. Vance is as smart as Netanyahu, as ambitious, and potentially quite as nefarious.
If October 7th happened in Israel, October 7th can happen here. Will it be from incompetence or nefarious planning? It doesn't really matter, because powerful people can exploit it. First would be an intermingling of mourning and gloating from the foreigners who say we deserved it. Then would come the rapid response that shocks the world. Then the war that suspiciously takes forever. And then?...
If October 7th killed over 1200, would such an event in a country with 30 times its population kill 36,000? If a country of 12 million can kill 60,000 or so over the course of two years, will a country thirty times that size kill 1.8 million? If the destruction in America were bad enough, how many Americans would even bat an eye at that number?
12. I don't remember why or exactly when, but last year amid all the fertumult of this war, I watched a few clips from Schindler's List. At the time, the official death toll was a mere 30,000 or so. And as I watched the 'I could have done more' scene; with the tattered clothes and gaunt, haunted faces of Jews with no future in a bombed out continent, I wept.
For whom?
Who'm I kidding. I know for whom..
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