I said yesterday that whatever happens to Jews happens to other people next.
What's the evidence?
Consider street terrorism - that fear we encounter every time we step out our houses; that's what Israelis encounter every day of my lifetime. Whether suicide bomb or mass shooting, it's a lottery. In a few years we'll be like Israel. If you don't know someone affected by a mass shooting, your friend will. If there become two a day rather than one and become politicized, what would Americans not do to stop them; liberal and conservative? Would we defund police if they were what stood between us and a right-wing militia barrel?
We can sum up life and history in this irony: the people you most wrongly revile are the people you become.
Along with the irony of terrorism, consider that of authority: the government you most fear is usually the one who won't kill you.
Israel's loathed by neighbors as an occupier. Israel-hatred props up many dictatorships, all of whom kill more people. To Israel's northeast border is a regime killing twenty times as many Arabs in ten years as Israel in seventy; to Israel's south, the oil regime responsible for planetary peril. Neither attracts more than a futile sigh, Israel attracts obsession.
In America, we're taught to hate certain groups, but who's more likely to kill us? Muslim terrorists or guns? Illegal aliens or unregulated companies? What's more likely to imprison us in a room? Chinese biological weapons or the United States justice system?
These ironies cut in all directions - not just how Jews are victims, but how Jews victimize.
Israel's #1 talking point is that it's the only democracy in a sea of dictatorship. The talking point works because it's true. Live in Israel and see if it takes a month to yearn for less democracy - 13 political parties in the Knesset and 35 unrepresented; yet it can't unseat a Prime Minister nobody likes, religious parties blackmail the process, Israelis were on the world's strictest Covid regulations, the religious population grows exponentially every generation, and Israel's youth is the most radically nationalist generation the country's ever seen. The more prosperous Israel becomes, the more it resembles Palestine.
In Trump's America, the closer we came to authoritarian rule, the more we resembled countries the CIA interfered with - compromised elections inaugurating a corrupt President chosen by agents abroad, the constant threat of political violence, the lure to radical political ideologies right and left, the constant presence of street protesting, and the worry that everything we say is recorded.
In all those third world countries, one can't help wondering - did they really lose anything by our involvement? Would their lives be better without America's presence? The unsentimental answer is 'probably not,' and they'd have been worse if left to Russian interference without Americans balancing the power.
We liberals would like to think that America's problems were surmountable before Trump, but the rot was all there: Impeachment, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Iraq, Katrina, Great Recession - all in 10 years. Did we deserve these disasters? Of course not. Were we complicit? A bit... Were we naive? Of course - and willfully naive; we had all the problems of a third world country and ignored them because we thought ourselves superior; but we're not superior and how dare we think so.
In all these cases, we can say people don't deserve misfortune; that's true, and yet we do.
Misfortune happens, and in retrospect, the reason's often obvious. We know what we should have done, but we did something else. Circumstances change over time, and we'd try something different if we knew the consequences.
Humans can become heroes, but none of us is born heroic. Most of us aren't good or bad, we just make decisions from a set of circumstances, and try though we might our decisions are usually wrong. Most of what happens we simultaneously deserve and don't.
The incipient war began for one of two reasons:
1. Israel's Prime Minister provoked a war with a totalitarian regime for his own gain.
2. Hamas provoked a war knowing it would look like Israel's Prime Minister provoked a war for his own gain.
Which one is almost immaterial. A country's leaders reflect their public as much as they shape it. Israelis and Palestinians allowed themselves leadership this bad, and here is the inevitable result. As we all do, Israelis and Palestinians both deserve and don't deserve their fates; but when you're living on the world's faultlines, you don't get away with anything, and faultlines are where Jews always live. Bad decisions which elsewhere take two generations to pay for take a month in Israel. From generation to generation, this is what it means to live as a Jew. It's sometimes what it means to die as a Jew.
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