How do you explain?: Day 24

There's nothing new in feeling betrayed by leftist friends. By the time I was 20, I learned that all too well. If you want to expose yourself to different points of view yet hang around any ideological wing long enough, they eventually betray every cause you thought they believed in - right as well as left, until you realize that you just don't believe in anything anymore. Last night a lefty friend I value wanted to engage me in talking about why I feel betrayed, but I just don't have the wherewithal to do it. How do you find common ground with them without putting you both through the ringer of how dialogue requires both sides to jump through hoops of logic that neither side believes are true?

I have no ideals left: I don't believe leftists that there is any such thing as justice, any more than I believe rightists that there is any such thing as security. I refuse to demonstrate on behalf of Israel because I refuse to advocate for what I think is an opening for the permanent collapse of Israeli democracy, but I refuse to pardon friends who demonstrate on behalf of Palestine - current or former. It's all a bag of shit, sold to us by a vengeful god as a way of determining who's an idolworshipper. The world has so few universal truths: there are only the practical considerations of the moment: problems you can only tackle one day at a time, one foot in front of the other until you make a chip into the problems, sustained only by the faith that eventually, you'll see the progress from where you were last month, last year, last decade, last epoch and era.

My rage is all spent for this fight. So many people 'find themselves' in wartime, I know I have in the past. The pulse of their righteous outrage goes through the roof. All I can find during this period is cynicism and sadness. We are three weeks out from the worst day in Jewish history since the Shoah, and already people are protesting against the world's only Jewish state for the crime of doing what any embattled country would do to survive. For now, the feeling of betrayal is especially acute and bitter, whether justified or not. Eventually you can forgive friends who do, but you can never forget, and you can't help but keep a list of the betrayers. Over and over again, I hear stories of Jewish family members getting harassed and grandchildren of my parents' friends. It says something that all the people getting harassed are younger than me. The writing on the wall is so clear. People see the world in what they think are newly minted moral absolutes, but these moral absolutes are as old as humans ourselves, and these moral absolutes bring as much death as they do progress and the progress is always at the Jews' expense. When ideology propels the world over practicality, Jews get killed.

People on every ideological side want to find common ground with waffly centrists, but if a whole generation of peace talks proved anything, it's that there is no common ground to be had, and if you say what you really think, you only make people madder. If you want to understand logic of either side, it requires them stepping through dimensional doorways of self-reinforcing logic. And of course they won't.

Even to a person on the other side of good faith from Israel's, how do you explain that a friend who believes that Israel's actions can be termed genocide that it's the lowest sort of betrayal to a Jew who lost his entire ancestry to genocide? To them, even the death of 10,000 is a genocide, but if that's genocide, then what is the death of six million, mostly in a period of two years, with the goal of the complete annihilation of our peoplehood? A goal that nearly succeeded on an entire continent where we'd already lived in states worse than persecution for more than a thousand years.

How do you explain that when it comes to violence against Jews vs. violence against Muslims, persecution of Jews matters more? It inevitably sounds like the Jewish form of racial supremacy, but it matters that there are more than a billion Muslims in the world and only fifteen million Jews. If enough Jews die, a whole peoplehood and memory goes up into smoke forever. Nobody would be left to mourn us, nobody would be left to value us, the whole memory of what we ever were would perish in just the manner that the entire memory of European Jewry already has. To a Jew, saying that every life is precious is like saying to African-Americans the dreaded phrase 'all lives matter.' How do you explain to them that there is little such thing as 'mere persecution' in Jewish history, and what starts as persecution often becomes outright desire to annihilate us within a period of a few years? It inevitably sounds to them as though we're saying that our demands are more important than theirs. It sounds that way not because they misunderstand us, it sounds that way because it IS that way, that's absolutely what most of us believe with all our might and souls and we make no apologies for it.

How do you explain to them that the American funding of Israel is not what gives Israel license to misbehave but rather what keeps Israel from misbehaving? Israel would have long since laid waste to the Arab world if not for the harness of American support. If they ever believed us, it would inevitably make them think the Israeli government is even more evil than they already think it is. How do you explain to people who believe foreign policy can be moral that you can only create morality in foreign policy through immoral compromises? How do you explain to them that if they create a standard for every other minority that when you accuse them of something that sounds like a racist trope, you're being racist; then by accusing Israel of siphoning American money and having undue influence on American foreign policy, they're antisemites by their very own standards? How do you explain to them that the very fact that they ignore other conflicts in world affairs which cost so much more life than the Israeli conflict is the basest level of hypocrisy? Even if it's not antisemitism, you can cut their bad faith with a cold butter knife.

How do you explain that what they term the military industrial complex is as inevitable as the private industries that grow around public health, education, and welfare? How do you explain that whatever may come from it in the future, military industry may be what's kept the peace for three generations? Many of them would explode at the very thought. How do you explain to them that if they think there should be constant government regulation in domestic affairs, then they're hypocrites if they think we can simultaneously be laissez-faire in foreign policy? How do you explain that if the US does not take a near-autocratic hand in running the world, then much more immoral governments will run the world and lay waste to whatever morality we squeeze into world affairs. Most on the Palestine side wouldn't just reject all that, they would reject the moral character of anyone who suggests any of it.

How do you explain without their laughing at our paranoia that Hamas and the like are exploiting their simple slogans like 'From the River to the Sea, Palestine Must Be Free' or 'Intifada until victory' to make their people believe that millions in the West are inciting them to the genocide of Jewish millions - directly related to the Palestinian Liberation Organization charter's mission statement to 'toss all Jews into the sea'? How do you explain to people who don't see the harm in constantly calling Israel an 'occupation' means to a few billion people that they too believe that the State of Israel should not exist in any form and must be ended?

How do you explain to them that even if pre-emptive war may kill everybody else, it may be what saves Jews? It probably would have saved us from Hitler in the 30s, a pre-emptive strike against Iraq in '81 saved Israel from Saddam hitting them with nuclear arms just as he hit them with scud missiles ten years later, and the fact that Israel never took a pre-emptive strike at Iran's nuclear facilities may have doomed Israel no matter how Israel otherwise behaves.


And for the moment, the most important of all, how do you explain to them that a ceasefire would only be used by Hamas to regroup and hog all the supplies for themselves? How do you explain to them that Hamas has deliberately not built shelters to house the dispossessed? How do you make them believe that Gaza has gotten twenty years of humanitarian aid and Hamas used nearly every bit of it to build 311 miles of tunnels underground? If you want to provide welfare for your citizens, you use the money to do exactly that, not for secret tunnels. How do you explain to them that you can't trust the UN votes against Israel's violations of human rights because Iran, the regime who means to wipe Israel off the map, heads the UN Human Rights Council? How do you make them believe the horror stories in a long series of intra-Muslim wars in the Middle East involving the deaths of multiple millions, often of the grizzliest variety? If this is what they do to each other, how much worse would they do to us? How do you make them believe that Israel has offered 1200 trucks of aid every day and negotiations broke down because Hamas refused 800 of them - probably because Hamas would no longer be able to control who gets the relief? How do you explain to them that their very support of Palestinian resistance gives cover to all the death threats received these days by Jewish college students all across America? How do you explain that Hamas would murder the very secular, progressive, and particularly queer people who voice support of Palestine most vociferously? How do you explain that a vast minority of Palestinians would cheer their execution? They would never believe any of it. How do you explain to them that Hamas means to get as many of their population murdered as they can and have declared so on al-Jezeera? How do you explain to them that a sizeable minority in the Arab world approve of Palestinian mass death because they believe more in the imperative of Islamic conquest than they do in peace and human rights? Most of them refuse to fathom the idea that people can be so evil.

How do you explain that the reason Israel seems like the bad guys is only because Israel's existence is the one time in Jewish history that Jews have successfully prevented the genocide that's beset them literally a dozen times in their history? Not just the collateral damage of less than 1% of a population but the real thing: 20-85% of the Jewish population over a large area of the earth. How do you explain to them that there are fates still much worse than a Naqba? How do you explain to them that Jews have encountered Naqbas of exile literally dozens times in their history, INCLUDING AN EQUIVALENT NAQBA IN 1948?

And yes, it's more complicated than that. It's all more complicated than all that. Every bit of it. That's history, not a narrative but a nuanced reconstruction of events in which every perspective is considered and critiqued. But if you want to understand the Middle East, you have to entertain every narrative BEFORE you dismiss them, exactly as how the worldwide right has to entertain all of the left's points before they dismiss their points in turn. In order to understand other people's reasoning, you HAVE to rid yourself of ideological, self-serving logic that inevitably proves your point of view. What is true for Palestine is also true for Israel. Israel turned rightward because the whole world rejected their point of view except for American-style liberals and American-style conservatives. Literally, the whole world else. When you reject the whole narrative of the other side, there is no peace to be had, there is only more provocation to the very war they claim they work to prevent.

A Brief Digression on Israel's Funding: Day 23

Much is made of Israel's hefty foreign aid from the US: more than $3 billion every year. It's a lot of money, and it also isn't. Israel has a GDP (gross domestic product) of almost $500 billion every year. So on the one hand, Israel seems like it doesn't need the money, and believe it or not, there are calls across the political spectrum to cut it in both countries - nearly as many on the right as on the left, so it probably won't last much longer.

So why is it there?

The answer is: it's a public endorsement, a statement of credibility on both sides. In this arrangement, the US gets the use of Israeli intelligence (of which General George J. Keegan said is 'worth more than five CIA's'), and Israel gets confidence from American investors without parallel in any other country. Put those two facts together, and what do you get? Israel's favored nation status is not the reason Israel 'misbehaves', it's reason Israel doesn't 'misbehave much worse.' So long as Israel exists publicly under the US's embrace it will act in the interests of a place like the US and not drop a host of WMD's on the Arab world, which their government threatened to do in 1973, just before the funding started... People think they want to find out what happens when that check goes away, but I really don't think they do.

Day 22

  I'm not going to link to it, but it's impossible to give any kind of balanced thought on the day you watch something like what happened in Russia. However tough it is to watch for everyone else, I doubt any Jew could watch it and have any clear thought about the future.

Did We Invent Modern Cancel Culture?: Part 1: Day 21

Keeping score of which side suppresses free speech more is a fruitless endeavor. Even if the pro-Israel side has obviously done less in the last few weeks, especially since the pro-Israel side has done less, knowing that only serves to embolden people on the other side of the discourse. The pro-Israel side has done plenty to fight dirty against pro-Palestine protestors: from withdrawing university donations, to trying to collect a blacklist of people who belong pro-Palestine organizations, to calling for deportations of non-citizens who demonstrate for Palestine to corporate pressure campaigns. We'll get into the many more strongarm tactics of the Palestine crowd another day, but the fact that the pro-Israel dirty tricks are few enough to mention in a long sentence tells you that, ultimately, it's not a very serious smear campaign. The pro-Israel side has done too much to play the martyr role, and too little to fight this PR war effectively. Like any war, you fight the PR war dirty, or you don't fight it at all.

But the bigger problem is that there should never have been a PR war, and the fact that there is is mostly our side's fault. Andrew Sullivan suggested today that perhaps modern cancel culture can be traced back to American Jews' tactics on behalf of Israel. This argument's been in my head all day. It's not a great argument, but it's a valid one, and I can't just dismiss it.

For the last few years I've soft-pedaled talk about cancel culture. I didn't want to lose any more friends than I already have, but for more than ten years I've been warning about various incarnations of intersectionality, critical race theory, general 'wokeism' (whatever it means...), and yes, cancel culture. I've been warning that this is the new Marxism, year-by-year turning earnest progressives into hardened far leftists willing to excuse violence wherever they see it so long as it's not committed by their own state. Country after country has lost itself to totalitarian government because run-of-the-mill liberals and conservatives thought they could work with their greater extremes, and by making them collaborators in the political process, thought they could control the hard wings of their discourse. But hard wings of the discourse are hard because they have the will to do things the softer among us would never countenance. Political process is just a triviality to them, and by their own admission, they believe society's issues are too urgent to ever wait a moment longer for a solution. Once you let them help govern, it's only a matter of time before they push you out, not the other way around.

There is no controlling extremists, be they Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Trump may be more nefarious than Sanders, and he's certainly quite a bit more powerful, but what the two share in common is that they don't want the political process to work. Their whole reason for getting involved at the Presidential level is to destroy the poltiical process so that their vision of government can take over. Inevitably, they get some sympathy by not-as-extreme people on their side, tired of politics's slow bore, who hear the unsubtle heat of their rhetoric and inevitably think to themselves 'well, of course, they have a point...' And, of course, both of them do have points: even Trump, but when you paint a world in two-dimensions, you willfully try to make your audience forget the context, and the context is EVERYTHING.

Whether or not cancel culture was anything more than a trivial matter on the world stage, it absolutely exists and has since the beginning of the internet. Trump's election and 'metoo' shifted cancel culture into high gear, because the one place progressives had control over was their own side. Progressives absolutely have the right to oppose people whom they feel don't speak for their values, but getting rid of any but convictionable offenders turned out to be extremely unwise, and that was eminently predictable.

Getting rid of Al Franken rid us of one of our most effective liberal senators during a period when government was so dysfunctional that the only people who can get parts of it working properly was senators like Al Franken, and until metoo, he seemed the only politician whose approval could unite the various wings of the Democratic party. There's an alternate universe where Al Franken is our two-term President and Donald Trump is still just a reality star. Stripping Louis CK of his high platform only made him a martyr, and now he's returned a hero of the very crowd that embraces toxic masculinity. Cancelling Kanye for his various remarks only proved him uncancellable and gave a blueprint of how cancelled celebrities can keep their careers going so long as they don't shut up. And JK Rowling... well, it's only made her double down, use more of her platform for anti-trans remarks, and donate more of her billion to anti-trans campaigns.

This is the world we live in, but the difference between current Democrats and Republicans is this: Democrats cancel cultural figures for their personal actions, Republicans cancel cultural figures for their votes.

And that is why they win.

Imperialism vs. Totalitarianism: Day 20

Here's what it comes down to. What do you think is the bigger world threat? An imperial world in which people at the bottom of privilege continue to be controlled by people at privilege's top, or a world of dictatorship in which millions are controlled by a small group of violent people whose object is ultimate control over your person.

Where you are on this issue dictates your place in the Israel/Palestine debate. You can say 'I don't want either,' but the chances you perceive both threats as absolutely equal are miniscule. The world is full of difficult choices, and ultimately we all have to make one.

The irony is that for all the attention Israel/Palestine gets, Israel/Palestine is nearly the least clear-cut example of this dichotomy. Israel is thought the ultimate colonialist power of our time when Jews were literally the most marginalized group by colonial powers for two thousand years, were thrown out of Israel by Rome, the most awesome colonial power that ever was, and only allowed their own country because their population was annihilated to an extent that makes Rome look like Switzerland.

Meanwhile Palestine had no chance for any totalitarian dictatorship until Israel evacuated Gaza in 2005 - a point when the worst sort of dictatorships were established in Iran and Iraq, it was still disputed by the many right wingers throughout the world that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people or if they were just southern Syrians or a collection of tribes having nothing to do with each other. Before 1967, what we now call Palestine was simply parts of Jordan and Egypt.

Furthermore, there is imperialism, and then there's imperialism, and there's totalitarianism, and then there is totalitarianism. One totalitarianism is kleptocracy, the elimination of active political enemies, mass surveillance, and practice of the art of fear to instill compliance. This is the majority of dictatorships, including in the Middle East. Then there is the totalitarian cult of murder, the dictatorships which depend on an absolute enemy whom they can kill, and once they eliminate this enemy, they require new enemies whom they can similarly eliminate, with every citizen terrified that they and loved ones are next. This is the dictatorship of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kim family, it is also the dictatorship of Saddam, Bashar al-Assad, Omar al-Bashir in Sudan,and Idi Amin. It must be noted that the vast majority of these mass murderers did so in the name of anti-colonialism. There were certainly traditional right-wing military regimes which killed with this devastating alacrity: Suharto in Indonesia, Mobuto Sese Seko in Congo, Ismail Enver Pasha of Turkey, but on the whole, this was more a revolutionary phenomenon than a reactionary one, and a point the left still has not come to terms with.

But there are also the mass imperial murders, done in the name of civilization but clearly as a cover for kleptocracy. But again, there is imperialism and then there is imperialism. There are the imperial powers like Britain and France which left at least a patina of functionality in their regions: infrastructure, sanitation, medicine, general rule of law. And then there are the imperial slaveholders who worked their conquered populace to death in order to maximize their profit margins. This is the imperialism of King Leopold of Belgium, responsible for somewhere between 2 and 10 million deaths in the Congo (population 20 million at his start). This is the imperialism of the vast majority of Spanish conquistadors - most of whom were far less ethical even than Christopher Columbus, this is the imperialism of 1930s Japan, determined to exercise their complete control over the former Chinese empire, and it is the imperialism of the Dutch West India company in Indonesia, who utilized murder as a means to maximize their profits.

And then there are the ambiguous cases. On the one hand, the British Empire is technically responsible for famines in India on the most massive scale, 2 or 3 million dying of starvation at a time. But on the other, it would seem that the death totals of their Indian famines were, if you can believe it, less deadly than when India ruled itself under the Mughal dynasty. And then there are the ambiguous dictatorships where you're not really sure whether they are merely authoritarian governments instead of full-on totalitarian. An obvious example is the Islamic regime in Iran, which in the 1980s had instances of mass murder on the most colossal scale during the Iran-Iraq War: and yet today, no truly totalitarian regime could have a culture that thrives with near-freedom of expression as Iran's does.

The world is not worth giving up on, but it is a far darker place than first world countries give it credit for being. There are colonialisms and dictatorships that we simply must tolerate as the price for living in the world, because either is better than a failed state at civil war where death can come from any direction, and quite often does.

So is Israel an imperial power, and is Palestine a totalitarian dictatorship? Well, both have elements of the two. There is no question that Israel exists on land once lived on by the ancestors of Palestinians, and whether they were cleared off of it by Israelis or by rich Arabs or both, they were absolutely cleared off of it and packed tightly into fallow places. There is equally no question that the Gaza run by a kleptocratic dictatorship that, even if it doesn't mean to bring mass murder on their own people, mean to visit murder on the Israelis nothing short of genocide in the millions.

It gets still more complicated, because Palestine clearly has imperial ambitions, and Israel is clearly beginning to resemble a dictatorship. If there is a binational state, don't kid yourself, Palestine would be as much an imperial occupier as Israel currently may be. If a binational state is run by the current West Bank leadership: a Fatah culture of kleptocracy, they would exploit Isreali's technical means while denying the same rights to Israelis that Israel currently denies to Palestinians. On the other hand, Israel is beginning to resemble a dictatorship, and cannot dislodge its's leader who's been in power since 2009, even though everybody's wanted to for years, and even after he oversaw the biggest disaster in the history of the country, they still can't do it.

So ultimately, it comes down to what you think the greater threat to the world's well-being is. Personally, I'm very firmly on the side that totalitarianism is worse. There are legitimate arguments to take the other side, but imperialism does not cost as many lives as totalitarianism. The reason? So many of the very worst dictatorships were established in the name of anti-colonialism, and because of that, so many of them were excused by leftists who believed that ending colonialism was the most important of all goals. Many people point out how deeply unpopular imperialism is in the third world, and that's absolutely true. But, believe it or not, there once were many natives who approved of it everywhere. The reason you don't hear about them? Millons of them were killed, liquidated as a class, deemed enemies of the new states, collaborators with the imperial occupiers, and killed en masse with a speed and number and intention that imperialism, on the whole, did not equal quite as often, and when it did, was often little worse than the native rulers who came before and after them. Once you're dead, you have little reason to take pride in whether you were killed by a native power or a foreign occupier. And it's not like imperialism was ever less frequent in the East and South before the West got there.

But then we look toward the future, and we see just how quickly the supercorporations of tech have placed a stranglehold on the world economy. Companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now as powerful as certain first world states. They will dictate the policy of entire countries, and the chances that their power will be checked is unlikely. Each of these companies has a chance to deregulate the world economy to the point that they work millions and millions to death in slave conditions. Companies have worked the planet into a global warming that could easily kill a billion people or more, and any chance refugees will be saved depends on the willingness of countries to welcome millions of immigrants wholesale from countries whose cheap labor we already depended on for our prosperity.

But then again, there is no predicting that the anti-imperial governments who follow will have any less blood on their hands. History would seem to show that extremely unlikely.

And still further, the very worst totalitarian regimes, the majority of Roman Emperors, Hitler's Germany, Mobutu's Congo, the Spanish conquistadores, are, basically, what we would call right wing regimes that combine the very worst of totalitarianism and imperialism, regimes so bloody that there is no true word for this kind of regime yet coined.

So yes, the future could very much prove anti-totalitarians extremely wrong in the way we prioritize history, and ultimately, it is a question of perception. However you interpret history and world events, and it is very fair to say that your interpretation can reliably predict your exact feelings on the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The End of the Jewish Era - Day 19

 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/HksnkliM1mQ...

I don't know how I got it into my head as a litle kid that I could be like Leonard Bernstein or Vladimir Horowitz, but at 6, that notion was definitely there and impossible to dislodge. All you had to do to understand how I got it was turn on PBS and you'd see the two of them, or Itzhak Perlman, or Isaac Stern, or Beverly Sills, or (gulp) James Levine, or one of a couple dozen other famous Jewish classical musicians and you see right away that representation on a screen matters every bit as much as people say it does.

The problem is the other side of that coin everyone wants to forget these days: representations are the ultimate poisoned chalice, the devil luring young people into the siren song of promises that never materialize. No matter how good you get, no matter how hard you work, it's all luck. It's all who falls backwards into the right mentor, the critic who's there for when you fill in for the main act, a recording executive who feels generous that day, Everybody wants the option for success but nobody wants to think of what goes into that success: the premature surrender of childhood and innocence, the lives subordinated to the goal - not just the life of the celebrity but the celebrity's family and all their handlers, the lifelong identity as a product more than a person, the anxiety of failing to deliver the product that people pay to experience, and the withdrawal of approval and love that follows. People think they can domesticate celebrity, people think they can make the circumstances around celebrity better, but the value comes from the scarcity: if you make the circumstances around celebrity better, celebrities cease to be celebrities. The whole reason celebrities exist is because humans need god replacements: a space for us to behave irrationally and gossip like peasants about which knight is hooking up with which lady. If they're just like everybody else, they're boring, and if we've figured out how to make their lives better before figuring out how to make our own better, then celebrities truly will be better than the rest of us....

I suspect among Jewish guys I was only extraordinary in that regard for having chosen that career path having been born in the 1980s, when most of my peers had no idea who they were. Immature as I remain at 41, I was a prematurely mature little shit, watching videotapes of PBS Great Performances of the New York Philharmonic and Public Theater when most kids were playing with GI Joe and Barbie.

But if you were watching during that period, you couldn't help but notice the utter disproportionality of successful Jews in the arts, and I didn't grow up wanting to be a Jew, I just grew up with the notion that the world's most successful people were Jews. If you wanted to be a movie director, there was Spielberg, if you wanted to be a comedian, there was Seinfeld, if you wanted to be a rockstar, there was Dylan, if you wanted to be a painter, there still was Chagall (though let's face it, our novelists slightly underperformed..), if you wanted to be known throughout the world as a great figure of the arts, that just seemed like a legitimate career option. And if your longings to succeed stretched beyond the realm of the arts, there were equivalent men of science, academia,business, visionaries of every field. The only realms that seemed closed to us were US President and... ahem... athletes.

How distant that period seems now. The hunger to achieve success in that stratosphere is long gone among Jews. Now we have Drake, and..., and as the hunger to achieve success goes, so do the avenues for those who want to achieve it.

Jews never counted among minorities, Jews never counted among whites. We exist, as we always have, in that neither region of the model minority who needs no leg up, and soon, as the only people neither white nor of color, we may be the only people with positions are so insecure that we are mistrusted by every side of the world's discourse, 'court Jews' taken only as accepted members so long as our politics line up with yours, told that we simply have to wait our turn like everybody else, but relegated as ever before in Jewish history to the line's back.

It is still too painful and too dangerous to wade into these waters. I will but I'm just not ready yet, but the rage in me boils no less than those who try to be less impartial or nuanced, and if this fury courses through me, how much worse must it be for Jews who try not to see it from the goyim's point of view.

Not that it matters to anyone but us, but we Jews have no avenue for our rage in America. After the same brief sojourn into prosperity we had everywhere else, we are the same dancing monkeys existing on your whims, back to existing amid the terror that one day your fury at us will be far greater than the fury of any Israeli military.

Night Off: The Two Most Important Paragraphs I Wrote (you will be offended) - Day 18

Still another, more biased to the Palestinians, is that though the empires have fallen, the world is still controlled by white people as an imperial vestige. White people view people of color as expendable, their concerns and opportunities immaterial. Gazan Palestinians exist in a state worse than segregation, they live in a ghetto as packed as any Jewish ghetto in Venice, stripped of precisely the opportunities Israelis take for granted. Whether there was a Palestinian peoplehood in 1948 or a collection of disparate peoples forced off their lands, there is very much one now, forged in a cauldron of poverty and squalor. Whether they were ejected from their land by Jews or ejected by rich Arab overlords looking to make money by selling the land to Zionists, they were ejected from their land and have every right to believe their land was stolen from them. From 1948 onward, there were most definitely atrocities committed against them by Jews and perhaps mass atrocities by any standard. Entire generations live and die trapped in the very medieval ghettos that define Jewish history, and somehow most Jews are blind to how they've become the oppressors they finally cast off. Palestinians are expected to accept their circumstances as the price for living a dispensable life. Palestinians are told that their independence is not a right, but a reward for an impossible standard of good behavior. Their entire religion is dismissed as a disgrace to civilization. The few of them lucky enough to emigrate are often treated by their new countries as an existential threat. The few of them lucky enough to work in Israel are often fired due to baseless suspicions, and merely to work in Israel must subject themselves to humiliating searches, suspicions, questioning, and sometimes assaults. Most importantly, a full half of today's Gazans are under 18: children told to resign their entire life story to a land of desolation. The world expects them to accept these humiliations without resorting to terror, without wanting vengeance, without viewing those who fight their occupiers as heroes, and to accept circumstances unabideable in a thousand ways without resorting to precisely the self-defensive violence that allowed for the State of Israel. There is no less a mountain of evidence for this view as for the Jewish view of the pornographic interest in Jews' moral failings, and anyone on the pro-Israel side who does not see some validity in these arguments is out of touch with reality. The vast majority of Israel's supporters willfully repress these notions wherever they encounter them, in themselves, in each other, and in worldwide discourse. One plurality of Jews reacts to these points with sanctimonious crocodile tears as a means of dismissing these points. Another Jewish plurality reacts to their mere suggestion with a contemptuous rage that is terrifying to behold.

Yet what that argument doesn't take into account is that while innocent children deserve no oppression, their parents voted themselves into a totalitarian state, and when parents abdicate their responsibiity to their children, the parents' enemies should be the last people expected to take responsibility for children taught to kill particularly them. It ignores that until this conflict, the Jordanian Civil War had a higher Palestinian death toll than anything in Gaza or the West Bank (Lebanon is another story): Jordan is 70% Palestinian, and yet nobody refers to what goes on in their country as apartheid. When the Israeli borders were first drawn up, it included the entirety of Jordan, so it's arguable that Jordan, 4 times Israel's size, is the true Palestinian homeland. It ignores that Hamas, and Islam itself, has violent injunctions against Jews written into their founding documents. It ignores that hundreds of millions of Muslims around the entire world are oppressed similarly by Muslim dictators in Muslim countries and massacred in far more lethal numbers -and somehow Jews particularly are blamed for what Islam does so often to itself much more brutally. Even now, as terrible as it is, the average person has a much better chance for a long life as a Gazan under Israeli occupation than they would as an Iraqi under Saddam, a Syrian under Assad, a Lebanese during their civil war, an Afghan at any period between 1979 and 2002, an Armenian or Anatolian under Ismail Enver, and literally dozens of other Islamic regimes. It ignores that just as the Palestinians experienced a Naqba of exile, so too did a virtually equivalent number of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, forced by their countries leave for Israel in the very same 1948. It neglects that there was a second Naqba of Palestinians from Kuwait, 270,000 of which were ejected in 1991. And again, it ignores that many Muslim dictators find the oppressive circumstances of the Palestinians extremely useful: endowing their propaganda filled newspapers with a nation of infidels ready made to hate that distracts people from their immediate oppressors - a nation of people who've been hated unremittingly for 3000 years. Jews were oppressed by white people more than 2000 years before most people of color knew what a white person was, and even after people of color encountered the white man's rage, Jews still were white people's favorite scapegoat at home. The crocodile tears of the pro-Palestine side is just as sanctimonious, and, from my view, the rage quite a bit more terrifying. The pro-Palestine crowd raises ignoring the context of Israel's situation to an art, and those who excuse Palestinian acts of violence raise anticolonialism to an authoritarianism that would excuse the bloodiest butcheries of leftist totalitarians like Stalin and Mao.

Eycha - The Book of Lamentations: Day 17

 

It's too late at night to start on another big writing project for this diary, but if I stop writing I leave myself to the mercy of reading on the internet, and that will do me in.

So instead, I'm going to start a series I've thought about for a week in which I write about some books relevant to the situation. So let's start with an obvious one. Eycha - The Book of Lamentations, which I've written a little about before. Even if there's TMI about Jeremiah's hemorrhoids, it is one of the great literary masterpieces of the Bible, and unlike many others, it takes about ten minutes to read.

But before that, let's briefly go back eighteen years, because it was a few days before my 24th birthday when I realized the full power of the Bible. A friend committed suicide just an hour after saying a personal goodbye to me. I was living in Israel, dozens of us were in mourning, and all of us mourned in our own way. Even music gave me no comfort, so I did what I (somehow) promised myself I wouldn't do in Israel and opened the Bible. As I quietly chanted along with the words of Ecclesiastes, I wept as I read.

I turn to the Bible in trouble, not for the word of God but for the spiritual comfort which only great art provides. if the Bible is not God's word, then The Bible is a curation of the best stories and poetry written over a thousand years in one of the world's first literary cultures. The Bible is, almost literally, an anthology put together (and edited) for public use. Whose use? Well, I can venture an extremely uneducated guess that it reached its final anthologized form at the court of the Hasmoneans (Maccabees), which is why the Books of Maccabees are not counted in the Jewish version of the Old Testament. I'm sure some biblical history professor has taught a class that reads the Bible in an historical context: starting with Miriam's Song of the Sea and ending with Song of Songs.

The Bible, like all the great religious texts, tells us truths far deeper than the religions they inspire. They make us see the eons progress, and dispel us of the illusion that there is any such thing as progress. Whether any religion is at all true, the impulse that makes people turn to religion is true: that sinking feeling that when you expect fulfillment to be derived from social action, you will likely fail to find it. Whether it's through religion, or art, or science, or learning itself, fulfillment is derived by contemplating mystery, not from solving it. What the history of politics teaches us is that for all the victories we fought so hard to deserve, every battle is eventually a losing one, and just like in the life cycle, every civilization is in a battle to maintain prosperity and health, but eventually, everything that lives must die.

And that's why a sacred text like the Bible is deeper even than the greatest secular texts. For me, nothing in even Shakespeare compares. I've said it before in these spaces, but Shakespeare, so influenced by classical Greece and Rome, is about great men and nobles. He's every bit as great as everyone says, but in Shakespeare, everyone is outsize, everyone is extravagant, everyone is too quick to fall in love and react with hatred. Shakespeare is a map of human personality because he can magnify our personal evolution to seconds which in real life takes years to unfold.

The Bible is not about great men. Sure, the Bible has plenty of Shakespearean kings with operatic recitations, but most of its great men are small men. The forefathers and prophets are all outsiders, weirdos, and not nearly so virtuous as their reputations. They're rejected by their fellow men and isolated for what they foresee, viewed with contempt all the moreso for their eloquence. Shakespeare's greatest characters feel lonely in the company of other people, but characters in the Bible are most ecstatic when lonely. Moses sees the burning bush while alone on the mountain, Joseph interprets dreams in prison and his father dreamed while exiled to a rock, Isaiah is alone when he sings to his vine and Jeremiah only curses God after he's taken out of the stocks.

Eycha was composed by Jeremiah, the Bible's resident depressive; the book is chanted on Tisha B'Av, a holiday so depressing that Jewish day schools tell kids it's in the summer. Supposedly, he composed it in the midst of Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC, though the destruction of King Solomon's temple is just one among the dozens of times Jerusalem was destroyed.

Look at the structure of Eycha first: Five chapters, 22 verses in the outer four - representing the 22 letters of Hebrew's alphabet, and 3x22 verses in chapter three, the central chapter. The whole thing is 7x22: a book of perfect form. Judaism is huge on numerology and 'seven' in Judaism doesn't just represent the days of the week: in ancient Hebrew there are seven terms for Heaven and seven terms for the earth. There are seven laws in the Covenant with Noah, seven weeks for the Spring Harvest. seven days of Sukkot and Passover (in Israel). David was the seventh son of his family, and every sabbath, the Torah reading is divided into seven intervals. Not to mention, the Menorah in the Biblical Temple had seven lamps.

But the form would barely matter if it didn't house content. What is revolutionary about Eycha is that it's one of the few books in the Bible courageous enough to ask aloud if God stopped caring.

In the first chapter, the destroyed Jerusalem is compared to a violated woman. Jerusalem's rape is clearly likened to a woman's, and just in case it seems as though that has a patriarchal trivialization of women's trauma, try to remember that every sacking of a city is generally compounded by the behavior of the conquering soldiers. Surely Jeremiah was composing from the scenes he witnessed. "All that honor her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness... Her filthiness is in her skirts, she had no comforter... Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?... The lord hath trodden the virgin... as in a winepress." I will not press its contemporary relevance any further.

The second chapter is terrifying, it is about God's anger, and literally declares: "The Lord was as an enemy." The Bible, like the greatest literature, is visceral at the level of language. Whether in the compact Hebrew original or the florid English glories of King James Bible, the feel of the language is as tactile as anything in Shakespeare or Dante. Read some of the English in line 4: "He hath bent his bow like an enemy, he hath stood with his right hand as an adversary, and slew all that were pleasant in the tabernacle of the daughter of Zion, he poured out his fury like fire." Read it again, look at that alliteration, feel how tactile it is in the mouth: "bent his bow" "as an adversary" then a phrase with no alliteration - as though he is bending back a bow again, and then releases a linguistic arrow "he poured out his fury like fire.": an arrow of words flies through eternity, so memorable that even Donald Trump quoted it. In the Hebrew it's no less visceral: Hebrew is a tactile language, full of consonants, but in Hebrew it's the vowels that do the heavy lifting. The ornate: "He hath poured out his fury like fire" becomes the very compact "Shafakh ka'esh. Khamato." Five 'ah' sounds in three words.

The form completely changes in chapter 3 to terser sentences for a much more direct tone. It's entirely possible that chapter 3 was a separate poem fused into the middle, but whoever redacted it made it make great formal sense. The themes obviously go together. This is where the accusations against God go into high gear. There are fifteen separate accusations beginning with 'He hath.' Finally, in accusation 16 he directly accuses God with a 'Thou hath.' That basically is the first third, the middle third sounds like a man in captivity, trying to assure himself that his captor is merciful. Perhaps the captor is the divine voice in the head of a crazy man. Perhaps the captor is an army holding captives ransom. But the last third goes back into the accusations, and switch to 'thou hast': direct accusations against God in the Bible itself.

And now we get to the horrifying chapter 4, which describes famine: "They that are slain with the sword than they that are slain with hunger." and documented in an incident which happened everywhere from the Roman destruction of Jerusalem to the Holomodor famine of 1930s Ukraine: a mother cannibalizing her own children. The English softens the phrase to "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children," but the ever more direct Hebrew makes it definite what's happening: "Y'dei. Nashim rakhamaniyot--bishlu" Bishlu - boil.

Chapter 5 is in the laconic form of chapter 3. It's a little underpowered next to the tactile horror of the previous chapters. It sums up the themes already addressed, like the final paragraph of a high school essay. And yet there's a final peroration "Thou, o Lord, are enthroned forever, Thy throne is from generation to generation. Wherefore dost Thou forget us ever, and forsake us so long time?" It sums up the whole thing: OK, God is wroth with us, but we have a right to be wroth at God too.

The Bible is greater than any religion. It's the book Jews have to turn to when they inevitably realize that progress is a myth. Conservatives and progressives have different explanations for why civilizations collapse: progressives generally see history as a linear progression, progress built upon progress and the civilizations fall because of their failure to keep up with necessary progress when progress is demanded. Conservatives believe civilizations fall precisely because progress is demanded. To them, civilizations rise because of their values and fall because of failure to keep those values. Of course, the truth is neither, and both. Some progress delays civilizational collapse, some hastens it, and we have no idea which is which, because eventually, civilizations fall. Period. There is no wherefore or why except in the realm of hypothesis. What remains of civilizations is two things:

1. Their art: their books, their buildings and pictures, their history and philosophy, and eventually, their music and movies - all of which is a record of their entire times and worldview and disappears like the conservative circle of rise and decline. And thereafter, it's a new society can write their particular cultural history with their particular worldview.

2. Their learning, their science, their math, their technology, all of which is a record of how those before us progressed, and evolved the species over time to make particularly us, and always there for civilizations thereafter to stand on the shoulders of their progress.

We too will disappear. We don't know when, and it will be tragic for those remaining, but we are part of a continuum of being so much bigger than us, As we can't pull a leviathan through a fishhook, we can't see what the inner plan is of existence, but God or not, there is a cosmos that has a cause and a reason, and Someone out there knows what it is.

Brother Bibi - Conclusion - Day 16

 

So this is still about Israel and Netanyahu, but we're going to begin with Thomas Mann. Mann is generally thought the greatest German author of the 20th century and symbol to the free world of how even a barbarian like Hitler could not destroy the greatness of German culture, which could not be destroyed even if Thomas Mann was exiled to Beverly Hills.

In 1939, Mann wrote an essay called Bruder Hitler - Brother Hitler, in which he tried to examine what Hitler;s followers saw in him and the culpability of establishment liberal/conservatives like him in bringing him to power. Hitler was, in spite of it all, 'my brother', and as a German, there is no dissociating Mann from Germany's collective complicity.

Now, let's be clear: in absolutely no way does Netanyahu resemble Hitler except in his wasteful incompetence in military matters. But even we in the Jewish world who hate him are culpable for his rise and his maintenance of power. Even as we opposed his policies, for fifteen years we benefited from the prosperity he brought and our wellbeing benefited from the security we thought he gave us.

Under Netanyahu, Israel reached an absolute zenith of its prosperity, and it's hard to believe it won't take decades to rebuild whatever's soon to be destroyed.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i've scrawled my endless annoyance with everything Israeli on my media, and yet, yes, it's more home to me than home itself. I want to be buried on the Mount of Olives, I want my soul to see the city at the center of history to watch it unfurl.

For all my exasperation, Israel is a family quarrel and when your family behaves destructively, you're reminded of how much you love them all the more. As I love America, which gave my family everything after Europe destroyed them, I love Israel, which I suspect is the reason America loves us. But I see the self-destructive ways they're both behaving and I'm helpless to stop them. I didn't enjoy living there, but every day now I'm thinking of those landscapes and that lifestyle and old friends and acquaintances and irritants with a painful nostalgia I'd have dismissed last week as performative bullshit.

Non-Jews always find something weird in the way Jews talk about their connection to Israel. Let's not lie, it IS weird. When you go there, it's like you're gripped by a sudden awareness that you've been an outsider your whole life, and your vague feelings of not belonging elsewhere have a reason. I don't doubt it's a false sense of belonging for people who need a meaning beyond their not quite satisfying lives, but this longing for Zion is real, and once you feel it you can never unexperience it. It's a longing for something more than fitting in, it's a longing to be part of something so large that being in its very presence illuminates. You see that desert and those fig trees, and you feel linked to a great chain of being, a great society linking the long dead to the not yet born, and you know that this is your chapter to write in a larger story that means something true. Whether you believe in God or you believe in nothing, you see that the larger story of Jewish history means something simply because it happened. The very facts of the Jewish story are irrational. Dozens of times, we should not have survived - a fact proven by how many of us didn't. Yet here we are, the product of those few who did, comparatively thriving in societies we know will eventually kill us just as every society did before them. God knows, Israel is not the proof that we will survive this time, but Israel is the proof that our suffering has reasons.

Once you experience something that powerful, the temptation is always there to think those before us suffered particularly for us, so we could come home, so we could achieve the reunion with the land they bled for for two thousand years. And even if we're not the reason for it , what amid a story as eternal as ours is fifteen years of false security?

But God makes Jews foot the bill for everything: for every moment we put too much faith in something other than absolute humility, he makes us pay in blood. In this case, 'humility' means everything from how we conduct ourselves in interpersonal dealings to how we deal with the international stage. The humiliating lesson of God is not that we should approach the world with our heads down, it's that we should never believe we have the true answer: there is no philosophy of how to approach to problems that always works. There are always exceptions, provisos, codicils, stipulations, caveats, appendices.

One can say that no one in Israel was responsible for what happened, one can say that everyone was responsible, but neither is quite correct. Only one side of Israeli discourse held vastly disproportionate power for an entire generation, and only one side elected their candidate precisely because they knew his filth of character, and they liked it. They so believe in what they believe that their hatred for those who oppose them became greater than their love of country. And just as He did in Biblical times, God punished the State of Israel in a manner so brutal, so unjust, so disproportionate, that one has to question His goodness, because if He exists, He heard the cries of the Palestinians, and punished Israel in exactly the manner He punished Palestine: only for Palestine's still greater hubris, He punished them still worse.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just because I think the Israeli side is more right than the Palestinian does not mean that the other side of the argument can be ignored. Just because I think the Israeli left is more right than the Israeli right does not mean that the other side of the argument can be ignored. Even if I disagreed with any of the three 100%, the other sides cannot be ignored because any solution that does not involve the eventual annihilation of the Palestinian people involves concessions to them all. When solutions become too drastic, one becomes the barbarity one supposedly abhors.

In any disagreement, someone is always more 'right. The chance that two people who disagree see an issue equally well is infinitesimally unlikely. Someone always has a slightly better view, someone always has slightly better points, but that does not mean the other person has no legitimate grievances, or insights, or solutions.

When two people are in the same boat on an ocean, it's highly likely that both are needed to get back to shore. One can try to toss the other into the sea, but the chance the murderer would survive is much less. If Israel annihilates Palestine, Israel too will eventually be annihilated. The genocidal precedent will be set, and some nuclear power in the international community will eventually go to total war with Israel and show them the precise lack of mercy they showed to Palestine. If Palestine and its allies annihilate Israel, Palestine will inherit a land soaked in blood, and the internecine warfare between factions will never stop until one faction emerges victorious in a generation-long totalitarian state of murder. If there is a binational state, a future civil war would be a foregone conclusion. If the status quo's maintained, the death tolls simply pile up until one of these solutions present themselves.

So that leaves the two state solution: a terrible solution among much shittier ones.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Israel is 75 years old, and Netanyahu is still Israel's only long term Prime Minister born after the creation of the state. For almost exactly one year there was Naftali Bennett and six months there was Yair Lapid: other than them, that's it. It would seem, for all purposes, that Netanyahu's Israel is what the founding generation fought for: easy money and lack of scruple, and, god knows how, a simultaneous lack of regard for both peace and vigilance. Teetering so on the edge of authoritarianism that a war could spill it over into precisely the sort of Francoist military dictatorship that presaged the coming of the last Jewish genocide.

But Brother Netanyahu is our kin. There is not a single Jew on earth who didn't somehow benefit from him in the short term, and we will all pay God's price for what Bibi did for us.

Brother Bibi: The World Leads Exactly Here - Part 4 - Day 15

 

Look, the ground invasion is going to happen. Whether it should or not is immaterial. It is going to happen and we all just have to pray because prayer is our only option that this conflict won't careen out of control well beyond the borders of Israel/Palestine.

At least it is until Bibi goes.

Israel is not simply a flawed democracy or a democracy for some, it is a compromised democracy. Even for Jews. There is literally almost no one who wants this government except the people in power, and yet they don't go. It's been two weeks since the biggest disaster in the history of the State of Israel, a failure of exponentially monumental incompetence, and still, there is no high official who called for the removal of Benyamin Netanyahu.

Maybe some removal is planned, a parliamentary ambush perhaps, maybe people are just waiting for an appropriate amount of time after the attack, but even if that is possible, what does it say about the State of Israel that such quiet planning would be necessary?

I could be very wrong, but if Netanyahu keeps power, my guess is there will be all sorts of talk that Netanyahu deliberately provoked the whole thing and looked the other way at Hamas's preparations even as he knew what would happen. It's exactly the kind of conspiracy theory antisemites love. Some 1% version of it might be true: maybe Netanyahu thought he could look the other way while Hamas caused a skirmish, provoking a momentary distraction while he maneuvers to stay in power. But even if there's no way that conspiracy theory is true, Netanyahu can benefit from it just as though it were true. A malevolent leader can draw the war out indefinitely in a hundred different ways and silence dissent at any point out of war necessity. For the last few years Bibi governed by a coalition majority of 61-63 in a chamber of 120, he is now at the head of a national unity government. And yet a man who called for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination on national television is still the Minister of National Security; and we're supposed to believe Israel is fighting for democracy? Israel, above all the world's democracies, has the intelligence and military apparatus to make itself into a dictatorship overnight, and emergency powers are a next easy step for a leader who manages to defang the judiciary.

...on the other hand, he might be gone in another two weeks.

Again, this invasion is going to happen. What's taking so long? Well, 300,000 reservists are training for very fraught circumstances, Netanyahu is shoring up his allies (such as Bibi is capable of having any...), Israel is gathering intelligence about what they will encounter in Gaza (probably chemical weapons, human shields everywhere, weapons depots in the most sensitive spots, snipers everywhere, killers blending into civilian crowds, I'm sure I'll think of other things later...).

Or, just maybe, god forbid, there's a strategy being formed beyond simply decimating Hamas. War is not about going into a place and smashing something out of rage. No one has known better than Israel that war is about very concrete objectives and contingency plans for every possibility. And yet Israel's already endured two quagmires (Gaza 1967-2005 and Lebanon 1982-2000: what goes on in the West Bank is arguable), it has no need for a third, and if there is no negotiated peace at the end of all this, there will be still worse carnage when Gazans under the age of 18 grow up - in Gaza, minors are literally 1 out of every 2 people.

When there is a ground invasion, it will be horrible on a level so far past any Israeli operation there has ever been. There are already more casualties in this Gaza operation than there ever were from any other. There will soon be multiples more. There can (and likely will) be accidents which make the hospital look like an Independence Day firework, and by the time what happened is cleared up, propaganda can ignite the world. And that's only the accidents. There will be rogue soldiers, there will be horrific moments on camera, there will judgement calls interpreted by the world in the worst possible light. Israel is about to be hated as never before, and next to what's coming the current genocide accusations will be a mere pebble skimming a lake.

Actual liberals will always look out for us, but much of the left wing will not protect a Jew they suspect of supporting Israel. They talk a good game, but Jews will always be the one minority for which an attack on us 'might have a reason.' Those numbers on the left who will equivocate about people who attack us will increase exponentially. It is a bad time for Jews again, and we all will reap our share of the coming whirlwind. We thought we could not be more consequential to modern history than Hitler made us, but here we are, eighty years later, potential kindling for a global conflict.

This is not just the decisive moment when Israel/Palestine finally explodes into the full scale war that's threatened it for fifty-five years, this is the decisive moment when we see whether compromised democracies can eliminate their threat - Israel, like us, is on the edge of systemically ossifying into authoritarian leadership for god knows how long. This is the decisive moment when we see whether the US can sustain a two-front foreign aid commitment to both Israel and Ukraine before China tries to take Taiwan, with half of southeast Asia and part of Africa within its sight next. Russia and China can always bring war to other shores (like ours), but it seemed as though there were only two basic fronts in a potential global conflict, against Russia in Eastern Europe, against China in East Asia. There is now a potential third.

It all depends on whether this ground invasion is conducted by a leader with principles and an end goal, or a leader with no scruples at all, ready to personally benefit from each and every step of chaos he inflicts to further ensconce his power.

I met a Rabbi this week who once was a soldier and saw combat. He said that the worst of all wars are when combat is fought in cities. Even at its best, war is organized murder. The only good thing to come out of it is that sometimes there is a good leader to make sure the dead have not died in vain. The end of this conflict is either a two state solution with a restored democracy in Israel, or a continued status quo with war that eventually spreads well beyond Gaza's 37 mile border. David Ben-Gurion was a leader who could do this, Yitzhak Rabin could do this, Lincoln and Roosevelt were leaders like that here in the US, even Joe Biden may be a leader like that.

But this guy, would you buy a used car from him?

Day 14: A Day of Rest

Fuckall, I'm taking a day off.

Brother Bibi: Part 3 - Day 13

This post is already much too long...

Basically: so that he could avoid a trial, Netanyahu sent through legislation defanging the judiciary, barring them from striking down legislation, from deeming a minister unfit or too corrupt for office, from barring a minster from service for prior convictions. It basically made the Prime Minister a sovereign, answerable to literally no one. The backlash: nine months of regular protests, sometimes as many as a quarter of a million people showing up to a single location. Hundreds, maybe thousands of army reservists threatening not to show up for duty. Thousands of small donations to legal funds to fight against a potential Netanyahustan.

For years before that, Netanyahu's electoral mandates were already slimming. Israeli politics is a bit like herding cattle, there are over fifty political parties and there's always the chance a stampede collapses the government. Bibi had to call new elections once every eighteen months for six years, his party never getting more than a quarter of the vote, then building paper thin coalitions nobody really wanted. But now, in order to get the majority he needed in a country growing tired of him, he did the unthinkable: scrapping together a government literally by bribing all the most distasteful parties into one tiny coalition of densely packed mole people. Here are some of the most charming parties and their leaders:

- United Torah Judaism: representing the Eastern European Orthodox, lead by Yitzhak Goldknopf, head of the Committee for the Sanctity of the Shabbat, devoted to making restrictions on public spaces and Sabbath driving, and banning Israel's national airline, El-Al, from flying on the Sabbath. Goldknopf is Minister of Housing and Construction - AKA, Minister of Settlements.

- Religious Zionist Party: a party with Jewish supremacy in its charter, lead by Betzalel Smotrich. In 2005, around the time of Israel's disengagement from Gaza, Smotrich was detained in possession of 700 liters of gasoline. This is the Minister of Finance.

- Shas: representing the Middle Eastern Orthodox, lead by Aryeh Deri. Deri was convicted of taking $155,000 in bribes while he was Interior Minister during Netanyahu's first premiereship. This was the Deputy Prime Minister until the Supreme Court deemed his seat unconstitutional.

...and the 'money shot'...

- Otzmah Yehudit (meaning "Jewish Power"): the militant far-right party, lead by Itamar Ben-Gvir, campaigning for the active deportation of the vaguely termed 'enemies of Israel.' He says it means Arabs disloyal to Israel, but nobody's sure if he actually means every Arab in the country, or even liberal Jews. What they do know is that as a lawyer, Ben-Gvir represented a who's who among Israel's hate criminals. They know he's the lawyer for Lehava, an organization for the banning of intermarriage between Jews and gentiles. They know he has a portrait in his living room of Baruch Goldstein - who broke into a mosque and shot 150 Arabs. When he was 19, he stole the hood ornament from Yitzhak Rabin's Cadillac, brandished it on national television and said "We got to his car, we'll get to him too."

This is the Minister of National Security.

So, let's be honest, Netanyahu is not just another Prime Minister like Olmert. Netanyahu is Bibi. Even were he convicted, Netanyahu wouldn't go to jail. Somebody would pardon him in two seconds and there are enough sympathetic judges that the case itself could get thrown out if only he'd let it go to trial. The Israeli world is too divided, the Jewish world is too divided, and clearly, too much is at stake. There's a better chance Donald Trump will go to jail than that Bibi Netanyahu ever will. A trial for a guy like Netanyahu is ultimately just an inconvenience. Trump is just dumb enough to do something that lands him there, but Bibi thrives on challenges like this.

What he wants is exactly what Trump wants, and what Putin has. Democracy without liberal rule of law: illiberal democracy is a dictatorship in all but name. Every illiberal democracy thinks they have the will of the majority, but the majority always splits, and speaks for smaller and smaller slivers of society, until it speaks for one man alone - after a certain point, you might as well call yourself 'The People's Republic of...' If Israel is not an apartheid state yet, it would be the moment such a law takes effect.

I may be the only person in the world who believes this, but I find it hard to dismiss the voice in that creeping spine nausea whispering that this is exactly what Bibi Netanyahu's wanted this whole time.