Again, I'm the wrong person to write this post. I'm much too cynical and only grow more as I age. Whether it's to point out the double standards in people's treatment of people of color, white people, or Jews, my perception of people crying for justice just gets sadder and sadder. Not lower, just sadder at how they don't realize that they're still more entrapped than they think they are.
Just ask yourselves a question, one that I've already posed: why is it that there is so much more outcry, in both the leftist world and the Islamic, for Palestine rather than Yemen where 300,000 are almost beyond doubt murdered by the Yemenite government (HEAVILY backed by the Saudis)? Just one of a half-dozen horrifying examples I could name.
The answer isn't quite antisemitism. It's a lot more complex than that, yet it isn't that complex. The answer is that, unlike in Yemen, it's being done by 'someone else.' In the hierarchy of privilege, Jews?..., when it counts we're seen as privileged, so we count as the untethered white oppressor. Rightly or wrongly,.
But the point is not Jews, Jews are just a straw man as we often are for the real problem. The problem is that to hold an Islamic country, even Saudi Arabia, to the kind of accountability to which we hold Israel is tantamount in many minds to admitting that not all people of color are victims of a white oppressor. Jews are seen as white, As I said yesterday, the majority of Jews in Israel--and the VAST majority of right wing Jews--are descended from other parts of the Middle East who in no sense even look white. But to put too much focus on Yemen or Ethiopia or South Sudan is viewed as an implication to non-white people of "Get your house in order!"
Jews? Well, historically, we haven't had nearly as many chances over history to be hypocrites, and every time we were we found the world ready to point out all our flaws and then some, but insofar as we have our hypocrisies, our hypocrisy is pretty breathtaking right now.
Just take the current 'cancel culture' debate of academia, this debate is just a distraction from issues that matter, and no side in it looks like anything but a cretin. I've gone through all this before, but the hypocrisy of both sides should take everybody's breath away.
Or for that matter, still more obviously, take the question of Israel being a democracy in a region of nothing but autocracy. So long as Netanyahu is still in power, this argument has frayed beyond repair. People can say all the want that Netanyahu will be gone soon, but until Netanyahu is gone, the argument is moot.
And for that matter, so many Jews complain about how Western liberals used to have Israel's back. Well, Israel turned its back on liberalism since 1977. In the 46 years since, Israel's been run by a right-wing Prime Minister for 37 of them. It used to be thought of as the near apex of worldwide social democracy, but has long since stripped its kibbutzim for nearly every dollar to get more corporate holdings.
The point is that it is so much easier to view others' behavior accurately than your own. If you peer into your own soul, your findings may revolt you.
We are accusing Israel writ small of the future problem in which we will all be implicated. It's a problem bigger than the US, it's a problem bigger than the West, it's a problem even bigger than capitalism or imperialism. The problem is the luck of being born into a place with the wherewithal to control the entirety of the planet's resources.
Imperialism is every bit the crime people think it is, but it's a deeply misunderstood phenomenon. If you're OK with people dying at pre-industrial revolution mortality rates, then you should be alright with humanity in that perpetually threatened state of nature. Some of us, however, might like better out of life.
It's not like Africa or Latin America knew how to use their natural resources without the West's discoveries, and it's not like imperialism would have never existed without the West. The West only did what every other region was already doing to itself, but by now, its very success at it is what threatens the planet. And therefore, imperialism's greatest crime, the crime that truly sets imperialism alongside Hitler and maybe surpasses him, could be in the future, not the past.
Whatever the total dead in Gaza so far, whatever the total may eventually be, we could be staring down a century of death that makes the 20th century look innocent. In the face of global warming, in the face of misused artificial intelligence, in the face of bioterror and vast nuclear proliferation, this outrage can seem insignificant. And if unprecedented numbers die, it will be people just like the Gazans, billions already relegated to life's margins who could not make it to a safe space. If the misfortune is bad enough, we will all suffer from it, but those of us in affluent countries still have a pretty good shot of surviving. Gaza is just a small tip of a melting iceberg on which billions of people sit, and compared to the crime the entire West and East Asia has perpetrated upon them, Jews as well as goyim, Gaza is just a tiny corner in a vast dry globe of displacement and famine.
Once we stop caring about results more than hypocrisy, we'll com to realize that this crime, something which dwarves even the Shoah, is what we should be working to prevent, Jews, gentiles, Arabs, everybody else, because what's at stake is so much more important than a few university presidents.
This post is too depressing to be this bad. Hopefully I'll say all this better in future weeks.
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