I had to defriend a guy I like for sharing an article accusing Israel of 'annihilation' in Gaza. Until I read it, I didn't think there was a word out there more hurtful to Jews than 'genocide', but annihilation is it. Annihilation, or 'vernichtung', was Hitler's exact word of intent for what he wanted to do to Jews. You might as well go all the way into medieval blood libels and say Israelis kidnap Palestinian babies, sacrifice them, and grind their bones into matzah.
When this all began, I prepared myself as best I could, knowing that the only way to ensure Jewish survival is hard, hard deeds that would make sick anybody with half their humanity intact. I prepared myself for hundreds of thousands of deaths before this all was done - not necessarily in Gaza but all around the Middle East. I haven't prepared myself for calling anything that happens a genocide - and I still think the accusation indicates a lazy sort of antisemtism. Nevertheless, I prepared myself for the worst sort of butchery: in Gaza, in Lebanon, possibly in Syria, possibly the West Bank, possibly even Iran, and god knows where else. I knew that I'd have to dissociate from many friends, and while I couldn't avoid it, I knew that talking to other Jews and their pride in vengeance would make me take multiple showers.
Worst of all, I prepared myself for the worldwide death of every human sentiment I value until the world recovers its sense, possibly not before I'm an old man: the death of American liberalism, of Judaism that can coexist with secularism, of any rational root that knows that the stability of the world is more important than any reform, any revolution, any principle; because once it all falls down, none of us can stand upright in the rubble. This conflict isn't like Ukraine where there are clear cut heroes and villains, and fuck you for thinking there are, this is a fight for survival and resources among two people who deserve it. Israelis are punished for achieving success for the first time in thousands of years. Palestinians are perpetually punished, by the Ottomans and Crusaders and Byzantines before the Israelis, passed over for success while other peoples around the north Mediterranean are only saved from squalor by their proximity to Northern Europe.
Will the death toll be over 5% of Gazans by 2025? Only a fool would deny the possibility. Though I have no idea how they come up with these statistics: the Economist tells us that there is one functional toilet for every 220 Gazans, one shower for every 4,500. Two thirds of Gaza's hospitals are closed and the 13 functioning cannot possibly minister more than a fraction of their would be patients. Arif Husain, chief economist of the World Food Program, says that the scale and speed of Gaza's famine is without parallel. Well over half a million are going without food for more than a day at a time. Whole families are given nothing more than a tin of beans to survive a single day, a sack of flour costs ten times what it did pre-war, and nearly all Gaza's cash machines have long since had their holdings drawn out. By 2025, it's possible that more Gazans will die of famine than bombs.
A kleptocratic dictatorship like Hamas is exactly as bad as it seems, and there's no victory in war against a totalitarian regime unless you siege the population to the point the dictatorship collapses, but it's worth prolonging the war if it means getting the supplies to the Gazans, even if Hamas steals many of them and the war goes on longer, Israel can't afford this level of hatred directed against them.
It's not a genocide, but it's the world turned completely to its dark side. I'm not willing to go over the basics yet again, but I don't see another option. Jews are not going to lay down and die again just because you demand it. And yet, to do this without guilt, to keep making self-righteous justifications, to not search endlessly for a different way, to declare with simplicity: 'we're right', 'they're wrong', is fascist, authoritarian, it's anti-democracy barbarism, and makes a direct line to any number of justifications that declare war on democracy. Once you believe completely in the rectitude of your violence, there is nothing you can't justify, and it's only a matter of time before you make violent decisions out of reasons far more contemptible than necessity.
War is war. It is so much worse even than all but the bloodiest dictatorships, and there's no way to trust that the Netanyahu government will prosecute it with anything but selfish aims. It's no genocide, but it's the killing of ten to twenty thousand innocent civilians in just four months with many more yet marked for death, it's famine, and it's more bombs than the US ever used in twenty years of Afghan occupation many times over.
The roots of this conflict are much more complicated than any bad faith American radical/Euroleftist would ever allege. For fifty years they've called Jews white oppressors when we'd been killed at unprecedented speed and volume for not being white enough, they call Israel an illegal occupier when dictators from minority sects occupy Middle Eastern country after country, they call for their countries to divest from Israel when they owe their entire first world existence to the cheap labor of China and and the cheap oil of Saudi Arabia, both of whom violate human rights with a volume dozens of times more than Israel's; and most outrageously, they insist Israel solve a problem of refugees which their countries solved by simply murdering hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, and exiling millions more. The world holds Israel to a standard no other country is held, and then insists that unconscious antisemitism has nothing to do with their assumptions.
This is what it means to live as a Jew in the world, and often what it means to die as a Jew. But as much as you brace yourself for those realities, they sometimes come at you at light speed and all you can do is cry out to the god who puts us into these circumstances and seems to get his gratification from our suffering. We have paid every single price for our continued existence, and now the price of keeping ourselves alive is murder itself.
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