Prepare for This Week

Intelligence shows that this is the week Iran plans its retaliation on Israel.

Don't think the US is not figuring into their calculations. Iran knows as we all do that there will be a massive pro-Palestinian demonstration at the Democratic convention. They want the average American scandalized by this protest and by merely at the thought that a political party would give house to it. Today's Republican party is the unity of authoritarianism, today's Democratic party is the chaos of democracy. The point, as always, is to use democracy's levers of freedom against itself.

The KGB called it 'ideological subversion.' The KGB used most of its intelligence not to spy or fix elections, but to make the advantages of liberal democracy look like a sham. They threatened, bribed and amplified all sorts of intellectuals, activists and demonstrators in the press and universities and unions to advocate philosophies that undermine democracy from the left, and they often provoked the same in right-wing journals, think tanks, and mass movements - and sometimes with exactly the same tactics they used on leftists. The point was to make hundreds of millions waver in their belief that democracy leads to better lives.

Whether KGB or FSB or the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the point has always been to divide us and make us despair. The point is not to make us look bad, the point is not even to make America look bad, the point is to make Palestine's own advocates look as bad as possible in the eyes of the average American, so as to provoke the maximum possible response. They want Trump to win because freedom and justice is a bigger threat to them than the US. The US is no threat to the Iranian regime so long as the US has no chance of living up to its self-conception.

In addition to holding my tongue about Israel in person, I've become more circumspect about writing about Israel. These moral conundrums are above my intellectual paygrade, they're above my moral paygrade, and well beyond my emotional bandwidth.

The only way I can make sense of this 'situation' is to believe that is that Israel/Palestine is a front in a much larger cold war. Gaza may seem under Israeli control, but its government makes it a client of Iran, which is itself a client of Russia, which is itself a client of China. The ultimate goal is to make the world safe for dictators, and no amount of hand-wringing about the imperialism of 150 years ago will change that in 2024 we deal with an imperial project that aspires to the whole world.

But like all cold wars, they can only be won if there if the demarcations of moral superiority stay clear. Israel may be fighting in a booby trapped Gaza, designed by Hamas to kill its own citizens, but the more casualties Gaza creates, the harder it becomes to pin the blame on Hamas. If the death toll goes up too quickly, the world says Israel goes into these booby traps all too happily: and you know what? About a large part of the Israeli population: the world is right. And so long as there is a majority which delusionally believes you can achieve total victory against Hamas, or even total victory without an even worse price, this minority will stay in power.

So long as this is the government of Israel, so long as there is a strong minority which supports it, even a nub, there is barely a difference between people who give cover to the ambitions of Sharia and people who give cover to the ambitions of Halacha. And furthermore, so long as there is a majority which delusionally believes you can achieve total victory against Hamas, or even total victory without an even worse price, this minority will stay in power.

There is an authoritarian petrie dish in the free world that believes it only does wrong by not going about its business with sufficient force. They believe, as the other side does, that extremism in the pursuit of virtue is no vice, and that belief is the telltale sign of an authoritarian movement: Jewish or Christian or Islamic, religious or secular, left or right, fascist or communist, socialist or conservative, and yes, even liberal. It is also the sign of authoritarians who believe the Israeli side is more justified and authoritarians who believe the Palestinian side is. Your beliefs give you the justification to think yourselves saviors. You are not the solution, you are the problem.

To banish doubts about your own beliefs is idolworship, and until we're all mercilessly careful about it, we are all guilty, all complicit, all aiders to and abetters of the most murderous forms of totalitarianism on earth: all of those forms, not just the ones we think are totalitarian.

If you do not check your own beliefs, you have no right to check anyone else's.

Note: wait a minute... the convention is NEXT week. This whole post is invalid.