Some strident words for chaverim on 'The Situation Over There'

I've supported Israel as best I could through their toughest period, but this new planned invasion of Gaza is ethnic cleansing of the gravest variety, and all for the craven motive to keep Netanyahu in power by appealing to his far far right base. Roughly 2/3rds of the Israeli public realizes that, regardless of October 7th, what's about to happen is unconscionable. Nothing about this has to do with Israeli security. It makes the hostages more likely to die and only increases Israel's isolation. 550 top security officials have signed a document denouncing it with the harshest terminology.

The most likely explanation is that that Israel found a taker for Gazans in some other country to be named soon, so it's probable the inhumane conditions are not ancillary collateral damage. The point is to create ghetto conditions akin to 1940 Warsaw, the claustrophobia's the point, the putrefaction's the point, the famine is the point, the point is to make life in Gaza so unbearable that Palestinians have no choice but to leave if they want to prevent deaths on a scale truly unimaginable.

This is Israel: next to Silicon Valley the most productive tech hub on Earth. It's only a matter of months before it develops the technology to monitor activity in the tunnels and plug up any hole. But in these 311 miles of tunnels, Hamas could have let some Gazans in at any point. Instead, Hamas willingly pushed their citizens in death's way, putting the largest entrances to the tunnels in hospitals, schools, and the most heavily concentrated neighborhoods, knowing that when Israel next invades, Hamas has willfully maximized their people's own casualties. Why is this not recognized? Because of naive lefties who choose not to live in the real world where self-defense and security is a fact of existence.

At the same time, while I don't want to use the G-word because nothing yet has been remotely worthy of it, if there is no alternate plan and 20-30% of Gazans die from this, there isn't another word in our lexicon for it. There should be: it still wouldn't be a crime remotely comparable to the 6/7ths of Jews in the Nazi empire who perished in gas and ovens, and the international standard for what constitutes annihilation of a people is so low because international organizations are stacked with precisely the countries who've long wanted to finish what Hitler started. The G-word word was literally invented to describe the Shoah, and the standard was lowered precisely to frame Israel as genocidal for acts that were barely a fraction comparable to what was perpetrated on Jews.

So even now, I categorically reject any claim of moral legitimacy from the anti-Israel crowd which makes no distinction between any form of Zionism and attributes a monolithic evil to a movement they know nothing about and can only cite scholars of the worst conceivable faith and sloppiest methodology to justify themselves. Even the most dovish Israeli peaceniks are little different to them from the most loathsome human rights violators on earth. They invoked the g-word before the 10/7 dead were cold in the ground: not a single word of sympathy for dead Israelis and Jews, not a single word of comfort to friends who were terrified the whole world was about to turn on them, and of course, not a single word about Hamas's role in all this. They are nobody's ally, neither Jews nor Palestinians.

But there isn't another word for it. There is only genocide.

And just as there should be a different word than the g-word for what Israel may yet do, there should be a different word than the d-word for what Israel currently is. Israel is currently a quasi-democracy that makes even more of a mockery of the real thing than our country does, and every minute the Israeli hard right remains in power, it draws ever closer to that 'other' d-word, the dreaded one: dictatorship.

So perhaps there is a third d-word that will just barely suffice for what's coming in Gaza, should Gazans be trapped by famine, it will be a democide so base that democide may be entirely insufficient a term for the scale of what comes. This plan is ethical filth, and we let it happen by unconditionally supporting Israel through its forty-five year descent into Revisionist Zionism's embrace. We too made no distinction between any form of it: whether it was the liberal Zionism of Weizmann, Rabin and Ben-Gurion, or the revisionist Zionism of Jabotinsky, Begin and the Netanyahus. We did not speak out, we did not make our support conditional, and we pretended one of the most prosperous countries on earth was still the little and embattled social democracy of seventy years ago. For my entire lifetime, it was always a farce, and we willfully repressed that our eyes could see the metamorphosis step by step.

Part of how we know the anti-Zionists aren't serious about their mission is that not even they are warning on the widest scale about the unprecedented operation that seems to be imminent. Why? They've exhausted their emotional rhetoric, because to them, all horror is the same in degree, without any nuance of context, and they're incapable of making distinctions between self-defense and mass murder. Surely, they reason, nothing can be more monstrous than what's already happened: oh yes it can, so very much worse. So if they're not going to warn, we have to warn. We have to oppose it. We have to root for its failure. In the long run, it can destroy Israel.

This is not Zionism, this is the perversion of it that happens to every ideological movement if we do not make the movement pay a price for turning its back on its own better angels. This drastic ethical backslide came for Zionism, and one day it will come for every movement of our time whose ethical standard currently seems unimpeachable to so many.

We owe our support to Zionism just as we do to any movement whose cause was fundamentally conceived in liberal ideals, but we owe any perversion of it complete, unconditional opposition.

Hamas is our enemy, Netanyahu is our enemy too along with all the hydra arms of his coalition; a hydra which is the probable Israeli future. If there ever is to be an end to this conflict, every serious person needs to agitate hard for the removal of this governance by excrement in both Israel and Palestine.