I'm currently in Europe, and now that I have a torn Achilles I may be here a while longer. If I can travel, I'll be in some of the most pleasant cities on earth, if I can't, I'll be stuck in Vienna: poor me. Long as I'm here already, I'm not sure I ever want to leave.
It's not a moment too soon to get out of dodge, things are getting hairy everywhere, they may get hairy here. Part of what's scary right now is that we don't know where chaos will spread.
I feel like the only person in the world with good options right now. Sometimes, there are no good options, and this is one of those.
In Israel? I support putting the Arab parties into government, it's frankly not going to happen, but in spite of what I said yesterday, please don't think I'm doing it in any way but holding my nose. Not because they're Arabs, but because every representative is an antizionist, the vast majority of them are authoritarians, and haven't let go of the dream of ending Israel.
But the alternative is authoritarian too, and even more powerful.
I could be wrong of course, but Bibi won, it's almost a foregone conclusion at this point because nobody will work with the Arab parties, it's almost impossible to imagine. If I had to take a guess what happens next, Bibi does what he always does: he calls a new election, installing himself as a placeholder Prime Minister for the next year and a half yet again...
If Eisenkot's coalition understood what was at stake, and they don't, they would let the Arab parties in. The Arab parties would only wreak further havoc on the Middle East, deliberately undermining Israel's destruction and effectiveness in the way America's President does his own country (...), giving powers like Qatar and Iran means to dictate Israeli policy which would result in Qatar drawn into a war Israel's already waging in Iran, and every Israeli Arab viewed as a potential fifth column with treatment that resembles everything which happens in the West Bank or even Gaza.
And that's the smaller problem...
The bigger problem is delayed still further, Bibi and his followers grow still more delusional, and eventually, whether Bibi or whomever follows, somebody could so easily make a mistake like Putin did in Ukraine, a mistake from which there is no backing out, and the regional volatility puts the entire world at risk. If Israel is the cause of World War, no matter how provoked, there is another two thousand years of antisemitism.
Half of Jews persist in this manichean, paranoid delusion that there can be a militarized Jewish state forever, and behold the results. The problem is that so many people, so many people reading this, blame Israel and the Jews who support Israel for this state of affairs, and yet the entire rest of the world is in the same situation.
The European riots are, ultimately, small potatoes, something that happens every so often in countries that never quite figure stability out. France treats its riots as a tradition of national pride. But then, the riots came to Belgium, BELGIUM!
I have always believed that what makes people violent is not issues of survival but issues of humiliation: people trying to survive are too busy surviving to be violent for any reason but self-defense. People who feel humiliated are the ones willing to be violent on a mass scale.
The riots in Europe are not particularly violent, and yet the humiliations grow every year. If Europe has to pay for its own military, the social programs will shrink. We're constantly flooded with information about everything wrong with society. Most people can't afford houses anymore, so many have student loans. COVID caused severe disruptions to everyone's lives, and we all live in some low level fear of the next disruption.
If you relate to any of that, imagine what people younger than you feel. Now you understand why people riot, and why these riots are likely to grow in scale: perhaps exponentially. Are the lives of most gen-Z'ers truly bad? Well, no, not really. But their lives are worse than their parents, and they have to compare their own quality of life to the people before them, and that is a truly humiliating experience.
So then there's us...
...I don't need to talk about it. You know already.
In the wake of all that, people turn to answers. The answers may not be very good, but answers give you a reason to get up in the morning, and once a certain answer catches on, so does the opposition to that answer, and it becomes the defining question of the time. Once upon a time, that question was is 'salvation by faith' correct, or 'liberty, equality and fraternity' or national self-determination, or the worker's paradise, now the question is if there is an invisible system of oppression. More than any other question, your answer to this question: yes or no, defines your place on today's political spectrum.
If there is such a thing as 'systemic oppression', the best evidence is not systemic oppression, the best evidence is 'systemic division.' The fact that with enough time, so many societies seem to bisect into something resembling exact halves: Protestants vs. Catholics, royalists vs. republicans, Republicans vs. Democrats, Zionists vs. Anti-Zionists... Even if the raw number tally of either side is not exactly the same, it so often looks like with enough time, two irreconcilable sides in a conflict have something resembling exact parity in power.
All it takes is one accident. Accidents happen all the time, some seem intentional but few of them mean to cause widespread destruction they wreak. Forty-nine accidents can be repaired, but then there's the fiftieth, and that's a point of no return... That's Sarajevo, that's the Bastille, the defenstration of Prague, Fort Sumter, Pearl Harbor... that's the moment nothing can go back to the way it was, and everything we know about society is spat out like Listerine.
A divine accident may have put me in a place I've always wanted to be. I'm in a place I've always wanted to be in over every other place in the world, and miracle of miracles, it's a neutral country. I may never want to leave, but if things happen while I'm gone, I'll live with the same survivor guilt my grandparents lived with for getting out of a place like this, which used to be a place like ours.
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