Why Do People Care So Much About Israel/Palestine: Day 9 - Rewritten

So here, again, is the post I did that seemed to get the best response. I'm going to share it again with a crucial difference. The truth is, I pulled punches. There is one view I did not include because putting it in would enrage both sides. I may be called both an antisemite and a racist for including it. Here is the version with two long extra paragraphs (13 and 14) that are guaranteed to offend literally everybody with any skin in this game. Please feel free to read, but at your (and my) own risk.

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Like clockwork, fickle sympathy turns. For less than a week sympathy was Israel's, now it's for the Palestinians. I won't say that either sentiment is wrong, just that it's disingenuous in both cases. A good person has balance between resilience and compassion. If your heart melts too much, the more easily it can turn to stone. The way to save lives is to accept that this situation is exactly as grim as it looks, and that any way out involves accepting that life is of a complexity well beyond what most people are prepared to accept from it.

When two people are locked in a fight for survival, the moral concerns of who's more right don't matter, what matters is the hard facts of how to save life, and how to prevent the fight from killing people not involved in the conflict. In this war, what matters most is preventing the war from spreading. We'll talk about how to prevent the war from spreading another day, but within the war itself, there is no progress until two objectives are met.

1. There is no progress until Hamas dies out: it's a mixture of a totalitarian dictatorship and a mafia that deliberately maximizes casualties on its own side and converts foreign aid (concrete and metal) into weaponry and tunnels into Israel. If Hamas continues to kill, there is no way Israel's support of Likud won't grow.

2. There is no progress until Likud's stranglehold on Israel goes to jail. Israel has swallowed the intellectual poison that you can simply throw humiliation at the Palestinian territories then expect that they won't continue to support revolutionary movements whose main promise is to bring revenge to the other side.

Obviously, being me, I think Hamas is priority 1. They constantly try to maximize casualties. Israel generally tries to minimize them. One can, by hard facts, make the opposite argument, since Israel has, so far, killed many more people, but one also has to take into account that if Israel allows Palestine more leeway while Hamas is in power, Hamas will use that leeway to kill many more thousands.

I don't know if there is a way to make both sides see the light unless there is a true war between the two sides in which hundreds of thousands die: at least hundreds of thousands. Only then would both sides realize the price of the status quo. One thing that people don't realize about Israel/Palestine is that for all the attention it attracts, the casualties so far are quite minimal by world standards of war. In every war there's rarely more than a few thousand casualties in a world where many wars cost millions, and yet the attention and ink of Israel/Palestine is so disproportionate to the world destruction it wrought so far.

So why then does Israel/Palestine get so much attention?

One explanation, perhaps the most facile one, is to say that people can't get enough of the moral failings of Jews. Historically, there's a mountain of evidence for that. Jews always end up on the fault lines of history, accused of committing a moral abomination in a hundred different ways. You'd have to be an idiot not to see a pattern here.

But that does not explain the specifics of this conflict. It reduces the conflict to a simple pathology and assumes that everybody who criticizes Israel is just an antisemite. That's stupid, and it allows a grotesque double standard where everybody who complains of being painted as a racist for comments that may betray unconscious racism (generally conservatives) hold others (generally liberals) to that standard for the same behavior against Jews.

Another explanation, slightly less facile but still biased to Isreal, is that the Palestinian cause lays bare the hypocrisies of the Arab world, where Egypt could have taken Gaza, Jordan could have taken the West Bank (and both were offered multiple times), and Palestine could be their problem instead. But it's useful to keep the Palestinians in squalor, and by forcing the problem on Israel, it gave Arab nationalist dictatorships a different villain for its populace to hate.

But that absolves imperialism of its role. It absolves the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years of cruel imperial violence against Arabs, it absolves the British Empire for creating arbitrary borders so they could install kings and dictators in every country who would continue to funnel money and oil to the British, and it absolves the Americans for their hypocrisy of lecturing Arab states for their human rights while still being dependent on Saudi oil. If any two Middle Eastern countries have leaders (dictators) who do the best they can to operate with Israel in good faith, it's Jordan and Egypt. In both countries, potential radical Muslim political movements nip at the heels of the rulers, movements who could easily turn the these far more powerful countries into equivalent of a Hamas dictatorship.

Another explanation, more sympathetic to the Arab world, is that so many Arab tribes were denied their own self-determination in the days of Ottoman and British imperialism, then arbitrarily thrown together in countries where the borders were drawn by the British to reward rich Arabs who collaborated with them with kingdoms. Even so, Arabs were able to determine their own destiny without the interference of imperial rulers, and yet they had to accept a non-Arab country of people who resemble Westerners, existing within their midst in a state with the greatest military on earth. Even if Israel is not an imperial threat to the vast majority of Arabs, it has a superficial resemblance to an imperial threat and certainly seems that way in a vast plurality of Arab minds.

But Israel's territory is literally 0.1 percent of the Middle East's landmass. It's just one country in the Middle East among 23. Even when Israel was at its largest between 1967 and 1979 (really 1982), it was barely 0.3 percent, and if the Arab populations stopped radicalizing against Israel with violence, Israel would probably elect more liberal leaders who would significantly demilitarize the country. It absolves the average Arab for having a vastly disproportionate reaction to Israel's existence, obsessively holding a paleonationalist humiliation over opportunities for peace and prosperity.Still another, more biased to the Palestinians, is that though the empires have fallen, the world is still controlled by white people as an imperial vestige. White people view people of color as expendable, their concerns and opportunities immaterial. Gazan Palestinians exist in a state worse than segregation, they live in a ghetto as packed as any Jewish ghetto in Venice, stripped of precisely the opportunities Israelis take for granted. Whether there was a Palestinian peoplehood in 1948 or a collection of disparate peoples forced off their lands, there is very much one now, forged in a cauldron of poverty and squalor. Whether they were ejected from their land by Jews or ejected by rich Arab overlords looking to make money by selling the land to Zionists, they were ejected from their land and have every right to believe their land was stolen from them. From 1948 onward, there were most definitely atrocities committed against them by Jews and perhaps mass atrocities by any standard. Entire generations live and die trapped in the very medieval ghettos that define Jewish history, and somehow most Jews are blind to how they've become the oppressors they finally cast off. Palestinians are expected to accept their circumstances as the price for living a dispensable life. Palestinians are told that their independence is not a right, but a reward for an impossible standard of good behavior. Their entire religion is dismissed as a disgrace to civilization. The few of them lucky enough to emigrate are often treated by their new countries as an existential threat. The few of them lucky enough to work in Israel are often fired due to baseless suspicions, and merely to work in Israel must subject themselves to humiliating searches, suspicions, questioning, and sometimes assaults. Most importantly, a full half of today's Gazans are under 18: children told to resign their entire life story to a land of desolation. The world expects them to accept these humiliations without resorting to terror, without wanting vengeance, without viewing those who fight their occupiers as heroes, and to accept circumstances unabideable in a thousand ways without resorting to precisely the self-defensive violence that allowed for the State of Israel. There is no less a mountain of evidence for this view as for the Jewish view of the pornographic interest in Jews' moral failings, and anyone on the pro-Israel side who does not see some validity in these arguments is out of touch with reality. The vast majority of Israel's supporters willfully repress these notions wherever they encounter them, in themselves, in each other, and in worldwide discourse. One plurality of Jews reacts to these points with sanctimonious crocodile tears as a means of dismissing these points. Another Jewish plurality reacts to their mere suggestion with a contemptuous rage that is terrifying to behold.

Yet what that argument doesn't take into account is that while innocent children deserve no oppression, their parents voted themselves into a totalitarian state, and when parents abdicate their responsibiity to their children, the parents' enemies should be the last people expected to take responsibility for children taught to kill particularly them. It ignores that until this conflict, the Jordanian Civil War had a higher Palestinian death toll than anything in Gaza or the West Bank (Lebanon is another story): Jordan is 70% Palestinian, and yet nobody refers to what goes on in their country as apartheid. When the Israeli borders were first drawn up, it included the entirety of Jordan, so it's arguable that Jordan, 4 times Israel's size, is the true Palestinian homeland. It ignores that Hamas, and Islam itself, has violent injunctions against Jews written into their founding documents. It ignores that hundreds of millions of Muslims around the entire world are oppressed similarly by Muslim dictators in Muslim countries and massacred in far more lethal numbers - and somehow Jews particularly are blamed for what majority Islam countries do so often to themselves much more brutally. Even now, as terrible as it is, the average person has a much better chance for a long life as a Gazan under Israeli occupation than they would as an Iraqi under Saddam, a Syrian under Assad, a Lebanese during their civil war, an Afghan at any period between 1979 and 2002, an Armenian or Anatolian under Ismail Enver, and literally dozens of other Islamic regimes. It ignores that just as the Palestinians experienced a Naqba of exile, so too did a virtually equivalent number of Jews in the Middle East and North Africa, forced by their countries leave for Israel. It neglects that there was a second Naqba of Palestinians from Kuwait, 270,000 of which were ejected in 1991. And again, it ignores that many Muslim dictators find the oppressive circumstances of the Palestinians extremely useful: endowing their propaganda filled newspapers with a nation of infidels ready made to hate that distracts people from their immediate oppressors - a nation of people who've been hated unremittingly for 3000 years. Jews were oppressed by white people more than 2000 years before most people of color knew what a white person was, and even after people of color encountered the white man's rage, Jews still were white people's favorite scapegoat at home. The crocodile tears of the pro-Palestine side is just as sanctimonious, and, from my view, the rage quite a bit more terrifying. The pro-Palestine crowd raises ignoring the context of Israel's situation to an artform, and those who excuse Palestinian acts of violence raise anticolonialism to an authoritarianism that would excuse the bloodiest butcheries of leftist totalitarians like Stalin and Mao.

And then there's the explanation that people are lazy, and it's easier to believe the narrative of one or the other rather than do the work of understanding things.

That is true but it doesn't help much.

Here is the explanation I believe:

Israel/Palestine is the literal meeting point of every debate the world has. It involves all the crucial questions of liberalism, imperialism, totalitarianism, democracy, economics, terrorism, militarism, weaponry, and international law. Because it involves so many existential world questions, Israel/Palestine is like a rorschach test of every person's ideology on earth, and therefore anybody who cares about the world's future has an opinion about this tiny region, which serves as a laboratory whose resolution would definitively prove everybody's notions correct or incorrect.

This is particularly unfortunate for Jews, because Jews are involved in these existential questions wherever a lot of them end up, and eventually end up seen as the opponents to whichever country a large number live in. Throughout history, if you have an ideology, particularly a simple one, you always run into problems with Jews. If you're sufficiently an old-school Christian you hold Jews responsible for killing Christ. If you're sufficiently atheist, you hold Jews responsible for creating monotheism. If your ideology is sufficiently nationalist, you see Jews as a fifth column. If your ideology is sufficiently communist or intersectional, you see a disproportionate number of Jews as capitalist collaborators. And if your ideology is sufficiently Muslim, you remember that the Quran calls Jews enemies, infidels, unbelievers, evildoers, cursed, corrupt, distorters and falsifiers of sacred texts, and you remember that Mohammed was one of history's many great men who massacred whole towns of Jews.

And yet just because Jews have this history does not invalidate the grievances of Palestinians, which are not in history but now, and actionable, and far more oppressive than the current living conditions of Israelis.

Israel/Palestine is a region that is literally the center of the earth's largest landmass: at the meeting point of Europe, Asia and Africa, and therefore it is precisely where Western concepts of democracy and liberalism meet southern concepts of anti-colonialism and revolutionary independence, where Western concepts of history meet with Eastern concepts of continuity and eternity. It is therefore a conflict with maximal tension between the three. To examine this region is to lay open the hypocrisies of them all: the imperial delusions within liberal democracy and the totalitarian delusions in anticolonialism. The manichean delusions in conservatism and the pie in the sky delusions in progressivism. Nobody wants to admit the weak spots of what they believe, but they're always there, and until the world comes up with a worldview that takes all its contradictions into account, the fascination with this tiny central sliver of the world will continue: probably to its detriment.

Brother Bibi - Part 1: Day 11

 For a quarter century, mention of his name would cause me a vague spine creep of nausea. From the 1996 election, days like last week were fate. Nobody has the excuse of saying they didn't know the scum that is Bibi Netanyahu from the first time he ran for Prime Minister and he refused to condemn hundreds of rabbinical incitements for Yitzhak Rabin's assassination. An orthodox fanatic killed my political hero, Netanyahu faced a weaker candidate, and he became Prime Minister.

I liked Shimon Peres. Except for his suavity, everybody seemed to talk about him the way they talked about me. They mistrusted him for being too European, too Yiddish, having too much trust in words and too little practicality. He was the last of Israel's founding fathers to leave the bimah, but everyone dismissed David Ben-Gurion's personal assistant as 'not a real Israeli.' But if I liked Shimon Peres, then Yitzhak Rabin was my political hero.

When Yitzhak Rabin was 25, he was COO of the Palmach, the Jews' elite special forces in the Israeli War of Independence, a war both the CIA and the British foreign ministry predicted Arab forces would win. Rabin had only joined the Palmach seven years earlier when he could neither shoot nor drive. Twenty years later he was commander-in-chief of the Israel Defense Forces in another war that was supposed to be lost yet took only six days to win. Later we learned that Rabin lead the army while personally on the edge of a nervous breakdown, yet he oversaw the whole thing. When he was Prime Minister the first time, he resigned at the first hint of a scandal rather than represent his constituents unfairly - his wife had $10,000 in an American bank account. When he was Defense Minister in the 80s, he ordered the IDF to retreat from the center of Lebanon to a line much nearer the Israeli border, and during the First Intifada got much criticism for ordering soldiers to beat Palestinians and shoot them with rubber bullets. Many critics thought he should have killed them.

Yitzhak Rabin was a statesman for the real world. Not a fighter for social justice but an actual fighter; in theaters of war where morality is compromised on every side, he used his soldier's grit to move the moral needle inch by inch. When a literary man like Peres promised peace, no brilliant speech could make Israelis believe him. When one of Israel's greatest generals promised it, the belief was real. When Peres shook Arafat's hand, he was all smiles. When Rabin shook it, he looked as though he was about to run to the nearest bathroom to throw up. It's Rabin who said what history might remember as the most necessary quote about peace of the 20th century: 'you don't make peace with your friends, you make it with very unsavory enemies.'

If history has one rule, it's that our beliefs are wrong. Even if the right believes otherwise, there was a moment when peace between Israel and Palestine was possible. Even if the left believes otherwise, it was never going to be anything but a very bad peace. A shitty peace is better than no peace. It would have made Palestine into a kleptocratic dictatorship: like Jordan at best, Kuwait at worst; it would have made Israel live with a certain level of terror: like post-apartheid South Africa (and we won't get into that debate...). Both sides found it unacceptable, but both sides would have their futures guaranteed. The threat of nuclear war would drastically reduce as Israel concentrated the entirety of their force to Hezbollah on the northern border and policing Iran's developments. A handpicked heir to Arafat would have full control of Palestine. He'd value his physical safety to the point that he'd crush any violent Islamic forces with a savagery that impresses even them. A million Israelis would leave the country at the first sign of better opportunities elsewhere and a series of right-wingers would win election by blaming the peace process while running roughshod over the rights of Israeli Arabs. But two corrupt sides would have seen cooperation as their mutual interest, and worked together to ensure that no twice in a century war would originate from them.

One of the many things our modern tellings of history get wrong is that progress does not happen from the bottom up. The bottom may demand progress, but progress only happens when a 'great man' is a 'good man' and uses his great power to make sure that no man can ever be as powerful as him ever again. We call the people atop who make history 'Great Men', but as often as not, great men are villains: sociopaths and narcissists who rise to society's top because of their will to extreme acts people with a conscience never fathom. The struggle to wrest power from them is eternal, and often as not, we fail.

The Jewish world's failure has a name, and that name is Bibi.

The Faultline: Day 10 or 11

 

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On either side of 1900 was the Age of Political Assassination. Even in the age of unregulated industry, one of the most dangerous jobs in the world was to be a member of a royal family: among the assassinated were Czar Alexander III of Russia, Empress Elisabeth of Austria, George III of Greece, Umberto I of Italy, Grand Duke Sergei Romanov of Russia, and of course, Czar Nicholas and his family. There were attempts made on the longtime Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Czar Alexander II, Queen Victoria alone survived seven assassination attempts, and there were further attempts on her husband and both her successors. Not to mention all the political assassinations of Presidents in the US and France. So of all these assassinations, why did the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand cause World War I?

It's because he was killed in Serbia. The Balkans were the most volatile faultline in Europe where key interests between Austria and Russia were competed over. Austria could not let the assassination of the Emperor's heir go unanswered, so they went to war with Serbia, but Russia had vital interests in Serbia, so they declared war on Austria. This caused Germany, who had vital interests in keeping Austria strong, to declare war on Russia too, which caused France and England to declare war on the German speaking empires because they had vital interests in protecting Russia.

Whatever else happens in Israel, the most important thing, by far, is to prevent this war from spreading. The very heat and consistency of people yelling about Israel, the absolute differences in perception, should tell you just how volatile this faultline is.

Israel exists right on the faultline between East and West, and earthquakes on faultlines cause tectonic shifts in the power of the world, and power shifts in the world cause violence. It probably won't be WWIII, but do not underestimate how possible it is.

Whatever your opinion is about Israel's actions in Gaza, whatever your opinion of the Palestinian people's continued support of Hamas, whatever your opinion of Hamas or Likud, if the war spreads far enough, none of that matters.

Russia and China, previously cozy with Israel, have already spoken out against Israel's actions and for the plight of Palestinians. It should be obvious, neither Putin nor Xi give a shit about the Palestinians, any more than they do their own people, but they want to advance their interests: China wants cheap oil and Putin wants to prop up fellow dictators: if any of them fall, it could inspire the Russian people to coup against him. Putin doesn't care about Palestine, which isn't even truly a state yet, but he very much cares about Iran, whose dictatorship is sometimes as threatened as his.

Iran has already warned that if Israel launches a ground invasion of Gaza, it will strike Israel preemptively. Just as Russia's government saw Serbia as fellow Slavs under threat from overly militarized Germans, Iran's government sees the Palestinians as fellow Muslims under threat from overly militarized Jews.

The US wants to be uninvolved in military commitments after Iraq, but they don't have a choice. If they want to stop Russia from retaking what was the Soviet sphere of influence (an empire in all but name), they have to help Zelenskyy take a stand in Ukraine (and should be doing more). If they want to stop the Middle East from going nuclear, they have to be involved in the Israel/Palestine conflict. But if China uses the US's overcommitment to take Taiwan, thinking the US won't be involved, the US will have to interfere because Taiwan could well be a prelude to China creating an empire in all but name around East Asia.

We can deal with two strikes, we cannot deal with three. Between Ukraine, Palestine, and Taiwan, the easiest to deal with is Palestine because Israel is the one world power on which we have influence. Israel can deescalate, but if Israel launches a ground invasion, the question is: does Iran mean what it says?

Here's a further question that's troubled the world for more than forty years: is Iran rational? Does Iran's religious government care more about surviving than they do about holy war?

Iran has, until now, never launched a preemptive war. The war between Iran and Iraq cost as many as 2 million lives. Iran was reckless to the point of insanity in that war (look up the term 'human wave attack'), but the war was launched by Saddam Hussein. To this day, for all Iran's appearances of irrationality, for all Iran's chaos in having a government whose policies can be overruled by their religious leaders, Iran has never done anything so irrational as launch a preemptive attack on Israel, because they know that anything which could destroy Israel could destroy them.

Does Iran care? Clearly Hamas doesn't care. Hamas launched this attack on Israel knowing that many Hamas leaders would be killed in the actions that follow. They seemed perfectly satisfied to die for their cause and to throw thousands of Palestinians into bomb's way with them. So make no mistake, it's entirely possible Iran's government feels the same way.

And here's a further complication: contrary to left opinion, when dealing with an irrational actor, the most important thing is not to back down. A rational actor can be convinced by diplomacy and coordination, but an irrational actor only responds to force because if a country does not respond to a challenge with a fight, they will pick more fights until they get the fight they want, and they'll have used the intervening time to prepare that much better for war.

So why has Netanyahu not ordered a ground invasion yet? He announced he would days ago, the world thought it would happen days ago, and we're all just waiting. Don't be fooled by Netanyahu's bluster, he's very much a rational actor and could have launched a full-scale ground invasion of Gaza in a number of conflicts before now. He realizes that last week's attack is already the epitaph on his career, and does not want to be the Prime Minister who risked Israel getting nuked (this is the moment to briefly mention that Obama/Biden's Iran deals are looking very suspect right now...). It's possible that Iran has the bomb now, but even if they don't, ignoring the Iran threat runs the risk that they will use the intervening time to finish building it.

My sense is that Iran is ultimately rational, but there is no good resolution to this conflict, and whatever the resolution, so much more than this conflict depends on Israel making the right call. Can Netanyahu be trusted to make the right call? Well, he certainly didn't make the right call in preventing this attack....

Why Do People Care So Much About Israel/Palestine: Day 9

So like clockwork, the fickle sympathy turns. For less than a week it was about the Israelis, now it's about the Palestinians. I won't say that either sentiment is wrong, just that it's disingenuous in both cases. A good person has balance between resilience and compassion. If your heart melts too much, the more easily it can turn to stone. The way to save lives is to accept that this situation is exactly as grim as it looks, and that any way out involves accepting that life is of a complexity well beyond what most people are prepared to accept from it.

When two people are locked in a fight for survival, the moral concerns of who's more right don't matter, what matters is the hard facts of how to save life, and how to prevent the fight from killing people not involved in the conflict. In this war, what matters most is preventing the war from spreading. We'll talk about how to prevent the war from spreading another day, but within the war itself, there is no progress until two objectives are met.

1. There is no progress until Hamas dies out: it's a mixture of a totalitarian dictatorship and a mafia that deliberately maximizes casualties on its own side and converts foreign aid (concrete and metal) into weaponry and tunnels into Israel. If Hamas continues to kill, there is no way Israel's support of Likud won't grow.
2. There is no progress until Likud's stranglehold on Israel goes to jail. Israel has swallowed the intellectual poison that you can simply throw humiliation at the Palestinian territories then expect that they won't continue to support revolutionary movements whose main promise is to bring revenge to the other side.

Obviously, being me, I think Hamas is priority 1. They constantly try to maximize casualties. Israel generally tries to minimize them. One can, by hard facts, make the opposite argument, since Israel has, so far, killed many more people, but one also has to take into account that if Israel allows Palestine more leeway while Hamas is in power, Hamas will use that leeway to kill many more thousands.

I don't know if there is a way to make both sides see the light unless there is a true war between the two sides in which hundreds of thousands die: at least hundreds of thousands. Only then would both sides realize the price of the status quo. One thing that people don't realize about Israel/Palestine is that for all the attention it attracts, the casualties so far are quite minimal by world standards of war. In every war there's rarely more than a few thousand casualties in a world where many wars cost millions, and yet the attention and ink of Israel/Palestine is so disproportionate to the world destruction it wrought so far.

So why then does Israel/Palestine get so much attention?

One explanation, perhaps the most facile one, is to say that people can't get enough of the moral failings of Jews. Historically, there's a mountain of evidence for that. Jews always end up on the fault lines of history, accused of a moral abomination hundred different ways. You'd have to be an idiot not to see a pattern here.

But that does not explain the specifics of this conflict. It reduces the conflict to a simple pathology and assumes that everybody who criticizes Israel is just an antisemite. That's stupid, and it allows a grotesque double standard where everybody who complains of being painted as a racist for comments that may betray unconscious racism (generally conservatives) hold others (generally liberals) to that standard for the same behavior against Jews.

Another explanation, slightly less facile but still biased to Isreal, is that the Palestinian cause lays bare the hypocrisies of the Arab world, where Egypt could have taken Gaza, Jordan could have taken the West Bank (and both were offered multiple times), and Palestine could be their problem instead. But it's useful to keep the Palestinians in squalor, and by forcing the problem on Israel, it gave Arab nationalist dictatorships a different villain for its populace to hate.

But that absolves imperialism of its role. It absolves the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years of cruel imperial violence against Arabs, it absolves the British Empire for creating arbitrary borders so they could install kings and dictators in every country who would continue to funnel money and oil to the British, and it absolves the Americans for their hypocrisy of lecturing Arab states for their human rights while still being dependent on Saudi oil. If any two Middle Eastern countries have leaders (dictators) who do the best they can to operate with Israel in good faith, it's Jordan and Egypt. In both countries, potential radical Muslim political movements nip at the heels of the rulers, movements who could easily turn the these far more powerful countries into equivalent of a Hamas dictatorship.

Another explanation, more sympathetic to the Arab world, is that so many Arab tribes were denied their own self-determination in the days of Ottoman and British imperialism, then arbitrarily thrown together in countries where the borders were drawn by the British to reward rich Arabs who collaborated with them with kingdoms. Even so, Arabs were able to determine their own destiny without the interference of imperial rulers, and yet they had to accept a non-Arab country of people who resemble Westerners, existing within their midst in a state with the greatest military on earth. Even if Israel is not an imperial threat to the vast majority of Arabs, it has a superficial resemblance to an imperial threat and certainly seems that way in a vast plurality of Arab minds.

But Israel's territory is literally 0.1 percent of the Middle East's landmass. It's just one country in the Middle East among 23. Even when Israel was at its largest between 1967 and 1979 (really 1982), it was barely 0.3 percent, and if the Arab populations stopped radicalizing against Israel with violence, Israel would probably elect more liberal leaders who would significantly demilitarize the country. It absolves the average Arab for having a vastly disproportionate reaction to Israel's existence, obsessively holding a paleonationalist humiliation over opportunities for peace and prosperity.

And then there's the explanation that people are lazy, and it's easier to believe the narrative of one or the other rather than do the work of understanding things.

That is true but it doesn't help much.

There are still other explanations, more well-disposed to the Palestinian side, which would involve difficult truths I don't want to provoke people on either side by naming, but more importantly, there is another explanation: the one I believe.

Israel/Palestine is the literal meeting point of every debate the world has. It involves all the crucial questions of liberalism, imperialism, totalitarianism, democracy, economics, terrorism, militarism, weaponry, and international law. Because it involves so many existential world questions, Israel/Palestine is like a rorschach test of every person's ideology on earth, and therefore anybody who cares about the world's future has an opinion about this tiny region, which serves as a laboratory whose resolution would definitively prove everybody's notions correct or incorrect.

This is particularly unfortunate for Jews, because Jews are involved in these existential questions wherever a lot of them end up, and eventually end up seen as the opponents to whichever country a large number live in. Throughout history, if you have an ideology, particularly a simple one, you always run into problems with Jews. If you're sufficiently an old-school Christian you hold Jews responsible for killing Christ. If you're sufficiently atheist, you hold Jews responsible for creating monotheism. If your ideology is sufficiently nationalist, you see Jews as a fifth column. If your ideology is sufficiently communist or intersectional, you see a disproportionate number of Jews as capitalist collaborators. And if your ideology is sufficiently Muslim, you remember that the Quran calls Jews enemies, infidels, unbelievers, evildoers, cursed, corrupt, distorters and falsifiers of sacred texts, and you remember that Mohammed was one of history's many great men who massacred whole towns of Jews.

Israel/Palestine is a region that is literally the center of the earth's largest landmass: at the meeting point of Europe, Asia and Africa, and therefore it is precisely where Western concepts of democracy and liberalism meet southern concepts of anti-colonialism and revolutionary independence, where Western concepts of history meet with Eastern concepts of continuity and eternity. It is therefore a conflict with maximal tension between the three. To examine this region is to lay open the hypocrisies of them all: the imperial delusions within liberal democracy and the totalitarian delusions in anticolonialism. The manichean delusions in conservatism and the crusading delusions in progressivism. Nobody wants to admit the weak spots of what they believe, but they're always there, and until the world comes up with a worldview that takes all its contradictions into account, the unfortunate fascination with this tiny central sliver of the world will continue: probably to its detriment.

Day 8: I need a day off

 With great family news, I need to focus on the good before we get back to the grim.

Pray for the world and that we can leave a great world for the next generation.

Survival vs. Pride: Day 7

 

I planned on these 'essays' being full of historical context (which is my thing...) book quotes (kind of my thing...), statistics (which I'm pretty good at), and geostrategic analysis (at which I get everything wrong). I want to be even-handed, I want to be impartial, I want to value both narratives, but I'm too busy mourning everything I believe in, everything I value, everything I love.

I believe in America. I believe in Israel. I believe in liberalism. I believe that without that tripartite cement holding together a house of brick, there is a perpetually threatened Jewish people, and I'm sitting shiva for all three. I feel like ripping my clothes, covering the mirrors, going unshaved. I'm not mourning any person, I'm mourning a world where Jews can breathe free.

I was already mourning it until I heard just tonight: THREE close cousins, ten to twenty-five years my junior, were recently harrassed for their identity as a Jew. For the youngest one, the teen, it was simply assumed that he was a Jew in spite of no obvious indication.

In today's climate, no other minority group would have to take this without immediately shouting its unfairness from the rooftops. but it is the new normal at institutions all around America, particularly colleges, where the march of hundreds against Israel happened with numbing frequency before this war, and have became de rigeur this week at universities of particularly progressive ideology, and if you can't hear the antisemitic dog whistle, we can and it's deafening us.

https://twitter.com/emilykschr.../status/1712742119289340324

Today, a columnist I inordinately esteem made a long post saying that Netanyahu let this attack happen with full knowledge of what would transpire, and to believe otherwise is to be insensible. So highly do I esteem this guy that my brain went off and for fifteen minutes, I believed him. Then I realized: if Netanyahu did it, he's a dead man - politically, maybe even literally. World history will never let anything else be his epitaph.

But whether or not Netanyahu let this attack happen (and if he did, then he's more incompetent than the stupidest member of the Trump White House), I can't imagine a future when he isn't accused of it, and if history is any indication, such an accusation could spread like a cold.

Antisemitism is not the same as racism. Racism is a gut level prejudice or disgust. There is certainly an element of gut-level disgust in antisemitism, but antisemitism is fundamentally a disease of paranoia: seeing in everything Jews, Jewishness, Jewish power, Jewish culture, Judaising. The purest form of antisemitism is seeing the power and influence of Jews everywhere, all the time, a condition that cannot be escaped. In this way, the closest bigotry to antisemitism is homophobia. One could almost call antisemitism a kind of schizotypal disorder in how it perceives patterns in things which are not there.

And this is the reason the Netanyahu theory scares the 'bejeezus' out of me. A conspiracy like this could absolve Hamas of the worst antisemitic act since Stalin's Doctor's Plot (and arguably since the Holocaust itself). I suppose there's a very very small chance some version of it has a little bit of truth, but even were it true, why does the Middle East exist in a condition where such attacks are ever possible? Attacks like these could only be perpetrated if Palestinians so place their resentment at a value above their survival that they willfully voted themselves into a totalitarian dictatorship, and at any point could show equal resentment for their dictators to their occupiers. And yet after 20 years, Israel, not Hamas, remains their eternal enemy #1.

How did Israel become successful? Because they swallow every humiliation and resentment so they could go about the process of living. In 1948, while Arab states and tribes rejected the idea that any small part of the new Middle East could be controlled by anyone but Arabs, David Ben-Gurion said that Zionists would accept Israel as a state the size of a postage stamp. If Israel ever falls, it will be because Israelis too come to prize their resentments above their survival.

If there is anything we can impart to the new generation, it's this: survival is everything, and pride is nothing. Valuing survival does not mean that everybody has to live the longest, and devaluing pride does not mean that everybody shouldn't fight for their rights or dignity. Survival means that you valued your responsibilities more than your rights, pride means you valued your rights more than your responsibility. Survival is more important because without responsibility, rights disappear.

Just like there is no democracy possible without rule of law, there are no rights possible without doing the necessary things to maintain rights. What ultimately leads to a more fulfilling life? Fighting for your rights or doing the necessary things to build a good community and family? It's easy enough to say that you can have a fulfilling life by doing both, or that by fighting for your rights you're building a better community, but without a worthwhile community whose institutions are pre-built, how can these rights last more than a few years?

I'm mourning a world where Jews can breathe free, but a world where Jews can breathe freely is not a world where Judaism means much at all. Maybe the 'here and now' is all there is, and if it is, then we may be losing everything worthwhile. But nobody afflicted looks to the easy times for inspiration, and there are only easy times when the people in hard times look to past hard times for inspiration to keep going. Perhaps all this new oppression is a brief blip and Jews will go back to the relatively carefree life we seem to you to live, but it is not Jews from the easygoing generations who are looked to for inspiration. It's the Jews who survived the worst circumstances to help build for a new generation.

And from situations like that, there is no greater reason for pride in all the world.

When Jews Can Only Trust Jews: Day 6

Sympathy for a political group either lasts a generation, or it lasts three days. The poor intersectional left... I mean it... many of them think they've gotten permanent sympathy from history: take it from us, if your future is bright, all this sympathy will go away in 30 years as you accumulate gains and acceptance and become unfairly cast in the role of the villainous oppressor. If your future is dark?...

We Jews had our period of generational sympathy from Hitler's election until Henry Kissinger. Now we've had our three days of sympathy, and the sympathy will metamorphose until we're villains on a scale unprecedented in our lifetimes. This is how lifetimes of villainy start: it's never fair, it's never productive, but it is what it is. One century of Maccabee Jewish independence ended with the Roman occupation of Judea. All it took was seventy years under the Romans and somehow we became known as the people who killed Christ for 2000 years. (It was the Romans, by the way... Search my facebook page, two people over the years have accused the Jews of DEICIDE! ON MY PAGE!)

The world moves too fast now for 2000 years of villainy, but villainy for five years? Brace yourselves. Some of our most unassailable friends may wash their hands of us for a while when they can't get us to grovel sufficiently, then welcome us back when this all blows over in seven years as somebody else becomes the villainous flavor of the month, and then they'll treat us as though we always fit their perfect definition of woke.

Some of us fled into gentile friends' loving arms of white bread because many of the Jews in our life were difficult and hurtful. If we can stereotype a people, then we American Jews... well we're not the easiest to get along with, are we? And let's face it, compared to Israelis we're as easygoing as a retired WASP investment banker in an alligator shirt with a cocktail in his hand on a boat with khaki shorts.

This is already a terrible period for Jews, it'll only be made worse when we realize that most of our goyisher friends cannot be there for us when we'll need them most.

There will be atrocities committed by Israel. Period. They will be dreadful and malevolent. They will challenge everything we ever thought we knew about Israel. They will not be what Hamas just did, and yet everyone we know will tell us that they're worse.

Collateral damage of civilians is not the same as intent to murder, and who is responsible for collateral damage when Hamas put their munitions factories near schools and hospitals? Who's responsible for displacement when Hamas puts their tunnels and bunkers underneath the most populous regions of Gaza City? In moments of rage Israeli soldiers may commit massacres of a dozen civilians, even a few dozen, but there will not be a single night in which 1300 were butchered with complete intention as a public statement of barbarity: everyone from genocide survivors to babies. Israel has cut off all supplies and aid to Gaza. Thousands of wounded may die for lack of medical care and starve for lack of food, but what is Israel supposed to do when Hamas will hoard all the aid and distribute it as rewards for service and compliance? There will be cellphone captures of the murders most brutal, but can anything Israel do be as brutal as a kidnapping one-hundred-fifty people of all ages with intent to murder them on live television?

And yet friends the world over will push us to draw moral equivalence, and push, and push, until the yelling and the insults start, then the green lines in the sand that everyone crosses.

And, let's just presuppose, Israel does commit democide on a vaster scale with intent. Let's say that the unthinkable happens and the modern Israeli army proves itself truly as bad as Hamas. What are our Jewish friends supposed to do? OK, we'll say that Israel is an apartheid regime if it satisfies you, but were Israel truly as heinous as Hamas, it would commit far worse acts than Hamas, and no one would be satisfied by a mere designation of apartheid. Were Hamas the dictators of a more powerful country, they'd be as brutal as Hitler and Stalin. If Israel truly were as bad as Hamas, they would do still much worse things, and the world would demand precisely that designation as one of the worst regimes in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. There will never be a day when Israel plans a deliberate massacre of just 1300 civilians for which they'd planned over a period of years, because were Israel Hamas, they'd be powerful enough to kill over a million.

If Israel were truly as bad as Hamas, none of our friends would be satisfied except with the designation that Israel is an absolute mistake, a mixture of failed state and totalitarian regime, a religio-nationalist ethno-state should never have existed, can't exist a moment longer, and is the logical end result of founding a country on a religion .

Even on the .00001 percent chance Netanyahu's Israel turns out as bad as the Nazis themselves, we cannot agree. We will not agree. Other states go through periods of extreme nationalism and religious mania, and their existence is not questioned. When things get hairy for Jews, there's only one place guaranteed to take us. If that place ends and Israel turns into a binational state, the evidence is overwhelming that terrorists would come after Israeli Jews like butchers after kosher chickens. The very charters of Hamas and the old PLO say... you know what they say and if you can't figure out what they say about Jews, you need to read things more basic than what I have here.

Israel is not a mistake. Jews are not a mistake. How long, O Lord, until we're not treated like one? There are a bit over 15 million Jews in the world. I've read statistics that if Jews were allowed to grow naturally without genocide, we'd currently be 200 million. This is just the natural outgrowth of a religion that discourages converts and preaches only to other Jews - and unlike every major religious and secular power in world history, Jews haven't killed more than a couple thousand at a time since the biblical era.

Love your friends dearly, esteem and value them, but do not trust them to appreciate all our dangers any more than a group of color can trust white people, even after you explain it to them. Only other Jews can be trusted. However exasperated Jews are by each other, however much we'd like to retreat to our shabbesgoys, this is a period when only Jews can be there for each other with any real understanding of what we endure.

It's Beginning to Get to Me: Day 5

It comes at you in waves. You do your best to steel yourself and then the loneliness melts you like a white flame.

The moment it hit me was the moment I realized: as I should have known, my long distance friends have reached out from all across the country: from North Baltimore county to all across the Eastern seaboard to Chicago to Denver. My Baltimore friends?... Do I have Baltimore friends anymore? I've a few but...

I understand I've been forbidding on the issue of Israel: now as ever before, and nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Yet so many people elsewhere are heedless about the possibility and it's helpful to know that they'll chance a difficult interaction, even with this interpersonal grumpy bear. But this bear wants to write about Israel, he really doesn't want to talk about it. Sometimes you just want to talk about your new bike.

Maybe I'm person non grata in a hipsterland that issues social fatwas as easily as dispensing pez. If I'm suddenly on the social fritz with a couple dozen variouses, why am I outcast now after I've had the same uncontrollable emotions for eleven years with everybody seemingly OK with it? Why not ten years ago? Why did a social fatwa against me end six years ago as arbitrarily as it started the year before? How long am I in the penalty box this time? I had many more people in touch after I swore I was never going to socialize again on this page because of the way people went after Israel!

If you're Jewish, it's a very lonely period. It's thankfully made better by friends who reach out, and thankfully a number have, but even friends can't make it less lonely.

It's one thing to put doubts about Israel's future actions 'beneath the fold,' but what makes this most lonely is that so many people I know can't even stop voicing their doubts even now. Why can't this fucking wait until the casualties pile up? The families have just barely started to sit shiva, and already we have to endure the 'but' crowd. It's one thing to voice your misgivings with serious nuance below a fold so nobody has to read it who doesn't want to, it's another to do it with simple slogans, three sentence opinions, and other people's writing.

This is a time for the mourner's feelings, NOT YOURS. If nobody cares what I think or feel about Israel, they sure as shit don't care what you think. All it does is isolate Jews further, and for those who are particularly passionate on the Israeli side, all it does is provoke them to greater resentment.

I have already written serious misgivings about Israel's operations. In principle I don't regret it, and yet when I see other people do it I regret it instantly. It eats at my sense that Jews have their own space to occasionally feel like Jews first and every so often, not worry every minute about whether they'll be seen as having dual loyalties.

I have no idea where my ultimate loyalties lie any more than I know where yours are. I'd like to say that I'm a loyal citizen of this country long before I'm loyal to Israel, but what does that mean in a country where so many citizens currently think the country is not even worth being loyal to? I think my loyalty to this country is far above Americans who excuse the traitors on January 6th in the name of loyalty, or Americans who outright disavow their loyalty to a country they claim founded on genocide.

The world of being a Jew is lonely on the best of days. Life is different for Jews than for everybody else. In no way are we better or worse than other cultures, but we do have different concerns. Other cultures comment that we've lifehacked the universe: a portable culture of success, able to establish ourselves as movers and shakers ("machers") in whatever society we live.

Maybe that's superficially true, but what's the point? We lose our success every time we gain it, and a thousand times more quickly than it ever took Jews to become successful. In society after society, it's a generational process that takes a hundred years, and then it's all lost overnight: privilege, pride, titles materials, money (money more than anything), it's all worthless in the end; a mirage, a chimera, a farce from a god who wanders us from place to place, convinces us 'this is the time it'll be different,' only to dash our hopes for the sake of His glory.

So yes, these days I'm very lonely, we're very lonely, and we're only going to get lonelier when you pronounce your awful decree to disavow Israel or cease to be your friend. Even if you don't, we will always fear the moment you do. We deserve to live in this state no more than any other oppressed minority does, and however different or marginal it seems for the moment, oppression it certainly is.

Have No Illusions About Bibi: Day 4

Think about 9/11, that moment that should have united the world and renewed American administered peace for the 21st century. Instead of American peace, we had a neoconservative project of American power pursued as the sole arbitrating force of world administration. From the moment America refused the offer to activate NATO Article 5 that an attack on one member state is an attack on them all, we should have known, the Bush Presidency was a doomed project. People the world over never likde America's world administration, but they never had many suggestions for what could replace it. 

The Iraq War was a sufficiently predictable disaster that it basically absolves everyone who predicted its catastrophe, even if they had stupid beliefs themselves. Nevertheless, it was not quite the apocalypse many leftists projected, particularly in Europe, who contended the Iraq invasion to be a risk of World War III. Iraq was about as big a disaster as it was ever going to be, and still: no World War III.  

This is not going to be World War III, not for a while at least... but unless Netanyahu goes, it will be as big a catastrophe for Israel as the world knows. Watchers suddenly call Israel united now as though it were 'the old Israel' - 'the old Israel' hasn't existed since Menachem Begin took over in 1977, it's never coming back and nobody sane wanted 'the old Israel' at the time which dealt with apocalyptic threats to its citizen's lives every day for thirty years. Even if Netanyahu stays Prime Minister for years hence, we owe Israel our support just as we owe the support of 100 dictatorships the world over who keep the forces of world chaos at bay; nevertheless, have no illusions what it is. This is 'the new new Israel', nearly as radicalized as Yassir Arafat, and similarly chaotic. Netanyahu's project to eliminate Hamas is as doomed to failure as any project to remake Iraq. 

And now we get reports that Netanyahu ignored Egyptian intelligence that an attack was imminent three days before it happened. At best, this is rank incompetence and the same arrogant trust in his own judgement for which Bibi's been notorious for 30 years. At worst, Bibi 'wagged the dog' and willfully used this attack to save his power and prevent himself from going to jail for corruption. 

Is Netanyahu capable of such evil?

Come on. Of course he is. We've known the evil of Bibi ever since he refused to disavow all those rabbis who called for Rabin's assassination. He lusts for power and will do anything to get more. But if the latter is true, and let's call it a 1% chance, I doubt Netanyahu thought the attack would be nearly as awful as it was. Either way, this is the incompetence of dictatorship, a paranoid authoritarian locked in his own mind with no advisors he trusts. States have to make alliances with dictators all the time, but we owe them no respect. This is the work of a third rate tin pot leader, determined to preserve his own power even if he drags one of the world's most successful countries into mediocrity. 

There is a chance to save Israel, but there is only one solution. Bibi. Must. Go. Forever, disgraced, distrusted, ignored. In a just world, Netanyahu's incompetence would be investigated for treason. This is no just world, this is the world we have and for the moment it's the best we're going to do. This is 'the big one', an Israeli quagmire that ends with demoralization and isolation on a level even the new Israel never experienced. The tragedy is that, for the moment, it's the option we're stuck with. Netanyahu must go, and Netanyahu will go whenever Israel realizes his plans are delusions. Let's just hope it takes four months rather than two years. 

Make Yourself of Steel: Day 3

I remember an interview with a famous historian (Jewish, of course) whose family got him out of Germany in time. The famous interviewer asked him "What happened to the rest of your family." The reply: "They were all killed." What happened next was ten seconds of the coldest silence I've ever experienced. The historian stared the interviewer straight in the eye. No morsel of rue or regret for the lost. Just the brutal fact that people were once people. Now they're all gone.

When history happens, you don't get to sentimentalize it. With any luck, the savage details (what Stalin apparently called 'the wet stuff') disappear beyond the record and you get to awaken from reality's nightmares, but when it doesn't, you either stare it straight in the eye or you make bad decisions that just make more wet stuff.

My advice is to leave the sadness for the future, leave the anger for the future. The post traumatic stress will come however you feel now. For the moment, you're in the thick of it, and the most important thing is to keep your head clear, achieve the objective, and get out. When you hear what happened in Kfar Azza, don't get angry, don't get sad, just acclimate yourself. It's going to happen again, and again, whichever side does it, and eventually you'll be numb to it until it's over and the real work begins of coming to terms with the horror you repressed. But that is for down the road.

Political sympathy is cheap and fickle. Nobody should know that better than Jews. It's personal friendship that's deep and lasting, and if your gentile friends are your real friends, then whatever they think about Israel, they will listen to your grief and horror and all of it else. Political gains are never won by causeheads baiting people into argument (believe me, I know..) but our friends are there for us to work through our grief and horror in private, and if your friends are truly your friends, then they will either see your logic and come to agree in time, or you will see their logic and come to agree with them, and if you never agree, you will respect the disagreement and not bring up what only causes ugliness.

New generations are always becoming acquainted with tragedy. Thinking we've evolved is an occupational hazard of being. Humans are not more generous or tolerant than they used to be. It's not because humans have always been this brutal, it's because humans have always been generous and tolerant. Life is a series of moments, and in terrible moments it's the same people who help those in need who do terrible things. People are not inherently good, they're not inherently bad, they're inherently people, and the circumstances of any moment add to the completeness of who we are.

We live in an era that doesn't like traditional readings of history. Leave aside whether there was ever such a thing as 'traditional history', the one truth about history that never changes is that certain events have monumental, overwhelming consequences remembered forever, discussed by normal people for a hundred years and debated by historians for thousands. Certain events are so traumatic that they feel like a bomb went off inside you. Once every twenty years or so, an event insists on itself and their consequences reach out forever.

We don't know whether the Hamas attack is one of those moments, but it certainly feels like one right now. The world may never be the same after this: not just the Jewish world but the world entire. For eight years, the tensions of an already tense world steadily ramped up without a break: more division, more ideology, more mutual hatred, more disagreement. Whenever a clear world majority decides their disagreements are too important to compromise on, there will be war, and it may be war unlike any the world has ever known.

Is this that moment? I don't know, but history is not for the feint of heart, and we all live in it. For the moment, I categorically refuse to make any demonstration of my Israeli patriotism, even as every chamber of my heart beats blue and white. Yet again, Jews find themselves at history's epicenter, and what's at stake is so much larger than two peoples. What the heart wants at the moment is so much less important than figuring out how to minimize life lost in an impossible situation that, if it's one of those historical nodes, could claim billions.

Pour Out Thy Wrath: Day 2

Usually, when Israel trouble happens, I get so angry that I have to talk myself out of mailing dogshit to people who piss me off.

This time, I'm beyond anger. I feel numb, I feel cold. I worry that if I check my feelings I'll realize I'm devastated, shattered, wrecked, utterly run over.

My reaction now is more narcissistic than selfish (the two are different). My brain seems to know that the world is ruined, but my heart hasn't caught up yet. My brain knows that no rage can save the world of everything I love. My brain recognizes it's the death of the two state solution, it's the death of liberal zionism, the death of 20th century American liberalism, the idea that one can be wholly liberal and wholly Jewish, of liberal democracy itself and who knows how much else or how many? My not quite reliable brain tells me this is the death of the idea that all the various sides of my life will ever live in accord. The conflicting parts of me feel stretched out as though on a cross and if my heart bleeds any more it will stop. I have no room for rage left because my rage is with the world itself and the god who made it.

Half-remembered lines occur to me like those in Psalm 79, excerpts of which we're supposed to chant in the Amidah three times a day (at least I think this is the passage...): "Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called upon thy name... And render unto our neighbours sevenfold into their bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, O Lord."

By biblical standards, those lines don't seem all that shocking until you realize that the Hebrew word for 'heathens' is 'goyim.' We've used the word 'goy' to make fun of gentiles for centuries, and so long as we're powerless, it's a great punchline. But this passage is literally an incitement to g*nocide at the whole world, and whether or not such incitement is offensive, that wrath is present in the heart of every Jew right now. If the progressives among us deny it, then they're as repressed as any Catholic nun.

Goyim can make all the well-wishes they want, but it's for you, not us. At this moment, Jews are literally staring down the potential that we either k*ll hundreds of thousands or be k*lled ourselves by the millions, do you really think we care whether or not you feel a moment's sympathy for our plight?

In fact, we don't want your sympathy. We want you to be terrified of us. We want you to gape in horror at what we're capable of. The State of Israel is pretty good circumstantial evidence that the world stops k*lling Jews when the price of k*lling us is as high as the price of Jews for living. When it's all over, we'll be horrified at what we've done and we'll cry convenient crocodile tears; we'll swear we were only following orders because a leader bewitched us, but we'll be alive, relieved that some other group died by the millions this time.

I know that I should let that statement sink in without qualifier, but I guess I have to add that of course, I'm not advocating for anything 1% as lethal, but if you've never felt the urge to d*mocide, you've never been part of a group on which one was perpetrated, and the temptation toward d*mocidal options is why idealism never works.

We'll get further into this at a later date, but even if I'm a liberal, I'm no idealist. I'm a liberal because if you don't spend money taking care of the poor, the poor revolt. I'm a liberal because if you don't build alliances with other countries that guide one another to better behavior, those countries make war on you. The stability of the state comes before everything else: equality, liberty, human dignity, whatever... if you don't have a stable government, the anarchy will kill you.

There are all sorts of transformative projects which assert without evidence that humans are capable of better things: libertarians promise that with enough freedom there can be greater prosperity for all, socialists promise that with enough state intervention inequality can be a thing of the past. Neoconservatives swear that a powerful military can change regimes of small countries anywhere to any kind of government, woke intersectionalists swear that by redistributing the privileges of white men oppression between demographics can end. Political coalitions require the interpolation of all these ideas into party platforms, but the moment rank-and-file liberals or conservatives start actually believing in ideals over results, the battle is lost.

I'm not a Zionist because I believe that God promised His land to the Jews. I'm a Zionist because I believe that without the land of Israel, Jews will die by the millions again.

What that actually means is for another day.

ET: Almanac

 Before their eyes in sudden view appear

The secrets of a hoary deep, a dark

Illimitable Ocean without bound, 

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth, 

And time a place are lost; where eldest Night

And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold

Eternal Anarchy, amidst the noise

Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.

For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four Champions fierce

Strive here for Mast'ry, and to Battle bring

Their embryon Atoms; they around the flag

Of each his faction, in their several Clans,

Light-arm'd or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow,

Swarm populous, unnumber'd as the Sands

Of Barca or Cyrene's torrid soil,

Levied to side with warring Winds, and poise

Their lighter wings. To whom these most adhere,

He rules a moment; Chaos Umpire sits,

And by decision more embroils the fray

By which he Reigns; next him high Arbiter

Chance governs all. into this wild Abyss,

The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,

Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,

But all these in their pregnant causes mixt

Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight,

Unless th'Almighty Maker them ordain

His dark materials to create more Worlds,

Into this wild Abyss the wary fiend

Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while,

Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith

He had to cross. Nor was his ear less peal'd 

With noises loud and ruinous (to compare

Great things with small) than when Bellona storms,

With all her battering Engines bent to raze

Some Capital City, or less than if this frame

Of Heav'n were falling, and these Elements

In mutiny had from her Axle torn

The steadfast Earth. At last his Sail-broad Vans

He spreads for flight, and in the surging smoke

Uplifted spurns the ground, thence many a League

As in a cloudy Chair ascending rides

Audacious, but that seat soon failing, meets

A vast vacuity: all unawares

Flutt'ring his pennons vain plumb-down he drops

Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour

Down had been falling, ahd not by ill chance

The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud

Instinct with Fire and Nitre hurried him

As many miles aloft: that fury stay'd

Quencht in a Boggy Syrtis, neither Sea,

Nor good dry Land: nigh founder'd on he fares,

Trending the crude consistence, half on foot,

Half flying; behooves him now both Oar and Sail. 

As when a Gryphon through the Wilderness 

With winged course o'er Hill or moory Dale,

Pursues the Arimaspian, who by stealth

Had from his wakeful custody purloin'd

The guarded Gold: So eagerly the fiend

O'er bog or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare,

With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,

And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies: 

At length a universal hubbub wild

Of stunning sounds and voices all confus'd

Born through the hollow dark assaults his ear

With loudest vehemence: thither he plies

Undaunted to meet there whatever power

Or Spirit of the nethermost Abyss

Might in that noise reside, of whom to ask

Which way the nearest coast of darkness lies

Bordering on light; when straight behold the Throne

Of Chaos, and his dark Pavilion spread

Wide on the wasteful Deep; with him Enthron'd

Sat Sable-vested Night, eldest of things,

The consort of his Reign; and by them astood 

Orens and Ades, and the dreaded name

of Demogorgon; Rumour next and Chance,

And Tumult and Confusion all embroil'd

And discord with a thousand various mouths. 

T'whom Satan turning boldly, thus, "Ye Powers

And Spirits of this nethermost Abyss,

Chaos and ancient Night, I come no spy, 

With purpose to explore or to disturb

The secrets of your Realm, but by constaint

Wand'ring this darksome desert, as my way

Lies through your spacious Empire up to light,

Alone, and without guide, half lost, I seek

What readiest path leads where your gloomy bounds

Confine with Heav'n; or if some other place

From your Dominion won, th'Ethereal King

Possesses lately, thither to arrive

I travel this profound, direct my course; 

Directed, no means recompense it brings

To your behoof, if I that Region lost,

All usurpation thence expell'd, reduce

To her original darkness and your sway

(Which is my present journey) and once more

Erect the Standard there of ancient Night;

Yours be th'advantage all, mine the revenge."

Thus Satan; and him thus Anarch old

With falt'ring speech and visage incompos'd

Answer'd. "I know thee, stranger, who thou art,

That mighty leading Angel, who of late

Made head against Heav'n's King, though overthrown. 

I saw and heard, for such a numerous host

Fled not in silence through the frighted deep

With ruin upon ruin, rout on rout,

Confusion worse confounded; and Heav'n Gates

Pour'd out by millions her victorious Bands

Pursuing. I upon my Frontiers here

Keep residence; if all I can will serve,

That little which is left so to defend

Encroacht on still through our intestine broils

Weak'ning the Scepter of old Night: first Hell

Your dungeon stretching far and wide beneath

Now lately Heaven and Earth, another World

Hung o'er my Real, link'd in a golden Chain

To that side Heav'n from whence your Legions fell:

If that way be your walk, you have not far;

So much the nearer danger; go and speed; 

Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain."

He ceas'd; and Satan stay'd not to reply

But glad that now his Sea should find a shore,

With fresh alacrity and force renew'd

Springs upward like a Pyramid of fire

Into the wild expanse, and through the shock

Of fighting Elements, on all sides roud

Environ'd wins his way; harder beset

And more endanger'd, than when Argo pas'd

Through Bosporus betwixt the justling Rocks:

Or when Ulysses on the Larboard shunn'd

Charybdis, and by th'other whirlpool steer'd.

So he with difficulty and labour hard

Mov'don, with difficulty and labour hee;

But hee once past, soon after when man fell,

Strange alteration! Sin and Death amain

Following his track, such was the will of Heav'n

Pav'd after him a broad and beat'n way

Over the dark Abyss, whose boiling Gulf

Tamely endur'd a Brdige of wondrous length

From Hell continu'd reaching th'utmost Orb

Of this frail World; by which the Spirits perverse

With easy intercourse pass to and fro

To tempt or punish mortals, except whom

God and good Angels guard by special grace

But now at last the sacred influence

Of light appears, and from the walls of Heav'n

Shoots far into the bosom of dim Night

A glimmering dawn; here Nature first begins 

Her farthest verge, and Chaos to retire

As from her outmost works a brok'n foe

With tumult less and with less hostile din

That Satan with less toll, and now with ease

Wafts on the calmer wave with dubious light

And like a weather-beaten vessel holds 

Gladly the Port, though Shrouds and Tackle torn; 

Or in the emptier waste, resembling Air,

Weighs his spread wings, at leisure to behold

Far off th'Empyreal Heav'n, extended wide

In circuit, undetermin'd square or round,

With Opal Tow'rs and Battlements adorn'd

Of living Saphhire, once his native Seat;

And fast by hanging in a golden Chain

This pendent world, in bigness as a Star

Of smallest Magnitude close by the Moon.

Thither full fraught with mischievous revenge,

Accurst, and in a cursed hour he hies. 

John Milton: Paradise Lost

To Life: Day 1

I deliberately haven't read anything. I have deliberately not watched the news. I absolutely don't want to know what's going on until I can't ignore it. This war will be here in two weeks, this war will be here in two months, this war may be here in two years, and I want to live my life as normally as I can for as long as I can. There is so much to say about this even before learning anything about the new situation.

I'm lucky my family didn't move to Israel. I'm lucky I didn't move to Israel when I was tempted. Most of my close family lives in the US, and I currently have no close family in the Israeli army. Nevertheless, Israel wars are my special version of hell, where everybody insists on talking about what Israelis call ha-matzav 'the situation,' and they talk, and they talk, and scream and yell, and everybody makes hurtful statements they can't take back, and life becomes a series of reminders that you're a Jew among Jews, a Palestinian among progressives.

All I can do is make a list of those dozens of people I have to go out of my way to watch myself around so as not to ignite my ever-so-short fuse they seem eager to burn. When I'm around my half-neocon Pikesville family, I'm inevitably accused of being an unforgiveable defender of Palestinians. When I'm around progressive friends, I'm inevitably accused of being a reprehensible defender of Israelis. And so often has it happened in the past that if it's not them who do it, it's me hurling accusations back. I really don't like the person I become in this situation, and it astonishes me that they seem perfectly alright with whom they become. How were they so protected from consequence that they don't realize the shameful state which transfigures them?

The fact is that when it came to Israel, I grew up in something not unlike a cult. Jews get understandably touchy when people accuse us of dual loyalties, but when every grade school event began with both the Star-Spangled Banner and Hatikvah, something was wrong. Not a month went by without appeals to the parents to send their money to Israel. Not a week went by when Jewish day schools wouldn't remind their students that we owed Israel our love, but the ultimate injustice was that they were right.

Because whenever it really matters, nobody gives a shit about Jews. Nobody came to the aid of Jews in Germany because so many were convinced that Jews were the most privileged people on earth, then every Jew in Europe vanished into smoke. What can we do but have a homeland we loyally reverence as the only reason we're not living impoverished in the same ditch where live so many other minorities? Whether or not you think that's true, we KNOW that's true. The shtetl is still within living memory. So are tenement houses and the postwar refugee camps. Minorities are only treated well when they have the option to leave. Would it really help our cause if we volunteered to live like them again?

What it comes down to is that I'm a person without a spiritual home. I feel like a second class citizen among both Jews and gentiles. My home is culture, my home is history, and it's not much more comfortable a house to live in than it was for those 2000 years of Jews who could only find themselves in sacred texts. Torah is not my home, but Jewish history is my home, because the history of Jews is the history of the world, and as history and culture now expands to include the whole world, so too will the study of Jewish history. One day, be it next year or in two hundred, the State of Israel will cease to be, and the Hebrew nation will find themselves scattered to the Global East just as they've been for two thousand years among the Global West.

The most important part of reading history, the part even historians have trouble with, is having no illusions about it. In history, there's only one real question: life and death. There is no such thing as justice. There is no such thing as freedom. There is no such thing as victory. There is no such thing as progress.

All things of this earth are subject to a life cycle, and it is in our interests to prolong that cycle of life as long as we can. Humans can bear any burden so long as they live, and the more burdens we bear, the greater heroes we are to those who understand us. The only important question is whether life is allowed to progress to a long delayed end. All governments and companies rob us of freedoms and justice, but what matters is whether their inhumanities are symptoms of plans to rob us of survival. More oppressed groups seem to live shorter lives, less developed nations certainly live shorter lives. Nations with less substance abuse live longer. Slaves and wage slaves are deliberately exploited for their bodies until their bodies give out.

A long life is, generally speaking, the metric which indicates a healthy life with many seasons of joy and suffering. The proliferation of life is why we live, everything more than that is either commentary or sentimentality.

Hopefully I'll be more articulate on Day 2