Pig After Pig...Army After Army...
The Hamas-Israel-Iran-Saudi imbroglio is an infamia for the ages.
“It’s hard to care about one person.” He was a Stalin apologist. Or as he preferred to be thought of: “an explainer.”
“But imagine how difficult it would be to care about an entire nation,” he nodded, deeply, and in earnest. “Almost impossible. So, yes, perhaps mistakes were made.” Unofficial estimates place this at about 7 million mistakes. Or about 4.2% of the Soviet Union’s total population were ushered off of the planet under Stalin…and his “mistakes.”
So when in a grand guignol of political “gestures” Hamas used paragliders to float out of the sky to attack Israel, machine gunning civilians and festival goers, taking hostages of the ones that weren’t kidnapped, and bombing the rest, the global response was predictably bifurcated. Those whose belief in the justifiable reaction to months of Netanyahu’s eye poking and expansion of settlements versus those who have correctly posited that were this to have happened in America, we would have vaporized the actors as part of what would be believed to be a justifiable reaction to baldfaced terrorism.
The former group, ginned up on a wide variety of feels, has been rallying and directing their anger via rallies and, not so unexpectedly, in halls of academia, as though the Israelis had machine gunned themselves. Various acts of antisemitic violence have attended these actions even while more even-handed heads have parsed out the difference and the distinction between Jews and the government of Israel.
[T]hrough all of the talk and militating for this point or that, one thing remains the same: the aforementioned death. Two state solution? Death. Normalizing relations? Death. Deconstructing Israel? Death.
The latter group, shocked and appalled at the apparent lack of global allyship, is maintaining a belief in the vapor solution, and maintaining that there’s no moral equivalency in the aggrieved retaliating to an attack by the aggrieved.
And as always where Israel is concerned there is the strong hum/thrum of voices pleading for restraint to avoid doing that which would be expected from any single other nation on Earth. So, lines are being drawn, friendships are ending, the Internet is aflame with falsehoods, lies, misapplied truths and confusion, and absolutely nothing has been achieved. Outside of death. And the Saudi-US-Israel rapprochement that had been in the works. That, also now, a victim of death.
Speaking of death and victims and dead children, grandmothers, unarmed civilians, women who were raped and then killed, and bombs leveling city streets while Hamas supporters celebrate with Knafeh, as a finer point it should be noted: this is about nothing but. Princeton professor and Middle East historian, the late Bernard Lewis describes this seemingly never-ending spiral of violence as fundamentally a “crisis of modernity,” and frames the agita felt by aggrieved parties on the Palestinian side as a generalized part of this crisis.
But through all of the talk and militating for this point or that, one thing remains the same: the aforementioned death. Two state solution? Death. Normalizing relations? Death. Deconstructing Israel? Death. Forward? Death. Backward? Death. Stasis? Death. Change? Death.
Global hardliners rejoice and recall, in spirit or practice, the old Himmler dictum regarding the curse of great men being their having to step over corpses. Progressives are falling to the wayside, swayed by a confusion between vengeance and justice, and what they mean and how are they applied, and through it all innocents are dying, even as I write this, while their so-called leaders are learning how hard it is to want to care about a nation of them.
Global hardliners rejoice and recall, in spirit or practice, the old Himmler dictum regarding the curse of great men being their having to step over corpses.
Scant solutions and a plethora of problems that point to this never-ending story never ending because, and let’s not fool ourselves, absolutely no one believes that there will be peace in the Middle East even if Israel were to magically disappear tomorrow. So what would the tone and timbre be of what constitutes a correct take?
There are two.
One involves the kind of statecraft that we have yet to see. Even when we look at the IRA-Sinn Fein and that intractable deal in Ireland. The kind of statecraft that got Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin assassinated. The kind of statecraft well beyond Bibi Netanyahu who famously said when he’s not fighting corruption charges, and I paraphrase, given the history of my people on the planet if the choice is between overreacting and under-reacting, I will choose the former.
The other involves the zero sum game of everyone dying. A Dresden deal with Gaza until it is bombed into glass, with IDF ground crews coming in for clean up of everything that moved or breathed. Followed by regional retaliation against Israel that kills everyone there.
The differences are stark and outside of aggressive point making, it’s hard to know which to choose when even former Secretaries of Defense are laying claims that there are no honest brokers here, America most of all. “Your government is fucking them [Israel] four ways until Sunday,” said a former Secretary of Defense on background about so-called American “support.” “Don’t be fooled by the aircraft carriers there.”
“You’re talking about the Biden administration?”
“What other one would I be talking about?” he said in a call from DC.
For my part, Americans who are viewing Palestinians as Middle Eastern Native Americans, are missing the point that Hamas has no fundamental interest in peace because peace doesn’t pay like no-peace does. Moreover, we have no idea what the “average” Palestinian thinks is a solution that works since they are mouthpieced by the PLO and the Palestinian Authority and have no voice outside of them.
And outside of this an associate of Rabin’s assassin, right wing extremist Yigal Amir, still defends Amir’s actions in the name of “protecting” Israel. Answering “of course” when the question was asked, would he have done it again?
So it goes, a chess game with no conclusion and nothing but misery to be paid for playing.
Driving 75 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone Jamil, a friend of mine, gets stopped by the police one night in Mountain View, California. His muscled up Trans Am, tires bald from pulling donuts outside of the gym where we first made our acquaintance, drew the kind of attention you might have expected it would with its windows limo-tinted. And, oh yeah, the extreme exhibition speeding, as police call it.
“Do you know why I stopped you?” asked the cop, like they always ask.
“Yes.” Jamil was studying to be a dentist.
“Why?”
“Because I’m Palestinian.”
Now I was not there but Jamil described what happened next: confusion, head shaking, a denial and him, in the end, beating the ticket with a cop caution to “take it easy next time.”
Yeah. Good advice. Too bad absolutely no one will take it. So while it’s good to see you all getting excited about something/anything realize this: as it goes there’s no way to “win” this. Which leaves? Grief, death, relentless despair and unbridled joy for hardliners worldwide whose world view lines up here perfectly with the current zeitgeist.
So what am I suggesting? Oh man…it’d be nice to give peace a chance for a change but that’s really just dirty hippie talk that will, in all likelihood, never happen. Ever. So happy birthday to death, which is all we were ever promised anyway.
Is that good? Bad?
Well, it’s disgusting. But this is where we are and this is what we have wrought.
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