if you really want to know
As I say repeatedly... it is a curse to know a lot about all of this. By no means everything, of course. But I think the reason it corrodes my mental health is that being Jewish and following these things provokes a kind of existential anguish that is hard to bear alone. So I am putting all this here and you can read it or not. The fact that nobody ever engages with my rants (although this isn't really a rant) tells me you probably won't read it. But I have to put it somewhere. I guess I do wish you would read it, just to know that someone did.
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First off - this was all so incredibly stupid. Well, everyone can agree that this means the other side was stupid, right? No. But there seems to be some kind of political or ontological choice in whichever stupidity you start with, and that should tell you immediately we are in the land of false dichotomies and Hobson's choice kind of thinking.
The stupidity that is driving me most nuts right now is Jewish friends of friends saying, well, Israel has to do something. And I think that's when it really hit me how trapped people are by their lack of thought and context. This is a war. There are plenty of things you can do to win a war other than "flatten the other place into oblivion and commit a genocide." In fact, if those are your only choices, I dare say your military thinking is pretty fucking bad! More on that below. Then they say, "so what's your solution?" and dude, I am not a military strategist and I don't have magic answers but I can promise that someone, somewhere knows a smarter way to do this.
Flattening places, with the possible exception of Hiroshima, doesn't work to end wars. We have known this since Curtis LeMay. The Blitz didn't break England. Dresden didn't break Hitler. Bombing Cambodia didn't break the Viet Cong. In fact in almost all of those cases it had the opposite effect.
But you know what the threat to flatten places does? It wins elections. In Israel, in the US, in the Arab world (when there are elections)... it's always the same. Fearmongering is electoral gold.
(I think there are a lot of Americans who watched Apocalypse Now and Kurtz's monologue about the vaccinated children's arms and thought, "yes, you need to match brutality with brutality to win." The film, for all its genius, does really not make you understand that he is supposed to be totally delusional.)
So stupidity number one is accepting a calculus that even in its own, military terms, is a counterproductive failure, a worse-than-failure. That's not even counting the moral and ethical calculus of looking at people as so many eggs to break to make an omelet of revenge.
Stupidity number two is that killing civilians for its own sake will end a conflict - or, if you like, bring about liberation. Again... has never happened. Almost always makes it worse.
You can certainly look at any number of places where thugs took power, but it was almost always in the context of a coup or other broader movement. And within five minutes the thugs and that broader movement are at each other's throats. You had an almost 10 year civil war in Ireland in the 1920s over this very issue. Everyone hated the British, but the goons who wanted to kill Protestant civilians decided that they would kill a lot of Irish civilians too.
This is why those lefties cheering Hamas are just so incredibly stupid. Hamas are guys who viciously torture any other Palestinians who they think are against them. That's how they took power there in Gaza in the first place. When they fire rockets against Israel, about 20% of them blow up in Gaza (which they then tell people are Israeli airstrikes). These are guys who deal in brutality for its own sake. It is like the mob. I am sure that most Gazans detest them, but then, they don't have a lot of options.
There has been a lot of reporting about the cruel irony that the Israelis who Hamas killed were often peace activists. They lived in that neighborhood with Arabs to try to make a better world. Then you think about the broader context and goals of the bad people. There's no irony in that at all. That was the very point.
And the other things that American leftists do not understand is that Hamas was Netanyahu's preferred client for dealing with the Palestinian problem, and Gaza was his vision of how this should end. There are conspiracy theorists around the latest attack but the broader outline of Likud policy has been very clear for a long time: when Hamas crushed the PA in Gaza, Bibi didn't object. Their presence served his cynical electoral purpose, which was making Israelis fear Palestinians. The rockets were not "blows for liberation." They were part of a careful kabuki with the Israeli hard right. You hit us, we hit you, we both go back to our people and say "what else are you gonna do? You're stuck with me."
So why did this end last week? It's hard to say, but the thing about bad actors is that they dislike being ignored. (North Korea has to periodically test a missile to get us to remember they exist.) The prospect of being marginalized by a peace deal between Bibi and the Saudis and the Gulf states probably did not sit well with Hamas. I have a feeling that they wanted to rattle the cage, literally, and things got out of hand. The gunmen probably didn't expect it to be so easy, and when they got to the kibbutzes, well, they do what Hamas has always done.
So that brings us to the most monumental stupidity, which is the callousness of an Israeli government that only exists due to cynical deals between a group of terrible actors.
Netanyahu is desperate to stay out of prison for his corruption charges. To get a majority in the Knesset, he courted absolute ghouls who were always considered completely beyond the pale of politics - the kind of scum who are in every legislative body in the world - and gave them plum cabinet assignments for things like security. People whose idea of "security" is to give machine guns to settlers and say, "have at it" - on the West Bank.
Before you say, well, what kind of terrible political system gave people like that such power? Remember we are about to have Speaker Jim Jordan here in the USA.
Anyway, Likud does not give the tiniest tin shit about Gaza. That's why they were willing to give it to Hamas. The nutcakes they are in bed with care about the West Bank, so they were focused there. The prospect that was coming into view in the last few months was a situation in which Jewish settler thugs ran rampage through the West Bank while the Saudis and Gulf states turned a blind eye. Bibi would keep his coalition and thus himself out of prison, and even look statesmanlike. It was a massively hubristic and dangerous calculus. But in electoral terms, it had worked. Until now, it won't.
This is when things will be their worst. Because Bibi now has literally nothing left to lose. He has already lost, forever, because his basic value proposition was shown to be a complete illusion. He didn't make Israel stronger - he made it much more vulnerable. But now, with that having been revealed to the world, it's not like the guy has tools in his toolbox for how to get out of this situation.
When Trump, or Bolsonaro, finally went down, they did not go gently into that good night. They tried to do as much damage as possible on the way out. That is what is going to play out now, and if you think it's been ghastly up until now, you ain't seen nothing yet.
And here is what I think I need you to know, what I desperately wish Americans understood. Israelis know all of what I just said in their bones. Nobody loathes Netanyahu or the current government like Israelis. They are able to say things that American Jews cannot say, because they do not care if what they say will be seized upon by a bunch of naive college students somewhere or some fucking antisemites on Twitter. They have to actually live there. Israelis have zero patience with Americans about all of this, which makes them infuriating to deal with, but they have a point. Most Americans simply do not have the imagination to understand how depraved and cynical this all is.
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Why do I know all of this? That and four dollars will get me a cup of shitty Starbucks coffee at the hotel.
Auden has a poem that is not very good as poetry but that does economically explain something that I think about a great deal.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
I think this is very hard for us because we want to think of the Nazis as being the one kind of movement that is categorical, Satanic evil. But even Satan had his reasons. And I think Auden is saying, sure, you can learn the whole history, you can unpack the whole thing. It's all there, in hundreds of years of bad decisions and bad thinking. But it is always going to come down to what you already know in your heart.
And in that sense the moral question and the practical questions are the same. If you treat people like shit, the thing will never end. But people do not learn. And on and on it goes.