I don’t think there’s much working with the PLO in Israel’s present or future. If you mean the north of Gaza: Hamas won't be for long. If you mean the north of Israel, that’s Hezbollah; and they will have to be dealt with next, if Iran isn’t directly. Assuming the Biden Administration doesn’t prevent it.
Surrender of Hamas fighters down there is unlikely. I don’t know why: they’d only sit in Israeli prisons until the next wave of terrorists traded them for a hostage.
I understand the emotional desire to negotiate for the release of hostages. It is somewhat surprising that the stupidity of doing so has so eluded most segments of the Israeli political spectrum.
They get it. But they can’t face down a hostage’s family; the people are sentimental and stand with the latter, however irresponsible (which of course creates an enormous incentive for hostage families to be irresponsible).
It does give one to wonder whether women’s suffrage is an entirely good idea in such a bad neighborhood.
I've always thought that Israel's reticence to show the carnage wrought by terrorists, while nice and considerate of the families of the victims, was a bad idea. People sympathize with victims. Israel never shows the victims. It was easy for the West to side against ISIS because we saw the videos of their cruelty, we read narratives of their barbarity. Over and over and over again. But Israel rarely releases detailed information much less photographs of the barbarity waged against its citizens by the terrorists
This is a problem akin to Bastiat's Parable of the Window--the difference between seen and the unseen. When three or four Israeli hostages are traded for 500 Hamas ghouls, the faces of the three or four released hostages are seen; the faces of the hundreds or thousand who will be slaughtered by the ghouls are unseen--until they are seen on, say, October 7.
> In ginning up their accusations of “genocide,” Israel’s critics often claim that Israel’s response to October 7 lacks “proportionality.” Proportionality, though, is a principle of war that only seems to matter if Israel is a combatant. No matter how vicious, depraved, or menacing its attackers may be, Israel is expected to respond only with some unspecified “proportional” response and then leave its attackers to regroup and rearm for further attacks on Israeli civilians.
Like so many other terms, Leftists are redefining "proportionality" here for self-serving purposes. Proportionality does not mean "the response must be proportional to the provocation," and no amount of pointing out how disproportionate to what happened on October 7 Israel's actions allegedly are will make it mean that.
Proportionality means that the army's actions must be proportional to *their stated goals in the war.* If your goal is to capture a certain city, for example, and you're coming in from the east, there's something wrong going on if you're indiscriminately hitting targets 200 miles northwest of that city.
Israel's goal here is the extermination of Hamas. And so far, they've done an admirable job of staying on-target.
Thank you, I truly feel incomprehensibly frustrated when in dialogue with most anyone on these issues. The alacrity with which they absorb numbers without a moment of reflection, and then amplify it on social media as if it's a fundamental physical truth such as gravity or particle-wave duality is just mind-boggling to me. Erstwhile "scholars" and people of letters show themselves to be little more than sequacious consensus lemmings.
Not seeing obvious manipulations and lies for what they are at an individual level is one thing, but when this is being "put into the groundwater" so to speak, and coloring nearly every daily interaction, it becomes a tidal wave of BS that one can't navigate, swim through, or avoid. The little Hamas-nics on my nearby campus are eagerly stopping normal traffic, blocking pedestrian foot traffic, tying up police resources that are better allocated to violent crime, etc. It shouldn't be this easy for propaganda to thrive. But perhaps there is an aside there on the degradation of our national educational apparatus which privileges "activism" and "simplicity" over the "pursuit of truth" and "complexity".
I read broadly, but critically, and it didn't take me very long to arrive at many of the same conclusions you have. To observe the mental laziness, or lack of curiosity in nuance or depth, or historical context, has me screaming into the void at times. Sadly I see many of the same echoes in virtually any topic these days - "race", climate change, school curricula. Thank you for also void-screaming with such a critical eye and fluid prose.
Well...I grant you it's a little like Kremlin-watching in the old days ("Aha! The 3rd Undersecretary Of Tractor Overproduction was seated to the *left* of the Premier in the Interim Party Congress! The meaning of this is clear, comrades...") but I can imagine some value in perusing the actual words and tone of what they say. There are many Isrealis who know Arabic, yes? And who are sufficiently familiar with the culture that they might be able to glean insight into the enemy's attitudes and general thoughts, which, while it may be of very limited military value (and I'm sure the IDF has far better intelligence sources) would keep the population a small mite better informed of what's going in their weird little heads.
Of course, it's grating to read lies and bullshit, but maybe it's a positive sign to the world, and each other, that Israel can tolerate it anyway. Anywayh, I'm not Israeli and I have no strong opinion on it, I was just thinking out loud.
I will re-iterate. The world does not need to read Hamas lies in an Israeli newspaper. Any more than American newspapers printed German or Japanese lies during WWII. I trust that the intelligence services are familiar with reality and they don't get their info about the enemy from the enemy's propoganda.
The challenge is to present the bullshit data in such a way that no literate reader could walk away from the piece thinking the numbers are anything other than libelous bullshit. If you quote some UN official merrily parroting the Hamas data, it is risky to wait till a later paragraph to make clear that the accusations are false. Otherwise, people will zero in on the quote and miss the context. Richard Feynman said, “Mathematically equivalent information formats need not be psychologically equivalent.”
One question I can't quite find a solid answer for is why does the Western corporate/mainstream media, meaning more or less orgs like the BBC, NYT, NBC, etc and their journalists, seem to support the Palestinian side of the story, up to and including taking the reports of Hamas at face value (Hamas! Not exactly known for their integrity), and why do they all seem desperate to paint Israel as some cruel genocide machine engaged in the mass slaughter of Palestinians?
I would be inclined to say that all these liberals and beneficiaries of liberalism (free press, free speech etc) should take the side of the ME's only liberal democracy (and ironically the only place in the Muslim world where Muslims have civil rights), but I guess that ship has sailed and the postliberal left now only sees Oppressor/Oppressed etc...
But the BBC and the NYT etc? Have the execs at these places really all converted to the Social Justice faith? Is this a real business model? Or is all politics now a cross bw sports and ideology, so that if your business caters to liberals who always want to be on the side of the supposed oppressed underdog, as this is what motivates and defines modern liberals, the media orgs are just giving their customers what they want?
My only other guess is that the Jewish state, being created as the homeland of a specific people, has to be treated as an enemy by our globalist ruling class, as globalists imagine all people as interchangeable consumer meat widgets.
Sorry for the rambling, I'm just genuinely perplexed.
I was familiar with most of those examples, but as none of them took place in my lifetime, this current explosion of "Jew Hate for Justice" has been shocking and disorienting.
I guess our liberal classes are often liberalism's worst enemies—things like civil liberties, free and open societies, free expression etc don't often rise to the level of overarching noble causes that people want to fight and die for (perhaps Liberalism's Achilles' Heel) whereas abstractions like Justice and Equality really get the blood flowing, as they also provide a way to gain power and smite enemies.
And somehow every time a new crusade for Utopia is born, the first obstacle is always the pesky Jews and how they must be dispatched in order for the glorious future to come into existence. Once again, the Jews are our canaries in the coalmine for the ugly explosion of hate and violence that seems to loom up ahead.
A friend shared a recent NYT story on Jews and their (former) friends who claim they are "anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic." It was disturbing to read, not only because of the subject matter but it seemed to me that the writer was slowly and very subtly trying to convince the reader that people who are "anti-Zionist" aren't "anti-Semitic." I should include a link, or at least the headline.
I don't care how someone tries to parse "anti-Zionism," it really comes down to that they hate Jews.
Indeed. Or likes us "in our place." With a caveat that their notion of "our place" changes on whim, with Jews expected to surrender what lives they have built each time that whim strikes.
I think there is a savior industrial complex that has slowly grown up over the past 75 years. There is a large demographic -- which includes many in the media and government -- that really depends for its power and funding on being perceived as the saviors of some other demographic of wretched sufferers.
However, note that job security requires that the wretched sufferers remain wretched sufferers indefinitely. They can't be the kind of group to whom a finite amount of assistance can be given and then things get better -- that would not preserve the power of the saviors.
But indefinitely wretched is not a description that fits Jews well, particularly in Israel, since even when they are oppressed or unlucky, they tend to just dig themselves out of the hole on their own. It also doesn't fit certain demographics of US immigrants, e.g. Indians or Southeast Asians, who we will also note are never clients of the savior industrial complex, even when they are oppressed or impoverished.
But it seems to fit superbly for Palestinians, or at least those that still remain in Gaza after 50 years of out-migration by the talented and energetic fraction. Those that remain seem to be basically permanent basket cases, who cannot for the life of them improve their lot, even with help. They are therefore ideal clients for the savior industrial complex. And once the victim class is identified, it becomes easy to identify the oppressor class.
The "savior-industrial complex", which might just be the White Man's Burden transformed and reified into a cult religion based on White Guilt and White Saviorism, is one of the most powerful aspects of our age, which is odd considering no one ever mentions it and even trying to analyze or discuss it is socially verboten.
The greatest strength of the "savior-industrial complex" is that it operates behind a moral force field, and as it styles itself as the Official Defenders of the Oppressed, challenging it in any way has become the social and intellectual equivalent of kicking a kitten.
All of this is downstream or an aspect of the rise of the great faith of our age, Social Justice, and how the Soc Just academic priesthood gradually seized both the means of cultural production and all the heights of morality that Christianity once occupied, thus essentially giving its disciples the same godly glow and appearance of divine imprimatur that priests once held.
I think this is just another shard of smashed Christianity (the Social Justice faith and its centering of a moral universe on a sacred Victim is deeply Christian, as well as its fundamentalist interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan), where the old faith has to die so some heretical offshoot can be born and thrive. We'll always have the poor (and other supposed victims) and we'll always have the people who claim that they love the poor victim so passionately that it makes them our betters and gives them the right to rule.
Love the term "Savior-Industrial Complex." And somehow, it's always possible to define Jews as the oppressors. The waves of Ellis Island immigrants were poor, and thus a burden on Real Americans. Then, their kids and grandkids grew wealthy, and thus a burden for the poorer downtrodden folk. And sometimes, the two complaints traveled side-by-side.
As it has been said “ the cause is never the cause. Revolution is always the real cause”. Jew Hate fits so nicely into that narrative. Recall that the drumbeat against any response by Israel was well underway and loud before any response by Israel. Also note when confronted with the facts of the horrific treatment of women and children captured on the invaders GoPos we are told that isn’t true but numbers made up by Hamas must be. There is only one explanation and it is the world’s oldest hatred.
Lastly of course the US administration knows the numbers accepted by the UN are false. The question should be asked is why should they accept them. The only plausible explanation is they don’t care about the truth only about the politics. When faced with that conundrum I might ask are they stupid or evil and conclude they are both.
> As it has been said “ the cause is never the cause. Revolution is always the real cause”.
Who said that? I've never heard that before, but it sounds a lot like the concept I came up with of the Principle of Revolution. ( https://robertfrank.substack.com/i/101913715/the-principle-of-revolution ) I'd be interested in seeing the reasoning behind how other people have arrived at a similar conclusion.
The concept of proportionality in warfare is bizarre. It's *war*. You've already decided there's no rational deal to be made with your enemy, and you're reduced to *killing* him, which is the most violent and insane possible response. You would only be driven to this in the most extreme situation (assuming you're a normal and rational person and nation). So by definition you're taking a desperate path, and *surely* the #2 concern (#1 being to actually win) is to be 100% certain you never have to do it again.
Which means the concept of proportionality is insane. You want a wildly *disproportionate* response, a massive crushing defeat, the kind of disaster that people talk about with bitter anguish for the next three generations, so your enemy never resorts to violence again, so that war truly does become unthinkable. Proportionality makes war thinkable, it's a cruel and thoughtless concept.
> (assuming you're a normal and rational person and nation)
I think that's the key right there. So much of the work being put in by modern-day antisemites is focused on shooting down that core assumption. If the Israelis aren't rational and normal people, if they truly are "settler-colonialists" rather than the rightful owners of the land, if they truly have been practicing "aparthied" rather than bending over backwards to accommodate the local Arab population, then that makes their cause look a whole lot less just.
Well, you can't work backward from a "lack of proportionality" to the conclusion that the Israelis are in the wrong. There are really only two possibilities here (1) Israel was wrong to start the war, or (2) Israel was right to start the war -- and war by definition must be disproportionate to be worth the appalling cost.
A lot of fools[1] want to have it both ways: they can't bring themselves to say Israel was wrong to start the war, should've just turned the other cheek or something, because that's a pretty appalling position (and deeply unpopular), but they still want to say *something* bad about Israel, so they invent this chimera of "proportionality" and imply that it's just always been some important aspect of Just War Theory or some other such academical bullshit.
---------------
[1] Including the President, of course. What a shame that such a mediocrity as Joe Biden should've ascended to the Presidency. I feel like a Roman citizen watching Nero appoint his horse to the Senate.
FDR is said to have said of Huey Long sending his son Russell to the U.S. Senate that at least Caligula sent both ends of a horse to the Senate [the Noble Senator Incitatus].
The concept (in the real laws of war) isn’t about the relation of my force to the enemy’s force, which as you say should be as disproportionate as possible, but rather the relation of the expected military value of a particular objective to the expected collateral damage of that specific mission.
Since the destruction of Hamas is the objective of the war, the expected military value of it must be regarded as infinite. It would justify, in terms of proportionality, any collateral damage; but the IDF, being the IDF, goes to extremes to minimize it anyway.
It's a concept novel to the 21st century that the enemy's civilian population is always "collateral" damage. One aims at the enemy's armed forces not because they are more guilty or responsible than those not in uniform, but because the former are much more dangerous, being armed, and need to be defeated first. But there's no rational moral universe in which, say, some 19-year-old German kid drafted involuntarily into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front is guiltier or more responsible than, say, a civilian member of Hitler's cabinet, or any random Gauleiter.
I grant you, if we go all the way back to when "war" was the fight of one baron against another, undertaken without the support of the peasants, a collection of personal and dynastic crusades -- let us say around the War of the Roses -- then this concept recovers its meaning, and we can regard Caesar's slaughter of the inhabitants of towns that supplied food to Celtic warriors as the war crime it probably was.
I'm willing to entertain the notion that the non-Hamas population of Gaza is innocent in some real sense -- but I think I would have heard considerable evidence of that by now. News of Gazans ratting out Hamas fighters, maybe blowing them up with IEDs (or munitions supplied discreetly by the IDF). Germans who despised the Nazis attempted to assassinate Hitler more than 40 times. Where are the stories of Hamas lieutenants assassinated by Gazans? Or even betrayed to the IDF? It's difficult for me to come to any conclusion other than that the Gazans other than Hamas may not be actively shooting at Israeli soldiers -- but they're pretty comfortable standing by while others do it on their behalf. That's not innocent.
I was explaining what the concept in the laws of war is—there are actual treaties; I was not making an argument for (or against) the proposition that it is an appropriate concept in Gaza.
Years back, I read about the Fascist- and Nazi-wannabes in South America before and during World War II. The writer said they were busy trying on uniforms and strutting around. When they saw what happened to Hitler and Mussolini, they quietly changed back into street clothes and hung the uniforms back in their closets.
Spode now calls himself Lord Sidcup. No word on whether the Black Shorts (“Saviours of Britain”) still say “Heil Spode!” Also, sadly, has liquidated Eulalie Soeurs.
I could never stand magical realism. There is a reason adults read novels rather than romances; except the childish, for whom magical realism is okay but telenovelas and Marvel Comics Universe movies are even better.
So many articles written (and many of them by large journalistic outlets that should in theory still do some actual investigative journalism) since the numbers were revised, and all of the articles I’ve read still include lines that are more or less stating: “Israel’s war in Gaza, that has resulted in over 34,000 dead, most of them women and children…”
“Israel’s war in Gaza” is my new favorite phrase that Hamas-cosplaying westerners use to imply that Hamas didn’t start this war by butchering 1200+ Israelis.
Yes. Mostly people leave because their employers leave, I believe, and that because we Californians have come close to making all commerce illegal (and we’re closing in).
The land prices are high because our BANANA policy basically makes it illegal to build, let alone increase concentration; and rentals are affected by our having made it legally hazardous to be a landlord, and though we have “controlled” it in some places we haven’t quite yet banned rent.
This is not even to speak of the “reparations for slavery” (California was a free state), the state health benefits for illegal aliens, the state university debacle, the crazies in the street, and the decriminalization of crime.
Outstanding as always sir. Thank you for the look at the numbers. Something most journalists will never even consider once they have the story they want. I recall that Stalin was reported to say 'show me then man and I'll show you the crime.' I think journalism's motto is now, 'show me the cause and I'll show you the story.'
It is to laugh. This is not Sy Hersh territory.
I don’t think there’s much working with the PLO in Israel’s present or future. If you mean the north of Gaza: Hamas won't be for long. If you mean the north of Israel, that’s Hezbollah; and they will have to be dealt with next, if Iran isn’t directly. Assuming the Biden Administration doesn’t prevent it.
Surrender of Hamas fighters down there is unlikely. I don’t know why: they’d only sit in Israeli prisons until the next wave of terrorists traded them for a hostage.
I understand the emotional desire to negotiate for the release of hostages. It is somewhat surprising that the stupidity of doing so has so eluded most segments of the Israeli political spectrum.
They get it. But they can’t face down a hostage’s family; the people are sentimental and stand with the latter, however irresponsible (which of course creates an enormous incentive for hostage families to be irresponsible).
It does give one to wonder whether women’s suffrage is an entirely good idea in such a bad neighborhood.
I've always thought that Israel's reticence to show the carnage wrought by terrorists, while nice and considerate of the families of the victims, was a bad idea. People sympathize with victims. Israel never shows the victims. It was easy for the West to side against ISIS because we saw the videos of their cruelty, we read narratives of their barbarity. Over and over and over again. But Israel rarely releases detailed information much less photographs of the barbarity waged against its citizens by the terrorists
Israel respects the privacy of the families. Not everyone wants to be an internationally famous victim.
This is a problem akin to Bastiat's Parable of the Window--the difference between seen and the unseen. When three or four Israeli hostages are traded for 500 Hamas ghouls, the faces of the three or four released hostages are seen; the faces of the hundreds or thousand who will be slaughtered by the ghouls are unseen--until they are seen on, say, October 7.
Exactly, precisely, the relevance of this blog to that war!! Outstandingly well said, Mr. Graboyes!
It occurs to me this morning that, if I were you, I would put some version of this in the description of the blog, and maybe in my personal bio.
> In ginning up their accusations of “genocide,” Israel’s critics often claim that Israel’s response to October 7 lacks “proportionality.” Proportionality, though, is a principle of war that only seems to matter if Israel is a combatant. No matter how vicious, depraved, or menacing its attackers may be, Israel is expected to respond only with some unspecified “proportional” response and then leave its attackers to regroup and rearm for further attacks on Israeli civilians.
Like so many other terms, Leftists are redefining "proportionality" here for self-serving purposes. Proportionality does not mean "the response must be proportional to the provocation," and no amount of pointing out how disproportionate to what happened on October 7 Israel's actions allegedly are will make it mean that.
Proportionality means that the army's actions must be proportional to *their stated goals in the war.* If your goal is to capture a certain city, for example, and you're coming in from the east, there's something wrong going on if you're indiscriminately hitting targets 200 miles northwest of that city.
Israel's goal here is the extermination of Hamas. And so far, they've done an admirable job of staying on-target.
Superb explanation.
Lie like Dogs
Actually, dogs are pretty honest. Except they falsely claim not to have had their dinner yet in hopes of getting seconds.
Thank you, I truly feel incomprehensibly frustrated when in dialogue with most anyone on these issues. The alacrity with which they absorb numbers without a moment of reflection, and then amplify it on social media as if it's a fundamental physical truth such as gravity or particle-wave duality is just mind-boggling to me. Erstwhile "scholars" and people of letters show themselves to be little more than sequacious consensus lemmings.
Not seeing obvious manipulations and lies for what they are at an individual level is one thing, but when this is being "put into the groundwater" so to speak, and coloring nearly every daily interaction, it becomes a tidal wave of BS that one can't navigate, swim through, or avoid. The little Hamas-nics on my nearby campus are eagerly stopping normal traffic, blocking pedestrian foot traffic, tying up police resources that are better allocated to violent crime, etc. It shouldn't be this easy for propaganda to thrive. But perhaps there is an aside there on the degradation of our national educational apparatus which privileges "activism" and "simplicity" over the "pursuit of truth" and "complexity".
I read broadly, but critically, and it didn't take me very long to arrive at many of the same conclusions you have. To observe the mental laziness, or lack of curiosity in nuance or depth, or historical context, has me screaming into the void at times. Sadly I see many of the same echoes in virtually any topic these days - "race", climate change, school curricula. Thank you for also void-screaming with such a critical eye and fluid prose.
And thank you!
Even Israeli media like the Jerusalem Post and the Times of Israel print Hamas propaganda instead of ignoring it.
Interesting observation. Kind of depressing, too.
Every time I see a headline "Hamas says..." in the J Post I comment asking why theybare posting Hamas propoganda.
Very depressing.
Yup
Is it not a good idea to know what your enemy is thinking?
We know exactly what they are thinking at all times. Kill the Jews. Now an article discussing their plans or their strategies? Obviously.
Well...I grant you it's a little like Kremlin-watching in the old days ("Aha! The 3rd Undersecretary Of Tractor Overproduction was seated to the *left* of the Premier in the Interim Party Congress! The meaning of this is clear, comrades...") but I can imagine some value in perusing the actual words and tone of what they say. There are many Isrealis who know Arabic, yes? And who are sufficiently familiar with the culture that they might be able to glean insight into the enemy's attitudes and general thoughts, which, while it may be of very limited military value (and I'm sure the IDF has far better intelligence sources) would keep the population a small mite better informed of what's going in their weird little heads.
Of course, it's grating to read lies and bullshit, but maybe it's a positive sign to the world, and each other, that Israel can tolerate it anyway. Anywayh, I'm not Israeli and I have no strong opinion on it, I was just thinking out loud.
I will re-iterate. The world does not need to read Hamas lies in an Israeli newspaper. Any more than American newspapers printed German or Japanese lies during WWII. I trust that the intelligence services are familiar with reality and they don't get their info about the enemy from the enemy's propoganda.
The challenge is to present the bullshit data in such a way that no literate reader could walk away from the piece thinking the numbers are anything other than libelous bullshit. If you quote some UN official merrily parroting the Hamas data, it is risky to wait till a later paragraph to make clear that the accusations are false. Otherwise, people will zero in on the quote and miss the context. Richard Feynman said, “Mathematically equivalent information formats need not be psychologically equivalent.”
LOVe the lead graphic!
I gotta admit. So do I. :)
Another superb piece, Robert.
Thanks, Ehud!
One question I can't quite find a solid answer for is why does the Western corporate/mainstream media, meaning more or less orgs like the BBC, NYT, NBC, etc and their journalists, seem to support the Palestinian side of the story, up to and including taking the reports of Hamas at face value (Hamas! Not exactly known for their integrity), and why do they all seem desperate to paint Israel as some cruel genocide machine engaged in the mass slaughter of Palestinians?
I would be inclined to say that all these liberals and beneficiaries of liberalism (free press, free speech etc) should take the side of the ME's only liberal democracy (and ironically the only place in the Muslim world where Muslims have civil rights), but I guess that ship has sailed and the postliberal left now only sees Oppressor/Oppressed etc...
But the BBC and the NYT etc? Have the execs at these places really all converted to the Social Justice faith? Is this a real business model? Or is all politics now a cross bw sports and ideology, so that if your business caters to liberals who always want to be on the side of the supposed oppressed underdog, as this is what motivates and defines modern liberals, the media orgs are just giving their customers what they want?
My only other guess is that the Jewish state, being created as the homeland of a specific people, has to be treated as an enemy by our globalist ruling class, as globalists imagine all people as interchangeable consumer meat widgets.
Sorry for the rambling, I'm just genuinely perplexed.
First and foremost, assholes since Biblical times have found reasons to hate Jews--and cognitive dissonance has never been an obstacle. The NYT has a long history of garbage reporting. In the 1920s, they were enraptured by Mussolini. (Consider this link: https://www.nytimes.com/1922/11/05/archives/mussolini-hope-of-youth-italys-man-of-tomorrow-hard-work-his-creed.html) In the 1930s, Walter Duranty served as Stalin's mouthpiece (https://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apologist-Walter-Duranty-Timess/dp/0195057007). As Hitler began his upward climb, the NYT was pushing his narrative: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/new-york-times-nazi-correspondent. The NYT was anti-Zionist before Israel's founding. They were often craven during the Cold War. BBC has a similarly problematic history, though I'm less familiar with the details. Can't say much about NBC's history.
I was familiar with most of those examples, but as none of them took place in my lifetime, this current explosion of "Jew Hate for Justice" has been shocking and disorienting.
I guess our liberal classes are often liberalism's worst enemies—things like civil liberties, free and open societies, free expression etc don't often rise to the level of overarching noble causes that people want to fight and die for (perhaps Liberalism's Achilles' Heel) whereas abstractions like Justice and Equality really get the blood flowing, as they also provide a way to gain power and smite enemies.
And somehow every time a new crusade for Utopia is born, the first obstacle is always the pesky Jews and how they must be dispatched in order for the glorious future to come into existence. Once again, the Jews are our canaries in the coalmine for the ugly explosion of hate and violence that seems to loom up ahead.
Thanks!
A friend shared a recent NYT story on Jews and their (former) friends who claim they are "anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic." It was disturbing to read, not only because of the subject matter but it seemed to me that the writer was slowly and very subtly trying to convince the reader that people who are "anti-Zionist" aren't "anti-Semitic." I should include a link, or at least the headline.
I don't care how someone tries to parse "anti-Zionism," it really comes down to that they hate Jews.
Indeed. Or likes us "in our place." With a caveat that their notion of "our place" changes on whim, with Jews expected to surrender what lives they have built each time that whim strikes.
I think there is a savior industrial complex that has slowly grown up over the past 75 years. There is a large demographic -- which includes many in the media and government -- that really depends for its power and funding on being perceived as the saviors of some other demographic of wretched sufferers.
However, note that job security requires that the wretched sufferers remain wretched sufferers indefinitely. They can't be the kind of group to whom a finite amount of assistance can be given and then things get better -- that would not preserve the power of the saviors.
But indefinitely wretched is not a description that fits Jews well, particularly in Israel, since even when they are oppressed or unlucky, they tend to just dig themselves out of the hole on their own. It also doesn't fit certain demographics of US immigrants, e.g. Indians or Southeast Asians, who we will also note are never clients of the savior industrial complex, even when they are oppressed or impoverished.
But it seems to fit superbly for Palestinians, or at least those that still remain in Gaza after 50 years of out-migration by the talented and energetic fraction. Those that remain seem to be basically permanent basket cases, who cannot for the life of them improve their lot, even with help. They are therefore ideal clients for the savior industrial complex. And once the victim class is identified, it becomes easy to identify the oppressor class.
Such a great comment!
The "savior-industrial complex", which might just be the White Man's Burden transformed and reified into a cult religion based on White Guilt and White Saviorism, is one of the most powerful aspects of our age, which is odd considering no one ever mentions it and even trying to analyze or discuss it is socially verboten.
The greatest strength of the "savior-industrial complex" is that it operates behind a moral force field, and as it styles itself as the Official Defenders of the Oppressed, challenging it in any way has become the social and intellectual equivalent of kicking a kitten.
All of this is downstream or an aspect of the rise of the great faith of our age, Social Justice, and how the Soc Just academic priesthood gradually seized both the means of cultural production and all the heights of morality that Christianity once occupied, thus essentially giving its disciples the same godly glow and appearance of divine imprimatur that priests once held.
I think this is just another shard of smashed Christianity (the Social Justice faith and its centering of a moral universe on a sacred Victim is deeply Christian, as well as its fundamentalist interpretation of the Parable of the Good Samaritan), where the old faith has to die so some heretical offshoot can be born and thrive. We'll always have the poor (and other supposed victims) and we'll always have the people who claim that they love the poor victim so passionately that it makes them our betters and gives them the right to rule.
Love the term "Savior-Industrial Complex." And somehow, it's always possible to define Jews as the oppressors. The waves of Ellis Island immigrants were poor, and thus a burden on Real Americans. Then, their kids and grandkids grew wealthy, and thus a burden for the poorer downtrodden folk. And sometimes, the two complaints traveled side-by-side.
As it has been said “ the cause is never the cause. Revolution is always the real cause”. Jew Hate fits so nicely into that narrative. Recall that the drumbeat against any response by Israel was well underway and loud before any response by Israel. Also note when confronted with the facts of the horrific treatment of women and children captured on the invaders GoPos we are told that isn’t true but numbers made up by Hamas must be. There is only one explanation and it is the world’s oldest hatred.
Lastly of course the US administration knows the numbers accepted by the UN are false. The question should be asked is why should they accept them. The only plausible explanation is they don’t care about the truth only about the politics. When faced with that conundrum I might ask are they stupid or evil and conclude they are both.
> As it has been said “ the cause is never the cause. Revolution is always the real cause”.
Who said that? I've never heard that before, but it sounds a lot like the concept I came up with of the Principle of Revolution. ( https://robertfrank.substack.com/i/101913715/the-principle-of-revolution ) I'd be interested in seeing the reasoning behind how other people have arrived at a similar conclusion.
I really liked your post on the topic.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9944844-saul-alinsky-the-radical-organizer-and-mentor-of-barack-obama
Thanks!
Agree on all points.
The concept of proportionality in warfare is bizarre. It's *war*. You've already decided there's no rational deal to be made with your enemy, and you're reduced to *killing* him, which is the most violent and insane possible response. You would only be driven to this in the most extreme situation (assuming you're a normal and rational person and nation). So by definition you're taking a desperate path, and *surely* the #2 concern (#1 being to actually win) is to be 100% certain you never have to do it again.
Which means the concept of proportionality is insane. You want a wildly *disproportionate* response, a massive crushing defeat, the kind of disaster that people talk about with bitter anguish for the next three generations, so your enemy never resorts to violence again, so that war truly does become unthinkable. Proportionality makes war thinkable, it's a cruel and thoughtless concept.
> (assuming you're a normal and rational person and nation)
I think that's the key right there. So much of the work being put in by modern-day antisemites is focused on shooting down that core assumption. If the Israelis aren't rational and normal people, if they truly are "settler-colonialists" rather than the rightful owners of the land, if they truly have been practicing "aparthied" rather than bending over backwards to accommodate the local Arab population, then that makes their cause look a whole lot less just.
Well, you can't work backward from a "lack of proportionality" to the conclusion that the Israelis are in the wrong. There are really only two possibilities here (1) Israel was wrong to start the war, or (2) Israel was right to start the war -- and war by definition must be disproportionate to be worth the appalling cost.
A lot of fools[1] want to have it both ways: they can't bring themselves to say Israel was wrong to start the war, should've just turned the other cheek or something, because that's a pretty appalling position (and deeply unpopular), but they still want to say *something* bad about Israel, so they invent this chimera of "proportionality" and imply that it's just always been some important aspect of Just War Theory or some other such academical bullshit.
---------------
[1] Including the President, of course. What a shame that such a mediocrity as Joe Biden should've ascended to the Presidency. I feel like a Roman citizen watching Nero appoint his horse to the Senate.
In this case, only half the horse.
FDR is said to have said of Huey Long sending his son Russell to the U.S. Senate that at least Caligula sent both ends of a horse to the Senate [the Noble Senator Incitatus].
I didn’t know that quote. :) nearly half a century ago, I wrote an article comparing a particular senator to Incitatus. A metaphor for the ages.
If FDR said that, it must have been during a seance as Russell Long was elected to the Senate in 1948, three years after FDR died.
No wonder I could find lots of attributions but no actual quotations.
The concept (in the real laws of war) isn’t about the relation of my force to the enemy’s force, which as you say should be as disproportionate as possible, but rather the relation of the expected military value of a particular objective to the expected collateral damage of that specific mission.
Since the destruction of Hamas is the objective of the war, the expected military value of it must be regarded as infinite. It would justify, in terms of proportionality, any collateral damage; but the IDF, being the IDF, goes to extremes to minimize it anyway.
It's a concept novel to the 21st century that the enemy's civilian population is always "collateral" damage. One aims at the enemy's armed forces not because they are more guilty or responsible than those not in uniform, but because the former are much more dangerous, being armed, and need to be defeated first. But there's no rational moral universe in which, say, some 19-year-old German kid drafted involuntarily into the Wehrmacht and sent to the front is guiltier or more responsible than, say, a civilian member of Hitler's cabinet, or any random Gauleiter.
I grant you, if we go all the way back to when "war" was the fight of one baron against another, undertaken without the support of the peasants, a collection of personal and dynastic crusades -- let us say around the War of the Roses -- then this concept recovers its meaning, and we can regard Caesar's slaughter of the inhabitants of towns that supplied food to Celtic warriors as the war crime it probably was.
I'm willing to entertain the notion that the non-Hamas population of Gaza is innocent in some real sense -- but I think I would have heard considerable evidence of that by now. News of Gazans ratting out Hamas fighters, maybe blowing them up with IEDs (or munitions supplied discreetly by the IDF). Germans who despised the Nazis attempted to assassinate Hitler more than 40 times. Where are the stories of Hamas lieutenants assassinated by Gazans? Or even betrayed to the IDF? It's difficult for me to come to any conclusion other than that the Gazans other than Hamas may not be actively shooting at Israeli soldiers -- but they're pretty comfortable standing by while others do it on their behalf. That's not innocent.
I was explaining what the concept in the laws of war is—there are actual treaties; I was not making an argument for (or against) the proposition that it is an appropriate concept in Gaza.
Great take.
You are very kind. Right, of course, but kind.
:)
Years back, I read about the Fascist- and Nazi-wannabes in South America before and during World War II. The writer said they were busy trying on uniforms and strutting around. When they saw what happened to Hitler and Mussolini, they quietly changed back into street clothes and hung the uniforms back in their closets.
Spode now calls himself Lord Sidcup. No word on whether the Black Shorts (“Saviours of Britain”) still say “Heil Spode!” Also, sadly, has liquidated Eulalie Soeurs.
Had to look that one up. :)
Even the most well-read among us have astonishing gaps in our general education. :)
Always liked the idea of Wodehouse, but never read Wodehouse. During my literature days, I focused on Southern US and Latin America.
Summer reading. Lighter than air—but an astonishing use of language on every page.
I could never stand magical realism. There is a reason adults read novels rather than romances; except the childish, for whom magical realism is okay but telenovelas and Marvel Comics Universe movies are even better.
So many articles written (and many of them by large journalistic outlets that should in theory still do some actual investigative journalism) since the numbers were revised, and all of the articles I’ve read still include lines that are more or less stating: “Israel’s war in Gaza, that has resulted in over 34,000 dead, most of them women and children…”
“Israel’s war in Gaza” is my new favorite phrase that Hamas-cosplaying westerners use to imply that Hamas didn’t start this war by butchering 1200+ Israelis.
I am a beige colonizer of one part of California from (by birth) a slightly different part of California.
I disrelish California politics but I do like the climate. When I die I hope I go to heaven but I don’t expect the weather to be as good.
I really have nothing especially wise to say about the end of the Golden Age and the persistence of Jew-hatred and other primitivism.
https://babylonbee.com/news/god-baffled-that-democrats-managed-to-ruin-california
Yes. Mostly people leave because their employers leave, I believe, and that because we Californians have come close to making all commerce illegal (and we’re closing in).
The land prices are high because our BANANA policy basically makes it illegal to build, let alone increase concentration; and rentals are affected by our having made it legally hazardous to be a landlord, and though we have “controlled” it in some places we haven’t quite yet banned rent.
This is not even to speak of the “reparations for slavery” (California was a free state), the state health benefits for illegal aliens, the state university debacle, the crazies in the street, and the decriminalization of crime.
So I would say overall that we’re nearly there.
Well done and articulated, thank you. I wonder if such news will winnow its way into the mainstream conversation. Highly unlikely.
Everyone chose their side a long time ago (the bane of the political and social divide) so I doubt anyone will tamp down their position-of Israel.
People now carry their own immutable data in their back pockets, their bespoke truths..
As Pat Moynihan often said “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”
How quaint that now seems..
About the Jews it’s business as usual for the last couple of millennia.
Outstanding as always sir. Thank you for the look at the numbers. Something most journalists will never even consider once they have the story they want. I recall that Stalin was reported to say 'show me then man and I'll show you the crime.' I think journalism's motto is now, 'show me the cause and I'll show you the story.'