Israel should exist (Day 44)

I want to clarify something I wrote last year. I am sickened by what Israel has become, specifically the institutionalized discrimination against their own Arab citizens. However, that doesn't translate to the eradication of Israel.

Let me be clear: I do not approve of Israel's decimation of Gaza. As of this writing, approximately 30,000 Gaza residents have been killed, thousands more have been maimed, and hundreds of thousands are starving. I am outraged by the performative visits to the region by our Secretary of State. So harried, so principled. If the administration wanted a cease-fire, they have a number of other levers they could pull that don't amount to a PR tour. 

But...no, per David Remnick, *and* I cannot forget what begat this recent round of violence. 1200 Israelis butchered, 200 taken hostage, on October 7. And I mean butchered, as well as sexually assaulted and tortured before being murdered. I don't need anyone to tell me how much Palestinians have suffered in Gaza and the West Bank; before I heard the details of what had happened, my first reaction was, well, what did people expect? But once I did hear the details, my reaction was horror. 

It says something that people defended what Hamas did. Somehow, I think when Frantz Fanon wrote about the necessity of violence, he wasn't referring to the need to rip fetuses from their mothers' wombs so someone could have the pleasure of killing them both. At least, that wasn't my read of Wretched of the Earth.

I wasn't moved to write about this until one of the few internet communities I remain a part of praised the young man who burnt himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy to protest the carnage in Gaza. His words about actions during a genocide have been praised; he could be eloquent when he wanted to be. Less has been made of his statements on Reddit. Here's a taste. My favorite is the part where he says there are no Israeli civilians, even at a music festival. The implication: they deserved to die as they did. 

It seems to me this is not a sentiment we should be celebrating, and I am terrified as I take in the number of people that are doing just that.

I appreciate that "and" doesn't balance the scales significantly more than "but". There is scale, and the Israeli government went way too far less than two weeks into their operation,  and we are well past that. Was the goal to get the hostages? Get the leadership of Hamas? Make Israeli citizens feel safe? They have failed miserably at all of those, and yet they continue. It is clear this is as an exercise in Netanyahu's vanity, and he needs to be stopped. (And please spare me any speculation about how diplomatic recognition by the Saudis is going to stabilize relations in the region. That's the kind of wishful desperation I recall from Egyptians begging the army to stabilize the country during the Arab Spring. That went as badly as any other deal made in Hell is going to.)

And to everyone who clapped for South Africa when they brought charges of genocide against Israel in the world court, why? That was a more transparently false exercise than the shuttle diplomacy of the Biden administration. Genocide is difficult to prove because of the factor of intent, and South Africa knows that. If they had actually wanted something done, they should have gone with war crimes, because that's much easier. But they weren't going for progress; they, like the Americans, were going for PR (and given the state of the ANC, who can blame them?).

I have my own ideas about The Answer, but right now we need a cease-fire, and we need to repair what is left of Gaza as the hostages are returned. (If you want the leadership of Hamas, please go to Qatar.) We do need the two state solution--needed it decades ago--but it's ridiculous to hold starving people hostage to that prospect in the middle of a disaster. 

Israel needs to be better, and they have much to answer for--but they haven't done anything that precludes them from "being". Say "genocide" or "war crimes", and I will say Germany, Cambodia, Syria, the United States, France, the UK, Russia, China..who won't I say? Bring up Israel's age, and I'll ask you to look up the ages of many countries formed during the decolonization movement--and that will include a number of countries who haven't covered themselves in glory, as well as those with--wait for it--territorial disputes. And tell me about the immorality of displacing people; I will agree, but I will also point you to the other countries that have done the same, including other countries in the region who kicked out their Jewish residents after the formation of Israel. 

Before anyone calls on Israel to cease to be, they need to ask themselves if they're willing to apply those same standards to everyone else. I suspect not. 

The real question: what do we need to do to make things better? I'd rather spend my time on that.

Deb in the City

The road to hell

If I'm writing a lot about Slavery and the Culture of Taste, it's because the book covers numerous topics that get at the heart of the intensifying anxiety so many of us experience as we contemplate the current state of our culture.

One of the things I can't stop thinking about is how the internal contradictions were always so obvious to the "founders" of modernity. Instead of addressing those contradictions, they played verbal and mental gymnastics with themselves, then threw on layers of pretension to hide what they couldn't fix.

Did it really never occur to anyone that their circles couldn't be squared? That they needed to strip down to brass tacks and start again? Because it certainly has occurred to a number of people now. Or did they think that there was a moment, some time in a vague future, in which those contradictions could be resolved? Was that moment supposed to be now?

If you value liberty as a fundamental right and believe that your civilization is better when those in it are free, you don't get around that by redefining certain people as inferior or subhuman because it is an economic necessity that those people work under conditions you wouldn't be willing to take on for yourself. You have to redesign your economic system, which will almost inevitably mean redefining the concept of success. 

I feel pretty strongly that the answer isn't to use machines to provide silent servitude; the fact that so many -- in business and fiction -- fantasize about robots that might as well be sentient speaks, to me, of a recognition that a spark of humanity is necessary for, well, the company of other human beings, and we endeavor to escape that at our own peril.

Philip Ball's excellent Modern Myths theorized that one of the fears Frankenstein stokes is that we will become the robots, not so much that they will take us over. After reading Slavery and the Culture of Taste, I have to wonder to what extent Frankenstein was inspired by slavery. I can't help but think that Mary Shelley, like so many around her, had a deep seated recognition that modernity was creating monsters -- more out of those who used other human beings than the misused human beings.

Sunny Auyang's book The Dragon and The Eagle covered these topics as well. Auyang distinguishes between those who use slaves (Han China) from those who depend on them (Imperial Rome). Empires end: ultimately what drives them is conquest, and sooner or later the costs of conquest outweigh the benefits. But while all empires suffer from hypocrisy of one flavor or another -- the prestige of the metropolitan center versus the practical importance of the "creole" borders; philosophies that center on the importance of law and advancement versus those that lean on custom to justify corruption -- those that depend on slavery come to almost neurotically venerate the concepts of freedom and liberty. 

In many cases, concepts do not take shape until their hateful opposite is articulated. This may be normal. What is unhealthy is not only that those contradictions are allowed to co-exist, but that a society allows itself to become or remain dependent on that which they have told themselves is intolerable. This is what twists us and causes us to make compromises that we, ultimately, can't live with; this is what causes us to be people who don't really believe anything except that which is most likely to help us survive. This is what makes us hypocrites who spout ideals that in the final analysis we won't do anything to support them. 

I started writing this post before I came across this article about Israel from The New Republic. My rabbi is quoted there, and his quotes are one of the few bright spots in the piece. The Jewish way is to do the work. (I might add so is the Korean way, so I am doubly obligated; I suspect there are few cultures in the world that valued complacency.) The work needs to be done, but I am under no delusions that doing so will guarantee that Israel will be any kind of safe haven for me or anyone else in my family. Not everyone in my family is straight; no one has been Orthodox since my grandfather; I am a woman of mixed heritage. This Israeli government isn't welcoming to people like me, period.

And even if it were...no, I'm sorry, I can't stomach the trampling of human rights anymore. (Yes, I refer to the Palestinians. No, I don't care that some of them wouldn't like me because I'm Jewish; the vast majority are not that way, which is amazing given their increasing desperation, which by definition leaves people with few good and ethical options.) I've fought with many people on both sides of the issue of Israel since the age of fifteen, and for some reason it's only gotten worse as I've gotten older. It is bad enough that I live now in a settler-colonial country that has made mistreatment of BIPOC and immigrant people a policy; I do not want to flee to another place that does the same thing. I do not want my safety to come at the cost of someone else's. I am not going to be soothed that I am doing the right thing because of a chauvinist notion about my heritage.

Good intentions by themselves aren't the only things that guide us to hell. I submit that the dirt surrounding that path are the compromises, contradictions, and hypocrisies that we try to blind ourselves to, and the end of the road is the point at which those good intentions run out. Of course it's hell. 

I want to survive -- I want my family to survive -- but I don't want any of us to do it in hell, especially while there's still time to avert it. Let's all do the work while we still can.

Deb in the City