I posted this on my Facebook page this past Tuesday (slightly reworded here). It’ll be my last post on October 7 here at PoT as well, at least for awhile. I’d prefer to take some time and process the event before I say very much more.
I’m getting off of Facebook for awhile. It’s a cesspool at the moment, and I’m sick of it.
Just to clarify my own views before anyone decides to put any in my mouth while I’m gone: I do not accept the legitimacy of the 10/7 Hamas attack on Israel. I believe in a right of self-defense and of resistance, but I don’t regard this attack as an instance of those things. I know enough about suicidal behavior to recognize it when I see it. This is an enactment of murder-suicide. It’s not liberation. There is nothing here to valorize. If you feel differently, feel free. But don’t expect my support. It’s not forthcoming.
And if you think you can build a society worth living in on this suicidal-homicidal ethos, maybe think again. Spend some time in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan or Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan while you’re at it. That’s the future you’re bringing into existence. As a first generation Pakistani, that’s not a future I’d want to go back to, or contribute to.
As for anyone who welcomes the Israeli assault on Gaza or the West Bank, I regard you as complicit in murder. It doesn’t matter who you are, how long we’ve known each other, etc. That’s where we stand. When the Israelis say they mean to reduce Gaza to rubble, they mean that they intend to engage in area bombing of a densely populated space where no one has anywhere to flee—just as they’ve done, over and over, from Beirut to Gaza, since 1978 or 1982, depending on how you count. And the vast majority of the victims will be non-combatants, as they already are, and always have been—just like the ones killed in Sderot, and at the music festival in Re’im, and so on.
If you want a repetition of that mass killing, I guess it’s because you think the people of Sderot or Re’im have greater value than the people of Gaza City or Khan Yunis. I don’t.
As for anyone who supports US military involvement in Israel or in Iran, all I can do is shake my head and move on. If as an American, you want even more war than we’ve had in the last two decades, you’re welcome to it. Enjoy the party, but count me out.
The only feeble hope we had was the one Blinken deleted: a ceasefire for an exchange of hostages (at least the non-combatants, unharmed), full stop, with no further conditions on either side. But it’s characteristic of our times that the best ideas are the first ones deleted, and the ones most loudly shouted down. The people most eager to spill blood are the ones who’ve never cleaned any up.
I’m not interested in listening to people whose idea of discourse is the unfurling of flags, or the recitation of slogans about the supposed imperatives of “resistance” or “retaliation” in a context where those terms have such attenuated application. Carry on if that’s your thing. But don’t bother me with it. It’s not mine.
Policy of Truth 
Just awful and brutal, the whole thing.
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Also predictable.
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There are no limits on retaliation, apparently. And only Israeli force is to be construed as retaliatory. The root problem, from their perspective, is terrorism. So it’s justified to impose as much force as they think required to eradicate terrorism, come what may. The root problem is never occupation or siege. So the axiom becomes: it is unjustifed to use any force of any kind to resist occupation or siege. There is only a duty for Palestinians to obey Israeli orders and die at Israeli hands. It has been this way since the founding of Israel. American writers are too squeamish and ignorant to say out loud that Israel was founded on mass killing. It has always engaged in mass killing.
The meaning of the now-ubiquitous mantra “I Stand With Israel” is not an affirmation of the value of human life but an affirmation of ethnocratic bloodlust. It’s a collective green light for mass murder dressed up as righteous victimization. This is the meaning of our country now, and of Israel. We are mass murderers who conceal our collective guilt behind historical amnesia and double standards.
Israel has already killed twice as many Palestinians as the number of Israelis killed by Hamas on 10/7. But in a world where Israel has a monopoly on righteous victimization, that’s not enough. If 90% of Gaza supports Hamas, then 90% must die. Millions must passively let bombs fall on them, or bullets hit them, and offer zero resistance. Presumably, they should feel gratitude for being killed by what calls itself “the light unto nations” and “the most moral army in the world.”
The implication: we should arm Israel, applaud it, and praise it, even if it manages to kill our own citizens, or their loved ones. “Thy kingdom’s will be done, on Earth as it is in Hell.”
https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/world/2023/10/13/nj-man-family-gaza-israel-palestine-war/71173295007/
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it seems that they believe self-defense is an open ended skirmish where they can play out their revenge fantasies on a race of people they dont like all under the umbrella of self defence
out of curiosity I’d like your opinion of this tweet by Matt Walsh which I’ve copy/pasted
‘A lot of people this week have been pretending that they don’t understand the moral distinction between deliberately killing civilians for the sake of killing civilians and attacking a military target where civilians are likely to die as an unintended consequence’
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Sorry I forgot to ask about this thread on twitter. it comes across as thoughtful
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Yes, Saul is thoughtful. But I guess I would say this. There are many complexities in the “5000 year” history of the place, but one thing is clear enough. Since Israel’s founding, Americans and others in the West have been given an ultimatum that amounts to moral blackmail: either stand in solidarity with Israel, in admiration for being the only liberal democracy in the Near East, or stand accused of anti-Semitism and a secret longing for a second Holocaust, a Final Solution.
For all of my adult life–I’m 54–I’ve heard Zionists at every place on the political map, Left or Right, and of every nationality, magnanimously according me the privilege of criticizing this or that Israeli policy, but never, ever to connect the dots and implicate Zionism itself or Israel itself. That essentalist tactic is to be reserved only for Islam: Islamic terrorism derives from evils inherent in Islam itself, but not Zionist malfeasance. Likewise, classical anti-Semitism has its roots in Christianity itself. But Israeli depredations never derive from Zionism per se. They’re deviations from an unmarred script, not expressions of it. Only a Nazi would say or think otherwise.
Well, I don’t want to be a Nazi. So let me accept this principle, and affirm its implications:
I hope that’s convincing.
Now, here is what I observe. For most of its existence, Israel has ruled a subject population under a system of apartheid. How did this come to this pass? By aggressive conquest.
So here is the first implication. If Israel is a liberal democracy, its actions must be an expression of the will of its people. So its people must, as a whole, be committed to aggression and apartheid. Maybe Isaac Saul is not committed to those things, but if so, he’s a drop in the democratic bucket. He may be a thoughtful person, but politically speaking, no one is listening him. I feel his pain, because no one listens to me, either.
A second implication. If Israel really is–as Herzl believed and said–an outpost of Western civilization amidst Asiatic barbarism, it seems that we can infer that aggression and apartheid are essential features of Western civilization. What else would it mean for Israel to be an outpost of Western civilization, and choose, willingly and with open eyes, for most of its existence to express these very values?
Right now, in the United States, the lesson people are drawing from the 10/7 attack is that the attack shows us that decolonization was a bad idea. Not, of course, the decolonization of the United States from Britain. That was a great idea, whatever its implications for the Native population of North America. The bad idea was 20th century decolonization. What we need, they imply, is a return to the imperialism of the century before. Where did we get this idea? We got it from the Israeli occupation. Put another way, we got it from Israel.
I guess I would say to Isaac Saul: there is no need to go back 5,000 years. Pick up yesterday’s newspapers and you’ll see where we’re all headed, in the name of Israel’s Enlightenment values and liberal democracy. We’re headed right into ethnic cleansing at Israeli hands.
But we’re headed there because for all their bragging about the wonders of their polity, and all their recriminations agains the truculence of the Palestinians, Israelis decided, collectively, that it was better to ratify aggression and apartheid than undo it. Having done so, they then professed surprise when they were attacked, then doubled down and defended the aggression and apartheid that got us here. They asked us (Americans and others) to subsidize their choices for decades, demonized us as anti-Semites when we balked (however hesitantly), and are now inviting us to fight an all-out war for them so that they can keep playing this game for the foreseeable future with our everlasting complicity and approval.
Saul says frankly that he doesn’t know what to do. It’s always easy to say “I don’t know what to do” when you’ve squandered every prior chance to do something. That’s why even thoughtful Israelis like him elicit fatigue and frankly boredom in me. They had their chance. They blew it. So here we are, facing the predictable consequence. I’m sure it will produce another generation of thoughtful Israeli commentary, time without end. But the damage has been done, and can’t be undone. The commentary is anesthetizing, but it won’t save the patient.
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Correct. It is, by now, a well-worn and well-rehearsed tactic. First, create the conditions for an attack in the full knowledge that you’re doing so. If no attack materializes, prolong things until one does. When it does, fixate on the most barbaric atrocities involved in the attack. Make some up if you have to. Demand that everyone immerse themselves in your pain, at the expense of every other consideration, including their own pain. Then launch a “retaliatory” attack that evades the fact that the attack against which you’re “retaliating” was itself a retaliatory attack. Since you are “retaliating” in “self-defense,” don’t worry about the fact that the savagery you inflict exceeds the savagery you suffered by an enormous degree. Just keep doing it, insisting that the other side had it coming, and has no comparable right of self-defense or retaliation. Issue impossible orders–e.g., demand that a million people leave north Gaza for south Gaza in a day, under conditions of active bombardment–dressing them up in a mask of “humanitarianism.” When people comply, kill them. Tell people to evacuate via Rafah Crossing. Then bomb it. Etc.
Then stand before the world with tears in your eyes, pleading that you “had no choice.” You had no choice but to create a country by ethnic cleansing, to sustain it by ethnic cleansing, and now to defend it by ethnic cleansing. Insinuate that the other side “had a choice,” but don’t tell anyone what it was, and don’t mention the fact that no matter what they did, you managed to contrive an excuse to kill them in droves.
When people say that they “Stand with Israel,” the preceding is what they’re standing with. It would be more accurate to wear a T shirt that said, “I Stand With Ethnic Cleansing, on the Premise that Civilizational Membership Dictates Moral Status.”
On Matt Walsh, I assume that the quote you gave is a defense of Israel, intended to suggest that Israel does not deliberately kill civilians for the sake of killing them, whereas Hamas does.
Taken literally, all of Hamas consists of “civilians.” So do all of the settler militias. Neither are regular military organizations. Same with Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ismail Haniya. They’re all “civilians.” None of the preceding political leaders is a specifically military officer with a military title. Does Matt Walsh think that none of the above is a permissible target in military conflict? Adolph Hitler was Chancellor (or “Fuhrer” =”Supreme Leader”) of Germany, not Generalissimo. Was he not a legitimate target? Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party, not “General Stalin,” or “Admiral Stalin.” Hands off? Vladimir Putin is President of Russia. “President” is a civilian title. Does Putin deserve civilian immunity? Taken literally, that’s where Walsh’s clever tweet actually leads. If so, maybe he needs to re-word his principle.
If Walsh means “non-combatants,” my response is that a tweet doesn’t resolve what counts as one, and what doesn’t. Many of the people hit in the 10/7 attacks were combatants. They were soldiers. Would Walsh be willing to admit that they were legitimate targets? Many Israeli military bases were overrun during the 10/7 attack. Were these then legitimate targets? I’d like to see him pronounce explicitly on that.
But even if all of that is resolved, Walsh seems to be assuming that Israel does not deliberately kill non-combatants for the sake of killing them. Really? Does he actually know that, or is he pretending to know? If he knows, how does he know, beyond accepting their say so?
Even that won’t suffice, however, since Israel has explicitly admitted to targeting non-combatants. During the Great March protests in Gaza in 2018-2019, Israel operated with rules of engagement that explicitly prescribed that soldiers target anyone, combatant or otherwise, who “approached” the Israeli security fence from the Gaza side, with no specifications as to what counted as an “approach.” Anyone who appeared to be approaching the fence–of any description whatsoever, male, female, child, handicapped, non-combatant–was to be shot either to death or to be maimed. More than 200 were killed. What was the response in the United States? Silence. In some cases, approbation.
These are the same people now caught up in horror and besides themselves in indignation over 10/7: zero horror or indignation for Palestinian non-combatants killed for the sake of being killed; 100% in reserve for Israelis. They ignored 16 years of blockade, and all the death it caused. They ignored Operation Cast Lead and the wanton killings there. They ignored Operation Protective Edge, same thing. They ignored the Great March killings. They ignored the killings of 2021. They ignored Jenin. They ignored the ongoing annexation of Area C. They’re ignoring the dozens killed in the West Bank right now. They’ve ignored the rivers of blood Israel has spilled. The only thing they care about is the Israeli blood spilled last week. And that’s what they demand of the rest of us. Well, easier demanded than gotten.
I can’t help mentioning that the United States has, for 60 years, adopted a doctrine of mutual assured destruction in nuclear warfare. In other words, we target non-combatants for the sake of killing them, on the premise that we have the right to annihilate whole continents of uninvolved third parties in our “self-defense.” If deliberately targeting civilian non-combatants is evil, no one exceeds us in evil. If Gaza deserves annihilation for its adherence to this evil dictum, so do we.
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Mind you the objectivist comments on this particular matter are quite retarded. They’ll immediately talk about no moral equivalence and then suggest one side wants Life and Liberty, and another side wants Death and barbarism. There arguments boil down to this basically
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There’s a very clear explanation for that approach. Their official position requires them to trace current injustices backwards to their origin. Injustices committed by force start with an initiation of force. Injustices committed without force start by someone’s taking what is undeserved or unearned. So if you knew nothing about the sociology or history of the Objectivist movement, you would expect them to approach every conflict by a rigorous application of those principles. But they can’t do that, because they have no workable account of either principle, and have not managed to produce one in sixty years. Honest people would admit at that point that Objectivism has literally nothing distinctive to say about the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the Objectivist movement is not a movement made of honest people.
One way to bypass this problem would be to adopt an explicitly racial or sectarian approach, but they can’t do that, because it too obviously conflicts with other principles they hold. So they’ve opted for the closest approximation to racism or sectarianism that they can come up with, one that doesn’t lapse that far into irrationality but doesn’t live up to their professed principles, either. They adopt a vague but conventional conception of “Western Civilization,” identify it with everything good, then associate everything that falls outside of it with everything bad. They then sort the world into heroes and villains, based on their preconceived notions of who they are.
With that set of assumptions in place, the rest is easy: in every conflict, assume that the most “Western” party has the most justice on its side (regardless of any other fact); the higher the stakes of the conflict, the more it clearly it will follow that the non-Western side is congenitally irrational, unjust, and barbaric. When evidence arises to contradict these dogmatic assumptions, minimize, dismiss, talk over, and evade it on the premise that nothing can contradict the starting dogmas. Every civilization has a fixed essence; Objectivists know it without being able to offer any of the relevant definitions or evidence; and that’s that. Either you’re on their side, or you’re a barbarian.
The only plausibility here is that in many respects, life in “non-Western” societies is unhealthier, less pleasant, and less free than in “the West,” particularly if you live an unconventional lifestyle that’s not tolerated over there. But in other respects, life in non-Western societies can in certain cases be preferable to life in the West. There are a lot of variables in play. Some of this is a matter of personal preference, and how one chooses to gamble on the contingencies of life that arise everywhere. It is not self-evident that life is better in “the West” for everyone, no matter what. And in a rational world, it would be possible to get the best of both worlds by traveling between them, or splitting time between them, or whatever.
But however that pans out, even if one society A is inferior to another one B, it doesn’t follow that in any conflict between A and B, A is automatically wrong and B is right. Nor does it follow that the modal person in A is morally inferior to one in B, while the modal member of B is superior. Etc. Objectivists cling to the reverse of these beliefs as though their lives depended on it, not because their lives do depend on it, but because the practice of mass killing depends on it, and that’s one addiction they can’t seem to kick.
I can’t begin to describe the contempt I have for Objectivism and for the Objectivist movement. They complain when people liken them to fascists, but lo and behold, they talk and act consistently like fascists. The only fig-leaf that conceals the fascism is their dogmatic adherence to a “non-initiation of force principle.” But since the principle has no content and no justification, it has no application in the real world. That’s why they apply it so opportunistically, and drop it when the whim strikes. Their loose talk about “civilization” is just a desperate way to conceal this. There’s nothing civilized about them, or the world they would choose for the rest of us.
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oh ok interesting
I think Sam Harris has similar thoughts
https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-sin-of-moral-equivalence?fbclid=IwAR25Wvc_bbJz2EPSGexOW3ztyEwkqBWqKpZXLlab9mpjhizct137J88h_rQ
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Yes, that’s a nice example of what I have in mind. I highly doubt that Sam Harris knows any more about Islam than he does about free will, but let’s pretend that he does. Let’s even pretend that he’s right: there is some fundamental dichotomy between “Western civilization” and the civilization of Islam, and the former is fundamentally superior to the latter. Fine. What does that prove about the rights and wrongs of the Arab-Israeli conflict of the last 150 years or so? Nothing. What does he himself manage to prove about it in the article? Nothing.
Does civilizational membership confer moral status? Suppose that you reject the phenomenon of moral luck. In that case, those born in better civilizations enjoy an undeserved privilege to those born in worse ones. That entails that the efforts of the former will lead to better outcomes. But allowance would then have to be made for the suboptimal conditions of the latter, conditions they had no hand in making. Would they not get extra credit for striving against it to become merely decent? How then would we prove that the modal person in one culture is morally more virtuous than the modal person in another?
But let’s get down to brass tacks. This is Harris’s attempt to discuss the nitty-gritty of the actual conflict:
But as usual, the nitty isn’t all that gritty.
Which jihadists use their own people as human shields? When? Under what circumstances? What counts as using someone that way? How do we differentiate it from simply being around other people in a densely populated space? And since he concedes that Israelis commit atrocities as well, quantitatively speaking, how do we tally up the one against the other to figure who commits more atrocities than whom? Harris prides himself on his “hard scientific” approach to things. Does this look like hard science to you? It looks like someone just patently pulling things out of his ass.
“Hamas fires rockets from hospitals and mosques and schools”: evidence? Where are the citations? Here is Norman Finkelstein on the same topic: “To extenuate Gaza’s civilian death toll, Israel, per usual, accused Hamas of using civilians as ‘human shields’. But reputable human rights organizations and journalists, per usual, found no evidence to sustain Israel’s allegation” (Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, p. 217, with footnotes 37 and 38. The latter footnote cites Amnesty Int’l’s 2014 report, “Israel/Gaza Conflict,” two articles from British journalistic sources, and a set of internal citations to chapters of NF’s own book). My point is not that Finkelstein is necessarily right. My point is that unlike Harris, Finkelstein writes with full knowledge that this is a contested topic. Harris pretends otherwise. Who is the more credible witness, and which is the more credible set of claims?
At this rate, I could say that “babies were beheaded” and “partygoers raped” on October 7–as lots of people have. Suppose I say it with great conviction, even put on a tie and jacket for the occasion. Would that make it true? Joe Biden professed to see photos of the beheaded babies until his handlers jumped in to clarify that, well, he hadn’t. How is this different from Donald Trump’s saying that he saw crowds of New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11 from Trump Tower? Like Biden, Trump made up his bullshit. Like Trump, Biden made up his. Both confabulated claims practically calculated to get people killed. Trump failed in that; Biden succeeded. Yet Biden’s liberal fans are absolutely certain that there is a huge moral chasm between these two cretins. There isn’t.
On beheaded babies and raped partygoers, follow the citations in this article.
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-16/media-official-lies-genocide-gaza/
Again, I don’t claim certainty on what happened. But that’s precisely my point. If I’m not certain, I don’t pretend to know what I don’t know. If I make a contestable claim, I acknowledge its contestability and my own fallibility. That’s the rational way of conducting oneself. It’s not what Harris, the great paragon of Western civilization, has done.
“There were cases in the war in Iraq where jihadists literally rested the barrels of their guns on the shoulders of children.” There have been cases of Israeli soldiers using Palestinian children as shields to hide behind when attacking other Palestinians. If the one thing proves that Palestinians are barbarians, shouldn’t the other prove that Israelis are? B’Tselem has a whole section on its website on the Israeli use of Palestinians as human shields.
https://www.btselem.org/topic/human_shields
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-use-human-shields-rising
I won’t even bother to document this beyond a single article from nine years ago, but it’s common knowledge that Israel requires Palestinians whose homes are under demolition orders to demolish their own homes at their own expense. This isn’t a one-off. It’s standing policy, and has been for decades. But it doesn’t seem to figure in Harris’s civilizational calculations.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2014/3/23/palestinians-forced-to-demolish-own-homes
“Conversely, the Israeli army routinely warns people to evacuate buildings before it bombs them.” It just as routinely doesn’t. Couldn’t the routine of warning people be part of a PR exercise? And if so, wouldn’t that detract from its value? If I bomb x houses, and warn people in some fraction of x cases, does it follow that I don’t intend to kill the inhabitants of the remainder? Harris seems to think so, but his thinking so is either a pure non sequitur or an expression of blind faith.
Take the current “routine” of warning people to leave north Gaza for south Gaza. Couldn’t one rationale be to clog the roads and sow panic and confusion as a purely military tactic–just as the Zionist militias did in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War? Harris writes here as if in total, blank ignorance of the historiography of the 1948 Arab Israeli war. The lesson that that historiography teaches is instructive: Israel was founded in ethnic cleansing, and now seems to be repeating its founding act in another domain, Gaza. Terrorize the population under guise of “protecting” it, then force them out of a region so that the region is emptied of them, killing the ones who won’t flee in terror. Civilized behavior? (The standard text on this topic is Benny Morris’s Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.)
Notice that everything I’ve said is compatible with the claim I’ve granted for the sake of argument: Western civilization is superior to the civilization of Islam. Not that I expect Harris’s argument for that claim to be any more cogent than any of his “arguments” for anything. But granting its truth doesn’t help Harris. Civilizational essentialism doesn’t decide historiographical controversies. You have to get your hands dirty in the facts. That turns out to be a different thing than plunging your hands directly into the blood of people from an alien civilization, but we all have our preferences.
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on the issue of the empty claims of beheaded babies, I’m old enough to remember those stories about Iraqi troops going around and killing babies in their incubators in Kuwait
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What I find remarkable is that like Trump, Biden claimed personally to have seen the relevant thing, in this case, pictures of the beheaded babies. Seeing them was the whole point of his peroration. He never thought he would see such a horrific thing—except that he didn’t actually see anything at all. I guess believing whatever Netanyahu’s press office tells you is as good as seeing something with your own eyes, especially if you have no intention of using your own eyes, much less your brain.
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I never liked Biden but wrongly gave him enough credit to not be this stupid.
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i have another question
what would a proportionate response on the side of Israel be if there was ever one?
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The only proportional course of action is for Israel to offer a ceasefire and Hamas to return the non-soldier hostages, starting with the young, the old, and infirm, and moving then to the peace activists. That gives Israel what’s of most value to them, and allows Hamas to avoid the worst things that might happen to Gaza. It also allows Hamas to hold onto the soldiers they have in custody. With those in hand, they can negotiate getting their own prisoners out of Israeli prisons. At that point, both sides can figure out the moral mathematics of trading x Palestinian prisoners for y Israelis to their hearts’ content. And with heartwarming, morally rich fodder of this sort at their disposal, the writers of doctoral dissertations, novels, poems, and journal articles would benefit as well.
Applications like that aside, I don’t think that in bello norms like proportionality apply to wars fought in defiance of the necessary ad bellum conditions for just war. This is not a just war on either side. The proportional thing to do is for each side to realize that it’s wrong, and stop doing wrong. If that sounds unrealistic to some ears, I guess I would say that it’s a lot easier than either invading Gaza or defending it. Some people insist on doing things the hard way. I’m not one of them.
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Incidentally, I think it would be a coup for the Israelis to fail to invade. Hamas attacked to draw them into an invasion. Not invading would shatter that expectation.
Meanwhile, Hamas should release the non-combatant hostages, then use the soldiers specifically to get Palestinian children out of Israeli prisons. That would underscore the rough moral parity between what they did (as far as taking hostages) and what Israel does (as far as indefinitely imprisoning children). It would be a nice propaganda victory for them, and honestly, one that I would approve and applaud.
If the Americans had any fucking brains at all, they’d have engineered this deal by now, but intelligence is the one thing our intelligence services lack. I know it sounds like bragging, but I once trained to become a member of the US Foreign Service, then dropped the idea and became an academic philosopher. Their loss, not mine.
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would you still advocate the D & S without the B or do you still think the B should be left out
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I haven’t done the systematic study of BDS that I’ve long wanted to, so what I’ll say here is somewhat general.
I’ve sometimes described my position as “DS minus B,” but that’s an oversimplification. My view is that B, D, and S all have a legitimate role to play, but have to be targeted and discriminate. They have to identify a target or set of targets engaged in or complicit in injustice, and then respond to it/them by depriving it of some resource it uses for injustice. To some degree, I suppose, this may be professional bias speaking, but I’m flatly opposed to BDS targeting academic or medical or biomedical institutions (where these institutions are not complicit in injustice). This is partly because I know such institutions from the inside, and know that in principle, they can be run without participation or complicity in injustice.
But I’m sure there are other institutions that fit the bill. I certainly wouldn’t advocate boycotting Israel as such, or Israelis as such. It would be absurd to boycott one’s Israeli friends if they were absolutely innocent of any complicity in wrongdoing. Likewise, it would be absurd to boycott romantic relations with Israelis in the same context. Suppose you’re engaged (to be married) to an Israeli. (This is a live issue for me, since I’m always marrying someone.) Should you hold the wedding in Haifa? Sure. How about Palestinian Hebron? Sure. Why the hell not? Boycotting that would be stupid and pointless.
Suppose you’re enrolled in an online class, based in Israel, on some relatively apolitical topic, or at least one that shows no bias toward any untoward position. Should you cancel your registration? No. One of the biggest problems with Israeli society is its tendency to act as though Palestinians didn’t exist. That problem can’t be remedied by building a wall that shuts them out. In general, indiscriminate boycotts are stupid and counter-productive. They also emphasize all the wrong things. They run roughshod over issues of actual praise and blame, and turn everything into a tribal food fight.
That said, some things have to be boycotted. Anything to do with the Israeli military should be boycotted. Likewise the Border Police, or any part of the police (which may be all of the police) that engages in or is complicit in the systematic suppression of Palestinian rights. Dual citizens (Israel American, Israeli Canadian, Israeli Australian) should stop enrolling in the Israeli military. If they lose their dual citizenship as a result of that refusal, they should be content to lose it. That’s the price one pays for justice. It isn’t free.
Similarly, I fully support boycotting what JVP calls “the Deadly Exchange.” That’s an apt description of the “exchange programs” our police departments have with the Israeli security apparatus. Western police departments have to stop taking their lessons from an apartheid state. If some apartheid-soaked lessons go unlearned, well, sorry. You can’t have everything. Too many of our police departments have too many things, many of which don’t belong to them.
https://deadlyexchange.org/
Birthright should be boycotted. I’ve seen it in operation at very close range. It’s just state sponsored propaganda of the worst kind.
https://www.birthrightisrael.com/
Israel Bonds should be boycotted. There’s obviously a nationalist-military agenda there.
https://www.israelbonds.com/
Groups like the Hebron Fund should not only be boycotted, but investigation should be undertaken to withdraw their non-profit educational status. The Hebron Fund is not a non-profit educational organization, but a propaganda and logistics outfit for the perpetuation of apartheid in Hebron.
https://hebronfund.org/
And so on. We could make a list. It would be a long list. As my examples suggest, the ball is very much in the court of diaspora Jews. They’re the ones who have funded the infrastructure of apartheid for all these decades. They have a responsibility for repairing the damage they’ve done. They’re very quick to point the finger at people they regard as either lax on anti-Semitism, or themselves anti-Semites. It’s time to point the finger back at them.
Long past time: Israeli apartheid didn’t sprout into existence overnight. It took their concerted efforts and evasions to build it up. And they can’t take the comforting tack of blaming everything on “The Right.” For one thing, plenty of them are on “The Right.” For another, Israeli politics, like American, has largely been bipartisan on foreign policy issues. No one can honestly blame the settlements, the occupation, or the siege of or past bombings of Gaza on “The Right.” Ehud Barak, that peace-loving guy, was Minister of Defense during Operation Cast Lead. If American Jews would like to defend that operation as an expression of left-wing values, let’s hear it. I guess we have heard it, and what it proves is that bullshit comes in many partisan guises. But bullshit is what it remains.
As for divestment and sanctions, that would require a more technical and detailed discussion than I can competently manage right now. But I’m hardly averse to the idea, properly conceived and executed.
It’s too bad that American Jews have sunk so much capital into demonizing BDS, gesturing idly at the (idle) Peace Process, characterizing virtually all peaceful modes of protest as “terrorist” or “anti-Semitic,” then furrowed their collective brows in perplexity as to how the explosion of 10/7 came about. “Unprecedented.” “A complete shock.” Etc. Etc. No, sorry: really none of those things. Gee–close down all avenues of non-violent political expression, then wonder why expression becomes violent. Do we really need Shin Bet, Mossad, the FBI, and CIA to figure that one out? How about a bit of Langston Hughes?
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46548/harlem
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sorry i’m going to throw at you another query
I keep reading about this ‘absolute right to self-defense’ is there such a concept? or is the right to self-defence qualified and conditional?
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Well, context matters, and I don’t know the context you have in mind (though I think I can imagine it). But I guess I would say that the right of self-defense is all of those things at once: absolute, qualified, and conditional.
“Absolute” means without exception. It’s possible to define a norm that is unexceptional once you identify the qualifications that apply to it, and the conditions within which it applies. So at least in principle, the three claims are mutually compatible.
For instance, someone on the receiving end of initiated aggression always retains a right of self-defense. “Someone on the receiving end of initiated aggression” is a condition that excludes “everyone, always.” The “a” in “a right of self-defense” is indefinite, but is consistent with qualifications: a right of self-defense conceived one way may exclude different rights conceived different ways.
Even more obviously, “No one has an unlimited right of self-defense” is an absolute that makes reference to conditions and qualifications. “No one” is a categorical statement, hence absolute. But the norm is explicitly excluding a right without limits, which means it’s endorsing limits, i.e., conditions and qualifications.
Even saying that force must be used in self-defense establishes a limit. “Self-defense” is not just any old response, conceived any old way (or none). “Self-defense” has to be distinguished from retributiom, vengeance, and deterrence (which have to be distinguished from one another). A right of self-defense is not a right to those other things, even if/where those other things are justified. And personally, even apart from the fact that retribution/vengeance/deterrence are not instances of self-defense, I don’t think, separately, that they’re justified.
Deterrence is the most plausible of the three, but I reject it. It’s a subtle and difficult task to establish, but I would say that there is a difference between a justified-defense-in-depth and deterrence. A justified defense-in-depth is one that destroys some threat within previously justified boundaries, i.e., boundaries where the defender is permitted to operate in the first place. “Deterrence” is totally open-ended. Thus, the United States has the right to defend itself some miles past its coastline, in places where its allies permit operations, and in places where some entity initiates force against it. But it cannot permissibly “deter” threats by treating the whole world or whole universe as its “battlefield,” promising to kill uninvolved billions of third parties in order to deter threats to itself by some adversary. Thus deterrence can justify mutual assured destruction in strategic nuclear warfare, but self-defense cannot.
In warfare, I would say that a right of self-defense is only permitted to the defender against initiated force, subject to the principles of discrimination (not targeting non-combatants) and proportionality (achieving defensive aims, not ones that exceed that). In the “current” war, neither side satisfies even the first constraint. Neither side is exercising a genuine right of self-defense. Both sides are engaged in cynical, rage-induced, wanton slaughter–with defensive considerations added on like shit smeared on top of a poisonous cake.
I put “current war” in scare quotes because contrary to popular wisdom, “the war” didn’t begin on 10/7/23 or 10/8/23. It began in June 1967, when Israel invaded and conquered Gaza. That war (the war) ended in Armistice, not final settlement. That means that the war never really ended. Nor was it truly ended by the Armistice. At a bare minimum, the Israeli blockade of 2007 re-established the state of war that existed prior to the Armistice. Arguably, the occupation and settlement did so well before that. But the war has been raging since 2007. Israelis and Americans had the luxury of paying no attention until two weeks ago, when, in their narcissistic vision of things, “the war began.”
In other words, Israel started “this war,” so it’s not exercising any right of self-defense. Hamas’s 10/7 response to Israel’s war was wanton, cynical slaughter, so it’s not exercising one, either.
Israel and its defenders would have you believe that 10/7 was “unprecedented.” No, it wasn’t. The precedents to 10/7 are Israeli: Operations Cast Lead (2008-9), Protective Edge (2014), and the response to the Great March (2018) were all on the same moral level as Hamas on 10/7. The Israelis are not innocent. They are guilty of mass murder. This mass murder may be invisible to Western eyes, but that’s not because it didn’t happen. It’s because the old myth of blindness-induced-by-masturbation actually happens to be true of Western civilization. They can’t see things happening right in front of their faces because they’re too busy jerking themselves off in self-congratulation over the glories of their civilization to notice. Yet things happen anyway. Funny how that works.
Hamas would have you believe that they “had no choice” but to respond to the preceding by initiating 10/7. I don’t accept that. In doing so, they had to know that Israel’s response to 10/7 would be forthcoming–indeed, to want it to be forthcoming. They not only deliberately and intentionally targeted non-combatants in Israel, they exposed the entire population of Gaza to Israeli onslaught simply to invite a wholesale war with Israel and ignite one in the region. All of Gaza had to be sacrificed to their non-existent strategic goal–in other words, the whole population had to be sacrificed to pure, nihilistic destruction. This isn’t even a case of doing evil that good may come. It’s doing evil so that nothing good will come.
Evil, but then: how different from American nuclear policy? Both policies are rationalized by “self-defense,” but motivated by the same unlimited appetite for destruction. Everyone is demanding that we condemn Hamas. I’ve already done so, but in a way I regret it. Impartiality would demand a simultaneous condemnation of every guilty party, not just one. In the future, if anyone asks me for a condemnation of Hamas, I’m going to ask for reciprocity as a condition of doing so: I’ll condemn them, but what will you give me in return?
Both sides and their partisans would have you believe that they “had no choice” but to do what they did. I don’t believe that, but if it were really true, then then the rest of us would “have no choice” but to remain silent before this spectacle of horror, neither supporting nor condemning either side, but simply watching the tragedy unfold, like something out of Sophocles. Necessity would have forced them into depredations, as necessity would force us into silence. Yet both sides demand our assent to or support for their atrocities. Fuck them.
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very interesting analysis. Yes everyone was quick to condemn Hamas like it all started on 10/7. Apparently caging people in and taking away their dignity and future wasn’t happening all these years. I think for this reason the spirit of resistance is still alive and looking at the conditions in the West Bank I can see why there is support for armed resistance. Hamas has no presence there and there is still settler violence, settlements etc…
You’ve already described the great march but even I wasn’t aware of Operations Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014). So were these aggressive attacks on civilians as well
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It’s an understatement to say that the people of Gaza have been caged. They’ve been wantonly murdered as surely as the Israelis victimized on 10/7. As on 10/7, Israel has lumped non-combatants with combatants, killed both together indiscriminately, then invoked self-defense as its excuse.
Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge were the dress rehearsals of the current Israeli operation: training grounds or experiments in mass killing. The current operation is their consummation. There is a Facebook post by Tal Tsfany, the head of the Ayn Rand Institute, calling for the annihilation of the Gazan population on the grounds that “There are no individual rights of enemy civilians in a state of war.” The Israelis have now proclaimed the entire population of “North Gaza,” Gaza north of Wadi Gaza, “a partner in a terrorist organization,” hence a candidate for liquidation. There are between a half million and a million people in north Gaza right now. Taken literally and without charity, what the Israelis and their supporters are telling us, without shame, is they have the moral authority to exterminate between a half million and a million people, plus any in south Gaza that they might wish to hit. It’s not clear what the casualty count will actually be. But their declaration of intentions is a declaration for a Final Solution. That’s what I said in my first post on this subject. They have obliged.
No one can honestly tell us at this point that the Israelis occupy some moral height denied to their adversaries. Their nation was birthed and sustained in ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing–mass ethnically-motivated killing–is an intrinsic feature of Zionism as applied to the real world. What we’re seeing now is just a repetition of an old theme, hardly something “unprecedented.” File it under: “Why I Am a Lifelong Anti-Zionist and Will Remain So.” The crux of the anti-Zionist case is that Zionism leads to the expropriation and mass killing of non-Jews.
One correction: Hamas does in fact have a substantial presence in the West Bank. But settler violence is indiscriminate. It targets coveted properties, not party affiliations. A Palestinian friend of mine told me that “hates” Hamas. But they’re after him all the same. As for military operations, it’s perennially unclear what relation they bear to Hamas.
The best scholarly account of Israel’s military operations in Gaza that I’ve read is Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom. It’s actually one of several books he’s written on Gaza. Sara Roy’s Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development is also good, but more focused on the destruction of Gaza’s economic capacities than its people.
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That thread is atrocious but this comment is probably the most benign out of it.
‘The proper goal is to destroy the enemy’s fighting capacity AND its will to continue fighting. Any civilians casualties along that route are regrettable but necessary.’
According to William Martel Victory in war happens when a country fulfils its political and military goals. This is the most common definition. Israel technically loses this war if they cannot eliminate Hamas in its entirety such that no-one fights under their banner in any subsequent period of time. If Israel cannot achieve this they would have lost the war in potentially the most humiliating defeat in the contemporary period of any modern army. Problematically for Israel though, if Israel succeed in killing each and every Hamas militant what is to say that new ones will not emerge in subsequent generations?
Although Israel is stronger militarily, they are fighting a losing psychological battle by ‘mowing the grass’ (officially a name given to killing Palestinians every few years to subdue them) they create the desperate conditions through which participation to Hamas becomes more compelling for the Palestinian laity, they break Sun Tzu’s law ‘do not push a desperate foe too hard’ they then have to make their own populations and the populations of the Palestinians suffer by seeking to destroy that which they created themselves.
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Victory does imply the achievement of the combatant’s political and military goals, but justice is a constant among the political goals, which is why I’ve always argued that both “strategy” and “victory” have to be conceived in moral terms. They’re not value-free or amoral concepts, as is often claimed.
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the statement by the head of the Ayn Rand Institute is quite appalling but not unexpected and pretty much the statement of the Israeli president as well: ‘there are no innocent civilians in Gaza’. the funny thing is all these statements can be turned around and used against their own people. Are they not aware of that or do they simply not care and think they will be coming out on top after all the ethnic cleansing is done. They’ve already tried to eliminate Hamas and that didn’t work. It seem like you said this is the Final and also Failed Solution.
Objectivist takes on these issues are worse than some of the Israeli takes I’ve seen realizing what a mess Netanyahu has made. Wait til the invasion is a couple weeks in and thousands of reservist troops are killed and maimed fighting in the rubble of Gaza. His problems are just starting, soon there will be thousands more families against him.
and The attitude of governments like the UK and Canada is truly appalling
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You’re absolutely right that Israel’s claims can be turned around against it: if everyone in Gaza (or even “north Gaza”) is a terrorist, then by parity of reasoning, everyone in Israel must support indefinite military occupation, siege, apartheid, and mass killing, too. In that case, no one is innocent on either side, which is the “barbaric” claim of Hamas’s that everyone claims to oppose. The hard truth is that when push comes to shove, no one really opposes it. And another hard truth is that there is in fact some truth here. Both Hamas and the current Israeli government are pretty popular. But they are popular because each populace sees the other as a threat, and identifies with what it takes to be the strongest safeguard against the opposing threat. The irony is that in both cases, the apparently strongest safeguard consists of maniacs straight out of Motorhead’s song, “The Brotherhood of Man,” which I would rate as the single best guide to this conflict that you’ll find anywhere.
The Israelis think it safe to equate everyone in Gaza with terrorism because they believe, delusionally, that they themselves are utterly innocent of wrongdoing. So their assumption is that it’s perfectly safe to collectivize ascriptions of moral responsibility. If we do, what gets collectivized in their case is innocence, whereas what gets collectivized in the Palestinian case is guilt. This assumption comes from their age-old belief that they are the paragons of a superior civilization–which is also where Objectivism comes in. Objectivism has no authentic account of rights or justice, just a lot slogans masquerading as a theory. To fill the gap, it has to rely on conventional conceptions of civilizational superiority: civilizational superiority is the proxy for what’s supposed to be an account of force-initiation. In this respect, Objectivism has to outdo Israeli propaganda because unlike ordinary right-wing Zionist propaganda, Objectivism has to leapfrog over most Israelis’ instinctive commitment to Judaism. It has to be purely, rigidly secular. Objectivism then becomes the ludicrous attempt to fashion an Old Testament morality without recourse to the Old Testament God, while claiming moral superiority to Islam.
My own suspicion is that the “imminent” Israeli ground invasion has been somewhat overhyped. I don’t think the Israelis are quite as stupid as their PR is making it sound. One gets this picture from what they’re currently saying that they’re going to engage in “door to door” fighting for a decade or a century or whatever until Hamas has been “eradicated” etc etc. Maybe that will happen, but I doubt it. I think it’s more likely that the Israelis will, under guise of conducting a “full scale ground invasion,” rely very heavily on air power. They will, in each instance, select a “terrorist den,” equating everyone in some neighborhood with Hamas/ISIS/the Wehrmacht/the SS, then hit it with enormous amounts of firepower from the air (or tank fire or artillery), then mount a “ground offensive” where their troops will shoot wildly at anything that moves. And then they will retreat. Victory! Unless Hamas counter-attacks, that will become the new definition of “victory.” Then they will repeat this tactic over and over. Once the public’s taste for blood has been sated, indeed fatigue sets it, all-round victory will be declared, and they will wrap up, go home, and celebrate until the next suicide bomber strikes. In this respect, they’re just as cynical as Hamas, honestly, but not quite as suicidal. This approach will kill/maim a huge number of people, and wreck a huge amount of infrastructure, but it will not rid Gaza of Hamas.
Of course, I don’t really see how Hamas’s calculations will work, either. Hamas only wins if they drag the Israelis into an all-out bloodbath, and keep on top of them. I don’t see that happening.
Alternatively, they win if they drag Hezbollah and Iran into the war, along with the US. That might happen, but even if it does, it won’t yield a happy result for them.
This whole episode is an all-round, all-out failure of reason by all parties. We are en route to the worst case scenario. It is so fucking bad that I honestly wish I could just look the other way and stop thinking or talking about it, but apparently I can’t.
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that’s what I was thinking too. the amount of air power used is a clear indication that they’re not interested in a land invasion and also that they’re a very one dimensional military force. also the destruction they’ve caused is detrimental for a future ground offensive. It is actually worse than had they bombed less but as you said their goal is pure revenge
The current Israeli administration and Netanyahu specifically are like the beggar with the clever sign: “I’m not hungry, I just want liquor.” Except his sign says “I’m not hungry, I just want to do war crimes with my friends.” I wonder what kind of speech he gives to the Germans when they meet up with him
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Yes to much of that. It’s forgotten how much of their military is tied down on occupation duty in the West Bank, fighting unarmed or lightly armed civilians. I have seen them in action. Their indiscipline is more obvious than their capacity for warfare. Many of them are just dumb, arrogant, overbearing children with firearms. I can’t speak to the whole of their military capacities, but the average soldier on West Bank occupation duty has no chance in Gaza. I have to think they have some other, superior force in reserve. Otherwise an invasion just looks plain stupid to me. Though hardly my problem.
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Oct 7th, yet assimilated & intermarried worshippers of avoda zara [kapo-Jewish-Goyim-Nazi-lovers] stand with Hamas/Islamic Jihad war criminals.
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This comment would ordinarily go straight into my “Junk” folder, but if I put it there, I couldn’t show it to my assimilated Jewish ex-wife.
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Like that a lot. HaHaHaHaHa.
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I’ll keep you posted on any further developments.
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