I once had to go a week without food. It weakened me and made me ill, but didn’t kill me or come close. It actually takes a long time to die of starvation, at least if you have water and shelter, as I did. If hundreds or thousands of people begin to starve to death, it’s because people are bent on killing them that way.
That’s what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has been for months, or years, or decades, depending on how you look at it. Most proximately, it has intentionally violated a ceasefire to which it agreed in order intentionally to starve the population of Gaza to death.
These facts make October 7 almost entirely irrelevant at this point. Other things being equal, a ceasefire sets the sequence of force initiations back to zero. Israel violated the ceasefire to which it agreed in order to exterminate the population of Gaza. So Israel is now the indisputable force initiator in this conflict, the clear aggressor. And since we’re its eager partner in this endeavor, so are we.
In logic, if Israel was justified in destroying Gaza over October 7, it should now be justifiable to destroy Israel in turn. If it was OK to fixate on the evil of October 7 to the exclusion of all that preceded it, it should now be OK to fixate on Israel’s campaign of mass starvation to the exclusion of any thoughts about October 7. If it was really true that Hamas’s aggression made Hamas responsible for all subsequent casualties in the region, from Iran to Yemen, Israeli or Arab or otherwise, that same thesis is now true of Israel: Israel now owns every war-related casualty from Iran to Yemen, or wherever else the conflict ends up going.
If you don’t like these conclusions, you must dislike the logic that leads to them. But people who rejected that logic would not be in the culpable position we’re now in.
No logic can extricate “the West” from the fact of its guilt, however. That guilt is undeniably, indelibly “Western Civilization’s” forever. If Israel deserves destruction, so does it. It’s poetic justice of a sort that, care of Great Leader Donald Trump and other nationalist sociopaths, the West is busy destroying itself. All it would take is one large scale “terrorist attack” to accelerate and complete the project of self-destruction. Will it happen? Who knows. The real question at this point is whether anyone should care.
I revised the last paragraph of this post a few days after posting, in response to comments by Roderick Long in the comments below. I’d originally ascribed culpability somewhat confusingly to “us.”
Policy of Truth 
Not sure how the logic of “we” works here.
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Americans are collectively though not distributively responsible for what their government does. A sizable majority of the population either actively supports the relevant policies, or is willing to vote, act, speak etc in such a way as passively to support them by complicity. Active dissenters and genuinely neutral, totally agnostic, uninvolved people fall outside of that, but there’s still a “we” there. I call it a “we” even though I’m morally outside of it, because I’m causally roped into it. If I was involuntarily put on a sinking ship, I’d still be part of the “we,” even I had nothing to do with the reason why it was sinking.
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Okay, but you say “No logic can extricate us from the fact of our guilt.” That sounds like you’re saying you’re morally, not just causally, roped into it.
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Fair enough. It’s a very compressed post, and I probably should have been clearer.
Ultimately, I think there are several different “we’s” here—the morally culpable, the complicit, the borderline, the innocently roped in, the not-that-innocently-roped in, etc. Some of “us” are culpable, some are totally innocent, but many of the innocent are liable, in the sense of being on the hook for fixing what’s broken. We’re obliged to act, not because it’s our fault, but because being-roped-in requires you to try to undo the knot (for some of us, anyway; not all).
But I guess I should be clearer that even so, there is a sense in which the refusal of identification with the “we” (whether you’re roped in or not) is possible. It doesn’t necessarily get you off the hook, but it keeps your hands clean. In a world as morally grimy as ours, that has to be an option.
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As you probably saw, I ended up changing it. I think I have to break the bad habit of relying on the first person plural.
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You should read this book Anthem. Dunno if you’re familiar with the author.
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Dude, nobody reads “books” anymore. I saw the movie!
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Well, I tried to watch the movie.
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