In defense of Israel

In which I make the best possible argument, given the facts; bear with me

By Peter Beattie

What does it mean to defend “Israel”? That is, what do I mean by “Israel”?

The philosopher Max Stirner would call “Israel” – along with “the U.S.”, “Nigeria”, “China” and proper nouns for all other countries – a spook. That is, a word attempting to capture the essence of a group of people so large as to be incomprehensible. Have you toured the full territory of Israel? Its entire landmass, whether as defined by the 33 out of 57 member states of the 1947 United Nations who approved the original partition, or extending to “Greater Israel” and including land currently located within other countries? Have you met and gotten to know all 9,842,000 people who live there? No? Then for you, as for everyone else, “Israel” is just a spook. It’s a concept we employ to make the incomprehensible seem comprehensible.

And the “Israel” spook, like all nation-spooks, has innumerable and varied meanings from person to person. As it must: we don’t store information like computers, we store information in human brains as schemas, where basic facts about Israel connect to feelings and memories. So one person’s Israel-spook-schema might share the same basic demographic and geographic facts as another person’s; but it might also include sharply contrasting, emotionally laden facts, like civilians killed by suicide bomber versus civilians killed by hellfire missile, along with memories, like the grandfather recounting the time that he helped defend the country from invading armies, versus the grandfather recounting the time that he returned home to find that it had been stolen.

Worse yet is the usage. Nation-spooks like “Israel” and “the U.S.” are words commonly used to describe the actions of governments; but the schemas they activate represent all people within that country. It’s a commonplace to say things like “the U.S. imposed tariffs on every country in the world,” as if 300+ million people in the U.S. collectively agreed, when the actual referent of “the U.S.” in this instance is just one person. Hence when I first heard the Michael Parenti clip at the start of this Choking Victim song, I instantly agreed: we shouldn’t say “we” when referring to the actions of our government, nor the nation-spook proper noun. And that goes for countries with majority support for their government too, out of respect for the 1/4^th of USians who opposed their government committing the supreme international crime against Iraqis, the half of Jewish Israelis who oppose genocide, the 1/5^th of Jewish Israelis who oppose ethnic cleansing, etc.

Worst of all is when one of these nation-spooks gets conflated with another spook: ethnicity or its pseudoscientific cousin, “race”. This opens the door for super-spook-schemas, where members of a group sharing a religion or culture claimed by a nation-state are considered united with the government of that nation-state. In the case of Israel, two groups of rightists push for this super-spook-schema conflating Jewish people with the Israeli state: anti-Jewish racists, and spokespeople (paid and volunteer) for the Israeli government. Once one’s schema for “Israel” includes “Jewish people” or “Judaism” as a unity, all Jewish people are unthinkingly indicted for atrocities committed by the Israeli government or military. There is suggestive psychological evidence that this already occurs among some: those whose schemas for “Israel” and “Jewish people” are closely linked.

The Israeli Right loves this conflation. Don’t let them succeed.

Deficient defenses

Before setting about defending Israel, we need to lay out one moral assumption, an assumption in my more naïve days I would have considered too obvious to mention. All human beings are of equal and infinite value.

For some, religious beliefs are the source of this position. For those who don’t take unwarranted leaps of faith, this same position is well founded in science (we’re all members of the same species) and elementary reasoning from experience: we’ve all experienced pain, there is no reason to believe that our experience of pain is any different from other members of our species, hence the golden rule stands on its own without a god or gods imposing it.

With that out of the way, we can dismiss out of hand a couple of utterly deficient defenses of the Israeli government. First, that its actions are justified on account of self-defense. That argument is cut off at the knees once we acknowledge the equal, infinite value of all human beings – not just human beings with Israeli citizenship. Because then, we would acknowledge an equal right to self-defense for Palestinian human beings, and end up in the position of Death incarnate, supporting the equal rights of the Israeli military and Palestinian militants to defend themselves to the death of millions of people. (Mostly Palestinian people, given the disparity in power.)

(Cognitive dissonance warning: the rest of this section is for the non-religious, or religious believers who are secure in their beliefs. This includes religious people whose god is all-loving, and not at all like that one serial killer’s dog who commanded him to murder people. For religious fanatics, whose god is the violent, parochial sort, you need to learn from your civilized co-religionists; I can’t help you. I used to be a religious fanatic myself, and I know how you/we think.)

Another eminently dismissible argument in defense of the Israeli government is based in religion. That last bit on its own should suffice as a counterargument.

But to elaborate, religion provides no rational warrant for anything. Religious fanatics live in their own mythological world, where an invisible man (or woman, men, women, animal-human hybrids, etc.) who puts voices in heads can command all sorts of things: some good, some neutral, some atrocities. In the immediately relevant version, the invisible entity is male, and in his capacity as realtor granted one group of people – his favorite out of the many groups of people he created – a particular parcel of land on the western fringe of Asia. (Unfortunately, he absentmindedly allowed other human beings he created to settle in the land first; so he had to help his preferred group of human beings kill the first group and take the land he “granted” them.) Hence the state of Israel, the inheritor of this divine land grant, is justified in illegal occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Why? Because the invisible man said so, that’s why.

This is the argument of religious-fanatic Jewish supremacists, but it is also part one of the argument made by their more numerous and powerful heretical cousins, religious-fanatic Christian supremacists. (Who, for a group not often supposed to be in control of the media, largely remain out of the media spotlight as they do nothing but constitute the largest voting and donor bloc backing the ongoing genocide.) In their part two, sometime after the divine realtor’s grant of other people’s land, the invisible man had a child. This made him grow as a god, deciding that he would start loving all the people he created, no favorites. Well, for a bit, at least. Because sometime after the state of Israel inherited the original land grant, and all Jewish people have moved there, his plan is to murder them. Along with the rest of the non-Christian world. Plus all Christians from the wrong sects.

If part one is nonsense, part two is nonsense squared. The rest of the world, innocent of any Abrahamic hallucination, must look at this as Voltaire imagined a Chinese visitor to Christian Europe in the 1700s reacting to the religious fanatics there:

‘What a disgrace for the human mind that small nations think that only they have a right to the truth, and that the vast empire of China is given up to error! Could the eternal being merely be the god of the island of Formosa or the island of Borneo? Would he abandon the rest of the universe?... the light of the sun illuminates all eyes, and we are to believe that the light of god illuminates only a small and puny nation in a corner of the globe! What a horror, and what a stupidity!’

Genocide

But what of defending Israel from the charge of genocide, which attentive readers will have noticed I already assumed to be accurate?

Well, the best argument that can possibly be made on this account is that the definitive authority on whether the crime of genocide has been committed, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), has not yet issued a final ruling.

That’s it.

Of course, this isn’t much of an argument, because the nature of genocide is such that an evil this profound must influence our epistemological stance: a greater tolerance for false positives, or an “excess” of precaution, as the trade-off for preventing the crime of crimes. The ICJ’s order for provisional measures issued last January (and immediately violated) found that there was a plausible case that the Israeli government is committing genocide. Or, as the former State Department U.S. judge on the ICJ helpfully, without a hint of sophistry, explained, the court did not find it plausible that the Israeli government is committing genocide – instead, the court found it plausible that Palestinians were at risk of having their right to be protected from genocide violated. See the difference? Other than the first formulation is clear, and the second is more complicated to the point of ambiguity, but only makes sense when interpreted in the exact same manner as the first formulation?

Speaking of no hint of sophistry, we have all been told that the ICJ in its immediately violated order did not command a ceasefire. All it did, in its 15-2 ruling (even the U.S. judge in the majority; only the Ugandan Christian supremacist and ad hoc Israeli judges in the minority), was order that the "State of Israel shall ... take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of ... killing members of the group [Palestinians]; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group..." That is, the ICJ did not order an immediate suspension of military operations – a fact spun into the yarn that the court did not order a ceasefire – it only ordered that any military operations not kill or cause serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinian people. So repositioning troops and materiel, a military operation, permitted; using troops and materiel to kill or cause serious bodily or mental harm, prohibited. That's what users of the English language colloquially call a "ceasefire".

For no-hint-of-sophistry on stilts, turn to the Israeli government’s arguments at the ICJ. (The arguments the overwhelming majority of judges rejected.) Faced with evidence that top Israeli officials used a particularly genocidal part of the Bible to justify their actions and kindle the bloodlust of their soldiers, the Israeli argument included reference

‘to one further matter of some biblical moment. [Such darling rhetoric!] Yesterday, the Applicant referred time and again to two Statements by the Israeli Prime Minister where he said: “Remember what Amalek did to you”, and attached great importance to it as part of the argument that Israel has demonstrated a genocidal intent. There is no need here for a theological discussion on the meaning of Amalek in Judaism, which was indeed not understood by the Applicant.’

Thankfully, the Israeli legal team spared us an extended theological exegesis, which I, as a former religious fanatic, am certain would have comprised liberal theologians arguing against a literal interpretation of holy texts. That is, heresy. Though I am curious about the mental gymnastics required to interpret a clear-cut divine command to genocide (actually, omnicide, as it included animals as well), and a punishment for not completing the omnicide, as instead a metaphor for god’s love or moral rectitude or something.

Leaving aside the admirable clarity and frankness of the discussion over international law to which Westerners have been exposed in their mass media, the best possible argument that can be made for Israel on the genocide its military is evidently committing is: between the ICJ’s provisional order and the judgment of scholars who devote their lives to studying genocide (most recent instance), the Israeli military is most likely committing genocide, though a definitive legal determination must await the ICJ’s final decision. In the meantime, we must act as if the crime of crimes is currently being perpetrated. To pick nits, we could also say that even a final ruling against Israel would only establish that certain named officials are guilty of genocide, not every Israeli citizen. It may well be that many top officials and members of the military are guilty merely of multitudinous war crimes, having only the intent to kill innocents or a criminal disregard for human life, not the particularly heinous intent of exterminating human beings who are Palestinian in whole or in part. That’s the only tenable defense on this question.

Defending Israelis from Israel

I also want to defend Israel from, well… most of itself. While many on the global left bridled at the ubiquitous question with which they were aggressively prodded toward the beginning of the genocide – “do you condemn Hamas” – I, on the other hand, quite liked it. Its pertinence was lost on everyone asking it, but I was happy to answer that I condemned Hamas for a lot longer than the Israeli government; and since we’re asking questions, what occasioned your change of mind on Hamas, from support to condemnation? To arrive at the position I maintained consistently, it was enough to know that the Israeli government promoted Hamas as a fanatical, non-socialist opponent of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, meant to discredit the Palestinian cause and reduce the likelihood of founding a Palestinian state. I condemned Hamas back when the Israeli government was supporting it. Why your change of heart? And today, I would follow that up with the question, “do you condemn ISIS?”, since the blood-soaked, cynical crackpots at the top of the Israeli government are now arming an ISIS franchise. (Oh, sorry, they aren’t crackpots – arming ISIS is a masterful gambit, says this former U.S. soldier fresh off the roaring success of the Iraq invasion and occupation.)

At least the religious fanatics who support the Israeli government have an internally logical position: mass murdering people to establish Greater Israel makes perfect sense, once one takes the illogical leap of faith into believing that an omnipotent invisible man sanctions, nay, commands you to do so. He’ll have your back, so long as you don’t piss him off (like Samuel did by not fully omniciding Amalek). But for non-religious fanatics, the violent secular ethnosupremacist paranoiacs like Netanyahu, what exactly is the logic here? It seems to be that the Oct. 7^th attacks justify the illegal conquest of other peoples’ land to form Greater Israel – not because a god commands it, but security and military necessity compel it. Standing in for an omnipotent invisible man, the U.S. empire has your back, so what’s the risk?

For one, what is not a “risk” but has already happened, Israel stands at the bottom of global public opinion rankings. Being viewed as the apartheid South Africa of the 21^st century doesn’t augur well for a regime, even with the support of the U.S. empire (not the omnipotent invisible man).

Let’s say the non-religious Israeli and other-national fanatics get what they want: eliminating all Palestinians and non-Jewish people from Greater Israel, whether via genocide or ethnic cleansing or a mix of both, and annexing territory from Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. What kind of security would this be, surrounded by the recently conquered and enraged, and earning the disgust and condemnation of the entire world (outside of the U.S. and European ruling class)? Is the U.S. empire looking particularly healthy and likely to be long-lived right now? How about when the Pentagon’s prediction of “all hell breaking loose” – as a result of the ecological catastrophe we are being frog-marched in to – becomes the global norm? Does that seem like a recipe for security, or for endless war, pogroms, and violent chaos?

Odd that those most stridently supporting Israel’s right to exist are those cheering it down a path to total destruction. I, on the other hand, will always defend Israel’s right to exist by never once attacking it; because Israel is equal to all other nation-states on earth, including in that all states share the absence of a right to exist. That’s a right only people, all people, have. It’s what international human rights law gives people: the right to exist, to live. (International human rights law also gives people a lot of economic rights, which are similarly widely violated.) The people of Israel, not the state, have a right to exist; and both the religious and non-religious fanatics supporting the current Israeli state are jeopardizing the right of Israeli people to live. And, of course, violating the right of countless Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian people to live.

The only irrefutable defense of Israel

With these arguments dismissed, what remains? There is one area where thinking people and supporters of the Israeli government alike can agree.

This requires a bit of background. A key reason why a majority of Israeli society is currently in the grip of an abhorrent bloodlust is the siege mentality. A siege mentality can afflict people of any country, and its core feature is the inaccurate belief that the rest of the world harbors negative behavioral intentions toward the in-group – in other words, that the rest of the world is out to get us. It’s a collective form of paranoia; but as the saying goes, you aren’t being paranoid if everyone is out to get you. And Jewish Europeans had good reason to believe that the rest of their world – barbarian Europe – was out to get them. But thankfully, the whole world isn’t Europe; and anti-Jewish racism doesn’t have much purchase in the majority, more civilized parts of the globe. (Despite the best efforts of Israel’s “defenders” to conflate all Jewish people with the rogue state of Israel.)

Notwithstanding reality, the siege mentality and its paranoia have saturated Israeli society and its few supporters around the world. Hence for your average member of this group, who inhabits a media-curated alternative reality in which Israeli suffering is foregrounded and more widespread and terrible Palestinian suffering is invisible, how to explain the world’s overwhelming condemnation of the Israeli government? Why do Westerners in particular focus on the crimes of the Israeli government, but don’t pay anywhere near as much attention to crimes of other governments? Because they’re all out to get us, of course!

This reasoning is such a satisfying way of explaining away global moral condemnation – worked in apartheid South Africa too – that it must be protected from inconvenient facts. For one, that Westerners might care a bit more about crimes in which their own governments are complicit. But there are also crimes in which Westerners’ governments are complicit, yet receive far less attention – for instance, the assault on Yemen most recently, the Bangladesh genocide further back – so here, the it’s-anti-Jewish-racism hypothesis would seem better supported. Until we remember that human brains aren’t neuro-linked to the internet or an encyclopedia, and we are highly reliant on the media system of the country we live in; which, in the case of the U.S., does not provide much information at all about government crimes abroad unless they are committed by official enemies. But the U.S. media does cover Israel, because it is of interest to Jewish USians, and more importantly due to their larger numbers, evangelical Christians (who are presumably eager to track the signs of the upcoming divine bloodbath). Ignorance, not anti-Jewish racism, explains the focus on crimes of the Israeli government to the exclusion of others.

Ignorant of this ignorance, and needing a soothing rationalization for supporting a genocidal apartheid state the rest of the world holds in contempt, supporters of the Israeli government resort to an almost-logical whataboutism: if those condemning the Israeli government’s atrocities do not equally or more loudly condemn atrocities committed by other governments, then they must be motivated by anti-Jewish racism, thereby making their supposedly moral condemnation mere ooze leaking from the pustule of prejudice. Out of sight during this rhetorical sleight-of-hand, the content of the moral condemnation is dismissed without consideration. (This logic applied to Stalin would result in the conclusion that he did nothing wrong, because the supposedly moral condemnation of his crimes coming from contemporary fascists was actually motivated by anti-Slavic racism.)

But supporters of the Israeli government get so close to a sound argument, I feel compelled to help them over the finishing line. It’s one that they can’t cross for an obvious political reason; but I am under no such stricture.

Let me explain: I, a Unitedstatesian, condemn the Israeli government for being the product of settler colonialism, under the sway of ethnosupremacist ideology, ethnically cleansing its territory of the native inhabitants, now committing genocide, imposing racist laws separating the dominant from the subordinate ethnic group, and acting like a rogue state by flagrantly violating international law in too many ways to enumerate.

See my point?

Not yet? Let’s go back to global public opinion, where Israel ranks rock bottom. Most human beings seem to think that Israel is the worst country on earth. Most likely because, as I just mentioned, the Israeli government is a rogue state flagrantly violating international law via apartheid, ethnic cleansing, the war crime of aggression, and genocide, with the support of a large percentage of its population.

Yet in that same survey of global public opinion, the U.S. ranks in the top ten.

The Israeli government is by far not the worst in the world. That invidious distinction is unarguably merited by the U.S. government. Supporters of the Israeli government can only grind their teeth in silence while I or any other USian issue the condemnation above, because they recognize that without U.S. government support, the Israeli government is kaput. But what they’re thinking is: ‘are you fucking kidding me!? A USian is lecturing us on settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, structural racism, and genocide? Where is your native population? Mostly murdered and buried, with a few survivors stuffed in Bantustan-reservations suffering atrocious levels of poverty and suicide. You’re hectoring us over ethnic cleansing and genocide, why? Because we didn’t do it as effectively as you? We’re the European settler-colonialists, but John Smith and George Washington were Iroquois?’

No, even with the near-universally recognized crimes of the Israeli government, Israel towers over the U.S. in any fair moral accounting – at least in the sense that if one were to dive down to the lowest survivable depths of the ocean, one would still be towering over the Mariana Trench. And this isn’t debatable. Take the entire moral balance sheet of the Israeli government: every crime is replicated in full on the U.S. government’s balance sheet. Now sure, if the Israeli government is the serial killer who actually does the murdering and dismembering, and the U.S. government is the partner who supplies and maintains the murder weapons, insulates the house so victims’ screams cannot be heard, keeps the police away, and disposes of the human remains, then during the sentencing phase, the Israeli government might get a somewhat harsher sentence. But as co-perpetrators, they would both be convicted of the same crimes.

(European governments would be the sanctimonious neighbors who inveigh against serial murder in principle, but leave discretely wrapped hacksaws and axes at the front door. The German government, when questioned by the police during a murder-weapon delivery, would respond with righteous indignation that as a reformed serial killer, it commands a unique moral authority to declare that serial murder isn’t happening at all; and that one must be racist to presume otherwise merely on account of the muffled screams coming from the house or the blood seeping out of its foundations.)

What makes Israel tower above the U.S. morally – or rather, what makes the U.S. plunge far further into the depths – is the vastly longer list of crimes on the USian balance sheet. This is the Israeli government’s first genocide; for the U.S. government, it’s the… fourth? Let’s say fourth at least: after the Native American genocide, the genocide in the Philippines, and the Guatemalan genocide. (The enormous massacre in Indonesia would count too, if it weren’t for the flaw in the Genocide Convention’s definition which excludes ideological or political groups; a case can be made that the U.S. government was an accomplice in the Bangladesh genocide as well.) And that’s “merely” genocide – mass murder plus thought-crime, the intent to destroy a national/ethnic/racial/religious group of people in whole or part.

Was it Israel that killed millions of human beings in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in an attempt to destroy a political group in whole? Was it Israel that killed millions of human beings in Korea, also in an attempt to destroy a political group in whole? Did we hear an Israeli accent when an air force general said that we “burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too” and “[o]ver a period of three years or so we killed off, what, 20 percent of the population of Korea”? Was it Israel that committed the war crime of aggression against Iraq, causing the deaths of millions and forcing many millions more into exile? Is Israel the hegemon of the Western Hemisphere, with a long record of backing odious regimes throughout the Americas that tortured, jailed, and murdered political opponents, all to ensure control over the hemisphere’s resources? Was it Israel that decided to turn Afghanistan into the USSR’s Vietnam, arming religious fanatics to turn the country into an abattoir for Afghans and Soviets; then once Afghanistan had served that purpose, was it Israel that left it in ruin for a decade, then invaded and occupied it for two decades, finally withdrawing its troops and putting it under economic siege? Is it Israel that predominantly rules over the global economic system, which kills over eight 9/11s’ or twenty 7/10s’ worth of people every day due to malnutrition? Is Israel the world’s largest fossil fuel producer, that is, the biggest impediment to avoiding ecological catastrophe and omnicide? Is Israel the wealthiest and most powerful country on earth, whose ruling class refuses to use its wealth and power to create an indefinitely sustainable civilization, threatening all life on earth to temporarily preserve their privilege?

No, that would be the U.S. ruling class.

Was it Israel that supported the apartheid South African regim- oh wait, yes it was, but now we’re back to items on both governments’ moral balance sheets.

Dehumanization

In the 2015 film, Battle for Sevastopol (a joint Ukrainian-Russian production about a Ukrainian sniper who served in the Red Army, calling to mind another terribly saddening ongoing mass murder), Eleanor Roosevelt asks Lieutenant Pavlichenko how many men she has killed.

Her response: “not men, fascists.”

It’s a great line – it’s rousing, and it resonates. But it’s also an example of one of the darkest aspects of political psychology, dehumanization. The 309 fascist soldiers whose lives Pavlichenko ended were dehumanized, stripped of their humanity, to make them psychologically possible to kill. Dehumanization is endemic in war – the enemy is always dehumanized, to make killing palatable.

Yet while political psychologists view dehumanization as a lamentable, dangerous flaw in the human mind, few if any would object to its use by Allied soldiers in WWII to make fascist soldiers killable. (I certainly wouldn’t; I cheered at that line, and felt the cognitive dissonance only later when I realized this was a textbook example of dehumanization.) And that is because the fascists first dehumanized themselves: by adopting beliefs in “racial” superiority and inferiority, that the strong are justified in dominating the weak, and that entire groups of humans deserved murder or enslavement for the benefit of other groups, fascists forfeited their own humanity. Mere ideas-in-heads, once acted upon, can turn a human being of equal, infinite value into something inhuman, meriting imprisonment, reeducation/deradicalization, or, lacking those options, to prevent them from acting on the vicious ideas they believe in, death. Yet mere ideas-in-heads can also re-humanize, when they replace inhuman supremacist beliefs.

The final defense of Israel I can possibly offer is that Israeli people are just people. (Alas.) You can take any group of people on the planet, put them into the exact same environmental context, and you would get the same results as in Israel today: a tiny Left, probably around the same relative size as the U.S. Left, and more numerous religious fanatics righteously braying for blood, secular fanatics using sophisticated language to explain why torrents of blood are necessary for peace, and most numerous of all, normal people who don’t pay much attention to matters outside of their personal lives, but who are influenced by their education, media system, and peers into believing that the whole world (but especially “the” Arabs) is out to exterminate them, hence the “war” “against Hamas” is justified. Such normal people, Orwell observed, “not only [do] not disapprove of atrocities committed by [their] own side, but [they have] a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them” in the first place.

It is no different in the country Israel towers above morally. Human beings are sponges, we’ll absorb whatever our environment offers us. God forbid I deny people their “agency” – which as Davids Graeber and Wengrow observed, is the recently popular euphemism for free will – so I’ll rephrase: we have the “agency” to absorb whatever our environment offers us. Sometimes our environment offers us choices. But in what sense, exactly, are these choices “offered”? The U.S. is an open society, without de jure censorship; there is seemingly total freedom of choice. Instead of reading “The” Economist, for instance, people in the U.S. are “free” to choose to read Monthly Review instead. But how many USians even know that Monthly Review exists? “The” Economist is on newsstands everywhere, and has a marketing budget; Monthly Review isn’t and doesn’t. Even assuming perfect free will “agency”, we cannot choose what we don’t know even exists. To explain his assertion that in every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, Marx wrote: ‘The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production [i.e., though somewhat broader, the means of mass communication, the media], so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.’

That’s the general case; an example of the exception would be those who know that this website exists and chose to read it. Some of you exceptions may be “red diaper babies”, and escaped the typical indoctrination since birth; others may have happened to develop a contrarian mindset, and sought out counter-hegemonic ideas; a few, like me, found reason to reject the ideas with which they had been indoctrinated, and searched over years for better ideas. But most often, for most people, we follow our peers, and adopt just enough of the conventional wisdom to avoid looking stupid or outrageous to others. And so it is that my fellow USians – the overwhelming majority of whom, if you met personally, you would probably like – fall prey to beliefs that dissolve their humanity. For some, like the Israeli meatheads who go viral online by proudly boasting of their racism and barbarity, their transition to inhumanity is obvious and grotesque. But most are otherwise decent people who simply believe the ideas or spooks that dominate their environment: Iraq may nuke us, Vietnam must be liberated from communism, fighting the evil Soviets requires getting into bed with some bastards (“but he’s our bastard”), and so on. This is what we must change though education.

Light unto the nations

Israel-Palestine is simple. There is a far more powerful side, and a far weaker side. The world can look at this conflict for a brief moment, and come to the obvious conclusion that the far more powerful side must make concessions to the far weaker side to secure peace and justice. You don’t need to be Einstein to figure this out. But even before the British left, he could see what was coming: ‘When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks.’ The terrorist organizations Einstein was referring to have evolved into the ruling coalition in the Israeli government today. And the catastrophe has already begun.

The solution only seems difficult if we limit ourselves to Pareto optimality: no one at all worse off, and at least one person better off. With that limitation in place, sure, it’s intractably complicated. But once we embrace the reality that some people need to be worse off, simplicity dawns. New losers need to be made of out today’s winners: secular and religious ethnosupremacist fanatics. The United Nations General Assembly needs to amend the mistake a very different version of itself made in 1947. No partition, just a single, secular state with equal rights for all, a truth and reconciliation commission, UN peacekeepers to deal with any Jewish or Muslim terrorist groups opposing the will of the (real) international community, and the Communist Party of Israel put in charge of de-Baathification.

The Israeli Right is right about one thing: there are worse evils in the world than those committed by their government. Omnicide trumps genocide, and that is the direction we are heading as the U.S. ruling class adopts eco-fascism without much hint of the prefix, branding it “climate realism”. Instead of doing the existentially necessary – working with China, pressuring the E.U. to act beyond PR and half measures, and building an international coalition to transform the global deathtrap economy into one indefinitely capable of sustaining human life – the criminally stupid U.S. ruling class is dead set on prosecuting the Dumb Cold War. Just like the old Cold War, but this time waged against its third-largest trading partner, the only country led by people with enough brains to invest massive resources into renewable energy, becoming the world leader in the field, and making the technology an affordable alternative to those whose continued use risks turning Earth into Venus. The Dumb Cold War is accelerating our descent into full-spectrum collapse (in Pentagon-speak: all hell breaking loose); and now, with so-called Western civilization – still only a good idea – embracing the Israeli military’s redefinition of international humanitarian law, things are getting darker. “Distinction” no longer means civilian vs. combatant, but us vs. them. “Proportionality” is getting the reverse-Genesis 18:32 treatment, where the presence of one Hamas dog-catcher is enough to justify the extermination of a city block. If this perversion of law holds, then the wars triggered by ecological collapse will be Gaza on a planetary scale. And in the Dumb Cold War the U.S. ruling class wants to foist on the rest of the world, the only likely way global heating will be reversed is nuclear winter.

So for those who were only recently and rudely introduced to global politics via the first live-streamed genocide: stopping it is merely the first step. There is a long road ahead, so we need to unite, educate, and recruit. “Politics, in essence, is to increase the number of our friends and decrease the number of our enemies”, as Mao observed. We could use all the help we can get. And if the Gaza genocide galvanizes enough people to unite in turning the tide, to achieve justice in Palestine, end the Dumb Cold War, and build a sustainable civilization, then the state of Israel may yet – ironically – prove to be the light unto the nations.

*Note on comments: if need be, I will adopt the eXile’s old comment policy, correcting stupidities where needed for the authors/bots themselves