A myth beloved of the Baby Boom generation is “we ended Vietnam War.” By this, they mean that it was the vast mobilization of the entire youth generation that convinced the US government to withdraw from Vietnam in 1973. Make no mistake: popular opinion certainly played a role in Washington’s decision to get out of Vietnam, but the opinions of student radicals and the counterculture were almost certainly irrelevant. Government officials were certainly aware of the antiwar demonstrations and regard them with a mix of irritation and alarm, but the Pentagon Papers reveal that no one in the Johnson administration saw them as a reason to end the war, and it is doubtful that things were any different for the Nixon Administration.

There is little evidence to suggest that the majority of young Americans actually opposed the war, or participated in the Peace Movement, the counterculture, or were members of the radical left. Many, of course, evaded the draft in some way (about 500,000 out of about 2.5 million total drafted and a pool of 27 million), but not always on the grounds that they were morally or politically opposed to the war. Besides, as annoying as government officials found them, with the voting age at 21 and with a relative minority of young people participating in anti-war politics full-time, officials of neither the Johnson and Nixon administrations took the youth peace movement seriously in any political sense.

Things did change in the early-70s, as the peace movement escalated, broadened, and moved into the mainstream. Although Johnson “lost” Walter Cronkite when the latter editorialized after the Tet Offensive, the real turning point came in the wake of the revelations of 1971 – the leak of the My Lai massacre of three years prior, the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and the Winter Soldier Investigation. By the end of 1969, while almost 60 percent of Americans surveyed reported that they had become disillusioned with the war, 52 percent reported that they approved of Nixon’s handling of the war with 40 percent disapproving, and almost 60 percent reported that they supported the war “until it meets its aims.” Significantly, five months after 100,000 protesters demonstrated in Washington against the war and the Kent State shootings, the right-wing pastor Carl McIntire organized a 100,000-strong March for Victory there in support of the war.

Nixon’s approval ratings, along with support for the war improved after the revelation of the US invasion of Cambodia in late April and the Kent State shootings the following week. Approval both for the President and for his Cambodia policy had 57 percent support and, in the same Gallup survey, 62 percent of Americans responded that it was “necessary” to continue the war. That support collapsed in 1971. A major part of that was the revelation in the Pentagon Papers that US officials had known by the beginning of 1966 that the war was unwinnable but had committed vast resources and manpower to a losing proposition, culminating with Johnson’s 1968 surtax.

My point is that it was not the morality of the war, so much as its material and final cost that ultimately led to the US withdrawal from Vietnam. In fact, Washington’s policy from 1968 (when the US troop commitment reached its peak of 549,000 men) onward, was to draw-down US troops an implement “Vietnamization,” while finding a way to bring North Vietnam and its squabbling sponsors (China and the USSR) to the negotiating table. The rationale for this policy was that the costs of the war had become too great and had begun to threaten spending on domestic social programs and had become an economic drag.

Public opinion was a factor, of course, but by the time the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam brought 500,000 demonstrators to Washington in 1970, the Johnson and Nixon administrations were already committed to withdrawal. There were fewer than 70,000 US troops in Vietnam by the spring of 1972.

Modern wars typically end for two reasons: A decisive victory or defeat, or economic exhaustion. The Second World War ended with a decisive victory for the Allies and a defeat for Germany and Japan. The First World War basically petered out, with a revolution in Russia, caused largely by the empire’s economic collapse ending the war in the East in 1917, and the economic collapse of the German Empire in 1918. The United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, ending its war, because it could no longer justify the expense of maintaining a costly stalemate.

So, the prospects in Gaza are for a decisive victory for the State of Israel or the Gazans – and neither of these are remotely likely – or the economic prostration of the State of Israel. Demonstrations and social media commentaries (like this one) and campaigns are unlikely to have any more influence on Israeli thinking than the peace rallies of the 1960s had on Washington in the Vietnam War, and doubtless much less so in the absence of widespread war resistance in the State of Israel. What we do in the streets and online is absolutely irrelevant in the State of Israel as long as it has enough resources to continue its brutal War on Gaza. Shaming them, and Zionists, with comparisons to Nazis is a waste of time; they won’t be shamed.

The State of Israel’s resources will remain unlimited as long as its sponsors – particularly the United States – do not limit them. In theory, this is where dissent – on the streets and in social media – might have some influence. Some Israeli allies have reduced or ended their military support, and that is doubtless related to public opinion in their own countries, although I am deeply skeptical about how significant social media dissent is in this case.

I am, of course, well-aware of anti-war sentiment in social media, although I am also very well aware that my friend-space skews heavily to the left and anti-Zionist. Recent encounters with other social media spaces suggests to me that my experience of social media is not, in any way, representative of either social media opinion or public opinion. Indeed, while recent polls have shown that 50 percent of Americans believe that the State of Israel has “gone too far” in Gaza, with 46 percent responding that its actions have been either appropriate or insufficient, that does not necessarily translate into opposition to US military aid. A poll last month found that 77 percent responded that the US was providing “the right amount” or “not enough” military aid.

I might well be wrong, but it seems to me that this war will probably only end when its costs run too high. Despite his bellicose rhetoric, Benjamin Netanyahu must be aware that “total victory” in Gaza is a fantasy, and if he doesn’t his military and intelligence advisors certainly must. But there is no cost to him – and, in fact, great political benefit – in pursuing an unwinnable war as long as he can afford it. The disapproval of the world, and even the growing unease of the State of Israel’s biggest sponsor, which has been making vague noises about a ceasefire, is irrelevant as long as Netanyahu can afford to bomb Gaza.

What, then, is the point of our dissent – both in the streets and online. This is not a rhetorical question; I am really interested in what you have to say.

***

My resistance to Zionism is founded, to a great extent, on my critique and rejection of nationalism and the politics of tribal belonging. The former is an ideology which emerged in the 19th century and which drove, and continues to drive, the genocidal geopolitics of the last two hundred years. The latter is the means in which the dull mindless mass is mobilized to slavishly and passively follow the nation. “Belonging” demands nothing of you other than being born into a particular line of descent; one doesn’t do anything to belong – it is the very antithesis of having an identity. And, while “the nation” is a convenient category within which to contain “belonging,” it is neither necessary, “natural,” transhistorical, nor extra-discursive.

But please be aware, this critique of nationalism and the politics of tribal belonging applies not only to Zionism but to all nationalisms. Your nation, whether it is the French nation, the Russian nation, the American nation, or any other nation is, to me, equally suspect. Don’t bother trying to tell me that you are any more primordial than anyone else.

***

Haaretz: Is Blaming Everyone but Itself for Its Own Disgrace

Perhaps it is a consequence of my psychoanalytic training, but I never feel comfortable with psychoanalyzing whole communities, and especially political polities and cultural groups. Do Jews have mommy issues? Are Americans overcompensating for some inadequacy? Are the British collectively anal retentive? It all seems like what Sigmund Freud called “wild analysis.” You cannot get whole communities on the couch and spend four days a week for several years free-associating to unwrap and uncover the mysteries of the unconscious. Besides, communities and countries are aggregates of many, many people and their interacting neuroses. I might, for example, speculate (wildly, with no actual data) that Vladimir Putin is a grandiose narcissist, but I can’t say what collective trauma lies at the bottom of all of Russia’s neurotic inability to recognize that. There is, in fact, no single trauma but any number of traumas experienced by 144 million Russians. There is thus no Russian neurosis, but rather more than 144 million of them.

Yet, Gideon Levy’s commentary in Haaretz has me wondering if, while we cannot psychoanalyze whole communities, can we then use the lens of psychoanalysis to understand their ideologies? That is, not to unpack a mythical unconscious, diagnose, and cure a people, but to understand some of the cultural modalities by which they understand themselves and their collective place in the world – their ideology. Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse would say yes. I guess I am going to have to make time to read The Nature of Man and Eros and Civilization again. The thing is, Levy’s description of Israeli cultural life and collective self-representation sounds like pathological narcissism to be – almost to an extreme. Were we to witness the kind of grandiose celebration of minor achievements (“top 16 in badminton”) the obsession with honor, and a “childish longing for recognition” in a person, we might (wildly) assume that they are at least a bit narcissistic. So, too, the inability to accept criticism, and the compulsion to blame everyone else for their problems, and the delusion that “everyone is against me.” Indeed, most of us can recognize these features in a toxic narcissist (wildly analyzed) who was once president of the United States and might well be again.

Perhaps that is why redhats, white nationalists, and Christian nationalists are such staunch Zionists – often even more passionate in their support for the State of Israel than many Jewish Zionists: Israel embodies all that they worship and admire.

***

As a rule, I believe victims’ accounts of sexual assault, abuse, and rape. It’s not that I believe that the victims are incapable of lying, but the risks that come with an accusation make frivolous claims unlikely in the extreme. Victims, usually women, expose themselves, even in the 21st century, to murmurings that maybe they “sold their honor to cheaply;” why didn’t you fight back, tooth and nail? Often the rapist is a powerful, popular man deploying that power in an act of sexual savagery, whose popularity shields him from any real suspicion. What will happen to the champion swimmer’s career? How do we know she isn’t just trying to blackmail the handsome celebrity?

This is why the vast majority of sexual assaults – as much as 75 per cent – go unreported. The likelihood of justice for rape victims is so remote that few will put themselves through the wringer of public exposure. It is almost impossible for me to imagine someone, usually a woman, exposing themselves frivolously. If someone says that they have been raped, I am inclined to believe them.

And I know that rape happens. Virtually every woman whom I know, and a fair number of the men, has been the victim of a sexual assault in their lives – and often many times. Rape is such a pervasive feature of our culture that we don’t even notice it even when it’s there, like the Rape of the Sabine Women, transformed into a wholesome family entertainment in Stanley Donen’s musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. It is how our great (male) cinematic heroes set the world to rights, as when James Bond cures Pussy Galore of her sexual deviance (and opposition) with the power of his penis, and Clint Eastwood’s stranger begins his vengeance by raping Callie Travers before allowing outlaws to exterminate her town.

Rape has come along with war throughout the entire history of human conflict. Some of our earliest wars were doubtless fought as vehicles of rape, meant to completely dominate the enemy population and wipe out the genetic material of its male line. Men and boys would be slaughtered, and women and girls would be integrated into the victor’s tribe or community as sexual slaves and concubines. You only need to read the Bible to know about that. Masculine sexual/reproductive domination was the means and end of war. “Israel is laid waste, his seed is no more,” the Pharaoh Merneptah engraved in stone in the 13th century BCE.

In the Roman expansion, the Crusades, the European Wars of Religion, the 30 Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Sino-Japanese Wars, commanders offered rape as a reward, along with loot, to their underpaid, brutalized troops. And even when it was not official policy, as in the World Wars of the last century, it was a common freelance practice. It’s even played for laughs in the 1967 action movie The Dirty Dozen and in the novel on which it was based.

War is the highest achievement of human atrocity, when wholesale slaughter is deemed not merely acceptable but a patriotic act, where good people commit crimes of unimaginable savagery, where even good, gentle, kind men like my father are induced to drop thousands of tons of high explosives on civilians, women, and children asleep in their beds in the name of vengeance. War is the great omnium of atrocity that combines murder, destruction, pestilence, mutilation and, yes, rape in a single act of barbarism.

So, yes, I believe that it is entirely possible that Hamas terrorists raped and sexually brutalized Israelis in the 7 October attack. I am not inclined to regard the militiamen of the Al-Qassam Brigades with any more favor than I regard any soldiers. I certainly don’t believe that they are saintly paladins of justice and liberty any more than the men of any army, regardless of what I might think of the righteousness of their cause. The soldiers of the Union Army fought (in the end) to bring an end to slavery in the Civil War – and yet there were a good many rapists among them.*

Indeed, just this week, the Advocate General of the IDF cautioned Israeli soldiers to behave and refrain from committing “criminal acts” in Gaza. If General Tomer-Yerushalmi believes that things are so bad that she has to make a public statement so Israeli soldiers stop committing these acts, then this criminality must be very pervasive indeed. And since rape, like brutality and looting, is an inevitable partner in all wars, we can conclude that some of the men of the “most moral army in the world” (as they like to call themselves) are rapists. After all, the cases of sexual assault committed by Israeli security forces against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in military detention are well documented.

However, I am skeptical of the report submitted to the UN this week by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel which found that sexual violence was “systematic and intentional” in the 7 October Hamas attack.

To be blunt, I find myself in an uncomfortable position. I will almost always accept the testimony of a rape victim with few reservations but, while the ARCCI claims to have collected eyewitness testimonies in the production of the report, it is not clear whether it contains victim testimonies, and I can’t verify whether it does, because it has not been released to the public. So, I find myself awkwardly suspended in the void between what Israeli officials say the report contains, which I know, and what the report actually contains, which I don’t know. And to be honest, I don’t trust Israeli officials.

These are, after all, the same officials who accused Hamas of murdering and decapitating “dozens of babies” in the 7 October attack, but never produced any evidence of these atrocities, apart from the statements of witnesses of witnesses. And then, they let the accusations drop. And these same officials accused the UNRWA of harboring employees who they claim participated in the attacks. Yet, they never actually produced any evidence, and the directors of the UN agency keeping asking for it so they can pursue their own investigation.

Given the State of Israel’s track record of crying wolf, this third time around I am inclined to skepticism. After all, the Israeli modus operandi seems to be to make huge accusations that grab the headlines, enrage the State of Israel’s allies and supporters, and then to never substantiate the claims. After a while, the memory of the headlines fades, leaving only the outrage. This is, in fact a variation of a well-known propaganda tactic called die große Lüge. Google it.

And some of the claimed incidents of sexual violence, which the ARCCI says were pervasive, “systematic and intentional,” are lurid to a cinematic extreme. At least two of these incidents are extremely reminiscent of the 1978 rape exploitation horror film I Spit on Your Grave, produced and directed by the Israeli filmmaker Meir Zarchi. But maybe that’s just a coincidence.

The ARCCI report – which hasn’t been made publicly available, so I can’t be sure – seems to claim that this horrific sexual violence was not merely a consequence of an undisciplined attack, as General Tomer-Yerushalmi wants us to believe that the criminality of the Israeli soldiers in Gaza is merely incidental to the brutal invasion. It was, one American newspaper reported, the use of “rape as a weapon” similar to what happened in the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides of the 1990s. That was, incidentally, when we began to really talk about the deployment of sexual terrorism in war – and also when the term “genocide” leapt from international law and scholarship to the popular lexicon.

And it is hard for me not to wonder if this report, with its mysterious content, might not be a response to the accusation of genocide leveled against the State of Israel in the ICJ and, well… Pretty much everywhere. I have to ask whether this is just the State of Israel and its allies and proxies saying: “I’m rubber, you’re glue” and “we’re not the genociders, you’re the genociders!”

Both the timing – like the timing of the tale of the decapitated children and the UNRWA accusations – seems awfully convenient. And the accusation mobilizes the mythic trope of the drooling Arab white slaver and rapist so essential to European captivity narratives and beloved of Zionist romances like Leon Uris’s Exodus so effectively that I have to question whether it is, itself, fiction. Indeed, as far as I can tell, there have never been reports of Hamas using rape as a terror weapon, let alone as a “systematic and intentional” terror weapon, in its 37-year history. Admittedly, I have only the archives of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe to consult, but it does seem that, if Hamas did “systematically and intentionally” deploy mass sexual violence in the 7 October attack, it was a novelty and an innovation.†

So, I remain skeptical, and uncomfortably so. Rape is an atrocity; rape in a war is an atrocity within an atrocity. And, while I don’t believe that rape victims are inclined to lie, I know that the State of Israel is most certainly so inclined. I don’t know if Hamas deployed rape as a weapon on 7 October, but I do know that the State of Israel, its allies, and proxies, certainly did – or the accusation of rape – this week.

***

I mean, what are the State of Israel’s claims? “Hamas decapitated 62 babies!” “There was a Hamas command post underneath the Al Shifa hospital.” “Staff members of the UNRWA participated in the 7 October attack.” “Hamas ‘systematically and deliberately’ deployed rape as a weapon on 7 October.”

Israeli officials make the allegation and grab headlines, and then fail to follow-up with, you know, evidence. No evidence is ever forthcoming, but the lurid, sensational headlines remained burned in people’s retinas. This is a classic propaganda play, and the fact that so many people still believe that there were dozens of decapitated babies and insist that the Al Shifa hospital was a Hamas base in the absence of evidence and in the face of evidence to the contrary, is only a measure of how effective it is.

And it is effective largely because it resonates with racist tropes so close to the hearts of diaspora Jews and westerners generally: Of the Arab white slaver drooling over the captive white women in his hareem, of the savage Muslim fanatic, of the crafty Arab shopkeeper who will pick your pocket while he cheats you at his dirty stall in the Kasbah.

People believe these lies, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, because it reinforces what they already believe. No evidence is necessary once the accusation is made. They call it confirmation bias. I call it ideology.

***

I think the important thing to remember is that the State of Israel lies. It has lied consistently over many decades about the intentionality of the Nakba, about its role in the European imperialist war in 1956, about its aggressive and unprovoked attack on Egypt and Syria in 1967, about its nuclear program, about the brutality of the Occupation, about the settlements and plans for the illegal annexation of the Occupied Territories, about the “decapitated babies,” about the UNRWA, about how “we do not bomb hospitals.”

In my line of work (I am a historian) we always “consider the source.” And the State of Israel has consistently demonstrated that it is an unreliable source. At this point, I am not inclined to accept anything that the State of Israel or any official source related to it claims without a high degree of skepticism.

***

I, too, am uncomfortable with the Prince of Wales making political pronouncements. But the Commonwealth Monarchy is meant, in part, to represent “the conscience of the Nation.” (Benjamin Disraeli’s words.) Throughout its history, the Sovereign has often failed to do that. Yet, sometimes, as when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth comforted Britons in the rubble of the Blitz, or when HM Queen Elizabeth II exhorted all members of the community to treat each other with “respect and love,” as she did in a Christmas broadcast a decade ago, they succeed. So, perhaps the prince is not speaking about politics, but morality and conscience, which is something that politics often lacks.

***

I can only guess that most of the flood of tendentious, inaccurate, and inflammatory memes regarding Gaza, Palestine, and the State of Israel (on both sides) is the work of Russian meme factories.

***

A reminder: I regard equating events with the Holocaust to be a form of Holocaust denial. I will unfriend you.

***

I don’t believe that most people (in the United States, in any event) really know what happened in the Holocaust. For most of us, “the Holocaust” is simply a signifier of a “very, very bad thing” which can thus signify any other “very, very bad thing.” Moreover, “holocaust” (without “the”) is merely a common noun and is thus generic and nonspecific. So, the specifics of the Holocaust – the Shoah and the Porajmos – are lost. One can deploy the Holocaust as a floating signifier without reference to the death camps, the killing fields of Operation Reinhard, Aktion T4, the brutal deaths of as many as 1.5 million Roma (one half the European Romani population), 6 million Jews (two thirds of the European Jewish population), and millions more of Slavs, political prisoners, dissidents, disabled, and LGBTQ people. One can forget that the Holocaust was not the consequence of the German war effort, but a specific and deliberate policy of extermination often carried out in contradiction to war aims and military interests.

The actual memory of the Holocaust – the Shoah and the Porajmos – has faded, leaving only mute memorials exhorting later generations to “never forget,” mandated history classes bowdlerized so as to spare the tender feelings of highschoolers, TV and films that transform the Holocaust into heartwarming melodramas, adventure stories, or sensationalist pornographies of violence. There are no survivors left to tell of the selections, the human experiments, the degradation, of lining up at the lime pits, waiting for the bullet in the back, of slaving to make Volkswagens, Fords, Hugo Boss suits, Maggi soups, and Continental tires until they dropped dead, their bodies disposed of in trash heaps. It is easy now to just think of the Holocaust as a “very, very bad thing” among other “very, very bad things.”

As an educator – and one who teaches 20th century history – I am complicit in this process of forgetting. If people today lack the knowledge of the Holocaust that will make them lose their breath, if they believe that it is simply a fungible category that can be ignorantly applied and reapplied to any atrocity that they choose, if they cannot grasp its vast enormity, then I am at least partly responsible for that. It is difficult for me to accept my failure as a teacher, but there it is. I am sorry.

***

* The memory of the Holocaust is now truly dead; it is now merely a label. The death of one person is a tragedy; the deaths and unimaginable suffering of millions is mere rhetoric.

† Similarly, Hamas has never used beheadings in its attacks and appears to be a highly-disciplined military force – certainly disciplined enough to resist the largest and best-armed military in the middle east for four months while being outnumbered 15-to-1.