I am not surprised by much these days. People are all-too-often who they are, incapable of any real change and set in their courses until they breathe their last breaths. It is, perhaps, a cynical view of humanity, and I am willing to wear the mantle of a cynic and acknowledge that I am probably not exempt from the rule. Still, the idealist in me – there is a Byronic romantic inside every cynic – still sniffs the breeze for evidence of change, the possibility of something, I don’t know… different.
After the months of the State of Israel’s War on Gaza (which one commenter in social media so helpfully reminded me “isn’t a war, it’s genocide,” as if war and genocide are two completely discrete, separate categories), I find that I have become highly attuned to subtle changes in the landscape. I can’t say, for example, what it means that the Canadian government is slow-walking approval to ship military hardware to the State of Israel. That is something that the Dutch would do; Canada, sharing a border with and utterly dependent on the United States, has tended to avoid angering the State of Israel’s biggest sponsor for at least the last half-century.
Yet… Here we are.
But then, there seem to be subtle changes in Washington, too. President Biden has been talking a tiny bit tougher to the Israeli government; his administration has welcomed unofficial visits from members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet. And Charles Schumer’s speech today in the Senate, where he called for new elections in the State of Israel and a new government, with someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, that would conclude a ceasefire and restart a peace process with Palestinian sovereignty as a goal sent a clear message.
As the top Democrat in the Senate, and the most senior Jewish political leader in the United States, Sen. Schumer has been a resolutely reliable supporter of the State of Israel. Yet, here he was, calling for peace, and accusing both Netanyahu himself and the right-wing Israeli government as two of the main obstacles to peace. The senator made left no doubt: “I speak for myself, but I also speak for so many mainstream Jewish Americans — a silent majority — whose nuanced views on the matter have never been well represented in this country’s discussions about the war in Gaza.”
On one level, this is just one prominent politician calling for change. Yet, at another, this represents a sea-change; not only is Schumer a senior congressional Democrat, but he is no squaddie, nor even a sort-of-progressive like Elizabeth Warren. The senator is a staunch moderate, the very personification of the Biden administration’s middle-of-the-road liberalism. If Senator Schumer is against the War on Gaza, and has staked out a position starkly opposed to Netanyahu and Maximalist militant Zionism, then this is significant. Especially so, since this is exactly how Democrats test-market policy changes – wo can forget when then-Vice President Biden endorsed marriage equality to test the water less than a week before President Barack Obama did twelve years ago.
On their own, these are imperceptible, glacial movements, none amountonng to much; but taken together, with rising global demands for an end to the killing, and with a US presidential election eight months away, there is more than a faint whiff of something in the air that could well be change. Something is happening.
I know that the true believers cling to the faith in some kind of apocalyptic (in its original meaning) moment of reckoning, when the State of Israel will be finally humbled by Gaza’s heroic resistance, and time will roll back to the early afternoon (local time) of 14 May 1948, but that won’t happen. As much as many of my pro-Palestinian friends might wish it otherwise, the State of Israel is not just going to go away, and there will not be an accounting for the Nakba, 1967, the Occupation, the settlements, and this horrific war overnight.
What there will be is a reckoning in the international community, where the State of Israel finds itself all alone, isolated, and a pariah among nations, where it can no longer count on the carte blanche of its sponsors – the United States, Germany, even Canada. It will finally be “a country like any other,” as its founders and leaders have always claimed they wanted it to be and that means facing an accounting for decades of violations of international law and human rights, and sanctions for is bloody aggression. Just like any other country would.
Is it cause for celebration? No; that would be extremely premature. We can celebrate when the IDF withdraws from Gaza and the State of Israel is forced to recognize the inevitability of Palestinian statehood, whatever shape that takes.
14 March 2024
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I cannot claim surprise that at least some of the Israeli government’s “evidence” that employees of the UNRWA were involved in the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack was from testimony extracted under coercion and torture. Israeli security and military personnel have routinely tortured and abused Palestinian detainees in the Occupied Territories when the stakes were far lower. Human Rights Watch’s report Torture and Ill-Treatment: Israel’s Interrogation of Palestinians From the Occupied Territories documented Israeli practices in excruciating detail three decades ago. It beggars belief that the State of Israel has cleaned up its act in the past generation of reactionary rule.
The evidence of the State of Israel’s claims has been scant, to say the least, and these new revelations – dutifully, passionately, and unsurprisingly denied by Israeli government officials and their diaspora mouthpieces – only help to discredit whatever passes for what passes for Israeli “truth” even more. Perhaps that is why countries, like Canada, which had suspended their support for the UNRWA, are quietly funding the UN relief organization now. It does seem that the Israeli government is simply not to be trusted.
But, more importantly, this week’s revelations also underscore the casual, day-to-day brutality that the State of Israel deploys to maintain its illegal rule in the Occupied Territories. “Hmmm… We need to fabricate evidence? Don’t worry, we’ll just beat a confession out of someone…”
12 March 2024
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I believe that I get these ads because the Facebook algorithm has (a) noted that I spend a lot of time commenting on Gaza, and (b) my alternative profile name is my name in Yiddish, which I think the algorithm parses as Hebrew. All the same, it is a fascinating view into the Zionist mind. Let us not forget, these ads seem to be saying, who the real victims are here! They are the brave men and women of the IDF.* Forget those two million Palestinians who are starving to death in Gaza, these are the people who need your help!
Significantly, this particular ad purports to be a fund to deliver food aid to the IDF, one of the best-funded military forces in the world. I can only imagine how much the owners of this enterprise take off the top. War is always a marketing opportunity. †
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* The frequency with which attractive young (AI generated?) Israeli women appear in ads of this sort would suggest that more than half of the IDF is composed of attractive young women. Draw your conclusions.
† This Food for Life organization has no relationship, and should not be confused with Food For Life Global, which is a legitimate charity.
16 March 2024
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I would never have imagined that the State of Israel’s War on Gaza would have become such a fertile merchandising opportunity. Yet here we are; my social media feed is clogged with ads for keffiyehs and Palestinian flags on one hand, and IDF tea towels and Chai pendants – “to show your support for the brave mean and women defending Israel” – on the other. It is a bit schizophrenic, to be sure, and I am not sure that the Facebook algorithm really has me that well pegged: “He’s Jewish, and he seems interested in events in Gaza… But he has a lot of friends with Arabic-sounding names… Hmm, let’s split the difference.”
It also speaks to the nature of political engagement in the era of social media; our politics are performative. There is no practical way for an individual to intervene directly in the destruction on the other side of the world, and our domestic governments’ foreign policies which, after all, are utterly central to ending the killing, are set and can change at only a pace too languid for an age accustomed to the instant gratification of the Internet and Amazon.com’s same-day delivery.
But we all have to do something, don’t we? We can’t just sit here and wait for the wheels of history to turn while tens of thousands of people are dying (or, conversely, while the State of Israel is still under threat, if you happen to be on that side). What’s more, we only have value in social media – our social media capital – when we are noticed; a capital marked by comments, “likes,” and shares. Our political investments intersect with our existential social media reality, and we produce ourselves politically and socially be being seen.
So we declare “I stand with Palestine,” or “I stand with Israel,” or we post endless commentaries in the ether so that, if nothing else, we can do something. Maybe it will make a difference, in some way; perhaps the aggregate of millions of voices shouting into the void will bring change. It can’t hurt and, even if it is not much, it is something.
But that desperation makes us marks for merchandisers. In social media, and in the anonymous daily interactions and encounters we have in what used to be called “real life,” our capital is our visibility, and our politics are thus performative. We do not as active subjects, but as passive objects observed in the flow of humanity and the endless deathscroll of social media. And to be seen, we must wear our identifying badges, whether they are the Palestinian or Israeli flags on our profile pictures, or the pre-fab images and slogans that we display as our identities, or the keffiyehs or the Blue-and-White buttons and pins that define us.
And merchandisers are more than happy to take our money to offer a salve to our political impotence. All social media “activism” is performative; all of it – even this commentary – is cosplay. I don’t even know if it is real, but at least it is something.
16 March 2024
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Memory of the Holocaust is now truly dead. It was murdered by the State of Israel and its Zionist proxies who cynically appropriated it as a fig-leaf for Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people, and by antisemitic anti-Zionists who denied it as a way of denying the legitimacy of the State of Israel. Thanks to both partners, it is as if the Holocaust never happened. And with the memory of it dead, with the reality of the suffering and deaths of six million Jews and more than one million Roma in the killing fields and death camps evaporated like the last traces of a nightmare upon waking, it will almost certainly happen again, seemingly for the first time.
15 March 2024
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War degrades us all.
It refines and simplifies the ineffable complexity of the universe and reduces everything into seemingly- objective (but only seemingly) categories of “us” and “them,” “good” and “evil,” right and wrong. Every combatant, and every one of their supporters, believes that THEIR cause is the just one, chosen and guided by the One True God.
War promises an apocalypse – in the original meaning of a final revelation – in which we will finally know for certain that we all fought with the armies of the light and right, no matter which side we were on, and whether or not we actually fought at all. We all care deeply for the victims, and above all for the children… But not theirs, whom we dismiss as “collateral damage,” or unfortunates caught in the crossfire, or just the enemy.
War degrades us by severing our ties to other humans on the “other side,” or those heretics on our own; it makes us deaf to their cries and blind to their suffering. It transforms our и humanity into a zero-zum, into questions of “security,” or politics, into abstractions. It transforms us all into abstractions. It degrades us by reducing our humanity to halves, or to the numbers and point spreads of a sports book. It makes us less.
One might argue (one might) that war is sometimes necessary (for a “greater good”) of that is was inevitable. It is, after all, not always something that we can choose. War comes to us. Yet, that too degrades us by making us pawns of circumstance with no autonomy, choice, or agency. We are thus mere flotsam on the tides of history and events; the discarded plastic bags that coalesce in vast rafts on our oceans. And that degrades us, too. For what is more degraded that garbage?
15 March 2024
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Is this maybe some sort of credo?
I simply do not trust any person who claims to oppose war, but who does not condemn all wars – even the ones that are necessary, and which produce ultimately beneficial results. Such wars might be necessary, but they are never desirable or moral. One might have to accept such wars in much the same way one must accept an amputation to save one’s life, but the amputation itself is never a good thing, even if survival of the patient is. We should not welcome our mutilation and disfigurement even if we are ultimately grateful for our lives. When we make exceptions and say that some amputations are better and more desirable than others, that the amputation itself is valorized by the end result, we end up celebrating mutilation for its own sake.
This is where I part from those who romanticize wars of liberation and “armed resistance” for their own sake from a position of safety and privilege. But it is also where I lose trust in those people who claim to oppose a war but believe that they could support another war. They are not for peace, or justice, or any human value.; they want exceptions. And they want the war they would wage against their enemies to be the good war – they are, in the end, pro-war.
And that is why I do not trust them.
15 March 2024
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I am endlessly fascinated by all those men (and they are almost always men) who sit in their comfortable living rooms and home offices, endlessly checking their social media feeds, who romanticize war and armed conflict, and truly believe that their heroes’ glory somehow transfers to themselves. Only when we recognize that war, in all its forms, is a failure of humanity, though maybe sometimes inevitable and necessary, will we perhaps find a way to live without it.
My father, Joseph Aaron Friedman, was the greatest man I have ever known. Along with two brothers and a sister, he served in the RCAF during the Second World War, and was short down, wounded, and imprisoned in a Nazi prison camp. He lost his closest friends on one night in 1944. My father was proud that he had answered the call, as he sometimes put it, but had no illusions about the cost of war, and how he bore its scars. My father, a war hero by any standard, flatly denied the heroism of war, however. He told me, on one of the last occasions that I spoke to him, as he was recovering from chemotherapy shortly before his death, that although he was proud to have taken his place in the RCAF, he committed “terrible acts” for his country. “War is a crime,” he said. “It is always a crime, even when we are given no choice.” He did not feel like a hero for this. He felt diminished, even if he made greater sacrifices than the oh-so-comfortable bystanders in their living rooms who cheered on the war and cheer war still.
But my father was and will be a hero to me. He was a man of decency and integrity who saw war for what is really is. He is the man whose standard I aspire to meet.
15 March 2024
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One of the things that I find most fascinating about those people on the left whose sole explanation for everything is “American imperialism” (NATO, in the Middle East, in Asia, etc.) is their eagerness to deploy a theory of American Exceptionalism, albeit an inverted one. In this narrative, the United States is still the “indispensable nation” preordained to govern the world, only as a force for “evil instead of niceness” (as Maxwell Smart might have it). This is an amazingly narcissistic American worldview: No country or people have any agency outside of the interests of the United States, or outside of resistance to the interests of the United States. It’s all about the United States.
Apart from the fact that such a worldview cannot be justified historically, apart from the fact that it is an extraordinarily colonialist way of thinking, it is very much an American way of thinking. Which is why, I think, it appeals to Americans.
16 March 2024
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