The Israel Defense Forces must be the most incompetent armed force on the face of the planet. I know that this contradicts the image of a highly trained, well-armed, and ruthlessly efficient military but let’s face it: that’s marketing. Make no mistake, the IDF has scored some startling successes in its 76-year history. The rescue of some 250 passengers of an Air France Airbus A300 at by Israeli commandos at Entebbe in 1976 was spectacular; the 1967 War, in which an Israeli surprise attack overwhelmed the combined armies of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt in less than a week is textbook.
But that was a half-century ago or more. Today, the vaunted IDF can’t even (as we say) organizirn a shtup in a hayzl. Far from being the greatest military force in the world, as their boosters and fanboys any thing claim, the IDF has shown itself to be, more than anything, the Army of Chelm. Chelm is a mythical village in Ashkenazi folklore populated entirely by village idiots: the State of Israel’s soldiers are Chelmites, a textbook case of incompetence.
Think about it: The State of Israel invaded Gaza after the 7 October attack, with its collective chest puffed and steely resolve it its eyes determined, as Benjamin Netanyahu (the Israeli prime minister and the little brother of Yonatan Netanyahu, the “Hero of Entebbe”) said, to “eliminate Hamas.” With tanks, heavy artillery, helicopters, supersonic jet fighters, drones, cruise missiles, submarines, and ships, and outnumbering an enemy armed mostly with small arms and a few mortars by a factor of at least 15-to-1, the smart money bet that this was going to be a short, easy war. A “police action” more than anything else.
Yet, here we are, seven months later and, with all of its weapons, technology, and vaunted skill, and the IDF is still pinned-down by Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades in a bloody stalemate. The only thing that the IDF has achieved in Gaza is the murder of almost 35,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom were civilians, the displacement of almost two million people, the creation of a famine, the diplomatic isolation of the State of Israel, and a genocide case before the International Court of Justice that will be Israelis’ Mark of Cain for a generation. Even the IDF’s own senior officers have publicly complained about the indiscipline of their men.
The IDF is truly the Army of Chelm.
I am no admirer of military competence; the soldier’s vocation is an abomination. Yet, I am painfully conscious of the consequences of military ineptitude. A poorly led, inept army is an undisciplined army. Frustration blurs military objectives and breeds chaos in in the ranks. The bloodiest massacres in history were not perpetrated by efficient, proficient military units and soldiers, but by undisciplined, incompetent, disorganized rabble like the IDF.
The 1864 massacre of the Union Army garrison at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, 600 men of the United States Colored Troops, was perpetrated by a disordered force of Confederate soldiers who knew that their war was lost, and they were led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, the homicidal maniac who would soon be the first national leader of the Ku Klux Klan. The American soldiers who murdered the villagers of My Lai in 1968 were green, having been “in country” for a few short months, scared out of their minds, and led by careerist officers only interested in body counts.
Throughout history, incompetence has been the surest recipe for atrocity and genocide, and the IDF has shown itself to be the most bumbling, inept, armed forces in the world. The State of Israel is fighting a war that it cannot win, with soldiers incapable of victory and infected with frustration and failure.
19 May 2024
***
There is a meme going around social media claiming that “nine Zionist billionaires own ninety percent of the media.” It stopped me in my tracks when I saw it posted by a social media friend. I’m fairly certain that my friend did not intend to promote an antisemitic libel, and they removed it when I explain how it was problematic.
The meme is very problematic, mobilizing the myth of Jewish control of the media, or Hollywood, or whatever. It is just another variation on the there of the shadowy cabal or outsiders who corrupt the soul of the good and righteous and illegitimately influence government and policy.* I mean, stop me if you heard this one before, but the myth rests on the proposition that Jews are not and cannot be citizens, and as actors external to the social contract, whatever influence they have on the body politic can only be illegitimate.
The meme doesn’t say “the Jews,” of course, but within the context of the message, it doesn’t have to. “Zionist billionaires” is merely a convenient substitution for “rich Jews” which resonates in this historical moment. I am as critical of Zionism as the next guy, and I support any thoughtful criticism of the State of Israel and opposition to the War on Gaza. But in this context, it is pretty clear that “Zionist billionaires” is just “dirty Jews” in sotto voce.
The figure of “nine Zionist billionaires [who] own ninety percent of the media” is so vague that it has to be. After all, who are these nine Zionist billionaires? The meme declines to say, giving the reader the opportunity to imagine who they might be and mobilizing all those indistinct, yet powerful tropes in our cultural memory. Remember the bearded, hook-nosed conspirators in Mear-One’s “Freedom for Humanity” mural? Yeah, those guys.
Moreover, with no indication of where this figure comes from – The Economist or Forbes? Who know? – there is no way to take it seriously. How is it calculated? Does “the media” include all media, like television, newspapers, online content providers, infrastructure companies, entertainment media, and music, or just some media? And it is not clear whether this is “ninety percent” of American, or English-language media, or of global media. I’m just going to guess that the meme means ninety percent of all media (content and infrastructure) everywhere in the world. That, at least, is consistent with the myth of a global Jewish conspiracy.
Yet, the world’s largest media conglomerates – Dai Nippon, Disney, SONY, Vivendi, Comcast, Warner Bros., etc. – are publicly traded and thus not owned by a single billionaire, Zionist or otherwise. The private corporations – Bertelsmann, Essel, Televisa – have little-to-no explicit involvement with Zionists or Zionism (Bertelsmann is German-owned, Essel is Indian-owned, and Televisa is Mexican-owned). Heinrich Mohn, owner of Bertelsmann Verlag in the 1930s and 1940, and the great-Opa of the company’s current chairman, was in fact and honest-to-God Nazi. And I am pretty sure that Essel’s Subhash Chandra and Televisa’s Emilio Azcárraga Jean aren’t Zionists, either.
Grand conspiracy theories are like that, however; they traffic in vague inuendo rather than actual facts so they can gain traction in people’s often-legitimate anxieties. Billionaires, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk (neither of whom is either Jewish or particularly Zionist) are a scourge on the planet, and the principal agents of our late-stage capitalist horror show; the State of Israel’s War on Gaza is a horrific, ongoing atrocity, and many of us are watching with mix of rage and despondency. If you don’t think too much about the details, it all sorta-kinda fits.
We believe in grand conspiracy theories because they bring order to a complex, chaotic universe; they allow us to make sense of things that are otherwise too much to wrap our heads around or threaten our understanding of how the world works. White, Christian, male power and privilege are eroding? It must be all that “wokism” that’s undermining the natural order of things. You can’t raise a family and own a house on an average salary anymore? It must be all those immigrants and the Davos Clique. The Biden administration won’t abandon its support of the State of Israel? It must be those nine Zionist billionaires who own ninety percent of the media.
But it is just that appeal that makes it essential that we approach grand conspiracy theories critically. The meme’s contention is that the cabal of nine Zionist billionaires are using their ill-gotten power to influence media coverage of the War on Gaza and hide the truth. (“Hiding the truth” is an old, time-worn antisemitic accusation.) But is the media coverage that these shadowy Zionist billionaires are allegedly influencing really that pro-Israel? Do the media even really speak with a unified voice?
These are dark times, the situation in Gaza is dire, and it is long-past time that the Palestinian people obtained real justice. But repeating absurd conspiracy theories and antisemitic libels are not going to bring peace in Gaza or secure a future for all Palestinians.
17 May 2024
***
Yuval Noah Harari makes a very strange argument for the future of Zionism here. He notes, correctly, that Zionism emerged as one nationalist ideology among many in the 19th century, and then proceeds to argue – somehow – that its relevance has been hijacked by bigotry, intolerance and suprematism deployed by villains like Benjamin Netanyahu. I can only surmise that Harari is not a very good historian or, at the very least, he hasn’t actually read the literature of nationalism or, for that matter, Zionism.
The nationalisms that Zionism evolved alongside in the 19th century and of which it is a species, were predicated on ideas like the German Sonderweg (the “special path”) or and the French “mission civilizatrice.” They were forged and consolidated in imperialism and colonialism, which clearly demarcated the boundaries between the national community which was served by nationalism and the nation, and “the other.”
As Hannah Arendt observed, in its most highly-developed form nationalism narrated humanity as being comprised of nations which, like biological species, are in constant conflict. Nationalism understands the relationship between nations as a zero-sum game, where success for the French nation, for example, can only come at the detriment of other nations, like the Germans or the Vietnamese. That is one reason for nationalism’s irredentist impulses – if a portion of the nation, like the Bohemian Germans or German Austrians, lives beyond the boundaries of the national state, then the nation is at the mercy of the other and, more ominously, it undermines the national state’s claims of necessity and legitimacy.
This, of course, is a characteristic of Zionism, which is firmly rooted in German nationalism. If the State of Israel is necessary for all Jews to “live as Jews,” then the fact that it is possible for Jews to “live as Jews” in other states and among other nations undermines its necessity and legitimacy.
So, too, is the suprematism and bigotry that Harari curiously claims to be foreign to the “true Zionism” of Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, and was illicitly introduced by villains like Netanyahu. Yet, these Zionists never hid their exclusion of “the other” from the national state that was supposed to be the container of the Jewish people. Herzl, after all, declared in Der Judenstaat that the State of Israel would form a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” It is hard to read these words without hearing a claim of suprematism and the exclusion of the other.
Nationalism can only be exclusionary, suprematist, and bigoted. It posits the special mission of a national community, a Volksgemeineschaft (community of the folk) defined by descent and tribal belonging. One need not actually do anything to belong to the community of the folk, one’s membership is ordained by ancestry and nothing more. And, since the highest value of ancestry is purity – like the pedigree of a dog breed – it can always be contaminated and debased in contact with the other. As in the law of “survival of the fittest,” as natural evolution was then misunderstood by so many, survival of the nation demanded exclusion of the other and preferably its domination or extermination.
That made a lot of sense in the intellectual context of the 19th century, when Artur de Gobineau and Madison Grant were revered as prophets, and eugenics and “racial hygiene” regarded as legitimate science. Forged in colonialism and imperialism, undergirded with a foundation of unreliable pseudoscience, and legitimized by the Hegelian Machtstaatsgedanke (Power State theory), the nation appeared to Europeans – a tiny portion of the world’s population – as the natural and necessary organizing category of mankind (and they meant mankind). And this is the soil in which Herzl, Max Nordau, and all the others planted Zionism, their own nationalist varietal.
Harari, indeed all Zionists, continues to live in the 19th century; they cannot conceive of humanity being organized in any way except in nations, let alone left unorganized at all. Harari’s fantastical attempt to reclaim a “true Zionism” is a symptom of this, and his inability to understand the world, or humanity, beyond the horizons of 1899.
15 May 2024
***
I have been thinking about this photo of Jerry Seinfeld at an Israeli “military fantasy camp” this winter, and I find that it speaks volumes about a certain kind of American Jewish masculinity. Here is Seinfeld clutching an assault rifle with a raised fist and the stupidest, dorkiest shit-eating grin on his face. This is a man who feels energized, and his masculinity validated just by proximity to violence and living vicariously through the Israeli murder specialist standing next to him.
This image seems to capture all that is mainstream, Zionist, American Jewish masculinity: Weak, emasculated, and only capable of expression through fantasies of military derring-do and bloodshed. At home, Seinfeld is a pathetic milquetoast frightened by the challenge by women, people of color, LGBTQ people, and changing times to his white, male privilege. And, like so many wealthy, Zionist American Jews, he well-understands that his enjoyment of this privilege is entirely provisional.
He is not “white” so much as “ecru,” and he knows that. The real American privilege inheres in the redhat neototalitarian movement’s white and Christian nationalist base. They tolerate him because he is useful, or entertaining, or the object lesson of what a Jewish schmuck really is, and he is so eager to be accepted by the racist and antisemitic redhats who define toxic American masculinity as their funny pet k!ke that he is more than willing to advance their case.
But in the State of Israel this man, so grateful to be used by his “betters” for a modicum of their recognition, gets to cosplay a tough action hero and then go back to his luxury hotel with his stories. And this, I believe, is part of the ideological appeal of the State of Israel to so many doughy, overfed, insecure American Jewish men.† It feeds their masculine fantasies and allows them to believe that they are great, epic heroes that American popular culture demands that they be.
They have internalized the violence and aggression of Israeli toxic masculinity by proxy, walk with the swagger of arsim outside a Tel Aviv nightclub, and declare “you don’t mess with the Zohan!” They can do nothing other than revere the IDF and celebrate the violence against Palestinians. To do otherwise would be a form of psychic suicide, where they might have to acknowledge that they are little more in America than the sniveling pets and willing fuckdolls of the white nationalist right.
13 May 2024
* “Cabal” is itself an antisemitic slur, originating in Christian imaginings of the occult power of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition.
† I do not believe for a moment that all American Jewish men are doughy, overfed, and insecure, but there is a distinct correlation between the ones who are and the ones who embrace the Zionist myth of the “muscle-Jew.”
Thanks for the comments on the “nine Zionist billionairres”, it’s something that’s been bumming me out and I think you explained it well.
I’m gonna take exception to the “incompetence” thing though. I appreciate challenging the myth of invincibility of the Israeli military. And if you want something to demonstrate incompetence, October 7th itself does a pretty good job, where they basically had no military defense at all to the attack.
But in the weeks after October 7th, many commentators foresaw pretty much just how this has all gone. Not because they had some special insight into Israeli military incompetence, but because they could see that “eradicating Hamas” militarily was not actually a possible goal, and when you try — this is what happens. Many of us were in the streets and halls of Congress protesting that first week too, because we saw the same thing — because Israeli politicians were saying what they intended to do, and it’s what we’ve seen.
The destruction of all society in Gaza is the machine working as intended. Vengeance and annhilation were either the goals, or the only thing that a futile attempt to “eradicate Hamas” can look like, or really some combination of those two that nobody involved was too concerned with. There is no “competent” counter-insurgency against an internal population that has a different outcome, this is how that sort of thing looks.
The incompetence is political, in thinking that the safety of a population can be achieved through the wholesale destruction of another people. Not a question of competence in the application of military force.