How can we talk about Israel and Palestine? How can outsiders talk about this war, glued to our screens like so many children pushing our noses up against the windows. Where do we start? When does it end?
How can I be appalled but not surprised.
A ground operation in Gaza will be awful. It will be Old Testament Biblical. 2.37 million people in 365 square kilometers, 6500 souls per square. Street by street, block by block, room by room, creeping death and devastation. Life reduced to seconds, centimeters, and gasping breaths of toxic dust. 2.37 million people with nowhere to go, no way out, and no choice left but how to die.
And because they will die, they will fight.
The Palestinians and the Israelis, the old and the young, the true believers and the secularists, Jihadis and Zionists, the lifers and the conscripts, they will die together. Tens of thousands of them. Multiples of that will be wounded, many so badly that they will envy the dead. They will die and their deathblood will mix in streets where the living never would.
And we will watch.
There will be cheering, and wailing, and screaming, and threats. It will spill out into streets around the world as protesters and counter-protesters struggle for control of the narrative. Some because they truly believe and others because they know that this is spectacle. But don't get it twisted because wars are won and lost in the hearts of men. The spectacle is vital ground.
And in the spectacle, they serve too who sit and watch.
For the record, I hope Israel wins, that they do in fact destroy Hamas. I hope that Israel wins because if they win then there is a chance that decades from now an open and democratic society will have a reckoning with its wars. And that people will weep and tear down the old statues and open the archives to see the ghastly apparitions of the ones who are alive today but not tomorrow.
I do not see that chance if Hamas wins.
So now I am a watcher too.
Damn it all.
I think that we all can have our personal interpretation. Killing humans in the world is just another commodity like so many tones of gunpowder. It is coldly calculated into world strategies without a ripple. (25,000 is nothing.) The only important thing is the window dressing, which went haywire this time. Therefore it is the West that is in crisis. They mouth certain civilized words for centuries, but this time it sticks in their throat.
I think that this may be the first time that martyrs will make a difference. Their lives (and deaths) have world importance. I think this is the first time that thin cover-up words, are just too thin. And they will not make a difference, and might be broken for a long time to come.
With regard to Israelis, I think it is perplexing that 15.7 million people, 0.2% of the total 8 billion can be the center of attention and the center of conflict that is a world concern. You can answer me that if you can.
If you have ever studied about the TALMUD, you'll have no surprises. Just accept it. While it is written for 600 years, it is an oral rabbinical tradition for 3,000 years. It isn't going to be undone, or modified. It is clear that the Oslo peace accords were just another window dressing for western consumption.
You can't know the Talmud unless you read Hebrew. Or someone could read it to you. One person does just that, Israel Shahak. His short book is not a commentary nor analysis. He just straight reads key passages. Is the Talmud anti-Semitic? Of course not; it is Semitic in the full sense of the word. I uploaded my copy here:
https://brax.me/f/Jewish%20History%2C%20Jewish%20Religion%20The%20Weight%20of%20Three%20Thousand%20Years%20by%20Israel%20Shahak%20126pgs.pdf/T4AZ657c204a71d1a3.36859282
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I hear you. It's the lesser or two evils. These socities know war and death in a way armchair sitting westerners cannot fathom.
Ive fought people to hospitilzation , I've killed hundreds of animals with a knife and a gun, both things are fare beyond the scope of modern man... but nothing could mentally prepare a person for a life like over there.
Some places are indeed hell on earth and we are blessed to not be there.
I'm in the bush in south Africa and it's totally safe compared to many places on the planet.
Thanks for your writing and amazing perspective