Eyeless in Gaza

At the Mill with the Slaves

Mess. By his own hands. Man. Self-violence? what cause
Brought him so soon at variance with himself
Among his foes? Mess. Inevitable cause
At once both to destroy and be destroy'd;
The Edifice where all were met to see him
Upon thir heads and on his own he pull'd.

Man. O lastly over-strong against thy self!
A dreadful way thou took'st to thy revenge.

—John Milton, Samson Agonistes

While anyone with eyes and a brain can recognize that Gaza is on the precipice of famine, there are a few holdouts who insist it’s not and that the images of starvation and suffering are part of a successful “psychological operation” that’s insidiously shaping world opinion. At this point, that requires concocting an absurd and insane conspiracy theory that insists that the United Nations, every concerned NGO, the Israeli press, the Arab media, the Western press, raw video footage, and eyewitness testimonies are all being successfully manipulated by—whom exactly? Hamas? The emirate of Qatar? This would grant these entities the same mystical powers as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion grants the Jews.

In fact, much of the discourse surrounding the destruction of Gaza echoes classic antisemitism. One can hear all the familiar tropes of Holocaust denial: “It’s not intentional. It’s mostly disease and starvation brought about by the war. The numbers are exaggerated for political purposes. If they wanted to exterminate, why were so many spared in this area? Israel is such an advanced country; if they wanted to, they could kill everyone, so how can there be any survivors at all?” And its core is the kettle logic that’s at the center of all Holocaust denial: “It didn’t happen. But they deserved it.” So, there’s no genocide, but there are also no innocent people in Gaza, so who cares what happens to them anyway?

In a previous post, I considered the split on the right between a philosemitic and pro-Zionist faction and an explicitly anti-Zionist and antisemitic faction. But the implicit antisemitism of the philosemites needs to be reemphasized. How does the “America First” Republican Party of Trump remain so friendly and indulgent to Israel? Partly, there is an internal power struggle over the question. And partly, the largesse of Zionist billionaires is important for Republican fundraising and the maintenance of right-wing institutions. But to insist that’s the key factor risks a whiff of antisemitism itself with its notion that a few Jews are pulling the strings. The ideology in play is still genuinely persuasive to many, perhaps the majority, on the contemporary right. It’s always ideology, more than the promise of money or titles, that can make one ignore the evidence of the senses. Once, this was mostly a question of Christian Zionism: dispensationalist Evangelicals who saw Israel as fulfilling a religious purpose. But, increasingly, Israel is seen as what they call a “civilizational ally” of the West.

During the Cold War and the height of the War on Terror, this could be laundered more believably with the Jewish state as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” But with the decline of liberal democracy in both the United Statres and Israel and latters open and shameless embrace of its Jewish supremacism, Israel rallies new and once unlikely friends to its side, who see in Israel not “the only democracy in the Middle East” but the kind of ethnostate they’d like here at home and fulfilling a racial mission abroad. A friend calls it "the Buchanan to Bibi pipeline.” While liberal Zionists might start to recoil and wring their hands at the slide into openly Kahanist fascism in Israel, these types are smugly enjoying it all.

This potential was, of course, always there: liberal Zionists might tell themselves the Israeli cooperation with antisemitic apartheid South Africa was only one of convenience, but the National Party saw a real kinship in their situation: “Israel and South Africa have one thing above all else in common: they are both situated in a predominantly hostile world inhabited by dark peoples." For those on the Right who share the Camp of the Saints worldview, where whites are at risk of being engulfed by the coming of the colored hordes, Israel serves an increasingly important function.

In Ha’aretz, Etan Nechin writes about how the continued denial among American liberal Zionists as they become substantially obedient to a fascist regime:

The main problem is that here in America, many still talk about Israel's extreme right-wing takeover as if it's temporary – as if the country is just going through a rough patch. They parrot the line that Israel is still "the only democracy in the Middle East," even as the attorney general is pushed out for defying the government, and the judiciary—once the last check on political overreach – is gutted to serve a far-right agenda.

….

When major Jewish organizations reject a meeting with France's foreign minister after its President Emanuel Macron says he will recognize a Palestine state, it shows how far the mainstream has drifted – not rallying to offer hope, but locking into the Israeli right's deterministic view of a forever war.

On his Substack, Shaul Magid writes about how Meir Kahane’s apocalyptic “zero-sumism” that requires the total expulsion or destruction of the Palestinians is insidiously taking over the entirety of Zionism:

Defending the devastation in Gaza as legitimate, defensible, even necessary, is a form of zero-sum-gameism. Can liberal Zionism square with that? A reasonable person doesn’t commit an act of socicide at the level of Gaza without coming to the conclusion that it was somehow necessary. That is precisely its justifiability.

Zero-sum-gameism will make Israel into a military fortress. And it will destroy the ethical core of Judaism as we know it. I feel that is already happening as I hear zero-sum-gameism waft through liberal Zionist circles (even in the form of “it’s unfortunate but…”).

(There’s something to be written about the zero-sumism of Trumpism and Kahanism both sprouting in the outer boroughs of New York, but another time.)

In his fine book on Meir Kahane, Magid writes that Kahane’s extremist movement sought to “decolonize” Jews: through the use of violence, they’d go from submissive and weak to assertive and dominant. But, of course, we can have seen how easily this “muscular Jew” is woven seamlessly back into the web of imperialism. Through the Zionist movement, Jews found a way to make themselves useful to the great powers again. And they learned fast: from merchant group to martial race in less than a generation. And here lies the great irony of Zionism: rather than being an expression of Jewish pride and self-determination, it has folded the Jews back into the pocket of gentile protectors who are, in actuality, false friends. On some level, antisemitic propaganda has been internalized by these Jews as a form of flattery: “Call them strong and clever and special, and you can do pretty much whatever you like with them.”

The Kahanists say, “Trust us: We have no illusions about our gentile ‘friends.’ We understand they are antisemites at heart. We know and want that Israel will have to go alone. But we have Hashem on our side, so it’s okay.” In other words, their vision for the Jews in the land between the river and the sea is not just genocide but also collective suicide. Like Samson, they would pull the temple down on their heads.

The racial conception of Jews battling Arabs is old: Israel’s racist allies are only dusting off the old genre fiction of imperialism that led the fate of Jews and Palestinians both to be put in the hands of this or that Colonial Office bureaucrat with Orientalist daydreams about whether it would be Jews or the Arabs more embodied this or that virtue and could be relied upon to further their goals of world domination. Now it’s their would be successors, at much lower ranks in the bureaucracy, who fantasize about playing colonial sahib again. But Jews should take warning about the fickleness of such men and women. With no stake in the conflict, with it serving as a mere career opportunity or screen for fantasmatic projections, their “friends” will be today a philosemite, the next an antisemite. It’s much the same thing.

The logic of imperialism, of “great games” between power blocs, will always tend to result in the liquidation of “useless” peoples caught in between. It’s no coincidence that the genocide in Gaza comes after both the fall of the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, which for a time put the Palestinian Question at the center of an "anti-Imperialist” ideology that was simply an extension of imperialism by other means, and the abandonment of the Gulf states of the Pan-Arab and anti-colonial solidarity that called for a just settlement of the Palestinian Question before any thought of peace with Israel could be contemplated. One could argue that the “Abraham Accords” fated the Palestinians to political irrelevance, and what so often follows, physical destruction: for their “allies,” the Palestinian role as freedom fighters had played itself out, just as the Jews’ role had been played out in Europe, and they had become a relic of an earlier stage of development. Iran perhaps wanted to play the role of patron and protector of the Palestinians, but was neither willing nor able to do so.

The return of naked imperialism, with its division of the world into biological races, is a grave issue for all minority peoples like the Jews. Perhaps one day Jews and Palestinians will find a source of solidarity in the repeated experience of being used up and discarded by “history’s actors.” To my fellow Jews, don’t take any comfort in temporary privileges and titles granted by our masters. Don’t do their dirty work for them. Zionists love to talk about the “lessons” of Jewish history, but ignore its most potent one: They will use us today and toss us out tomorrow.