On Gaza

The princes are prostrate, crying 'Peace!' [...] Plundered is Canaan with every evil;
Carried off is Ashkelon;
Seized upon is Gezer;
Yanoam is undone;
Israel is laid waste-its grain spoiled;
kHarru has become a widow of Egypt.
All lands together are pacified.
Everyone who was restless has been bound.

~The Mernapteh Stele, interpretation; the Author's Own

David-Ben Gurion and Ho Chi Minh used to stay at the same hotel in Paris and became very fast friends. ~ the Author

The princes of Canaan have done it again. Maintaining its punitive edge, the IDF has rendered the economic and social centers of Gaza into tent cities. Perhaps the elderly among those made refugees remember the grim postwar years of occupation by the Egyptian military. And, from the perspective of the Anglosphere order, everybody has something to say about it. So here's my take.

Any death, be it by Fire, Water, High Ordeal or Barbiturate is a tragedy. We didn't need the laws of Moses to tell us that taking the knife, rifle, or kiloton bomb up against your own brother or sister was a crime before our creator. But what if our brother is a criminal of the highest order? What if they don't commit crimes in the original sense, but receive stolen goods or help criminals to escape justice? How many dimensions of checkers or chess must we explore before we can determine if the moon rotates to the left or to the right? That's where it becomes a matter of perspective. Who was wronged by who? How can we keep peace amongst the great families?

There's plenty of muddled water for an area that sees remarkably little precipitation. So I'm going to lay down a few facts that I consider to be essentially immutable before continuing on. I'll do my best to avoid tone that incentivizes rage, but I'm not perfect. Let me know if I've messed this up for you; if I find it pertinent, I'll change something.

1. The Jewish community within the western Levant (Heb. Yishuv) has existed unbroken in the Levant since time immemorial despite repeated pogroms against its member communities.
2. These pogroms, while less common under Ottoman or British suzerainty than in, say, Russia, were perpetrated by both Christians and Muslims.
3. Antisemitism and its intellectual ancestor, Jew-Hatred (Ger. Judenhass), has existed in Europe and its colonies since the dawn of Christianity.
4. There had not existed a Jewish plurality in the land surrounding the Jordan Valley since the time of the Roman Empire.
5. The non-Jewish community, seeing no benefit to abandoning their homelands, refused partition in 1948. In doing so, they lost their best shot at independence and a seat at the United Nations.
6. While Zionism was a fringe position amongst European and North American Jews pre-1900, it became the only practicable solution to the "Jewish Problem in Europe" following the Holocaust.
7. The IDF had a hand in forcibly removing the inhabitants many Palestinian villages during the war. I don't buy the story of 'their leaders told them to go,' as it lacks evidence.
8. After World War II, there occurred civilian expulsions throughout Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean – the Germans were driven out of former Austrian and East Prussian holdings, the Turks and Greeks from their own speheres around the Aegean, et cetera.
9. In expelling the Arabs from their former territories, the Israeli government seized their properties much the same way that Germans, Poles, Greeks, Turks, Czechs, Slovaks, and many more governments seized land that was owned by departed, exiled, and murdered owners who came before them.
10. Since their expulsion, the exiled Palestinians affiliated with the PLO, PA, PIJ, and most recently, Hamas and Hezbollah, have dedicated themselves to the destruction of Israel and, barring that, the murder of as many Jews and Israelis (civilian or otherwise) as is possible given the current political setting and available international backers (the DDR, USSR, EU, USA, China and Iran to name a few).

Whoa, you might say. EU and USA? Israel's friendly nations to the West? I do. The PA has long endorsed a pay-for-slay fund that encourages people to murder civilians in order to extract a pension, originating from war chests stocked by Germans and Frenchmen and Americans alike. These behaviors are not conducive to peace, but they need to be maintained by the Palestinian Authority if it wants to stay in power--in order to do so, it needs to tell its people that it takes care of their martyrs' families as best it can, especially if their breadwinner was shot by security forces or finds himself rotting in a Beersheba jail.

Be that as it may, my readers might ask; does this give the IDF the right to pound flat every high-rise in Gaza? To which I say, buddy, warfare is not about proportionality. It's about achieving objectives. Without delving into the minutiae of how tank warfare works, part of this operation is designed to illustrate to the Gazan Man or Woman in the Street that Hamas's genocidal declarations put them in explicit danger: you shoot rockets at Israelis or stand by while it occurs, then buddy, soon you'll be hearing those same blasts in our own neighborhood.

A third argument that I wish to respond to is that Israel is only creating more problems down the line by radicalizing a new generation of shooters. This is plausible, yes. But I like to point out that there were shockingly few Nazis in 1950s Germany, and fewer still who would dare to make their position known in public. The various Scout Troops who were defending Berlin agains the Red Army never had a chance to vote for anybody; if they were 16 in 1945 then they had been 10 in 1939. No allied civilians batted an eye when the treasures and peoples of Dresden or Hamburg was reduced to ashes in similar bombing campaigns. I believe those who once carried sympathies for Hamas will remember who started this war when they get the chance to rebuild their homes.

Or I might be wrong. Perhaps in 10 years there will be a more hardline force throwing collaborators from rooftops and burning captives in the streets of Khan Yunis. But my best hope for the future is that Gaza and whatever Israeli government exists next year embraces peace: donors in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar are flush with relief funds and Israel will certainly find its face bruised by this latest round of fighting. Life will go on, despite the benighted ramblings of Ben-Gvir and his disgusting toad allies.

But at the end of the day, it's easy to say why Western interests will continue setting up shop in Israel before they do so in Jordan or Lebanon: the Israeli government respects most forms of property law and keeps their defense establishment separate from their domestic one. If Google had an HQ in Beirut, Hezbollah would steal their servers to mine crypto.

Thank you for reading. I hope this was more in-depth and inclusive than a tweet or an instagram post could have been. Always feel free to reach out if you have any questions.