Israel is not fighting to remove Hamas from power in Gaza.
Nothing about this war makes sense until you realise that what’s at stake here is something other than victory. The length it’s been going, for one thing. During the Suez War, it took Israel five days to capture the Gaza Strip from a well-armed and dug-in Egyptian army. In 1967, Israel had seized the entirety of Gaza by the end of the Six-Day War’s second day. The IDF of 2024 is not the IDF of half a century ago, and unlike the Egyptians, Hamas has nowhere to retreat. But I’m not sure that can explain why this conquest of Gaza has already taken seventy times longer than the last one. Or the other unusual events that keep happening. Not long ago, Israeli jets bombed the al-Shifa hospital complex in Gaza City. You might remember that last November, the IDF besieged the hospital: they cut off fuel and bombed solar panels while snipers shot doctors through the windows. Dozens died. In the end, the IDF captured the complex, which they claimed was a Hamas command centre; their evidence consisted of a few Kalashnikovs planted in an MRI room, a box of dates, and a calendar on a wall. So why are they bombing it again now? IDF strategy in Gaza appears to consist of a series of rapid advances, moving in to destroy houses, smash up shops, vandalise schools—and then equally rapid retreats, followed by aerial bombardment of whoever’s moved into the ruins. Outside a few strategic areas like the Salah al-Din Road, which runs the length of the strip, they’re not interested in holding territory in Gaza. They do not want to have to take over governmental duties for its population of two million (and shrinking) Palestinians. They don’t want to collect Gaza’s taxes, operate its sewage system, or pick up its litter. They just want to destroy.
This is a war without opposing sides. Up until October 6th last year, Israel’s leadership liked having a Hamas enclave on their doorstep: a little sandbox for their occasional, limited wars; a permanent rebuke to the Palestinian cause. A lot of effort went into preventing Gaza from reuniting with Israel’s notional partners in the Palestinian Authority. They did not want their enemies to lose power. Sometimes there were rockets and a few Israelis died; this was an acceptable price to pay. Trouble has its uses. There’s an idea floating round on the fringes, that the Israeli security services deliberately ignored warnings and allowed the attack on October 7th to take place, so afterwards they’d have carte blanche to do whatever they wanted in Gaza. This is nonsense. For weeks afterwards, Israeli ground forces surrounded the strip and did nothing at all, because the political leadership had absolutely no idea what it wanted them to do. Clearly they had to respond in some way. They had a deterrence to maintain. But they had no interest in taking over from Hamas in Gaza, and they definitely didn’t want the Palestinian Authority to run the place. For a while they tried to shop around the idea of an international military occupation led by the US and Britain, but the US and Britain weren’t interested. The result is what we’ve seen over the past few months. A war fought for no actual objectives whatsoever, a war to change nothing. Mere extermination.
Does anyone still pretend Israel isn’t deliberately targeting civilians?1 As of February 2024, the IDF is wiping out the population of Gaza at just under half the rate at which the Khmer Rouge wiped out the population of Cambodia. When the deaths from disease and starvation are finally added up, the figure might be higher. Whole swathes of society, indifferently consigned to death. Cancer patients, dialysis patients, diabetics, premature babies. The entire enclave is in the middle of an artificial famine. Absolutely nobody has access to enough food; Israel has bombed almost all of the strip’s bakeries and every single one of its flour mills. In between these general liquidations, the IDF still finds time to single out specific individuals. In the last five months, they’ve practically wiped out Gaza’s intelligentsia. At least 94 academics killed, many in airstrikes directly targeting their homes. Hundreds of journalists. Doctors, lawyers, artists. The people who might give Gaza a voice. Hiba Abu Nada was a poet and novelist:
O little light in me, don’t die, even if all the galaxies of the world close in.
She was murdered in a targeted strike on her home. Salim al-Naffar was a poet and pacifist:
I battered the door of death and found no answer. From this small land, we grew.
He was murdered in a targeted strike on his home. Refat Alareer was a poet and scholar of Shakespeare:
If I must die let it bring hope let it be a tale.
He was murdered in a targeted strike on his sister’s home.
Others have been killed at random, simply for existing. Al-Shaima Akram Saidam was the highest-scoring student in last year’s Palestinian high school exams. She wanted to study English at university and work as a translator. She was killed by an Israeli bomb. Abu Shadi ran a popular knafeh restaurant. Every day, people used to queue up outside his place; if they couldn’t afford to pay for his sweets he gave them away for free. He was killed by an Israeli bomb. Elham Farah was a music teacher; she taught generations of Gazan children to play the piano. When the bombs came, she sheltered with some other Christians in the Holy Family Church. During a quiet moment, she left the church to see if her house was still standing, and an Israeli soldier shot her in the leg. The people inside the church tried to help her, but every time they stepped outside the Israelis opened fire. She died slowly in the street. Later, an Israeli tank rolled over her corpse. Yotam Haim, Alon Shamriz, and Samer Talalqa were three Israeli hostages captured by Hamas on October 7th. Two months later they managed to free themselves. They approached Israeli troops while stripped to the waist, waving a white flag, and calling for help in Hebrew. An Israeli sniper shot and killed Tamriz and Talalka instantly. Haim fled into a nearby building. Soldiers followed and called for him to come out. When he did they killed him too.
They’re murdering indiscriminately. You can wave a white flag; you can be an old woman or a newborn baby or someone else who visibly poses no threat whatsoever; you can be an Israeli hostage calling for help—if they see you, they will try to kill you. The five-month massacre in Gaza is not collateral damage, or an unfortunate side effect of the war against Hamas. There is no war against Hamas. Just this. The only military objective is to kill piano teachers and poets.
What I find really unbearable, though, what sticks in my throat like a clammy marble of rage, is the combination of mass murder and smugness. Israeli soldiers keep filming themselves committing smug atrocities. There’s one video I can’t stop thinking about: not even close to the worst thing the IDF has done, but maybe the most galling. An Israeli soldier stands in the ruins of a classroom in Gaza. He pulls a framed certificate off the wall and smashes it. He takes the time to erase the lessons from the chalkboard. Big man! How brave, this soldier encrusted in body armour and grenades! How heroically you defend yourself against a room where young children learn to read! But that really is exactly what he thinks. He thinks he’s being brave. Standing up against the oppressors of the Jewish people. Refusing to walk meekly into the gas chambers. He even writes it on the now-erased board: עם ישראל לא לפחד; the people of Israel aren’t afraid. Elsewhere Israeli soldiers posed in Gaza’s parliament building, grinning like they’d just taken the Reichstag. What a victory! This murderous ratissage into a city that’s been under Israeli occupation their entire lives, and their parents’ entire lives too. Then they planted dynamite around the building and blew it up. The entire country is mad off this stuff, and I do mean mad: saucer-eyed, loony. Israel’s foreign ministry shrieks like a funeral drunk whenever any government dares to raise an objection to its killing spree. Spain is Hamas! Ireland is ISIS! The whole world is made of Hitler! They also think they’re being brave. A lonely voice for justice. Confronting a cruel world with its complicity. At the Kerem Shalom crossing, protesters draped in the Israeli flag dance and sing and block aid shipments from entering Gaza. More famine! More disease! More stillborn children! They think they’re being brave too. The arctic glint of righteousness in their eyes. Even the more liberal sectors of Israeli society are getting in on it. Someone who was in Tel Aviv recently told me that most liberal Israelis don’t really have the emotional bandwidth at the moment to care too much about Palestinian suffering. They know what’s happening just down the coast from Tel Aviv, but it doesn’t register. They’re still in shock after October 7th, still worried sick for the hostages, still mourning the dead. It’s too early to worry or mourn for anyone else. The person who told me this didn’t think this Zone of Interest-style sociopathy was a bad thing. He didn’t understand why I found it so hideous. In a way, it’s also brave. It takes courage to let yourself really feel what you’re feeling, to sit with your grief, to admit that you hurt. It takes courage to be so emotionally complex. Not like the barbarians on the other side of the fence.
This madness is not limited to Israel. Everyone remembers being bullied at school. Even celebs, film stars, supermodels, beautiful and charismatic people, all seem to have had a hard time of it when they were kids. Some people build the entire foundation of their adult life on having been bullied as a child. You were such a misfit, you were so interesting and different… But nobody seems to remember being the bully, and I promise you that at some point in your life, you were also the bully. I certainly was. I couldn’t comprehend the senseless sadism of the kids who’d gang up on me, back when I was seven years old with dyspraxia and a speech impediment. What had I ever done to them? How could anyone bear to be so cruel? But somehow, all that stuff went out the window as soon as I encountered anyone lower down the totem pole than I was. My cruelty wasn’t senseless. Other people had been cruel to me, which made me a victim: anything I did was, by definition, fighting back, being brave. After all I’d been through, didn’t I deserve to experience the joys of power? Just a little? As a treat?
Judaism gave the world the idea that righteousness might not belong to the strong: our God is on the side of the weak, the poor, the persecuted, and the despised. First He thunders: ‘The Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible.’ But in the very next verse: ‘He executes the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and raiment.’ This is the moral core of the religion, and I think it’s also the foundation of any ethics worth the name. But it’s also an incredibly dangerous idea, and when misused it can become a potentially infinitely destructive weapon. Ethics always risks hardening into identity: suddenly it’s not a question of how you should treat other people, but how other people should treat you. Nietzsche wasn’t wrong when he said that the meek and the just would be tyrants if only they had power. Judaism makes it very clear that you should not do this. ‘Remember the stranger among you, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.’ Some version of this instruction is repeated thirty-six times in the Torah, more than any other mitzvah.2 The commandment is telling us not to misuse the weapon. Do not, under any circumstances, get too attached to your identity as a victim. Do not assume that everything you do is brave. Whatever happens, the victim you should be thinking about is not you; the victim is the person you victimise.
Have we kept this mitzvah? You know the answer. Have we fuck.
Maybe it was inevitable that the people who invented the ethics of the oppressed would end up facing more than our share of oppression. But we’ve made an idol out of self-pity. Being a Jew means being a victim. All histories contain suffering—but haven’t the Jews suffered most of all? In every century? In every country we’ve ever inhabited? Aren’t we the weak, the poor, the persecuted, and the despised? Weren’t we bullied at school, for our high intellects and our limp lokshen arms? Don’t other people have an obligation to feel bad for us? Even Jews who, like me, have never once been a victim of antisemitism—we’re still victims by descent. As a Jew, I’m not more likely to be impoverished, uneducated, or imprisoned than my gentile peers; in fact, precisely the opposite. But the victimhood remains. The one legacy of oppression I can never hope to escape. Like black tar on my skin. On Christmas Day last year, while the bombs continued to fall, the smug fucking face of smug Stephen Fry took over British TV to demand that the public do more to cherish and pity the Jews. Anything unpleasant—the taunts of some ordinary bigot, or the resistance of a people violently dispossessed for seventy-five years—gets folded into the vast archive of Jewish suffering, from Tiglath-Pileser to the death camps. It’s all the same thing. Hamas is Haman is Hitler. October 7th is an episode in the Holocaust—and so is anyone who marches for a ceasefire. As Gaza starves, David Schwimmer is demanding explicit quotas for Jewish representation at the Academy Awards. From the open letter: ‘An inclusion effort that excludes Jews is both steeped in and misunderstands antisemitism. It erases Jewish peoplehood and perpetuates myths of Jewish whiteness.’ Isn’t it finally time to tear down the structural barriers keeping Jews out of that great WASP citadel, the entertainment industry? The letter continues: ‘The absence of Jews from under-represented groupings implies that Jews are over-represented in films, which is simply untrue.’ It’s signed by nearly three hundred Jewish actors, directors, and producers. Don’t laugh! They’re victims! They’re being brave!
The Israeli essayist Shulamith Hareven saw that this attitude breeds monsters. ‘If my only identity is that of the victim, the world's deterministic and doomed victim, I may commit any atrocity, including exiling Arabs from their homes and taking possession of their land, because I am the victim and they are not.’3 But in actual fact, of course, the Arabs are victims too. Israel and the Palestinians are unequal in almost everything: one society is rich and one is poor, one illegally occupies and one is illegally occupied, one has precision missiles and one has stones. But here, they are exactly the same.
There’s a certain kind of discourse I’ve come to really, really hate: the way some people go into rhapsodies over violent Palestinian resistance. The courage! The heroism! Put a red triangle in your display name; hoot at videos of rockets exploding against a Merkava’s Trophy APS like you’re watching the football. Isn’t it thrilling? Isn’t it fun to root for your team? Everyone secretly wants to swoon over men in uniform with big guns, even leftists.4 If you have more rarefied tastes, though, you can wax poetic, or, worse, philosophical. Armed resistance is a profound act of love. Every bullet fired by the resistance is a flower in hands of a child in our liberated future. The resistance are fighting for every one of us! The indomitable spirit of humanity! It can’t be crushed by bombs, it can’t be killed with bullets, and as long as there’s still a living hand in Palestine and a gun to fill it, the unconquerable hope of the oppressed will still bloom…
In 2001, the American journalist Chris Hedges visited Gaza for Harper’s. There, he witnessed a massacre, Israeli forces killing Palestinian children for sport:
Out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker. ‘Come on, dogs,’ the voice booms in Arabic. ‘Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!’ I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: ‘Son of a bitch!’ ‘Son of a whore!’ ‘Your mother's cunt!’
The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armoured jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.
A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies.
This is the Palestinian resistance. It’s not beautiful. It’s not inspiring. It’s desperate and futile and sad. Generation after generation of children, throwing themselves into the path of one of the most brutal military machines in human history, smashing their skulls against its steel hull, mangling their limbs in its treads, thousands of them, for seventy-five years, destroying themselves as they try to face down an engine that simply rolls on over the dying and the dead. These kids were brave, much braver than I’ll ever be. They rose to defend their honour. It’s noble. But stupid beyond belief. Later, Hedges talks to Lieutenant Ayman Ghanm, a Palestinian police officer who says he’s given up on trying to save these boys’ lives. ‘When we tell the boys not to go to the dunes,’ he says, ‘they taunt us as collaborators.’
I began by saying that this is a war without opposing sides. Israel is not actually trying to defeat the resistance; it has no political objectives, just violence. But the same goes for the resistance: they are not, in fact, doing anything to meaningfully resist. Think about what actually happens in Hedges’ story. The Israeli soldiers call through their loudspeakers for the Palestinians to come, come and be killed—and the Palestinians obediently show up. Their resistance is indistinguishable from following orders. The Israeli state wants a certain level of violence from the Palestinians, it actively courts it, and the resistance factions keep doing exactly as they’re told. They teach Palestinian children that the best thing they could do with their lives is lose them. This is not a very healthy attitude, but when you start up your bullshit about the glorious resistance you are part of that sickness. What would actual resistance look like? Maybe it would start with not handing over your life to the enemy. Not climbing up the dunes.
In saying all this, I’m obviously breaking one of the biggest taboos on the left, which is that you must not presume to tell Palestinians how to go about their resistance. I might have spent time in Palestine, but I’m not Palestinian. I’m not subjected to the daily nightmare of occupation. Who am I to start preaching? My only reply is this: if the armed resistance factions were resisting sanely and effectively, this kind of taboo wouldn’t need to exist. If there were a better argument for their actions than don’t criticise the victims, you’d be making that one instead. But there isn’t, so you can’t. It’s not a coincidence that the exact same rhetoric is deployed by Israel and its apologists: yes, we’re committing hideous atrocities, but how dare you notice? Who are you to say anything to us?
Whoever’s saying it, the fact remains that there is no military path to a free Palestine. This fact is inconvenient and unfair and doesn’t leave much room for the optimism of the will, but that doesn’t make it any less true, and if you think there’s an exemption from unfair truths that’s awarded to especially just causes then you are wrong. Israel has nuclear weapons: it will not be overthrown with small arms and explosives. I don’t think I have the right to condemn violent resistance altogether—but I can reject violent resistance that’s doomed to fail, that achieves nothing and produces nothing except violence for its own sake. Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad claim to be fighting for an Islamic republic, in which Jews will be free to live peacefully as long as they don’t dispute the sovereignty of Islam. The PFLP claims to be fighting a revolutionary people’s war for a liberated workers’ state. Their critics say that both are actually fighting for an unlimited genocide, the death of every single Jew in Israel. But what difference does it make? This is all make-believe! None of it matters, because none of it is ever actually going to happen! They’re not fighting for anything at all. They’re just fighting.
Over seventy-five years of violent resistance, the armed factions have done a lot. They’ve massacred people waiting for their flights in European airports. They’ve gunned down random motorists on Israeli roads. They’ve killed babies with sniper rifles. They’ve decapitated babies with knives. They’ve blown up discos full of teenage girls. They’ve wiped out half an Olympics team. October 7th was the biggest, bravest action ever taken in the entire history of the Palestinian resistance, and if we’re measuring in terms of dead Israeli civilians, it was a tremendous success. Are you happy with the results? I’ve seen people try to claim that the attack was worth the price, because it exploded the myth of Israeli military invulnerability. If you believe that myth was worth 30,000 lives you’re not just a monster, but a moron. The attack was stupid. All these attacks have been stupid. Being a victim does not make your actions justified, and it certainly doesn’t make them smart. What was any of it for? Did they make things better? Did they reduce anyone’s suffering? Did any of these attacks, even once, manage to prevent Israel from oppressing Palestinians? Have they brought any tangible benefit, anything at all, to the Palestinian people?
But support for violence remains high. The latest PCPSR report found that 68% of people in the West Bank and 56% in Gaza still favour armed struggle. And actually, I can think of one benefit all this bloodshed has brought. Violent resistance is an emotional salve for the indignity of living under occupation. A synthetic sense of dignity. You might be powerless, your future might not be in your own hands—but by killing, you can still show your enemies that you are a man. You can hurt the other side in some small way. Make one of their children suffer. Make one of their mothers weep. Force them to recognise your existence. And all of this is already justified ahead of time, because you are a victim and they are not. You will die in the process, of course. And afterwards, your family might die too, and your neighbours, and thousands of people who had nothing to do with you but happened to be part of the same people, including the young children who never got to make any kind of choice about any of this at all. Afterwards, when the smoke clears, nothing will have meaningfully changed. But maybe it’s worth it. For one shining moment, you get to experience the thrill and the freedom of being brave.
On the 15th of August, 1998, a car bomb exploded in the Northern Irish town of Omagh. The bombers had phoned the police with a warning, but didn’t explain exactly where in Omagh the bomb was located. The police started clearing people away from the courthouse, since courthouses were frequent IRA targets. And it was in this case too, except the bombers hadn’t been able to find a parking spot near the courthouse, so they’d left the bomb further up the road instead. The police ended up herding people towards the bomb, and when it went off it killed twenty-nine people and injured hundreds. Omagh was the deadliest attack on civilians in the entire history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It was also the last.
The bomb in Omagh had been planted by dissident republicans: factions that rejected the Good Friday peace process, and wanted to keep fighting, killing and dying, until their taxes went to Dublin instead of London. Shortly afterwards, they announced a unilateral ceasefire. They were ashamed of what they’d done. The ceasefire didn’t last; after a few years, they announced the resumption of their armed campaign, and even fired a few mortars at police stations. But that sputtered out too. Towards the end, in desperation, they tried retroactively denying responsibility for Omagh. It didn’t help. It’s hard to really put your heart into a war once you’ve felt the touch of shame.
The usual hope is that Israelis and Palestinians might be brought together by their shared history of oppression. Palestinian suffering even has the same contours as Jewish suffering: exile from the land, expulsion from one country after another, an existence on the fuzzy margins of the world, where nothing has its proper shape, now mass extermination… But that kind of reconciliation is simply never going to happen. A shared history of oppression means victimhood, which means the assertion of rights, which means the claim to justice, which means the innocence that excuses every crime, which means the joyous struggle for liberation, which means bravery, which means death. We have tried all of that stuff, we’ve tried it for most of a century, and all it’s done is brought us here: to the point of genocide. Enough death. There’s only thing that can rescue the Israelis and Palestinians, and it’s not solidarity or self-determination, it’s shame.
Shame is not a punishment. It might not be what you deserve, but it’s what you need. Shame is what prevents you from killing. You should be made to marinate in your own side’s atrocities. You should have to sit in it like a cold bath. Wail with the horror of it all. We turned our sons into killers! We hurried our sons into the earth! What were we thinking? What have we done? Forget finding common ground: Jews and Palestinians should be afraid to look each other in the eye. Afraid to mumble a few words to each other in the souks, because of the deep shame of what their people did, the shame that might at any moment erupt on their foreheads. You should hide away from your own friends and neighbours. The people just like you. These silent visions of your own monstrosity. Forget one state, two states, borders, treaties, deals. One year of total black shame over everything and everyone. Afterwards, you can come out again. Maybe then we can talk.
One of the weirder things to come out of this war is the way much of the edgy, radical, iconoclastic, leather jacket-wearing right wing suddenly started sounding like they’d just received a big pile of money from the Atlantic Council. So Curtis Yarvin, dark prince of the dark right, insists that ‘it is clear to any sane person that if Israel could install a technical device on its bombs that would prevent them from killing civilians, it instantly would.’ Yarvin is, as he keeps reminding us, a Foreign Service brat. Does he really expect us to believe that he’s never heard of the Dahiya Doctrine? But his problem is that what’s happening in Gaza indicts his entire ideology. Yarvin is a monarchist: he thinks society should be led by a singular, absolutely powerful sovereign who has total authority over his subjects without any kind of democratic accountability. He has deduced from first principles that getting rid of our current form of government and replacing it with this one will immediately solve all our problems and produce a maximally benevolent and generous regime—because if power is totally unassailable, what possible reason would it have not be maximally benevolent? In other words, Yarvin is a utopian. His real intellectual ancestor isn’t Thomas Carlyle, it’s Charles Fourier. He designs aluminium columns for his phalansteries. But his models do not quite stand up to the messiness of actual reality. What’s happening in Gaza is actually existing neoreaction. The IDF has a rigid top-down command structure. Its relation to the ordinary people of Gaza is one of total power without any accountability whatsoever. But for some reason, it’s not offering them equity in Rafael Advanced Defence Systems, so everyone can profit from their own houses being bombed, or whatever bullshit speculative notion Yarvin likes to cook up. Instead, it is systematically killing them. Whoops! Time for Curtis to go back to the drawing board. If it’s any consolation, his theory is one casualty of the war in Gaza that absolutely deserves its fate.
This line also gets at another deep cleavage within the religion. Judaism is the origin of universalism: one God and one Law for all the sons of Noah. But Judaism is also capable of expressing a very narrow and very petty ethnic identitarianism. A tradition inherited by the Israeli state, which is for us and not for them, carrying out its exterminations against the seed of Amalek. There’s a story in the Talmud about a Roman emperor who sends two officials to the sages of Israel to understand their religion. ‘The officials read the Torah, and repeated it, and repeated it again, reading it for the third time.’ Afterwards, they come away convinced that the Law was just and true, all except for one Mishnaic ruling. The book of Leviticus says that ‘you shall have one manner of law for the stranger as for one of your own country: for I am the Lord your God.’ But the oral law says that if an ox belonging to a gentile gores an ox belonging to a Jew, the gentile has to pay compensation—while if an ox belonging to a Jew gores an ox belonging to a gentile, the Jew doesn’t have to pay a penny. This, the Romans point out, is unworthy. There are various rabbinical explanations for the discrepancy, but the sages don’t try to drag any of those out. The Roman officials are right. The sages simply extract a promise that they won’t inform their government about that particular ruling, for the sake of everything else that is just and true. They know that the law has fallen short of its universal aspirations, and they are ashamed. This might be what’s most valuable about Judaism. All religions are flawed, but our religion gives us the tools to correct its own failings. Abraham succesfully tries to bargain with God for the sake of innocent life, and later Moses does the same: sometimes, human morality and the human intellect is justified against an unjust Heaven. Our God is a God that’s amenable to argument.
It’s not just Zionists playing this game. Among nice young left-wing Jews in the diaspora, people like myself, the usual move is to totally disavow the state of Israel and all its atrocities: to say that what really distinguishes this country is not that it’s a Jewish state, but a settler-colonial state, one that merely happens to be populated with Jews. I made that same argument myself, a long time ago, in an essay titled Why zionism is antisemitism. I don’t know if I’d produce the same essay now. The writer Barnaby Raine has made the stakes clear here: the point of distinguishing Israel from Judaism is to restore to the Jews our proper status among the victims of the Western world order, rather than a guilty outpost of imperialism. But I’m sick of it. Lately, I’ve started feeling the urge to identify with the state of Israel, precisely in its moral abyss. Israel is an expression of all the worst tendencies in my people and my religion, but that doesn’t mean they’re not my people and it’s not my religion. If I have some responsibility here, I don’t want to disavow it. Its evil might also be my evil. I am not so innocent. I am not so pure. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
Maybe especially leftists. Our protest movements failed, our electoral movements failed; all we have left is Palestine, the only struggle still going. (This, by the way, is why the Western left pays so much attention to struggles in Palestine, rather than, say, Tigray or Sudan. Despite what the world’s dumbest critics keep insisting, it has nothing to do with the fact that the struggle in Palestine involves the world’s only Jewish state. It’s because unlike those other struggles, Palestine effectively functions as a proxy for domestic political antagonisms. The borders don’t line up exactly, but the bulk of the left and a growing portion of liberals support Palestine, while most conservatives incline towards Israel. Palestine is politically legible in a way that the Karen-Mon conflict in Myanmar is not. But if Fox News and the Daily Mail started passionately defending Indonesia’s sovereignty over the whole of the former Dutch East Indies, the Morning Star flag of West Papua might convey the same meaning that the Palestinian flag has now. For Jeremy Corbyn, who has a pure soul, it already does.)