This is Israel's 9/11

Or why the reaction to the Israel-Palestine conflict is disheartening.

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Years of stridently cretinous hyper-exploitation has eroded the internet’s capacity to generate anything besides outrage and contempt. There is something hard and despairing about watching the horrifying developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict unfold as a series of interpersonal carnage on my smartphone. It feels awful and complicit to sit around and go about my imperial core life while this goes on, and it is also nauseating to realize how some dopey-smug button-mashing can reveal how untold millions of our fellow citizens are despicable psychopaths who froth at the janky fantasy of mass violence and apocalyptic genocide.

Given that established, franchised intellectual property seems to be the last remaining thing that Hollywood values, it isn’t striking to see this reflected in the broader culture and the naturally diminishing returns that come with telling the same stories, in the same ways, over and over. The pressures of The Discourse mandate an industrial extrusion process that scans as an increasingly degraded and insulting reiteration of 9/11 and its bullshit moral dichotomies. Stand with Israel and support their slaughter of a captive population because “Israel has a right to defend itself,” or else you are an anti-Semitic “terrorist sympathizer.” Or if you support the Palestinian people, you must feel compelled to condone the Hamas attack and celebrate the mass murder of unarmed civilians as a form of “legitimate resistance” because “settlers are not civilians.”

My sympathies lie with Palestine because my politics are built on economic justice and anti-racism that I try to distinguish from the woke culture war riffraff that soils the progressive brand. The idea of an ethnostate—no matter how justified given the history of the Jewish people—doesn’t particularly jive with my commitment to broad-based socioeconomic equity and liberal, democratic values. Pardon my hot take, but I oppose Hamas because theocratic terrorist organizations are bad, and its attacks have endangered Gaza and harmed the interests of Palestinians. I will not pretend to have any expertise or special insight about what is currently unfolding, so I cleave to empathy and choose to acknowledge this deliberately maximized, abject human suffering for what it is. Despite their government committing actions of unspeakable cruelty and madness, I also extend love to the Israeli people, because a lack of mutual acceptance is the kind of weakness and failure that has brought about this conflict. We’ve witnessed what hatred and a brutal lack of compassion can do, and it is monstrous.

I was at my ends limiting my time on social media as this horrifying violence progressed, and I could only assume the dogshit content swirling around Twitter has warped and dizzied any coherent understanding of this geo-political carnage. Inevitably, my attention was sucked in when I saw reposts of adult film star Mia Khalifa’s cancelation for tweeting that Hamas should shoot their videos horizontally, right-wing influencers Ben Shapiro and Andrew Tate arguing with each other about who’s tough enough to fight in Gaza, and seething cucklord dweebs spewing unfathomably racist nonsense. I hit my absolute limit for the horror and disgust with the American government and mainstream media when the White House Press Secretary described any calls for a ceasefire to be “disgraceful” and “repugnant.”

The difference in how moralistic liberals have reacted to Ukraine and Palestine makes my blood boil—and while this is a banal observation, these events clearly illustrate how “whiteness” is produced and directly defines who Westerners relate to as victims. For all the handwringing and hairsplitting about how Very Complicated and So Nuanced this all is, fellow Substacker Freddie DeBoer has posed a simple question: What should be done with the Palestinians? The relationship between Israel and Palestine is asymmetrical: There is one group that is the most powerful country in the Middle East, backed by the U.S., and they act on another population with total impunity and a complete lack of accountability.

As a thought experiment, let’s consider a scenario involving a population of Jewish refugees in the West Bank in Gaza and an Arabic government in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv turning this area into an open-air prison. Let’s say we knew this Arabic government bombed Jewish Gaza with white phosphorus, killed civilians indiscriminately, the Jewish people had no provisions for medicine, the Arabic government enacted an embargo that blocked Jewish Gaza from accessing food and electricity, that unemployment and life expectancy and malnutrition statistics in Jewish Gaza were horrifying, that one of the major policymakers in this hypothetical Arabic Palestinian state said “we need to put those Jews on a diet.” Or, in the Jewish West Bank, we were fully aware of regular Arabic settlements where they destroyed the Jewish farmers’ foods and terrorized Jewish civilians with rocks, the Palestinian security forces broke children’s bones, and Jewish people weren’t allowed to drive on their own roads. Most of us would have no problem understanding what this situation is.

There will always be anti-Semitic crackpots who condemn Israel because their teasing, daring Forbidden Thoughts are nothing more than raw and unreasoning bigotry and musty small-mindedness—their discourse unspools in skeins of euphemism and begged questions and increasingly fervid requests for permission. But there are real questions that demand a serious assessment of the Israeli government. Why has AIPAC hosted Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić, a nationalist politician who has praised accused war criminal Slobodan Milošević? Why does the Israeli government have relationships with far-right parties in Europe? Why has Benjamin Netanyahu’s son posted borderline alt-right memes? Why is Israel trying to achieve the alt-right fantasy of a religiously/culturally pure ethnostate even though it is from the descendants of one of the greatest crimes in human history? These questions are inseparable from the racism inherent to this project.

Some of the freaks who have maundered their bilious napalm into the Israel-Palestine discourse are just creeps or sadists, or are truly committed to some corrosive ideology, while the rest have found themselves trapped in social media’s shrinking and chaotic senescence. Immerse yourself in the foul-smelling juices that slosh around on there and it will saturate various important membranes in ways that are disorienting. Its fragrant currents will pull you away into fractious, anxious communities. A news diet of skunkmeat and various brackish oozes will leave you extremely ill. Irredeemable politics-brain is very strange and outwardly unpleasant to someone who has not already replaced all of their previous thoughts and points of reference with culture war signifiers. Even people who project haughty command over recusing themselves from the hothouse dynamics of online political debates have been carried on those strange tides to other remote shores and couldn’t go home even if they wanted to.

The open cheering for Hamas and celebration of the killing of Israelis have been troubling, but not as disturbing as the unconditional support being shown for Israel’s actions in response to Hamas’s attacks. As I write, about 1,400 Israelis were murdered in these abhorrent tragedies, and over 2,300 Palestinians have been killed since then, the vast majority of them civilians. Lives disintegrate into numbers. Over a million people live in the part of northern Gaza where Israel has saturation-bombed the entire strip flat, and now it looks like a stateless cyberpunk horrorscape of expanding biomass. The streets are periodically flooded with raw sewage while white phosphorus rains from the sky, burning flesh of screaming civilians to the bone, and surveillance drones fill the air with an audible buzz. Our elected leaders are overwhelmingly lining up behind the idea of stockpiling Israel with more weapons and our senile cryptkeeper president is doddering out to give Israel full diplomatic support. When the Israeli defense minister Yoel Gallant announced a “total siege” and a complete blockade on all food, fuel, and electricity to Gaza, he justified this collective punishment of Palestinians on the basis that “we are fighting against human animals.” Just as sympathy with oppressed Palestinians is no justification for supporting the killing of Israeli civilians, sympathy with the loved ones of the murdered Israelis should not blind us to the fact that creating more grieving families will only make this conflict worse.

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