On The Edge

The world is on a knife's edge. Michael Harris writes:

With the assassination of the political leader of Hamas in Tehran, Iran is vowing revenge against Israel.  No one knows what that will look like.  

Another missile and drone attack on Israel itself like the one last April, an assault on Israeli shipping, or an indirect strike at Israeli assets outside the country. It could get very personal—civilians, diplomats, politicians, no one knows.

While the world waits to see what Iran does, the earlier assassination of a Hezbollah leader in Beirut all but guarantees that the Iran proxy group will also be seeking vengeance. Tension is already high along Israel’s northern border, and any retaliatory attack by Hezbollah could transform sporadic fighting into a full-scale war in Lebanon. 

All of this is unfolding against the backdrop of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, triggered by the mass slaughter of 1,200 innocent Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. The terror group also snatched hostages, more than 100 of whom are still being held in Gaza.

The consequences of that war have been catastrophic:

Israel’s nine-month war has killed 40,000 Gazans, many of them women and children. It has also displaced 1.9 million people and caused an estimated $20-billion in damages to homes and infrastructure. Since the IDF cut off all services in Gaza, including water, and severely limited the food supply, a humanitarian disaster is also brewing.

Not all the violence has occurred in Gaza. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, in 2023, Israeli forces killed 492 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 12 children.  

Israel is also holding more than 3,000 Palestinians in “administrative detention.” These detainees are being held without charge and trial, based on secret information that they pose a threat.

The war in the Middle East never ends. But it could end us all.

Image:  Andrew Meade and photographs courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Netanyahu's Big Lie

                                                                                    http://stopthewall.org/

History is full of ugly ironies. Among the ugliest is the Netanyahu government's use of the Big Lie to justify what is happening in Gaza. Chris Hedges writes that, while covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire. I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the corpses of the victims, including children. This became a surgical strike on a bomb-making factory. I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes the demolition of the homes of terrorists. I have stood in the remains of schools—Israel struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least 10 fatalities at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19 at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday—as well as medical clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields.”

Truth is always the first casualty of war. And so it is in Gaza -- which exists in another world:

This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in “The Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind,” those who supply the masses with the illusions they crave become their master, and “whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” This irrationality explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss—is so rabid. That so many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.  

Hate is at the root of what is happening in Gaza. And the Big Lie justifies hate. It turns history on its head; but it also destroys history:

As Hannah Arendt pointed out, the ancient and modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth, those who wield the Big Lie “want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.” The old sophists, she said, “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” Those who resort to the Big Lie “destroy the dignity of human action.” The result, Arendt warned, is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.” And when facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence.

Martin Luther King suggested that the only legitimate response to force was "soul force." At the moment, there is precious little of that -- anywhere.