I can’t write about Gaza

I can’t write about it either, but Stop.

Thank you for this

A great metacommentary with the right simple message.

Just stop.
A beautiful piece, so well written.
Embedded in truth and humanity. Thank you.

Yes the right simple message?

Is not one of the problems that so many prohibitions (including self-inflicted ones) on writing about Gaza etc is one reason why the Palestinians have so often been left to their apartheid fate?

Those who support what has been done (is being done) to the Palestinians rarely seem so inhibited.

Please stop.
One of the most insightful pieces I’ve read on this “topic”. Thanks.

A long paragraph defining despair.

Don’t Start.

“Suppose They Gave a War and No One Came.” (McCall’s, October 1966)
“Charlotte Keyes was the one who put this phrase into circulation in 1966, borrowing a line from Carl Sandburg 30 years earlier. It appeared on posters, bumper stickers, buttons, in a 1968 Monkees song (YouTube here; lyrics here), and even a 1970 movie title. (And now yields 14,000 results in Google, using the first five words.) As Ralph Keyes explains in his book The Quote Verifier (N.Y: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006) p. 239:
…
https://www.genekeyes.com/CHET/Chet-1.html#Suppose

The Monkees – Zor and Zam
… “None upon none.
The war it was over before it begun.”
(Micky Dolenz attempts lilting)

Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppose_They_Gave_a_War_and_Nobody_Came

As a German, I should indeed be careful with what I write in context. But one thing appears obvious to me:

Everybody who publicly or at least pseudonymously on social media defends what happens in Gaza with reference to the population there not having overthrown the Hamas government, or to tunnels under a hospital, or to Hamas having committed atrocities, would immediately recognise their own argumentation as offensive nonsense if the exact same thing was done to their own people or country with exactly the same justification. If, say, every single town in Texas was reduced to rubble and its entire population driven to Mexico in retaliation for a hypothetical Texan Patriot Militia murdering a thousand Chinese citizens, they would not react kindly to the argument that this is entirely justified because China has a right to defend itself, and this is the only way the militia can be defeated because one or two of their members could have been hiding under that high school in Dallas that was just flattened by an air strike, and every male adult Texan who is killed or arrested is a terrorist by definition, because otherwise the People’s Army wouldn’t have targeted them.

Not that this thought experiment is going to convince anybody who is intrinsically indifferent to intellectual and moral consistency, but I find that “what if this was done to me?” generally helps me clarify some issues for myself.

Alex, I would say of course because all the values that you would use to defend Jewish people and Israeli people or any people would go into that calculus and then you want to apply them consistently, and assume they would be applied consistently to all human beings. Then you see they are not applied consistently to the Palestinians—sometimes not even slightly, not even as a pretense.

So people will backtrack or make up stories or flat out lies to conceal that. Trying to process what is happening when they do that is like walking in a labyrinth of mirrors. This might be why some people get so freaky when it comes to this topic. I always assumed it was antisemitism or know-it-all-ism or a combo of both that would make some people like that about Israel. Now, I think maybe it is because you see values we need for mutual survival (or believe we do) turned on their heads. Every day is opposite day. It’s very emotionally disorienting. Some responses can probably corrupt your own value system.

The period before Iraq War was like this and Trump’s election and what came after was like this but we don’t imagine the people acting this way are our main defenders of universal human values. We started to expect them to be outside our moral universe.

When people inside your moral universe are saying indefensible things, it is much more distressing. We depend on social confirmation of values to reassure us we’re still dealing with an intelligible social world. We maybe feel safer when we think we have some shared moral framework with at least a few powerful people. That’s there’s some basic decency in most of those we’re depending on. Also, that we can tell who is decent.

I guess Trump did throw this off at first but then we re-adjusted because we believed we had figured who the people were who had chucked all the universal values under the bus. We tagged them or stereotyped them in some way that made it not so inexplicable.

Now I see how this happening frequently could make you cynical and paranoid because you start doubting the goodness of other people and that you’re living in a shared reality with other people. I am trying not to let that happen to me so much.

It seems clearer to me now it could make you start to get an us v. them perspective or gradually move into one if you think morality doesn’t have a real purchase on people. You cluster with the ‘us.’ People are doing this too much now in my view. Sometimes because they are angry, and sometimes because they truly want someone to hate. This will poison your mind, but they don’t seem to care.

And I wonder if this happened to some of the Israelis so what is confounding everyone who is not part of their ‘us’ is that it looks like some of the people in the government (maybe most of them?) don’t have a commitment to universal values at all, and they don’t see Palestinians as equal human beings. They have dehumanized them. This happens as a process, I suppose. It’s probably more complicated if you do bad things to people over time, even if they are doing bad things to you, then you shift perspectives so you don’t have to feel bad about what you are doing. Obviously, a commitment to truth is going to go completely out the window. Truth takes more than a back seat to loyalty to your group. It’s barely even on the bus.

You cannot be truth-seeking and have the group loyalty to that intense degree I assume, if you are dealing with people who are don’t share your total value for the group. They won’t agree with the things you do, and will come at you with their universal values in a way that is very inconvenient.

Of course, sometimes —maybe a lot of times—it’s a pretense anyway as Americans are absurdly uninterested in the equality of people in the countries they harm. But they fake it a lot, even to themselves, a la The Quiet American. Still, even the pretense puts a lot of limits on what you are willing to do and what you can get away with, especially in war. And these are good limits.

When people stop faking, and also become only holders of particular values for their own group, is this part of what leads to fascism?

Anyway, it is extremely confusing and disorienting how these plain ideas which we expected everyone to understand aren’t working at all on our own government, whom we thought were not really the ‘us v. them’ types but the ‘universal values’ types. It’s also frightening because we know where the particular loyalties and sloughing off all universal values leads.

I share your reluctance to write, Chris, but in my case it doesn’t matter since Nir Eyal expresses my view more effectively than I ever could:

https://dailynous.com/2023/12/20/disproportionate-and-intended-harm-to-innocents-in-israels-war-in-gaza-guest-post/

Despair is a sin.

Btw I think John Mearsheimer did a good job both of writing about Gaza and of writing about why people can’t write about Gaza.

https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/death-and-destruction-in-gaza
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

Also read the Onion:
https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-stands-with-israel-because-it-seems-like-yo-1850922505

@28:

Rubbish. What does propaganda have to do with this?

https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-bombs-destruction-death-toll-scope-419488c511f83c85baea22458472a796

“In just over two months, the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II. It has killed more civilians than the U.S.-led coalition did in its three-year campaign against the Islamic State group.”

https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-12-21-2023-7d9718b32bf0d308c44c7c9e3c4e0deb

“More than half a million people in Gaza — a quarter of the population — are starving, according to a report Thursday by the United Nations and other agencies, highlighting the humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s bombardment and siege on the territory in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.”

“Rubbish. What does propaganda have to do with this?”

It matters because the picture changes somewhat if the Likudnik/IDF claim that the reason Hamas environed itself as deeply in Gaza as it did was that Hamas was betting that an effete colonial power would not care to go through the burning bodies of civilians and a ruined civilian world to get to it (because that would look bad) — was correct. (Or, to switch tenses, is correct.)

Of course, if that was the bet Hamas made, Hamas was wrong. As for the Israeli side of the equation — everything we’ve seen thus far suggests that Netanyahu has his story and is going to stick to it, no matter what happens, come fire, come flood.

I don’t know what makes the people who are reading this think that his story is my story — it’s not — but there’s not much I can do about the conclusions they reach.

Can’t you even call out a genocide when you see one?

??
“Can’t you even call out a genocide when you see one?”

A bit farfetched in the case of a resistance against an occupying force. The commission of genocide would imply that the occupying force has been defeated and the resistance has now become the ruler.

Stephen
“Occupation forces do not have the right to defend themselves.”

Query how that applied to US forces occupying the Confederate states, or Japan post-1945, or Allied forces occupying Germany, or British forces in the late troubles in Northern Ireland.

(a) President Andrew Jackson and the sabotage of Reconstruction. We are currently witnessing the remaing entrails of the occupation of the Confederate states being used to prevent another Trump Presidency.

(b) Formally, Japan unconditionally surrendered, becoming an ally of the US el quicko and the only effective resistance forces were scattered across the Pacific Islands in small groups.

(c) Again, Germany unconditionally surrendered, and the occupation forces accepted that there were to be German governments composed of German citizens. It might be an idea to poll the German people on this matter because the US is still the Occupying Power, The views expressed in the East, who came late to the US Occupation party, may well differ from the views of those in the West.

(d) I did spend some time in Northern Ireland during the conflict and I strongly sympathised with the Catholic minority. As, effectively, the Troubles were a Civil War and one of the parties aims was to merge Ireland and Northern Ireland and there was little stomach for this in Dublin and Westminster, both countries found it convenient to treat acts of violence as crimes under existing criminal law with the British military merely supplementing the capabilities of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the argument did not arise outside of the public bar.

On a moral and legal level, occupying forces do not have the right to defend themselves because defense usually takes the form of attack, although individual member of the occupying forces does have the right to use reasonable force to defend him or herself to ensure their own safety if attacked.

I don’t want to drift into a discussion of the Geneva Convention and the Additional Protocols, on Xmas morning but I would draw your attention to the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2625, “The Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Co-operation among States” 1970 which states, inter alia:

“5. The principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples

2) Every State has the duty to promote, through joint and separate action, realization of
the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, in accordance with the
provisions of the Charter, and to render assistance to the United Nations in carrying
out the responsibilities entrusted to it by the Charter regarding the implementation of
the principle, in order:

(a) To promote friendly relations and co-operation among States; and

(b) To bring a speedy end to colonialism, having due regard to the freely expressed
will of the peoples concerned;

and bearing in mind that subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and
exploitation constitutes a violation of the principle, as well as a denial of fundamental
human rights, and is contrary to the Charter.”

and

“5) Every State has the duty to refrain from any forcible action which deprives peoples
referred to above in the elaboration of the present principle of their right to self-
determination and freedom and independence. In their actions against, and
resistance to, such forcible action in pursuit of the exercise of their right to self-
determination, such peoples are entitled to seek”

This seems to me to be pretty much the position the most of the world takes in relation to what appears to be a deliberate policy of genocide by Israel in Gaza, a policy which appears to have the full support of Jewish Israelis. And that raises a completely different set of questions.

J-D

It is good if violence stops, generally speaking. It is not so good when the outcome is the continuance of the occupation and the maiming, killings and imprisonment without the least formality passing for due process will continue on a daily basis as they did before. It’s partly the fact that the means often justify the ends, but it is also a fact which I believe is indisputable: there are times when the means justify the means because that’s when the world sits up and begins to pay attention. It is the logic of the intifada and the car bomber; it is the logic of the oppressed demanding release and the right to be heard beyond the prison walls.

“Occupation forces do not have the right to defend themselves” doesn’t apply to Gaza since the Israelis moved out, lock, stock etc in 2005. Gaza has not been occupied between then and Oct 2023.

“I can’t be sure they are lying this time” was dealt with by Alexei Sayle in his alternative alternative Christmas message.

If Israel could decide what gets in, how did all those weapons get there?

Suzanne’s comment alluding to Julien Benda prompted me to open James Joll’s Europe since 1870 to refresh my memory on what he says about Benda, which as it turns out is not all that much. However, on the page in question I found this, which I suspect engels will like:

“The sky over Europe and the whole world,” André Gide noted in his diary of 8 February 1933, “is so heavy with the storm; hearts are so full of hatred that sometimes I cannot help thinking that only a conflict between classes could put off the mortal conflict between nations.”

(Joll, Europe since 1870 [Harper & Row, 1973], pp. 322-323)

JD & Stephen
JD first: If you can’t understand the very simple concept that the means justify the means then you obviously do not see that conflict, particularly resistance and the occupier’s response, not to mention an occupier’s response to perceived resistance (murdering the odd journalist or crippling young people with a shot to the legs) is a combination of impulse (usually inflamed by emotion or, worse, the sense of impunity) and the simple mechanical response of the piss-poor training kicking in and it is like being on a runaway train and the only thing you can do is follow the track. For most, if not all, combatants the means are the end because most violence is a reaction to a provocation, real or perceived, but IMHO to have an occupying force control your life is a very real 24/7 provocation. A question: have you ever been involved in direct physical conflict? A street fight, maybe? If you have you will have that experience to draw on to understand why the means do end up justifying the means.

And now Stephen:

As the Confederacy formally surrendered, it accepted what was to be a very short-lived occupation and began to slip back relatively quickly into the mainstream of political life in the United States by purely political means, ie, expediency demanded unity because the common fight was to occupy the the rest of the country to the Pacific. There were groups of former Confederates who continued to fight against the Federal government and, by and large, those who survived were treated magnanimously by the authorities. And the resolution of the disputed election of 1876 confirmed the complete integration of the Southern states in the political process at the highest levels of government and enabled their self governance.

I did make one error. I meant, of course, that Vice-President Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln and not the ghost of President Jackson – although the indigenous people of the Plains probably couldn’t see the difference.

Johnson attempted with much success to limit retribution against the former Confederate states. Johnson, a Southern Democrat, was placed on the ticket by Lincoln to help re-unify the United States, and he attempted to temper the Northern Republicans desire to punish the South. One reaction by the Radical Republicans was to impeach President, and another was to incorporate Section 3 in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1868 to ensure that former office holder sand oath takers under the Confederacy could not stand for election to public office without the consent of two thirds of both the Senate and the House. And that is why I brought up the example of President Trump and his current legal entanglements. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. Just blowback.

The final issue you query, “I can’t be sure whether bertl is for or against the Confederacy, or another Trump presidency” is completely irrelevant. However, apropos the Confederacy, Faulkner said it well enough. As for Trump, I look at the horrors the Biden administration has created in the Ukraine and Gaza, his blowhard diplomacy with China, the obsessive posturing with Iran, not to mention his deliberate destruction of the base of the European manufacturing sector, and I have to say, if the choice is between Biden and Trump, I guess commonsense tells I will have to go with President Trump. Pity (or maybe thankfully) RFK Jnr chose to publicly play Russian roulette with every chamber loaded when he was questioned about Gaza. The words revealed the man.

“[B]ertl” outs himself as an anti-democratic Putinist and crypto-fascist who writes even worse than “steven t. johnson”

DFTT. Maybe it will go away.

Have a cold and feeling irritable…

“As for Trump, I look at …[Biden’s] blowhard diplomacy with China, the obsessive posturing with Iran…” Both are Biden’s continuation of Trump’s policies and criticizing the one but not the other is purely partisan hackery. Trump assassinated an Iranian general on a formal diplomatic mission, risking war with Iran and even reportedly contemplated an open attack on Iran’s people and territory! Selective outrage is not convincing.

“…not to mention his deliberate destruction of the base of the European manufacturing sector…” Biden does not administer the EU. The so-called destruction is likely for roughly the same forces in politics and the economy that have weakened the industrial base in the US and the UK, longstanding trends predating both Biden and Trump. Trump didn’t reverse this and his generalized hostility to foreigners suggests he has no more interest in preserving the “European” industrial base than he has in preserving the Chinese industrial base. Trump is a habitual liar and an incompetent so his threat of ten percent tariffs on all imports is probably hollow but it is absurd to claim this isn’t aimed against the European industrial base too. They are competition.

But this may be a clumsy reference to the sanctions on Russia? Specifically that the oil and natural gas embargoes are wrecking the European industry? But, after Russia is defeated, even if it is not partitioned, the stooge government will fire sale all assets, just like Ukraine is promising to sell its farm land. The EU industrial base then will have a semi-colonial edge and all the current sacrifices will pay off, at least for those that have enough money to buy in on the new arrangements. CT and its commentariat of course reject the notion that Ukraine is a horror and ascribe themselves (CT is international, except for Jeremy Corbyn,) only the purest of selfless humanitarian motives for economic warfare against the people of Russia. It is not at all clear why “…I look at the horrors the Biden administration has created in the Ukraine…” is considered to be an argument against Biden and for Trump, even if you disagree with CT on this. The Ukraine war began years before Biden. And Trump had his entire term to do something else! If you really believe the US runs the EU, then you also believe Trump had no problem telling the EU to undermine Minsk, making him a co-creator with Biden of those horrors CT sees as made in Moscow.

“…and Gaza….” CT is decidedly ambivalent about whether they are horrors in the sense of willful crimes, rather than tragic accidents where “we” (not part of that club myself) are the pure bystanders. But if there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that Trump is pro-Zionist, just as much as Biden, if not more so. Even campaigning for president Trump has no noticeable criticisms. It’s not because Trump is too shy.

“I have to say, if the choice is between Biden and Trump, I guess commonsense tells I will have to go with President Trump.” Common sense has got nothing to do with it. I suggest that the universal animus of the mainstream media—-which by the way includes Fox News, Sinclair, the Wall Street Journal and a multitude of other outlets—against Biden has warped the judgment of the gullible. All factions of the media have been against Biden since the defeat in Afghanistan. They demonize, the loyalists chorus.

bertl @47 criticizes Biden for “posturing” vis a vis Iran but seems to have forgotten Trump’s “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran.

As for the former Confederate states becoming “self governing” after the Civil War, much hangs on what that phrase is taken to mean. After the end of Reconstruction there was a growing exclusion and segregation of the Black population culminating, circa 1890, in the full-blown system of Jim Crow.

A question: have you ever been involved in direct physical conflict? A street fight, maybe? If you have you will have that experience to draw on to understand why the means do end up justifying the means.

What bertl has written here is demonstrably false. I have never been in a street fight, but earlier in my life I have been involved in direct physical conflict and the experience has given me no insight into what bertl means by ‘the means justify the means’.

When people use words in ways which correspond to the way I use them myself, communication can take place. The same is true when people use words in ways which I don’t do myself but am familiar with from other people using them the same way. When people use words in ways which are not familiar to me from either kind of experience, communication is hindered.

For example:
Last year (or possibly it was the year before) some people at work were using the word ‘deprecated’ which did not correspond to the way I use it myself. It also didn’t correspond to other general usage of the word, as I was able to confirm by checking a dictionary. When I asked them what they meant, they explained that they meant ‘inactive’. It’s not wrong for them to have a private usage of ‘deprecated’ to mean ‘inactive’, if they find that convenient among themselves, but it obstructs communication if they use it the same way with people who are not familiar with that usage.

For another example:
It’s not wrong for my best friend to say to me that ‘We need some shlebs for the ghibbies’: from years of experience, I understand this without difficulty, and if it is more convenient for somebody to say this (or if, as I imagine, they just find it more pleasing), it doesn’t obstruct communication with somebody else who understands that usage (like me, or my daughter). But it will obstruct communication with anybody unfamiliar with the usage (including, I am confident, everybody else reading this).

When bertl writes ‘the means justify the means’, the way the words are being used does not correspond with the general usage with which I am familiar, as I have confirmed by checking a dictionary. Anybody can look up ‘means’ and ‘justify’ in a dictionary and discover that it’s not the general usage (as recorded in dictionaries) that bertl has in mind in this context. If bertl chooses to explain the intended definitions of ‘means’ and ‘justify’ then I may be able to understand; if not, then not.