Those endless wars, but the one in the Gaza Strip in particular, have rotten my mind. Not that I find my opinions on the Gaza war falsified — rejected by many, yes, but not falsified — but my problem is rather that with my opinions on the Gaza war I more or less directly landed in the camp of the extreme conservatives. What an unsavoury crowd of people. The kind of Ben Shapiro, Douglas Murray, Bari Weiss... It has been their recent unanimous lament and hysterical outcry over the death of Charlie Kirk, their fantasmagoria about wokeness, feminism, campus leftism, the alleged companionship with radical Islam, all in an sinister alliance to undermine and abolish "the West"... Boy, what freakshow is that? How can Zionism remain viable when it chooses, of all, the fundamentalist, in part evangelical right in the U.S. as coalition partners?

I don't like people like Shapiro, Murray, or, for that matter, Bari Weiss (although I'm fond of her interviews with Einat Wilf and Lucy Aharish), their cult-like attitudes of "moral clarity", "privileged access to reality", of "speaking the truth in plain words", of fearmongering and end-of-time-doomerism... It's the mirror image of their caricature of the "woke" campus Left, their intolerance, bigotry, and blindness for the suffering of anybody who is not in their camp.

It was on February 7, 2024, when Israel's Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time declared the goal of "total victory" over Hamas. Man did my stomach knot. Because at least in my country that call for "total victory" pretty much sounds like "Endsieg", like "final" or "ultimate victory". How could he talk that way? And even if one does, is one willing to pay the price that comes with that?

The only way to gain a semblance of "total victory" over the Gaza-ISIS (aka Hamas) is not just to bomb the shit out of them (and with that out of the Gazans) but to take away "once and for all" their prime weapon: Taking hostages to force Israel's hand.

To take this weapon out of the hand of the Palestinians in general, Israel would have to show that it can no longer be blackmailed by hostage taking. And that means: Israel would need to accept to sacrifice all remaining hostages (now and in the future). Can Israel do that? Does it want to? Can it look itself into the mirror when it does that? But that would be the price to be paid for "total victory". (There are arguments in favour of this stance. Remember when the IDF soldier Gilad Schalit was released after five years in Hamas captivity in exchange for 1.000 Palestinian criminals, one of those released from Israeli prisons was Yahya Sinwar, the mastermind of the October 7 attacks.)

But even Israel should decide to take that route, the Gaza-ISIS will have won. Because it will have accomplished to remake Israel into a beast. Israel cannot want that. So yes, Israel should keep fighting the Gaza-ISIS. But it should not have dreamt of "total victory".

These lines of reasoning don't seem to get acknowledged, or are shrug of, by the current coalition of Evangelicals, U.S. and British far right, and the various voices in the Israeli-Zionist Right, comprised mainly of Orthodox and national security advocates. Too much so is the hallucinated alliance of campus anti-Semites, woke climate movement, of feminists, LGBTQ, and the Islamic pro-Hamas movement out to undermine not merely Israel but the whole West.

One of the tragedies of the Middle East conflicts (there are several, not one) seems to me that both sides, Israeli and Palestinians, may hate the other for what the latter managed to achieve in brutalizing the former. Look what you made me do! And whereas the Palestinians build their national identity on the pride about their hatred of the Jews, the Jews rather look in shock and trauma, desperately clinging to anything resembling a rest of humaneness instead of bestiality. And the more they try, the more they get spit upon by a world gone mad.

Protracted disputes with an old pal from Identica times over the Middle East conflict(s) reminded me of that aspect. He insanely pro-Palestinian, me utterly pro-Israeli. In the end he blocked me and requested the Masodon staff to take down some of my posts for "genocide denial". He succeeded, and my various appeals have never even been replied to by the moderators. Anyway, his remarks haven't been futile. At last, when the Charlie Kirk murder showed how the Trump Right had found their martyr and was willing to utilize him and how the Zionist Right closed ranks in solidarity with them, I found a small crack to breathe. Not with that ilk!

It doesn't mean it extenuates my solidarity with Israel and the Jewish struggles. But with more sadness now than before, and less anger and hatred. And that is something I think this Identica pal has in part initiated. I thank him for that.

#talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten
#Israel #Gaza