Future Discount: Israel and Palestine

We have almost all had some experience with the concept of future discount: the snooze button now versus the good things studying harder for the test might make possible in the future. The exhilaration and social cachet of your own car now against the future advantages of having saved up and taken the bus. For too many people, future discounting means weighing the escape the pill, the pipe, or the needle offers now, versus the chances for the uncertain possibilities of a better future.

Few forms of future discounting have the seductive nature, or pose the dangers, of apocalyptic religious belief. A coming apocalypse justifies gratifying the present at the expense of the future because God will call an end to the world. The righteous, whether they provide for the future or not, will receive their eternal reward. In that system, imprudence does not look like self indulgence, or as a pursuit of pleasure with consequences others may have to pay for. Rather, it appears as as an affirmation of faith.

Free riders

The Atlantic's Yair Rosenberg describes a sketch on Israeli television: Israeli Defence Force representatives knock on the door of the wrong apartment. They expect to find a family of one of their soldiers, and to tell them, with deep regret, of the death or grave wounding of their relative. Instead, a Haredi Jewish man answers the door, and before they can speak, he tells them he will never, under any circumstances,enlist in the army. His work of prayer and study matters far too much: for him, for his community, and ultimately for the Jewish community and the State of Israel.

The sketch touched a nerve: the war in Gaza, with its mounting casualties and economic disruption has touched most Jewish Israelis, with a notable exception: the Haredim, or the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community enjoys an exemption from military service. The religious parties in the ruling political coalition fiercely guard this exemption, but the in the parts of Israeli society that bear the financial and human costs of the war, resentment of the Haredim as free riders could bring down Prime Minister Netanyahu's government.

I have a mental image of representatives of the Jewish community knocking on a door, and a different person, representative of a very different free-riding community opening the door: US. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. 

All or nothing: a convenient paralysis

Therapists characterize all or nothing thinking, the ability to see only polar opposites, as a cognitive distortion.  Politicians, governments, and advertisers all rely, to greater or lesser degrees, on convincing people to make decisions that work against their own interests, so they find cognitive distortions very useful. Far too often, those of us who work for peace and justice accept these distortions without analyzing them, and when we do, we limit our effectiveness.

Governments have worked hard to promote all or nothing thinking in relation to peace work.. The idea of peace as an all or nothing proposition, with no possibility of any position between absolute passivity and unlimited, lawless violence has proved useful as a political strategy and as an administrative technique for authorities in charge of military conscription. To the extent advocates of peace and justice work have accepted this proposition, it has proved disastrous for us, and more important, it has done real harm to the people we work and advocate for.

Conspiracy minded

Iran isn't actually powering missiles with money

George Orwell characterized the English "Rule of the Saints" under Oliver Cromwell as "a military dictatorship enlivened by witchcraft trials". Those words appear to describe Iran pretty well today. A dictatorship, and particularly a military dictatorship, needs an enemy, and the current regime in Iran had identified Israel as an enemy well before the Ayatollahs came to power. Iran's declarations of solidarity with the Palestinian people and support for Hamas in the current conflict continues a policy they have pursued for over forty years. It seems obvious the leadership in Iran strongly approves of  the current opposition to Israeli policy in the West, and it makes sense expect them to support organizing in opposition to Israel in any way they can.

The genocide convention

Words is what we do here, Miss Kincaid. - Law & Order, Censure

Imagine for a moment a legal system with only one defined crime: intentional murder. It's not difficult to see the problems such a system would create. Many crimes aside from intentional murder seriously affect people's lives; this would create pressure to extend the definition of murder. Victims of crashes caused by drunk drivers could argue those who victimized them intended to kill and had simply selected their target at random. 

 

The natural human tendency to demand precise definitions for the offences we commit, while pursuing expanded definitions of the offences others commit against us, would make this problem impossible for a legal system to manage. Worse, a vague and broad criminal law would intersect with the difficulties of determining what really happened in a crime or tragedy. Because of this, almost every legal code defines a large number of offences with explicit definitions and punishments varying according to the severity of the offence.

Poetry and government

 

"The silent wheels roll through the quiet green," happens to be the first line of a sonnet, a poem written in a highly specific form. The word form here matters: a form, by definition, has a formal definition, one which a poem, or anything else with a formal definition, must fit. A Shakespearean sonnet must consist of exactly fourteen lines, divided into three stanzas and a final rhyming couplet. In the stanzas, each alternate line must rhyme: first with third and second with fourth. A line in a sonnet must consist of exactly ten syllables, or beats, with alternate strong and weak stresses, and each pair of beats must begin with the weaker beat. Like the drumming of Indigenous North Americas, this poetry mimics the beat of a human heart.

Many other formal definitions exist: computer languages have extremely specific formal definitions, many of which make the definition of a sonnet look very loose and informal. In each case, a formal definition acts as a scaffold. It does not define what people who employ the form may express, but it does define, and thus restrict, the means of expression. Above all, the scaffold, by itself, has nothing to say about the quality of the expression. The literary record contains a long list of very bad sonnets: trite, sentimental, poorly expressed, but none the less fitting the formal definition of the sonnet. Conversely, the world contains many magnificent poems that do not fit the definition of a sonnet.

There are no...

...settler colonialist children. There are no capitalist children. There are no wealthy children, for all children come into the world with nothing, and depend on others for their needs.

Every child deserves the support and love of the community. Every child deserves protection in conflict, relief in disaster, care in sickness, education, and connection with a family to love and care for them.

We've been here before: A personal view of the Israel-Hamas conflict

 

Flag of Kach/Kahane Chai

Over the last five months, the dialogue between Israel and the international community, including some of the strongest supporters of Israel in the international community, has begun more and more to resemble the conversation at an intervention. The participants all express support, sympathy, solidarity with Israel, emphasize their friendship, and slowly work around to the lengthening list of symptoms suggesting their friend has gone off the rails. The sense of dismay at the behaviour of the Israeli government grows steadily more apparent. Increasingly, we see calls for moderation, expressed willingness to broker and support a settlement leading to peace and freedom for Israelis and Palestinians alike, and behind those words of encouragement the seldom bluntly stated but increasingly solid consensus that the behaviour of  the current government of Israel will lead to catastrophe.

Perhaps a memory of my own can help explain why this is happening. 

In the empty spaces between the words...

Does "make America great again" signal a desire for a recovery of American self confidence and more products made in the United States, or a last clutch at a white supremacist social order? Either, or both, depending on who you ask. 

Does "defund the police" refer to a proposal to shift responsibility for social and mental health issues from the police, jails, and prisons, and redirect the associated funding to health and social service agencies, or does it mean disbanding all police agencies? It depends on who you ask; I have heard both interpretations of the slogan asserted with conviction.

Does the slogan "land back" mean Indigenous nations should have increased jurisdiction over resource development, land use, and environmental decision making within their traditional territories, or does it mean packing "white" people back to their place of origin?

 

Does the chant "from the river to the sea" call for a single, democratic, non-confessional state with room for all believers between the Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Does it mean a single Palestinian Muslim-majority state from which Jewish inhabitants, or most of them, have fled or forced to leave? Does it mean a single Jewish Israeli state from the Mediterranean, as a Likud slogan has advocated, or even beyond the Jordan, as some advocates of "Biblical Israel" claim?

Talk is cheap

Germany has come out strongly in support of Israel's position at the International Court of Justice and against the allegations of genocide brought by South Africa. The statement from Germany mentioned a sense of obligation felt by the current German government as a result of the mass murders of Jewish people committed by Nazi Germany. 

Tomoyuki Yamashita would like a word...

General Tomoyuki Yamashita

 Recently, Jonathan Cook published a substack essay, in which he questioned the evidence for widespread sexual violence associated with the Hamas breakout from Gaza on October 7. In his essay, he makes the following extraordinary statement:

The reason why Israel’s apologists for genocide need to inflate their claim is because, sadly, opportunistic rape would be entirely unremarkable in any violent, militarised situation – and indeed unremarkable in behaviours towards women in western societies in general.

First, it should go without saying: nothing justifies genocide. Those who believe the Israeli government, or apologists for Israel, have alleged sexual violence against Hamas to justify genocide or even ethnic cleansing in Gaza need to respond on principle: nothing justifies crimes against humanity. Nothing Hamas fighters did on October 7 justifies intentionally harming or killing the children of Gaza. 

Second: allegations of war crimes matter. They matter because of what Sr. Helen Prejean called the basic human solidarity against suffering and death. They matter because without investigation and accountability they will happen more often.They matter especially when people we might otherwise sympathize with stand accused, because if our solidarity depends on a political test it means nothing.

Finally: if you let loose armed fighters on a civilian population, you own what they do. The American government hanged the Japanese general Tomoyuki Yamashita on exactly that basis, and his fate has haunted more than one military commander since, with good reason. Our rules and standards for warfare exist to make resort to violence harder and less appealing, and to offer the maximum protection to uninvolved and unarmed persons caught up in a conflict.

We do not need to accept allegations of rape and sexual violence by Hamas fighters on October 7 without scrutiny, but neither should we dismiss them. Standards of human rights and human decency must apply to all of us, or they will come to apply to none of us.

Friends like these

 Recently, Barbara Kay published an opinion piece praising the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, calling the organization a "true friend of Israel". 

Israel does have friends, and quite possibly many supporters of the International Christian Embassy have the best possible intentions for Israel, Israeli citizens, and the wider Jewish community. However, by no means do all so-called "Christian" "Zionists" have the best interests of Israel in mind.

Trauma informed

The image carries a meaning in a way very few others do.A squat tower with an ill proportioned and ugly railway gate, it serves as an instantly recognizable shorthand and an indelible stain on the history of our civilization. In the history of past five hundred years, an age of endless empire, of ever more destructive wars and increasingly empowered hatreds, this one image in all its meanings occupies a unique place. This gate opens onto a killing machine capable of  efficiently carrying out a million murders, a large proportion of more than six million murders in the four years between the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the fall of Berlin. Together, the murder and enslavement beyond this gate created the index trauma of our time. We measure other crimes, other catastrophes, and other horrors against this one.

 

...by omission

Last entry I wrote about my frustration at having no outlet during a time of even greater global turmoil than usual: the first major war in Europe during my lifetime, renewed war in Southwest Asia  (aka the "Middle East"), and looming over everything, global climate change. In the current round of crises, and in particularly the outbreak of war in Southwest Asia, so much remains unsaid, so many problems seem to me to have gone without a mention, I just feel a need to speak, if only to say things I think obvious.