The Imbalance of Means and Ends

when there's no way forward

Some background discussion before the point.

Over the course of a couple of days, this week, emails and comments have explained to me that I’m a vile antisemite who libels Israel, and also that I’m a mindless Zionist mouthpiece who masturbates to pictures of murdered Palestinian children. So yeah, it’s fun. And a good number of subscribers have moved for the exits. I see that discussion has become close to impossible, and roving bands of angry people are hunting for either a direct declaration of absolute loyalty or for wrongthink they can punish. I give up on trying to make anyone happy in that environment. Take this ride with me if you want, go if you need to.

Now, for the total clarity, here are my ideological priors in the matter of Hamas vs. Israel, so you can decide if you can tolerate hearing from me:

1. Hamas launched an unforgivably vicious attack on Israeli citizens, including a large number of unarmed people who can’t possibly be regarded as fair targets, in ways that can’t be justified at all by reference to colonial repression or open air prisons or whataboutism or anything else. Hamas murdered large numbers of innocent people, full stop. You’re not going to find me receptive to arguments about CIA false flags and Mossad psyops, and I’ve been extremely irritated over the last day by the dead-certain insistence that Hamas can’t possibly fire a rocket that might go off course and land in the wrong place.

2. Israeli officials have said that they regard every member of Hamas as a “dead man walking,” and I think that’s just fine. If I were sitting in an IDF TOC, I’d be clawing the walls for a way to get at the Hamas leaders who are sitting safely in Qatar while they order mass murder in Israel. Hamas: fair targets for Israel, all of them.

3. But I do not support unrestrained warfare against everyone in Gaza, a position I suspect a great many Israelis share, and I hope to see us avoid a descent into a major regional war or a war with the US as a direct participant. To quote the late Fred Thompson, this thing will get out of control, and we’ll be lucky to live through it. Kill Hamas to the greatest extent possible, avoid killing people who are not Hamas to the greatest extent possible, look for the endgame. Endless war for poorly defined purposes goes to dangerously unexpected places.

If any of that enrages you beyond your capacity for calm discussion, feel free to post a comment telling me what a monster I am, and then go. You don’t have to post the same comment ten times. And I’m invariably unreceptive to the claim that I’ve said something that can’t be said, or to the rhetorical maneuver that explains to me what I’m really saying. Chris Bray, subtextual Jew-hating crypto-Zionist secret monster.

With all of that said, here’s something we might actually discuss:

While critics of the Israeli war demand that Israel turn toward restraint, millions of protesters in major American and European cities have done this:

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” If Palestine is free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, then all of Israel will be gone, and there won’t be any Jews left there. No one is actually trying to stop war or protest in favor of restraint by using nakedly eliminationist language — and the rhetorical game of gaslighting about it, pretending it’s a lie to call eliminationist fantasy eliminationist….

….is tedious behavior that doesn’t accomplish anything. Global mobs chanting for a Judenfrei Palestine: likely to soothe? Likely to make escalation less likely? How are these messages being heard in Israel?

Similarly, the arrival of the cryptkeeper in Israel, mumbling slogans from his notecards, offers no reason for hope.

And I lack the physical strength to say much about the stupidity of this move, which is neatly suggested by the subhed:

Someone needs to rewrite a 21st-century Moby Dick in which President Ahab goes to sea to chase the white whale until he can make it take free money from the United States government. Perhaps one day we can find something on the planet that we’re willing to not subsidize. Finnish cheesemakers? Knitting circles in Uzbekistan? In any case, we should probably mount a giant sign on the Capitol to identify it as an ATM. It serves no other purpose.

So the alleged peace protests are the functional opposite, and the high-level diplomacy appears to be babbling nonsense and counterproductive checkbook flourishing. It seems to me that we have a widely expressed desire for peace, but we have no politics of peace. We have no organized and coherent means by which to end the war that people are on social media demanding to stop. We have motion without action, TikTok-quality cultural emanations without political meaning.

I don’t see what works as the brakes.

I’d love to have someone talk me out of that view.