Eyeless in Gaza

I dislike writing about Israel/Palestine issues, because one beneficial effect of coming to know a lot about a few subjects is that, if you aren’t a narcissistic egomaniac, you realize you don’t know anything to speak of about an almost infinite number of other, equally complex and difficult subjects. For me one of those latter subjects is pretty much everything about the whole Israel/Palestine question, so this post is really just a placeholder for discussion of a critically important political and human rights issue.

Here’s a story about the Israeli government’s impeding escalation of the war in Gaza (gift link). What the strategy or end game here is remains opaque to me — counter-insurgencies have a really terrible track record, and the failure of the IDF to eliminate Hamas as a military and political entity after 18 months of intense fighting and blockading of a territory smaller than the city of Chicago would seem to raise some questions about whether any of this makes any sense from a military perspective, leaving aside the whole human catastrophe.

Here’s a related subject, which is the open sewer of anti-Semitism that now exists on the North American right wing. Check out this interview clip between two fairly far right figures, Jordan Petersen and James Lindsay, in which Lindsay is putting forth the controversial view that Hitler shouldn’t be valorized and that the Holocaust was bad. As you can see from the comments, this elicits a grotesque outburst of the most disgusting anti-Semitic tropes from the Petersen fan base.

When you combine what’s happening on the right wing in this country with the obvious strains of anti-Semitism in a lot of the anti-Zionist anti-settler colonialist rhetoric on the left, it makes for a very ugly situation, especially given that the ongoing human rights catastrophe in Gaza is being accelerated by the corrupt and generally despicable Likud government in Israel.

That starving the civilian population of Gaza and anti-Semitism are both bad things is apparently too complex a thought for many people to keep in their minds at present.