"Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good." - Barack Obama
In honour of the death of OJ, I repost my blog post from 2021.
https://therentcollector.blogspot.com/2021/03/floyd-and-oj-one-victim-one-perpetrator.html?m=1
This week I listened to the first hour of Sam Harris's latest podcast with Douglas Murray and Joseph Szeps, the part available on YouTube. I've always found Harris to be a thoughtful and articulate public intellectual on a host of subjects, although admittedly, I've never read any of his books. A neuroscientist, he came to prominence as a professed atheist, a moral rationalist and a promoter of clear thought through the regular practice of meditation. Lately, I've been particularly interested in how he has been thinking about the war in Gaza and the moral quagmire Israel finds itself in while prosecuting the conflict. His position has been consistent and steadfast throughout. He supports Israel unequivocally. But its not because it's Israel ie. not because he's Jewish and it's a Jewish state. He says he'd support Denmark if they were the country engaged in this conflict. He supports Israel because he believes that the battle they are fighting is for civilization. It's a battle against Jihadism, a religious death cult, and an ideology that is contrary to any basic moral standard of human decency. He argues that this is the correct way to view an opposition who straps explosive devices to their children to turn them into suicide bombers, and who teaches children to die as martyrs as the ultimate heroism. Harris is incensed by the way 'supposedly educated and smart' westerners have lost their moral bearings by siding with such people. In the first 10 minutes of the podcast he summarizes his position succinctly. Perhaps most surprising to my ears is when he compares Hamas to the Nazis. He argues that if we can legitimately justify the bombing of Dresden, which killed more than 30,000 ordinary German citizens, surely the killing of thousands of innocent Palestinians is justified, because Hamas is worse than the Nazis. The Nazis did not weaponize their citizens by using them as human shields. They did not use hospitals and elementary schools as rocket-launch sites. They did not build tunnels to turn residential areas into military infrastructure. It appears that for Harris, with western civilization at stake, any means of defeating Hamas, no matter what the cost, is warranted. The World Central Kitchen attack was a tragic mistake, he says. In war there are always tragic mistakes.
I agree with much of what Harris says, and my support of Israel is as steadfast as his. Hamas must be defeated for all the reasons he describes in terms of the ideology they represent and threat to western values. They cannot be permitted to survive in any functional way. But unlike Harris I also support the war because I support Israel. I believe Hamas must be defeated because they are a threat to the Jewish state. This is an existential war for Israel. Where I differ most with Harris is the way he conflates Hamas with the Palestinian people. He argues that Palestinians support Hamas and the barbaric acts they committed on October 7th. This is indisputable based on recent polling. But reliable polls taken just prior to October 7th in Gaza indicated that Hamas was extremely unpopular. It's not unexpected that during a conflict, and in this case one in which you are pummelled into homelessness and starvation, the population would rally around their perceived 'defenders'. What we know about Hamas is that they were feared by Gazans and ruled without election and with an iron fist. They corruptly deprived Gaza of resources for almost two decades, and used whatever they could steal to turn the territory into a military facility and to line their own pockets. We also know that Hamas is a proxy for Iran. Under such circumstances, any reasonable person needs to question the extent to which ordinary Palestinians can be held culpable for the actions of Hamas. Is the analogy to Germany during World War 2 even remotely applicable here? Hitler and the Nazis were broadly popular with Germans and they actively supported the war effort enthusiastically at all levels of society. The Nazi government marshalled all of the powers of the state to prosecute their war of expansion. In the very last stage of the war, when the Wehrmacht was in shambles and Berlin encircled, the Nazis called upon the Volkssturm, the ragtag national citizen militia comprised of ordinary citizens, from high-school age to retirees, to fight the Red Army in the streets, and they did. The culpability of everyday Germans is inarguable. How can one use the same standard of culpability for what is happening to the population of Gaza?
But there's another comment made by Harris and Murray which has been accepted as a given, but with which I take issue: That the IDF (and by extension Israel) is held to a higher moral standard than other countries (hence there is anti-Semitism at play). They cite other horrific conflicts and attrocities taking place around the world that are not given anywhere near the same scrutiny as Gaza. That there is greater scrutiny of this conflict is undeniable. But in my view it's for a host of reasons that make this conflict unusual and one-of-a-kind, that has nothing to do with any moral double-standard or anti-Semitism. Israel possesses unique geographical, religious and historical significance that merits unique international attention. This conflict is not a civil war in Syria or Sudan. In the west we simply have no political reason to care as much about those types of conflicts regardless of the attrocities being committed, especially when they are in Africa. Conflicts on continental Europe are always of greater political concern. For example, we have a lot more reason to care about the war of aggression waged by Putin against Ukraine. We were properly outraged by Putin's barbaric targeting of apartment buildings, theaters and hospitals in Mariupol. Remember how we cared about the war in the Balkans and were horrified by the genocidal slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995? The Serbian perpetrators were doggedly pursued and eventually brought to the ICJ (International Court of Justice). No Jews involved there. Israel is subject to the same standard of behaviour during wartime as any other signatory to international treaties and conventions. But one also has to consider that the Palestinians are unique. They have been wards of the international community since 1948 and have special status at the UN as multi-generational refugees. The Palestinians have waged a successful campaign for decades to situate themselves in the global conscience as a symbol of 'neo-colonial' injustice and victimhood, falsely I believe. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not about moral double-standards or anti-Semitism in my view. The global reaction we are witnessing is largely attributable to the unique and longstanding political aspects it engenders.
I want to be clear. I don’t for a second believe that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide. If there is a genocide it’s being committed by Hamas, as they weaponize the Palestinian civilian population, using the lives of innocents as a tactic of war to demonize Israel. It’s diabolical, evil, and it’s working. People are not placing blame where it needs to go, on Hamas. And for any thinking person the tactic would signal how necessary defeating Hamas is, not just for Israel but also for the Palestinians. And yes there are mistakes that happen in war. Israel killed three hostages in a tragic mistake. But every possible effort must be made to respect certain moral boundaries when waging any conflict. We cannot accept that the ends always justify the means and ‘anything goes’.
The big news today is a solar eclipse,
And where the viewing is optimal.
The sun interrupted like a sentence elipsis,
By a rare occurrence celestial.
It won't happen again in North America,
For another twenty-two years.
Get special lenses to protect your retinas,
To watch it with nothing to fear.
The Moon crossing the face of the Sun,
As Earth's darkness reaches totality.
Like that plague in Egypt, before the first born sons,
Met with their ordained fatality.
Why am I feeling so ambivalent,
About something this richly mythical?
A once-in-a-lifetime without equivalent,
Event that is cosmically cyclical?
This storied sign of impending calamity,
Misfortune and natural disruption.
It's not as though the breadth of humanity,
Is unfamiliar with grief and corruption.
The moon that will cast us all in shadow,
Briefly extinguishing daylight,
Is the moon that reflects the sun's luminous glow,
In the blackness of every night.
You might call the moon two-faced,
Which reminds me of each of us,
How we treat each other and are disgraced,
And will soon return to dust.
Every second is one-of-a-kind,
Not something we will witness again,
To the darkness inside we're habitually blind,
Regardless of heavenly omens.
So I won't watch from the roof of my home,
Or from some other high-up joint,
I'll spend the eclipse writing a poem,
To try to make a lasting point.
Dawn less spree,
Dawn less spree,
Twos key pass par laze you,
Say four may, Say four may!
Dawn no core,
Dawn no core,
Twos key pass dawn liquor,
Ah more, Ah more!
My last post about an inflection point almost intuits that the World Central Kitchen (WCK) disaster was about to happen. Sometimes you can feel something in the air. Not that you know for certain something is going to happen, but the trend lines are there. There was something about the way this war was progressing that worried me. My concern was that until this moment the IDF still had the credibility of making the self-defense argument, even with scores of thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties, because Hamas was using civilians as weapons of war. I argued that any sort of famine would transgress that moral boundary, because the obligations change from an active engagement combat circumstance to a prisoner of war situation, and as such, the IDF becomes responsible for ensuring the basic human needs of the civilian population. My worst fears were realized. The WCK catastrophe, although certainly unintended, severely damages any credibility the IDF had when they claimed to be taking precautions and following international law and conventions of war. The details that are starting to emerge appear damning, and I fear it's going to get even worse. The 'fog of war' is no excuse. Apologies don't cut it. Unless heads roll, and ideally Netanyahu's would be top of my list, Israel is in deep trouble on multiple levels. The trust deficit, both domestically and internationally, is reaching a critical point. The passionate protests we've been seeing in Jerusalem in the last 24 hours (with violence surprisingly erupting) that demand his resignation suggest a lot of Israelis agree with me. I hope it has an impact so that this listing ship of state can get back on course. None of this fundamentally changes my support for Israel or my view that the war is justified, especially as long as there are hostages involved. But operational carelessness are undermining the goals. It's hard to see any path forward unless something changes.
I had other thoughts this week about war, namely Russia and Ukraine. Since the start of that war more than two years ago (if you don't count the invasion of Crimea in 2014), I've been trying to find an intellectual framework for Putin's aggression that makes sense of it. Some people have characterized it as an imperial war, Putin's desire to re-make the old Soviet Union, to re-establish a Russian Empire. Others have characterized it as a vanity project for Putin who fashions himself as a modern day Peter The Great. They've focused on his mythological view of himself and his desire for an historical legacy. Still others have taken a more pragmatic approach and see the war as a political move to divert the attention of everyday Russians away from his economic failures in favour of patriotism and a quasi-religious Nationalism. Of course, all of these perspectives probably play some role in Putin's motivation. No doubt it's changed over time, as the war shifted from being a lightning strike against Kiev in the first few days of the invasion, which failed miserably, and became a war of attrition. But I'm starting to think that Alexei Navalny's view was always the right one (even before the war). The war is about class warfare. It's about a monarchical oligarchy trying to protect its power and privilege. It's a throwback to 18th-19th century Russian aristocracy. The one that was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. The war being waged is not actually Russia against Ukraine, in reality it's Putin against his own underclass. The tip off for me is that Putin wears a business suit, while Zelensky, in his role as Ukraine's commander in chief, wears army fatigues. The symbolism is unmistakable. This week, with a stroke of the pen sitting at his desk, Putin called up an additional 150,000 conscripts to prepare for the meat-grinder of Ukraine. According to a US intelligence report an estimated 315,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded in Ukraine to the end of 2023. If accurate, the figure would represent 87 percent of the roughly 360,000 troops Russia had before the war. I wonder how long Russians are prepared to accept this until they reach their breaking point.
It feels like an inflection point. After Chuck Schumer's unfathomable call for elections in Israel to oust Netanyahu, the rising tensions between Biden and Bibi that have been building for weeks finally came to a head with the US abstention of the UN Security Council ceasefire resolution vote. Hamas must be very encouraged that their campaign of Palestinian self-flagellation is winning the day. Western leaders are talking about recognizing a Palestinian State - although it's hard to imagine what that would accomplish - and US Vice-President Harris has talked about further consequences if Israel conducts operations in Rafah, the last Gaza stronghold of Hamas. Israel argues that it needs to go into Rafah to finish the job of eliminating Hamas. Meanwhile, northern Gaza is on the brink of what has been called the worst famine in modern human history. According to some reports, by May up to 680,000 Gazans will be at risk. This represents the largest famine since Somalia in 2011 when approximately 450,000 starved. I wonder how many Palestinian women and children Hamas counted on dying before enough international pressure would come to bear on Israel to force them into retreat. Dying can be a powerful political tool, especially in the age of social media.
We are taught that we must not stand idly by and watch innocent people die if we have the ability to do something about it. It's a basic moral imperative. But what do you do when bad actors place others intentionally in harm's way to protect themselves? It's undeniable that Hamas is responsible for the catastrophe currently befalling the people of Gaza. In their strategy of assymetrical warfare, it's undeniable that Hamas has used the entire population of Gaza to shield themselves from Israel's superior military power. It's undeniable that their only hope of 'success' was for massive numbers of innocent Gazans to die and the world to be outraged against Israel. They view all Palestinians as not merely expendable, but as their main weapon. They call them 'a nation of martyrs'. But Hamas's responsibility for wanting and engineering the deaths of thousands of their own people can't negate the moral imperative of others to spare innocent lives if they can. Those of us watching the catastrophe of Gaza have to agonizingly hold two conflicting moral principles in our minds at the same time. One that demands evil to be eradicated in self-defense, and the second not to kill innocents in the process. In a case when one of the parties has weaponized the death of their own civillians as central to their strategy, contrary to every accepted norm and convention of warfare, we are forced to ask, which must take precedence, and at what point should that precedence shift, if ever? At what point must my self-defense take a backseat to sparing the lives of others?
We've been told that the IDF has respected, as much as possible, international military norms and conventions in their rules of engagement in Gaza. We've been told that whenever possible, in an impossible setting of urban guerilla warfare, they have done whatever they could to warn civilians to get out of harm's way before taking action. I am confident that this is the case. I am also confident that Hamas is doing everything possible to undermine Israel's efforts, and that this accounts for the vast majority of civilian Palestinian casualties. But famine changes the calculus. Ensuring the adequate supply of basic human needs is essential. In this regard, the Palestinian population must be viewed like prisoners of war and treated as such. If the IDF is doing anything to make sure famine is avoided, they need to tell the world about it. If they are being hindered in that effort by Hamas we need to know about it. Right now, to many of us, it still looks like what the IDF is engaged in is justifiable self-defense. If there is a famine, it won't look that way anymore.
