Plus: “the Nazi in the mirror”
8 March 2024 – – This week I have sequestered myself away from family and friends to finish the final script of my Holocaust/genocide film, now almost 6 years in the making – significantly delayed by COVID and some health issues. Final filming begins next week and there is much to be done.
But I have also been unmoored by the genocide in Ukraine war, and now the genocide in the Hamas/Israeli war. How could I not be? Cultures that continually play their deadly, dystopic sameness.
The Middle East is front of mind tonight. One thing Hamas is effective at is doing judo on Israel by convincing it to turn its considerable strength towards doing things that delegitimize itself legally and politically. It is a costly strategy but fits with their ambitious long-term goal of total rejection of Israel, and an exodus of Israelis.
This concept that Israel has, of “total victory”, has become such a ridiculous concept due to the inability of any Western country to completely crush Afghanistan or Iraq or Vietnam, etc. And the level of intrinsic antisemitism that has been revealed in Western democracies has been both disturbing and ironic given its epicentre within the “DEI Academic Complex”.
But in reality, this is not Vietnam. It is not a proxy political war. It’s a war of survival. In this context the possible outcomes are different as the participants are not foreign powers but regional ones playing on home soil. Any sustainable solution will be regional and must include Arab nations.
And as far as “total victory” that will only come by expulsion of the entire Gaza population to Egypt – but that doesn’t appear to be on the table. And even if Israel crushes Hamas (highly questionable) they merely win a poisoned chalice of having to rule Gaza’s 2 million people.
The Pentagon analysis published last week is correct. It recognizes the threat that Israel faces from Hamas, but Israel is allowing tactical victory against Hamas to be replaced with strategic defeat due to creating a situation where essentially Hamas is emboldened and the people of Gaza, the Palestinians who live in Gaza, can’t live in peace.
Hamas seems to be taking the Vietcong perspective – that you can lose every battle but still win the war.
Yes, it’s far more complicated and nuanced than I making out, and I will expand this essay when time permits. Frankly, most Israelis are unlikely to just leave even if things really get too tough. And the problem from Hamas’s perspective is that “soft power” doesn’t stand a chance in front of “hard power”. And Israel knows it well.
For now, Israel’s biggest strength is the lack of Arab resolve and unity. The latter is unlikely to change any time soon unless there is a geopolitical tectonic shift that displaces the U.S. from its apex position.
But I think that shift, away from the U.S., for better or worse, is already underway and what’s happening in the Middle East is only accelerating it. See the current issue of Foreign Affairs which addresses that issue.
Today I re-read parts of John Robb’s “Brave New War” (published in 2008 and which I have quoted in previous posts). Robb is a former Air Force officer and counterterrorism expert and he has written extensively (since the early 2000s) on how the same technology that has enabled globalization has allowed terrorists and criminals to join forces against larger adversaries with relative ease and to carry out small, inexpensive actions through asymetric warfare.
There are two very relevant pages from his 2008 book that apply today:
I’ll have more from Robb’s book in a subsequent post. And many of these same points are made by Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld in his 1991 book “The Transformation of War“.
But there is another issue I wish to briefly note, what the author Naomi Klein calls “the Nazi in the mirror”. Earlier today I had two phone conversations with Israeli friends in Tel Aviv and the conversation went something like this:
Somehow Hamas has been able to get world opinion to minimize their actions of the mass slaughtering, torture and rape of Israeli civilians. For Israelis, no rationale – even arguments about the colonization of Palestine – can justify that.
But now they watch the soldiers of their Israel Defense Forces putting out mocking “victory videos” celebrating what almost look like fiendish killing rituals, and torture. They see those who have not already been killed are being starved to death. Almost the entire population of Gaza has been displaced. Their homes, hospitals, universities, museums, infrastructure of every kind has been reduced to rubble. Their children have been murdered. Their past has been vaporised. Their future is hard to see.
One of my Israeli friends said “am I looking at a Nazi in my mirror?”
After 6+ years of immersion into the history and practice of genocide and massacre (a brutal trip) there is one thing I have learned: there can be a murderous annihilatory impulse to pursue one’s interests at all costs to feel “protected”. It is the supremacist mindset that casts the extinguishments of entire peoples and cultures not merely as an unavoidable “necessity”, an element of safety, but also easily done if it is considered an inferior race.
No, I have no answers on this … yet. But I will and I must in order to bring my film to a close.
And that will require the deliberative distillation of a mindset that has studied centuries of history across continents and cultures drowned in blood.