Israel’s hardline supporters are becoming unhinged because the war is morally indefensible

The pause in the Israeli destruction of Gaza has been extended and may be extended further. Should the attack recommence, the pause will have proved to be a near-sadistic dangling of hope to what must be more than one and a half million Gazans now concentrated in the southern half of the strip, 1 million of them displaced. It has been reported that despite the killing of numerous Hamas commanders, the group remains substantially intact. It is also reported that the hostage deal was offered to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weeks ago, was refused, and was revived only because of the political pressure coming from hostage families. If so, there have been thousands of excess deaths. 

Should it resume, and should Israel continue its stated aim of “wiping out Hamas” — which no-one really believes — it will have to begin targeting the southern part of the strip, to which Hamas has presumably moved. This will leave the Gazans with nowhere to go, except to gather on the beach in their hundreds of thousands. The pressure on Egypt to open the border will become immense, and expulsion will be able to be conducted under the cover of necessary humanitarianism.

Yet the Israeli government might be having some reflection on opening assaults on the southern Gaza Strip. The designation of this as a “safe zone” has been part of its argument to the world that the operation is not targeted at Gazan civilians. The “safe zone” was bombed anyway, and getting to it involved pitiful marches of civilians — the tired, the old, the sick, hungry, thirsty and desperately ill. But if Israel were to embark on a bombing campaign across the whole strip, which would suggest the goal of destroying a society and its people wantonly? At that point numerous governments might start to make real objections.

Gaza is typically described as an open-air prison. With its sequestered daily life destroyed — the neighbourhoods, shops and shopping malls — and Israel using water as a weapon of war, one can name it more clearly as a ghetto, and name what Israel is doing as destruction of such.

Steadily, global opinion may be turning against Israel. The Hamas October 7 raid is fading into memory. With journalists coming back into north Gaza during the pause, the sheer destruction of an entire city is being communicated to the world. If bombing begins after this pause, the pictures will begin all over again, less connected to any earlier event, simply the hail of bullying destruction. Israel’s hardcore and elite defenders will back it, whatever it does, even if the death toll climbs to 30,000, 40,000 or 50,000.

But with the continuing destruction, the question of what it is for is pushing steadily into the mainstream, whose default support for Israel is based largely on low information. They know nothing of why the Gazans are there, of what Israel is, and see a bunch of homicidal maniacs attacking a peaceful parallel society. The more the bombing goes on, the more this reverses. Insofar as anyone in the mainstream is paying attention, many are starting to wonder what could possibly justify this destruction. 

This gradual shift is making the pro-Israel lobby increasingly extreme, even hysterical. For several weeks it was sufficient to show simple indifference to Palestinian suffering using the distancing of high-tech death, a spurious moral argument about the “inadvertent” killing of civilians, and a very basic racism involved in the support of a nation founded as a European movement vs a brown-skinned Asian-African people. This is breaking down in Western societies, from the simple bludgeoning of mass violence, but also due to the changed composition of Western societies and their multicultural character. The Israel lobby has been somewhat blindsided by this. It has appealed to a “general public” to make some judgments the lobby presents as “obvious”, and what has come back at it is a complex mix of arguments about sheer proportionality, oppression, colonialism and racism. 

The immediate response has been to up the rhetoric. Thus the term “genocide”, increasingly used about the Gaza destruction, and with genocide specialists affirming it, has been labelled by the Israel lobby as a “blood libel”. This is another example of absolute surrealist exaggeration, comparing an ancient pernicious myth about rabbis taking Christian children’s blood for ritual purposes with an argument over terms for what is commonly agreed to be the killing of thousands of civilians by a high-tech air force.

Accompanying all this was a widening of the accusation of “anti-Semitism” against any pro-Palestinian positions. This has been particularly so against an open letter signed by numerous ABC, Nine and Guardian Australia journalists. This letter contains a series of general assertions about critical journalism, and some content points noting that stories on Gaza should strive to give the historical background of Palestinians in 1948, and what the UN has declared to be the illegal occupation of the West Bank. The tone is comparatively neutral. There is no mention of the mass terrorism that was the method of expulsion in 1948, nor of the comprehensive apartheid regime operative in the West Bank. Yet even the letter’s uncontested facts seem to be too much for Mark Leibler, for whom the letter is anti-Semitic. 

Julie Szego has had much to say about the rise in anti-Semitism, which is undoubted, though nothing that I’ve seen reflecting on the morality of Israel’s specific actions. But her take on the letter is something else, constructing its assertion that statements by both the Israeli government and Hamas should be read: 

The letter calls on reporters to treat unverified information from the democratically elected government of Israel and the terror group Hamas with the same ‘professional scepticism’. Israel ‘apparently’ deliberately targets journalists, according to the letter; while Hamas, we can only presume by omission, fiercely respects the fourth estate.

This is a masterpiece of misconstruction, typical of “left” Zionists who have been dragged into supporting mass killing by a Zionist-fascist government. Szego implicitly suggests that a “democratic” government would be more trustworthy than a group that uses terror. Vietnam and Iraq give the lie to that. The latter is pertinent since Szego supported the Iraq War and advocated it, even though it was based on ludicrously false claims of weapons of mass destruction by “democratically elected” governments.  

Szego notes that the open letter says Hamas should be treated with “professional scepticism”, yet three lines later suggests that it treats Israel as a liar and Hamas as “fiercely respect[ful] of the fourth estate”.  She can’t even get her line straight in the same paragraph. 

Such confusion is possibly a mark of an increasing inability of some of Israel’s supporters to square their support for it, with government and Israel Defense Forces actions. In his lively column telling journalists to get their facts straight, Chris Mitchell claimed that:

Israel is not a European coloniser. More than half its Jewish citizens are Mizrahi and had always lived in the Middle East. When 700,000 Palestinians left Israel in 1948 after Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon attacked Israel …

We’ll take the coloniser-status of Israel as a comment. The second half is simply wrong. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians began before the attack on Zionist forces by Arab states in 1948. The Palestinians didn’t just leave on a Contiki holiday. They were frightened into fleeing by “Plan Dalet”, a terrorist operation every bit as brutal and sadistic as Hamas’ October 7 raid. No serious historian, Zionist or anti-Zionist, disputes this. But for Israel’s uncritical supporters, this knowledge is unbearable. So they must dissemble. 

But the most extraordinary reaction to Israel’s fading support has been the attempt to lessen the crimes and evil of the Nazis in order to emphasise the crimes of Hamas. The current round of this began with UK commentator Douglas Murray, a neocon Western supremacist, arguing that Hamas was worse than the Nazis because even though the Nazis killed more than 6 million Jews and others, Hamas was worse because German soldiers had expressed “some shame” and disgust at what they were doing. 

This argument has been made before, and keeps popping up in conservative circles. Remember when Tony Abbott began an intervention with the statement “The Nazis were bad, but …”? That was in 2015, and he trotted out the same line about the Islamic State, also known as ISIS:

I mean, the Nazis did terrible evil but they had a sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it.

Netanyahu himself did some Nazi apologetics the same year, 2015, telling the World Zionist Congress the absurd, debunked story that Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews, but was persuaded to do so by the grand mufti of Jerusalem in a meeting in 1941. 

This week conservative historian Andrew Roberts added a twist by suggesting that the Nazis “only” wanted to exterminate European Jews, while Hamas wants to kill the world’s Jews. This is nonsense. Hitler’s oft-repeated aim was for world domination by Nazi Germany over several generations. In World War II, Hitler speaks simply of the necessary annihilation of the Jews. Roberts’ argument was endorsed by Douglas Murray. Similar sentiments were echoed by Israel’s Economy Minister Nir Barkat two days ago, applying Murray’s and Roberts’ logic that “it’s not a number game”, and that the intimate, physical violence of Hamas’ attack makes it worse than the Holocaust. 

The rapid refutation of the cracked reasoning in all this would be: to feel shame after killing is no better or worse than conscienceless killing, they’re simply different kinds of wrong; grotesquerie and sadism only provisionally make a killing worse than straightforward killing; quantity and quality can’t be absolutely separated — there is a moral difference between killing 10, a thousand, a million people for a cause. 

So all these arguments are morally spurious. But they’re also simply incorrect. Many of the many thousands of German soldiers were disgusted by the killing they had to do, and many more soldiers and civilians enjoyed it immensely. The procedural, Fordist-Taylorist extermination of a people with gas chambers — which Murray, amazingly, seems to believe is less worse than a single, violent terrorism raid — was accompanied by immense daily sadism, torture, cruelty, medical experimentation and really — is this where we are? Treblinka, one of the four main death camps, killed around 1 million people over 14 months. There have been numerically greater genocides, but the moral vacuity of comparing this with a single, horrific raid is a sign of absolute moral depravity.

Murray is an aesthete turned political; his first book was on Lord Alfred Douglas. His Spenglerian politics is simply the armed wing of his aesthetics, which finds the ugly, angry, sadistic grotesque Hamas raid to be, if you like, “dirtier” than “conscience-struck” Nazi killing. It’s the usual deal. Aesthetic politics is the back-channel to fascism. That lies at the heart of the general approach, which is an attempt to expel the radical evil of Nazism from the European right and attribute it to non-European “savagery”. Increasing numbers of Zionists and Israelis are doing it because of the historical adjacency of Zionism and European anti-Semitism, as entwined movements seeking communities of national purity as at the root of the good life. Claiming the savagery of intimate bodily torture and terrorism to be more evil than any amount of less procedurally sadistic killing is a way of legitimising killing through bombing with open-ended numbers.

Many of those who can see the evil of all this are non-Europeans of all ages across the West who know well the hypocrisy of imperialism and “Western civilisation” as justifying state killing on a mass scale. But they are joined by a much larger number of younger people. They’re not only raised in the imminently global sphere of social media where you can video chat with someone two hours before they’re blown to pieces in their apartment by Israel’s air force, and thus have new forms of connection to the global that simply did not exist for earlier generations. 

But many of them have also had an education in something else, and that is the great truth of the 20th century: that technical progress not only does not equate with moral progress, but makes domination and killing of humans easier by rendering it as a distanced process. This insight has come into the culture and the education system through many sources, but probably one above all: Hannah Arendt’s 1963 article/book Eichmann in Jerusalem, and her evocation of the “banality of evil”. The book has been much criticised in its particularity since, but the general argument applies of the everydayness of causing suffering. The idea runs through the education system now, and through the cultural system. 

Leaving aside the simple deliberate amoral indifference of some, I suspect many of Israel’s older defenders truly cannot think their way into that moral truth. So they can look at the mass bombing of civilians, the wholesale killings of children, and simply not see that as the same sort of thing as stabbing someone to death no matter how many multiples of people are being killed. For those of us who do see it, Israel’s actions come out of a period of pre-Nazi morality, the 1920s in the 2020s, its passage into the present covered by the status of Jews as the core victims of the process of techno-amorality.

It was not possible for the Bush administration in 2003, for example, to say it would, or to actually plan to, carpet-bomb America’s way to victory. It had to be sold in terms of smart bombs and casualty minimisation. Israel alone is granted not only the right to kill an open-ended number of civilians, but for this to be taken as a mark of essential decency. This remains the default setting of many above a certain age. One saw it, in chilling clarity, in the robodebt inquiry, as one public servant after another showed they saw nothing wrong with implementing lies that were destroying people’s lives. It is a moral blankness that the Israel lobby has relied on for some time. That it isn’t working on a younger crowd — precisely because of a lesson derived from the Holocaust — is why the director of the US Anti-Defamation League has noted that it cannot connect to Generation Z with its message.

The problem for Israel is that if bombing simply recommences, it will break through the shell of older attitudes. More people will ask why this thug state is simply resuming mass killing. Why is Israel saying that these desperate people with guns on motorbikes threaten a state capable of eviscerating a city? Why do the UN representatives of a nuclear power wear cardboard yellow stars on their jackets? Why do its supporters obsess over a poster and a slogan without at the same time saying anything public about the mass killing being conducted in their name, thus courting the charge that their genuine concern comes to seem a form of fragile collective narcissism? 

As the bombs are loaded back into the undercarriages to vaporise more people like us, in apartments like ours, tweeting like us, until they don’t, we will see if the line holds, or if the immense forces of pro-Israeli propaganda are subject to a sudden and historical reversal. Which may already have begun.

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