A stormy day. A few bouts of rain. Lots of wind. I didn't go to Jerusalem this shabbat. To top it all: Tonight I head to NYC for Thanksgiving week.
Dizengoff Square last night. Music against a background of sorrow.
At a cafe:
Pic at a cafe on Dizengoff:
Return the boys and girls.
Women and children.
Old and young.
Soldiers, babies and kids.
All of them.
All of them.
A world.
Peace & Peaceniks
Built In?
I remember reading of an Israeli soldier returning home after the 1982 massacre at Sabra and Shatila. This soldier gets home. His mother won't let him in until he answers: Did you have anything to do with what happened?
This is not a denial of Israeli abuses, or intermittent acts of unauthorized or excessive violence by soldiers. There are tens of thousands of soldiers. Such things occur and are, I hope (and often see) punished. This is an observation: Israeli soldiers have mothers. While on active duty, those mothers typically see their kids every week. These mothers do not want monsters as children. And they say so.
Peace Voices?
In my extended circle there are a few who actively communicate across the Jewish-Arab communal divide. What was more interesting, in months past, was how the schism in Israeli society triggered "centrists" to attend Breaking the Silence and similar events.
Voices against war, while not overwhelming in number, exist.
Puppets?
I am troubled how Hamas essentially controls history:
They choose when, where and how to attack
They know what the reaction will be
They then essentially control the Western Press, inflaming the situation
The world forgot? Hamas took power via a Palestinian civil war in Gaza and controls with the muzzle of a gun. For fifteen years. Every piece of "news" citing a Gaza official, hospital director, etc. is a Hamas-approved message. No one can go off script. There are repercussions to going off script in an authoritarian state….
In the Soviet period, seasoned Western journalists knew to frame and caveat the information they received, knowing it was from an apparatus built for spin, containing varying quantities of fact.
Example of the hour: Per Arabic language sources, the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (from the PA in the West Bank), issued a release within the past day "quoting" Haaretz (a leading Israeli newspaper), that Israeli civilians were killed by Israeli helicopters on October 7. (E.g. That all or some of October 7 was an Israeli provocation, not a Hamas attack.)
When it comes to Gaza, has journalism forgotten these lessons?
(It is also true that TikTok memes probably drive more opinion and street action than any "news" organization. C.f. Bin Laden’s letter on TikTok.)
Neo Conservatives
After the fiascos of the 2003 Iraq invasion and Brexit, how neo-cons have any airtime left is a mystery. Also interesting is how some neocons sit on a fence: For example: Openly homosexual while espousing nativism. (I find it dissonant.)
Being outside the Politically Correct universe has an advantage: You can say what you see in simple language. An example:
Douglas Murray (a journalist Raf sees as Neo Conservative) has been getting a lot of play in Israel. In one interview he notes:
Syria: Between a third of a million and a million died in the past 10 years.
In recent months Pakistan started demolishing homes to deport a million and a half people, triggering warnings of a human rights catastrophe.
The past ten years saw tens of thousands killed in Yemen and ten million deprived of water, electricity and food.
Where have the protesters been for these incidents of mass murder and displacement? Marches in London, Paris and Washington D.C. demanding a ceasefire? American aid and weapons are part of those conflicts too. Where are demands to stop?
Bottom line? Gaza and Cease Fire advocates don't care about Muslim or Arab lives. If they did, we would have seen them on the streets many times by now. The protesters only protest Israel and Jews.
I don't love neocons like Douglas Murray. He, and his crowd, have promoted a number of positions that are antithetical to my sense of progress. From a perspective of utilitarianism or effective altruism, his observation is simple: Recent protests related to Gaza are not about people or human rights. They are about anti-semitism. One small interview (from which the above is drawn), 4 minutes:
Which Brings Us To... Antisemitism
In the classic, In Bluebeard's Castle, George Steiner suggests that European anti-semitism flows from a cognitive, even biological, struggle to accept Monotheism. And while Christianity makes it easier to swallow, the demands of moral absolutism are "unnatural" enough to trigger the hatred that surfaced in the first half of the 20th century as Nazi and Soviet antisemitism. (Steiner’s thoughts defy distillation. It is pages-per-serving. That is all I am going to try to “package” today.)
Today's antisemitism seems to come from elsewhere. Some appears to be the fruition, as it were, of twenty years' of conspiracy theories incubating on social media. The explosion of Bin Laden’s ideas on TikTok did not come from nowhere. There are years of meme’s leading up to it. For example: The zillions of views garnered by Lizard People conspiracies. Where does all that go? The background worldview of millions. What can it be exploited for? The streets of Western capital cities.
Before the rain, was sun. On Friday, beaches were open and lifeguards on duty!
Relief Area
Alef
The beach on Friday afternoon:
Bet
Meh, too much LGBTQ+ bashing. Just what the LGBTQ+ community probably doesn’t need.
The weather in Tel Aviv is still funky. NYC will be colder. I’ll have to wear pants (gasp).
I hope to post most days. As it will be a consolidation of feeds, or revisiting previously cut material, entries may be short.
Stay well,
Raf
(Thank you A.K. for feedback, content and engagement.)