Israel’s War Against Morale and Morality: Learned Helplessness, Elite Capture, Managed Fascism, and How to Fight Back.
This article was first published at ongenocide.com and is syndicated here with permission of the author
Last week a heartbreaking message was delivered on twitter: “This will be the last post we share here. We believe there is no point in telling our human stories anymore; everyone has grown accustomed to seeing us killed. It's no longer worth the risk to send our voice out to a world that is content with mere solidarity. Even many of our human stories no longer interest people (even our voice is being ignored). It's time to stop waiting for a savior and to help ourselves survive. Please try to keep us in your prayers.”
These words came from @GazaMartyrs, an account dedicated to naming and humanising people killed by Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. The decision to end these activities came after another post that read: “Nothing has ever shaken or broken me before like Mohamed did today during our filming. There is nothing in this world that justifies killing a man's children, mother, and wife all at once. He went from being the happiest man because of his children to being completely shattered in a single moment. This is the reality for all of us here in this hell. We are being killed here, losing our dearest loved ones and friends, and all we have met with is abandonment and silence.”
That earlier post came in response to a particularly cruel story. Readers may be familiar with the tragic details. Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan left his wife, mother-in-law and newborn twins to obtain birth certificates for his babies. Social media posts show how happy Muhammad and his wife were with their beautiful and beloved new arrivals. An Israeli strike hit precisely the 5th storey apartment where the proud new mother, Dr Jumana Abu al-Qumsan, was standing at the window trying to get an internet signal.
Given what we know of the timing and precision of the strike it seems very likely that Israel deliberately timed the murders so as to leave the father bereft. This is an act of psychological warfare. It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that Israel would deliberately leave a survivor whose tragic loss becomes a global news story, but, as the reaction of @GazaMartyrs shows, such actions can be very demoralising. Thankfully @GazaMartyrs have resumed their work, but the source of their despair is ongoing. Israel is selectively using ostentatious atrocities to make Palestinians feel powerless and isolated while also creating a divide between the global Palestine solidarity activist population and less engaged majority populations in Western countries.
We cannot know for certain that this or any particular act of murder was also a macabre form of psychological operation, but if it’s not true in this case it is certainly true in others. The killing of Hind Rajab and the paramedics sent to her aid took place over many hours, took great coordination, and was clearly intentional and purposive. Equally in the initial months of the assault on Gaza an IDF run Telegram social media account shared many explicit posts by IDF personnel showing themselves committing clear war crimes. There are many other instances where Israeli officials and personnel have gone out of their way to show cruelty, viciousness and illegality. There is no real dispute that this is happening, but it seems natural to assume that this action is counterproductive to Israeli strategy and it is a product of dysregulated ideological fervour. This is by no means a safe or sound assumption. There are clear benefits for Israel in ostentatiously promulgating terrible crimes, beginning with the effect of terrorising people in Gaza and demoralising Palestinians and their allies throughout the world.
Israel is using its acts of brutality to wage psychological war on Palestinians and those who oppose the violence and oppression visited upon them. These acts work on different levels and it is clear to see that currently Israel seeks to avoid publicising its acts in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, but allows acts perpetrated in Gaza and on Palestinians taken from Gaza to be seen widely. In doing so they show how little they fear losing support among the international general public. They do this all knowing that a significant minority of Westerners, mostly due to racist views about Palestinians, will never waver in their support for Israeli violence even at its most inhumane and extreme.
Powerlessness
Many people reading this will bear emotional scars from these months of slaughter and suffering and fear and grief. We have witnessed so much of the violence in graphic and often intimate detail. How can any activist, doing whatever they can to bring an end to the horror, not feel a sense of impotence? There seems to be no avenue to make our voices heard, to exert our will. We are constantly reminded that our efforts seem to change nothing. Each new obscenity feels like another gut-punch meant to teach us again and again that there are no limits. There is no red line.
There is a reason for the feeling of helplessness in that it is the product of design. Israel is using its ability to act with impunity to create that sense of impotence and futility. At the same time the parade of atrocities we see, whether by accident or design, also serves to distance activists from our compatriots. Even though most people in the general public favour peace in Gaza, they are woefully misinformed about the nature of the violence there. Those people are led to believe it is a military conflict, in which civilian deaths are collateral damage. They do not understand what genocide means and they think that activists who use the term are either exaggerating for rhetorical reasons or are deranged fanatics. If you try to explain by using illustrations of what is going on each day in Gaza, they will think you a wide-eyed partisan and are highly unlikely to believe you. They will make the reasonable seeming inference that if what you are claiming were true then it would be talked about on the news and our political leaders would behave much more assertively in reaction to these atrocious crimes.
At times it has seemed that each atrocity by Israel is concealed and effaced by the next, like a deadly form of Gish-galloping. (Gish-galloping is a bad faith rhetorical technique, used often by Zionists, where instead of explaining a position cogently you simply overload people with a stream of arguments, many or all of which may be indefensible individually). As well as doing that on our screen, it feels as if Zionists are also enacting this as a violent psychological warfare technique. We are being deliberately overwhelmed by a relentless grinding tempo of massacre upon massacre. Events such as the Superbowl final are exploited for their distracting power, but more prominent acts of Israeli violence are themselves used as camouflage for further murder, such as when the IDF used the aftermath of the Flour Massacre to kill many aid workers.
When it suits them, Israeli officials know that they can lower the rate of death so that, having themselves set a bar of what is newsworthy violence, they know with certainty that news media will ignore or bury this increasingly banal mass killing. They have completely corrupted the news media through manipulation of their established practices – the “news values” that guide them on what is and is not worthy of passing on to the masses. This works alongside practices of direct control, covert control, lobbying, and flak to create a system in which the critical reporting of Israeli violence is disproportionately infrequent and is always blunted leaving the talking points of apologists unchallenged. For the general public this means that the deaths and mutilations they see become a form of background noise because the root causes seem disputable and the complicity of our own governments is made to seem at least excusable if not tactically merited in the apparently confusing and contended circumstances. Israel does not seek to win public support for its genocide, it seeks to control the nature of public disapprobation by ensuring that the stark one-sided nature of its genocidal onslaught is hidden.
Every military action of the IDF has a propaganda dimension. This is the culmination of a long history of violent psychological operations developed by the US in the last seventy years. From Edward Lansdale hanging the bodies of exsanguinated rebels from trees in the Philippines after WWII, to the hybrid military/psychological/political onslaught of “Shock and Awe” unleashed on Iraq in 2003, the distinction between warfare and propaganda has become non-existent. Clearly the main approach for the IDF is to maximise the power of indirect violence through hunger, exposure, deprivation and disease. The violent agonies of displacement and famine have never been understood by the general public, and the situation in Gaza has few parallels because of its sustained and inescapable nature. Yet while they exploit the media habit of silence on this form of violence to assuage the general public, they also use targeted dissemination of more shocking violence that they know will reach only those who already oppose their oppression. For example, there is the aforementioned Telegram channel that an IDF psychological warfare unit created to disseminate images of graphic violence, destruction and overt war crimes. Their material reached the activist population of the West through social media, and may have featured in news of non-Western countries, but did not reach the general Western public.
The invisible violence of diseases, homelessness, fear, dislocation, constant exposure to discomfort, lives arrested and deprived of aspiration and meaning is as nothing to the Western public. At the same time the more shocking graphic images of violence are also absent from their lives. But while the opiated masses live in the smog of manufactured acquiescence, activists are bombarded with a surfeit of graphic imagery that may also serve to dull the emotions. Israel can choose to attack the morale of the activist population by creating messages through acts that we can read but the general public cannot, acts that we know are true but can never prove. They can sadistically terrorise, hunt and murder Refaat Alareer. They can take their time massacring Hind Rajab, her family, and her rescuers. They can deliberately leave Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan alive to spread the sense of terror and helplessness. All or most of it must be deliberate, but we cannot demonstrate this let alone prove it to such a degree that people who assume that such things can never happen will change their worldview.
Israel uses its impunity to display its impunity. The sadism is functional. The Palestinians in Gaza become like mice cornered by a cruel cat while we watch in horror unable to intervene, unable to reach, unable even to comfort. In Gaza the people are subject to every imaginable attack. True to the nature of genocide the onslaught occurs at once on many levels, each multiplying the damage of the others. Outside of Gaza, though, we are all subject to a psychological attack. They are using the techniques of “learned helplessness” on us all.
Absurdities and Epistemic Bifurcation
There is a saying derived from Voltaire that has been honed over a few centuries to: “Those who can persuade us to believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.” Our society produces absurdity by controlling what is and what is not speakable. This is a self-perpetuating system as each incident that is interpreted in that restricted light is another data point proving that the sort of event that is excluded from consideration must never happen because there are no examples of it happening. Certain historical analyses that are plausible according to the specifically pertinent facts are considered inadmissible because they contravene a predetermined framework of the way the world works. Most commonly we see such contentions labelled as “conspiracy theories” (CT).
I do not want to alienate those who struggle against the right-wing CT community, but the term itself is toxic. What is and is not labelled “conspiracy theory” has nothing to do with whether or not something involves a conspiracy, nor is it valid to criticise a theory on the grounds that it posits a conspiracy. Those people who use the term seem to have no idea of the weight of the anti-intellectual shackles that they are helping to fetter humanity with. That which is and is not considered CT is determined by naked power. For example, in a thousand years historians will look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq and will probably take it as read that the war occurred due to the quantity and high quality oil in Iraqi territory. Tony Blair, however, successfully argued that “the oil conspiracy is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it.” So instead of a banal imperial reality that is in total accord with overt US foreign policy doctrine (the “Carter doctrine”), the news media gave far more credence to the elaborate tales of intelligence sources such as “Curveball”, tales of mobile weapons labs, yellowcake lies, the “dodgy dossier”, fever-dreams of missiles hitting “British soil”, and so forth. The banal and historically normal explanation was a “conspiracy theory”, but the elaborate and unrealistic tissue of complex fabrications was acceptable even though each contention involved a high number of conspiracies. So much for “conspiracy theory”.
Thus there is a growing two-way credibility gap. There is an epistemic bifurcation that is part of a wider atomisation that is creating a world of mutually exclusive realities. The empire has taken the Roman principle of divide et impera and worked out how to send it through our eyes and into our brains on an individual level. I have long remarked on the fact that US actions are often clearly meant to be read in two ways – one message to the imperial masses, and a very different one to those who resist. To the disempowered masses of the “Arab street”, for example, they are often sending the message that they are a ruthless, savage, mass-murdering genocidal power. The very same acts used to send that message, though, are often framed in the West as being acts against the barbaric violence of the people they are killing. Nor do they have any scruples about re-imagining themselves as victims. Their prolific expansive use of unmatched military violence against much weaker people becomes something they have had forced upon them by their unwitting well-intentioned entanglement with the dark quagmire of non-Western incivility. And then, as per Frankie Boyle’s famous quip, “they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.” That heart-of-darkness shit just keeps happening to the poor bastards, and somehow they never learn. The Panglossian optimism of the “Whig theory of history” has been replaced with the whingeing narcissism of the “Shitlib theory of history” where the perpetrators are always the victims (and Trump was, would be, and always will be 100 times worse).
The absurdity of the mainstream worldview does not come from any individual incident, it comes from the cumulative effect of excluding certain possibilities from consideration over and over again. This feeds the vulgar empiricism of those who always insist that positive proof is necessary for some interpretations, but not for others. Such people do not like any suggestion that a pattern might be discerned, or even sought to be discerned, among events which share common characteristics. Ironically (but not really ironically) right-wing activists who oppose the “mainstream” will sometimes exploit these behaviours to create bad faith attacks on the bad faith orthodoxy. For example, some anti-vaccination activists question the viral origins of AIDS and SARSCov2 on the basis of a vulgar empiricist claim that ignores all of the statistical links as being insufficient as they are not direct demonstrations of a laboratory infection leading to the attributed disease. These people are ridiculous, but effectively this is what orthodox scholars in some fields do all the time. The thing that makes this apparent right-wing dissent ironically unironic is that these dissident activists are largely controlled by a bunch of astroturfing billionaires and their toadies. I would go so far as to say that I have a theory that there is a conspiracy among some very wealthy people to control public policy by creating flak for governments through loud and over-resourced fake activists.
Now that I have accidentally outed myself as a proud conspiracy theorist, I feel empowered to say that sometimes we should consider that things may be as they first appear rather than insisting that things must be explained in a certain way. There is always an assumption that “civilised” governments and their military arms will not do certain things like killing their own civilians or committing genocidal violence against others. No number of proven historical cases of US, UK or Israel doing such things will be taken into account. In reality, governments in general are well demonstrated to frequently exceed the bounds of behaviour that any normal person would consider tolerable. The Zionist 3 (US, UK, Israel) even more regularly exceed the violent inhumanity of most contemporary societies. I am not going to list proven crimes here, but if I did so it would show that no action of these governments should be judged on the basis that they would not cross certain lines or that they are constrained in any way by morality. No doubt there are people and institutions that limit some atrocities, but what is limited is determined by pragmatic considerations of power. The moral calculus is complex and contended, but the most important fact to remember is that there is no ultimate red line. If the stars align the right way for the worst amongst them, they will begin implementing a “final solution” for the Palestinian people and we are already well along the road to that horrific destination.
In April, a World Central Kitchen team of 7 aid workers was slaughtered with thorough and deliberate overkill in the “deconflicted zone” of Deir al-Balah. Orders passed through multiple channels to achieve this. Israel’s non-explanation was that they thought that armed militants had taken one of the vehicles. They initially mentioned a possible kidnapping, but that was not part of the later report possibly because outside of Israel it is not considered normal to respond to a suspected kidnapping by killing the victims. The Israeli report claims that they mistook a guard for a militant and thought that one of the aid workers was another militant because someone allegedly thought that a bag was a gun. At no stage was there a suggestion that the imaginary militants posed any immediate threat to anyone. That would suggest that they were not looking for people they needed to target, nor people they should target, but rather the people they could get away with targeting and killing. Command gave permission to engage the vehicle with the suspected militants. After attacking that one vehicle Israel claims that two soldiers went against procedure by attacking the other two without permission. According to Israel it was all done in error. It was a very thorough mistake to take the lives of every one of the seven aid workers in the convoy.
This all happened at a time when the Israeli government was fighting diplomatically to be allowed to block aid entering Gaza altogether and many Israelis have shown a violent antagonism against humanitarian aid and to aid workers. The IDF report begs so many questions that even if taken at face value it does not preclude premeditated murder. It is not an exoneration of criminal intent it is a narrative framework provided for those who already assume that these deaths cannot have been purposive. Yet it was such a very comprehensive attack and Israelis have no lack of motive at a collective or individual level. Whether seen as a military strategy to deny supplies to armed militants, or an intrinsic part of the genocidal war against the Palestinian people, or a product of anger and hatred towards those who seek to give succour to the enemies of Israel, there are clear reasons why someone might deliberately use a pretext to kill an entire aid team.
We don’t know for sure that Israeli individuals at some level in the chain of command decided to kill an entire aid team, but the circumstances and results certainly lend themselves to that possibility. These killings led to a result that the Israeli government desired. Some aid organisations halted operations meaning that aid was further restricted, as was the number of outsiders coming into Gaza to help and (perhaps more crucially) to bear witness. Like the 2010 killings of 9 activists trying to deliver aid to Gaza by sea, the WCK killings sent a message. These deaths set a precedent and as we have seen in the case of recent attacks on aid vehicles in Gaza, Israel can attack without consequence any time it wants and aid organisations have no choice but to suspend operations.
Many of you reading this may be feeling uneasy that I am suggesting that in all probability someone with some level of authority in Israel decided to kill an entire aid team. The conventional wisdom is that, as Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Absent some genuine scientific or statistical expectation, though, this is the fallacy of conservatism – the idea that of two or more interpretations of events one is to be preferred as being more mundane. In political matters the weight of conservatism is usually purely ideological and has nothing to do with any scientific criteria.
Is it shocking to think that some Israelis actually intended all of the WCK workers to be killed? Perhaps it is shocking, but it is anything but extraordinary. Some might object that they wouldn’t risk it because they could not necessarily get away with it. But they can get way with it, and they know it. As long as Israel itself investigates and exonerates itself of intent in the short-term it doesn’t matter if later investigations bring that into question. Our leaders in politics and media do not ask for truth, they ask for fig leaves. Once they have the fig leaf, they add it as a page to the Encyclopedia of Official Truth. Thus, the lie that a possible thing is not possible, becomes the absurdity of claiming that these perfectly plausible things can never happen.
All of this is made even more sickening and alienating by the overt way that Israel can systematically kill Palestinian aid workers. The absurdity of the Encyclopedia of Official Truth is deepened in these cases, not by the insufficiency, but by complete silence. Israelis can openly share footage of themselves committing atrocities and other war crimes, but despite the unimpeachable source, it is not considered newsworthy. The victims are not considered newsworthy. The violence of the genocide in Gaza has become unremarkable, as has the violence of settlers and security forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not news, they may say, but there is a bit of a catch here. The existence of passenger aircraft is not news either, but news media do not act as if they don’t exist. When discussing Palestine the media are like people who try to explain air disasters without ever admitting that aeroplanes exist. That is because, on the one hand, the ongoing systematic violence against Palestinians is too banal and well-understood to bear reporting on but on the other hand the systematic genocidal nature of violence, which is the key context, is politically controversial. Therefore, the thing that is too well known in one sense must become a complete unknown when reporting on related events. Just how did the lifeless bodies of these 83 people end up scattered here amidst this metallic debris less than an hour after departing from an airport? What could explain the event? Is it because they were being used as human shields, or might a stray Hamas rocket have killed them?
Elite Capture and the Bonds of Shame
On The Daily Show Rob Corddry responded to the Abu Ghraib scandal by satirising the collective US position, “...the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a ... well, we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.” The political leaders of the Western world and most other countries went along with exactly that contention, and they continually reaffirm it to this day. They do exactly the same with regard to Israel, but the results are far more grotesque. Israel doesn’t have the soft-power of the US and its image as a liberal Western nation doesn’t have as much sway in convincing us to ignore reality.
It is increasingly hard for people to believe the narrative of plucky little Israel, living at the outer edge of civilisation withstanding the onslaughts of the barbarian hordes that surround it. Some people have clearly internalised a racist blind hatred of Palestinians as such, but for those who haven’t the pretextual nature of Israel’s “security” narrative is wearing thin as they continue relentless violence and unconcealed dispossession of Palestinians. Even the average regular Western consumer of “Islamist terrorist” content is likely to find the generic conventions weakened if not violated by the glimpses and hints that slip through to them of house demolitions, land theft and infrastructure destruction. A glimpse of a road being destroyed as shown above may not immediately cause a rethink, but it will sow the seeds of dissonance and the Zionist “security” narrative will seem stretched thinner and thinner until one day it just snaps, and that person is lost forever to the Zionist cause. Meanwhile the Israelis themselves are finding it hard to maintain the façade of civilised morality as the culture of fanatical racial hatred deepens. Their public relations on social media now feature gleefully captioned images of the bloody bodies of slain enemies. They are speaking more and more to a narrow group of fanatics who have no interest in outdated imagery of liberal Israel as the bulwark against extremism. They are speaking to a racist core that want a fascistic militaristic muscular Israel standing against the barbarian Asiatic hordes like the 300 at Thermopylae.
Our beloved leaders in the Western political, media, business and academic world largely speak as the racist Zionists do, but without the foaming mouths and spray of spittle. They are not enthusiasts. They are not ideologues. They are measured and pragmatic. They are not ideological fanatics, rather they are fanatical Panzaists who believe this to be the most banal of all possible worlds.¹ If a giant were to suddenly appear and swipe them with a massive spiked club, their last words as they lay mangled and dying would be a warning about the dangers of windmills. They know that Israel is a bastion of Western civilisation and embodies the values of the West. Historical reality notwithstanding, Western values include the knowledge that all of the horrific violence they commit is only ever because they had really good reasons and ultimately had no real choice in the matter. In fact not doing the violence would be a complete dereliction of Western values. To eschew righteous killing would be insulting to the memory of those who died in far-off jungles to protect our freedoms. It would be like wiping your arse with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, the Magna Carta, and the screenplay to the beloved M*A*S*H finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” .
Western atrocities are always undertaken to prevent something that we are assured will be worse, not just for “interests” but generally speaking for the people that will be shelled, bombed, shot, displaced, and starved. When the West kills people it is really in those people’s interests if they could but see it. As an unnamed US Army Major told Peter Arnett in 1968, “It became necessary to destroy the town [Bến Tre] to save it.” Scaled up the Western attitude could accurately be parodied as, “the only thing worse than committing genocide is not committing genocide”. ²
Little that has come after October 7 2023 really supports Israel’s counterterrorism discourse, but each day brings more evidence that belies it. The numbers of dead are bad. The optics are bad. The logic is bad. The sheer duration is bad. The reports from third parties are bad. The diplomacy is bad. The court cases are bad. The polls are bad. The context is screaming in the ears of our leaders: “THIS IS GENOCIDE!” Despite this, they still live in a world where it is very costly to call the genocide a genocide, and there is no cost at all for outright genocide denial. Yet as “Israel’s right to defend itself” becomes ever more self-evidently detached from reality, none of these people are shifting their opinions, in fact many are hardening.
If the world worked the way it is meant to work, world leaders should fear the consequences of supporting a genocide. It is a crime to support genocide, whereas there is no crime of being insufficiently helpful to Israel (they just act like there is). In political reality (which influences realms beyond politics) the formal and theoretical situation is reversed. Some people, such as the leader from a small leftist party or a lecturer in Middle Eastern history, can say “genocide”, but those with the authority to speak as part of the establishment must prevaricate or make an outright denial using the aforementioned fallacy of conservatism. As typically seen in the academic world (for example) to speak certain truths you must declare yourself to be partisan or “critical” and banish yourself to the fenced-off free-speech zone where dangerous truths are quarantined in containment. In contrast, those who speak for power (such as those with administrative positions) must privilege power over evidence as a source of truth.
As the distance between the evidence and the official “truth” grows ever starker, you might expect that people’s positions might change, but we can see that this is not happening. Leaders will not change unless they are pushed with extreme force. They are trapped, you see. The worse things get the more they are psychologically and politically tied to being genocide enablers. At high levels of any hierarchy there is always a survivorship bias in favour of expediency. Those who act inexpediently do not keep climbing the rungs of the power ladder. Expediency is the water in which our fishy leaders swim, breathe and defecate, but even they must morally rationalise to tell themselves that their self-interested actions are for the greater good. For most (apart from a few sociopaths and outright neofeudalists) their careers are built on the foundation that they must advance themselves in order to advance humanity. Once they have decided on the righteousness of their position they have access to all of the human arts of evading, ignoring, or explaining away undesirable evidence.
As the visible evidence of terrible suffering grows, those who support the causes of that suffering become morally tied to the position. From what may have been a relatively mild support, as time and body count grows it becomes ever more necessary to believe in the value of the cause while the atrocious cost skyrockets. Those who keep acting in support of the violence become de facto members of a baby-killer club. Like those in clubs whose initiations involve social transgressions, such as humiliation or violence or coerced sexual behaviour, they become tied by bonds of shame that are also potential bonds of blackmail. The leaders are detached from the herd of the naive public – the masses that do not and cannot ever understand the sordid but unavoidable realities of real power and true politics. This is wonderful news for Imperialists and Zionists. The Zionist 3 cannot maintain a legitimacy that will convince a rational person to support the genocide, so they want to trap an elite class in an irrational state that is isolated from democratic influences.
In far more basic practical terms it is also impossible for leaders, especially those directly involved in politics, to change position on something that is so significant and has such a naked moral dimension. The reality of our politics is that any admission of, well, anything at all is a weakness to be exploited. That is even more so if one chooses to betray the cause of Israel and the US empire. In the media world, for example (though equally in other areas) the flak machinery in the “propaganda model” theorised by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent is now reinforced by what appears to be a fascist 5th column within leadership roles who exploit any weakness as an occasion for oppressive over-reaction. Thus, any number of people can complain about media bias against Palestinians and it will be greeted at best with empty gestures but in contrast any accusations that criticism of Israel is “antisemitism” maybring serious consequences even when completely without merit. Some of this is due to the work that has been done (for example with the IHRA definition of “antisemitism”) to create an institutional bias, but it seems equally clear that ideologues or corrupt agents will seize on any pretext to purge the heretic.
The more absurd the elite position the more defensive and hostile to questioning they become. The Marie Antoinette vibes are getting stronger and stronger as they do everything to isolate themselves from the wrong voices or the wrong questions. Some of us masochistically geek-out to footage of Mark Miller and similar creatures contorting words into unrecognisable abstract sculpture, but we are a small minority of connoisseurs of political bollocks. We are, to coin a term, wank wonks.³ By contrast, normal people only experience the political speech of proper leaders, not spokespeople. None of the reporters who push Miller into verbal nonsense by being direct and persistent will ever be allowed to ask such questions of Biden, Trump or Harris. No Western leader will be pressed with hard factual details on the realities of the genocide, and we all know it. So, presumably, do any political reporters who value the “access” that lets them earn a living.
The walls of allowable thought become ever thicker and opaque to those ensconced within, but equally they are brittle. The organisers of the Democratic National Convention did not even allow a pro-Harris Palestinian-American delegate to deliver a vetted speech because even letting her humanity be seen is a political cost to them, regardless of her co-opted words. Things are so delicate that they could not accord a reminder of the plight of millions of Palestinians to be seen as valid in the same sense that the plight of 100 Israeli hostages is seen as valid. Violent societies often employ selective sentimentality to erase the humanity of the enemy, even to the point of total hypocrisy.
¹ With apologies to Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote), Voltaire (Candide), and Robert Sheckley (Mindswap).
² Further apologies, this time to Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray).
³ Apologies, in this instance, are owed directly to the reader.
Our Fascist Reality and How to Fight Back
People are tired. People are demoralised. Yet people are persisting. There seems to be no diminution of anti-genocide activism despite the hollow feeling of impotence that pervades. Stopping now seems unthinkable, despite having so little to show for extraordinary amounts of time, energy, imagination, tears and anger. One of the problems is that a lot that we do is premised on the idea of changing public opinion. This is difficult when access to the eyes and ears of the public is dominated by bad faith equivocation and outright lies, but it is essential. It is essential, but unfortunately it is by no means sufficient.
If we were a democratic civilisation then winning over the public would be the end-game, but it isn’t. Even if we can’t persuade a majority in the West that the genocide is a genocide, they have at least come to understand that an attack on Hamas does not justify the death and destruction that is happening. Unfortunately, the public doesn’t have any say in government policy in general and international relations in particular. The traditional view is that we inhabit “distorted polyarchies” which are pluralistic but in which political power is highly skewed in favour of those with wealth and status. Part of this system has long been the manipulation of the public through indoctrination and censorship. Great figures in what liberals stupidly refer to as “democratic” theory, such as Walter Lippmann, openly despised the intellects of the vulgar masses and believed that “democracy” required the “manufacture of consent” (hence the title of the Herman/Chomsky classic). Sheldon Wolin referred to “managed democracy” leading to a resultant “inverted totalitarianism” where a demoralised confused public is dominated by corporate power. In the 20 years since Wolin wrote that, however, we have seen the rise of a global fascist movement that exists in the same structure of inverted totalitarianism. “Managed democracy” has become “managed fascism”.
In managed fascism anomie pervades the dispirited and/or precarious masses. The resulting discontent is increasingly harnessed by the very people causing discontent, harnessed and used to create a force of reactionary ideologues empowered to crush any who threaten to enact reform or revolt. These new brownshirts are not just in the streets. There are keyboard brownshirts, thinktank brownshirts and boardroom brownshirts. They belong to no single party, but they tend to follow their leaders with such fervent myopia that they might not notice the core of reactionary patriarchal racial-supremacy that they are signing up for. The fascist ideology of our age may not have a single Führer, but it has a single essence that is cohering rapidly.
The good news is that the steps we must follow to force our own countries to fight against genocide in Gaza will also serve to weaken inverted totalitarianism and to combat the burgeoning fascism of our age. We must work to infiltrate actual democracy into our political institutions, we must work to make leaders fear the public, and we must force reason and intellect back into the public political discourse in place of dishonesty and bullying. An awful lot of groundwork has been laid by the posting and postering and protesting of the last year. Possibilities are opening, though the road ahead is not short nor easy.
The first thing that needs to be understood is that any ceasefire will not be a ceasefire. The past has shown that when Israel raises the bar on its levels of slaughter that bar is never subsequently lowered. Permanent violent assault is the future of the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territories. Ever deeper immiseration, ever deeper control, and ever deeper humiliation. Israel has gone all in and there is no real going back, only further charades and chicanery. For this reason we can safely commit to the long haul rather than succumb to the sense of immediate need. If public opinion is reset by a pretence of peace, we need to show people that there is no peace and continue from that point. One thing should now be clear to most activists – something that has been true from the start but has been well hidden – the genocide will not end until Palestine is free. That can only mean one democratic state from the river to the sea. If some of the citizens refer to that state as Israel then let them as long as others can call it Palestine and all the people that belong there can call it home.
People will need patience and diligence more than anything. The long haul means knowing that you will just keep coming back to the work when you can. It means thinking of angles and approaches when you can. It means cultivating yourself and others when you can. It means switching from thinking of goals to thinking of processes.
The long haul approach means approaching the heights of power by building power, not arriving as a petitioner with doffed cap asking for justice from the lord. What I mean by that is using the force of democracy to change things at the attainable level and building upwards from there. A successful model in the past has been to bring activism to local bodies, even if only for symbolic resolutions. It works because the core of activists are not a “vanguard” or in any way analogous to the brownshirts mentioned above. It works because activists represent the public sentiment and, at the local level, you can face down politicians who can’t spin their way out of the fact.
People have been building connections within unions and associations, places that hold vestiges of democratic power in our pluralistic fascist societies. Once these bodies are forced to take an anti-genocide stance there is much that can be achieved. For example, if medical unions are made to engage in the issues they can issue statements over hospital attacks or murders of health workers and agitate for the media to cover the issues in a manner that focuses on Israel’s intentional targeting of medical personnel.
All aspects of activism aim at the same thing, exerting moral, intellectual and democratic power in polities governed by people to whom these are all alien concepts. In these times of dire democratic deficit the power of the people is more or less the same as it is under a dictatorship, but that power is not to be despised. If the masses speak with one voice they have all the power – well sort of. An important caveat is that they have to speak with one predominant voice and that voice must be issuing a demand. It is not sufficient that the majority of the public oppose the genocide, it must be that a clear self-conscious and confident majority makes it known to the government that they will not tolerate continued collaboration with genocide. This is a blunt instrument. The public cannot demand specific policies as easily as it can veto broad flavours of policy.
Public intolerance of government complicity in genocide does not necessarily entail specific disruptions such as riots or strikes or direct action. All that is needed is that a norm against genocide denial is established in the collective consciousness. We already know that this works because such a norm already exists regarding the Holocaust. Mainstream public figures cannot support genocide denial in that instance and it must be extended to this genocide. The key is that people at all levels know that their complicity will be visible such that a politician dare not deny the genocide because the journalist would not dare normalise their denial nor fail to mention it. To create that new political reality is going to take a broad-front approach. All avenues of intellectual resistance must be pursued at all times until the war is won. There can be no half-measures because we know beyond all reasonable doubt that half-measures or compromises are merely false hopes, rest stops on the long road to defeat. Ending the genocide means ending the genocide, and that means ending the occupation.
The fight for Palestinian freedom is the fight for our own freedom. This creeping managed fascism is no joke. The 1930s showed that once fascism got its jackboots under the table, though it may have been a fringe belief to begin with, its values grew within the wider society. The same is happening now. In the US and the UK particularly we have seen increased activity of right-wing racist mobs. While there has been a selectively firm and rapid response against some of the rank-and-file racist rioters in the UK, the leading provocateurs are unmolested. Meanwhile peaceful direct action on the left is punished far more severely while terrorism laws are being used to oppress selected individuals for opposing genocide. Over time fascist politics create fascist populations. There can be no better illustration of this fact than what has happened to the minds of Israelis in the past few decades.
The reason that what is happening is fascistic rather than simply plutocratic and authoritarian is because of the power of old and new media to create cadres of hateful fanatics – useful cadres. The logic is the same as that which led Stalin to become such an enthusiastic exponent of Russian nationalism despite a lifetime devoted to an internationalist ideology and despite not even being Russian. Nationalism was a tool of power that had been lying around. The aspect of fascism that is relevant here is the epistemic ideology of combat and enmity that followers take on. They become anti-intellectual self-programming robots who do not build an episteme from observed facts, but rather populate their own and each other’s mind with “facts” created from the predetermined worldview. The manipulation of old media by people like Rupert Murdoch has fed this, but we also need to bear in mind the harmful effects of the ideological isolation present in the online world. Each person’s phone becomes a pocket beer hall where thousands of impassioned preachers of hate can be watched holding forth on the need for action, the need to violently punish the malefactors who (in their fevered heads) have wronged them.
Israel has effectively lost its battle to colonise Palestine. The only future for the project would be an ethnic cleansing and annexation of all the occupied territories, which the world cannot tolerate if it claims to respect law and rights. The only path for Zionist victory is through an international regime of fascism – a world where the most powerful countries reject the rule of law and in which the only reality the masses ever experience is that which the rich wish them to see. So, you may ask, what’s new? What is new is the matter of degree that will be required. Israel must now defeat the growing legion of institutions that, after decades of bending over backwards to create a Palestine exception, have been forced by the hard work of grassroots activists to accept the humanity of Palestinians and the inadmissibility of denying otherwise universal rights on the basis of statelessness (and/or the special pleading of the “Jewish” state).
I am not suggesting that increasing fascism will be forced on the entire Western world just to support Zionism. If anything I feel it works the other way around. Support for Israel is more useful as a pretext for suppressing political dissent than the inverse. At the same time the utterly unmoving steadfast support shown by the US regime for Israel shows how important this is to the empire. When US officials cite US “interests” we need to pay very close heed. In 1986 Joe Biden said would have to “invent an Israel to protect US interests in the region” if Israel didn’t exist. Nearly four decades later he reiterated, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” We should also recall that we are in the third decade of what some US officials referred to as the “Long War”, a war they predicted was going to take 30 years. The scope of the Long War was global, but of the known prominent targets all have been targeted with hybrid or outright warfare and all suffer ongoing violence. The “War on Terror” was the pretext for the Long War, but as the history of Africom shows, the war has a tendency to start before the terror. (The same can be said of the Iraq insurgency which was in response to the depredations of “counterinsurgency” and the NLF insurgency in late 50s South Viet Nam which was prompted by the suppression supposedly meant to quell it).
I cannot even imagine what the ultimate aim of the Long War is, if such a thing exists. All I can say is that this seems like a very dangerous period in terms of a possible overt World War, and Palestine seems to be at the centre. The end of a 30 year Long War also roughly coincides with the believed 2000 year anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ. Many millenarian Christians feel that this time the end really is nigh. As frightening as the prospect of an apocalyptic war is, we cannot assuage or mollify the aggressors because they are beyond such measures. We can only constrain them by defeating them and if there is a risk of wider war it only grows with the diplomatic and military empowerment of Israel’s genocide.
This is our fight, and by “our” I mean everyone who is sane. Will enough people realise this? I don’t know, but I will end this article with an observation made by TikTok and Twitter user @highlyvibey: “anyone who’s okay with slaughtering children for their political ambitions is okay with killing you too”.
Kieran Kelly researches and writes about genocide for his website ongenocide.com