Am I the only person in America who finds it impossible to support either side in the appalling slaughter in Gaza? Not that my personal opinion counts for anything. Does anybody's? I see people marching in the streets waving flags and chanting slogans, and I wonder whence comes their certitude.
William Butler Yeats' brilliant 1919 poem "The Second Coming" echoes fully a century later.
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
Israel is led by a cunning war criminal bent on revenge for the monstrous act of terrorism that began the war on Oct. 7; Hamas leaders are fanatical lunatics heedless of the lives of Palestinians they purport to represent.
Enraged partisans on both sides invoke their gods, each convinced that mass murder is divinely sanctioned.
"Passionate intensity," indeed.
Religious wars, America's Founding Fathers understood, are invariably the worst.
If Israel has a strategy apart from the political survival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition government, it is not evident to outside observers. They are trying to solve a problem they refuse to acknowledge with 2,000-pound bombs. The problem being the continued existence of several million essentially stateless Palestinians who have nowhere to go and every right to exist as their ancestors have for centuries on land that Israeli "settlers" claim God has promised to Jews in perpetuity.
By so doing, Israel has forfeited the good will of democratically inclined citizens and governments around the world, while accusations of antisemitic bias made against critics ring increasingly hollow. Bombing and shelling hospitals, schools, civilian neighborhoods and refugee camps, killing many thousands of women and children, and blockading aid convoys to the point of widespread famine: These things seem more the actions of a Russian than an Israeli army.
The murdering bastards of Hamas could hardly have wished for a more potent boost to their propaganda.
Writing in The New Yorker, David Remnick summarizes public opinion inside Israel:
"Seven months after Oct. 7, it is still Oct. 8, the day after, in the State of Israel. The country remains in mourning, a depressed state of being that alternates among rage at Israel's enemies; rage at its leaders; anxiety about the hostages in Gaza; excruciating doubt about the future of the country; and bewilderment that so much of the world has turned its attention to the horrific, ever-growing number of dead and wounded Palestinians."
Sadly, this kind of moral paralysis is echoed by what outside military observers say is a complete failure by the Netanyahu government to envision a strategy for the day after tomorrow. Even as the Israeli Defense Forces appear to be mounting a full-scale invasion of Rafah in the south of Gaza, for example, they are having to simultaneously retake neighborhoods in the north that they seized, and then abandoned, months ago.
Largely because the Netanyahu government refuses to make plans for the governance of Gaza -- they refuse to form an occupation government, or allow anything resembling a Palestinian state -- the Israelis appear to have stumbled into a strategic limbo: an ongoing game of Whac-A-Mole, with the civilian population left to wander in the rubble searching for food and water, like extras in a Mad Max film with donkey carts instead of souped-up trucks.
Such rhetoric, however, trivializes the awful reality. What's going on in Gaza is not so much a war as a massacre.
An American army officer recently resigned from the Defense Intelligence Agency, posting an open letter online. According to The Washington Post, Maj. Harrison Mann explained that his work in support of Israel's invasion of Gaza had burdened his conscience past the breaking point.
"The past months have presented us with the most horrific and heartbreaking images imaginable ... and I have been unable to ignore the connection between those images and my duties here. This caused me incredible shame and guilt.
"This unconditional support also encourages reckless escalation that risks wider war," he warned.
It's a humanitarian catastrophe with madmen and murderers on every side. With sane political solutions ruled out of bounds, one can only hope for moral revulsion like that of Maj. Mann to bring about a ceasefire. Peace can then sometimes grow habitual.
Here in the USA, cranks and holy warriors are getting a lot more attention than they deserve. Writing in her New York Times column, Michelle Goldberg quoted a Columbia University professor who spoke of feeling "jubilation and awe" on Oct. 7 and a Georgia Republican congressman who warned Columbia's president that the school was "going to be cursed by God, the God of the Bible and the God over our flag."
Accessories to murder, the two of them.
Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of "The Hunting of the President" (St. Martin's Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.
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