Category: History

On October 7, 2023, about 6000 militants from Hamas and various paramilitary groups invaded Israel from Gaza, following a barrage of 4000–5000 missiles. The militants killed 1,195 people, most of whom were civilians, murdered in sometimes horrific manners preceded by abuse or torture. The indiscriminate massacres included non-Israeli foreigners among the victims. For a world long inured to Arab-Israeli violence, this was a new level for the Gazan militants, both in its scope and its wanton cruelty. The term “terrorism” hardly captures the utter lack of moral restraint exhibited by the attackers, who were instructed to kill as many people as possible.

As always, both sides in the conflict can point to outrages committed by the other side to justify their own excesses. In this instance, Hamas claimed it was responding to the long-standing blockade of Gaza, the encroachment of Israeli settlements, and threats to the al-Aqsa mosque. Even if these claims had merit, any international sympathy toward the Gazan plight was seriously vitiated by shock toward this murderous campaign. No ethical person would want to defend such barbarism.

In the ensuing months, a politically struggling Prime Minister Netanyahu found popular support for retaliatory actions against Hamas and its indirect supporters, particularly Hezbollah in Lebanon. Unlike what one might expect in the U.S. or other Western countries, Netanyahu did not enjoy a popularity boost from the war, which is why he continually postponed elections his party would surely lose. Israelis are accustomed to war as a fact of life, so it cannot be used as a distraction. Many blamed Netanyahu for this appalling failure of security and intelligence, and later for the failure to secure the release of hostages.

After initial successes in destroying the leadership and infrastructure of Hamas and Hezbollah, including their tunnel network, Netanyahu did not relent. He continued to demolish civilian areas of Gaza, including hospitals, and imposed a total blockade to the point that Gazans went months without any food aid in 2025. The deliberate systematic destruction of sources of food and medicine, wanton killing of civilians and reduction of entire areas to rubble, were not new to Netanyahu and his Likud predecessors. Again, the scale was greater than ever and disproportionate to the offense. To date, over 67,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, including 450 deaths from starvation. Even accepting Netanyahu’s claim that 16,000 of these were militants, that means over 75% of the dead are civilians. This does not even count the various maimed, wounded, sick, hungry and displaced.

Netanyahu and others in his government have long considered themselves justified in war without mercy against the Palestinians. They do not recognize any legitimacy to aspirations for Palestinian statehood, and have long opposed the two-state solution. The demographics of Palestine imply that their intent is to subjugate or exterminate the Palestinians, since a one-state Palestine would not have a Jewish majority. The ethnic breakdown is roughly 7 million Jews and 7 million Arabs in Palestine as a whole, including Israel. In Israel proper, there are 7 million Jews and over 2 million Arab Israeli citzens. In the Gaza strip there are another 2 million Arabs, and in the West Bank there are about 3 million. Keeping the Arab populations divided is the only way Israel can maintain its numerical dominance.

Some ministers have decried the Palestinians or Gazans as rats and other dehumanizing epithets, and have used overtly genocidal language in their intentions. While the actions of the Israeli government may meet the legal definition of genocide, it need not be the case that they intend, at least for now, to exterminate the Palestinian population completely, though they have seriously contemplated a total ethnic cleansing, i.e., expulsion of Gazans from the entire area. Even if they ultimately relent from such extremes, one may wonder how the Jews, themselves the victims of the most horrific genocide in memory, should do anything remotely resembling this crime?

Many of the most militant Jews in Israel were raised or educated in the United States, or influenced by those who were. They are familiar with the militarist bravado and sense of racial entitlement that is common in the U.S. “Hit them before they hit us,” aligns not only with the U.S. imperialist justification for destroying much weaker opponents as though it were an act of courage, but also with a strain of U.S. thinking about the Holocaust. The Austrian-born Bruno Bettelheim, in his introduction to Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account (1960), lamented how the Jews misguidedly thought that by carrying on silently they could escape persecution. Instead, this passivity emboldened their persecutors, so that they could count on their captives marching into their ovens. Violent resistance, when it occurred, succeeded in killing some of the captors, but such resistance was surprisingly infrequent. Fictional fantasies of Holocaust revenge violence pepper American television and film, most notably in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009). “Never again,” in this view, seems to mean that we will not march like lambs again, but will act like lions.

This is the wrong lesson to take from the Holocaust. The idea that humans are divided into predators and prey, and it is better to be the predator or “master,” is a distinctive pathology of Nazi thought, founded on an anthropologically false notion of human origins. Emulating the Nazis on this point will not stop there, as once one adopts the habit of behaving like a predator, he will adopt the associated practices of predation. Instead, the more valuable lesson would have been to recognize what was happening in the early stages. The first step was always to dehumanize people, to strip them of their dignity and act as if social niceties were irrelevant. Once you take away someone’s human dignity, it is a short step to saying you may do anything to them.

“This is war,” is the perennial excuse for denying human dignity to others. The Geneva Conventions were introduced to take away this excuse, and it is telling that the current so-called U.S. Secretary of War speaks of the rules of engagement imposed by these conventions so disparagingly. Fascistic regimes invariably characterize whoever they wish to persecute in martial terms. This race or political party is a traitor or an enemy within. Immigrants are invading our country. An immoralist sees war everywhere, because that gives cover to his freedom from moral restraint.

The Palestinian leadership has not done itself any favors, to be sure. From the corrupt government in the West Bank to the terrorist-affiliated government in Gaza, there are good grounds for being hesitant to give the current Palestinian Authority unconditional recognition as a peer sovereign nation. Those who protest the war crimes of Israel against the Palestinians may find it difficult to distance themselves from the corrupt and violent organizations that enjoy popular support, if only because they fight back. The use of victimhood to justify criminality is not limited to the Israelis.

Netanyahu and other militaristic Zionists have cynically employed the accusation of anti-Semitism against any who would dare criticize Israel or support Palestinian autonomy. It is, to be sure, unavoidable that in any broad-based opposition to Israel, there will be some anti-Semites, especially in the Arab world where there is no such taboo against anti-Semitism or racism as there is in the West, for they are further removed from the experience of the Holocaust.

Neither Jews nor Muslims, nor many secular persons raised in those communities, place the same value on mercy toward enemies as is found in the West, following the twin legacies of Greco-Roman and Christian ethics that have informed modern liberalism. Thus there is somewhat less incentive for restraint in the Middle East than in the West, though the value of mercy is being eroded in the U.S. as well. Liberal-minded advocates of the Palestinian cause may find themselves aligned with the merciless while pleading for mercy.

We cannot expect even the simplest subtlety to be grasped by a U.S. President and Cabinet that is aggressively anti-intellectual and devoid of any principle besides power. When the current President sees a conflict between the strong and the weak, he negotiates with the strong and forces the weak to accept the settlement. This absolves him from the necessity of understanding anything about the conflict. Simplistic mentalities must identify “good guys” and “bad guys,” then side with the good guys to beat the bad guys. A conflict where neither side is fully good does not fit the formula, but they will force a fit anyway.

The result of this forced Manichaeism is to demonize, by extension, anyone who advocates for the wrong side, in this case the Palestinians. Most of the administration’s aggression against universities has been justified, at least pretextually, on the grounds that they tolerate or encourage anti-Semitic behavior. This accusation is also used as a pretext to deport anyone who criticizes Israel or advocates for the Palestinians. To consider this reasonable is to exhibit weapons-grade ignorance about the Arab or Muslim world. It would be practically unconscionable for anyone from that area not to advocate for Palestine or oppose Israeli aggression. It would be like expecting black Americans not to oppose white supremacist groups. Thus this ban on pro-Palestinian speech, apart from being unconstitutional, has the effect of restoring the so-called Muslim ban attempted during the first Trump presidency.

Immigrants are now afraid to speak on the Palestinian issue, for fear of deportation, which is exactly what the Nazi-emulating Trumpsters want and delight in. Like all cowards, they take pleasure in the fear they cause in those who have much less physical force at their disposal. Like all ignoramuses, their only eloquence is through truncheons and gun barrels.

My father was amazed that Hitler was a German and not an American, since the United States had always been a hotbed of the most virulently racist and anti-immigrant sentiment in the West. Even in modern times, when racism was put to shame in the wake of the Holocaust and the black civil rights movement, a strong bigotry toward other races and nationalities, motivated in large part by a thorough ignorance of the rest of the world, has found broad adherence among so-called middle America. To be sure, the more overtly malicious forms of racism have been replaced by relatively benign prejudices in most quarters, but the old antipathies and fears remain buried in the psyches of many. It only takes one deranged populist, incapable of filtering his id, to bring a new legitimacy to old bigotries.

The Orange Tyrant has exploited the baser impulses of the electorate, demonizing immigrants with fictions borrowed from the first ten minutes of Scarface or from whatever he saw on social media. Support for his immigration policy has stayed above 50% long after his perceived competency on the economy and other matters tanked, but at last his nakedly Nazistic practice of deporting people to hellish foreign prisons without due process has scandalized the sensibilities of middle America to the point that a majority disapprove.

Just like the original Nazis, the Trumpistas garner public support for their extremist anti-foreigner policy by appearing to limit it at first to the most distasteful and unsympathetic minority, supposedly the worst of the criminals. Exploiting the false perception that these violent criminals are numerous, they expand to an ever-wider net and hope no one notices. At first the Jews had to present papers in order not to be sent to the camps; later the Gestapo stopped checking papers. Similarly, we find summary deportation expanded even to those with legal status, and even permanent residents are not exempt from having their status revoked on specious national security grounds. The deportations to Third World prisons are defended legally on the grounds that immigration constitutes an “invasion.”

Who invaded whom? Do we need to recount all the broken treaties and genocides perpetrated against the Native Americans, who are far less numerous in this country than in most of the Americas? Should we remind the ignorant that the Republic of Texas was founded by Southern U.S. migrants to Mexico who wished to introduce slavery in a nation where it was illegal? On behalf of that noble cause, the U.S. invaded and conquered a third of Mexico, in a war that was opposed by Abraham Lincoln and for which Ulysses Grant considered his country had earned God’s punishment in its own Civil War. Long before the Orange Tyrant, this country had built its own Berlin Wall on the border between San Diego and Tijuana, keeping out the undesirables. In the aptly named Operation Wetback, the Eisenhower administration conducted mass deportations based on ethnicity, even including some U.S. citizens. Immigration is an “invasion” only when the immigrants have the wrong skin tone and language.

The aggressive “Gulf of America” nonsense is a fitting example of the pettiness and ignorance beneath this bigotry. It is only because the United States is among the least American nations on the continent that it can think of itself as simply “America” without irony. The USAers neither know nor care about what goes on in America as a whole. There is more in common between Brazil and Mexico than there is between the U.S. and America. To the ignorant Americans, everything south of the border is one big impoverished blob indistinguishable from northern Mexico. El Trumpo often refers to Central American immigrants as being from “South America,” as though the “South” meant anything south of the U.S.

With the current regime, as in the Nazis, the anti-foreigner hatred is much more acute than in the general population. Thus their agents wear masks, abductions are made quickly to more favorable jurisdictions, and cruelty is deliberate. The idea is to intimidate many into registering, surrendering themselves or self-deporting. These tricks were all used on the Jews, and they are surely tricks again. The Orange Tyrant has repeatedly proven that his word is worthless, tearing up his own agreements on a whim. This is why he is worthless as a “deal-maker” and nothing he does will last. A one-trick pony, he only knows how to threaten and intimidate the weak into bending to his will.

The courts have been wise to the transparent bad faith of this government, but nonetheless have been extraordinarily patient and given it ample opportunity to offer some token defense. In some cases, the government cannot even meet this low bar, so Rumeysa Ozturk was released due to complete lack of evidence. In other cases, one fiction forces another. The claim that someone was sent to a Salvadoran prison due to “administrative error” was a laughable falsehood, designed to avoid admitting that the deportation was in willful defiance of a court order. But this claim is now in the record and the government was operate as though it were true. Now it will claim that it is unable to facilitate the return of that person. Yet its pathetically limp non-efforts belie the initial claim that this was a deportation in error, for if that were so, surely the government would make some attempt to correct it. Caught between two lies, it will surely at some point be forced into outright contempt of court. Then what?

How about the biggest scandal of all: that a nakedly tyrannical regime can establish itself without resistance, and with only a minority willing to call it a tyranny? Was my father right about this country? Are we more fertile ground for a Hitler than Germany was? Surely, there is no talk of genocide against the immigrants; the crimes of the first Hitler has made such talk forever unthinkable. But the other aspects of dehumanization remain. It is even less forgivable in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth that we should regress into this tribalistic alienization on the basis of race.