I’ll write my essay entitled “Why the rest of the world should withdraw all support from the Middle East in general, and Israel in particular, and throw a blanket over the whole lot of the bastards until they’ve exhausted themselves slaughtering each other and seen the light of true peace” some other time.
I share the dismay and disgust of all right thinking people at the misery being visited upon the innocent Palestinian civilians by Hamas and Israel, but it is curious that those of us who can justify, or at least not condemn, the Allied bombing of civilian cities in Europe and Japan, where vastly worse horrors were inflicted upon millions of people, are upset by the current, and relative to WWII trivial, suffering in Gaza.
I suspect it’s similar to being able to watch the usual collection of death, destruction, misery and general human ugliness on the nightly news while calmly eating a meal but being significantly distressed if seeing in the real world a dog, let alone a human, run over and badly injured. WWII is distant to us, but Gaza is closer to our reality.
Unlike WWII, we’re not automatically aligned with one side and hostile to the other, so perhaps part of the reason we’re so disgusted with the conflict in Gaza is that, as pdf27’s meme says, we’re simply human.
Another reason we’re disgusted may be that we expect better of the Israelis because, like the white South Africans during the Apartheid era, they’re like us. There is an implicit racism in this, because it requires us to expect better of people like us but not of necessarily lesser peoples, such as rabid ratbag Islamic jihadists, Arabs, black Africans and so on, because their habitual violence and contempt for human life is all we expect of them. Which results in justified condemnation of the Israelis for their inhumane attacks on innocent and defenceless Palestinians, especially children, but nothing comparable for Hamas in this conflict or worse actions and often atrocities in other conflicts around the globe.
Separately, why is Hamas fighting what it knew was going to be a losing battle before it started, and which could only visit death and destruction on its own people? And the answer is, I suspect: Because Hamas was losing the support of its own people and becoming irrelevant so, conforming with basic revolutionary theory, it confected circumstances which increase oppression of its own people by its enemy, thus generating support for it and increasing hostility to its enemy. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to create a stream of dead and injured children creating local and international disgust and contempt for the Israelis. The following photo of a little girl rendered naked by napalm burning off her clothes, with her brother to the left who lost an eye, did more to undermine Western presence in and conduct of the war in Vietnam than countless reasoned arguments over many years.
As for the Israelis, they’ve never let an opportunity pass to undermine their supposed desire for peace by intentionally sabotaging themselves, and thus demonstrating their consistent hypocrisy, with contemporaneous expansion of their settlements and or other insults to the Palestinians.
Now, where can I find a blanket big enough to throw over the lot of the bastards and let them slaughter each other until …
