Curating Catastrophe
Curating Catastrophe
Its growth encouraged in the past by the Jewish State, Hamas emerged as the Islamist enemy of Israel's enemy, the PLO. Today Hamas is trending towards a strategic victory over Israel.
Israel is mired in a floundering counterinsurgency operation in Gaza and on a path towards strategic defeat. In the eyes of the Global South, Israel has already descended to the international pariah status last occupied by South Africa in the 1980-90’s. More surprisingly, a growing portion in the Global West, especially younger adults ideologically adjacent to wokeness, see the Jewish State as all-too-white, oppressive and colonizing. Like South Africa in the past, Israel may soon suffer from international boycotts, divestment and sanction campaigns. Ironically, the Global West has been trying to isolate Russia in a similar way for the past two years but has utterly failed.
Israel’s primary enemy is the Islamist group Hamas, who are a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) organization. Up until the 1980’s, the secular, nationalist and slightly socialist Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was the leading opponent of Israeli occupation in Palestine. Yassar Arafat was its bumbling, milquetoast leader who failed to effectuate a winning insurgency strategy against decades of Israeli occupation. The PLO’s resistance was weak and ineffective, while internationally the name became synonymous with terrorism. In the early 2000’s, the PLO was rebranded as Fatah, and/or as the Palestinian Authority (PA), which serves as a self-occupation force in the West Bank.
The PLO’s sheer nerve in resisting Israeli dominance for decades triggered a deep narcissistic wound in Tel Aviv. Conniving minds there in the early 1980’s decided to split the Palestinian resistance by promoting Islamic resistance groups. In 1987, these rivals coalesced into Hamas.
At first this divide and rule strategy bore plentiful fruits. Israeli grand strategy is to one day annex the West Bank, which has deep roots in Jewish history, and to jettison the Gaza Strip, which has traditionally been part of Egypt. As the PLO began transitioning away from terrorism in the 90’s, Hamas filled the void with their own terror attacks. If the PLO and Hamas ever came close to declaring a truce to stop terrorism, either Israel itself or Jewish terrorists would conduct attacks against Hamas or sensitive Islamic targets, thus shuttering any ceasefire agreements from the Palestinians. Israel would then claim to have no “partners for peace” and continue to grab land in the West Bank, while eventually withdrawing from Gaza in 2005.
But now Israel finds themselves in a strange situation. The liberal, secular Uncle Tom-type Palestinians are in charge of the West Bank, which is deeply coveted by Israel. Meanwhile the hard-nosed Islamic, Malcolm X-style Hamas run the unwanted Gaza Strip. Israel cannot reward “good behaviour” by Fatah because that would lead to the loss of the West Bank. But having lost control of Hamas in Gaza, Israel must now switch to Messianic mode in a futile attempt to reassert authority and dish out punishment. The excesses associated with emotional Messianic violence are burning Israel’s remaining international political capital. Israel may either face international boycotts or be forced into a two-state solution. Even elements within the dysfunctionally co-dependent ruling class of the United States is tentatively hardening its attitude towards the Jewish State.
There are several historic precedents where all-too-clever leaders replace a weak opponent with one that eventually crushes them. In 1917, the German government sponsored the Bolshevik’s rise to power in Russia to undermine the failing Czarist regime. Less than 30 years later, the Red Army crushed the Wehrmacht and smashed its way into Berlin, proudly waving its hammer and sickle banner over the Reichstag.
In 2015, Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign came up with their infamous “Pied Piper” strategy. Hillary convinced friendly news executives to give massive coverage to Donald Trump’s burgeoning campaign, providing critical media oxygen to his eventual insurgent victory in the Republican primaries. Just a few months later, Trump squelched Clinton’s dream of becoming the first female president. The cuckish Jeb Bush, Clinton’s most likely opponent had she checked her hubris by not intervening, would have in all likelihood never been able to defeat Hillary and she would today be serving her second term.
Alexander the Great’s Carrots and Sticks
Today’s destruction in Gaza is not the first time the city has suffered a catastrophe. When in October of 332 BC, Alexander the Great approached Gaza, what is now known as the Holy Land was part of the Persian empire. Alexander’s plan was to conquer the entire Mediterranean coast (near current-day Israel) before moving inland to capture Egypt. Only then would he invade his arch-enemy Persia.
Gaza was an important city protected by powerful walls at the time and Alexander called for the city to capitulate. Alexander had a strict but simple carrot and stick policy: when he threatened a city, if the occupants surrendered they would survive. If they chose to fight, he would annihilate them.
In Israel today, these choices are less clear. Fatah / Palestinian Authority has all but surrendered to Israel and is assisting the Jewish State by self-occupying themselves. And yet instead of rewarding them, Israeli settlers, backed by the government, are incessantly grabbing Palestinian land and hostages. Israeli actions in the West Bank punish Palestinians when they “behave.”
Back in 322 BC, Gaza was ruled by Batis, a fat eunuch sent to command Gaza by Persia. When confronted with Alexander’s ultimatum, like Hamas today, Batis refused to surrender.
It took two months of bloody preparations, during which Alexander was seriously wounded in the shoulder, before Gaza could be stormed. During the assault, Alexander was wounded a second time. The refusal of the Gazans to submit had delayed his subsequent invasion of Egypt by two months. Alexander slaughtered all 10,000 adult male defenders and sold their women and children into slavery. Their leader Batis was captured alive and brought before Alexander:
[Batis] stood there, grimly defiant, covered with dust and sweat and blood, a huge corpulent dark-skinned eunuch. Interrogated by Alexander, he refused to utter a word; he would not even beg for mercy. The king, who actively disliked ugly people (and was himself in a very ugly mood) seems to have lost control of himself at this point; the ordeal before Tyre had left him more than a little frayed. Curtius asserts that he had Batis lashed by the ankles behind a chariot and dragged round the walls of Gaza till he was dead: a grim variant on Achilles' treatment of Hector's dead body in the Iliad.
This is the type of decisive and emotionally reassuring victory Israel can only dream of. Today Hamas is fighting a guerrilla war, where they refuse to confront the superior Israeli Army head-to-head, preferring opportunistic ambushes, which are filmed and disseminated via social media.
On a strategic level, things are even more complicated. Israel has announced that they will eradicate Hamas, but even if this were possible, destroying Hamas would undermine the Israeli grand strategy of dividing the Palestinians and assuring they will never have a proper partner for peace. Netanyahu has already announced that the Palestinian Authority (PA) will not be allowed to take power in a post-war Gaza. Without Hamas, Israel would lose their excuses for not negotiating with the PA for a two-state solution.
Roots of Hamas: Muslim Brotherhood and Western Resistance to “Hitler on the Nile”
In the post WW2 West, both the United States and Britain resisted Arab and Persian nationalism, but for slightly different reasons. Britain was a collapsing empire, and the antithesis to imperial rule is nationalism. In the aftermath of WW2, numerous “national liberation movements” struggled for independence. For example, India, under the nationalist leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, broke free of the British Empire in 1947.
Britain had two choices, either resist the nationalist groups militarily where possible or appoint obedient kings, dependent on British backing for their local power. Robert Dreyfuss, in his 2006 book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, describes the political architecture of the Middle East which emerged after WW2:
the entire Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq, was locked in the grip of a political ice age. Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia were French colonies; Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Yemen were British colonies. Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were kingdoms ruled by monarchies installed by London. And Egypt, under the wobbly King Farouq, was the political and economic center of the Arab world.
During the 1950’s, America was the ascendant global power. Nominally an opponent of imperialism due to their revolutionary past, the US refused the traditional hegemonic policy of vulgar direct imperialism to dominate the world. The US preferred a more sublime, indirect control, where the Third World would internalize obedience to America. The US wanted as much political influence and access to raw materials as possible but without direct occupation of subject nations. Dreyfuss explains:
Washington’s early belief that liberal Third World nationalists might be able to modernize their nations while, at the same time, keeping them in the Western orbit. But the Eisenhower administration wasn’t buying it. Its view was: You are either with us—that is. Third World leaders had to allow military bases, join alliances, and make economic concessions while implementing free-market policies—or you were against us.
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The cornerstone of the administration’s Middle East policy was the Eisenhower Doctrine. Echoing FDR, Ike proclaimed America’s imperial goal of incorporating the Middle East into its permanent sphere of influence. “The existing vacuum in the Middle East must be filled by the United States before it is filled by Russia,” proclaimed Ike. In a message to Congress in January 1957, the president promised that the United States would provide military and financial aid to any Middle East countries “requesting such aid against overt aggression from any nation controlled by international Communism.”
The roots of Israel’s embrace of Hamas lie in the early 1950’s following the rise to power of Egypt’s secular-nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. In reaction to Nassar’s desire to nationalize the Suez Canal, the West covertly supported the right wing-Islamist Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Nassar got wind of the danger and quickly crushed the MB and scattered them into exile.
Israel is today under pressure to repeat what Nassar was able to do back in the 50’s. Dreyfuss explains the danger Nassar represented to what today is called the Collective West:
But more was at stake than the remnants of the British Empire. The emergence of Nasser was an existential threat to the oil kingdoms—to Saudi Arabia, to Iraq, and to the British-owned sheikhs in the Gulf. The British, and then the Anglo-Americans, opposed Nasser not because he was a communist, or because he was susceptible to communist influence; in fact, Nasser suppressed the Egyptian left and the various communist parties vigorously. <…> What was intolerable to London and Washington (and to Paris, too, until 1956) was that Nasser refused to be controlled, was adept at playing the superpowers off against each other, and inspired loyalty among Arabs outside of Egypt, including those sitting on top of the oil.
What especially worried London and Washington was the idea that Nasser might succeed in unifying Egypt and Saudi Arabia, thus creating a major Arab power. One of the ironies of the Arab world is that Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, which have historically been the centers of Arab learning and political movements, have no oil. On the other hand, except for Iraq and non-Arab Iran, the oil states—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar—have tiny populations and no intellectual tradition (except ultra-orthodox Islamic theology), and are ruled by royal kleptocracies whose legitimacy is nil and whose existence depends on outside military protection. Most Arabs are aware that both the monarchies themselves, and the artificial borders that demarcate their states, were designed by imperialists seeking to build fences around oil wells in the 1920s. From a strategic standpoint, the Arabs would gain much by marrying the sophistication and manpower of the urban Arab countries (including Iraq) with the oil wealth of the desert kingdoms. At the center of that idea lies Egypt, with its tens of millions of people, and Saudi Arabia, with 200 billion barrels of oil. Underlying the rhetoric of secular pan-Arabism is the reality that uniting Cairo and Riyadh would create a vastly important new Arab center of gravity with worldwide influence.
The urban / rural divide runs deep through history and is the cultural basis for most two-party systems. In 2015, when Hillary Clinton and her media cronies conspired to elevate the Donald Trump spectacle, they were promoting a hybrid candidate: an urban real estate huckster whose mastery of low-IQ rhetoric allowed him to disingenuously promote a rural agenda. This combination of urban slickness masked by rural stability proved too much for the Clinton campaign.
In 1956, with their Egyptian proxies—the Muslim Brotherhood—crushed, Israel and the West decided to take direct action against Nassar. Britain, France and Israel hatched up a hare-brained scheme. Again, from Dreyfuss:
London and Paris arranged for Israel to launch an unprovoked war against Egypt. According to the conspiracy, the British and French would wait a decent interval, perhaps some days, and then intervene militarily to impose a truce on Egypt and Israel, meanwhile seizing the Suez Canal in the process. Nasser, they hoped, would fall—perhaps be overthrown. And the Muslim Brotherhood, though weakened, was waiting in the wings. In the end. President Eisenhower—fearing that the Soviet Union would reap untold rewards by capitalizing on the Anglo-French-Israeli aggression—joined with other nations to foil the plot.
Israel invaded, not for the last time, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Desert. The US was furious and forced Israel to withdraw. Eisenhower threatened to crush Sterling if Britain didn’t back off. If it wasn’t obvious already, the Suez Crisis marked the definitive moment that Britain’s loss of global hegemonic power to the United States was unambiguously demonstrated to the world.
Today China and Russia have managed to unite not only Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but also Iran, into the BRICS-11 trade organization. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, both urban and rural elements of the Middle East are slowly coalescing into a united force. Israel in the coming years will not only have to deal with this new conglomeration of united Middle Eastern BRICS nations, but will also need to come to terms with China’s rising global dominance. The new Chinese global boss may not be at all as kindly disposed towards the Jewish State as the old US boss has been.
Muslim Brotherhood journey from Jordan to Gaza
During the 1950’s, a left-right binary developed in the Middle East. Secular nationalists, although far from communist, occupied the left. Their Keynesian economic polices were little different from the Western model. Only in response to growing US hostility did his left group became open to assistance from the Soviet Union.
The Middle Eastern right featured monarchies, often installed by the West, which relied on Islamist support and were economically conservative. In Jordan during the 1950’s, their pro-Western monarchy faced an attack from Arab nationalists. Surviving Muslim Brotherhood militants from Egypt were allowed to settle in Jordan, where they would support King Hussein. From Dreyfuss:
The Brotherhood, like the Islamic right everywhere, was strongly anti-communist, arguing “that in the twentieth century Egypt and the rest of the Islamic world were threatened by the onslaught of communist and nationalist ideologies which denied the supremacy of sharia.'' The Muslim Brotherhood was a loyal force in support of King Hussein, and bitterly opposed to pan-Arabism. Its social base in Jordan was rooted in the wealthy. East Bank landowning families who saw socialism and land reform as existential threats. When Jordan’s left-leaning prime minister Suleiman al-Nabulsi, who was influenced by Nasser, challenged the monarchy in a showdown in 1957 that came close to toppling it, the Brotherhood sided with the king and saved his throne. “ From this point on,” wrote Boulby, “ there existed an unwritten understanding of coexistence between King Hussein and the Brotherhood.
From the Israeli point of view, given that the PLO were left-leaning secular nationalists, importing this left-right conflict would lead inevitably to splits within the Palestinian ruling class. These fractures could then be exploited by Israel.
As the United States built its network of alliances in the Middle East, relying more and more on non-Arab states, including Turkey, Iran, and Israel, there developed an “Arab cold war,” with Egypt at one end and Saudi Arabia at the other. Superficially, it seemed as if the struggle within the Arab world pitted Soviet-leaning Arab countries against American-allied ones, but in fact the Soviet Union had no true allies and few friends in the region. The real dynamic that played out between 1954 and 1970 occurred between competing visions of the future of the Middle East. On one hand, there was Nasser’s secular, modernizing, industrial Arab world of independent but cooperative Arab republics. On the other was Saudi Arabia’s semi-feudal array of monarchies, with their natural resources put at the West’s disposal, in which the royal families’ ace-in-the-hole was the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic right.
While the US and Israel never openly embraced the Muslim Brotherhood, they tacitly supported Islamists in their attempt to destroy Arab unity and nationalism.
From Hama Rules to Hamas’ rule
One of the great enemies of Israel was (and still is) the al-Assad regime in Syria. In 1967, Israel invaded Syria and captured the Golan Heights, which they still occupy today. In 2019, in a futile attempt to curry favour among Jewish donors, President Trump recognized the Golan Heights as belonging to Israel. President Biden’s Administration has continued this policy. This decision will come back to haunt the US when it comes time to discuss the occupied Donbass and other regions in Ukraine.
In the 1970’s, during the Lebanese Civil War, both Jordan and Israel supported the Muslim Brotherhood in a terrorist campaign against the al-Assad regime in Syria. From Dreyfuss:
Beginning in 1976, the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria carried out assassinations, bomb attacks, and other violent actions in numerous cities, including Damascus. Next door, in Lebanon, Syria was engaged in a proxy war with Israel in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, and the Brothers proved to be a formidable anti-Assad force. Accusing the Syrian regime of being run by “false Muslims,” the Brotherhood declared jihad, its campaign led by Adnan Saad al-Din, a former member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The Combat Vanguard of Fighters, an underground paramilitary arm, assassinated Baath officials and prominent Alawites, security agents, and informers, along with Soviet military advisers in Syria. Gradually the crisis escalated into violent demonstrations and strikes, and then to major terrorist attacks. In June 1979, a gang of Brotherhood terrorists attacked a Syrian military school in Aleppo, killing eighty-three cadets by locking them into a building and attacking it with automatic weapons and firebombs. The following year, the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to assassinate Assad, and the government retaliated in an unrestrained counterattack. In October 1980, the so-called Islamic Front of Syria was established, uniting the Islamic Liberation Party, both factions of the Muslim Brotherhood, and other fundamentalist groups. Fighting intensified in 1981, and in November a massive car bomb in Damascus killed two hundred people.
Dreyfuss wrote his book in 2006, well before history repeated itself in 2011, as Western-backed Islamists once again launched a bloody civil war in Syria. But just as his son would do in the 21st century against militant Western-backed jihadis, in 1982, the elder al-Assad launched a devastating attack against the Muslim Brotherhood. In scenes reminiscent of Gaza today, Assad’s forces annihilated the Islamists:
Assad was determined to wipe out the last vestiges of resistance to his rule. His forces combed the wreckage of the city for survivors, torturing and executing suspected members of the resistance. Tens of thousands died in the violence and more than 100,000 became refugees from the carnage. The Syrian government plowed under the old city that had been the focal point of the rebellion. The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was smashed. The message was clear: Any attempt to overthrow the regime would be met with primordial violence outside any boundaries of the law of war. New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman coined the term “Hama Rules” to denote the brutality of the Assad regime and how it would respond if threatened.
Like father, like son. Since the uprising against his regime began in 2011, Bashar al-Assad has ordered his forces to destroy rebel enclaves in much the same manner as his father. Supported by Russian airpower, Hezbollah infantry, and Iranian advisers, Syrian forces have indiscriminately targeted rebel neighborhoods, using barrel bombs, other aerial delivered munitions, and artillery and tank fire to demolish them. Syrian forces have used chemical weapons (both nerve agent and chlorine) to kill and terrorize the population of rebel-held areas. Targets have included hospitals, markets, and schools, the purpose being to make rebel-held territory uninhabitable. The result has been waves of refugees flooding into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and mainland Europe. “Hama rules” are in force.
Spawning Hamas
Allowing Hamas’ rule has forced Israel to today play by “Hama rules” in Gaza. In 2009, the Wall Street Journal explained, How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas:
"Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel's creation," says Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Instead of trying to curb Gaza's Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat's Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with "Yassins," primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.
In his 1986 book, Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, former New York Times reporter David K. Shipler writes:
Politically speaking, Islamic fundamentalists were sometimes regarded as useful to Israel because they had their conflicts with the secular supporters of the PLO. Violence between the groups erupted occasionally on West Bank university campuses, and the Israeli military governor of the Gaza Strip, Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, once told me how he had financed the Islamic movement as a counterweight to the PLO and the Communists. “The Israeli Government gave me a budget and the military government gives to the mosques,” he said. (That early funding helped nourish the seeds of Hamas and other Muslim movements that used terrorism to undermine the Israeli-Palestinian Peace process)
The day after Hamas’ October 7th attack, The Times of Jerusalem reported: For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces,
For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.
The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.
The “Israel’s Islamists” chapter in Richard Dreyfuss’ book Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, goes into great detail on not only Israel’s assistance to Hamas during its rise to power, but how the Israeli right then exploited Hamas to their political advantage.
Whenever the PLO and the Israeli Labor Party moved toward an accord, Hamas would unleash a violent wave of attacks to disrupt the talks. “ Undermining the peace process has always been the real target of Hamas and has played into the political ambitions of Likud,” wrote one analyst. “ Every time Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appeared ready to take a major step toward achieving peace, an act of Hamas terrorism has scuttled the peace process and pushed the two sides apart.”
During the 1990’s Israel and the PLO recognized each other and pursued a peaceful settlement following the Oslo Accords. But both right wing Israeli Likud and Hamas rejected the peace process and together joined in a macabre political dance to scuttle the process.
Besides Hamas, which joined other Islamist organizations such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah (Party of God) in adopting a rejectionist stance, the Israeli right, led by Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon of the Likud, were fundamentally opposed to the kinds of concessions Rabin, Peres, and Barak were willing to offer. From 1993 onward, Likud and Hamas would reinforce each other’s opposition to peace talks, often taking advantage of high-profile provocations from one side or the other.
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The Israeli Labor government and the PLO combined to undermine Hamas. In addition to arrests and executions of leaders of Hamas, secular Palestinians were mobilized to support the peace talks. Popular opposition to terrorism was widespread. But the Israeli right, including its terrorist far right, would fatally undermine Oslo. In February 1994, an Israeli terrorist named Baruch Goldstein, a member of the extremist Kach movement, entered a mosque in Hebron, in the West Bank, and murdered dozens of unarmed worshipers. The massacre invigorated Hamas, which portrayed the attack as an assault on Islam requiring an armed jihad in response. A wave of suicide bombings followed. Then, in November 1995, another Israeli Likud-inspired terrorist murdered Prime Minister Rabin. The death of Rabin left a vacuum in Israeli politics, and the continuing suicide attacks by Hamas panicked the Israeli electorate, leading to the election of Netanyahu’s Likud in 1996.
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The pattern repeated itself in 2000. Netanyahu fell in 1999, and was replaced by Barak, who reengaged the PLO in negotiations and, with President Clinton’s help, came close to reaching a comprehensive deal. Once again, however, the Israeli right provoked the Islamists. In September 2000, Sharon made a heavy-handed, provocative visit to an Islamic holy site, the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, an action calculated to provoke the Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalists, and it did. The result was the second intifada (2000-2004). Suicide attacks in Israel murdered scores of Jews, and stampeded security minded Israeli voters into Sharon’s camp. Sharon was overwhelmingly elected prime minister, dooming any chance of a PLO-Israel deal.
Hamas’ attack triggers Israel into Messianic Mode
When attacked, Israel reacts with a Messianic kneejerk fervour, dispensing brutal Biblical or more recent Arab-style punishments. In this mode, Israel seems to have internalized the methods of Alexander the Great or the Roman Caesars, who crushed into dust the insurgent Jewish zealots back in 70 AD. This tendency towards emotional Israeli overreaction is today being exploited by Hamas. As a universalist Islamic group, Hamas doesn’t care that much about Palestinians, beyond using them as a vehicle for Islamization, and so are not dissuaded by the spectre of massive civilian causalities in their ranks. In fact, that is exactly the over-the-top politically damaging reaction Hamas is seeking. While Israel may have a “carve-out” from the Global West for committing massive war crimes, no such genocidal carte blanche will ever be issued by the Global South, who are the primary audience for Hamas’ political actions. Israel is tiny and survival as a pariah nation amongst the Global South will be challenging, particularly if the United States continues its global decline.
Even more worrying for Israel is that today elements of the powerful cultural left in the West are turning hard against them. After a decade of woke ideology denouncing whiteness and colonialism, Israel (and more broadly, Jews) are getting placed into the evil category of the oppression binary that woke culture preaches. A split is emerging in the Democratic “high/low” coalition. Wealthy liberal whites and Jews continue their traditional “no-limits” support for Israel while the less privileged activist “people of color” groups are all-in for Palestine.
Meanwhile, the popularity of MAGA Republicans—the political Frankenstein’s monster that Hillary Clinton’s doomed “pied piper” strategy created—is only growing. Donald Trump is leading against President Biden in national polls that traditionally overstate Democratic support. Just like Israel is forced to do with Hamas, the Democrats resort to increasingly desperate scorched earth political tactics to deal with the gathering MAGA storm. But reckless prosecutions or futile ballot bans only increase MAGA’s popularity with the young. The political establishment has lost control of the means of persuasion. Television was the traditional medium from which to instil ideological discipline upon Americans. But today’s young prefer their phones. Even those young voters who hate MAGA do not embrace the pro-Israeli Democrats — they are far more likely to support the Palestinian cause. All this spells long-term decline for America’s political establishment. And Israel, the US ruling class’ cherished Golden Child, will suffer because of it.