Israel's Impotent Furor

Clashing over Israeli war conduct and a Palestinian state, Biden as global leader--supposedly tasked to enforce universal rules--fails to rein in the embattled Netanyahu's volcanic tribalism

The battle between the universal and particular—Biden’s rules-based order falters from Netanyahu’s tribal disorder

With Israel losing on every other level—Benjamin Netanyahu is apparently winning his campaign to bring the Biden Administration to heel. While Iranian proxies humiliate America with impunity by launching volleys of missiles falling on US bases in Iraq and Syria, the Israeli leader flaunts his dominance over Biden by hijacking US policy and melding it to Netanyahu’s rejection of any eventual Palestinian state. It’s just possible that this increasingly public beef is simply a contrived good cop—bad cop spectacle for the international audience. But more likely, this apparent victory of Israel tribalism over US universality will prove to be Pyrrhic. The idea of the US as a fair and disinterested global hegemon is crumbling like a dam. The fading image of the US as the global referee is the final barrier keeping the Middle East—and most of the rest of the world—from uniting and engulfing the Jewish State with sanctions, boycotts, blockades and even missiles.

If the rift is real then relations between Israel and the United States have reached such an impasse that only regime change in one or the other nation will bring back any sort of equilibrium. Either the US must be completely subsumed by the Jewish State or Israel must submit to the arbitration and judgement of its American superior.

Sensing weakness, Benjamin Netanyahu has now openly rejected even the most mealy-mouthed American suggestion of some sort of compromised state for the indigenous population clinging on in Palestine. For decades this strategy of hanging the bait of eventual sovereignty in a distant future to the Palestinians in return for acceptance of present day Israeli domination has worked brilliantly. But in a rare display of honesty for a statesman, the Israeli leader suddenly articulated the true goals of the Zionist movement—total Israeli control of Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

The problem is that Israel, like most other Western nations, has become weak and effete while basking in material comforts of economic wealth. Israel does not have the military ability to wipe out Hamas. In fact, defeating insurgencies is a difficult problem even for the most martial nations because any military solution is only possible when pared with a political arraignment. America was exposed to this lesson during its failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Israel refuses to learn from her own experiences. Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 spawned a reaction from poor Shiite farmers, who for decades before, as war raged all around them, had tilled their fields in stoic quietude. Provoked by Israeli humiliation, these conservative peasants rose as Hezbollah and fought a nearly two decade insurgency to evict Israeli occupiers from their land. In the following twenty years, Hezbollah has only grown in power and military effectiveness and today represents a huge menace on Israel’s norther border. Israel was forced to evacuate nearly 100,000 settlers from the Galilee region. More than three months later these Israelis are still refugees and pressure is mounting on Netanyahu.

Both the US and Israel seem to believe the universal rules of irregular warfare do not apply to them. With enough vigour, blind belief and stubborn rejection of reality, they seem to believe their god of war will one day smile on them.

In response to Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution, President Biden meekly held out an olive branch by claiming that the Israeli leader has not rejected “all” two-state solutions. One truly wonders if Biden was referring to a potential Taiwanese-Chinese two-state solution?

In response to Biden’s stubborn rejection of his authority, Netanyahu put the American leader back into his place by again dismissing even a chimerical version of Palestinian statehood:

I will not compromise on full Israeli security control over the entire area west of Jordan - and this is contrary to a Palestinian state," he said on Saturday, reiterating his stance that any solution in the foreseeable future must include Israel's military control over the entire West Bank.

In the meantime US officials are forced to defend each and every Israeli action in Gaza. When video emerged of Israel demolishing the last standing university in Gaza, the US steadfastly refused to criticize these Israeli actions. This university had been used as a military headquarters by Israel for the past two months:

Israeli occupation forces (IOF) yesterday blew up Al-Isra University in Gaza after occupying it and converting it into a military barracks and detention centre for 70 days, according to the Palestinian Information Centre.

The university administration said in a statement today: “The IOF occupied the university building for 70 days, turning it into a military base and a centre for sniping isolated civilians in the areas of Rashid Street, Al-Mughraqa and Al-Zahra, as well as a temporary detention centre for interrogating Palestinians, before detonating it.”

Israeli media outlets published a video documenting the moment the occupation forces detonated the bombs that sent debris and dust into the air.

The university administration condemned “the barbaric aggression that targeted the capabilities of students of knowledge, the latest of which was the destruction of the building of graduate studies and the main bachelor’s colleges in the south of Gaza City.”

The statement pointed out that occupation soldiers and officers looted rare artefacts held by the university before demolishing the museum building to cover up the traces of their crime.

The US cannot denounce Israeli actions for the simple reason that collective punishment is the only response Israel has to Hamas terrorist / insurgent provocations. The Israeli military cannot defeat Hamas militarily and refuses to compromise politically. The Israeli economy can only withstand around three months of full mobilization. Israel’s conscripted soldiers may be ideologically keen but have little actual training. And so Israel is being forced into a humiliating withdrawal of the majority of their troops from Gaza, even as Hamas continues to rain rockets down. But in the wake of their partial retreat, Israel leaves the devastation of a scorched earth policy of Palestinian civilian infrastructure to serve as a warning to Palestinians to never again question the authority of their Israeli masters.

Below is an Israeli-produced propaganda clip demonstrating the stunning Israeli might in the cutting-edge field of civilian infrastructure demolition in Gaza:

While a few Gazans may blame Hamas’ actions for this destruction, human nature is such that the vast majority of Palestinians will blame Israel and dedicate the rest of their already devalued lives to seeking revenge. On Monday, January 21st, in what could be seen as a sign of divine retribution, at least 21 Israeli soldiers were killed as they were busying wiring explosives to demolish yet more Gazan infrastructure.

In response to the carnage wrought by Israel in Gaza, South Africa has brought charges of genocide against Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In doing so South Africa is explicitly pitting the universal prohibition on genocide against Israel’s tribal imperative to survive. For Israel, the universal is fused with its particular interests. In other words, their tribal needs as the Chosen People actually are their universal. These two radically different conceptions of the universal are battling in the ICJ and across the globe. Most observers, after decades of indoctrination towards the universal, are shocked by Israel’s blatant embrace of the particular.

US Hegemony: Detached Universalism or Partisan Tribalism?

Must a global hegemon such as the US be universalist? Or can it just blindly support its friends and destroy its foes? The US’ much maligned propaganda line about leading a “rules-based international order” indeed posits a universalist regime. It conjures images of an aloof hegemonic referee judging international disputes impartially—mimicking the enforcement of universal rules during a sporting match. Leading a prosperous global order in which all nations can thrive is often professed as the unselfish goal of the Western order..

Nevertheless, any international order will break down into friendly nations allied with the hegemon and foes who resist. Wouldn’t it then make more sense for the hegemon to reward her allies and punish her enemies? Such an openly partisan global order would contain incentives for allies to stay subordinate to the hegemon while together dishing out punishment to revisionist nations who dare threaten the existing global power structure.

In either case the hegemon will always exist in a state of exception. She who makes the law is immune from them. Do as the hegemon says and not what she does.

And so the sweet spot on the universal—particular binary is to impose a strict, self sacrificing universalist order upon your enemies while you and your allies remain free to act in a partisan, self-serving and tribal fashion. Tie down your enemies with rules of reciprocity, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" while you follow the rules of maximum exploitation, “do unto others in ways that best enhances my wealth and power.”

Rejecting the Universal by Exalting the Chosen

Both Christianity and Judaism have the concept of the Chosen People (CP). A CP has an interesting relationship to the universal—particular binary. Under no circumstances can a CP ever be held to abstract universal standards if these conflict with their particular interests. To do this would be to eradicate the CP’s exalted status. To have any meaning, CP status desires its universal recognition by the non-chosen. Of course any chump tribe can declare themselves chosen. The true art is in getting other tribes to agree. An outstanding feature of this recognition is the explicit application of a double standard: one for the Chosen and a completely different standard for the non-chosen.

An obvious international example of this Chosen—unchosen binary is the difference in treatment of Israel and russia (sic). Both Jews and Russians suffered heinous acts of genocide at the hands of Germans during World War Two. Nevertheless, in March of 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants against Russia’s President Putin. The tacit rule seemed to be that suffering from genocide in the past is no defense for committing genocide in the present.

Recently South Africa decided to play moral superpower and present an accusation of genocide against the Jewish State at the ICJ. American public relations officials employed by the Federal Government have rejected and attacked this case. Germany, an acknowledged expert emeritus on the subject of genocide, implies that because of the Holocaust, Israel must be given a pass. The French go even further, with Foreign Minister Stephane Sejourne giving Israel carte blanche by claiming, “Accusing the Jewish state of genocide crosses a moral threshold.” The French are also experts in the area, having committed genocide several times in Algeria.

Suddenly the rules have changed. The new axiom seems to be that those who suffer genocide in the past can never be charged with genocide in the present. The Holocaust acts as a moral shield and any attempts to limit Israel’s furor crosses this moral threshold.

But can this really be a general rule? Will Russia now be granted the same free pass for genocide? After suffering more than 50 million deaths at the hand of a Nazi invader, is Russia suddenly free of all moral constraints in attacking what they call a Neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine? Of course not, nor should they be.

China suffered a devastating genocide at the hands of Japan in the run-up and during WW2. Does this stop Western commentators from accusing China of genocide of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang? Since there was so little evidence that the case was not received at the ICJ, Western clowns created their own “people’s tribunal” and convicted China of genocide. Apparently getting bayonetted by Japanese soldiers during the Rape of Nanking does not create a high enough moral threshold to prevent China from being accused of genocide.

The Collective West could just as easily be called the Club of Genocide as the US, Britain, France, Germany, Australia and Japan are all guilty of committing genocide in the past. Russia and China on the other hand have committed self-genocide on their own people during the 20th century.

What the massacre in Gaza is doing is stripping any semblance of universality in the wake of nearly two years of Western moral preening about Russia. The mask of universality is ripped off to reveal a cynical battle where the West promotes their own tribal interests all the while howling in outrage that the rest of the world refuses to follow its rules.

Want Universalism—Get Tribal

A domestic American example of this double game of projecting the constraints of universal values upon your foes while rejecting any such limits for your own team is American commentator Ben Shapiro. Among the many conservative gatekeepers grouped under the menacing label of Intellectual Dark Web, Shapiro is the most clumsy and obvious practitioner of this double game. As he rails against identity politics—with a special vengeance towards any potential white identity politics—he himself indulges in the most ugly and bigoted Jewish / Israeli tribalism.

From an intellectual point of view, tribalism—cheering for the home team—is indeed stultifying and breeds ignorance. A consistently tribalist perspective closely matches the black and white thinking associated with Cluster B conditions such as narcissistic or borderline personality disorders. A tribalist must never let reality interrupt his compulsion to idealize his own team in tandem with devaluations of those deemed ‘others.” The reverse-tribalist is even worse, which is the mindset Shapiro tries to instil within his followers. A collective co-dependent will devalue his own team while idealizing those of the guru he blindly follows.

Take the example of the Ukraine war, where mainstream Western tribalists are forced to follow narrative direction from above. How embarrassing it must be to one day claim the pathetic Russian orcs are reduced to fighting with shovels and then a few months later claiming, without blinking an eye, that the omnipotent Russian colossus is about to ravage across Western Europe. The truth no doubt lies in a shade of grey somewhere between these black and white extremes. Sigmund Freud once stated: "Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.” Tribalists and reverse-tribalists are blind to the grey zone.

On a spectrum of universal to particular, most people would generally prefer to live in a universalist society with one set of rules that at least in theory are applicable equally to everyone. The exception being that there are strong temptations to drop universalism when a family member is in a dispute. But unilaterally renouncing the tribal and embracing the universal is a strategy of defeat if there are no incentives for others to follow suit. The mutually assured menace of everyone going tribal, especially wielded by the most powerful factions, is the only guarantee that other minorities will submit to the universal. Conversely, a powerful majority that insists on embracing tribalism will provoke minorities to follow suit.

Henotheism: Arraying the Universal and Particular

Israelites became Jews during their captivity in Babylonia. The brilliance of the Torah they produced there comes down to the fusion of the ancient god of the Canaanites El with Judah’s tribal god Yahweh. The product of this celestial alchemy was the monotheist tribal God of Israel. This theocratic innovation was born of a potent fury the Israelite elite conjured while being held hostage in the heart of Mesopotamia.

El represents the universal. For the Semitic people (of which Jews are only one tiny portion) El was the god of gods. His equivalent in the Greek pantheon is Cronus. El and his Goddess wife Asherah had 70 children. Their progeny spread everywhere and became the tribal gods of the various nations.

One of El’s sons was Yahweh. In Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud describes Yahweh as "a rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty.” Freud argues Yahweh was a volcano god and claims he was first the god of the Midianites, a desert tribe living in what today is Saudi Arabia. With the arrival of Moses, Yahweh was adopted by the Judeans as their war god.

The Israelites of the First Temple period (1200-586 BC) were not monotheistic. Strongly pagan, they worshipped their own national god Yahweh, but recognized that the other nations had their own gods. Above all the gods was El, who existed on a higher plane. Baal and the Goddess Asherah were also important deities. The worship of Asherah was strongest among women and is very similar to the cults of Dionysus in Greece.

A system where each tribe worships their own god but also recognizes that other tribes have similar gods they must worship is called henotheism. A henotheistic order is a stage between polytheism and monotheism

A henotheist alignment resembles the hierarchy of a sports league. There are the individual teams and above them there is a centralized administration—headed by the commissioner. During the First Temple period, Yahweh was the Kingdom of Judea’s “head coach” or war god while El was up in the commissioner’s booth, high above the playing fields (battlegrounds). El was timeless, distant and had no partisan interests in the various battles.

The Biden Administration is publicly acting as if such a henotheistic international order today exists. Biden is playing the universalist El trying to manage the tribal furor of Netanyahu.

In 605, the Neo-Babylonian Emperor Nebuchadnezzar II laid siege to Jerusalem. Judah, who had been allied with Egypt, the great enemy of the Babylonians, switched sides to save his city. King Jehoiakim handed over great riches, some hostages and agreed to pay tribute to Nebuchadnezzar II to save the city and the First Temple. The authors of the Bible, which was written later, despised this decision by Jehoiakim. After three years, Babylon looked as if they had weakened and so Judah switched camps back to the Egyptians. This was a fatal mistake as Nebuchadnezzar II returned to Jerusalem to destroy it and the First Temple. He took the royal court and ruling elite back with him to captivity in Babylon. Daniel from the Book of Daniel was a hostage from one of these campaigns.

The Torah was written during the Babylonian Captivity. It was written by a Yahwist faction who spent much time retconning history to insert Yahweh into the past. For centuries previously, various Yahwist elites in Judea had tried to impose monotheism, but these attempts were thwarted by popular revolts. The common people of Judea preferred paganism’s various gods and cults that symbolized natural cycles of life. But alone in captivity, the Judean elites became Jews as they fused once and forever El and Yahweh into the One and Only God. The Book of Daniel recounts attempts to get Nebuchadnezzar II to accept Yahweh as his god.

Fuelled by the impotent furor of military defeat in Judea, the intellectually potent fusion of El and Yahweh in Babylon emerged. This audacious creation meant that the newly-created Jews were the universal God’s Chosen People. No other tribe has ever had the audacity to conceive of themselves on such a grandiose scale.

What followed was a difficult time trying to convince other tribes to subordinate themselves by accepting Yahweh. The return to Zion occurred when the Persians rescued the Jews from Babylon and allowed the Jews to occupy Jerusalem and to build the Second Temple. Never a military power, Israel could not impose its god on other through conquest. Only during Roman occupation did a self-declared messiah appear and eventually Christian cults appropriated Yahweh and spread his name across the globe.

Masters of the Universal—Particular Dilemma

Today, as Benjamin Netanyahu plays violent volcano god, his ministers are exuberant in their genocidal exhortations for the eradication of the Palestinian people. In doing so they shock the world, who naively think there exist universal rules against genocide. Israel must self-sabotage in the eyes of others because as the Chosen it is their duty to reject universal norms of international conduct if they conflict with their tribal interests.

The US in its active role as the Redeemer Nation also rejects the universal—it is in a state of permanent exception. But today the US is called upon to act as the global commissioner’s office, to play the role El once played in Canaan. As the US meekly mimics El—managing global affairs from its lofty box seat—Israel refuses to respect the commissioner’s authority. That’s because for Israel it is their head coach Yahweh, impersonated by Netanyahu on earth, who is both their tribal god and the global commissioner.

As Israel denies America the the most fragile fig leaf of universalism, the resentment of the rest of the world only grows. The global order is increasingly resembling that of narcissistic family order. Israel, the golden child, is incorrigible. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are scapegoats in rebellion. Europe is the indulgent mother, actively and even gleefully enabling Israel’s genocidal horrors. And the US is cast in the role of a bumbling father, unable or unwilling the pull the reins on its marauding golden child.

A looming force does exist to temper Israel’s rabid violence. Diaspora Jews, chaffing at local chauvinism, have long militated to push their Western societies closer towards the universal end of the scale. The sight of seeing Israel rejecting the universal values they have long embraced is shocking to many of them. The majority of diaspora Jews reject Ben Shapiro’s exuberant tribalism. It is this group that may end up serving as Netanyahu’s Achilles Heel in his continued quest to merge the universal into Israel’s tribal interests.