The Last Human Element You Can Rely On

 Just days after October 7, 2023—I received a mass-mailing from a leftist advocacy group of some kind calling on us to help "stop the genocide in Gaza." 

I found this outrageous. Just days after Hamas's pogrom—a mass killing of Jewish civilians just because they were Jewish, at the hands of a terrorist group with an explicitly genocidal ideology—people were turning around and accusing the victims of genocide? 

It was "attributing to Abel the crime of Cain," as one Israeli jurist put it, who dissented from South Africa's case charging Israel with genocide. It was, if anything, a cruel mockery to a population that had just experienced their worst civilian mass-casualty incident in decades: indeed—since the Holocaust. 

But, as Norman Mailer once wrote in reference to the Israel-Palestinian conflict: "the older you get, the more you begin to depend upon irony as the last human element you can rely on. Whatever exists will, sooner or later, turn itself inside out." (Why Are We at War? (2003)).

And so too—the situation in Gaza has lasted long enough to turn itself inside out. Netanyahu's government has survived to fulfill the charge that people perhaps too hastily and preemptively accused them of at the outset of the fighting. 

Of course—there are still some arguable points that one could insist upon in the legal definition of genocide. The scholars could still have a fine anatomy lesson for themselves over the corpse of Gaza—analyzing whether Israel's leaders had the requisite specific intent to commit a genocide, or whether their actions in the enclave are still "merely" a war crime, atrocity, or crime against humanity. 

But certainly what they have done to Gaza at this point looks a great deal like other recent mass atrocities that I had no trouble calling a genocide. The war in Gaza has displaced at least as many civilians from their homes as the Burmese military's 2017 genocide against the Rohingya. More civilians have been killed in Gaza than perished in 2017 in Myanmar (Burma). 

The rhetoric of the Burmese generals on the eve of the 2017 mass killing and forced removal of the Rohingya was also eerily similar to the kind of statements Israeli officials have made since October 7. In 2017, the Burmese military junta made sinister references to "solving the Bengali problem" (their misleading term for the Rohingya minority, which they use to try to erase the latter's Burmese nationality).

Israeli officials' references to destroying "Amalek" is scarcely more cryptic or less ominous in its implications.

Israeli officials may claim the comparison is unfair, because Israel was acting in self-defense. But the Burmese officials might (and did) argue something similar. There was actually a jihadi group in Rakhine state that had attacked Burmese troops and posed a legitimate threat to the Burmese state. 

But the point in both cases is that this makes no moral difference to the charge of genocide. In Burma, as in Gaza, the existence of a dangerous armed group does not justify the wholesale massacre of innocent civilians who happen to belong to the same ethnic group. 

I still think Israel is perfectly justified in taking a police action against Hamas to free their own civilian hostages from captivity. I think the Burmese central government would have been entitled to arrest and prosecute terrorists who blew up or shot at police within their own territory. 

But that bears no resemblance to what either government actually did—which was to punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. 

I don't want this to be the case. "I too do not want to hear it/ I too do not want to know it," as Kenneth Rexroth once wrote. I hate that I have to entertain this conclusion. I'd much rather focus on resisting the authoritarian takeover of our institutions that is happening in the United States. Donald Trump is running an antisemitic white nationalist movement with overt ties to fascist ideology, and it would be a lot easier to hold the coalition opposing him together if we weren't also having a divisive fight within the ranks of the Democratic Party at this same moment over the human rights record of the State of Israel. 

But children growing up without schools, homes, parents, or food in Gaza right now can't be expected to wait for my political convenience. Netanyahu's government certainly isn't waiting that long before killing them. And indeed—it is the distractible and chaotic state of our times, in which there are many other worthy causes to care about as well, that has probably given Netanyahu's officials an opening to commit the mass killing and displacement in Gaza that many of them long dreamed of. 

And so I am forced to reckon with the fact that maybe the leftists I found so obnoxious in the early days and weeks after October 7 have been proven right in the event. Maybe I shouldn’t have dismissed them. "Perhaps,"—to borrow a phrase from Robert Lowell—"one always took the wrong side." So I have that now on my conscience. "Something to expiate," to quote D.H. Lawrence. 

Or, perhaps, what is happening here is simply what Keynes described in an oft-quoted line: "when the facts change, I change my mind." What may not have been a genocide in 2023 could have become one by 2025.

Mailer again: "Whatever exists will, sooner or later, turn itself inside out." And that may be exactly what happened here.