Israel is Falling

Good morning and thank you for subscribing. I try to keep my posts to about two per week so I don’t flood anyone’s inbox, but I apologize if even that is too much.

I watched a video in bed this morning from AJ+ that is an incredible indictment of the Biden admin and the US media in their culpability for the genocide in Gaza. I think more and more people are getting comfortable with the use of the word 'genocide' to describe what is happening in Gaza. Those who don't like the word, though, likely scroll right past anything that uses it. This makes it challenging to reach people.

I am trying to use my position as a white, male, secular American to advocate for the weak, vulnerable, and/or powerless who cannot advocate for themselves because prejudice against them (based on their race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality) prevents their being heard. I don’t try to speak for them, but in support of them.

I am not talking about Palestine because I believe doing so will make a real difference in my lifetime, I am doing it because I believe it is the right thing to do. Not only because of the current horrific bombardment and starvation of the Palestinian people in Gaza—although that is a highly motivating factor—but also the ongoing tyranny of apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the lack of support and opportunity for many thousands of Palestinian refugees outside Palestine, and the dispossession of many more Palestinians who live outside camps in the diaspora.

Israel has no future. Anyone who thinks that supporting the Palestinians is tantamount to abandoning Israel to defeat and destruction is missing the point that its defeat and destruction is inevitable. The world will not allow it to persist as it has been. The brutal and unrelenting war on the people of Gaza, the slaughter of innocent civilians, journalists, healthcare professionals, etc. has brought the radical hatred, bigotry, and genocidal intent intrinsic to the Zionist political project into stark focus.

There are more of 'us' than 'them'. There are far more citizens than administrators of nation-states and their security apparatuses. They can suppress and kill and imprison many of us, but not even most of us. Eventually they will suffocate and die without the support of the masses no matter how much they hoard resources and flex their economic and military muscle.

The world is going to go in one or another direction. Either in the direction of less settler-colonialism or more. Less apartheid or more. Less genocide or more. One of my nieces recently expressed concern that Israel would get wiped out without our support, and my answer today is that we can’t save Israel from itself. From its founding it has chosen a path that rejects true freedom and justice for all the inhabitants of that land, and the dispossessed aren’t going away. The question we should be asking is do we want to go down with them, or get out in front of history.

Something people often say is that history will judge this or that person, state, or event unkindly, but that promotes a misconception. History doesn’t judge, it documents. It is not going to look back on Israel and say "naughty, naughty", it's going to look back on (hopefully the peaceful, pluralist democracy of) Palestine and say "For just over 75 years, members of a Jewish supremacist movement called ‘Zionism’, attempted to redefine all of Palestine as an ethnostate called ‘Israel’"

To be clear I am not advocating for the destruction of Israel and certainly not for the ethnic cleansing or genocide of the Jewish people. I am predicting the dissolution of Israel and advocating for one state with equal rights for all as an alternative. Whether this is a realistic dream is for the future historians to document.