Bad Guys vs. Bad Guys

The Middle East conflict is insoluble--and none of our business.

One survivor of an attack told PBS that he hid in a bush for hours as Hamas carried out atrocities. “The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls,” he said. “After they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite.” And, he said, “they laughed. They always laughed. It’s — I can’t forget how they laughed.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/opinion/hamas-violence-women-israel.html?smid=url-share

I have on my piano a candlestick that an ancestor in the British army during WWI ‘liberated’ from Ypres cathedral. Rape and pillage have always been a feature of war though I’m sure the ancestor didn’t rape and confined his pillage to minor souvenir hunting.

The Geneva Conventions, aimed at harm reduction, prohibit rape and pillage and a range of other practices that were, traditionally, amongst the perks of military service. The armies of modern states are largely, or at least officially, in compliance. Pre-modern peoples, whether underclass urban street gangs, drug cartels, or third world liberation movements are not. They rape and pillage and invent novel, creative ways to torture victims. And they laugh, like the gods who, according to the Iliad, supervised the Trojan War.

‘It's their culture’—in times of peace as well as war. Women are men’s property and in time of war men take revenge on the enemy by despoiling their property. It should hardly be surprising that Hamas fighters are behaving in the way that fighting men from traditional societies have always behaved.

And it is not at all surprising that they are engaged in perpetual war against the Israelis who have locked them out of modernity. Confined to an over-crowded, impoverished strip of land they look across the border, where the third world abuts the first world, to an affluent country from which they are excluded. An iconic picture of the border shows a road with a border fence running down the median. On the Israeli side motorists drive along a paved highway; on the Palestinian side a man drives a donkey down a dirt track.

Palestinians maintain the standard arrangement for traditional societies, where women are chattel and warlords employ young lower-class males, whose only assets are muscle and guts, as enforcers. Israelis for their part maintain an ethno-state which recently announced that potential immigrants may be required to submit to genetic testing to determine whether they qualify for citizenship. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5034383/

Why is this any less racist than it would be if the US declared itself, as some conservative Evangelicals propose, a Christian state and required genetic testing for potential immigrants? The rationale seems to be that Jews are a special case: a perennial victim group that will require special accommodations in perpetuity. So the US, reacting to the commonly held view that criticism of Israel is ipso facto antisemitic and pushed by conservative Christians looking for the second coming of Christ in Israel, at Armegeddon, pours in aid.

How is any response short of ‘a plague on both your houses’ reasonable? This is tribal warfare and none of our business.