Israel, Hamas, and Victimhood

the get-out-of-jail-free card

Back in the day, the Zman tells us, justice was personal:

If a guy in the next village killed one of your people, justice required you to kill him or one of his people.

But now we let the cops and the justice system do it.

Then there is Israel and the Arabs, each the enemy of the other.

Hamas committed an atrocity against the Jews because their justice demanded it.

And,

Twitter was full of Jewish commentators demanding vengeance.

So justice now is personal, again.

Back in the day, when a tribe conquered the tribe next door, they killed all the men and took the women and children into slavery and that was the end of that.

But not with Israel and Gaza.

What I notice as the key factor in the Gaza Crisis is the Victim Question, that the Palestinians are accounted victims, and the Israels the oppressors. Congressional “Squad” members talk about Israel as “an Apartheid State.” Victims cannot be to blame.

Victimhood changes everything. Just read this NPR “explainer.”

Hamas killed 1,200 people in the attack, and took dozens hostage…
In retaliation, Israel has… killed at least 1,000 Palestinians and displaced more than 200,000 people….

But experts agree:

Netanyahu… aligning with ultranationalists and religious conservatives…
[Netanyahu] nominated [Ben-Gvir to the cabinet] who was convicted for eight times in inciting violence against Arabs…
Ben-Gvir… pushed for more settlements in the occupied West Bank, escalating tensions with Palestinians….
Then there is Netanyahu's plan to overhaul Israel's judiciary…
an increase in violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinian villagers…
[Peace professor] Telhami… said he observed total despair and desperation [among Palestinians]…

Victims can’t be to blame. They just can’t.

Hey, George Soros!

George Soros Demanded "America and Israel Must Open the Door to Hamas"

And dear old George has been sending money to Hamas for years.

At Powerline they are asking: “How did Jews go from victims to oppressors?” Back in the 1920s Jews in the US were clearly victims of various forms of discrimination. But then the 1960s, blacks became the oppressed victims and Jews became oppressors to the lefty radicals in the universities.

And now we have the rulers’ political formula that progessive rulers are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. The Allies are the white knights; the Oppressed Peoples are the helpless victims; the White Oppressors are always to blame.

We can see this operating with Israel against Hamas. It’s bad, but understandable, that Hamas should attack and kill Israelis. When you are a victim you sometimes strike out, in despair and rage. But it would be a war crime for Israelis to attack Gaza, and unthinkable for Israelis to dissolve the Gaza mini-state and scatter the Gazans to the four winds.

In the old days the Palestinian Arabs, in the defeat of 1947-49, would have ceased to exist as a people; they would have been scattered; they would have run for their lives, or submitted to being a conquered people.

But today, if you are an elite-approved oppressed people you have no responsibility, no guilt, no agency. And anyone that doesn’t honor that victimhood is an oppressor. You hold down drugged-out black George Floyd who is resisting arrest and you go to jail. And stores can’t take action against looters from the oppressed peoples, because they are victims.

But we should really start thinking about deprogramming Trump supporters.

I tell you: the guy that figures out how to cut the Gordian Knot on helpless victims and take away their Get-out-of-Jail-Free cards should win a couple-dozen Nobel Prizes.

In your dreams.