“When the facts change, I change my mind,” said John Maynard Keynes. “What do you do, sir?”
That is the hallmark of critical thinking. Facts shaping one’s beliefs — rather than beliefs shaping one’s facts. Humanity had long seemed to be progressing in that direction. But lately, not so much, with tribalistic thinking to the fore.
I was long a Republican. When the party changed into something horrible, I became an opponent. But it’s shocking how rare that’s been. Most “conservatives” remain loyal even while conservatism has been totally perverted. Turns out it’s more a tribe than a philosophy.
I grew up, attending Hebrew school in the 1950s, with Israel a bright shining light. After the Holocaust, a blessed refuge for long persecuted people. A monument to human perseverance and energy, “making the desert bloom.” A forward-looking democracy in a region of retrograde autocracies. A steadfast American friend in a world full of enemies.
All a realization of my humanistic vision. But now Israel has betrayed that, becoming one of the world’s bad guys.
October 7 was a crime against humanity, but so is Israel’s response. It has a right to self-defense but this is not self-defense. Gaza was already a big, immiserated prison camp even before, and Israel has now killed over twenty times as many as Hamas did on October 7; mostly women and children. Assurances of trying to minimize civilian harm insult our intelligence. This assault is so wantonly indiscriminate that tormenting and killing Gazans seems the point of it rather than some regrettable collateral damage. “Genocide?” Let’s not quibble over nomenclature, and just call it a pogrom.
Even unarmed people holding white flags are being shot. The death toll is sure to escalate as diseases spread, with medical resources devastated. There’s no anesthetic available and most injured people go untreated. Much of Gaza’s housing and civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, with 85% of its 2+ million people displaced and essentially homeless, survivors reduced to living in shabby tents, if lucky enough to afford them, or else just sleeping in mud, while struggling to somehow find vanishing food and water is a constant ordeal. There’s no fuel, scant electricity, no communications. Israel provides no help for its victims, and has reduced outside humanitarian aid deliveries to a trickle; insisting on inspecting them and barring almost every item on the pretext that it could notionally be useful to Hamas. And there’s no plan for how Gaza can be governable, or just livable, the day after.
Israel’s achieving its supposed war aims is highly improbable; certainly won’t save the surviving hostages; and even if Hamas is annihilated, Israel’s atrocities are sure to raise up countless more embittered enemies. From the standpoint of Israel’s true security interests, it’s insane.
And even now, America continues to supply weapons to Israel. This must stop.
Israel did, in 2000, make the Palestinians an offer they could not refuse; but refuse it they (Yasir Arafat) did. Prime Minister Netanyahu keeps insisting there’s no “partner for peace,” but he’s striven to make sure of that, even conniving at Hamas’s dividing the Palestinians. A road to a dead end, with no detour in sight. As if Israel can somehow simply make the Palestinians go away. They can’t all be killed.
Today’s Israeli government is the most extremist ever. But they did elect it, and while October 7 may have dented Netanyahu’s personal popularity, it seems most Israelis fully support the Gaza operation, in all its inhuman criminality.
I remember how, during the Balkan wars a quarter century ago, when Serbs were so guilty of so much horror, almost nobody of Serb ancestry would condemn it. That taught me something about human nature and the power of tribalism. Yet it didn’t make me anti-serbitic. Nor do Russia’s crimes today make me hate all Russians. Traveling in Russia when it was a free country in 1993 and 1995 I met many lovely people; they are victims. But meantime anti-semitism has a long history, and it’s a great irony that the very people who suffered from it now so cruelly victimize others. Thus bringing yet more hatred upon themselves. When it comes to the problem of anti-semitism, Israel’s crimes against Palestinians sure don’t help.
Religion is a big factor. Israel was, during my old Hebrew school days, a basically secular society. But religion has grown increasingly powerful there, especially with the “ultra-orthodox” Haredis, ridiculously coddled and reproducing much faster than the rest of the population, becoming an ever bigger voting bloc. With a messianic mentality, seeing themselves on a mission from God. What a recipe for conflict and bloodshed.
Religion scrambles the brain, it’s inimical to rational moral reasoning. That’s a big part of the story with today’s Republican party too.
