(If you have received this by email, please click on the title to access the most up-to-date version. I often continue to edit and correct typos after publishing the first version)
Men judge by the complexion of the sky
The state and inclination of the day:
So may you by my dull and heavy eye,
My tongue hath but a heavier tale to say.
I play the torturer, by small and small
To lengthen out the worst that must be spoken:— William Shakespeare, Richard II Act 3 Scene 2 (Sir Stephen Scroop to King Richard II)
In this scene from Richard II, Scroop has nothing but bad news to relay to the King. He prefaces his message with a wordy warning, as if to prepare the King, to ease him into the sense of the unfolding disaster, one little bit of bad news at a time. Scroop wants the king to know he is not enjoying being the ‘torturer’, perhaps he is afraid the king would try to ‘shoot the messenger’. No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, but Scroop knows that the King needs to grasp the full reality of his situation. We are likely to make bad decisions, if we do not see clearly, and do not recognise the situation we face.
Sometimes when I write, I feel like Sir Scroop. Just before I write, or talk about how bad Israel really is, and how dangerous, I wonder if I should offer something to soften the message, to ease people into it. When I look at what Israel does, and what it says in the sections of its media that are not translated into English, all I see is horror. I keep telling people that if no one stops Israel, they should expect the worst. I cannot, and will not try to soften this message, or ease people into it. What I say is the grim, and horrible truth, and everyone can see what I see, because it is there for everyone to see. Israel has pulled all the stops, and it is now openly exterminating the Palestinian people. It is not Netanyahu. It is all of Israel (with the exception of a very small minority).
It helps Israeli spokespeople and politicians when most of the population believes it is antisemitism that drives the ICC and the ICJ, or anyone else who dares to call Israel out, or even mildly criticise its actions. When you grow up there and see the world only from within, you believe this. I remember distinctly as a child, age seven or eight, feeling tormented by the thought that everyone hated us, and I could not understand why they did. It felt so unfair. It never occurred to me that what I was taught may not have been exactly the truth. I was only a child, and everyone around me believed it. When the world protests against Israel, it fits perfectly into the narrative of perpetual, innocent victimhood that Israeli society is steeped in. The majority of Israeli Jews believe that they are doing nothing wrong, that they never did anything wrong, and that everyone hates them, and wants to kill them just because they are Jews.
No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. I am sometimes rebuked for being ‘too negative’, or for ‘being too one-sided’. There are many, including many Jewish loyalists, who still cling to the belief, or hope that ‘Israel cannot possibly be that bad’. If things Israel does look bad, it must be some kind of trickery. I challenge them to tell this to every Palestinian on the ground in Gaza right now. Tell this to every child in Gaza who has no idea what has happened to their world, to their reality, to their family, friends, school, their home, and everyday, ordinary routine. While some people here struggle to accept that Israel can be ‘really this bad’, the people on the ground in Gaza, are struggling to get clean water, and food, to just survive famine and disease, injuries, the next bombing, the next Israeli massacre.
Let them tell this to the people in the colonised West Bank who face a horrific escalation in the menacing evil of the settler-colonisers (aka ‘settlers’) who are armed, and backed by the Israeli military and the Israeli Government. You cannot buy guns privately in Israel as you can in the US. The weapons in the hands of those settler-colonisers are all issued by the military along with the training on how to use them. These barbarians are running around in the colonised West Bank doing whatever they want. Palestinian lives are not worth much. For Israel any dead Palestinian is a blessing. When I was growing up we were told ‘a good Arab is a dead Arab’ — the word ‘Palestinian’ did not exist. The more these inhuman humans get away with, the more drunk they become on their power, and psychopathy.
Tell the Palestinian citizens of Israel that Israel could not possibly be ‘that bad’. The Palestinian citizens of Israel are on rapidly diminishing borrowed time, especially since Israel’s 2018 Nation-State Bill that declares that Israel is only for Jews. If you follow the link to the Wikipedia page, you will notice that this Bill is called a ‘Basic Law’ (in Hebrew: Hok Yésod). Most readers would probably just overlook this. Basic Law does not sound like much in English. But hok yésod in Israel is the equivalent of a Constitutional Law. Like the UK, Israel does not have a Constitution. Basic Laws, are fundamental, and are considered a basis for a future constitution. Basic Laws cannot be changed or repealed easily, and it is no coincidence that this Bill is a Basic Law. One of the functions of a constitution is to define the country’s identity, to declare what it is, and who it is for. The fact that Israel was always intended exclusively for (racially defined) Jews is old news. But turning this into a Basic Law means that Israel has been dropping all the pretences about what it is. The ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ is not, and never has been, and now it declares it openly with this Constitutional law.
Imagine what this must be like for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have always been treated like unwanted guests, and second-class citizens. This Bill opens the way for Israel in the not-too-distant future — if no one stops it — to strip the Palestinian citizens of Israel off their citizenship. It would be much harder for Israel to do such a thing without this Bill. Evil regimes in modern history have always made sure that whatever they did was ‘legal’. Nothing Germany did during the Third Reich was illegal by Germany’s own laws. When I studied the politics of genocide, this was just a historical fact, something that happened in the past. History is repeated right now in our time in front of everyone. A law such as this Nation-State Bill, is how a country paves the way to a genocide proper. No one tried to stop Hitler then, although he was clear about what he was planning. No one is stopping Israel now. The genocide in Gaza is not the end. It is the beginning of the end. Israel has always intended to remove all of the Palestinians from historic Palestine and replace them with racially ‘pure’ Jews. Bad new? Yes it is. It is also reality.
I always knew what Israel was capable of. The nastiness you see now, has always been there. Israel is not a nice society to live in, not even for its own citizens. There are bubbles, like everywhere else. But perpetrator societies are never nice to their own people. Israel did not ‘shift to the right’, nor has it suddenly become more extremist, or cruel. It always was exactly what it is now. It is not Netanyahu. It is Israel. He is just the latest in a long list of psychopathic leaders who have all done their share to advance Israel’s settler-colonial project.
It is, of course, possible that I might be ‘too negative’ at times. Like everyone else I am prone to moments of despair. There are times when I acutely feel my smallness. What can I, as a ‘social atom’ (a concept created by Jacob Moreno the father of Sociodrama/Psychodrama theory), possibly do in the face of an entire species giving in to its most primitive impulses of greed, cruelty, and the survival of the meanest? How can I stop this? How can I wake all these people up? How can I stop avoidable suffering right now? I cannot do anything on my own, hence these moments of despair.
We are falling so far short of our true potential
My entire life my focus has been on our potential, on what is possible for us as individuals, and as a species. It is the reason I am a psychotherapist. It difficult, often unbearable to watch us repeat the same shameful and bizarre, horrendously destructive patterns that we have acted out all through our recorded history. Why is it a given that countries should be hostile to one another? Why do societies not reach out to their neighbours whoever they are, and ask how they can make their life better? Societies are just groups of people who want the same thing that all humans want, to live, and to grow towards our innate potential, our full humanness. Why compete, when we desperately need to cooperate? What does competition give us that cooperation does not?
Our politicians need to discuss this in our Parliaments. This is the most important topic humans could possibly discuss. Our politicians on all sides of politics need to talk about why we cannot stop pursuing and perpetuating senseless killing and destruction, and all the suffering they bring. It is not really that hard. Why do so many people admire the very same people whose policies lead to nothing but destruction and suffering, who destroy everything that is good in the world and in humanity? For example, I am puzzled by women who vote for Trump. As the linked article asks, why would any woman vote for a rapist, and sexual predator who looks at all women as nothing more than sex objects? This is just one example. By using Trump as an example of something bad, I do not mean to imply that therefore the alternative is good. The real tragedy is that we are always reduced to choosing between varieties of bad. The lack of imagination in humanity, the boring repetition of more of the same, and the harm they cause is so desperately sad, and so unnecessary.
I have other essays on the way where I continue to attempt to answer these questions, and to explain this. But this piece, as you might have already guessed, is a lament, not an analysis. I do have to wonder now. Do we really need to understand a behaviour, its causes, or what motivates it to know that it is wrong?
There is such a thing as right and wrong. Anyone with a functional prefrontal cortex (PFC) has innate morality and ethics, an innate knowledge of right and wrong. No excuses or rationalisations can survive the razor sharp awareness of our prefrontal cortex. Those who have a functional PFC (the majority of people), cannot lie to themselves, at least not for very long. They know their own internal contradictions. They know when they do wrong. Our own brain contains our best observer, our best judge of right and wrong, our own redeemer from our primitive urges, our lies, and self-deception.
I hear from many people that they do not feel confident to speak out on the issues that trouble them (e.g. Palestine), because they worry that they do not know enough. I commend them. Only decent people worry about speaking in public without having enough knowledge or understanding. After all, only irresponsible demagogues shoot their mouths like loose cannons, saying whatever comes to their mind, even if it is complete fiction, and makes no sense. Any speech by Trump, or Netanyahu can serve as a good example.
Israeli settler-colonisers hold regular events in their neighbourhoods in the Colonised West Bank intended specifically to rouse the population into emotional fervour and ever worsening behaviours. Their leaders’ nonsensical, immoral delusions are intended to hypnotise their people into abandoning any sense of empathy, decency, or common sense they might have. They openly call on the people to pillage, steal, frighten, torture, destroy property, and kill Palestinians. The same kind of fanatic public events are held regularly also in the Israeli military. None of the speakers in those events worry about whether what they say is true, or accurate. Do all these people have an impaired PFC? Will they wake up someday from their stupor to realise what they did, or what they supported? People sometimes do, but usually when it is too late for their victims.
The news is bad.
Israel is as bad as it appears, and it will not stop until someone stops it. Change will not come from within Israel, and Israel is aided and abetted by our own governments.
Those who worry about not knowing enough to speak out, worry because they have a functional PFC. They are decent people who want to be sure they do not accuse anyone unfairly, or are too judgemental, when they know they too are flawed human beings like all of us. But a wrong is a wrong. A crime is a crime. Every human being who sees a wrong being committed has a right, indeed a duty to stand up against it, and to protect the victims. Victims are just people who happen to fall in the clutches of predators. Anyone can become a victim. All it takes is for someone to want something that you have. Murderous, greedy, psychopaths, human predators, cannot stop themselves.
Please find your voice and use it.
(I have added the text below in response to a reader’s comment, asking about the solution to having psychopaths in charge).
The solution is to present a counter-point, an opposition created out of an example of how things can be, and offering a whole new paradigm in which, among other things, people without empathy do not get to positions of power. Demanding a new way of life based on cooperation, and demonstrating it rather than succumbing to how things are is the way forward. What I see in ‘ordinary’ society is people fighting each other in the workplace, senselessly competing, getting really nasty with one another, being vindictive, not realising this is not the way. The attitude we see at the top echelons of society exists at all levels of society. Or another example is that people may play nice with each other in the workplace, then get home and be short, and impatient with their own children.
If we want something different, we have to be something different. It is not enough to point out the flaws in those in power, no matter how correct the observations are. We, all of us, those who are governed, ‘ordinary’ folks need to look in the mirror as individuals. Otherwise, the phrase I was taught in political science many years ago, ‘people get the leaders they deserve’ is true. Our leaders reflect the general culture in all our societies. It is nasty all the way down… If we want something different, we have to start with ourselves.
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Thank you for reading my work!
I applaud your temerity to bring up the “constant victim” narrative, it’s pathetic.
Jewish people thinking they are the most persecuted group in history need to talk to a few indigenous first people from the Americas.
No critical thinker possessing a sense of ethics denies the holocaust. That does not give anyone right to commit crimes against humanity and attempted genocide
If you could find a way to "soften" your message about what the ZioGenociders are doing, you'd be delusional. I'm always tempted to look for the good in things and people because I can be hypercritical. But in this case, don't doubt yourself. These vile creatures deserve much worse criticism than you can even imagine. Keep up the TRUTH TELLING! 💕