#i read this and was immediately reminded of an especially paranoid anti-ceasefire rant i saw on tumblr earlier

[riotouseaterofflesh]

You can wave a white flag; you can be an old woman or a newborn baby or someone else who visibly poses no threat whatsoever; you can be an Israeli hostage calling for help—if they see you, they will try to kill you. The five-month massacre in Gaza is not collateral damage, or an unfortunate side effect of the war against Hamas. There is no war against Hamas. Just this. The only military objective is to kill piano teachers and poets.

What I find really unbearable, though, what sticks in my throat like a clammy marble of rage, is the combination of mass murder and smugness. Israeli soldiers keep filming themselves committing smug atrocities. There’s one video I can’t stop thinking about: not even close to the worst thing the IDF has done, but maybe the most galling. An Israeli soldier stands in the ruins of a classroom in Gaza. He pulls a framed certificate off the wall and smashes it. He takes the time to erase the lessons from the chalkboard. Big man! How brave, this soldier encrusted in body armour and grenades! How heroically you defend yourself against a room where young children learn to read! But that really is exactly what he thinks. He thinks he’s being brave. Standing up against the oppressors of the Jewish people. Refusing to walk meekly into the gas chambers. He even writes it on the now-erased board: עם ישראל לא לפחד; the people of Israel aren’t afraid. Elsewhere Israeli soldiers posed in Gaza’s parliament building, grinning like they’d just taken the Reichstag. What a victory! This murderous ratissage into a city that’s been under Israeli occupation their entire lives, and their parents’ entire lives too. Then they planted dynamite around the building and blew it up. The entire country is mad off this stuff, and I do mean mad: saucer-eyed, loony. Israel’s foreign ministry shrieks like a funeral drunk whenever any government dares to raise an objection to its killing spree. Spain is Hamas! Ireland is ISIS! The whole world is made of Hitler! They also think they’re being brave. A lonely voice for justice. Confronting a cruel world with its complicity. At the Kerem Shalom crossing, protesters draped in the Israeli flag dance and sing and block aid shipments from entering Gaza. More famine! More disease! More stillborn children! They think they’re being brave too. The arctic glint of righteousness in their eyes. Even the more liberal sectors of Israeli society are getting in on it. Someone who was in Tel Aviv recently told me that most liberal Israelis don’t really have the emotional bandwidth at the moment to care too much about Palestinian suffering. They know what’s happening just down the coast from Tel Aviv, but it doesn’t register. They’re still in shock after October 7th, still worried sick for the hostages, still mourning the dead. It’s too early to worry or mourn for anyone else. The person who told me this didn’t think this Zone of Interest-style sociopathy was a bad thing. He didn’t understand why I found it so hideous. In a way, it’s also brave. It takes courage to let yourself really feel what you’re feeling, to sit with your grief, to admit that you hurt. It takes courage to be so emotionally complex. Not like the barbarians on the other side of the fence.

This madness is not limited to Israel. Everyone remembers being bullied at school. Even celebs, film stars, supermodels, beautiful and charismatic people, all seem to have had a hard time of it when they were kids. Some people build the entire foundation of their adult life on having been bullied as a child. You were such a misfit, you were so interesting and different… But nobody seems to remember being the bully, and I promise you that at some point in your life, you were also the bully. I certainly was. I couldn’t comprehend the senseless sadism of the kids who’d gang up on me, back when I was seven years old with dyspraxia and a speech impediment. What had I ever done to them? How could anyone bear to be so cruel? But somehow, all that stuff went out the window as soon as I encountered anyone lower down the totem pole than I was. My cruelty wasn’t senseless. Other people had been cruel to me, which made me a victim: anything I did was, by definition, fighting back, being brave. After all I’d been through, didn’t I deserve to experience the joys of power? Just a little? As a treat?

#israel #palestine #fear #against the brave #sam kriss #i read this and was immediately reminded of an especially paranoid anti-ceasefire rant i saw on tumblr earlier #what we want is not fear but the shame that leads to self-reflection