For some of us, this is the essential question: How does a genocide continue? What sustains the world’s complacency and enables its complicity? Let's consider a few answers.
Lee Yaron dug up for her book that one of the people who was killed on October 7 (he was defending his kibbutz and ran out of ammunition) had written for a small publication 10 years earlier that the neoliberal revolution in Israel had even privatized security and left the people in the south to fend for themselves. Even if Ronen Bergman & Co. had not written their latest expose in the Times Magazine which showed among other things that Netanyahu was willing to accept a deal with Saudi Arabia in which Israel would recognize a Palestinian state but Smotrich would have none of it we knew that so much of this senseless death is because of the people who want to be part of the West the least and have "shared values" with the axis of right-wing populism. Israelis who really want to be part of liberal Europe had visceral loathing of Netanyahu even on October 6.
I am practicing being a cold and unfeeling person by running to finish Adam Tooze's "Crashed" before it is due at the library in a few days but the point Tooze made about Greece could work here. Leaders can justify deep misery to their own citizens by saying that the market demanded that it be so but the market did not, political beliefs about what the market is for did.
In fact the visceral support for Israel of someone like Joe Biden is the support of someone who remembers when Israel really was an underdog and not a vastly militarily superior, wealthy country.
Just ordered his book the other day - it’s obvious from the quotes you selected that his writing is painfully beautiful.
Separately, I do agree that in this increasingly transactional world, we will need more grassroots boycotts to affect the calculations of governments who abandon basic human values.
Lee Yaron dug up for her book that one of the people who was killed on October 7 (he was defending his kibbutz and ran out of ammunition) had written for a small publication 10 years earlier that the neoliberal revolution in Israel had even privatized security and left the people in the south to fend for themselves. Even if Ronen Bergman & Co. had not written their latest expose in the Times Magazine which showed among other things that Netanyahu was willing to accept a deal with Saudi Arabia in which Israel would recognize a Palestinian state but Smotrich would have none of it we knew that so much of this senseless death is because of the people who want to be part of the West the least and have "shared values" with the axis of right-wing populism. Israelis who really want to be part of liberal Europe had visceral loathing of Netanyahu even on October 6.
I am practicing being a cold and unfeeling person by running to finish Adam Tooze's "Crashed" before it is due at the library in a few days but the point Tooze made about Greece could work here. Leaders can justify deep misery to their own citizens by saying that the market demanded that it be so but the market did not, political beliefs about what the market is for did.
In fact the visceral support for Israel of someone like Joe Biden is the support of someone who remembers when Israel really was an underdog and not a vastly militarily superior, wealthy country.
Just ordered his book the other day - it’s obvious from the quotes you selected that his writing is painfully beautiful.
Separately, I do agree that in this increasingly transactional world, we will need more grassroots boycotts to affect the calculations of governments who abandon basic human values.