Israel's Fault: The Problem with (a Messiah-less) Zion

Oh boy...

This episode is longer than usual, more contentious, as it addresses the current genocidal violence in Gaza in ways that neither 'the left' nor 'the right,' as they are now called (defined?), would stand behind; except perhaps with a dagger?..

We are both against what Israel is doing in Gaza, and think it ought to stop immediately (which would still be much much too late).

Our discussions, our rhetoric, our frameworks of understanding, however, are neither neutral nor universal. They involve issues that precede "universal categories" of "racism" - on either "side" - to show western eyes what they cannot see about this global problem.

Sagi calls it "metaphysical antisemitism," a term he borrowed from Gershom Scholem, but developed much (too much?) further. Accounts of this problem, here and now, cannot hide behind the tried and true tropes - of 'evil,' 'the right side of history,' etc. - but are viewed in a particular historical lens. Particular, because it presupposes Jewish specificity, but not to justify Israel's actions, or the manner(s) of Palestinian resistance to them. To do that we need a metaphysically sensitive analysis as to what underpins tropes like "anti-zionism," "Islamophobia" and the likes.

Just because "we hate Nazis" does not necessarily mean we're on the right side of history.
Just because Hitler accelerated the evacuation of a Christian, antisemitic Europe of Jews to the ancient land of Kna'an, does not make this land Zion (yet), nor him the Messiah.

What can the present situation teach us, from our, Jewish, perspective, about this knot? How do we explain, without explaining away, the terrible cycle of murderous, genocidal violence that has erupted in Israel/Palestine?

Probing these problems might help shine a light on a tragic impasse, where true things - real facts, real pain, real history - are employed for fallacious reasons, and yet persist (for the inaccessible truths that still burn, silent, within them).

Here we try to understand the situation in a way that does not flatten the discourse to "human rights"; it demands a greater responsibility to difference than that tired (and by now at least faltering, if not highly suspect) 'humanism' that allows Christian mora frameworks to gloss over their own metaphysical assumptions, and violence.
You know, like the idea of the Nation State being a solution -- imposed, by various means, upon the rest of the "civilized world" -- to an intra-Christian problem (that it did not solve). We are not anti-Christian, however, for, as the wise man said, they know not what they do. Instead of platitudes or tired binaries, here we try to think through these phenomena as conflagrations produced by a complex system of violence-erasure, a violence by other means, if you will, a violence delegated, farmed-out, rationally contracted and brutally enforced.
And made invisible.

The 'Colonialism' levelled at Israel hides metaphysical assumptions that need to be spelled out if the sides that truly matter, that truly suffer, in this murderous, brutal impasse - the Israeli and the Palestinian - are to be able to find common ground and a way out of this cycle.

So long as the hatred that fueled the worst atrocities of October 7th, and that chants "from the river to the sea" will not be listened as to its - decidedly non-antisemitic - drive; so long as Israel's claim to self-defense is either accepted as a carte blanche for violence, or dismissed as irrelevant to this issue, the impasse will remain.

We are trying to find a way out of this impasse.

Cancel if you must,
but
listen, if you can.