“He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand? 20 He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself or say, “Is there not a lie in my right hand?” Isaiah 44:20”
My maternal family, being Jews in 1930s Germany, were forced to affix yellow stars upon their clothing and were subject to daily public harassment. Finally, my mother and her sister, a few small family valuables sown by their mother into the lining of their clothes, escaped the madness on a Kindertransport, their father arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
At present, and since the inception of the Zionist state, in the name of those who survived Nazi inflicted brutality and blood lust, Palestinians suffer the Zionist’s version of crimes against humanity — that includes a type of Final Solution being enacted upon the inhabitants of Gaza.
War, in general, should be as outmoded among people possessed of heart, mind, and soul as is cannibalism, incest, and public lynching. Yet the political elite of the West not only permit Israel to perpetrate genocide but supply the weaponry that enable mass slaughter.
While, in the US, ICE thugs, with jackboots for minds, come for blameless human beings, as the Gestapo did my grandfather, as the worst among us cheer them on. The concept of Alligator Alcatraz (and the fact MAGA miscreants find it all so amusing) seems like a comic book version of Nazi evil. Himmel might have averred, “Das ist ein bisschen stark! Ist das eine Art Witz”! (“That’s a bit much! Is this some kind of a joke?”). The joke would have gone over like a flaming zeppelin at a Berghof dinner party.
Treblinka, Hiroshima, Wounded Knee and the US government-planned mass starvation of people of the American Great Plains, and Gaza are regarded as aberrations in human events. Yet, on closer examination, the demarcation point between civilization and human barbarity is nebulous at best.
Which side, one should ask oneself, again and again, of the tattered and torn divide are you on?
(Pictured: My son and I, in Berlin, in 2019, standing in front of the house stolen from our family by the Nazis. Palestinians, throughout Israel, could stage their version of the scene.)
Every action nations commit in war would be a crime in times of peace in a just society. Israeli actions, committed, by the IDF and the Zionist settler class, even before the Gaza genocide campaign, transgressed the boundaries of human decency. It is known, abused people, long after their horrible experiences, can become abusers. But whole societies? A cultural mythos of perpetual victimhood, it seems, can lead a people, once wronged, to become convinced they can do no wrong. Hence, the tragedy of a culture of grievance creates a compassion-bereft position towards outsiders.
A late uncle of mine, when a Jewish boy growing up in The Bronx in the 1920s, he and his brothers had to cross through treacherous-to-outsiders Irish, Black, and Italian city blocks when returning from school and other daily rounds. Often, they had to dodge barrages of thrown rocks and other threats to bodily safety. In adulthood, the European Holocaust re-enforced his animus toward the other and he conflated the survival of global Jewry with the existence of Israel.
Uncle Sol would pace the house and he was given to fulminate, even sans context, “an Arab is a Jew with his brains knocked out. Bomb them, that is all they understand.”
As a middle aged and elderly man, he was still dodging stones. His younger brother’s, an orthodox Jew by conviction, children became Israeli citizens and joined the ethnocentric ranks of the Zionist settler class. From the Bronx to Ramallah, through the generations, the madness perpetuates.
Uncle Sol, in his last years, as he descended into Alzheimer’s related dementia, hallucinated Palestinians marauders moved in stealth through his house; a stone-throwing Intifada of the mind shook the old man to his very core. There were peaceful days when he minded an imaginary nursery (he had attended to the care of his younger brother). He was prone to shouting, “Leave the children alone! Let them play!” How is it possible, by his bunker mentality worldview, that Palestinian children could not be viewed as human and that they were deserving of a homeland and a childhood?
“Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me…” — Exodus 20:5.
Problematic passage, to say the least. How does one transform the rage and concomitant tragedy that seems to be passed forward by consanguinity. Furies rule the blood. Is there anything under heaven that will end the blood-drenched madness inherent to generational trauma turned by-reflex into animus?
My DNA reveals, my ancestors were European e.g., Spanish, French, Germanic, with four percent coming from Northern Iraq and Iran. This is crucial: nada from ancient Israel. How is it I have a “right to return” to a land where my ancestors never dwelled but Palestinians, whose blood states that they are descendants of the original Jews of the Old Testament are forbidden to return to the land stolen from them?
Whenever the concept of a One State Solution is suggested to Zionists, they are stricken by the thought that Palestinians, now a majority of the population, would inflict the same brutal, dehumanizing treatment on Jewish citizens that they suffered during Zionist rule. In the childhood city of my birth, Birmingham, Alabama, the White overclass, during the civil rights era, expressed similar trepidation thus resisted granting African-Americans equal rights and protection under the law. The same mindset ruled Apartheid South Africa. The psychological projection is a de facto admission of guilt.
Israel is bleeding population. A new Exodus is extant. Jews, in large numbers, are leaving the Zionist state. Perpetrating Genocide and other acts of perpetual aggression have bankrupted Israeli society, both economically and morally. As the Ashkenazi elite exit the country, the zealots remain, and like my Uncle Sol, in his decline, they are dwelling in an hallucinated, and, in steep decline, version of the world.
Regarding a related false and death-besotted cultural mythos:
It is all over but Trump’s et al. palaver in public declaration and SHOUTING in pixel
Independence Day in the US… the lie of the mind of it all. More than two and a half centuries of the lie. Independence from the crown; then subservience to the moneyed class. Life (taking the lives of the original people of the land). Liberty (being at liberty to be exploited by those whose idea of liberty is enslavement and land theft). The pursuit of happiness (perhaps the most profound delusion promulgated there is manic pursuit – but scant happiness is on display. Only the micro frauds that maintain the macro fraud).
An imposter culture instructs – coerces the individual – to manufacture an imposter self – a social mask so that the culture itself does not destroy you.
Result: The grifter, the predator capitalist, the hollow to the core politician, and the anxious and depressed. Do you want to drive yourself even crazier and make the world even worse in its madness. Refuse to admit your own madness and the madness of simply being human unlooses upon the world.
When you face the abyss – that is, the realization we, all of us, are alone. When you are devoured by it – that is where and when you gain the company of others who feel and grieve for the sadness of the earth; of those who transform mortification witnessing human folly into humor and poetry. Then welcome home, lost and weary traveler. You have gained independence. You have shaken off dependence on the American lie.
In the macro sense; The lies promote nationalism in general; of Zionism; of militarism; of earth decimating, soul-defying cultures of greed and exploitation.
Once, the rancid lies have gone to compost, the green of the novel can rise and bloom. A dreams, yes. But so are the nightmares that are self-resonate feedback loops of past and ongoing tragedy. The legacy of violence begetting violent reprisal is as human and tragic as human and tragic can be. Moving forward, we have a choice: implement a just peace or else be plagued, in perpetuity, by endless torment inflicted by grievance-maddened furies.
“Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.” Psalm 51:10
Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man by Salvador Dalí