A Modest Proposal
The largest prison in the world is called Gaza. It got this way mostly because, when the territory now called Israel was ceded to Jewish activists following World War Two, the native population didn’t have the good sense to fuck off. And it’s hardly the fault of the Jewish settlers that took control. They did everything one should have done in order to push off a native population — terrorism, political maneuvering, race laws, torture, exile, and forced expulsions. The curious shape of modern Israel speak to their incomplete success — a dagger slipped between the two ribs called Gaza and the West Bank. But they didn’t fail entirely — the modern Palestinian diaspora is far larger than the Jewish one ever was; another unfortunate people who persisted despite the world looking to them, shrugging, and muttering, “who?”
There’s no shame in being dismissed by history. It’s happened to plenty of peoples across the ages. In many ways, the modern divide that separates the Israelis and the Palestinians is less a testament to the violent and genocidal origins of their faiths, and more to do with the skill and access of their respective propagandists. Besides, you can’t really be friends with people when God commands to you be first among the tribes — the Jews have a better claim. By the cruel logic of faith, the Palestinians were always doomed to this fate: life in the Holy Land was backwards during the days of Ottoman rule, but not especially violent. The arrival of the British changed that, if nothing else because Christians kind of like Zionism, if nothing else as a means to get rid of Jews. But I still feel for Sir Alan Cunningham, who was trapped running Palestine for the British when the first boatloads of refugees started to arrive following the World War Two and the Holocaust. As you might imagine, violence immediately tore through the region as the new arrivals took over the space. Israel became a nation in 1948, and annexed Gaza from Egypt in 1967. Alan must have known what was coming…
Fast forward through the decades of terrorism and recrimination, and we return to the crisis in Gaza today. Two million Palestinians “live” in this tiny strip of land (around 68,211 football fields for you Americans), unable to leave, unable to trade; trapped in total despondent dependency on their neighbors: Egypt, a broken and cruel dictatorship, and Israel, the conquering entity that put them there. This experience has left many of the remaining Palestinians brutalized — in the classical sense. And following this most recent, unfortunate decision on the part of Hamas to (shall we say) spark additional dialogue, this situation has gotten a whole lot worse. The 1400 or so Jews that were killed in this most recent outburst are being avenged a million times over — Israel has cut the territory off from food, water, and electricity. They’ve flattened whatever infrastructure remains, invaded, and killed everything they can find. The world has looked on, and far too many have applaud the slaughter as justified in the name of “self defense” (already there death count in Gaza has soared beyond 30,000; and it’s probably WAY higher in reality). No one will remember the names of Gaza’s dead, no matter how many lists we put out. And worse, no one will care for the wounded — those unlucky masses that, spared the release of death, will wind up maimed and hopeless for whatever life is left to them. History (meaning us) has promised the Palestinians one thing: ruin.
To understand where this can go from here, we might take a step back. Israel exists today because Adolf Hitler reached the conclusion that Europe couldn’t exist with Jews ruining all that cool stuff that the Arians were up to. Gaza exists because the Jews had to concede that, from a certain point of view, he was apparently right. Following the war, no one took seriously the proposition of reintegrating Jews into European society. The mask had slipped, and there was a sudden, overwhelming urge for separation. Given the lessons of this political history, it is perhaps unsurprising that the state of Israel saw no reason to peacefully integrate with the Palestinians.
Modern Israel is, to a certain extent, purely a consequence of Hitler’s government. The lessons that made Zionism seem a reasonable political project are precisely coordinated with Western anti-semitic tradition. It should come as no surprise that she mastered those lessons, retooling them for our geopolitical present. But this is okay — I’m not trying to highlight hypocrisy here — as an exercise, highlighting hypocrisy is a total waste of time. Rather, as plenty of well-meaning Americans will doubtless remind you, everything is justified in defense of our identities — they say that the words “Never Again” are inscribed on Israel’s nuclear weapons: a people born of victimization are almost always all too eager to make victims of their own.
After all, nothing justifies our suffering quite like how we inflict it on others…if you knew how I felt, you’d understand why I needed you to feel that way.
Of course, the Nazis were only in control of Europe’s Jews for a few years. In that time, they built ghettos (like Gaza), but it was always understood that these were temporary affairs. Ghettos were logistical centers; a quick stop on your way to a death camp. There’s some taboo here, but modern Jews seem to think that they can maintain their captive population forever. But if the history of the Jews and of the Holocaust is to mean anything, it is that this simply isn’t so. When you declare a people anathema and place them at your mercy, you’ll eventually be forced to do something about it.
Israel now has an opportunity to do something about it. Hamas’s act of vile terror opened the door wide for them. Indeed, that was probably the point — Hamas as a wounded man, spewing vitriol, desperately crying out for someone to put him out of his misery.
So here’s what I think. These are communities built on trauma, hell bent on inflicting their agonies on their neighbors. The Palestinians are, for better or worse, the weaker party. But fortunately, the Israelis have inherited a blank check (morally speaking) from most relevant global powers, so could slaughter most of Gaza’s Palestinian population over the next few months.
And perhaps they should.
Given their plans for the region, it would be the humane thing, really. It’s not technically genocide to eliminate a small regional enclave — after all, it’s not like the Israelis care about Palestinians in Jordan or Chicago. But they can easily leave Gaza a smoking, lifeless scar without too much hand-wringing. Bombing might seem so much more civilized than organized slaughter — it helps you to pretend you’re not doing what you’re actually doing, but it can be messy. Would a more directed approach be better? I mean, otherwise they just plan to starve and deny. Keeping these people there is unsustainable on any timeline I can think of. Besides, no one likes being called an apartheid state. Mean words sting, whatever our relationship to their meaning.
Should this end in the expected way, with a halfassed cease fire and deepening oppression, all we’re about to get is another generation of Palestinian children, lacking education and basic nutrition, raised in an environment birthed from ethnic violence. They’ll learn to hate their Jewish overlord, feeding a culture of anti-semitism and promoting the exact same cycles that the Israelis say creates the need for the current system of violent repression. Maybe in another 70 years, these same kids will shoot up another dance party to make a point about the violence of 2023, inviting the Israelis to kill and displace another generation. It’s the stupidest cycle in the world today.
So why pretend? Just get in there and put the poor bastards out of their misery already. Besides, maybe they don’t need to kill every Palestinian in Gaza. If you execute, say, 90% of the population, whatever cultural identity they once had will vanish in a generation following absorbtion into Greater Israel — people will forget quickly enough; the desert can be made to bloom from a sea of blood; corpses make decent plant food after all. America, the arsenal of the world, won’t ask too many questions. After all, half our political machine has been captured by a bunch of millenarian crackpots who firmly believe that by stoking tensions in the region, the Israelis are doing God’s work, and the rest come off as weak, pandering whores. This combination means that we’ll supply whatever the Israelis need to slaughter those people wholesale without too many questions. And if, say, Iran steps in, so much the better. There’s enough distance between Tel Aviv and Tehran that you could pretty safely “never again” those asshats back to the the age of Xerxes.
Regardless, this is the perfect moment for Israel to end this stupid charade. 70 years is too long to pretend you’re trying to be humane. Nothing about this humane. The best thing to do now is to kill as many of them as you can and ship whatever survives off to South America or Siberia or something. Maybe just put them on boats and “lose” them in the Atlantic. As we have repeatedly seen, no one actually cares. Everyone loves an underdog — especially when they get to take it out on another one. Besides, the sooner it’s over, the sooner we can get back to worrying about who’s using the bathroom stall next to you.
But this bullshit where you pretend to be better? Imagining that torture is preferable to murder? It’s gross. It turned you all into animals. Do what you’ve been waiting to do.
For the love of God, get it over with.
