Could Israel have done something different?

Wednesday afternoon quarterbacking

You’ve probably seen this meme, or something equivalent.

Of course, you cringed, that is unless you have no cringe left to give, your innate faculty of reacting to aversive bathos withered and hollowed into a grey, desiccated husk through prolonged exposure to hasbara. And yet, the meme does not come from nowhere. In pursuit of its overriding goal of comforting and soothing the Jew by indulging his masochistic fantasies of universal irrational hatred oozing out of the cosmos for no other purpose than to be targeted at him, it touches on something more primally important. In a world of sinners, there is a profound moral power in not having done something all that bad.

Everyone wants to wear this ring, but not everyone can. Some nations are doomed by their forebears to walk around in shame, fearful of their own shadow, perpetually afraid to take their own side. Meanwhile, the Amish are going to take over Pennsylvania and no-one is going to stop them. No-one even considers what it might mean to stop them because the moral power they have stored up by just not doing bad stuff generation after generation is so immense.

Both BAPists and assorted Jewish revanchist types will tell us that this is a contingent historical fact, the result of two millenia of marination in Christian culture, not a natural law of the universe, and doubtless they are right, big picture at least. What of it? You can go to Mongolia and look at their big silver statue of a mass murderer, but you’ll never feel comfortable in your own skin doing so. There’s a reason the term ‘mong’ refers to a kid who can’t hold his pencil.¹

The problem is obvious. Look back up at the above meme. The nature of geometry being what it is, you need three whatabouts for a good square meme, which requires including ‘24,000 Muslims massacred in Myanmar’. So, here are some estimates of civilian casualties in Gaza:

So, in short, we don’t get to whatabout about Burma anymore, Burma gets to whatabout about us. Fair’s fair, and, it’s easy to calibrate the focus so it’s worse than that. After October 7th, it was common to say the massacres were like twenty 9/11s based upon the population ratio between Israel and America. Either this logic works or it doesn’t. If it does, 30,000 civilian fatalities out of 2.142 million Gazans makes 1.4%. 1.4% of the population of Syria circa 2011 is 330,392. Actual Syrian civilian fatalities over fourteen years from the civil war are estimated 580,000-617,900. Per unit of time, then, the Gaza war is about an order of magnitude worse than the Syrian Civil war. If the Lancet estimate of 186,000 is correct, or even anything remotely close to correct, it’s two orders of magnitude worse.

Now, it’s true that compared to the total breakdown of human civilization that happened in the mid-20th century it’s still pretty trivial, and also compared to Genghis Khan or Tamerlane. It is presumably examples such as these that the more excitable types of Zionists have in mind when they invite you to look at ‘history’ that will contextualize the Gaza war and justify taking the gloves off. However, for the past year and a half we have genuinely earned the title of ‘the worst thing happening right now in the world, perhaps excluding some African country no-one can bring themselves to care about’. Whether it’s the worst thing to have happened in a decade, two decades or five decades I leave the numerologists of Substack to hash out amongst themselves (in the comments if you want). It’s bad enough, and regardless of our personal opinions or actions, it’s something the Jews will have to bear from now. What else does the responsibility of peoplehood mean? Vibes? Essays?

So while we grin and bear it, it’s worth perhaps giving a passing thought to the question of whether Israel could have done something different. If not, it’s easier to bear, and, if so, then we can rue it, and ruing has its own charms. Just saying the word rue is pretty fun; let it kind of roll around your mouth.

The alternative to what?

Before speculating on what Israel could have done, though, we have to be clear about what Israel actually did. Unfortunately, it’s not so clear. I mean, some people think it is. Sam Kriss:

Not long ago, Israeli jets bombed the al-Shifa hospital complex in Gaza City. You might remember that last November, the IDF besieged the hospital: they cut off fuel and bombed solar panels while snipers shot doctors through the windows. Dozens died. In the end, the IDF captured the complex, which they claimed was a Hamas command centre; their evidence consisted of a few Kalashnikovs planted in an MRI room, a box of dates, and a calendar on a wall. So why are they bombing it again now? IDF strategy in Gaza appears to consist of a series of rapid advances, moving in to destroy houses, smash up shops, vandalise schools—and then equally rapid retreats, followed by aerial bombardment of whoever’s moved into the ruins. Outside a few strategic areas like the Salah al-Din Road, which runs the length of the strip, they’re not interested in holding territory in Gaza. They do not want to have to take over governmental duties for its population of two million (and shrinking) Palestinians. They don’t want to collect Gaza’s taxes, operate its sewage system, or pick up its litter. They just want to destroy.

… A war fought for no actual objectives whatsoever, a war to change nothing. Mere extermination.

Ouch. Leighton Woodhouse:

It’s clear what’s happening in Gaza, and it’s been clear for over a year. In a campaign of vengeance for the October 7 slaughter of hundreds of Israeli civilians, the IDF is making Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians. At this moment, with the invasion still ongoing, we’re largely focused on the body count from direct military casualties. We have yet to comprehend the scale of death from famine, malnutrition and disease as a result of the annihilation of civilian infrastructure, let alone the mass homelessness and decades of acute population-level poverty that will arise from the leveling of neighborhoods and the total destruction of the economy. The consequences of this violence will last for generations.

Noah Smith:

At this point pretty much everyone except a few Twitter shouters realizes that Israel is being extremely brutal in this war. The U.S. shouldn't be supporting this; we should withdraw military aid, support Arab states' attempt to end the conflict, and pivot to Asia.

Scott Alexander:

I tried to get a good handle on Israel’s military strategy here and the consensus seems to be that it isn’t very strategic, there’s no endgame, and it’s basically “bomb approximately every building in Gaza so Hamas can’t hide there, and maybe at some point we’ll kill enough of them that we can feel victorious and leave”. I am not sure what this strategy offers which is worth 50,000 deaths and counting.

So if that’s right and this is either pointless or just about revenge, then, sure, we could have done something different. We could have just not done that. However, I agree more with what

Philippe Lemoine

said before the war:

Let’s think for a moment about what Israel can realistically hope to accomplish and whether it would help them in the long run. It’s not even clear to me that Israel can actually destroy Hamas or what this would mean exactly. If the Israelis try, and I think they almost certainly will, they will have to do a massive ground invasion of Gaza. In theory, I’m sure they could kill almost every member of Hamas over there, but in such a crowded place this would result in massive civilian casualties. In turn, this would result in strong international pressure to adopt tactics that are less costly in terms of civilian lives, which might just make the destruction of Hamas impossible. I agree that, for various reasons, Israel benefits from a double standard in the West to some extent, but there are limits to it and the West will not tolerate hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Gaza. If Israel tries to destroy Hamas, there will be a constant stream of shocking videos that will profoundly affect Western public opinion and have a very negative effect on Israel’s reputation abroad, including among Jews in the West. Of course, right now there is a wave of sympathy for Israel in the West, but it would be a mistake to think that it wouldn’t be affected by the kind of operation Israel seems poised to launch in Gaza. Arab governments will also be under intense pressure from their public opinion to react, which will not only affect Israel directly through the deterioration of bilateral relations, but also indirectly because Western governments still depend on them in various ways and can’t totally ignore their reaction.

Thus, I think that if Israel tries to literally destroy Hamas, not only will it suffer a massive economic and political cost, but it will probably fail because that cost will force it to give up on their initial goal before it has achieved it.

I agree. The material reality of Gaza is such that any serious attempt to destroy Hamas would lead to tens of thousands of casualties and the reduction of most of the area to rubble. It is not necessary to demonstrate that Hamas has a deliberate policy of using human shields or placing military installations in or under civilian infrastructure; the mere fact that Gaza was mostly a built up open area and that Hamas had no intention of going out to the fields to be mown down makes this so. Since this is the case, there is no need to posit that Israel has done anything other than what it has said it was doing the whole time, namely eliminate Hamas, a goal, which, as Lemoine correctly predicted, it could not do, in part, because the world would not tolerate the level of civilian casualties necessary to do it.

This is not to say that Israel has not committed war crimes. When Lemoine predicted that ‘Israel is probably about to commit war crimes on a massive scale in Gaza’; he was also correct. There are basically two main elements to this. First, it is objectively a fact that adhering to international law makes it harder to achieve tactical objectives and, in order to achieve as many of these as possible, Israel has made a decision to push right up to the limit of the law which means, in practice, frequently going over it. Secondly, Israel can’t just conjure up soldiers out of thin air and, while there is a draft of sorts, in practice, only those who want to actually go into battle. Those that want to are statistically either of lower intelligence or motivated by nationalist or religious chauvinism. In practice, officers on the ground have a lot of freedom of maneuver, which, depending on who they are might mean blowing up buildings for kicks, or a lot worse than that. I recommend this post on the subject:

Over the next few days, I came to understand just how many civilians were in that area which had as of yet been untouched by artillery and airstrikes. There was a hospital with many people inside, anyone walking around that area was a target. I am not aware of the exact instructions given to them, if there were any at all. I often heard the refrain “Shame we can’t fire on the hospital” from several troops and officers.

Thankfully our tank broke down the next day. The wheel that moves the track (called a sprocket) just fell off and we spent several hours towing the tank back to main area of the brigade encampment. Afterwards we were mostly resting until we left Gaza about a week later.

On our last day, we had a final relatively relaxed mission and my commander got out of the tank to burn a house down. When I asked him if he knew whose house it was, he responded “I don’t care”, and as he later said to me, “I just hate Arabs”. That was the final kick to an already dead horse, I guess, and though it would be several days until I parted ways with my company, I had a hard time speaking to any of them.

It is what it is. Hasbarists are wont to say ‘war is hell’ when confronted with this or that tale of death in the strip, but they seem to mean something else, I’m not sure what exactly. That’s what it really means, though, and also stuff like this:

Five people have died after a parachute failed on an aid package dropped by air into Gaza on Friday, reports say.

An eyewitness and the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza said the five were killed when at least one parachute failed to deploy and a parcel fell on them, the BBC's US partner CBS reports.

AFP news agency quoted a Gaza doctor as saying five people were killed. The BBC has not independently verified this.

As Sam Kriss (hi Sam!) can explain, what explanation for this can there be other than that aid agencies have a cannibal bloodlust oozing out of the deepest recesses of the human psyche where the lust for victimhood and the stink of revenge curdle into the black slime of murder? These Palestinians had names, had souls, had dreams of writing poems - haikus with dactylic pentameter! - about their pacifism, and yet an aid worker dropped a crate square onto their head. Does anyone still dare to resort to generalities, rancid with age, about the fog and chaos of war to justify such naked, such unashamed, such utterly banal daylight executions?

OK, so my parody of Sam Kriss sucks. Don’t blame me, I went to a comprehensive school.² You get the point though: a lot of messed up stuff happens in war because people did it on purpose, and a lot of messed up stuff happens because people did it by accident. All told, I reckon that the civilian casualties are just slightly towards the lower end of the spectrum given the military goal and environment.

Constraints

There’s a funny video where Bassem Youssef gets asked over and over again what Israel should have done instead and just babbles:

This is pretty representative. The only honest answer to this question I have seen from a critic of Israel is again Philippe Lemoine:

Whenever I criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza, someone invariably asks them what I think it should do instead. Just as invariably, I tell them that it should pursue a negotiated settlement of the conflict, which necessarily will require including Hamas in the negotiations because Fatah no longer has the legitimacy to speak for the Palestinians on its own.

So, in fact, surrender. This rare dose of candor clarifies things somewhat, but before moving on to some more schizo creative options, we have to list the constraints Israel was facing on October 8th, which meant that ‘do nothing’ was not a viable option.

1. Deterrence failure. It’s reasonable to say that Israel’s specific doctrine is mistaken or over the top, but it does have to have some kind of deterrence doctrine. Lemoine mocks the idea that Israel is in a dangerous neighborhood with a large number of hostile states and paramilitaries who would like to do more attacks if they thought they could get away with it. Someday, over the rainbow, he’s going to write an article about why this is wrong, swearsies. Nevertheless, this consideration is real, and to it we must add a related one. Israel’s ability to normalize relations with enough Middle Eastern countries to achieve long-term security is substantially predicated on it being a worthwhile military ally. If it’s a country that some trash militia can poke in the eye and get away with it, then it’s also not worth making peace with. This also applies negatively. If Egypt, in particular, does not see Israel as a credible military threat, then there is not all that much point in adhering to the Camp David Accords next time there is a good reason not to.

2. Hostages. As I’ve written before, a hostage deal to release a ludicrous number of terrorists and miscellaneous criminal hoodlums was both wrong and inevitable. So, strictly speaking, ‘doing nothing’ would have entailed an additional round of humiliation in which Hamas would have demanded a deal even more outlandishly lopsided than the one Israel gave them. And that isn’t even it, because there was also

3. Rockets. People forget, but on October 7th, the invasion started with the launch of 5,000 missiles. Hamas didn’t and couldn’t keep that up, but another 5,000 were launched by the end of January. Because of Iron dome, bomb shelters everywhere, a pretty good app alert system, and the fact that the Gaza envelope was depopulated, this caused barely any casualties, but it’s also not the kind of thing you can just ignore. What stopped them was turning Gaza into rubble so, absent that, in addition to getting its face rubbed through the dirt for the hostages, Israel would have had to go begging to get the rockets stopped too.

Maybe Lemoine will respond that, indeed, Israel should have responded in precisely this unprecedented display of self-abnegation, but I don’t think we have to take this seriously as an option. So let’s list the creative options.

1. Hizb’Allah and repeat

In 2006, in response to the abduction of three soldiers, Israel went to war with Hizb’Allah and then lost, eventually blowing up enough stuff that it could agree to a ceasefire with some dignity, consisting of a demilitarized zone that Hizb’Allah openly ignored from then on. Unknown to us, Israel then set about perhaps the most effective infiltration operation of a hostile military in history, allowing it to achieve a military victory in 2024 well beyond what literally anyone predicted. Only international pressure - itself substantially a product of the carnage in Gaza over the previous year - prevented complete destruction of Hizb’Allah as an organization.

One particularly frustrating thing is that, of the two wars Israel has fought recently, one was a comprehensive tactical and strategic success, and the other has been just a big mess, but that’s the one we have spent the great bulk of our time on. The Lebanon war split and demoralized the Muslim world, effectively demonstrated Israel’s worth as a military ally, and showed the extreme disutility of provoking it. The Gaza war united the entire region in anger as a daily stream of atrocity videos were rammed through state and social media, while projecting an image of disorganized incompetence and weakness.

Therefore, knowing what we know now, Israel could have pursued the following strategy. First, take out Hizb’Allah with all the pagers and bunker bombs and whatnot that we saw. Since Hizb’Allah attacked, there was no need even to rustle up a casus belli for this. Secondly, with the whole deterrence and looking tough bit achieved, admit that Hamas won that round and do whatever deal has to be done. Third, invest the same time and resources that had been put into infiltrating Hizb’Allah into Hamas, and do the same thing in 2040, or whenever it was ready.

2. A true siege

This one is kind of obvious because Gallant famously said that’s what Israel was going to do at the beginning, before presumably getting a call from the lawyers saying that it was a no-no. The arguments against doing a siege are (a) it would cause immense human suffering in the civilian population and (b) it might get you hauled up before the ICC, but that kind of seems moot now. Compared to what Israel actually did, a siege has the benefits of being free (in fact, revenue positive), not requiring Israelis to leave their jobs and risk their lives, and not producing an endless stream of carnage videos to be streamed around the world. Of course, there would be famine videos, but it would be relatively easy to manage these from a PR perspective. Even that fat Mencer dude could manage to get up before the camera day after day and say:

Along with the rest of the world, we are saddened at the worsening conditions in Gaza. We reiterate our call for Hamas to release immediately all of the captives, after which all restrictions of water, electricity and other goods will be lifted.

3. Operation reverse-Exodus

This one is also pretty simple. The central difficulty of the Gaza war is how to fight in a densely populated urban area without killing a gorillion people; to avoid this the people need to be somewhere else. The Bank of Israel estimates that the war is going to cost 55 billion dollars, and the total losses from missed economic growth are going to equal 400 billion. So, it’s really a steal for Bibi to get on TV, screened out across the world, and offer Egypt a cheque for 21 billion dollars to open its section of the concentration camp wall and let in whichever of their Arab brothers want out before hostilities commence. That translates to $10,000 per Gazan and is about five or six billion short of Egypt’s annual budget. The speech making this proposal writes itself: get paid for doing good.

If, on the other hand, Egypt out of sheer spite refuses to enrich itself while helping its Arab brothers get out of the way of a meat grinder, Bibi closes his speech by warning that Israel will simply wait 14 days and then blow up the Rafah crossing. Of course, that’s sort of an act of war, and maybe Egypt will decide to respond by invading or something, but that would be pretty retarded since Israel just did a full mobilization. Maybe Egypt responds with a counter-offer involving guarantees that the Gazans get to go back when the fighting ends. Sure, that can work. Pretty much anything they could have suggested would be cheap compared to our timeline.

4. Real Zionist war

Since moving from defense to offence, Israel has lost somewhere between 400-500 soldiers. This is an extremely low figure for an urban war designated by its architects as existential. Achieving this required heavy use of air support, and Israel has famously used more than 100,000 tons of bombs. In addition, it ruled out various military tactics, most notably anything involving sending soldiers into tunnels, which is where Hamas has spent the war.

The lopsided ratio of Israeli casualties to Palestinian deaths and the general level of destruction in the Gaza strip is considered around most of the world to be pretty grotesque. It also contradicts Zionist ethics. Trumpeldor said with his last breath ‘It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country’, or maybe he didn’t and someone made it up, but either way that’s what he was remembered for saying. He didn’t say it’s a sweet and fitting thing to blow up an apartment block so you don’t have to die for your country. In Israel today, the common viewpoint is that Israel has been too loose with risking military casualties, based on invocations of the principle of pikuah nefesh. Right Wing Zionists, naturally, react with extreme horror at the suggestion that Israeli soldiers should be put in harm’s way to spare any number of Palestinian civilians.למה יש עדיין בניינים עומדים ברצועה was on a lot of WhatsApp statuses about a year ago. This is one consequence of the general problem that, as a matter of fact, Judaism has not developed a body of thought that you can use to run a state today, and the attempt to apply what we have to the problem just results in the verbal equivalent of incontinent farting. (We’ll return to this in other articles).

Now, the fact is that, from the perspective of statecraft, if Israel wanted to fight a war in the true Zionist fashion, it can. Ukraine has lost around 70,000 soldiers against Russia. Adjusted for population, that works out as something like 15,000 for Israel. There’s an important difference, though, which is this:

Objectively, Israel has people to spare. Indeed, it has a housing crisis, and would benefit from offloading some of the vast majority of the population who are net tax consumers. Here are some based right wingers:

Who exactly benefits from their existence is not clear. If you go to any area that votes Likud, you can see many such specimens milling around. Since they want above all to fight Arabs, presumably it would be a great privilege for them to get strapped up with a GoPro and GPS and sent into a tunnel for reconnaissance purposes. As the poets and visionaries of military Zionism told us, battle elevates the human soul beyond what it can achieve in peace time, and, in their case, that must be correct, if only by default.

But I’m in a bad mood. Take this with a pinch of salt. The point is that the obstacles to fighting a war of this kind are not logistic or economic, but political and moral. You wanted a state surrounded by hostile Arabs, so figure it out.

5. Trading in the moral high ground

This is the closest thing to Lemoine’s ‘do nothing’ option, and is similar to Peter Hitchens’ proposal:

Why not say: ‘We have seen enough blood. Nothing is to be gained by shedding more of it. In fact, we are sure that our enemies want us to do precisely that. We will cease to bombard Gaza, and will abandon attempts at a ground invasion which will, in truth, bring only grief, much of it to innocent people. Most will understand our national rage at what was done to us and our initial desire to hit back. But our considered response to the Hamas murders is to turn to the world - and remind everyone in it exactly what Israel’s enemies did on October 7. These murders and kidnappings were not, as their apologists claim, responses to oppression or maltreatment. They were vindictive acts of racist hate. They were driven by a high-octane version of a much wider anti-Jewish phobia which is still all too common in the world. It was this phobia which led to the desperate measure of creating a national home for the world’s Jews, a place of last resort for those fleeing mass murder. It is this shameful and bigoted phobia which has stood in the way of general acceptance that Israel has as much freedom to exist as any other state. Look this hatred in the face. See what Hamas did on October 7. Look at those who have excused it or tried to offer apologies for it. And cease to help them. We in our turn will not please these fanatics by walking into the trap they have tried to set for us. We will seek out and punish known individual culprits. But we are not in the business of harming the innocent.’ Just try it. The bombs and the missiles have not worked. Perhaps this will.

However, moral capital doesn’t deliver a return unless you do something with it. Fortunately, there’s a long list of stuff Israel has needed or wanted to do for a while, so, instead of blowing our stash on the Gaza war, we could have done some mixture of the following:

• Evict the residents of Tulkarm or anywhere else used as a strategic base for terrorist attacks along the West Bank border.

• Close down UNWRA.

• Settle long-standing grievances with the PA e.g. the martyr’s fund

• Annex Gush Etzion, Maaleh Adumim, and anything else that is strategically reasonable.

• Liquidate the Northern Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Israel.

• Execute the most dangerous terrorists in Israeli prisons.

• Implement the law against illegal building in East Jerusalem

• Legalise Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount

Add your own suggestions. Rightoids are always moaning about this or that, and not infrequently they have a solid point. For example, here are some Arab rightoids chimping out at Damascus Gate.

No reason to put up with this except for NGOs and international opinion. Crack down and keep cracking down, until your October 7th allowance is used up, and then draw the new line wherever you reached.

Conclusions

If all of those options, or any combination of them, seems to you outlandish, that’s fine; you can therefore conclude that there was no alternative, and enjoy the guilt being lifted from your shoulders. No ruing for you.

What I take from this survey, though, is that, above all, any real alternative to Israel’s Gaza war would have required strong leadership. Curtis Yarvin’s modest proposal of October 18th is quite famous and, if you haven’t read it, you probably should. It basically boils down to a more logistically complicated version of Option 3. Yarvin writes:

This solution is not, I am pretty sure, what will happen. I also am pretty sure that, unless G-d takes a little more interest in the world he supposedly created, and in particular the people he supposedly chose, there will be nothing recognizable as Israel in 50 years—just like, after 30 years of governance by Secretary Blinken and his ilk, there is not much of the old South Africa recognizable. US diplomacy, keeping the world safe and orderly and free since 1919.

But this is how might makes right. Now, picture this victory—the victory of force and order over turmoil and chaos—worldwide, cleaning up all the world’s open sores. You are picturing the fall of the American empire—and realizing that, like the USSR (if much better), the GAE can actually fall upward. Almost all the problems it supposedly exists to solve will rapidly solve themselves as soon as it is gone.

It’s true, of course, that the Global American Empire is an impediment to any sort of plan of this sort, but it’s not the only the one. More immediate is that the Israeli government has no ability to conceive or execute such a plan, and the Israeli public would not support it. Pay money for Arabs to get a new version of Gaza? Trying explaining that over a sabih.

I’ve written before about how, in the context of Zionism, a messed up amoral psycho who has forsaken all hope like Bibi leading the country should be treated as a gift of divine providence. People think I just wrote that to wind them up and stoke engagement, and I did, but it’s also true. However, it’s only true within the context of Zionism. Israel defaulted to weak leadership, because any form of strong bold and decisive leadership animated by the principles of Zionism would have involved boldly and decisively jumping off a cliff.

The problem with kicking the can down the road, though, is not just that you eventually run out of road, it’s that, in the meantime, your capacities for doing anything else atrophy. The probable truth is that with a basic degree of competence on the part of relevant state authorities October 7th would likely have been no big deal, and can-kicking strategy would have remained viable. However, Bibi’s three-decade reign in the service of simply not shooting ourselves in the face has come at the cost of running down strategic reserves of decency, sanity and goodwill that are now almost spent. This isn’t a criticism per se; Yarvin’s fave Elizabeth I did the same with the Crown’s assets. There is not much else she could have done, but this didn’t leave the Stuarts any less broke.

Or let me try to put it another way. The problem with arguing that October 7th left us with no other choice than to turn the Gaza Strip into a field of rubble and mangled limbs is that absolutely nothing in Gaza changed on October 7th. The only new thing revealed was the drastic incompetence of the Israeli state. If it was right to invade on October 8th, it was also right to invade on October 6th. Many will bite that bullet happily, but the paradox is that if Israel has known what was about to occur, it would have prepared, and no subsequent invasion would have been needed. There were good reasons that Israel thought it the best of all possible options to confine Gazans to a cage before October 7th, and none of those reasons are any less valid than before.

Continuing the can-kicking strategy did not become less tenable because of October 7th. In the strict logical sense, it became slightly more tenable, since Hamas finished its invasion with significantly reduced offensive casualties. It just felt less tenable. So we defaulted down to the next most can-kicking option. We made a wasteland, and we don’t even get to call it peace.

We did what we did because doing anything else would have been too damn hard. We don’t have a state that could do something hard like that because the limits of Zionism make it impossible to have one. A Zionist state strong enough to do anything good would , before that, be strong enough to self-immolate - the Right Wing way or the Left Wing way, it doesn’t matter. Over the past two years, as we have fought steadfastly to erode our diplomatic, strategic and economic position, a strong state would have been great, but it’s not something you can rustle up when you need it. As things stand, unless suicide is your thing, it’s not even something you would want to rustle up. Yet it would seem you have no choice. You may think NonZionism is a self-indulgent moral pose, completely irrelevant to the whirl of events around you. Right now, you’re not wrong, but it’s also the only option that’s still left. Not a solution, but the precondition for thinking what one might be.

1. I am certain the statement is literally true as stated, though, admittedly, I do not know what the reason is.

2. I’m not bitter or nuffin’ but if you believe in income redistribution, you should get a paid subscription to me, not him.