Esoteric Bibi-ism somewhat vindicated

You can't push off the inevitable for ever, but you don't have to.

A guy called Ahmed Abu Suhaib wrote a book called The Al-Aqsa Flood: Contexts and Outcomes, while he was sitting in a tunnel somewhere underneath Gaza. The book is pitched as a justification of the October 7th attack by a Hamas mujahid aimed at the population of Gaza and/or general Arab and Muslim opinion. You can read a summary in English via Hebrew over at Alex Stein’s blog Love of the Land. If you want to read the original, it’s available for free download here.

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Unfortunately, the most authentically Israeli thing about me is that I speak absolutely no Arabic at all, so I gave it to Chat GPT to translate. I learned a lot. For example, I learned that if you tell Chat GPT to give you a translation that is as literal as possible while preserving readability, it takes that to mean that what you really want is cliff notes in the third person, and then if you tell it you actually want a real translation it says ‘come back in eight hours unless you want to pay, you bum’. I got there in the end, though. In most cases, what I got out was the same as what you can see at over at Love of the Land, though there were some discrepancies, and if an Arabic reader would be so kind as to sign off on a translation, that would be just grand.

Short Book Review

The first thing about this book is that it shows you quite clearly why Al Qaeda consider Hamas to be gay heretics. There’s not a lot in there about jihad, martyrdom, Islamic doctrine or jurisprudence and the like. There are repeated references to anti-colonial struggle in South Africa, Algeria, and Vietnam. Honestly, very lame. The second thing is that while it is a short book, it is almost incomprehensibly bad. You would think that the purpose of being brief is so that you can get to the point, but half of it is stuff like this:

The Flood was a spark, but sparks must be preserved if they are to become the light of liberation.

Muh sparks. Or this:

But beneath the surface, the resistance was watching, preparing, and waiting. The arrogance of the occupier blinded it to its own weaknesses. The Flood came like a thunderbolt, tearing down the illusion of invulnerability. Fortifications were penetrated, soldiers overwhelmed, settlements entered. The aura of deterrence crumbled, and the people of the entity awoke to a nightmare they thought impossible.

Ok, but what did you achieve?

From the dawn of the Flood, the world shook. It was not a skirmish on the border, not a passing clash; it was an earthquake. The enemy, who built his power on the claim of invincibility, who boasted of knowing everything and seeing everything, collapsed in hours.

You said that already, what did you achieve?

Among Palestinians, the Flood lit a flame. After years of despair, of suffocation under siege, of watching the cause neglected, the people felt life return. Gaza declared: we are not defeated. In refugee camps, in occupied towns, among the diaspora, the Flood was heard as the voice of revival. It told every Palestinian: the struggle continues, and victory is still possible.

Yes, I get it, but what did you achieve?

The Flood also reminds us that the struggle is not decided in one battle. Victory and defeat are not measured in days or weeks but in the long course of history. The occupier may believe it has restored its strength through destruction, but deep inside it knows that its aura has cracked, that its deterrence has weakened, that the fear which once protected it has been shaken. And the resistance knows, despite the devastation, that it has proven its existence, its creativity, and its ability to strike.

WHAT DID YOU &*^#ING ACHIEVE?

Every great event in history carries lessons for those who reflect. The Flood is no different. It was not only a clash of arms but a school of experience, teaching both resistance and occupier truths they did not wish to confront. The Flood revealed cracks, exposed illusions, and reminded all that the balance of power is never fixed.

Eventually, you give up. However it isn’t all like that. There is an attempt of sorts to justify the suffering the civilian population of Gaza has suffered since the start of the war.

Some will say: But the retaliation was unbearable. Was it not foreseeable? Yes, the scale of Israeli brutality was anticipated. But brutality was already our daily bread. Siege itself is a slow massacre. Bombardment recurs every few years. What difference is there between dying slowly in the shadows and dying quickly in the blaze? At least in the Flood there was initiative, a decision to resist rather than wait passively for the axe to fall.

‘What difference is there’? I would guess that the difference is quite a lot. It sure looks different:

He also tries to address the question of whether Hamas miscalculated. He explains that Hamas did not expect the attack to be as successful as it was, but also that they planned on it being bigger, and that a smaller attack would have not had the same strategic value, and a bigger attack would have been even more successful.

In short, it sucks. These people can’t think; their brains are jelly. Every chapter exhibits the confusion of metaphor with causation, the substitution of cliché for analysis, the random invocation of irrelevant analogies, and the appeal to pride and honour as a justification for imbecility. Whatever disease of the intellect you can name, it’s there. If there is any point to this blog at all, it is to resist those among our people who toil daily to spread the same habits of thought among us so that we, too, do not one day have to clothe our children in bin bags, surrounded by burnt-out wrecks and concrete dust. If I can train enough readers to instinctively vomit a little in the back of their mouths every time they hear the phrase This is the Middle East, then my job is done.

You can just kick the can

Anyway, back to the point of this article. There are some more things that you can learn from the book. First, it has been a topic of debate ever since October 7th how anyone could ever have been so naïve as to believe that Hamas were deterred. In Israel, where words of more than three syllables exert a kind of magical power, this is typically explained by something called a kontzeptzia. A kontzeptzia is a state of misapprehension about the world, specifically with regard to the extent of external threats, which affects society in general and leads to complacency and neglect. Periodically, Israel falls into a state of kontzeptzia, and then has to be jolted out of it. This idea exists somewhere in the gray zone between purely verbal and causal explanations, and is widely used to condemn anyone who raises questions about the wisdom of any given aggressive action, since they can be accused of not having sufficiently liberated themselves from the kontzeptzia.

Anyway, Ahmed Abu Suhaib has a different answer. The reason the Israeli security establishment thought Hamas was deterred is that they actually were deterred. They had decided that the things they had been doing 2006-2014 were pointless and undermined their own position, so they stopped doing them. The damage they could practically do to Israel was far less than the costs they then had to pay when they did. In order to attack Israel again, they calculated they needed to develop new military capabilities, and so they worked on that. That is what deterrence really means: being dissuaded from military action given your existing capabilities. In a follow up article, we will look at how Hamas developed this new capability, but for now it suffices to say that the failure of the Israeli state should not be defined as mistakenly believing that Hamas was deterred, but rather not understanding the steps it had taken to surmount that deterrence (rather like the mistake that Hizb’Allah made in relation to Israel).

The other big takeaway is that, on Suhaib’s telling, Bibi’s national strategy for Israel over the past twenty years gets a big thumbs up. According to Suhaib, Hamas had been successfully penned in inside Gaza, their military tactics doing nothing to harm Israel, and Palestinian resistance generally had been beaten down into ineffectiveness. Israel was successfully pushing ahead with regional integration. Israel’s defenses were continually getting better, and they had developed plans to deal with Hizb’Allah and Iran when the time was right. With each passing year, the imbalance in power between the two sides was growing. Israel was kicking the can all the way into the back of the net.

Now, of course, we have to take all this with a pinch of salt. Suhaib is trying to explain why Hamas did what it did, and, if the Palestinians were already on course for victory, then it would be an impossible task. However, that doesn’t mean he isn’t right. If we go through the details of his argument, they all seem to check out.

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There is widespread agreement among Israelis and Zionists today that the kontzepzia was wrong because, when defending against attacks like October 7th, we have to succeed every time, they only have to succeed once. The Right Wing version of this argument is that, since we can’t roll the dice forever without eventually losing, we have to achieve ‘total victory’, or kick them all out, or [redacted]. The somewhat less common Left Wing version is that we have to come to a final political settlement with the Palestinians. The logic behind these conclusions was originally voiced by the cringelord fake nationalists of the IRA back in 1984:

The IRA claims responsibility for the detonation of 100lb of gelignite in Brighton against the British cabinet and Tory warmongers. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country, torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it.

Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no war.

Bullshit! Thatcher didn’t die in an IRA bombing, she died at the age of 87 from a stroke. Technically, yes, the IRA only had to get lucky once. Technically I only have to get lucky once to win the lottery. I won’t win the lottery, and they didn’t kill Margaret Thatcher. You can argue the toss about whether in the larger scheme of things the IRA won or lost (it’s not clear what it even means given how fake and gay Irish nationalism is), but they didn’t win because they successfully blew up the British government.

The anti-kontzeptziists argue that had Israel been better prepared on October 7th, then Hamas would have called off the operation, and tried again a few years later. Had Israel also repelled it again, then they would have done the same. Eventually, the maths add up to the inevitability of Hamas success. Sure, that’s true if you are summing up to infinity, but Scott Alexander reckons we have till about 2027 until AI delivers us either a realm of universal plenty or embarks upon the road to our extermination. Alternatively, if you are an AI sceptic, collapsing fertility around the globe means that, in twenty years time at the most, there will be desperate labour shortages that will make Palestinians a biddable commodity. And those are just two obvious options that we can see by extrapolating from current trends. The list of things we can’t predict is endless. Lets say that, averaging out the possibilities, Israel probably needed to kick the can down the road for another 15 years until either a solution emerged or it became a moot point. 15 years isn’t that long. It’s not too much to ask your government to be competent for 15 years.

The thing, though, about competence is that it isn’t a policy. You can’t vote for or against it because no-one’s against it. The centre to centre-left upper echelon of the IDF that were running things on October 7th were obviously not competent. The man to go to for a detailed rundown of just how incompetent they were is Itzhak Brik, and his videos were flying around Israeli Whatsapp like a pigeon on meth for months after October 7th. But Itzhak Brik himself is centre to centre left. None of the stuff he spent a decade shouting about was a matter of principle, except the principle of ‘do your job’. On the other side, the IDF’s most right-wing general is Yehuda Vach, and if the allegations against him are true, incompetence isn’t the half of it.

However, while you can’t vote for or against competence per se, you can decide where it falls on your list of priorities. The Netanyahu regime does not prioritize competence for the simple reason that its organizing principle is the systemic promotion of the most corrupt, most venal, most boorish, and most ignorant elements of society whenever possible, wherever possible. That’s why the ambassador to the UAE was caught getting pissed and touching up women, and still has his job. Bibi seems to have hit on the strategy of isolating and destroying anyone in his vicinity who isn’t complete s**t, and promoting those who have nothing to offer but their loyalty, by a sort of instinct, but, bit by bit, it grew from a tactic into an ethos, and then a constitution. Everyone knows this. The ideological Right used to be very animated on the subject. Please God, he will shaft them before too long, and they will be so once again.

What does esoteric Bibi-ism mean?

Did you just scroll up to check you remembered the title of the article correctly? Yes, this is a pro-Bibi blog; that’s not going to change. Yes, I’m trolling; this whole blog is a troll really. You’re here, so it worked. I do have to explain myself every so often though. People often ask what NonZionism means. As I said in the first post, I don’t know yet, I’m working on it. Right now, though, if you put me on the spot, I would say that NonZionism means Bibi-ism without Likudism.

Bibi is a bad ruler in the sense the ancients would recognize. He weakens and hollows out institutions systematically, draining them of vitality and life in order to fund a constant stream of gibs for every undesirable and/or parasitic group in the Israeli social fabric. However, his bad rulership has little to do with his private flaws. Sure, he has private flaws, he has them up the wazoo, but they don’t really intrude. There’s nothing Neronic about him.¹ It’s hard to remember what his charges of corruption even are. Something about a box of cigars?

His wickedness consists, rather, of identifying every opportunity within the system for the insertion of kakistocracy and capitalising on it. Some of the things he has done are kind of vaguely illegal in an ambient sense, but the great majority were all within the rules. More strictly speaking, they are the rules. Who is really to blame, then, the man or the rules themselves? History (he does not believe in God) bequeathed Bibi his sacred task, which was to make Israel not commit suicide. He knew that no-one else could be trusted with it, and he permitted himself anything to achieve it. Did he go beyond what was strictly necessary to achieve this? Probably, but there’s no way to know for sure. He erred on the side of caution. Who, in the final analysis, is to blame for Tally Gotliv: the man who let loose the beast, or those who cornered him into doing so? We are all to blame. Except me, I don’t vote.

If you wish to hate Bibi, I won’t stand on your way, I ask only that you hate the system too. You are permitted to hate the player, but you absolutely must hate the game. But Bibi’s enemies do not hate the game, they are not even satisfied with merely loving it, they venerate it; they cling to it emotionally like a Palestinian clings to his implausibly oversized key. We have had occasion before to talk about

Daniel Gordis

, and now we have occasion again. Normie Israelis, he reports, are freaking out about Bibi saying that the United Arab Emirates is better governed than Israel.

First, OBVIOUSLY the UAE is better-governed than Israel. I wish Substack offered something beyond the standards options so I could emphasize the ‘obviously’ more, like flashing lights or big flames. Are there people who think the UAE is not better governed than Israel? What would they cite in defence of that view exactly? Secondly, what does the UAE do? Well, they don’t let dumb people interfere with the process of governance, they put violent religious nuts in underground prisons where they are never heard from again, they pursue a foreign policy based around maximizing comity with their neighbour and placing themselves as a bulwark of regional stability, and they invest their funds in long-term prosperity, prioritizing competence and diligence over ideologies designed for mass consumption. That’s what you want Gordis! I’m an internet weirdo who read too many blogs and old books and got radicalized. I think the UAE is tacky, and maybe even a bit pozzed, but, you, what is your problem? Democracy? Your democracy isn’t under threat, your democracy is threatening you. You need to turn it off, like literally right now. Bibi could be everything you want in a leader, and more. He would be glad to do it, I think. At any rate, he once would have been. You just need to get rid of his voters. Not like in a genocidal way, but politically speaking: remove them from the political process. More precisely, you need to remove the entire electorate from the political process. It seems like an impossible task, but a lot less impossible than beating Bibi in elections. At least give it some thought.

1. His wife is a bit Neronic.