At any given time, there are about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, which means at least 50,000 live births per year, which means about an extra, say, 24,000 young men reaching fighting age per year. So even if only a quarter of them, say 6,000, join the military wing of Hamas – or if not Hamas then whatever replaces Hamas after the current massacre is over – and even if the IDF manage to kill, say, 3,000 Hamas fighters per year – and that would be pretty ambitious – with every passing year there’ll be an increase of 3,000 young men to kill. Well no, not quite, if they manage to kill, say, 1500 of them when they’re still in the cradle or on the playground. So unless the Israelis up their kill quota by leaps and bounds, theirs is a labour of Sisyphus. And worse yet, for every infant or child they manage to kill, a hundred relatives will be dedicating their lives to taking revenge.
On October 7th Hamas took some of this revenge. And in the three weeks since, the Israelis took some of theirs. Short of genocide – which is widely judged unacceptable – there’s no end to this cycle. Both sides have come to take these losses in their stride. It’s the cost of living where they do. And of living how they do.
The parallels between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto are hard to ignore. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted four weeks, from April 19 until May 16, 1943. About the same number of weeks, I predict, it will take the IDF to quash the Gaza Uprising of October 7th. I’m sure the Nazis would have preferred the Jews hadn’t resisted. They too shook their fists at the inconvenience of it all. But that resentment was unseemly then. And it’s unseemly now. Shaking your fist at people who dare to fight back against four generations in a concentration camp is, well, unseemly.
This war isn’t going to end. Certainly not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours. In the meantime, have I taken a side? I have. I’m on the side of seemliness!
Categories: Editorials, Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
So what do you think is a tenable solution to this problem? Is there one?
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I’m a one-stater. Israel can keep the Law of the Return, but extend it to the Palestinians who were there before the Naqba. Is this tenable? Yes. Will this happen? No.
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Paul, what do you make of the demonization of pro-palestian demonstrations in the traditional and social media spaces?
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