Depending on when you start counting – and depending on who’s doing the counting – Jews and Arabs have been at war in Palestine since the first implementation of the Balfour Declaration in the early 1920’s, or since the Naqba in 1948, or since the Six Day War in 1967. So whether it’s been 100, 76, or 57 years, not unlike every other war it’s a war with brief periods of inactivity, but not one either side could, or ever can, credibly declare over.
Prior to ’67 the Palestinian refugee camps lay outside Israel. After that, however, the IDF became occupiers. To be sure occupation brutalises the occupied, as we saw on October 7th. But it also brutalises the occupier, as we’ve seen since. That’s because there’s simply no other way an occupied people can be occupied.
Hundreds of millions of people celebrated the Israeli victories of ’48, ’56, ’67, ’73, and ’82. Hundreds of millions lamented those same episodes as defeats. Hundreds of millions celebrated 9/11. Hundreds of millions of others thought it was unconscionable. Hundreds of millions celebrated October 7th. Hundreds of millions of others think it was unconscionable. Hundreds of millions think the razing of Gaza is justified. Hundreds of millions of others think it’s genocide.
Is there a mind-independent fact-of-the-matter about who’s right and who’s wrong in these judgments? There is not. Two peoples want the same piece of land, and neither seems willing to share it with the other. What choice is there but war?!
Thomas Hobbes tells us that “force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues of war.” He failed to mention a third, probably because in his day it was understood and accepted that “When two men desire the same thing which nonetheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies, and to this end, which is principally their conservation but sometimes their delectation only, they become enemies, and endeavour to destroy or subdue one another.” But that understanding seems to have been lost. In its wake has emerged a bafflegab dominated by something called rights-talk.
Without that bafflegab it’s doubtful that that third virtue, rhetoric, a.k.a. propaganda, could have got off the ground. Hundreds of millions think rights-talk is a stand-alone discourse. At most a half dozen people, myself included, think it was invented to make propaganda possible. Is there a mind-independent fact-of-the-matter about who’s right about this? There is. But it’s hard to disabuse hundreds of millions of people about anything, let alone about something as precious to them as being able to talk about their rights. Still, absent that talk of rights, none of the following makes any sense.
Every act of occupation or resistance has to be an atrocity, and every atrocity has to include a proper subset of the following: rape, the cutting off of breasts, dismembering bodies, cutting foetuses out of the womb, beheading babies – this one has to be done before the mother’s eyes – burning women and children alive … Among the victims special mention has to be made of the women and children vastly outnumbering the men. And, of course, to ask for the name of even one of these beheaded babies is a dogwhistle, a clarion dogwhistle, of siding with the perpetrator. Either everything is a war crime, or it’s all collateral damage. Things are as they seem or nothing is. The video footage doesn’t lie, or they’ve all been doctored. The truth is what you want to believe. And the propaganda is there to help you satisfy that want.
If over my career I’ve contributed anything at all – which I haven’t – it would have been advocating that the world rid itself of five things: airport farewelling and security, tax-adding rather than tax-embedding, haggis, the concept of ‘senseless war’, and rights-talk. I’d have died happy with one out of five. Hence my life of abject failure.
Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy
Paulosophical Vimplications 
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