Genocide in Gaza

and the shipwreck of American politics

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats

Photo by Mahmud Hams, AFP

“My brother would have begged Israel not to use our deaths and our pain to cause the death and pain of other people or other families. I demand that we stop the circle of pain, and understand that the only way [forward] is freedom and equal rights. Peace, brotherhood, and security for all human beings.”

—Noi Katsman (Kibbutz Holit), in a eulogy for her brother, Hayim Katsman, Israeli Peace activist, killed by Hamas on October 7, 2023

In the US there are political camps with regard to the State of Israel, most of them inflected to one degree or another by ideology understood in the Arendtian sense. One is the Israel Anything Goes (IAG) camp, wherein anything and everything that Israel does is co-signed uncritically. Within this category are sundry personal cosmologies and motivations which have wrapped themselves around this hegemonic ideological conceit. Those cosmologies have been contrived—as all are now—by an amalgam of family, school, social circles, and the gravitationally unbound expansion of public media. The IAG ideology is itself constructed of opportunistic historical victimology, a Israeli brand of white supremacy, Eurocentric guilt, and (especially in the US) a bizarre “Christian” Zionism which is itself fundamentally antisemitic. Within this ideological fortification, the State of Israel has relentlessly pursued its expansionist, ethno-nationalist objectives since well before its 1948 independence, when it first inherited the protective military and political umbrella of the US. Even the intentional 1967 Israeli attack on a US Naval vessel, the USS Liberty—which killed 34 American Sailors and wounded 171—did not interrupt US support or disrupt the IAG ideology. From a geostrategic standpoint—first in the UK and then the US—Israel has served as a kind of aircraft carrier or massive forward operating base in the region to buttress the fight against anything resembling unity among the surrounding nations in this oil-rich sector. The Great Game shall remain unfinished so long as petro-civilization endures.

The political problem in America is complex, given the affective resonance of Israel among American Jews, a substantial number descendants of Shoa victims, and all its cultural descendants. The early exceptions were Neturei Karta and Satmar Hasidism, very orthodox Jewish formations who opposed Zionism on the grounds that it was and is a secular (even atheistic) movement (Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Zionism’s author, was entirely secular), and that according to Rashi’s Midrash (a commentary on scripture), Jews were called to political quietism. A “Jewish State” is seen by them as anti-messianic, even demonic. The Zionist project was not even originally understood as “protection” from antisemitism. Jabotinsky’s Zionism was primarily predicated not on a victim narrative (it preceded the Shoa by decades), but on a narrative of Jews extending Western civilization (modernity) into the territories of “barbarians.” The victim narrative (Never Again [for us]) became part of the Israeli propaganda armamentarium after the Shoa, and it was used to portray Arabs as the historical heirs of Hitler (even though most Arabs in WWII fought for the British).

These groups, though, number only in the tens of thousands. American conservative, reform, and secular Jews once overwhelmingly supported Israel. Many still do. The political complexity presents itself in the peculiarities of US electoral politics and how it commingles with the geography of American Jewish enclaves and vast geographic domains of Christian Zionists.

A third of all Americans who identify as Jewish live in just 20 Congressional Districts, mostly in New York, with a substantial plurality in Florida and Illinois. In Presidential contests, with our gelastic winner-take-all state elections, these three states represent 78 electoral votes out of 538.

Because American Jews still largely support Israel from an IAG perspective, it remains easy to (incorrectly) conflate Jewishness (whether defined religiously or ethnically) with Zionism, and in a lateral propaganda move, to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism (even, sometimes contradictorally, when the anti-Zionist is himself or herself Jewish). Likewise, in an associative propaganda gambit, the very real victimization of the Shoa has been reified and transferred to Israeli Jews, none of whom are now victims of the Shoa, as a means of painting themselves as potential genocide victims at the hands of the very people they now separate, control, exploit, occupy, and not infrequently attack in ways sometimes reminiscent of (but not identical to) 1935 Germany.

Much is made of all this by conspiracy-minded antisemites who adhere to the International Jewish Conspiracy drivel that’s circulated around the world ever since Frederick van Millengen, a Brit, wrote The Conquest of the World by the Jews in 1873. But the fact is, there are around nine Christian Zionists in the US for every Jewish person (among whom support for Zionism is steadily decreasing, especially among the young). The voting bloc that is most crucial to the State of Israel in the US is not Jewish voters, but evangelical Christians. This is nothing new. When Theodor Herzl was formulating his secular Jewish nationalism, his greatest allies were British millenarian Calvinists, who Herzl admitted were “naive” but necessary to his cause.

The “return of the Jews” to Palestine has long been part and parcel of several idiosyncratic interpretations of Scripture (so much for sola scriptura), and in the US one version of this “return” eschatology was promoted very successfully by John Nelson Darby, whose early 19th Century “dispensationalism”—a “pre-tribulation rapture” theology—took hold in the US. These millenarian notions are taken quite literally, and they entail (1) “the return of the Jews” and (2) an apocalyptic destruction (which Christian Zionists welcome and believe they must assist).

In Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, around half the voting population adheres to some form of Christian Zionism. These are safe states for Republicans (for now), but in “purple” states like Georgia and North Carolina, almost one out of four voters are Christian Zionists, even as the Democratic Party remains committed to Zionism from a secular perspective. In these states, no one from either party could (or can yet) win a statewide election while questioning the Israel Uber Alles ideology.

Which is not to lay blame solely at the feet of Christian Zionists either. Democrats who are members of “mainline” denominations, agnostics, and atheists are likewise majority Zionist, based on the belief that opposition to Zionism constitutes a form of antisemitism (a propaganda trope favored by Israel itself) or the fear that one will be branded an antisemite if he or she criticizes any action of the Israeli state. Since the Trump takeover of the Republican Party, the Democrats have easily absorbed the most islamophobic fraction of neoconservative Trump dissenters as well (MSNBC has hired numerous former George W. Bush operatives)—a fraction whose Zionism is utterly unyielding.

"The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck."

—Paul Virilio

The fact is, as of October this year, just after the brutal Hamas attack (remember, 1,300 people were killed!) which provided Netanyahu with the pretext for the genocidal Israeli reaction, 77 percent of Republicans, 69 percent of Democrats, and 54 percent of Independents said they “support” the State of Israel. In large part due to decades of single-minded US propaganda on Israel’s behalf. Most Americans couldn’t point to Israel on a map, and yet a majority across demographics support IAG ideology. Seventy-one percent of “white” adults do. Fifty-one percent of “non-white” adults do.

This is very bad news for the Palestinians now suffering death, maiming, and mass displacement under a rain of Israeli ordnance. Netanyahu’s war crimes will continue with impunity, with the US, the UK, and most of Europe dutifully participating in the cover-up. This doesn’t mean that no price will be paid in the US, even apart from America’s status as an international pariah.

Consider some political situations like Michigan, where I now reside. In 2016, Muslim voters increased their national voting strength from 400,000 to 800,000 in response to the Trump candidacy, and to 1.1 million by 2020. 200,000 of them live in Michigan, where the most common spoken language after English and Spanish is Arabic. These voters turned out strong for Biden, who won 69 percent of the Muslim vote: 166,000, in a state where he won by a mere 150,000 votes. In Georgia, he won by a mere hair, a state that this year elected its first Arab-American to the state legislature. Recent polls reveal that Biden’s unqualified support for the genocidal attacks on Gaza has driven his numbers among Arab-Americans, Muslims, and young people more generally (see below) . . . into a ditch. If a rematch were held today between Biden and Trump, Trump would undoubtedly win, not because these fall-away voters would support Trump, but because they’d simply stay home.

We don’t yet know how the sustained Israeli attacks and the ever more horrific news from Gaza, just beginning to break the propaganda barrier, will affect the overall support for Israel, or how any effect will eventually ramify into the utter clusterfuck that’s developing with regard to the 2024 election cycle. As in Europe, Israeli-critical views and actions are being met with grotesque over-reaction, including blatant violations of civil liberties. Israel itself is becoming a garrison state (for Jews!) under Netanyahu.

How large a group exists of politically engaged Americans who maintain some form of principled devotion to fair play—even for those with whom they disagree—is hard to discern; and so there will be a reaction against the methods of IAG ideologues and devotees, but its significance in an ever more tribal consequentialist American ethical terrain is difficult to calculate.

What we can anticipate—for both uncritical Israel support and US politics more generally—are age demographics. Public criticism of Israel is heavily weighted toward the young. Among baby boomers and older, unqualified support for Israel is around 85 percent, with criticism of Israel at around three percent. Among Gen-Xers, this ratio is 63/10. Among Millennials and Gen-Z, the ratio is 48/12. For the moment, at least, even though the echo chambers of the “left” want to trumpet some ideological sea change, US support for Israel’s genocidal aspirations remains firm, and opposition—across all demographics—is marginal, no matter how vocal they may be. In addition to this, older voters still consistently post stronger turn-outs than young voters.

Still no good news in the immediate future for those on the wrong end of Bibi’s genocide campaign in Gaza.

Anticipating party support using demographics is trying to aim at a moving target. Yes, Republicans are faced with a grim trend in age demographics, which so far they’ve resisted through gerrymandering. Democrats are facing a problem among youth, as well, which contributes to low voter turnout. Young voters simply do not like the ever more obviously corrupt and sclerotic party leadership.

Jewish support for Israel is softening, especially among youth, but Jewish anti-Zionism in America is still in its infancy, at less than 20 percent (a substantial rise nonetheless in Jewish anti-Zionism over the past decade).

Recent Marist and Quinnipiac polls show an overall 53-54 percent disapproval of how Biden is handling Israeli actions, but this is hard to interpret, because it likely includes not only those who oppose Israeli ethno-nationalism, and those who are just rightfully sickened by the scale and brutality of Israel’s Gaza assault (which has now killed around 14,000, half among them children), but also many Republicans who would disapprove of Biden if he were passing out toys to children in a cancer ward.

Which brings us to the Trump wild card in American politics, apart from the questions of war and Zionism.

Donald Trump, as a political actor—need we remind—was originally an invention of the Democratic Party establishment and the media. Trump was once a friend of the Clintons. (Dare I mention that Jeffrey Epstein was a friend to both, and was himself employed in some capacity by Israeli intelligence?)

In 2004, Trump declared that he was probably more Democrat than Republican, for the same reason my brother said something similar when he was running a bait and tackle business on Galveston Island: Trump and my brother both noticed that business was better during Clinton’s presidency than under Bush senior. My brother was dyslexic and Trump is just too lazy to read, so neither was familiar with the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy, better know as “correlation does not mean causation.” (In fact, President Clinton was overseeing the development of a massive financial bubble, but Trump wrangled real estate and financial instruments, while my brother sold a lot of live shrimp, circle hooks, sinkers, ice, beer, and bug repellent.) Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Trump had run for President as a Reform Party candidate in 2000, a campaign that never gained any traction. Many believe his “candidacy” was a publicity ploy for his stupid TV program, The Apprentice. In 2004, Trump endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Primary, then McCain (against Obama) in the General Election. He joined the Republican party in 2009. In 2011, he endorsed Mitt Romney. In 2013, he gave a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee, whereupon political operators from CPAC suggested he run for New York Governor. In that speech, he stoked panic about illegal immigration, warned fellow Republicans against cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and floated the childishly oversimplified idea of selling Iraqi oil to pay Gold Star families a million dollars each. This mishmash of perfectly sensible ideas with puerile nonsense were harbingers of Trump’s eventual ascendance.

When he announced his 2016 run, which highlighted immigration panic, the offshoring of jobs, and islamophobia, he also resurrected the popular Reagan tag, Make America Great Again—an evangelical hearkening to a mythical American past that dog-whistled to everyone from racially-anxious white seniors and suburbanites, to militia nuts, to white nationalists, to conspiracy loons. Each group—whether those with legitimate grievances (like displaced US workers) or those suffering from delusions, terminal nostalgia, and paranoia—projected its fears, desires, and hopes onto and into Trump as an icon of resistance to what many understood—though looking through a glass darkly—as the soulless, technocratic bureaucracy of late neoliberal US governance. That governance had failed miserably in the 2008 financial debacle and the Obama response to it . . . which entailed printing trillions of dollars to bail out the richest people in America, saddling the public with their trash investments (called “quantitative easing”), and making the rest of us eat the consequences. Privatize the gains, and socialize the losses.

It needs saying that there was a considerable slice of voters who’d filled in the bubble for Obama at the polls—sometimes twice—who then flipped to Trump in 2016. But the real secret weapon for Trump was neither Trump nor the Republican Party; it was Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the media which supported it.

John Podesta, Robby Mook, Joel Benenson, and Jennifer Palmieri were the core team that concocted the Clinton “strategy” of promoting Trump’s brand as a way of setting him up as an easily defeatable punching bag. In October 2014, Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal posted a memo to Clinton aides, with a CC to Mook and Podesta, suggesting that a primary defeat of Jeb Bush would result in the breakup of the Republican Party, possibly even a calving off a third party. This was the infamous “pied piper strategy,” which listed three candidates they thought could be defeated with little effort: Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, and Donald Trump. Two homegrown liabilities were never taken into account. The Clinton team was consummately out of touch with the human realities of most Americans, and Hillary Clinton is and always has been an unlikeable, entitled, and obviously opportunistic phony with fabulously faulty political instincts.

When the first Republican debate was aired in August 2015, Neera Tanden messaged Podesta, crowing about how easy it would be to beat Trump. They were actually entertained by his antics. Democrat-aligned media jumped on this strategy bandwagon, and for months on end, every day was Trump, Trump, and more Trump. They wanted Trump to take down Jeb Bush; and this part of the strategy worked very well.

We all know the rest of that story.

Trump’s advisors saddled him up for a campaign that was almost entirely a sustained trolling exercise. It wasn’t prescient or brilliant; it was what they had. The reason it worked was because the Clinton campaign was like a room full of Korean War Generals mapping out a strategy for Vietnam in 1965 based on the assumption that they were fighting the same enemy in the same place as they did in 1951. The Clinton campaign simply didn’t realize that a huge fraction of the US public—which they held in contempt as “deplorables”—would respond as enthusiastically as they did to a campaign whose real unstated slogan was, “You can all go fuck yourselves.”

It was only as time went by that Trump hooked into a base within the base. In 2016, he appointed Marjorie Dannensfelser—former staff director of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus and wife of evangelical activist Martin Dannenfelser—as chair of his National Pro-Life Coalition. Trump has flip-flopped on abortion more than he’s changed his underwear, but he followed through as Chief Executive by stacking the Court and delivering Dobbs (which he later said was a disaster for Republicans in 2022). The evangelical anti-abortion base (however one stands on the issue of abortion) overlaps almost into a Venn eclipse with Christian Zionism and White Christian Nationalism.

It was only during his presidency that Trump’s supporters—who were taking a pummeling in the media and by “The Resistsance” ™—began taking on the aspect of a cult. It was also during his term when he moved the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, with the murderous Bibi holding one of his hands, and the equally murderous Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud holding the other. Trump’s nepotistic White House was being run by son-in-law Jared Kushner, a rabid Zionist (and an ignorant, entitled political operator).

During the Trump term, Jared and Trump-daughter Ivanka took over the White House. The rest of the staff was divided between the well-known clowns and a handful of people who were, for whatever cynical reasons, determined to protect Trump and his demented entourage from themselves. The protectors grumbled among themselves about the loons and the referred to Jared and Ivanka as “the interns” in reference to their general cluelessness about pretty much anything . . . or sometimes, “Javanka.” Nonetheless , the interns were running the White House, and Jared was the one Trump listened to with regard to Israel.

On January 28, 2020, Trump, who’d referred to the Al-Aqsa mosque as Al-Aqua—trumpeted his “deal of the century” in Israel-Palestine—a plan wholly concocted by Kushner—which was basically a blueprint for annexing the occupied territories and permanently closing the book on Palestinian self-determination.

By the time Trump was defeated in 2020, the US Embassy was in Jerusalem, and the presidency was assumed by Joe Biden. We are witnessing how much “better” Biden is than Trump on the Israel-Palestine question right now. But that is an aside, because we were talking about how Donald Trump is still inflected in US politics.

Trump himself is a dissipated, obese 77-year-old who, if anything, is even more ignorant, due to his own cognitive decline, than he was five years ago. He and Biden could easily be dead in five years. This matters little, because Trump-loyalty is now to an idol, an icon, not the man himself. In 2022, Helgard Müller published a book—not satire—titled President Donald J. Trump: The Son of Man—The Christ.

While facing 94 separate felony indictments, Trump is presently polling at 62 percent among Republican voters. In second place is the vampire Ron DeSantis with 14 percent. In a CNN poll two weeks ago on a hypothetical match between Trump and Biden, Trump bested Biden by two percent.

While in the wider scope of things, each party is in its own kind of crisis; in the near term—over the next year, that is—barring some black swan event, voters are likely to vote in patterns similar to 2016 (no pandemic this time). It’s the maps that make the difference . . . and the turn-out. Biden’s ever-more-obvious cognitive decline and Trump’s legal troubles are wild cards, too.

There is no realistic American political scenario that bodes well for Palestinians, and the Gaza genocide remains brutally on track. The strategies of both parties are reactive rather than proactive, and the government’s main response to every crisis is to kick problems further down the road and hope the next guy takes the blame when the shit hits the fan. Neither side gives a damn about Palestinians, though both sides are calculating how the horror in Gaza will affect their political fortunes in this country where the IAG ideology remains, at least until November 2024, hegemonic.

I wish I could find the good news hidden in the bad here, but I’m not seeing it.

America, the slouching beast.