The clock is ticking: murder and re-murder in Gaza

 I am generally hoping for a Democratic party victory in the House and Senate, but I am passing on voting for Biden. There are 31,000 corpses and counting that count against him. Whatever happens in November, we are set for that body count to soar to 60, 80 or more, and if, as now seems likely, the U.S. does nothing to stop the attack on Rafah, we might get a Palestine-rein Gaza by Christmas. Meanwhile, on of the Ministers of Fuck-all in Netanyahu's Cabient is distributing 100,000 guns to settlers in the West Bank.

Joseph Roth, in Paris and dying in 1939, corresponded with his friend Stefan Zweig about the leader of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann. Roth saw in Zionism the same blind natinalism and racism as he saw in Germany. Roth, who wrote a great book about Eastern European Jews - and was one himself - defended the view that that the bestiality of Hitlerism was in its attack on humanity itself, under which the attack on Jews should be judged: "If I am, as well, concerned to protect the Jews, it is only in so far as they constitute the the most directly threatened avant-garde of humanity."

Roth was a man who went from the Left to the Right, from sympathy for the Russian revolution to nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian empire. He is no sure guide to politics. But I think he expresses something very true here: we honor in every murdered person the image of humanity murdered. Six million or more Jews worked to death, gassed, tortured and otherwise extinguished by the Nazis were each of them a victim of a crime, and that individuality gets rather blurred by the easy use of the term genocide. Justice, at the extremes, is either a form of mourning or it is nothing. And if we murder in turn to "revenge" that person, we take a heavy risk - the risk of defiling that person's memory with the blood we pile upon it.

Hamas, on October 9, murdered 1200 some people. Netanyahu's government, since October 9, have re-murdered these people by murdering 30000 others, making a blood sacrifice that will forever stain those who did it and those who abetted it. We are at the beginning of the starvation and the murders of thousands in Rafah. Those who pretend the U.S. is helpless here are fooling themselves. Worse - I don't think they have any concern with yesterday's victims if they are brown, or Islamic. Meanwhile, the people under the various U.S. allied Middle Eastern dictatorships stew. The clock is ticking.