The high modernist zen masters

 

There’s an anecdote in Ellman’s biography of James Joyce that I really love, since it shows Joyce to be a master Jesuit after all:

“… one day he dined with Vanderpyl and another writer, Edmond Jaloux, at a restaurant in the rue St. Honore. As they drank champagne and Fendant de Sion, Jaloux, who happened to be carrying a copy of Flaubert's Trois Contes, began to praise the faultlessness of its style and language. Joyce, in spite of his own admiration for Flaubert, bristled, 'Pas si bien que ca. II commence avec une faute.' And taking the book he showed them that in the first sentence of'Un Cceur simple,' 'Pendant un demi-siecle, les bourgeoises de Pont-l'Eveque envierent d Mme Aubain sa servante Felicite,' envierent should be enviaient, since the action is continued rather than completed. Then he thumbed through the book, evidently with a number of mistakes in mind, and came to the last sentence of the final story, 'Herodias,' 'Comme elle etait tres lourde, ilss la portaient alternativement.' 'Alternativement is wrong,' he announced, 'since there are three bearers.”

 

Oh that High modernism! So elegant, so intelligent. What Joyce does to Flaubert here is what Flaubert, in his letters, did to Balzac – he trumps the master.

Masters. Zen masters, really. Who could hear the sound of one hand, clapping.

The implication is that a literary text is something made with precision. A word Robert Musil liked too. Soul and precision. It is like a sailing ship, where every plank must be tongue-and-grooved closely with every other plank to resist the elements.

Yet put this way, it seems wrong. Shouldn’t the novel seek, instead, to be penetrated by the elements? Or at least to reflect them – as per Stendhal’s image of the mirror walking down the road. Isn’t the mistake in Herodias, in fact, related to the fact that the description – the mirroring – involves three bearers?

Of course, Stendhal’s mirror shows up in Ulysses as the cracked looking glass of a serving girl. The crack is not simply a matter of distortion, but a reminder that the mirror’s smooth surface doesn’t really model what is happening in writing. Writing has parts and dimensions – words and sentences and paragrahs and chapters, among the parts, and denotation, sound, connotation and history, among the dimensions. I look at the page and see a smooth surface that I recognize as the printed page, but when I read, when I am initiated into what is going on, the surface breaks up. Joyce, that Jesuit, saw the old Latin alter in alternativement. It was the kind of second hearing that Flaubert had, too. But for the novel to work, one hand must clap, I think. Impossible to the secular ear, but not to the ear inside the ear.

Still: the ship metaphor that I used seems not to capture what is going on here, although it does suggest that the text resists – it resists first. But that resistance must not be so great that it doesn’t move. Joyce might correct Flaubert’s French, but recognizes that these corrections grow out of the spirit of Flaubert’s scruples.

But I don’t want to discard the ship image just yet, because it leads me to one of my favorite passages in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Here, too, the story becomes an image for a view of language and its effects:

“Le vaisseau Argo ~ The ship Argo

A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form. This ship Argo is highly useful: it affords the allegory of an eminently structural object, created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest actions (which cannot be caught up in any mystique of creation): substitu-

tion (one part replaces another, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is in no way linked to the stability of the parts): by dint of combinations made within one and the same name, nothing is left of the origin: Argo is an object with no other cause than its name, with no other identity than its form.”

Argo is, ultimately, a variable.

I think Joyce would have been intrigued by this passage, but I don’t think he would have quite agreed with it. Make Argo too much of a variable and you will forget what you are doing with it: going to find the very specific Golden Fleece.

And yet, couldn’t one say that the infinite circularity of Finnegan’s wake leads us to Barthes conclusion? There, in a dream language precision driven crazy by the latin roots of alternitivement, movement is always back to where movement started.

 

Untitled - Karen Chamisso

 

In the deadpan of poetry

Like any other mutant in the American grain

“speakers do not mark prosodically punch lines or jab lines”

But let it all sink to the bottom.

Bottom’s up! Such is the burden of the song.

And sometimes this can go on all night long

 

When the pills don’t kick in and the street noise interferes

With the dreams that are buzzing around my ears.  

Horror: genre and politics

 

 

“We read in the Salut publique de Lyon: an English photographer, M.s Warner, had the idea of reproducing on the collodion the eye of an ox some hours after its death. Examining that assay with a microscope, he distinctly perceived on the retina the lines of the paving stones of the slaughterhouse, the last object that had affected the vision of the animal, bowing its head to receive the blow of the butcher’s knife.” – Villiers de l’Isle-Adam

Since the Revolution, terror has had a leftward aspect. The Right (for instance, Edmund Burke and Joseph De Maistre) had a strong consciousness of the sublimity of putting the royals on the chopping block, as well as dissolving the very names of the nobility. Terror and shock, in various guises and platforms, was long the effect sought by anarchist and socialist. A healthy shock to the system, for the union leader, and for the poet, an amassing of dynamite underground. The poet-anarchist Laurent Tailhade produced a famous slogan at the time of the bombings in Paris in the 1890s: “Qu'importent les victimes, si le geste est beau!». In due time, those numb to beautiful gestures like to recall, Tailhade himself lost an eye to one of the bombs.

The working class culture of anarchy seems to have died, although its memorials are lovingly preserved on many sites on the internet – see, for example, the Maitron site (https://maitron.fr/). Where once we sympathized with the terrorist, we now – we the entertained – turn to horror for our sublime.

This is usually an intro to some meditation on horror as the defining effect of various fictions. My own sense of things is that horror as a genre can’t be understood without understanding horror in fact, from urban murders to concentration camps, that span the “modern period.” Foucault’s description of the drawing and quartering of Robert-François Damiens, which of course happened in a public space and was meant as punishment and spectacle, could easily be fitted in an anthology of horror. Even at this time, though, there were enlightenment philosophers that were doubtful of it as punishment but, as well, as spectacle. Napoleon, famously, banished abattoirs to the extremities of Paris because he did not like the populace being dulled to the spectacle of execution – given the populace’s actions during the Revolution. Yet as the spectacle of execution was confined more and more to state enforced restricted areas, printed media was invested in the grotesque and the horrid.

A lot of the literature on horror is devoted to horror as a genre. It is a genre, but what happens when the genre wall comes down is that one misses the capillary connection between the genre and the world outside the genre. Literature – and film and song and painting – are in the street and in the newspapers and the laboratories. Horror as a genre is stylistically marked, so often, by upfronting the capillary source. Poe, for instance, used mesmerism a lot, which made perfect sense in his struggle with the transcendentalist culture of New England. In England, de Quincey’s The art of murder was not just the beginning of modern true crime, but was a way of writing horror that fed on the Newgate tradition of reported crime. Poe’s followers in France picked up on the peculiarly capillary adaptedness of horror. When, in Villiers de L’isle-Adam’s story, Claire Lenoir, the narrator, a horrid savant named Tribulet Bonhomet describes himself as a “Saturnian of the second epoque”, which, as the Pleiade editors have pointed out, is a direct lift from a manual on handreading, Les mystères de la main révélés et expliqués, by Adolph Desbarrolles, which is still in print today. When, more currently, Stranger Things looks for its jump scare, it attaches to the very real MKULTRA program of the CIA, which supposedly ended in the late 60s – but actually just changed its name. To my mind, one of the great resources of genre is this capillarity. It is why it often feels more current, more plugged in, than the mainstream literature forms. The modernist device was to embrace that capillarity – which you see in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Ullyses, Mrs. Dalloway, etc. The Lyric Realist homing in on the upper middle suburban or urban household is as wary of this inlet from the outside as the upper middle class burger is of crime.

Social utility of fat cats

 

Social utility of fat cats: the use and limits of wealth

 

We need to discuss the social function of rich people. Besides the marginal entertainment and sports figures, and the rare inventor, I see two functions: administration and investment.

The social cost of administration has gone up considerably since corporations changed their nature, breaking the old postwar pact between capital and labor. Here, I am going to put to one side the growth of LBOs and private equity firms that developed new forms of looting corporations in the eighties in order to concentrate on the radical elevation in compensation for the highest levels of management. This took off in the 80s. The explanation for this, from the point of view of intellectual history, is that neoclassical economists provided a model that justified it. Then, as an institutional addendum, business schools saw in this issue a chance to create an alliance with a trend in corporations that would pay great benefits: expanding its presence both on the campus and in the world of business. Harvard Business school in particular boasted a team of scholars who cheered on the insane compensations of the new class of CEO with arguments having to do with “aligning” the interests of the organization and the management: the famous principle-agent problem, the solution to which was to massively bribe the leader.  The rationale for this was paper thin – one had only to compare the compensation for Japanese upper management in the seventies to  Americans in the eighties to see that corporate productivity and return on investment did not depend on giving the CEOs carte blanche and stock options.

One must keep in mind, from a political point of view, that the lowering of the marginal tax rate as a result of bills passed in Reagan’s first two years in office was the necessary but not sufficient condition for the subsequent explosion in upper management compensation. The gesture normalized the transgression of the post war pact, which saw the worker in some relation to management. It gave boards of directors a material reason for allowing and even encouraging a practice that, at one time, would have looked like gouging or an exercise in contempt for the stakeholders in the firm. The normalization worked: in the nineties, Clinton Dems showed no inclination to take the punchbowl away from this party, thus cementing the new norm. Rich upper management types – donors! – were now consulted as oracles instead of targeted as moneybags. This, crucially, paid extra dividends once one was out of office. The shadow side of neo-liberalism was the creation of a whole new strata of well paid consultants, lobbyists, and general wheeler dealers. If corporation X could not bribe Senator Y, Senator Y’s children or spouse could perhaps be hired at excellent salaries to lobby, or perhaps to think hard at think tanks, which like business schools experienced a true boom in the eighties. These think tanks were being bankrolled by wealthy philanthropists, who, in time honored fashion, used this instrument to avoid taxes and exert power. As the CEO class became more and more entitled, there was considerable trickle down to the political class, which became abettors and scroungers at the till. Similarly, the CEO model spread to non-profits. College presidents and museum heads were soon being paid astonishing sums to do what previous college presidents and museum heads had done for considerably less. There was no visible increase in the quality of colleges or museums, but this didn’t matter: that standard was obsolete at this point.

Thomas Picketty, who studied changes in the source of wealth along with Emmanuel Saenz, targets the income derived from administration as a major driver of income and wealth inequality in his book Capital. For a quick rundown of this, I’d recommend Mike Konczal’s excellent essay in the Boston Review in 2014.

Even so, if the exorbitant sums paid to administrators had resulted in a great increase in the pay to the median worker, it might be said that, on some level, it works. But this hasn’t happened.   The very wealthy have seen their income growing by about 6 percent per year since the seventies – in fact, the starting point seems to be 1973. The middle has grown, if at all – it flatlined during most of the 00s – by one percent per year.  The workers who comprise the lower eighty percent have seen their wealth, in Piketty’s phrase, “collapse”. This reverses the trends from 1945 to 1973, when it was just the opposite, with the wealthiest having less percentage gains than the middle.

The left argues that we have no reason to pay these exorbitant costs for administration. There’s no evidence that these costs have been worth it to the average worker in developed economies. On the contrary, they’ve decisively shifted power away from workers. This power is not just reflected in flatlining wages and increased debt: it is, as well, a matter of expectations, of seeing the future of one’s society as something in which one can expect justice, exert political influence, and enjoy the fruits of our greatly increased national product: making our lives more comfortable, but allowing us, too, to take risks without facing the chance of being kicked out on the street. And so on down the generations, ad gloria mundi.

Along with administration, the wealthy play a positive social role by making investments. The argument here is, it is true, circular – we need to the wealthy to invest, and that investment makes them richer, making us need them more – but it isn’t bogus. Investment means that credit is available to the masses; the making accessible and available credit to workers, beyond the mingy terms of the company store, was one of the great capitalist victories of the twentieth century. The Soviet Union died for many reasons, but one of the unheralded ones was the persistent refusal of the Soviet planners to create an internal source of credit. This devastated the economy that recovered very well from World War II, but that, by the sixties, was in desperate need of credit to renovate and take advantage of the efficiencies offered by technological progress.

So there’s that. One can accept that the sphere of financial circulation is necessary, however, without accepting the premium that is now being paid for investment is necessary or efficient  – or accepting the massive shadow banking system that has developed according to a logic of its own. The proliferation of financial instruments whose sole purpose is a quick return – basically, the casinoization of the banking system – has only been a bad thing. Although it has been an excellent thing for the very rich.

Our tax system mirrors the priorities of the very wealthy – hence, the flat tax on capital gains. This is a scandal, and everytime it is pointed out that it is a scandal, everyone is scandalized, and the moment passes. Here, the wealthy have been very successful at telling a story that is the opposite of what Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx told. It is perhaps the most successful propaganda ever to spread in America, if we discount the pseudo-science flogged by cigarette companies to keep regulation from happening in the fifties and sixties. The success of the cig companies can be measured in the obituary columns and the hospitals year after year. The success of the entrepreneur myth can be measured in bankruptcies, debt, and the decline in public investment is occurring not only in the U.S., but everywhere in the developed world save China.

The story made up by Schumpeter, and other conservative economists, went like this: wealth comes about because some risktaker seizes on an idea – a new invention or service, or a common one that can be done more efficiently, etc. – and founds a company. The company hires people, meaning that our risktaker is spreading the wealth. We need this person! And so the richer he is, the more he deserves our gratitude for graciously making such wealth for others.

This fairy tale is very popular on the right, and hardly disputed anymore on the left. Yet it is simply bogus. The wealth of the risktaker depends entirely on the services and commodities produced by the workers. The rightwing tale completely and neatly inverts reality. There’s no Gates, Jobs, or Bezos without the workers that embodied and carried forth the tasks that made them rich. All honor to their ideas – but they are ideas built on the labor, services and ideas of others. The indispensibility of the entrepreneur isn’t even believed by the banker class, which mouths this propaganda. As any glance at the history of the tech industry – where the myth of the wealthmaking wealthy is particularly strong – shows, when the idea of the risktaker becomes an actual company, his funders  – those VC angels – in the majority of cases replace him. The VC angels have no sentimentality about the “entrepreneur”. They know he’s a replaceable cog. Unless, of course, it is the man at the top of some Venture Capital company – then he’s an irreplaceable genius.

So, to put it in one sentence: the entrepreneur myth inverts cause and effect, for the malign purpose of justifying an unnecessary premium to the administrator.

But to return to the social function of the wealthy, it is at the convergence of administration and investment that we see the need, such as there is, for a wealthy strata. That need is not, however, for an uber-wealthy strata. We need to allow a premium for investment and for the higher administrative tasks. At least, given the present form of our economic system. But a premium can really be limited, and its limits should be defined empirically, not with an ideological elevator speech about freedom. In the fifties, the wealthiest level of Americans, the top 1 percent, owned 9 percent of the national wealth. They now own 35 percent. The bottom 80 percent own ten percent. This has happened in my lifetime. In my son’s lifetime, if global warming is seriously addressed and there is an America left, we can correct this. In my utopia, the top 1 percent would own five percent of the wealth, and the bottom 80 percent would own at least 50 to 60 percent of the wealth – leaving the next 19 percent with the spoils. That 19 percent is composed of administrators, professionals and people in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sectors.  These people have seen their incomes and wealth grow, but not in proportion to the freakishly wealthy upper 1 percent. That one percent – and even more the .01 percent – dominate the chart.

I’m conceding to the social function of the wealthy much that depends on the current system. That system itself has to adjust in a major way to the catastrophe it has generated and refused to confront – and who can predict just how that adjustment will be accomplished? But it should be pointed out that ecocide is not just a capitalist product – there was no country and system more devoted to ecocide than the U.S.S.R. As long as we refuse to rethink the treadmill of production, we will keep going the way of the Dead Planet. However, the acceleration in ecocide coincides, and not accidentally, with the increase in wealth inequality we have seen around the world. Economists, bizarrely, love to brag that really excessive poverty is decreasing, as if they had anything to do with it. This means, basically, that there are more families living on more than 2 dollars a day. Victory! But one can ask whether the price – a .001 percent that are living on 50 million dollars per day – is worth it. I for one say no. Inequality and the present system of industry are both factors in the same death march. One we can stop. And we can do that without rich people missing a single ten course lunch. The right will always complain it is a choice between the billionaire and the Gulag, but that is a false choice. We can choose to keep the wealthy without creating a wealth aristocracy. That’s the real choice.

wokeness - a political anthropology

I had one of those discussions last night in which the word “wokeness” wandered around like an uninvited guest at a birthday party.  “Wokeness”, at this moment in France, as a demonized thing that the Zemmourist right has decided is their ticket to ride. But for me, mostly, it is a fashionable phrase that will disappear in due course.

But then, as I was falling asleep, I had an odd thought: what if I’m… wrong?

1.

I grew up in a world in which the terms of political anthropology were clear: there was the left, and there was the right. One could draw a primitive graph showing American liberals a degree to the left and American conservatives a degree to the right, and that seemed to correspond to what we understood to be the stakes, which was about the working class and its consciousness and the owning class and its consciousness.

2.

Class has by no means disappeared, but consciousness has shifted, and with it the terms of our political anthropology.

I like to think of neoliberalism as a general term for a certain culture, and not just a certain political economic arrangement in the age of globalized capitalism. As a culture, it does work against the old solidarities by emphasizing the (false) dualism between the state and “private enterprise”. To put my cards on the table, I don’t at all buy this picture. The real question of governance is about alliances between something called the state and other entities, like multinational corporations. The upper echelon of both is on the same side, aiming for the same ends. However, putting this to one side, under neoliberalism the self is contoured more by the ecology of “private enterprise” than by the “state”. For example, Ferguson Missouri, which was subject to a massive study by the justice department, is a city where the police force, from outside, plays a massive role in controlling the mostly black population, but that population is almost completely plugged into businesses, small and large.

However, the political economy here is a culture in as much as this contouring of lives occurs in the absence of old solidarities – like an organized working class – and in the presence of a hyper-sensitive and sensational culture – a culture of affects. And this too is neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, the old successes of the civil rights movements of the late twentieth century are as important to the neo-liberal self-consciousness as “private enterprise”. Neo-liberalism is a synthesis of these two things.

Thus, when a neoliberal exults in breaking the glass ceiling (like Hillary Clinton or Sheryl Sandberg), this is not some cynical ploy, but the neoliberal culture in action. To my eye, feminism is about breaking the patriarchy, of which the corporation and the state are products – and thus, putting women in the CEO position is precisely as liberatory as replacing the guards in a prison with “screws” among the prisoners. Still a prison, my droogs and droogesses! But where I see putting a human face on an oppressive system, the neoliberal feminist sees my objection as a male reaction to female power.

3.

However, wokeness is proving to be as irritating to the neoliberal feminist as it is to the standard issue suit. Which says something about the position vacated by the decline of the left.

The shift towards individualism of a purely formal type has been followed by a shift towards living individualism. The individual lives, it turns out, and doesn’t just consume. Living involves memory. It involves the passions. It involves affect.

The “affect” effect, from the old Left point of view, is hokum. I think it isn’t, but I also think this kneejerk reaction has to do with the fraught history of affect discourse.

The old program of taking power from the capitalist and giving it to the producers has been dogged, on the right, with a long discourse about “envy”. It was fought against as not just bad for the economy, as conceived by the economist, but also as a bad feeling, akin to the sins of the pre-French Revolutionary days.

In fact, the program of the right, since the Revolution, is keenly attuned to the culture of feeling. In an ordered society, that culture produces the right feelings – in a disordered society, one for instance in which the producer somehow ends up in the governor’s seat, it produces hate and envy.

As it turns out, however, when capitalism triumphs, globally, the discourse of affect is retranscribed. What results is that the old rightwing position, which relied on a monopoly of guilt, is shaken, and the woke position as it were seizes the right to make guilty.

4.

I am  not happy about the current state of our political anthropology, but I do take it as a given. My hope is that wokeness is a necessary but insufficient condition for the making of a better, juster, and even happier world. That is the world I, wee little pea that I am, think is not only possible, but necessary if we are to  survive the catastrophes we have visited upon ourselves.

 

Open and Closed

  

Among the chief ornaments of the romance of philosophy is the high place accorded to the open, or to openness. Open the understanding or the mind or the eye, openness as a state of being – these are all on the plus side of the ledger. Heidegger, of course, is the great poet of openness in this tradition, charging openness with a numinous relationship to being that you can take or leave – but he is only building on a vast previous structure.

Closing, perhaps as a consequence, is never given high marks by philosophers. Closing one’s eyes or one’s understanding is, automatically, a bad thing. Even in building an argument, to come to a conclusion – a close – is often transformed, in the text, into opening up. After the Absolute spirit has tied itself in knots and done more tricks than Houdini, he at last is in a good place at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. You would think that the absolute spirit would be able to close up shop and go fishing. But no! He has to open up once again and go, in recollection, though the whole muddle again. No closing for it!

The open is, of course, closely aligned with liberty – in the philosophical sense. As for the philosophical sense of the closed – well, this is often associated with liberty’s end. Philosopher’s have spent surprisingly little time sussing out all the meanings of the closed. There are no doors in Plato’s Dialogues, and though, of course, the Greeks masked, there is no praise of hide and seek. The closed, at best, is an occasion for the open.

The only philosopher of note that has meditated on the closed is, I think, Bachelard. In Poetics of Space, he presents a strong sense of the house as an enclosure against the outside – and in particular against the oldest of seasons, winter. In winter, the open becomes hostile, the enclosed comfortable – in fact, the image of comfort. It is a comfort that belongs to the long lost age of huts and forests filled with snow and wolves. If the open is always a Greek summer, the closed is always a German winter.

 

This rap on the open and the closed lacks, for some reason, any reference to good old Georg Simmel (good old was his official title I believe), who wrote an essay pre-dating Bachelard's great series of phenomenologies and psychoanalyses: Bridge and Door.

Simmel also generated the prototypical Weimar style - before Weimar existed - and impressed it upon the generation of Benjamin and Kracauer. It begins with simplicities, and soon develops into an intricate world of references and echoes that shadow every paragraph. It is a style of knowingness that borders mysticism.

Anyway, the Bridge and Door essay, published as a feuilleton in a newspaper, proposes a way of looking at the outside as a unity of both connections and divisions. Everything is separate, and everything functions within a system. A bridge, for Simmel, is first an imaginative act, a way of seeing a river not as one thing, but as a thing that divides one bank from another. A primal image of division.

The connection that a bridge affords is contrasted with the closure that a door affords.

.... The door decisively represents that way dividing and bind are only two sides of the same act.

The person who first constructed a hut reveals, just as the first trailmaker, the specific human potential against nature, in as much as this person, out of the continuity and endlessness of space cuts out a parcel and shapes this into a particular unity in accordance with some meaning.

...

That the door is equally a functional link between the space of the human and everything that is outside of this sets up the division between the inner and the outer.

Exactly because it can also be opened, its closing gives the feeling of a stronger exclusion against all the beyond of this space more than a simply indivisible wall.

The latter is dumb, but the door speaks."

The door speaks. This mix of the philosophical and the lyrical is unbearable to a certain kind of common sense mind - a strong tradition in England. But it is music to another kind of mind, who enjoys leaps as well as the dull utilitarian tread of the deductive-hypothetical method.

the Flour massacre in Gaza

 
The softfocus NYT coverage of the extermination of Gazans continues. Israeli soldiers murdered at least a hundred starving Palestinians, and this is the lede" "The deaths of scores of Palestinians in a desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza..."

The double talk, where Hamas terrorists mass murder Israelis and Palestinians mysteriously die in desperate rushes for food administered by a kindly Israeli government should make even the most hardened NYT subscriber question what is going on.
I am sure that there must be a way to place the blame where it belongs: on those Palestinians. Surely the Israeli soldiers were just playfully shooting bullets to entertain the scum – er, the Palestinians who might even someday earn the right to be human beings – but the ignorant and silly Palestinians kept trying to catch the bullets! Meanwhile, a settler group began building a colony in Northern Gaza. They were removed by Israeli soldiers who did not, for some reason, lay down a covering fire while doing so. Those with memories that reach back, oh, to last week will recognize the West Bank pattern. First, the settlers are sternly warned that this is not legal, then they are told don’t make too much noise, and then they are noisily defended by the Likud government – while the U.S. watches approvingly.  
Recently, Vox published a bullet pointed list of all the things Trump did for Netanyahu’s government – in order to assure us that Biden is a much better choice than Trump. Then folks on blue sky noticed that every bullet point was continued by the Biden government – except one, where the policy was changed last month. Here’s what Trump did, according to Zach Beauchamp at Vox:
 
Recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, disputed territory with Syria taken during the 1967 Six-Day War.
Shutting off funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (which Biden almost immediately restored and then temporarily suspended again amid a scandal about its employees participating in October 7).
Abandoning the decades-old US position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a peace agreement and eliminating longstanding restrictions on spending US taxpayer dollars in them.
Moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the US mission to Palestine in the same city.
 
So, did Biden revoke recognition of the Golan Heights seizure, or punish Israel for its West Bank policy, or move the American Embassy back to Tel Aviv? No, he did not.
There is such a thing as a micro authoritarian regime. For instance, the regime that controls discourse about Israel in most of the West. The point is to produce a moral fatigue – to make the critics defend themselves from anti-semitism, even as the leader of Israel gladly pals up with real antisemites, from the neo-Nazi Bolsanaro to Orban to the Saudi royals to Trump. Moral fatigue is a great cushion for these mini authoritarian regimes, but when the bubble bursts it is not pretty – the constant conflating of Jews and Israel by the ultra-right in Israel and elsewhere is given to us as a problem in gaslighting, but is ultimately leveraging antisemitism in a horrific way.
The flour massacre yesterday was a crime that will soon go down the stream – to paraphrase a Rolling Stone song – who wants yesterday’s victims? Nobody in the world.