Sin Bin

 

“According to a Gnostic legend, a war broke out in heaven among the angels, in which Michael’s legions defeated those of the Dragon. The nonpartisan angels who had been content to look on were consigned to earth, in order to make there a choice they had not been able to determine on high, one all the more arduous in that they brought with them no memory of the combat or, indeed, of their equivocal attitude.

“Thus history’s commencement can be traced to a qualm, and man resulted from an original...vacillation, from that incapacity, before his banishment, to take sides. Cast to earth in order to learn how to choose, he was condemned to action, to risk, and was apt for it only insofar as he stifled the spectator in himself. Heaven alone permits neutrality to a certain point, while history, quite the contrary, appears to be the punishment of those who, before their incarnation, had found no reason to join one camp rather than another.” 

 

>>> E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered

 

That reality exists as a kind of sin bin for fence-sitters is a deliciously silly idea, yet also somehow makes so much sense.

 

It's actually an improvement on the 'solution' proposed by Mani, whose Christianity, like that of St Augustine, emanated out of Zoroastrianism. 

 

I will simplify rather ruthlessly. In the beginning there was Light and Darkness. They had both always been there. Then Darkness acquired an urge to spread, seeping into and polluting the perfect.

So a buffer zone was set up, two walls on either side, rather like we now see either side of Gaza. The beings born into this no man's land (actually 'man's land') have a spark of the Light in them which has to be distilled and restored to the good side of the wall so that it may be absolute once more. 

 

Upon completion of this historical process, the formal separation between the Light and the Dark will have been restored, and 'evil' put back in its box forever. 

 

The reason for the original leak is never fully explained. 

 

What is rather striking about this cosmogeny is that human existence is not conceived of as a primary end in itself, but rather a means to an end. 

 

A kind of cleaning package.

 

Bare Bones Republics

Over the past few years I have had some first hand experience of the Guatemalan justice system and this has permitted me to observe a set of fundamental discrepancies which may not be all that easy to solve, because they reflect an increasingly universal deficiency in the practice of Republican government in the Americas.

Judges here like to deliver sermons. If you listen carefully to these you get a sense of the intellectual and moral underpinnings of their worldviews, and in most instances you would be forgiven for concluding that their education largely lies on the foundation of codified law and the Bible.

In other words, almost everything they come out with betrays a lack of what, for want of a better term, we Brits would call a broad ‘classical education’.

Jewish and Christian morality is certainly a key component within the western concept of justice, but it seems to function optimally when tethered to the wisdom of the ancients as well as the contributions of more modern thinkers.

And the very notion of Republican government took hold in this hemisphere in an era when the classics were being actively rediscovered and propagated, most notably up north by the founding fathers of the USA.

Yet nowadays there would seem to be a growing cadre in positions of authority within American republics who rely almost wholly on scriptural perspectives, and I would argue that that is like putting diesel in a petrol car.

 

The Cadgers' Chorus

I’m starting to experience a degree of miffedness with all this moaning about the Sunday visiting vehicle moratorium during Lent.

First up, it’s just Sunday. And only a handful of such Sundays during the whole year.

Secondly, the majority of the people doing all this griping are doing it from within sectors of the local economy which are almost ludicrously over-saturated (beer, pizza, coffee etc.) and which almost anywhere else would be subject to superior year-round regulation.

Frankly, if your business cannot cope with a reduced footfall for half a dozen days per year, you are in the WRONG business. You are in effect operating at the rather iffy margins, like people who build homes on cheap land close to collapsible hillsides (...or indeed, ancient Mayan civilisation.)

Indeed, and this might be painful to hear, if you are not doing something significantly different (and better) than everyone else in the sector, you are little more than CLUTTER, not a vital ingredient in the lifeblood of the community.

Antigua really ought not — or at least need not — depend so wholeheartedly on tourism, and especially not the over-saturated sort. When I first came here there were relatively few transients present and the city was doing just fine.

This much-mentioned economic dependency today is largely limited to the enterprises which have been drawn in to exploit — and in many cases over-exploit in a notably parasitical manner — what they perceive as the opportunity offered by the host location.

“Antigua is for all” is their deceptively egalitarian mantra, which would in effect put a stop to any attempt at regulation. What they really mean is that "Antigua is a free for all", and that their right to make a living here trumps everyone else’s right to enjoy a reasonable quality of life or indeed occasionally pursue goals which are non-commercial.

We saw much the same petulant outpouring of grievance just a few months ago when the political protests and associated blockades were seemingly reducing inbound traffic, and a near identical mob of over-privileged whingers started up with a sob story they falsely assumed to be all-embracing and ubiquitous.

 

Ambiguity at the edges...

Extremism, left, right, racial and religious, and any combination of the four, now uses cosplay and carefully packaged ambiguity in the message, to avoid censure in western democracies.

Nobody waits for the full moon any more to release their inner wolf, because there’s a whole range of sheep costumes on the rack.

Ambiguity used to to be the preserve of the Centre, a spur to rational compromise, yet now it has become a key tool in the hands of zealots and the unhinged in general, half of whom were always a bit too dumb to ever fully understand it, but nowadays those that make use of it with practiced cynicism, do so in the knowledge that that is no bad thing...for them. Stupidity becomes the covert to their overt.

And now the compromise the Centre has to make, is ceding ever more airtime to the fanatics.

Mercerism

It's fascinating to me how many interesting themes this book had which didn't make it into the film, yet could easily form the conceits for alternative adapted screenplays. 

 

For example, the androids (replicants in Blade Runner) are produced on a Mars colony, not simply to provide labour, but also to serve up the semblance of human social bulk and a more complex society. Dick has a word for this in his fiction: simulacrum.

So, you could buy a package of neighbours: two adults, two kids and maybe a dog. Their presence nearby would be comforting, as would the knowledge that one could safely ignore them.

The other theme which is so on the mark for our present moment is the cult of empathy.

In the novel this is called Mercerism and adherents have an 'empathy box' at home which they use to observe and emotionally participate in, the tribulations of an individual who is pelted with rocks as he attempts to push his own large rock up the steep flank of a mountain, seemingly on a loop.

Later on in the story Mercer's situation is exposed as a phoney production, but this does not seem to be any kind of deal breaker for the believers.

Merleau-Ponty once said of Socrates that he "reminds us that it is not the same thing, but almost the opposite, to understand religion and to accept it," thereby demonstrating what both the French Existentialist and the Greek moral philosopher did not really understand about religion — how blind faith often advances willy nilly in the face of contrary evidence.

This is certainly true of the religious/political empathy cults which have taken hold of western society in recent decades, which operate on the basis of an unshakeable conviction and moral narcissism, and often tend to focus on subjects which can be observed through what my parents' generation called 'a set' (my father even referred to his laptop this way), which further reduces the need for engaging with facts, and thus understanding.

Dick's own understanding of how these belief systems work, how his own tended to work, was along the lines of "the Truth is out there, even when it's not".

The Bequeathed (Netflix)

 

Six episodes. From the director of the much-loved Train to Busan. Very watchable, yet rather like the latest installment of True Detective, the soap opera (and rather obviously decorative supernatural vibe) seems to swamp the procedural elements.

The subtitles are a bit ropey. I think this is the minimum Netflix needs to get right before pushing these shows out to a global audience. There's questionable vocabulary and unidiomatic sentence formation and the problem is somewhat exacerbated by the need to chug through this textual stuff as the cast members repeatedly embark on disconcertingly histrionic exchanges.

At the end I still had some key uncertainties about how all the different relationships tied together and why exactly Yoon Seo-Ha's husband met the fate that he did. I possibly wasn't always paying close enough attention, but this all added to the lost in translation sensation.

Part of the problem from a storytelling perspective is that there are in effect two protagonists, an art professor and a detective and the teleplay resists the temptation to bring them together romantically. The detective has a back story (of course he does), but this remains resolutely disconnected from the main narrative. And the art professor never quite attains the status of likeable/relatable central character.

 

Artificial Urges

One of the more convoluted explanations of Creation is that an absolute being, as the deists tend to conceive Him, falls short of completion until He is able to participate in contingency, albeit indirectly. He's self-contained and Perfect, but experiences urges.

I was reminded of this recently when pondering the crossroads humanity now seems to face with its own technological creations.

I find I am less interested in AI as an enhanced version of human capability, software which can do what we do, see what we see, but better, than as a pathway to 'artificially' unfolded forms of perception, which in effect remove the psychological filters which appear to stand between consciousness and reality in the raw.

In other words, we end up placing within our world something which goes against our own natural disposition, which is precisely what the theologians insist that God felt he needed to do.

 

(Either way, the assumption that creation comes bundled with benevolence can probably be Ockham’d away.)

 

 

Rock of Israel

Over the past few days I've been reading about the small but highly significant Jewish component of New Holland, the 17th century Dutch colony in what is now northern coastal Brazil.

They referred to themselves as Zur Israel, rock of Israel, a play on the name of Recife, their capital, which derives from Rock of Brazil, apparently, but is also a reference to a messianic snippet within the Book of Isaiah.

They had a fairly tolerant governor who they called wise: Johan Maurice van Nassau, who permitted them to form the first legal community of Jews in the New World. These guys were the real deal: settler colonists in contemporary parlance.

There were about 1500 of them, 20-40% of the whole population of the colony. Aside from their commercial interests (The three Ss: shipping, sugar and slaves) they ran various charitable programmes, including one for unattached Dutch women looking for a husband in the Americas (!), a bank of last resort for their Christian neighbours and, interestingly, a fund which regularly donated money to Israel.

And that historical factlet certainly caught my attention, because just how many idiots are there out there who think Israel is a place made up by Eastern Europeans at the end of WWII. 

Lady Gaga and Madonna's mad hatter Nazim Mashar certainly seems to, writing in December that “Hamas is a resistance movement and Palestinians have every right under international law to defend themselves and resist the theft and occupation of its land from European and American settlers." He later referred to the 'Zionists' in his own US-based fashion industry as parasites and called for them to be named and shamed.

Clearly none of the peoples who have invaded and repressed Israel almost since the dawn of recorded history: Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Turks and so on have in any way behaved parasitically. Absolutely not. Never. How could you even presume to say so?

I think we can leave it to an impartial third party, the Buddhists, to respond to this apparent injustice of stolen Arab land: Karma's a bitch!

 

No need to share...

One of history’s premium ironies is that the Jews themselves laid the foundations of their own long-term persecution, for who was it exactly who first came up with the idea that there was only one God and only one religion that could be True?

Having done that, they largely passed on the need to convert everyone else. Pretty much anyone could have pointed out to them that this was going to be a ticking time bomb.

All that needed to happen was for the notion of special revelation to become yoked to the Roman (and later Arab, Marxist-Leninist etc.) obsession with world domination and then everyone was fucked, but especially the Jews.

And the slightest hint that they might like to persecute their way out of this trap of perpetual persecution that they’d got themselves into was only ever going to make things a whole lot worse.

"The totalitarian attempt at global conquest and total domination has been the destructive way out of all impasses. Its victory may coincide with the destruction of humanity; wherever it has ruled, it has begun to destroy the essence of man." > Hannah Arendt

Dhimmis for Dummies.

The UN helped initiate this problem by not listening to the British who had been handed the Mandate in 1920 by its precursor organisation The League of Nations, specifically with the project of establishing a homeland for Jews.

After 27 years the Brits understood what the problem was, and would always be. 

 

On February 18, 1947 Foreign Secretary Bevin explained it to Parliament — the Jews want independence, but for the Arabs the point of principle is not the recognition of any rights of their own, but the denial of sovereignty over any part of the territory to the Jews. 

 

This was because the very idea of a Jewish nation was an affront to natural justice in the Arab worldview. As non-Muslim monotheists the Jews were supposed to reconcile themselves to the socially and politically inferior status of Dhimmis (protected people) and could under no circumstances be permitted anything like equal status within the 'Arab World'. 

 

The British lobbed this matter of irreconcilable perspectives back at the UN, who duly failed to address it. Instead they pressed ahead with a plan for partition, which was immediately and violently rejected by the Arabs after the Security Council vote. 

 

The UN thus oversaw a massive problem of displaced Arabs largely of their own making, which they have since gone about making ever more massive. 

 

They done this by switching from the mishandled, misapprehended compromise to establishing their own organisation (UNRWA) which would duly ‘go native’ and thus perpetuate, seemingly for eternity, the most rigid, relentlessly uncompromising mental model of the situation. 

 

Along the way UNRWA has explicitly helped transition this sense of injustice from its origins in Arab-Muslim chauvinism into something which will more likely gain traction amongst the gullible of the wider world (even Jews) — the geopolitical social injustice of 'settler colonialism'. This is a process I have given an appropriate name in the title of this post.

 

The partition of India created 20m refugees. The Russian invasion of Ukraine created 9.1m refugees. The Syrian Civil War created 6.7m refugees. The Israeli war for Independence initially created 360,000 refugees. 

 

Only the latter group has had its own UN Agency in perpetuity. This is because UNRWA consciously chose to preserve and then enlarge the group as cognitive refugees from the need to recognise Israeli legitimacy.

 

All that ever shifts is the underlying rhetorical justification for that fundamental intransigence, some of which is basically demented and anti-Semitic, but even in the more moderate register the effect is basically the same. 

 

There were in effect two wrong ways to go about this and the UN have tried both with a degree of die-hard obstinacy which has now left pretty much the entire institution looking in need of an overhaul.

 

As for UNRWA, it surely cannot survive in its current form. There unfortunately remains much that nation states are able to get away with, flaunting common decency, but multilateral organisations, especially UN agencies, have to be held to higher standards and frankly any degree of complicity in the rape, murder and abduction of innocent civilians has to be game over, surely? 

 

 

Oversize Racket

Over the past decade or so Guatemalan society has been serially defiled by a a number of rather epic corruption rackets, but even so, nothing even remotely on the scale of the one that UNRWA has been abetting in Gaza. 

The unique degeneracy of this scam has been the manner in which hatred and an explicit set of financial incentives (derived from monies contributed by both the ingenuous and the disingenuous) for pumping more violence into the cycle have been so deeply ingrained within it from the start. 

And just as the fraud based on poisonous ideological trickery is finally about to unravel — thanks to the exposure of a small group on its outer fringe found guilty of abominations which cannot be overlooked — up pop the usual suspects to demand its immediate, unconditional reinstatement. Jeremy Corbyn, inevitably, referred yesterday to the “moral depravity” of the decision to withhold further funding from UNRWA. 

Yet at the very least, some sort of open international enquiry and audit needs to be put in the diary by Guterres before the gravy train can start rolling again. 

This is, and has long been a CON, just like the zany narrative of historical resentment and de-legitimisation of Israel it has been blithely developing and broadcasting for decades. (In 1905, under Ottoman rule, two thirds of the population of Jerusalem was Jewish, yet the pro-Hamas propaganda line is that the Jews somehow ‘colonised’ their ancient capital and homeland.) 

In 2022 the US alone contributed $320m to this bloated scheme. UNRWA employs 13,000 staff in Gaza, one for every 114 ‘refugees’. That compares all too favourably with the 1550 serving 1.24m actual refugees in Cox Bazar, the world’s biggest facility. 

UNRWA employs more than the World Bank, and seriously outnumbers the UN staff in both Geneva (8500) or New York (6400). 

Today the WSJ reported that 1200 of these staffers are active Hamas operatives while 23% overall have participated in the Iran-backed terrorists’ military framework. 49% have been found to possess close personal or family ties with Hamas. This is more like a coffee plantation undone by leaf rust than a pristine orchard with a few bad apples in it. 

And during an extended period of alleged ‘genocide’ the number of individuals supposedly covered by the system of perpetual refugee status which underpins all this free money for the venal and hateful has risen to 5.9m from around 600,000, even though more Jews than so-called Palestinians were originally displaced in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war. 

And look who might just be able to step in and assist with any temporary shortfall...

Missed Opportunity?

One of Graham Greene's most interesting predictions, somehow prescient and unsound at the same time, was the notion that the Soviet Union would cease to be a problem once the KGB had taken control of it.

The Russian intelligence services were, he surmised, individuals selected for their own elite intellectual capacities and pragmatism. They would displace the nutty Marxist ideologues and all would be well in the world. 

He neglected to account for the possibility of tumefied greed and territorial covetousness amongst said pragmatists.

​The author had perhaps had some direct suggestions of doveishness within the KGB via his correspondence with Kim Philby who wrote to Greene that the invasion of Afghanistan was an "infernal business" and that most of his new colleagues in Russian intelligence were opposed to it. These letters were passed to MI6 and it seems that Philby's former colleagues were inclined to believe him. (similar sentiments may have prevailed after Putin's recent push west.)

One of the most intriguing exchanges between Greene and Philby followed on from the SALT II treaty between the US and the USSR. Greene suggested that this might be the ideal moment for the two superpowers to form a joint alliance against Iran. Philby noted how bonkers the Ayatollah was and that he would pass the suggestion on to the 'pragmatists'.

Judgment Day

The South African-led case at the ICC depends on some ideologically-informed propositions which deserve some interrogation.

Firstly, that Israelis are 'white' colonialists oppressing a dark-skinned native population and secondly that whatever the stated strategic aims served up by the IDF for their response to October 7, the underlying motivation is racism, conscious or unconscious.

These two notions allow those who claim genocide on behalf on the Palestinians to skip the objective criteria for the internationally-recognised crime (to a large extent formulated by Jewish thinkers in the last century), such as significant population decline over an specified period.

One of the ways of countering these claims is to deploy another, supposedly less ideological affirmation of the Palestinian cause, which I would tend to refer to as the 'scientific' postulation, based on recent DNA analyses.

What these apparently reveal is that Palestinians and Middle Eastern Jews (roughly half of all Israelis) are essentially the same ethnic group. This makes allegations of racism and white settler colonialism all rather moot, does it not? 

It's not hard for historians to see why this would, rather inevitably be the case. When the newly-Islamicised Arabs first invaded, many of the then natives, Jews and Christians in the main, were forced to adopt an Arabian-Muslim identity which they have since retained.

Thus — irony klaxon — many Palestinians possess Jewish ancestors, along with other heritable mixes from other peoples who have featured in the region since the Bronze Age: Caananites, Philistines, Samaritans, Coptic Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Frankish and Norman Crusaders, Turks etc. And so too do many of the Middle Eastern Jews.

What historians can tell you however is that the so-called scientific argument is not actually all that scientific after all, because it artificially separates Nature and Nurture, and in so doing ignores the fact that DNA alone is not a significant driver of events. 

After all, on my own native island, the English are not really Anglo-Saxon and the Welsh and Scots are not really Celtic. But these nations and their identities are grounded in complex underlying structures that have been historically meaningful: memetic not genetic. Conduct all the DNA tests you want, but language, existential beliefs and wider culture are the main drivers of history.

In spite of our modern obsessions with racism and ethnic cleansing, most historical conquests have been conducted by relatively compact armies of men who did not ultimately displace the much larger, mixed gender populations that they assumed control over. This was true of the Anglo-Saxons and it was true of the Arabs who rode into the Levant behind their Caliph in the seventh century bent on the conquest of Jerusalem.

The reverse process, the end of empires, is also worth considering here. When Islamic colonial rule faltered in the Balkans, new nation states took shape. These were based on a single ethno-religious identity (Greek, Bulgarian etc.)

The fate of the former colonial overlords who had enjoyed wealth and power in these territories for hundreds of years was rather mixed, shall we say. Some left for what remained of Ottoman Turkey, others were dispossessed or indeed murdered. Unlike the inhabitants of the Mandate, they didn't get the immediate opportunity to conspire with nearby allies to extirpate these nascent entities.

In ancestral DNA terms, many are still in situ, but they have adapted to a new identity and civic condition. Atavistic hatreds bubble away beneath the surface still, but these are not really the live geopolitical volcanoes they once were. 

If you look for western democratic nations that are still obstinately coveted by the Jihadis you tend to find only Spain...and Israel, of course. I think this is probably because these were colonies established by the original Caliphate and not the later Turkish empire, and so the urge to re-dominate goes deeper (and somewhat darker) from a cultural perspective. 

20% of Israelis are Arab and Muslim. They may not have converted to Judaism, or in the main converse in Hebrew, but they have to some extent adapted to the memetic structures of the nation within which they make their livings. Palestinians of this kind are, in a sense, already 'living the dream' of the one state solution. (Let's also not forget that pre-1948, Jews around there also regarded themselves as 'Palestinian'.)

Nearby one finds a couple of other notable Palestinian groups, open and closeted. In the latter category we have those with their own modern nation state in the form of Jordan. The other group are the ones that are the source of that big suppurating geopolitical sore we all to some extent suffer from today.

On some levels they are recusants: they do not wish to have anything to do with the Jewish state, to the point of being apparently psychologically incapable of living alongside it within their own UN-recognised nation.

They are also in a sense refuseniks, in that they have been denied the opportunity to leave and re-settle by the neighbouring countries sharing their basic memetic make-up and this historically unusual situation has been reinforced by the unhelpful doctrines that govern the UNRWA, which deem them to be perpetual refugees.

Genocide, like war, is in general a far more complex phenomenon than its most famous example from the middle of the last century. There are good reasons to be conscious of what the Holocaust and WWII have to teach us, but they can sometimes act as notable surrogates for an unwillingness to deal with the fundamental ambiguities of life. 

Take the last 'proper' genocide that most of the international community recognises: Rwanda. I say most, because Mitterand famously said at the time: "In such countries genocide is not too important" (!)

Au contraire. An understanding of what happened in 1994 is, I would suggest, essential to any understanding of the term. 

The original inhabitants of this mountainous little country were cave-dwelling pigmies called the Twa that now account for just 1% of the population. They were overrun long before colonial times by two distinct ethnic groups. A rather stocky and dark Bantu tribe and a lankier, lighter-skinned Nilotic people from the north. This distinction was already being eroded to the point of meaninglessness by the time the Belgians arrived, through a conscious mixing of both memes and genes.

Yet the Europeans duly upset this process of miscegenation and mobility between the two groups, and effectively revived the old ethnic polarity as a sociological situation.

In doing this they had a number of 'racial science' dogmas to play with, but also some absurd ideas derived from ancient scripture (that toxic body of nonsense again) - the so-called Hamitic myth - which claimed that Sub-Saharan peoples were descended from Noah's son Ham and were thus eligible for serial mistreatment. 

From then on Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutus were in effect castes (to a large extent divorced from underlying ethnic division) forced to play certain roles within the colony by their overlords.

However, many of the colonists themselves gradually became obsessed with the idea that the Tutsis were "oppressors" and they came to associate them with the feudally-privileged Flemish population of their own European homeland. This paved the way for the emergence of a Hutu-led dictatorship after independence.

When we cannot blame the worst problems in the world on the Bible or the Quran, we always have those "rogue intellectuals" with an inverted chip on the shoulder to fall back on, and so it was in President Habyarimana's regime, where the Hamitic myth was carefully inverted into a supremacist, genocidal ideal in manner that now has clear echoes in the Middle East.

 

Deadly Posturing

This week the ICC will release what I understand is a preliminary judgment in the genocide case brought by South Africa. 

It will never happen of course, but it is really a entire coterie of UN officials based in Gaza who ought to be facing charges at an international tribunal right now.

They've been guilty of playing a feel-smug game of ideological soldiers, rather like a visible (and screechily vocal) subset of students in mismanaged western universities.

You know the rules: Is it a bird, is it a plane, is it a terrorist...is it a freedom fighter? Pick according to your predetermined prejudices and then declare yourself unimpeachably compassionate...and right.

They behaved as if there would be no consequences for playing along with Hamas's Jihadi, AK-waving posturing. Yet it seems highly unlikely that they were not ever in a position to put the dampers on an unfolding tragedy which turned out to have very terrible consequences indeed for around a thousand innocent civilians just over the border: the worst pogrom against Jews since WWII, and an event they have ever since been at extreme pains to play down.

This in turn had an inevitable chain reaction effect establishing a seemingly unstoppable machine for munching on non-combatants, particularly those that were supposedly under their care.

Before all this, they were almost certainly complicit in the protracted transference of humanitarian aid towards ends which were essentially barbaric, but like those demented morons chanting "globalise the intifada", they probably surmised that bursts of genocidal violence would be the ideal way to achieve peace and mutual coexistence in the long term.

Should I ever decide to get together with a group of like-minded folk in Antigua and we then march around chanting "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free" (along with "shame on you!" every time we pass either Macdonalds or Starbucks), the real world consequences would likely be negligible. 

In contrast, these UN officials absolved themselves of their neutrality and in many cases bought into the Palestinian mythology wholeheartedly, "settler colonial entity" and all. In this instance there were some very unfortunate and foreseeable consequences, not only from a lack of UN push-back, but also from an element of UN push-forward.

In almost any other context this would be considered for charges of criminal negligence, at the least.

'Guarantees' (Read the small print)

 

The "international community" is not however a single, amorphous layer of well meaning outsiders.

And even when it is essentially a euphemism for the developed western world plus supposedly multilateral institutions like the UN, it has a rather patchy record when it comes to such guarantees. 

 

For example: when Ukraine was encouraged to surrender its nukes in return for 'protection' from any subsequent Russian aggression. (See also, right now, as it apparently runs out of shells.) 

Finding the strength is only the beginning of the process. In almost any conflict situation, the preservation of it is the hard part.

 

Given the underlying ideological and geopolitical polarities that have long operated in the Middle East, such guarantees would require cooperation between blocks that are fundamentally disinclined the cooperate on almost any issue. 

 

And one only has to gaze across at Kosovo to see how these committee-based solutions can result in a terrible muddle...and one could put money on the Middle East being able to come up with a far bigger mess.

 

Beyond the outside powers who have long been anything but impartial in this conflict, it seems to me that in the lead up to October 7 the UN in particular already has a quantity of blood on its hands. 

 

There is simply no way they can have been anything other than complicit with the misappropriation of global aid for non-peaceful, non-humanitarian purposes, and have done almost nothing to prevent the ascendance of a venomous, chauvinistic culture within Gaza in particular. 

 

Indeed, their insistence that refugee status is heritable has been unique to these circumstances and profoundly unhelpful, playing into the strategies maintained by other nations within the 'Arab World', which are as cynical as they are partisan. 

 

Yes, there is a cycle of violence, the spinning of which has to be slowed as much as possible, but after October 7 pieties alone are unhelpful. They are often merely vanity positions adopted by individuals who like to shore up their public image on social media. 

 

The cycle does not spin evenly. This is because anger and hatred are both real human emotions felt by individuals in the moment and also culturally induced phenomena, sometimes explicitly taught to children in a cruelly inverted process of socialisation. 

Arabism (2)

Anti-Zionism is not reasoned, humanitarian opposition to the chauvinistic extremists lurking on the right side of the bell curve of opinion within the Israeli democracy. 

Instead, Anti-Zionism is predominantly opposition to the very existence of Jewish self-determination, not always, but often enough informed by Anti-Semitism, open or closeted. 

Those who deny this are in many cases being knowingly dishonest. (Keep pressing, it comes out eventually.)

A good many anti-Zionists are just plain ignorant. But perhaps the most morally malignant kind are those who use terms like ‘occupation’ and ‘genocide’ in the full knowledge that they are essentially inverting the situational and historical truth.

One can ask why it is different, even if not admirable, when Netanyahoo says “from the river to the sea”? One credible answer would be 'because his ancestors didn’t come to Israel as brutal invaders'. And he knows which river and which sea. He's referring to the ancient state called Israel, mentioned in the Bible, yet even more significantly mentioned 43 times in the Quran. (Guess how many times Palestine is mentioned in that book?) 

I'd liken the way Arabism functions to that part of Homer's Odyssey where Ulysses and his companions are moving along silently via the undersides of Polyphemus's flock. In this case the sheep are various codifications of ideology, religious and political, which permit the motion to appear to transcend its ethnic origin.

The Arab empire has no more been a fundamentally religious or even ideological phenomenon than the Spanish empire was a Catholic one.

Yet outside observers touch the back of the passing sheep and sense the alluringly fluffy shape of the ideas: Jihadism, resistance, anti-westernism, anti-Semitism, nihilism and much else, but these are in fact subsidiary to the primary expansionist urge — exploitable epiphenomena given off by the Arabist imperial engine as it rather mutely pursues its goals, at once tribalist and geopolitical.

 

Arabism

There are a pair of 'silent' isms in the Middle East which barely get a mention compared to 'Zionism', definitions and counter-definitions of which are very much at the centre of debate, particularly in the ROW.

The first of these is Tribalism, which we can maybe come back to later, but it is one of the underlying mentalities which drives the various cycles of violence.

The second is Arabism, and the fact that this so often goes unmentioned is rather extraordinary, because it has been one of the factors feeding Zionism since the foundation of the modern state of Israel.

When looking for mentalities within the opposition to the Jewish state commentators habitually highlight the extreme forms of Islamism that are hard to avoid in the milieu of Hamas and their smoke-coming-out-of-their-ears, clerical cheerleaders. 

Many westerners 'standing with Israel' (albeit from a distance) often do so because of the perceived civilisational threat from this toxic blend of religious fundamentalism and totalitarian fascism.

Yet sometimes the moderates also say things that we perhaps ought to find equally troubling. Take Rashid Khalidi, prominent Palestinian-American and mate of Barak Obama, who teaches history at Columbia and in a recent interview expressed succinctly his Arabist opposition to regional Jewish self-determination: "[Jews] who came didn't come to live with the residents of the country [Ottoman provinces, then Mandate Palestine]. They didn't come to live with the Arabs. They didn't want to learn Arabic or take the citizenship." 

It’s that old “they won’t assimilate properly” trope. Or, those infernal Judeans are being a bit "what have the Arabs ever done for us?" aren't they?

Jihadism is the higher-viz, foreign policy component of Arabism, the latter the more inward-looking, domestic expression of the urge, which is the one which currently threatens Israel more than any other western democracy. (This is because, in spite of the occasionally hysterical expansionist rhetoric, it is the original captured territory that apparently matters the most and of European nations, only Spain gets the direct nod on a consistent basis.)

Arabism, in short, is the notion that any peoples living within the original extent of the vast empire — the Caliphate — regardless of their own ethnic and cultural histories, really do need to adopt an identity that is primarily Arab.

Speaking the language is a bare minimum (though the Persians, alone really, have been allowed a compromise) and practicing Islam is a lot more than a nice to have.

Since the very early days of the empire it has been extremely difficult for regional minorities to preserve and protect their traditions, be they Jews, Druze, Christians, Zoroastraians, Yazidis etc. And things have been getting worse, not better. Persecution has seen the Christian population drop from 20% to 4% over the course of the past century. 

Arabism is supposed to transcend all the internal rivalries established by Tribalism, and it has been bolstered by the existence of an apparently shared nemesis in the form of Israel and its own ism.

It is very much a form of imperialism — or a particularly open-ended form of nationalism — which operates by subterfuge whenever the repression is less violent and overt. It benefits from the fact that many in the west adopt its key presumptions almost reflexively. (The BBC routinely refers to the Tunisian tennis player Ons Jabeur as an ‘Arab woman’, for example.)

"From the river to the sea" and "free Palestine" are part of the subterfuge, for western ideological consumption. There is a vague pretence of liberal nationalist intent, but the mentality is fundamentally informed by the notion that Israel is an unbearable affront, a misalignment, a tumour even, within the sacred Caliphate. So, a negative not positive resistance: Freedom from....

This is another reason why it is absurd to compare the situation within Israel to South African Apartheid or even the Jim Crow laws of the American south. Not only does the 20% non-Jewish population of Israel enjoy the same basic rights as the Jewish one, you only has to ask yourself how Jews or any other cultural minority would fare within almost any Islamic majority society in the region. No matter how bad Israel’s local recusants fare, things would be so much worse if the boot were on the other foot.

Some do seem to get this. A recent study by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research, which would make the pro-Hamas propagandists squirm somewhat, found that between 2010 and 2022, the proportion of Arabs living in Israeli-administered east Jerusalem who would prefer to be governed by the Palestinian Authority dropped from 52% to just 38.2%.

So while some Palestinians don’t seem to urgently desire their own mini state because they are motivated by Arabism or Jihadi-imperialism, others, a very clear majority in this case, reject the idea because they understand what sort of state that would be. Occupation...Apardheid...nothing could be worse than self-rule!

The majority of Israelis have direct family experience of this under-mentioned asymmetry: it is often forgotten that at the time of the foundation of Israel 900,000 Jews were systematically expelled from homes around the Middle East many had occupied for a thousand years. For those whose morality has arithmetic foundations, it can be observed that this was, numerically, a greater catastrophe than the Nakba.

Learning Opportunity

Another important lesson we've learned, and not just in the past 24 hours, is that even here in Guatemala, adherence to principle, perseverance to the point of obstinacy and a degree of both tactical and strategic nouse, will see one over the finishing line, no matter how many dirty tricks the scumbags have up their sleeves.

And a bonus learning — it’s so easy to elect to be forever remembered for the bad grace with which one handles certain situations.

An Anti-Matter

If I had any sense that inside Gaza there is a genuine aspiration to build a modern nation state in which a desire to protect human rights and live in peace if not collaboration with its regional neighbours — an aspiration characterised by a failure to emerge which cannot be substantially pinned on outsiders — then I might have assumed a more balanced take on the present situation.

Even the Gazans’ useful idiots* in the lumpen-lefty community are really bad at disguising what ‘free Palestine’ really means, and seeing this weekend how Egypt has strengthened its border wall with the enclave into something resembling a MAGA reverie, has reminded me that the Israeli hardliners are not alone in regarding this as a territory almost irredeemably polluted by toxic mentalities.

Like the Saudis, the Israelis (and now the UK and the US) imagine rather optimistically that suppression with high explosives acts as a kind of tonic against geopolitical delinquency.

Egypt’s approach is far more like quarantine. Yet there is of course a measure of hand-washing involved, because the twisted Hamas mentality is very much an offshoot of that of the Muslim Brotherhood which first evolved on the other side of all that razor wire.

Palestine is an imagined entity. Not essentially a historical space where territory and cultural or ethnic identity congeal, like Israel, but the name of a no-compromise campaign for “Not Israel” or even “No Israel”, which was born with that essential negativity.

And it took time to become this thing, for in 1948, even though Arab imperialists reacted like antibodies to the sudden flourishing of Jewish democratic self-determination on their authoritarian turf, many of the people who still actively referred to themselves and their culture as ‘Palestinian’ were Jewish. Two decades and a good deal of self-inflicted territorial recession later, the moniker had become free of any association with the hated intruder within.

At base Zionism is the desire of Jews to finally run their own affairs in relative safety within their ancient homeland after two millennia of colonial oppression and persistent persecution wherever else they sought a measure of autonomy and basic tolerance.

I can’t see Anti-Zionism as much other than the determination to deny them this. Anti-Zionists often do actually admit this, but more commonly make a token effort to cover their essentially racist animus by portraying Zionism as something it is not or — at least only mutates into at one end of its bell curve — an evil coloniser ideology which needs to be expunged from the Earth. This is more than anything a disturbing inversion of the situation as understood by any historian worthy of the name.

* Many of whom, even more (dis)ingenuously, now verbalise support for the Houthis, an arguably even more unhinged group of zealots, responsible for ten times the number of deaths as Israel in this current war, as if they were the true representatives of the internationally-recognised nation called Yemen that we can expect to see represented at the Paris Olympics this year. As with the Gazans, it is what the Houthis are not, not what they are, which appeals to their newfound fan club abroad. 

Measured Anticipation

The events in Guatemala yesterday should serve as a reminder that 'History' is a sobriquet for two significant mechanisms in modern societies...

1) A dustbin

2) A process of change which is rarely linear and best measured in decades, if not centuries.

 

Very little can, or should change overnight here. I know how he will try to assess the new government's engagement with the structural realities of this nation in four years time, but perhaps the most important metric will be the hardest to pin down: a swerve towards a new kind of political action whereby diverse yet ultimately complimentary approaches are tolerated, creating a platform for long term positive gains across all the other key metrics. 

 

Right now the task is nurturing, but by 2028 the conditions for acceleration ought to be visible.