Palestinian mourners gather around the bodies of three siblings of the Abu Musallam family — Ahmed, 11; Walaa, 14; and Mohammed, 16 – killed by an Israeli shell in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip, July 18, 2014. Photo: Lefteris Pitarakis/Associated Press.
Today a blog post under that title appeared on the Times of Israel’s website. Not long after, it came down, replaced by this dour tombstone:
But the Internet lives by “Never Forget.” You can find the entire post, mummfied, here; and here is the text:
When Genocide is Permissible
YOCHANAN GORDON
AUGUST 1, 2014, 5:36 PMJudging by the numbers of casualties on both sides in this almost one-month old war one would be led to the conclusion that Israel has resorted to disproportionate means in fighting a far less- capable enemy. That is as far as what meets the eye. But, it’s now obvious that the US and the UN are completely out of touch with the nature of this foe and are therefore not qualified to dictate or enforce the rules of this war – because when it comes to terror there is much more than meets the eye.
I wasn’t aware of this, but it seems that the nature of warfare has undergone a major shift over the years. Where wars were usually waged to defeat the opposing side, today it seems – and judging by the number of foul calls it would indicate – that today’s wars are fought to a draw. I mean, whoever heard of a timeout in war? An NBA Basketball game allows six timeouts for each team during the course of a game, but last I checked this is a war! We are at war with an enemy whose charter calls for the annihilation of our people. Nothing, then, can be considered disproportionate when we are fighting for our very right to live.
The sad reality is that Israel gets it, but its hands are being tied by world leaders who over the past six years have insisted they are such good friends with the Jewish state, that they know more regarding its interests than even they do. But there’s going to have to come a time where Israel feels threatened enough where it has no other choice but to defy international warnings – because this is life or death.
Most of the reports coming from Gazan officials and leaders since the start of this operation have been either largely exaggerated or patently false. The truth is, it’s not their fault, falsehood and deceit is part of the very fabric of who they are and that will never change. Still however, despite their propensity to lie, when your enemy tells you that they are bent on your destruction you believe them. Similarly, when Khaled Meshal declares that no physical damage to Gaza will dampen their morale or weaken their resolve – they have to be believed.
Palestinians inspect a car destroyed in an Israeli air strike in central Gaza City, July 8, 2014. Photo: Ali Jadallah / APA images.
Our sage Gedalia the son of Achikam was given intelligence that Yishmael Ben Nesanyah was plotting to kill him. However, in his piety or rather naiveté Gedalia dismissed the report as a random act of gossip and paid no attention to it. To this day, the day following Rosh Hashana is commemorated as a fast day in the memory of Gedalia who was killed in cold blood on the second day of Rosh Hashana during the meal. They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same mistakes over and over. History is there to teach us lessons and the lesson here is that when your enemy swears to destroy you – you take him seriously.
Hamas has stated forthrightly that it idealizes death as much as Israel celebrates life. What other way then is there to deal with an enemy of this nature other than obliterate them completely?
News anchors such as those from CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera have not missed an opportunity to point out the majority of innocent civilians who have lost their lives as a result of this war. But anyone who lives with rocket launchers installed or terror tunnels burrowed in or around the vicinity of their home cannot be considered an innocent civilian. If you’ll counter, that Hamas has been seen abusing civilians who have attempted to leave their homes in response to Israeli warnings to leave – well then, your beginning to come to terms with the nature of this enemy which should automatically cause the rules of standard warfare to be suspended.
Everyone agrees that Israel has the right to defend itself as well as the right to exercise that right. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has declared it, Obama and Kerry have clearly stated that no one could be expected to sit idle as thousands of rockets rain down on the heads of its citizens, placing them in clear and present danger. It seems then that the only point of contention is regarding the measure of punishment meted out in this situation.
I will conclude with a question for all the humanitarians out there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?
This is all over the Internet today; the Times of Israel might as well never have bothered to hide it. The ToI hasn’t actually ventured to explain why it posted the thing. Its Twitter feed is phlegmatically full of the usual stuff, praise of the Israel Defense Forces, excoriations of the UN, but it did add at end of day:
No doubt we’ll hear, in time, that there was a mistake, someone pressed the wrong button, an intern will be fired. There’s always an intern.
Except that the Times of Israel also featured today a bloodthirsty op-ed by Irwin E. Blank, formerly of New York City, and “Formation Committee Chairman of the NY Salute to Israel Parade from 1978-1982″:
G-d had demanded that Saul (or the “prime minister”) enter into battle with the Amalekites (Hamas and its savage partners) and destroy them utterly even if that means to the last child, cow and goat. As cruel as this appears, it is a lesson that teaches a nation in terrible danger that it has a legitimate obligation to put a definite end to a substantial threat. The end of such a conflict must make it impossible for that enemy to rebuild and continue to vex one’s nation forever.
And another piece by one Zev Berger, “PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan,” which meanders through various ways of deciding how much killing is enough, and decides that indifference justifies everything: “What’s a reasonable death toll? I imagine people don’t really care.”
One thing you notice about all these opinions is: They come, ultimately, from the United States. (Yochanan Gordan is a certified public accountant in New York City, and part of the Lubavitcher community.) As imports, they parallel the Times of Israel itself. The ToI‘s founder and chief investor is Seth Klarman, a Boston billionaire hedge-fund manager. Klarman’s “political giving favors Republicans,” according to the Jewish Daily Forward, though — in a telling sign of how social liberalism and international neanderthalism can cohabit — he has partnered with vulture capitalist Paul Singer on a super-PAC meant to push the GOP toward accepting same-sex marriage. But the bulk of his philanthropy promotes right-wing and settler interests in Israel:
Klarman gives money to settler groups: the Central Fund of Israel,which pays for settlers’ “security needs” in the occupied West Bank, and Ir David, which is digging up East Jerusalem and displacing Palestinians. He gives $1 million in a year to Birthright, the program to send young American Jews to Israel to fall in love with the Jewish state. He supports the rightwing propaganda organization, the Israel Project (he’s on their board), gives big money to the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, and to top it off, Klarman is chairman of the board of the David Project, the group that has targeted Arab and Muslim intellectuals on college campuses.
But not for Gaza: Seth Klarman’s investment advice
In other words, Klarman exemplifies the increasing confluence between the Israeli right wing and militaristic American neoconservatism, increasingly obsessed by the same Arab and Muslim enemies, increasingly promoting the same extreme solutions: colonization, killing. Klarman told the Forward:
My own interest in Israel has become even stronger post-9/11, when the threat of terrorism and the danger of radical Islam collided with a global campaign on many fronts to delegitimize the Jewish State.
With all the Times of Israel‘s professions of political neutrality (belied by its ruling passion for the IDF), Klarman as media mogul seems to represent a respectable ego as against the rampant id of Sheldon Adelson, the American casino owner whose ferociously Likudnik rag Israel HaYom is the most popular newspaper in the country. (Adelson, whose cash kept Newt Gingrich‘s abortive presidential campaign going long beyond its expiration date, has trafficked in the ids of several countries.) But the id keeps peeping through in Klarman’s publication too, as witness Gordon’s short-lived screed, or Blank’s, or Berger’s. It’s as if all these Americans project onto Israel their own fantasies of a country freed from the restraints of normal politics or morals, indifferent to scrutiny, infinitely willing to kill, pseudo-democratic but with all its parties united around a common lust for death: Israel as the United States of Id.
Israeli missiles strike Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, on July 9, 2014. Photo: AP.
As Lady Bracknell said: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” To publish one op-ed approving genocide in a day may be an intern’s mistake; to publish three looks like you mean it. The three pieces run a strange but comprehensive gamut of justifications for mass killing. Blank offers familiar fundamentalist ravings, only meaningful if you know and care who the Amalekites were (but many do, many do). Berger gives us a woozy bureaucratic relativism, precise figures making precise judgments impossible, ethics suffocated by an avalanche of statistics. Gordon alone takes genocide fully seriously, understands that it is a moral choice. It means giving absolute moral priority to your own people, recognizing that this is a death sentence upon other peoples who get in the way. Or as Gordon seems to have tweeted today (if this is him):
In another blog post for the Times of Israel, back in May, Gordon wrote about the tension “we experience regularly as Jews in a modern world. We are faced with the perpetual question of are we meant to bend and conform to the morals of suburbia or fight and remain steadfast on the age-old values as our grandparents did in Siberia?” Plenty of Jews have felt such tensions, and plenty of others as well, without wanting to kill people. But you can see where the kid is coming from: growing up amid the split-levels of Nassau County, where no sublime calling ever vindicates the daily void, he longs for some higher morality of struggle to transcend mere neighborliness. Some other child might play video games, or shoot up the local middle school; but for him, there’s Gaza. Of course, he can disguise his personal dilemma in a bastardization of Hasidic language, but it meanwhile finds its imaginary fulfilment in a frontier Israel where the battle, he believes, is real. This voice is familiar. It’s the voice of that suburban nonentity, the nebbish Himmler, dressed up in an imposing uniform and speaking to the Gauleiter in Poznan in 1943. It’s stripped of authority and the drag, but the timbre is there. About the extermination of the Jews: “To have seen this through, and — with the exception of human weaknesses — to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.” Decency and morality inhere in those with courage to kill for us. The dealers in death stand vindicated because they stood up against their natural, debilitating qualms. Virtue lies in resistance to the blandishments of morality as it is commonly, suburbanly, merely understood. As Hannah Arendt wrote, “Although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people,”
Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom (for that the Jews were transported to their doom they knew, of course, even though many of them may not have known the gruesome details), and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.
To resist temptation is a … well, a tempting stance, luring us to emulation, to imitate the Lone Ranger, the stoic hero. No wonder, of these three pieces, it was Gordon’s that the Times of Israel deemed dangerous enough to take down.
I don’t believe these editorials represent the majority of Israeli opinion, or even a substantial minority. If anything, as I say, they are a sort of palimpsest: American fantasies of power, innocence, and freedom projected onto an abject territory, another episode in Israel’s strange colonial history.
Nor am I one of those who believes that genocide is taking place in Gaza now. The legal definition of genocide (enshrined in the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and indeed in Israel’s “Crime of Genocide Acf” of 1950, which carried the Convention’s terms into national law) requires the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” I don’t think that comprehensively destructive intent lies behind the crimes against humanity being committed in Gaza. But reading Gordon compels me to add: Yet. The two-state solution is dead; everybody sees that, on right and left. What remains, in the immediate future, is one state on Israel’s terms, from the river to the sea. A state in which much of the population is stateless, deprived of the basic rights of citizenship, subjected to continuous surveillance and control, condemned to bare existence as subalterns, even the freedom of movement suppressed, cannot sustain itself without a steadily expanding machinery of violence. Such a state will give up any shred or semblance of the rule of law, of the distinction between young and old, civilian and combatant, guilty or innocent; the only difference that will matter is them and us. A state like that is a killer state, pure, untrammeled. It’s good that Gordon’s words haven’t entirely disappeared. They carry, as he undoubtedly intended, the undertone of prophecy.
Note: In an “apology” posted today on the website of his father’s suburban New York newspaper, Yochanan Gordon writes: “I never intended to call to harm any people although my words may have conveyed that message.” You decide.
Meeting of signatories to the UN Genocide Convention, 1950. Seated, L-R: representatives of Korea; Haiti; Iran; France; Costa Rica. Standing, L-R: Assistant Secretary General for Legal Affairs; Secretary General Trygve Lie; representative from Costa Rica; and Raphael Lemkin, the Convention’s chief proponent.
