Notes from January

Short thoughts on performative empathy for Palestine, the war on the Jewish God, cultural stagnation, elite lawfare and more

Apologies again for the lack of new posts recently. We have a six month old baby and, as well as all the usual time-consuming new baby things, she’s been mildly, but persistently, unwell with an upset stomach for about three months now. The doctors don’t have any answers. She’s happy most of the time, but we’re just constantly changing her nappies. Factor in my paid job too and I have no time for writing in depth, sadly.

I do still read other people’s posts, albeit fewer than in the past, and I’m still a comment-writer. Perhaps it’s the lack of any other outlet for my thoughts, but I’ve written some extensive comments and notes on restacks recently, so I thought I would assemble another comment/note round-up post.

Apologies for adding less context than in previous posts of this kind. I just don’t have the time. Comments are edited lightly for intelligibility outside of their original context.

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Excellent discussion of the problems of mass immigration from low-trust to high-trust societies from Natasha Burge. If anything, the situation is worse in Britain and Europe, where more comprehensive welfare systems than the ones described by Burge meet a self-loathing elite convinced that the West is ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world, via imperialism and two World Wars, and that the developed world is “owed” access to the West’s bounty, which is merely the product of colonial extraction in the last five hundred years.

Underpinning this, as I’ve argued before, is the “blank slate” belief that human beings are basically good and that cultures are interchangeable; there is no sense that one culture can be morally better than, or even pragmatically different to, another. People are the same the world over and can be interchanged like other factors of production.

As a result, any critique like Burge’s is “flattened out” and treated as if it was saying, “Immigrants are criminals” and can then be dismissed as another product of Western imperialist thinking. The system carries on deconstructing itself and the victims of the extraction, the Western working class, turn to ever-more extreme politicians in an effort to turn it off.

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The thought Josh Slocum’s post (about not having to perform emotions) sparks in me: perhaps the worst part of 7 October for those of us outside Israel was watching the world perform empathy for the Palestinians while ignoring, deprecating or victim-blaming the Israeli victims of 7 October and the ensuing war (mostly Jewish, but also some Druze and Israeli Palestinian). Alongside the usual run of non-Jewish famous non-entities, Jewish “celebrities” and secular “intellectuals” performatively renounced their Jewishness (whatever that means) or used their immense knowledge of Talmud and halakhah (Jewish law) to argue that Judaism prohibits self-defence – but only for Jews. “Resistance” against Jews is fine, even mass rape.

In previous Gaza conflicts, I felt a degree of empathy for Palestinians caught in the crossfire. That died on 7 October. I vaguely feel something for the very young children – but they are brainwashed to kill Jews from age five or six and after that, I feel nothing.

“Gazans are not Hamas,” we are constantly told, which is true, but an awful lot of Gazans supported Hamas on 7 October, even if they don’t now, and most who don’t still support the idea of destroying Israel, they just support another terrorist organisation, usually for tribal reasons. Those mobs shouting abuse at the hostages as they were brought to Gaza or turning up at those sick hostage release ceremonies were not forced there at gunpoint. They chose to bring their children to a celebration (there’s no other word for it) of the murder of a baby and toddler.

The worst part of this performative empathy for me is hearing other religious Jews imply that I’m a bad Jew for all of this. That all human beings are made in the image of God (true) and that therefore we should empathise with and even love people who want us dead (not true) and minimise the harm we do to them, even in self-defence, even if means leaving them alive to try again another day (absolutely not true).

And if the USAF and/or IDF drop a bunker-buster bomb on Ayatollah Khamenei soon and send him to meet his Maker, I will be very happy at the death of the wicked. I even said Psalm 94 this morning (“Their evil will be made to recoil upon them, through their own wickedness they will be annihilated; the Eternal our God will annihilate them”) to try to send the mamzer to the Next World that bit quicker.

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Colonial Studies notoriously sees settler-colonialism as both inherently genocidal and “a structure, not an event.” That’s how its practitioners can claim that states like Australia, USA and Canada are actively genocidal. By arguing that Israel is a settler-colonialist state, the existence of Israel is inherently “genocidal” as the Middle East is portrayed as belonging to the Arabs. Everything you see online about Israel being genocidal is consciously or unconsciously downstream of this claim.

Of course, this argument itself is genocidal, as it erases Jewish history, not to mention all other non-Arab Middle Easterners (Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Copts, Berbers, Druze, Yazidi, etc.) and ignores the bloody Arab conquest of the region in the early years of Islam.

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The contemporary left has a real problem understanding that political problems are complex and reasonable people might take different views of the best solutions. Instead, they assume that they are “on the right side of history,” that their enemies are all “Fascists” and that if they lose a single election, “democracy is in danger.”

Ironically, the danger to democracy in the West increasingly comes from the lawfare of left-technocratic parties and judiciaries, the building of permission structures for left-wing violence, the delegitimation of moderate-right parties, and the failure of left-wing and moderate-right-wing parties to do anything about the mass immigration of people with contempt for Western notions of (small-l) liberalism and democracy, despite this policy being hugely unpopular with the population at large.

And, yes, some of these problems, or similar ones, are present on the populist right too, but in most Western states, institutional power and cultural hegemony remain with the left-technocrats.

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It’s strange that a ruling Establishment (not just the Labour government, but the judiciary, lawyers, academia, media) that cares so much about the human rights of terrorists and rapists is so determined to treat innocent people as criminals. Perhaps, the only way to treat serious criminals as victims is to think of the victims of crime (the general public) as criminals.

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Ruth Wisse on Jews and not despairing:

“The war against the Jewish homeland is no territorial conflict like Russia’s war against Ukraine, but a war to crush Jewish moral self-confidence and all that it stands for: the indomitable God and the people of Israel. We take up the fight better armed and under better conditions, but also against greater odds.”

I think that, as Jews, we underestimate the extent to which we are in a religious war, probably because so many Jews are not religious and are even embarrassed by religious language. Like it or not, to many people Jews are associated with the “God of Israel.” To people who object to that God and His morality (consciously or unconsciously), or who think He has rejected the Jews in favour of someone else, this association, which exists simply in Jews engaging in the religion they have practiced for over three thousand years, must be destroyed. The Nazis were quite explicit about forcing the Jewish God out of the world, but the idea lies implicit in much antisemitic and antizionist writing.

You don’t have to believe that the God of the Jews actually exists for this to be the case, merely to acknowledge the strength of that belief on human society and the determination of groups like some Christians, Islamists, Nazis, Communists and the like to break that connection.

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On Maia Zelkha’s article on Recycling Revolutions.

Fascinating. I’ve noticed this without having words for it.

I mostly watch 1960s and 1970s TV and listen to 1960s, 70s and 80s music, although I’m not from those generations (my wife finds this amusing). There was a freshness and willingness to experiment (not always successfully) that still comes through. I was a teenager in the 1990s, when the post-Cold War, fin de siècle mood was one of postmodern nostalgia (hence my ending up with the same tastes as my parents’ generation). This seemed to end with 9/11, but now seems to have continued, just with diminishing returns and an increasingly pessimistic view of the recent past, which went from being seen as gloriously fun to being understood as unending oppression and “resistance.”

Culturally, new films and TV series are likely to be remakes or revivals of old franchises (or “universes” as they tend to be called now). Postmodern mash-ups of multiple out-of-copyright characters are popular in prose and graphic novel format (confession: I’m currently reading Dracula Cha Cha Cha, the third of Kim Newman’s alternate universe sequels to “Dracula”, sprinkled with other fictional undead characters). This is about more than publishers and TV and film executives playing it safe. It indicates an audience more obsessed with the minutiae of existing narratives, particularly the ones they grew up with, than in putting in the effort to understand something new and original. (There is definitely a connection with cultural infantilisation and eternal adolescence here, especially among men.)

Politically, the past is misremembered on the left in particular to create a narrative of constant political progress, where every cause is eventually successful. The anti-Vietnam protests are remembered as more successful than they actually were. Movements that failed and fizzled out, such as the movement for unilateral nuclear disarmament (which was popular during the 1950s and 60s and then again in the 80s) or widespread fears that turned out to be alarmist, such as the overpopulation fears of the 70s, are quietly ignored. In this way a sense of continuity and momentum is created, a quasi-religious sense of being part of a movement that exists across time as well as space and is always “on the right side of history” (a popular, but meaningless phrase). The fact that some of the views held by that movement in the past would now be deemed “heretical” (the British far-left used to be hostile to the EEC, the forerunner of the EU, something unthinkable to the modern British left) must be erased, just as in a religion, earlier, now-rejected, dogmas must be suppressed lest they mislead the devout.

Where will this end? Here in Britain, there’s a widespread feeling of political, economic, social and cultural exhaustion with no clear sense of where we go next. People talk of wanting to see “the end of the twentieth century.” They mean the political and economic structures created then, but it could apply culturally too. Even the constant fears of “Fascism” look backwards for models to understand the present rather than trying to understand and critique the rising populist right on its own terms.

Thanks for a thought-provoking article!

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It’s a certain type of Jew. Not the “As a Jew,” but the “Both Side Jew.” The type of Jew who is genuinely a Zionist, but can’t talk about Israel without talking about the “Two State Solution” and “Settler Violence.” Like the As a Jews, the Both Sides Jews are usually from the intellectual class (rabbis, journalists, academics, Jewish NGO workers), often religiously progressive and invariably politically progressive.

Towards the end of the war, there was a rally for the release of the hostages here in London. The leaders of Progressive Judaism in the UK spoke and started speaking about the need for a Two State Solution, the evils of the settlers, etc, and the crowd started booing. It was a rally for the hostages, they didn’t need to centre the Palestinians again.

Almost immediately, various Jewish organisations, including Orthodox ones who usually steer clear of controversies involving Progressive rabbis, issued statements saying how terrible the booing was and the need for decorum and respect for different views.

To me, it seemed like a little class struggle, that the Anglo-Jewish masses had finally had enough and were saying, “We don’t have to signal our virtue by performatively “empathising” with Palestinians all the time” and they got slapped down by the intellectual leaders of Anglo-Jewry were saying, “We’re in charge, we have the qualifications, and this is how we talk about Israel/Palestine. We need to signal that we’re not that sort of Jew.”

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I think it’s worth seeing the delay of local elections in Britain in the context of technocratic administrations and courts across the West desperately using lawfare to keep populists out of power: the attempts to keep Trump off the ballot in the US before the last presidential election; the removal of Le Pen from the presidential ballot in France; the attempts to outlaw AfD in Germany; the corruption charges against Netanyahu in Israel.

Netanyahu’s counterattack, the proposed judicial reform (ultimately derailed, although perhaps not for long, by the 7 October attacks) was perhaps the most sustained populist response to a technocratic judiciary engaging in lawfare. Judging by the fact that it nearly brought Israel to a state of civil war and opened up the country to terrible armed attack from without, I am not at all hopeful about all other Western states getting through this period of “regime politics” without violence of some kind.

The technocrats are playing with fire in the belief that they are somehow immune to heat. They are not, but I worry that they will burn society down in the process -- they have already caused a lot of damage.

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