Interregnum: Gaza Detour
I’ve been working on a series of articles on the “Interregnum,” the period humanity is entering in which governing structures have failed and there’s no evident replacement. What the series needs next is an argument for why, in the absence of effective national or higher-level governance, “many, of us [would] cooperate with others, driven by hope and compassion and by elementary interests in community survival, rather than by greed and individual survival.”
I’ve gathered the evidence. I’ve thought it through. But a huge hurdle has arisen in the path to writing it down. That hurdle is, in a word, Gaza.
How can anyone argue for humanity’s capacity for generosity and compassion in the midst of such a violent event? An event that encompasses open and repeated breakage of virtually every rule devised by liberal humanity to make war just that bit less inhumane?
This phase of the long-standing Gaza conflict began with killing and kidnapping of children and old people, among others. It has morphed into not only much more killing of children and old people, but starvation as an openly deployed element of military strategy; the equally evident and purposeful destruction of water, sewage, and medical systems with the resulting spread of disease; the targeted killing of journalists and humanitarian aid workers; the bombing of embassy buildings in third countries that have always been considered safe havens.
We like to think humanity has improved morally since the period we in the West call the Middle Ages, when sieges involving intentional death of one’s enemies by thirst, starvation, and disease were commonplace. We like to think that the Nazi crimes of the 1940s didn’t disprove that. Rather, they were an insane anomaly never to be repeated — or adequately explained.
Yet here we are, openly debating whether Israeli ministers mean it when they say they intend to drive all 2.3 million Palestinians out of Gaza and, failing that, appear willing to see them all die. Ministers who want to build beach resorts on the ruins.
Missing Rules
Like many others, I have run away from writing about this for months. It’s too horrible to talk about with friends and family, much less write about. And what to say? How can Israeli behavior be explained? Hamas behavior was horrible, but it was explicable. The Israelis have gone too far for rational explanation.
Still, people try. Are the Israelis willing — or even purposefully aiming — to destroy the structure of rules governing war because they want to provoke Iran and Hezbollah into reciprocating in an “illegal” way that will bring the US into the war and destroy all Israel’s enemies, as some claim? Do they see this as the only way to make Israelis feel secure again and believe that end justifies the means? Seems crazy to me, but so does everything else, so who knows?
All you can say with any level of assurance is that Israel’s contravention of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols is another example of the collapse of the old “rules-based order.” And that these Conventions are likely to be missed a lot more than most of the rules that defined the dying order.
And/or are the Israelis intent on weakening Egypt and Jordan to the extent that they will agree to take in millions of Gazan and West Bank Palestinians in exchange for potentially hundreds of billions of Saudi, UAE and other oil states’ dollars? Seems crazy, but who knows?
Living in a Glass House
Nor is this just a matter of pointing fingers at the Israelis. Every step Netanyahu and his cronies take is enabled by a government in Washington that is not only the government of the country my family has inhabited for many generations, but a government for which I personally voted. We Americans are the enablers. Enablers are just as culpable as those who pull triggers. I bear responsibility, too. It is not a burden I wish to bear. It is not a burden I know how to shed.
Maybe it can all be explained by the bastardized Western version of Karma — only marginally connected to the belief in Hindu, Buddhist, and other Eastern religions from which it takes its name — of “a destiny resulting from one’s previous actions.” Maybe the chaos in Israel/Palestine is rooted in the horrors of the Hollocaust. Or maybe the chaos goes back much further, to the Roman Empire’s destruction of the Second Temple, or to the hundreds of years of war and dispersion of Jewish people that preceded that destruction.
And maybe America’s willingness to enable horrific events in Gaza is a carryover of “bad Karma” from centuries of what we’ve taken to calling “settler colonialism.” The half a millennium since Columbus “discovered America” in 1492. Centuries in which Europeans stole land from the inhabitants, killed most of those who didn’t die from disease, and took up settled farming throughout the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of what we now call the Global South.
Slavery accompanied many of these colonial settlement ventures, notably including in my own country. The Europeans’ “civilized” status supposedly gave them the right to steal land and destroy the possessions of “savage” indigenous people. To starve people as part of their military strategy, including by shooting most of the millions of buffalo on the open prairies of North America so the “Indians” would have no food or clothing and be forced to either move or die. Sound familiar? Like what’s happening now in Gaza, perhaps?
Oddly, 1492 was also the year when Columbus’s Spanish paymaster evicted from “Christian” Spain both Jews and the remaining Muslims. Descendants of both are doubtless present today on either side of the walls surrounding Gaza.
I’m not suggesting any of this is an explanation. It doesn’t explain, much less justify, anything. It’s just one way of thinking about it. One way of trying to apply our human habit of conceptualization to a tragically painful reality that might better be experienced by letting “the dark come upon you,” to quote T.S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker,” written in the chaotic early days of the Second World War.
One thing is clear: Those of us who believe humanity is capable of doing and being better than it has been doing of late will have to prove our point in some other place and way. The chance to do that is presenting itself more quickly than any of us would like, as the climate becomes chaotic, feeding into the chaos within the social and economic systems that generated the greenhouse gases that are destabilizing the climate — and the other poisons that are destabilizing Earth’s soil, water and air.
So, in the end of this mournful piece is perhaps the more hopeful beginning of another chapter in my exposition on the Interregnum.
