On Friday 1 August , the blog of the Jerusalem-based news site The Times of Israel published and then quickly removed a post entitled “When Genocide Is Permissible”. A barely literate homily in the Israel's-right-to-defend-itself genre by a New York accountant named Yochanan Gordon, it casually suggested that, if the cost of “peace and quiet” is the wholesale elimination of Palestinians who disturb it, then perhaps it is a cost that should be shouldered. It was exactly like saying, “but if you were in unbearable anguish and torturing Yochanan Gordon to death was the only way to recover your peace of mind, what would you do?” Of course the real thrust of this human being's argument was that, unlike residents of a certain Maximum-Security Colony for Western Rejects that costs America alone over $15 billion a year, civilised people back in the West do not face the terror of being the only humane pocket in the midst of encroaching barbarism. Westerners cannot fully understand “the reality of war” with the brown-skinned goyim, or what it can force the civilised pale-faced Jew to do against his civilised pale-faced nature. Back in the pro-Semitic calm of his East Coast office, only Yochanan's selfless commitment to the Ashkenazi man's burden makes it possible for Yochanan to understand. Hours into the worldwide furore that had flared in the short interval between the post appearing and being pulled, the author was still recalcitrant. “That is not cowardly,” he responded to one outraged tweep, “its [sic.] being responsible and moral. You would do the same if it was the only way to assure your security.” You too would practise infanticide, that is. Responsibly. Because you have to. Remarks like Jonathan Shainin's, “Give genocide a chance”, showed up the absurdity of arguing out of morality for a final solution. But they failed to point out that the genocidal impulse is a cornerstone of the current (pro-)Israeli perspective on Palestinians irrespective of their political affiliation. Genocide is a necessary condition if not of Zionism in general, then of the post-Zionism that best describes the current, neither-one-nor-two-state-solution status quo and the bleak prospects it holds. In an open letter to the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (incidentally published on the same day as “When Genocide Is Permissible”), the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Netanyahu's fellow Likud member Moshe Feiglin, outlined his vision for a “conquest” that would “turn Gaza into Jaffa, a flourishing Israeli city with a minimum number of hostile civilians”. Feiglin's plan is to set up ten encampments “on the Sinai border, adjacent to the sea, in which the civilian population will be concentrated, far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling. The supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated areas will be disconnected” in preparation for Hamas's “entire civilian and military infrastructure, its means of communication and of logistics” to be destroyed. What remaining “nests of resistance” will then be exterminated before Israel starts “searching for emigration destinations and quotas for the refugees from Gaza”. And those Palestinians “who insist on staying, if they can be proven to have no affiliation with Hamas, will be required to publicly sign a declaration of loyalty to Israel, and receive a blue ID card similar to that of the Arabs of East Jerusalem”. Now, Yochanan, dude, if this doesn't remind you of a certain 20th-century mass tragedy reflexively invoked every time anyone in the world objects to Israeli atrocities... My point is not that genocide took place again in Gaza. My point is that if you're committed to genocide, as every post-Zionist must now be by default — whether or not they are aware of it, whether or not they are idiotic enough to admit to it in a public blog post — you're in no position to claim moral or cultural superiority, least of all to justify that commitment. If the sight of face-covered Jihadis raising kalashnikofs over the black flags of the latter-day caliphate offends your moral sensibility, indeed, so should that of your own bare face in the mirror. No mantra of “liberalism, democracy, human rights”, no economic or scientific achievement, no historical narrative of dispossessed Jewry will make you less sectarian, irrational or brutish than the primitive rocket-firing orc over at the built-up areas used for launches and tunneling. If Hamas stands for premodern, decapitate-the-infidels barbarism, yours is not a civilisation either. And the problem with Hamas, Hizbullah and other Islamic resistance groups is not that they are endangering Israeli civilians. No evidence suggests that they have ever or ever will significantly endanger Israeli civilians. Aside from restricting the lives, personal and intellectual prospects of people in areas that it controls, the problem is that, whether directly — for apostasy or treason, or by giving the IDF a pretext to launch such things as Operation Protective Edge, using rhetorical terms like “the caravans of martyrs”, “the eternal struggle”, and “the invincible people” — the Islamic resistance is killing Palestinians. Today the body count in Gaza is over 1,856, there has been apocalyptic destruction, destitution and injury — and what have the Palestinians gained from what Hamas declares a victory even as their people stand amid the debris of their own homes in poisoned air, with thousands of maimed family members and friends, widowed spouses, orphaned, homeless, dead children? Speaking to CNN from the comfort of his seven-star Qatar hotel on Saturday and Sunday, Hamas's political leader Khaled Meshaal had the nerve to say, “Hamas sacrifices itself for its people.” Really. He added that Hamas “does not use its people as human shields” but had nothing at all to say to the fact that, by avoiding paramilitary action to start with or accepting the Egyptian ceasefire early on, Hamas could have prevented at least 90 per cent of the damage. Nothing. Instead, Meshaal proudly cited the casualty figures to make the point that while Israel killed civilians, Hamas did not — as if Hamas could have killed anyone and willingly desisted — as if embarrassing the Sisi regime, which would be the main reason Hamas failed to stop the ground invasion, was a noble enough cause for such carnage. To the question of what the resistance had actually achieved, Meshaal performed the classic Muslim Brotherhood About-face (MBAf for short): “Our people are convinced today that the only way to get rid of the occupation and establish their state is through resistance.” But surely. “We are stronger than they are in the justness of our cause,” he said. “Our steadfastness is a victory. For us to kill their soldiers while they kill our civilians is also a victory.” He might as well have said, “without so many Palestinian deaths we would have had nothing to sell the world, now, would we.” Indeed (pro-)resistance parties have since been celebrating their unprecedented triumph over a Zionist entity that was forced to withdraw, dragging the tails of defeat back over the border in the face of such mythical heroism. Never mind that the entity in question managed in the meantime to completely destroy the Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza, losing less 63 soldiers in total, and sustaining no damage at home. Aside from the fact that Palestinians are really quite ordinary people — who in recent decades, like every other Arab nationality, have been susceptible to political Islam, with the consequence that the lives of their children now hang on the far-fetched effectiveness of an MBAf — such mythical heroism is not actually about fighting the occupation, retrieving rights or land, or even negotiating a unified Palestinian state-to-be, something Hamas (and to a lesser extent the PA) have been actively working against since 2006. The mythical heroism of the resistance is about playing out complex and shifting roles in the three-way intra-Islamist war between Saudi Wahhabism, Iranian Shiism, and the Turkey/Qatar-led MB: nothing at all to do with the Palestinian question, and something that, when all is said and done, can only pose potential and indefinitely postponed threats to Israel while giving it the opportunity to concentrate, exterminate and at the same time orchestrate settlements. In the absence not only of sufficient power but also of the state structure, what the resistance has drawn on is the Fedayeen legacy of dying for the cause. It is something at least as old as Zionism and not altogether unlike the Haganah's focus on religious identity and terrorist methods. If genocide is permissible for the post-Zionist, what is permissible for the Islamist neo-Fedayi is suicide. “We kill soldiers,” as Meshaal put it — not very many of them, and not to any tangible benefit for our people — “while they kill civilians.” No degree of sympathy with the Palestinian cause should prevent anyone from admitting that this is an equally heinous crime, that it stands resistance on its head, enshrines the sectarianism on which Israel thrives as the order of the day in the Middle East, and honours the hideous figure of the suicide bomber as the Fedayi's heir. Yet from the standpoint of the apolitical Palestinian caught between “concentrate and exterminate” and “steadfastness is a victory”, isn't it still responsible and moral to ask whether suicide is permissible?
