John Schwarz
We’ve all committed many crimes, but the most salient today is our complicity in the ultraviolence of the past several months in Israel and Palestine. This includes complicity in the October 7 attacks by Hamas, in the same way that white Americans who failed to uproot slavery were complicit in the deaths of the five dozen men, women, and children killed by Nat Turner and his followers in 1831.
The Hague prison — officially the “United Nations Detention Unit” — currently has a capacity of 52. Since there are 750 million of us in America and the EU, they’d have to expand it a little. But it wouldn’t be that bad. The detention center includes access to “fresh air, exercise, medical care, occupational therapy [and] spiritual guidance.” That last part is especially important, because we’re going to need a being of infinite mercy to get us out of this one.
This isn’t advice for us to sit around feeling guilty. That does no one any good, least of all the people in Gaza and the West Bank. But we believe we must 1) recognize that we are guilty, 2) investigate how we committed these crimes, and 3) stop committing them as quickly as possible.
This all sounds awful. Merry Christmas, let’s get started.
Failure of Imagination
Our greatest crime is built into the glitchy operating system of human brains. People instinctively love to help other people, which is beautiful. The problem is we are cognitively incapableOpens in a new tab of perceiving more than about 150 others as fully human. The remaining 8 billion people on Earth are an undifferentiated mass of protoplasm that we can be easily convinced is trying to kill us.
Hillel the Elder tried to deal with this problem by explaining, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”
Just a few years later Jesus was craftier, informing his flockOpens in a new tab, “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
In other words, Jesus was telling his audience: “You know me and you like me, right? I’m one of the 150 people you consider human? Well, hold onto your f*cking hatOpens in a new tab, because everyone else on Earth is also human like me.”
This Christmas, Jesus would be saying, “Several baby Jesuses have been massacred on a kibbutz. Plus a bunch of baby Jesuses are being bombed by Lockheed fighter jetsOpens in a new tab with General Dynamics MK80 series bombsOpens in a new tab. Hundreds of baby Jesuses have been shredded and smashed. Then lots of these baby mes were brought to the hospital by donkey over rubble-strewn roads, but that was pointless because the hospital had run out of anesthetic and supplies long ago. Since October 7, the explosive equivalent of the nuclear bomb the U.S. used on HiroshimaOpens in a new tab has been dropped on Gaza’s 2.3 million baby Jesuses and former baby Jesuses.”
Paradoxically, people need powerful imaginations to perceive reality, including the reality that others are people too. We have failed to use our imaginations to truly understand what Hillel and Jesus were trying to tell us. So here we are.
Failure of Action
Our failure of imagination has led to a failure of action, especially on the part of the U.S. government. If we saw the world clearly, we would have understood that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank has for 56 years been both an ongoing human emergency and a big problem for the U.S. empire.
In Secretary of State Colin Powell’s autobiography “My American Journey,” he describedOpens in a new tab the USS New Jersey shelling Beirut in 1983 in support of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. “What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would,” wrote Powell. “And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target.” This was U.S. and French military barracks, which were simultaneously destroyed by truck bombs, killing 307 people.
We could have used the inflection point of September 11, 2001, to understand — these are difficult words to write — Powell’s wisdom. The 9/11 attacks were to a significant degree motivated by Al Qaeda’s desire to gain power in the Arab world by retaliating against the U.S. for our support for Israeli policy. And this was not a sign that Muslims are “inherently evil.” Rather, it shows they are people just like us, and hence some of them will inevitably be as appalling as some of us.
If we’d seen this, we would have made certain that we immediately ended the Palestinian nightmare — both on the grounds of basic justice and our own self-interest. But instead we’ve closed our eyes even tighter. The Israeli government made themselves so blind with racism that they saw the members of Hamas as mentally impaired savages who could never pull off an attack like October 7. They could have stopped it if they’d understood that they’re exactly like them: intelligent, organized, and capable of spectacular cruelty.
Sadly, the same thing has largely been true of Bernie Sanders. We now know that building an enduring movement was not the focus of his campaigns. This is especially heartbreaking because the surge in U.S. protests against the Israeli attack on Gaza has largely grown out of his campaigns — just without his involvement or support. You can only imagine what would be possible with it. Some day there will be another left standard bearer running on that scale, and we’d better lock down their commitment to something beyond themselves to start with.
In any case, we need to face the fact that changing anything significant in U.S. politics will require the rest of our lives. And for that to be bearable, it needs to be something that everyone actually enjoys and wants to do more than anything else.
We’re not sure what the answer is here, especially in a country with so much good TV to watch. But we’re pretty sure it will require something that people can’t get anywhere else. Let’s start with some good songs for everyone to sing, plus maybe some non-Nazi torchlight marches, and happy viral dances like those in IranOpens in a new tab that make the people in power afraid.
Get Back to Work
Over the past few months, the Christmas Grinch has taken our hand and led us to the top of his little Grinch mountain. There we’ve stood with him, overlooking the desolate junkyard of the U.S. war on terror. First, the Grinch pointed to the gully with the bloody cesspool of 20 years in Afghanistan and Pakistan — almost a quarter of a million people deadOpens in a new tab. Then he pulled us in closer and read from the Costs of War website. “Over 940,000 people died in direct violence when you add Iraq, Syria and Yemen,” he whispered. “3.6 to 3.8 million people have died indirectly in post 9/11 war zones.”
Then he showed the area he’d designated for dead Palestinians. It was already quite full, but he’d reserved an adjacent area to be sure it had lots of room to grow.
All this is real, not a story for children. All we can do is look the truth in the face and learn from our past mistakes. Then we have to get back to work, and see if we can prevent ourselves from taking an involuntary trip to the Netherlands.
Jon Schwarz – jon.schwarz@theintercept.com and Elise Swain – elise.swain@theintercept.com Via the Intercept
