Days of Rage

A short time-traveling excursion into the Gaza quagmire, 6 days after Oct 7

It’s Friday the 13th of October, 2023, and I’m sitting here in my “office” in Pleasant Valley, New York, USA, safely ensconced in the bosom of the allegedly most powerful nation in the history of the planet, as insulated from death by jihad as one can imagine possible on a day reportedly handpicked by a former Hamas leader to urge faithful believers everywhere to rise up and slaughter anybody who looks like they might be Zionist, Jewish, Jewish-adjacent, smugly pro-Western or otherwise unlikely to adhere to a literal interpretation of Quranic verse 2:216 with regard to dealing with genetically vicious, land-usurping infidels.

Public and private discourse around the globe at this moment is largely fixated on a series of events unfolding in a historically disputed sliver of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, dominated over the centuries since the Iron Age by a procession of Israelites, Judeans, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Muslim caliphs, European crusaders, Ottoman Turks and the British Empire before being turned over to Zionists following the genocidal mistreatment of stateless European Jews at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Officially dubbed “Palestine” during the British occupation of the early 20th century, the small colony, populated by roughly equal numbers of chronically un-neighborly Jews and Arabs, was subdivided in 1948 into the Jewish nation of Israel, the West Bank under Jordanian control and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian control. Residents of the latter two heavily Arab districts have since become known as Palestinians, and their lands have shrunk even more considerably over the past 70-odd years as a result of Jewish settlement following various wars between Israel and its Palestinian-supporting Arab neighbors. Along with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, Palestine had earlier been carved into existence out of the defeated Ottoman Empire by the British and French victors after World War I. The Brits had already colonized northeastern Africa and southwestern Asia and had wrested control of most of the critical Middle Eastern oil fields to feed its … and its burgeoning American protégé’s … hungry fleets of dreadnought battle cruisers, tanks, trucks and planes. Palestine was from the very beginning of British administration pigeonholed by the Western ruling class as a place in which to sequester, incorporate and recruit Europe’s Jews, giving them a nation to fight for and ensuring their cooperation in building a heavily armed bulwark against creeping orientalism in the heart of the oil-rich Middle East. Since 1948, the scrappy Jewish state has provided exactly what the Empire wanted, in spades, to the continued consternation of the surrounding carefully subdivided Muslim states … not the most insignificant of these being Iran, which coincidentally sits atop some of the largest oil and gas reserves on the planet, and which spends a lot of money propping up Hamas, which currently controls things in Gaza. By “controls,” I mean Hamas has taken the reins of the occupied Palestinians’ day-to-day existence in heavily urbanized Gaza, home of 2 million or so penned-up people whose forebears were once more equitably spread out through the countryside outside the city’s walls … lands now occupied by Israeli settlers. Gaza, taken over from Egypt during the 1967 war and nominally freed from Israeli occupation in 2005 (while still walled in with all entrances and exits patrolled and managed by Israeli forces) has been described as the “world’s largest open-air prison,” and is a cauldron of seething enmity toward the people who supplanted the Palestinians and have been failing to deal equitably with them and their continued existence, mostly because Palestinian authorities have repeatedly vowed to take back all of the land Israelis have occupied, and drive them into the sea in the bargain. Being logically fearful for their very existence, Israelis have never felt able to release their military’s boot from the neck of the people next-door whose land they took and who want to destroy them, so things have managed to go badly over the years. This eternal enmity once again reared its snarling, ugly head on Saturday, October 7, 2023 as a small horde of Hamas servants of Allah swarmed through the heretofore physically and electronically impregnable wall into a number of famously left-of-center and well-to-do precincts dotting Israel’s border with Gaza. Rampaging with impunity over the countryside into villages, kibbutzes and an innocent peacenik music and dance festival, they slaughtered and kidnapped freely for hours on end, completely unresisted by the vaunted IDF, which was reportedly busy protecting more ultraconservative elements of Israeli society on the other side of the country. 

Quite predictably, Israeli’s hard-case prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared total war on Hamas and Gaza, instituted a wartime government, and started bombing the crap out of downtown Gaza, softening it up for a major invasion and what is turning out to be yet another spate of industrial-era ethnic cleansing. The U.S., for its part, is sending over a couple of carrier fleets to stand by, possibly for a showdown with Iran, along with 2,000-odd “advisors” (shades of Vietnam). The chronically broken American congress is being hornswoggled into funding another giant omnibus bill to cover expenses for helping eliminate Hamas, continue arming Ukraine against Russia, and maybe starting World War III by finally realizing the NeoCons’ recurring wet dream of attacking Iran. Lovely. Meanwhile, thousands of innocent people on both sides of this historically trumped-up, religion-based feud … as well as more than a few guilty ones … are being gruesomely sacrificed, and will continue to be, far into the future.

Here in the U.S., as well as in other precincts of the deeply divided West, restless, misdirected citizens are being further micro-managed into ever smaller silos by their media masters as they eye each other suspiciously, fomenting wild fantasies in their increasingly surveillable minds as to what they would do about the shithole world around them if they and their dwindling cohort of like-minded compatriots could ever somehow wrest control of the cockpit from all the clueless, evil assholes running things into a ditch. Former allies on the left, particularly younger ones with no institutional memory of the Holocaust and the mid-20th-century indignities foisted on Europe’s Jews that jump-started this whole Israel/Palestine mess, are being split into verbally warring subgroups based on their perceived support or lack of support for one side or the other. A growing cadre of struggling “independent,” ostensibly anti-mainstream journalists and pundits have been manipulated by events into various Balkanized dead ends where they become targeted, doxxed and systematically suppressed by a combination of real zealots on both sides, politically motivated bot farms, and the strengthening army of international thought police. Everyone, everywhere, is being neutralized, as nations one by one devolve into authoritarianism, the carnage continues unabated and the dark future foretold in countless dystopian fantasies becomes ever more swiftly made manifest. 

As if on purpose. 

Is one promoting “conspiracy theories” when one lifts his or her field of vision up a few thousand feet and notices the possibility of intentional manipulation of world events to effect the long-term goals of a core cadre of extra-national power players? Could those alleged power players actually have the best interests of humanity in mind? Or not? Or is all this really just a bunch of out-of-control Hatfields-and-McCoys-style feuds, occurring randomly and completely organically, all over the globe, all at once, as the poor U.S.-led coalition of white-hatted good guys hops around from place to place, helping stamp out evil? Is the U.S. and Western European elitists’ vision of a happy, compliant world order and a “great reset,” involving total government/corporate information control and social credit scores for everyone, really the end game? Or is it China’s vision of similarly stifling suppression of individuality? Or, lord help us, Iran’s, or Saudi Arabia’s? Or Putin’s? Or Nazi Germany’s, which seems to be undergoing a renaissance? Because, clearly, according to every one of these dominant ideologies (including our own, when you get past the lip service and wishful window dressing), there’s no place for personal freedom. Over and over, the lesson has been driven home. Too much freedom, too much “democracy,” too much leniency, inevitably leads to a bunch of grinning, bloodthirsty dudes crashing your door down and lopping the heads off of you and your family. 

And maybe, sadly, it does.