If a guy goes crazy and tries to stab his tormentor, we say he seeks vengeance. A Mafia Don whose people kill for money, may think it worthwhile to pursue a vendetta against some inconsequential fellow merely to make a point. A very rich country, like the US, can indulge in wars of revenge for a decade or two. However, for weaker military entities, wars in the modern world are only fought for game theoretic reasons. It is foolish to pretend that any great issue of morality or justice is involved. The conflict 'front-loads' costs but may secure 'rents'. Sometimes, it is worthwhile for politicians to speak in a moralistic way. At others, it is foolish and mischievous. The truth is no great or lasting harm is done if lots of innocent people are killed in a far away place. Even genocide entails no significant karmic consequences. Pretending otherwise is foolish. Consider the Armenians. They were very successful in getting Western politicians to shed crocodile tears over a genocide which occurred a century ago. But they didn't lift a finger to prevent ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Kharabak. The Palestinian cause once had salience. Trump understood that nobody gave a shit about them anymore. Hamas may have temporarily reversed this in some parts of the world, but as the Gaza war drags on, it will become obvious that such is not the case. Either they are useful to the Brotherhood as canon fodder or human shields, or else they must accept the same fate as other displaced people in the region.
The always ridiculous Kenan Malik, writing in the Guardian, takes a different view- 'In the Middle East, as in Greek tragedy, justice must prevail over moral absolutism'.
The plain fact is that what prevails in the Middle East- like the Far East and West- is military force which in turn depends, in the medium to long term, on economic and geopolitical considerations. As for Greek tragedy, it was merely a type of entertainment associated with certain ceremonial occasions. Different prize winners might have different philosophies, or conceptions of what constituted eusebia or piety, but nobody greatly cared about such things one way or the other. Similarly, we may prefer the Lord of the Rings franchise to the Harry Potter Franchise but are not greatly concerned by their different ethical presumptions or metaphysical underpinnings.
When political solutions lose out to vengeance, in Aeschylus’s words, ‘Where will it end?’
Ethnic cleansing. That's how the Second World War ended. The losers- Germans, Japanese etc.- had to run away from territory which the winners took over. There was plenty of rape and murder by way of vengeance. Indeed, revenge was so complete, the fire burnt out for lack of fuel.
Watching the tragedy unfold in Israel and Palestine has sometimes felt like reading the Oresteia backwards.
Nonsense! No sonny boy has to kill Mummy in this story. What we have is the story of a Leninist Party- the Muslim Brotherhood- getting power first in Gaza and then in Egypt through the ballot box and then... fucking the fuck up coz that's what Leninist parties do even if they are Islamist and not Ba'athist or 'Secular-Socialist'. This is not to say that other outfits- e.g. the Pakistani ISI- can't fuck up a country if it falls in love with terrorism, but this has nothing to do with 'vengeance'. It is paranoid power politics of a Mafia type. It doesn't matter whether it is Pakistanis or Palestinians who have to put up with miserable economic conditions and terrorist outrages and massive deportations or population displacements- e.g. that of the 1.5 million Afghans being thrown out of Pakistan- the plain fact is nothing is the fault of the 'kaffir'- whether 'Yahudi' or 'Hindu'.
Still, it is good to know Malik reads Aeschylus backwards. It is the sort of party-trick which gets brown monkeys preferment in Bilayat.
A trilogy of plays by Aeschylus, written in the fifth century BC, the Oresteia tells of the transformation of ancient Greece from a society rooted in blood and revenge into one shaped by justice.
No it doesn't. Don't be silly. A person being pursued under the rules of vendetta could claim asylum at certain shrines or with certain 'Loaf Lords'. Moreover the shrine or 'Loaf Lord' could turn a profit by netting out such claims. It is a separate matter that the Ecclesia or tribal Assembly could purge blood guilt for a fee and this might be tied to the ritual worship of a particular local deity.
The Oresteia begins with the return home from the Trojan war of Agamemnon, the leader of the triumphant Greeks. He is brutally murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, in furious revenge for his having ritually sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia on the eve of conflict to placate the gods.
Hamas was the mother of Golda Meier. Her father was El Sisi who decided to sacrifice her to placate Donald Trump. But Golda was changed into a deer. Netanyahu goes mad when he realizes that he himself is that deer and he has eaten and had sex with himself.
It must be fun to be Malik and to get to read stuff backwards and then relate it to shitty stuff going down in parts of the world where terrorism is considered a great way to show your piety.
To avenge his father, Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, kills Clytemnestra. Pursued by the Furies, ancient deities whose role is to exact vengeance for major sins, he seeks refuge in Athens. The goddess of wisdom, Athena, convenes a jury to try Orestes. With the jury split, Athena votes in favour of acquittal, and in so doing opens up the possibilities of a world beyond that governed by the Furies.
This possibility always existed. Once there was crime or sin of any sort, some method of expiation was made available. However, it was never a crime to kill off foreigners, rape their women, enslave their kids, and take over their land.
The Oresteia is a complex work engaging in issues from patriarchy to democracy.
Not to mention issues relating to sexuality and gender fluidity amongst A.I enhanced goats
The human condition, for Aeschylus, was tragic, with Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes all facing impossible choices.
For Aristophanes it was comic. So what?
Part of the process by which humans civilise themselves and learn to live with the tragedy of their condition is, he suggests, in forging the distinction between vengeance and justice.
Which everybody knows by the time they are 5 years old. If Daddy steals your lollipop you are not allowed to knife him. Complain to Mummy and she will secure you justice.
Justice brings us into the sphere of politics and allows for the possibility of reasoned change and redemption.
Fuck off. Even Neanderthals went in for trade on the basis of comparative advantage. Economics comes first. Justice is about contract enforcement while Politics is about collective action problems.
The irony today is that the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians seems to be moving in the opposite direction, into a world defined more by the Furies than by Athena.
No. The irony is that Egypt's El Sisi hates the Muslim Brotherhood and therefore Hamas more than Netanyahu does. Egyptians were furious that Morsi & Co were utterly shit and are happy they have been thrown out. Gazans, sadly, still have to suffer under that evil bunch of nutters.
BTW, Malik is a Muslim. He should know that votaries of Allah are against Goddesses of any sort.
A world in which the erosion of political solutions to the conflict
Egypt kicking out the Brotherhood was a political solution. Sadly, Gazans weren't able to get rid of Hamas and PIJ.
has led to the pursuit of vengeance dominating the search for justice.
Malik didn't notice that the 'War on Terror' was totes about revenge. The poor fool probably thought it was about Human Rights for Lesbian Afghan goats.
This is most clearly visible in Hamas’s savagery.
Hamas is doing what the Brotherhood need it to do- viz. suck up to Iran while giving Erdogan a reason not to kick them out of Turkey.
Iran gains by showing Sunni Arabs are rabid dogs- like those of ISIS. No doubt, they suggested to Hamas that its fighters should not neglect the rape of babies and the beheading of grannies so as to impress the West with their professionalism as highly trained officers and gentlemen.
The organisation is not, as some on the left view it, an expression of Palestinian resistance
It is a Muslim Brother offshoot which is seeking to prevent Ergodan expelling its high honchos because they turned out to be useless tossers.
but of the degeneration of that resistance, of “lost hope that moral strategies can succeed”, in the words of the American writer Peter Beinart.
This is silly. Gazans have no chance of getting rid of Hamas's goons. To be fair, they are pretty good at 'resistance' to the IDF which is why America keeps talking about a cease-fire. Chances are, Hamas's fighter have three months supply of food and fuel. Why not wait them out?
Under Hamas’s rule, opponents are brutally dispatched, women’s rights denied, gay people tortured and murdered.
Which is why they are popular. Now they are doing a lot of rape and beheading their stock has risen. But that shit is exhausting.
Even given the impact of the Israeli blockade, Gaza’s rulers have done little to advance the lives of Gazans.
Why bother? It's not like they can escape or vote for anybody else.
The Hamas imagination is sustained less by a vision of Palestinian freedom than by a hatred of Israel and of Jews.
No. The Muslim Brotherhood dreams of a Caliphate where their Supreme Leader will be the Caliph. It is a Leninist party which, because it is shit at politics, will degenerate into a cult. Still, what are the lives of a few millions of Palestinians compared to ruling over billions of Muslims and being very richly rewarded for doing so?
Those who celebrate Hamas’s actions as “resistance”, and imagine that butchering Israeli civilians is what “decolonisation” looks like, have a wretched view of Palestinian rights.
No. They are silly virtue signallers who like telling their Mummies that they are more horrible than Adolf Hitler.
It is also a perspective that, in diminishing the value of Israeli lives, only encourages the growth of antisemitism.
Hilarious! Malik is such a sweet little innocent that he doesn't know what Muslims have always thought of Jews.
Desire for revenge is a feature not simply of Hamas policy. It is woven into Israeli perspectives, too.
The Americans may enjoy getting revenge. People of the Old World prefer getting Real Estate though, in traditional Islamic cultures, this may involve killing your brothers or cousins.
The “entire nation” of Palestine, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog claimed, “is responsible” for Hamas’s crimes.
Which is what you would say if you want all the land of that entire nation.
Israel’s heritage minister, Amichai Eliyahu, has written of Gaza, approvingly quoting a soldier: “Blow up and flatten everything. Simply a delight for the eyes.”
Written off, not 'written of'. There were Israeli settlements in Gaza previously. Maybe, there will be again.
Galit Distal Atbaryan, Likud MP and, until two weeks ago, Israel’s minister for public diplomacy, demanded the “erasing of Gaza”, adding: “Revengeful and vicious IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] is needed here. Anything less than that is immoral.”
Israel has won wars in the past and pushed out people. It is likely they will do so again. There are plenty of other displaced people in the region at the moment. The difference is, no one wants the Palestinians.
This is the language of the Furies, not of Athena,
Nor of Allah. Where there are Islamist parties there are displaced people and demands for vengeance. Jews aren't at each other's throats. Nor are Hindus or Buddhists or Christians though no doubt they have problems with Muslims in their neighbourhood.
and backed by immense military hardware. It is the language, too, of many western supporters of Israel. US congressman Brian Mast, speaking during a debate on his attempt to slow down humanitarian aid to Gaza, dismissed the idea of “innocent Palestinian civilians”, claiming, “I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians”.
America didn't give a shit about innocent Iraqi or Afghan civilians. The plain fact is, everybody else has done worse things than the Israelis in recent years.
Not just Israeli rhetoric, but also military strategy has shifted. Beginning with bombing campaigns on Lebanon in the 1990s, Wendy Pearlman and Boaz Atzili observe in their book Triadic Coercion, Israeli leaders came to see military action as possessing “inherent rather than instrumental utility”, with the use of “indiscriminate and brute force” justified on “moral as much as strategic” grounds. This is what Gazans now face.
Their idea is that it is only worth using 'triadic coercion' against States strong enough to eliminate the nuisance of 'non-state actors'. But, non-state actors in weak states can be encouraged to take over the state or at least fuck it up to a point where the place turns into a shit-hole. This has a 'demonstration effect'. Palestinians in Israel can see they are better of than their cousins in Lebanon or Syria. Gaza, of course, is a shit-show- but that's what you get for voting for Hamas 16 years ago.
Israel has sought not to find political solutions to the Palestinian conflict but to contain and manage it.
Nobody has sought to get the Palestinians to find a political solution to the problem caused by their various leaders doing crazy shit.
It has cynically helped nurture Hamas,
So has the EU and the UN.
Benjamin Netanyahu in particular propping it up as an obstacle to an independent Palestine.
That obstacle hasn't changed since 1946- viz. that Palestine is neither economically viable nor politically cohesive. Still, there are many traditional communities which have been displaced by various development projects in the region. They may be poor and suffer injustice but they aren't being turned into canon fodder by a crazy Leninist party.
“To prevent the option of two states,” Israeli general turned academic researcher Gershon Hacohen has observed, “he is turning Hamas into his closest partner. Openly Hamas is an enemy. Covertly, it’s an ally.” Israel is wreaking devastation in Gaza in pursuit of a monster it helped spawn.
One could say this about any pair of antagonists. Still, it is true that Hamas has been a good enemy for Israel because, it turned out, the Egyptians would hate it more than they did themselves.
While there has rightly been much criticism of leftwing voices celebrating the Hamas attack, far less has been said about the immensely more powerful political figures promoting incendiary, dehumanising rhetoric in the name of defending Israel, and the role of such rhetoric in justifying atrocities in Gaza.
Because what angry Israelis are saying is understandable. The problem is, it might actually come true. Israel may have done the calculations and decided to eliminate the problem once and for all. Final Solutions are only fatal to their sponsors if they lose a war. If you have enough nukes to assure mutually assured destruction- you will be left alone. Even if the West sanctions Israel, they have cool shiny tech they can sell to China and Russia and India- not to mention, less openly, their own neighbours.
Instead, in Europe and America there is a concerted effort to marginalise pro-Palestinian sentiments.
Though they could divide the Left a treat. The problem is, if Keir Starmer can't rescue us from the chaotic Conservatives, nobody can.
In France, demonstrations supporting Palestinians have been banned, while a proposed new law would make it a criminal offence to insult Israel.
Islam hasn't really won over a lot of hearts and minds anywhere. It is difficult to warm to a religion which thinks killing infidels might be pleasing to God.
In Germany, as an open letter from Jewish writers, artists and academics observes, in areas with large Turkish and Arab communities, “armoured vans and squads of armed riot police patrol the streets searching for any spontaneous showing of Palestinian support or symbols of Palestinian identity”.
Germany has shown it can take pretty strong measures- Final Solutions even- against unpopular minorities.
In America, those expressing pro-Palestinian sentiments have faced the sack.
The Cancel-Culture pendulum swings both ways.
In Britain, the home secretary, Suella Braverman, has suggested that waving a Palestinian flag could be seen as a criminal offence, and that “not just explicit pro-Hamas symbols and chants … are cause for concern”. The science minister, Michelle Donelan, a self-proclaimed champion of free speech in universities, has singled out two academics for censure for their views on Israel and the Gaza conflict.
Why are they not reading Aeschylus backwards and praying to Athena? Is it because of Neo-Liberalism?
There is more here than simply hypocrisy about free speech. It is an attempt to reframe the Gazan conflict as a moral, rather than political, issue,
Moral issues are political issues- if doing the right thing involves government policy.
and to delegitimise Palestinian perspectives,
It is perfectly legitimate that people in our country should not have a perspective on a situation in a far off country where we have no influence such that they end up causing a big nuisance here to the rest of us. It simply isn't the case that our country benefits from nutters running amok and then trying to kill kaffirs because they are incensed about Israel doing the sort of things we ourselves did during the war on Terror. On the other hand, young kids should protest in the streets against grown-ups- their parents included- having sex. The thing is totes gross.
an approach that can only make political engagement on a difficult terrain even more intractible.
We don't need to be doing any engagement or marriage or divorce in that region. Britain ceased to be the mandatory power there 75 years ago.
“Where will it end? Where will it sink to sleep and rest, this murderous hate, this Fury?”, the Chorus asks at the end of The Choephori, the second play in the Oresteia trilogy, after Orestes kills Clytemnestra.
After Aeschylus's play ended, the audience relished a comic satyr play with plenty of smutty jokes.
Today, the answer depends on whether we, and political leaders in Israel, Palestine and the west, wish to listen to the Furies or to Athena.
No. This isn't a story about morality or justice or seeing things from the perspective of disabled Guatemalan goats. It is a question about whether the Palestinians will be ethnically cleansed or become quiet and resigned to their fate before there is a nuclear war in that region. My guess is yes. By the end of the decade, policing of Palestinian areas might well be done by robots. But, by then, a large proportion of the population of the area may be living in Camps of one sort or the other.
What will happen to the Muslim Brotherhood? Having been thrown out of both Egypt and Gaza, will it ever again taste territorial power. I think not. It is is too stupid. But it may live on as a cult. Similarly, the virtue signallers and human rights 'law-fare' nutters will have lost any political influence. They may morph into a knitting circle or a pyramid marketing scheme of some type.
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