The Flog of War

 

Tom Cotton on Fox News Sunday: "As far as I'm concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas. Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend." pic.twitter.com/j1BiV7yjab

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2023

Sure. Make the rubble bounce.  As far as Tom Cotton is concerned. But I'm not Tom Cotton (thanks be) and I have a conscience and understand that just because Hamas sucks, doesn't mean responsible people get to be comfortable that innocent humans become collateral damage. This is why someone like Tom Cotton shouldn't really be a senator. One of my absolutes in a very small basket of them is sociopaths shouldn't be in office. If you have no empathy for other people, go be elsewhere. Sell patent drugs to gym rats. Produce reality television. Design hideous clothes for plus size people. You'd still be a horror-show, but you wouldn't this fucking dead-eyed horror-show, talking about how Palestinian kids are bearing responsibility for shit they never did to the extent that bricks should fall around their ears. 

He thinks he's talking about "rubble". He doesn't see that people, real humans, live in and around that. Kids are in, around, and under the rubble. They are starved and thirsty when supplies are denied them. He's a father. He isn't thinking about the rubble bouncing on his own kid. It never would. 

I'm a little sorry for my delinquent posting--but I took a couple days to think about why anyone needed to demand pictures of beheaded babies on Twitter to believe the Hamas massacre against Israelis existed, and why I saw so many pictures of Syrian dead babies I remembered from 10 years ago being called Palestinian dead babies. I'm having a hard, hard time understanding who is satisfied by pictures of dead babies at all. (This sort of thing isn't new at all and is for shock value.) 

So, who masquerades their bullshit faked-up video game footage or 10-year old infant snuff porn for likes and clicks and to advance the idea that some people have the right side of a conflict going on decades? Who exacerbates the conflict and obscures reality to frustrate and aggravate people who want to understand and be concerned about something meaningful? 

There's a nihilism in it. It's about making you switch off the part of you that understands that human lives matter and wants to care. You're supposed to fucking give up, shrug your shoulders, ask "what is truth?' Take no sides because they aren't really "your" sides. Or worse, settle into your tribal corner, stop caring if what you see is real, and justify your position based on what you no longer care is bullshit, so long as it soothes that last angry nerve in you that wants to engage with reality. So you even cheer bloodshed, for your side's sake.

War isn't football, and this weekend I've seen it treated that way. Folks refereeing the action from home. People calling what they think are the right plays from their couches. People oblivious to the reality that human lives are the football. Retweeting nonsense that they should have smelled was nonsense--even sitting members of congress. People up in arms if this or that political figure hasn't said the exact thing they were supposed to about both sides. 

All of which does nothing, nothing at all, to stem the tide of whatever will happen. Disinformation is exhausting and propaganda is a miserable thing to play on people with real memories and identities. 

Last Saturday, Hamas used the tactics I associate with Daesh. I don't think most Palestinians agree with Hamas, but they persist, and what does that mean, when they are embedded in the heart of civilian populations, and use the retribution they have invited to their communities as their recruitment? Sympathy for Gazans I can have. Tolerance for blaming Israel alone for how they strike back at what Hamas has wrought, I can't. 

Over the years, Hamas has lodged missile strikes regularly at civilian areas of Israel. They have been armed and supported by multiple Arab nations to fuck shit up, but those nations don't seem to want them to be armed enough or strong enough to achieve something real. Palestinians seem to be used by their Arab brethren, are in refugee camps in other nation states not much better than Gaza. 

They appear to be victims, but it isn't just Israel's doing. Innocent Palestinians are human shields for Hamas. Their dead bodies are PR fodder. And Hamas and radicalization deflect from what Hamas does to place the blame on Israel, so they don't really confront that Hamas stands in the way of Palestinian achievement. Hamas uses violence to no useful purpose. What have they ever achieved? 

Some absurd percentage of Hamas airstrikes land in Gaza, killing Palestinians. I don't understand, but I do. They have ratlines for moving munitions--do they use their tunnels to save lives? They told their people that the Israeli message to evacuate was a lie and to stay and blocked evacuation. 

I don't blame the innocent for what happens to them--I blame Hamas for willing it. I can only blame Israel to the extent they don't try to avoid civilian deaths, but there are limits. I have long foregone the idea of heroes and perfect scenarios. This is nothing to do with race or ethnicity for me, and the appalling mindset that leads to outright race murder, as happened in Illinois, sickens me. 

Another image of a dead baby. This victim of our US Islamophobia. 

It's only clear to me that Hamas is a danger to Israelis and Palestinians alike and needs to be removed, and that some kind of two state situation should follow. I am satisfied a truly intelligent, informed and empathetic person like Joe Biden is currently in office, surrounding himself with the same sort of people, who will tell an ally what lines they should not cross to maintain their humanity--but it isn't on him to tell them every step they must take to prosecute this war, or to determine how they defend their people when that defense must pass through the human barriers the enemy is embedded in. 

I believe in no heroes and no ideal situations under the sun. I can not call my instincts about what is needed for resolution in this matter fully moral. But there is sometimes a reason for harm in prevention of greater harm. I don't do pacifist marches and I don't waste pity on the errands of fools. I'd like a peaceful outcome in the conflict but I don't hold my breath. And I will never not be haunted by little bodies of distant victims.