Genocide

Here’s the Sde Teiman post. The short version is just the title. A nation engaged in genocide is of course going to brutally torture and abuse prisoners. This is unsurprising. But also unsurprising and often unsaid  is that there will be swaths of the public that support the genocide so much that they will attack and then occupy military bases to defend those accused of rape and torture. Because that is the nature of genocide. 

Genocide is not easy. It takes a lot of effort. Especially because it is do abhorrent to civilized society. It involves the mass slaughter of civilians, something possible only through dehumanizing the group being exterminated. Genocide involves atrocious acts because at its core, it is an atrocious endeavour. The sanitized air strike version even becomes difficult to maintain without dehumanization because it is ongoing. When you fly over so much rubble and wreckage on your way to add to it - on a daily basis - you have to register that those husks of buildings used to be inhabited. And that you can only continue if you do not consider those inhabitants as actual human beings. 

It’s possibly worse now than it has been. Before social media, it was easier to hide the atrocities. Before everybody had the ability to record video evidence, it was easier to deny what actually happens. But in the case of Israel and Palestine, this is not an issue. There is precious little effort to hide things. IDF soldiers have published mountains of evidence of genocidal acts - something that continues to this day with no sign of disapproval from above. And that too may be intentional. Dehumanization is a hard thing to maintain. As much as our lizard brains have tribalism and fear of the other hardwired in - so too do we have at least some level of basic empathy for others. Maintaining a genocidal regime means pushing what I have heard being called “genocide fever”.

Society is made of many individuals, and the opinions of those individuals spans wide ranges. The most extreme members believe some crazy ass shit and they would do horrific things if they knew they could get away with it. And so - we end up with protest crowds lead by elected cabinet ministers marching on and then taking over military bases - all in the name of defending the right to torture detainees by sodomizing them with object violently enough to break ribs. 

There have been statements that Sde Teiman is Israel’s Abu Ghraib. It’s not. It is much much worse. 60 detainees have been killed at Sde Truman over 10 months. 63 detainees were killed at Abu Ghraib over the span of four years - and 36 of those were due to mortar attacks from Iraqi insurgents, i.e. not tortured to death. But the horrific atrocities aren’t why Sde Teiman is worse - it’s the reaction to it. Even in the US bloodlust for Arab punishment, Abu Ghraib was too much. The US government and US society as a whole recognized that this was an awful stain on their reputation. They knew they were in the wrong. Now sure, some assholes did not acknowledge this - many commentators argued that this was justified. But that was the fringe view. It was a scandal because it was recognized as bad. 

That’s not what Sde Teiman is in Israel. Again, a protest against the arrest of soldiers who sexually assaulted a prisoner with a metal rod in a violent action that not only tore his rectum, but broke his ribs. With enough support that they overran a military base. Actually they occupied two separate military bases that day. It’s not something that is generally agreed upon to be bad. That’s genocidal fever. This is what genocide means - it’s a crime of motive, where there is an intent to exterminate a culture and society. Something only possible with widespread dehumanization of the victims. 

This was a hard post to write. It’s much easier to criticize the Israeli government or the Israeli state, but it is definitely problematic to criticize Israeli society. Antisemitism is a very real problem - extremely widespread and extremely dangerous. And criticizing the culture of a Jewish ethnostate definitely plays footsies with antisemitism. But this cannot be an immunity card. What if Israel society does start doing extremely bad things? Do we dare not criticize? And is this part of how we got into this mess we are in now?

To be clear - there is still a huge distinction between criticizing Jews and Judaism versus criticizing Israel, even Israeli culture and society. There are Israeli Jews protesting the genocide marching in the streets of Tel Avuv almost every day. In a state slicing towards totalitarianism such that posting a Palestinian flag on social media can get you arrested. Abroad, much of the protest movement against the Gaza genocide is lead by Jews, rallying to calls such as “Not in My Name”. To be frank, I can think of very little that is as Jewish as opposing genocide. They carry they weight of being subjected to such a crime.

There are reports of the IDF using Palestinians as human shields. Dressing them in IDF uniforms and marching them with their hands zip-tied into areas where they think there might be an ambush. Those include reports of soldiers refusing to engage in clear war crimes but being forced to by their commanders. That’s genocide - a system that forces people to dehumanize others against their inherent opposition to doing so. And that’s what’s happening in Gaza now. It is genocide.

It’s been clearly and obviously genocide for a long time now. Generations of apartheid and oppression. Of blockade and siege. Still ongoing. There’s a West Bank neighbourhood with chain link fencing as a ceiling - installed to catch garbage and glass bottoms being flung at the market by Israelis in the buildings above. How does a situation like this happen and be allowed to persist without dehumanization?

Those dark impulses are always with us. Part of the human condition is hating on others - it is something we keep in check and under control with civilization. But the degree to which it was not in check in Israel was quite large. The longest remaining occupation in the world - so this too should be unsurprising. And October 7 just provided the cover to act upon it. 

All the hashtag caveats. Not all Israelis. Hell, it’s even not all Zionists. But certainly some Israelis and for fucking sure it’s some Zionists. And we’re doomed to have this genocide continue because we refuse to engage in thinking about what fraction of Israelis and Zionists are genocidal, and whether this fraction is gaining influence in Israel. And the Sde Teiman riots give us a hint as to the answers to those questions.