Trump, ever the cowardly bully, sure can pick his targets. Greenland. Yemen. Gaza (great beaches, the best…). Pick on somebody your own size! Oh, right, Canada. It’s all of a piece and it’s very distracting. After all, the slaughter and dislocation continues in Gaza and the West Bank unabated. Strange how horror can oscillate into absurdity and back at ever accelerating rates. And strange how it rebounds to undermine basic American rights at home.
While thinking about why Israel’s most recent killings in Gaza felt like an even further turn of the screw, infinity occurred to me. Mathematicians tell us there are different types of infinity and that they can be used like numbers in different math operations. An example of these Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive infinities is that while there are an infinite number of whole numbers, there’s also an infinite number of even numbers (and odd ones). However, we naturally expect there to be twice as many whole numbers as odd or even. Actually, between any two numbers (for instance, 1.0000001 and 1.00000011) there stretches an infinity of numbers.
Six million murdered Jews and an equal number of non-Jews attaches a finite number to the Holocaust: twelve million. The moral depravity is absolute, an infinity that defies comprehension. The genocide in Gaza, with an estimated 60,000+ fatalities so far, is still genocide despite representing 1/200th of the deaths in the Holocaust. Gaza is still an infinitude of human failure and evil. One cannot measure the moral depravity of genocidal campaigns by comparing numbers of casualties. As with different infinities, they are all essentially equal.
The genocidal intent of the Netanyahu regime was rationalized as the inevitable collateral damage of war. Most of the world recognized that the war wasn’t really a war, the collateral damage the goal and not collateral at all, and that the ongoing mass killing of civilians was neither reprisal nor revenge for the heinous October 7th attack. Still, however flimsy the mask, the pretense did dilute American opposition to Israel’s invasion. This was important for very practical reasons: we were supplying Israel with the weapons to carry out its plan which supply also enriched our weapons industry. The U.S. government could have stopped the invasion or at least imposed limits on it extent.
Those reluctant to criticize Israel claimed that reports inflated Gaza’s civilian casualties, but the original and updated statistics have proven accurate. And what if they had been over-reported? It’s like claiming (falsely) that “only” three or five million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and “that sort of makes it not as bad as the Jews always say.” I’ve read such comments.
Israel’s latest military phase in Gaza isn’t killing as many people as the full-scale invasion did. It’s more like genocide as mop-up operation. No one pretends the most recent bombings and killings and blockades of food and medicine have the slightest military purpose. There’s a special brand of cruelty at work, more flippant and casual, like mutilating a corpse.
How can one aspect of a genocide seem crueler than another? It seems immoral just to say such things, much as comparing infinities seems absurd. But as obscene as the pretense was, tossing it aside bares the grotesque visage behind the mask. It’s clear this was always about obliterating Palestinians and their settlements and that the term “cease-fire” has no meaning no matter how often it’s used. Four hundred killed in a night-time bombing. 130 children.
But leave it to Donald Trump to add his own twisted, criminal twist to a twisted, criminal situation, a buffoonish clown cheering on Israel’s explicit goal of leveling and depopulating Gaza. Because Trump hath a vision— the Gaza coast lined with Trump casinos and hotels where giant insensate Mag-ites disgorge from their cruise ships and buy Trump bobble-head dolls, Gulf of America mugs, and t-shirts proclaiming “Gaza is oUrS!” Genocide always benefits someone.
There is some method to Trump’s political antics. The “shock and awe” assault on the American government has distracted Americans from Gaza (and Ukraine, to Putin’s benefit). We’re too busy trying to resist fascism at home. This is a shame because Trump’s vicious domestic policies also support Israel’s most vicious policies abroad.
The assault on the perceived “liberalism” of American universities is a case in point. It has been central to the right wing’s plan to undo the gains of American progressivism and even our wishy-washiest version of liberalism. Long before the Tea Party was a twinkle in the Koch brothers’ eyes, conservatives were attacking diversity, affirmative action, critical thinking, “leftist” professors, and (a sometimes too-apt target) political correctness in higher education. College campuses’ Gaza protests gave Republicans an excuse to bully colleges into suppressing free speech and the right to assembly. Behind higher ed’s capitulation is the Republican effort to whitewash academia’s entire culture and assert dictatorial control over curriculum and research.
The fact is the demonstrations were primarily driven by horror at the unending slaughter in Gaza. Images of mothers digging their dead babies out of the rubble will do that. An upsurge in campus anti-Semitism was a disturbing side-show to this and could have been addressed by colleges themselves doing what they are meant to do: create frameworks for open dialog and inquiry; insist on mutual respect by all parties; issue clear protocols for what constitutes hate speech and actions; and commit to a non-biased review of every accusation. Instead we have the broad brush of collective blame targeting ] opponents of Israel’s policies rather than those who actually broke the law.
Anti-Semitism had already staged a comeback due to the barely coded anti-Jewish rhetoric and images that have marked every stage of Trump’s rise to power. Suddenly it was coming from the Left. It is odious and inexcusable from any direction. But Trump and his minions have used the protests and their anti-Semitic fringe to profess to be shocked—shocked!—at the very anti-Semitism Trump traffics in. The recent craven cave-in of Columbia University to Trump’s pressure, which stripped Columbia of any shred of dignity, mission, and values, is a blow to every legitimate college in America. No sum of money—not 400 million dollars, Musk’s billions, withdrawal of donor funds—or administrators’ careers is worth staining a University with shame that will take decades to fade.
The upshot is that colleges and universities now have license to suppress protesters, free speech, open inquiry, and professors who encourage critical debate, not to mention the foreign students whose names they are passing on to ICE. The more such debate and protest is squelched, the easier it is for Trump and Congress to fund continued attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. Nothing should please Israel’s enemies more than to further secure Netanyahu’s hold on power, for he and his allies have destabilized and isolated Israel more than all its enemies managed in the 75 years before October 7th.
Given the fanatics who control the Republican Party, the attack on free thought will ooze into other areas: “DEI”; the history of feminist, anti-segregation, labor, and gay rights movements; critiques of crypto-currency; support for Ukraine; analysis of the right-wing takeover of the judicial system; opposition to seizing Greenland; rewriting the history of slavery; etc. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the extensive powers of the National Security state, there are few legal restrictions on the government’s ability to, in effect, suspend the Bill of Rights. ICE, for instance, is becoming a nationwide secret police with fewer restraints than those governing the F.B.I., one reason why the Trump administration appears so eager to undermine the F.B.I.
If they want shock and awe, we should give them shock and awe. A blow at one of their policies is a blow to all of them. Choose your battle because it is all part of the same war to rescue whatever is decent in this country and the world. Both nobly upheld and repeatedly violated, America’s legacy of humane ideals is still knit into the fabric of this country. We can not allow that legacy to die.
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