"One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This"

Disclosure - I haven't read the book "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This" by Canadian author Omar El Akkad.

The titular 'this' being nominally the Isreali ground invasion and bombardment of the Hamas administered, Palestinian territory known as the Gaza Strip, and often simply Gaza.

But also, in terms of flowers and chocolates, I understand the title to also just be a general socialogical observation. It is very akin to Peter Boghossian (somebody who predicts for example, that the West is so on track to capitulate to the spread of Islam, that they may as well just surrender now - something I for the record, evaluate to an embarrassingly garbage take) predicting maybe circa 2023 that the 'awokening' would transmute into gaslighting, people would claim that they were never into cancel culture, BLM, DEI, gender affirming care etc. which I feel by the cover of the aforementioned book, though likely ideologically the polar opposite of the Omar El Akkad, is a reasonable prediction of human behaviour.

To some extent I read the assertion of the title both as plausible and a kind of rephrasing of "Stein's Law" which Cory Doctorow, a fellow Canadian author has been sighting a lot in his most recent book tour (quarterly book tour?):

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." ~ Herbert Stein, 1989

Which as far as law's go, is kind of a truism, but what it might free you from is a sense that you need to arrest something that is by its nature constrained and doomed to fail.

But I think the innovative thing is the paradoxical title the "One day" coupled with "Always been".

I'm going to save my observations about fashion for another spot in another post, to which I think this kind of revisionism definitely applies and thought I'd interrogate the personal with regards to whether I have drifted towards that day where I will always have been against the Isreali response to the October 7th attack by Hamas. Am I tempted to revise?

The answer is almost certainly, as far as temptation. Have I revised? No. But nor have I been good at publishing on this blog for example, my position, or evolving position.

Certain things are documented though, like I have always thought the establishment of Israel was a shit idea. I don't like, nor trust Benjamin Netanyahu to do any good by Israel and I worry that Ben likes Hamas and Hamas likes Ben. I maintain ire at Hamas for attacking in the first place, as a contravention of 'when your enemy is making a mistake, don't interrupt them'  I do kind of believe there was an implicit or even coincidental triple-alliance of Likud-Iran-Hamas as three unpopular regimes that parasitically benefitted from getting into shit with each other.

None of that changed, but that's not "always" being against "this" the fact is, I find it hard to appreciate the destruction wrought by the IDF on the Gaza strip, now what I have been 'always' opposed to was Benajamin Netanyahu remaining in office post Oct 7th. his ability to remain there has, diminished my opinion of the larger Israeli population whom at some point become culpable for not removing him, just as I can pinpoint the moment the Republican Party in the United States became culpable for not removing President Trump being the second senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump where in my opinion under the leadership of Mitch McConnell, the Republicans demonstrated their complete lack of interest in upholding the amended constitution of the United States.

Like I'd argue that they should have impeached him earlier, much earlier on ethical, philosophical, pragmatic grounds, but it was certainly determined by the second impeachment trial.

There was a point, somewhere between year one and two of the Gaza responce where I saw a news story saying that basically Netanyahu refused to negotiate for the release of Israeli hostages, that was a determined point for me, where I essentially felt validated in my lack of confidence that Netanyahu could do anything but further damage Israel's standing in the world and region. I suspect Netanyahu is the kind of political character that actually basically now needs regional warfare to continue forever, though I've heard other analysts say that Israel has a long history of basically stirring up shit to kill any two-state solution or even regional peace-talks in the cradle.

I can support cynicism that the Netanyahu strategy was to bomb Hamas into releasing the hostages, but in a realpolitik sense, I accept the license of pretext up to the point that someone says "okay okay we'll release the hostages" and you say "nah, I think we'll keep bombing and embargoing and advancing ground troops" for me, once your bluff is called there is no longer any ambiguity as to whether Netanyahu is playing the transactional-analysis model game "now I've got you you son of a bitch" which is basically where you abandon all consideration of proportionality.

And I was open to for example, Rory Stewarts position he expressed prior to the release of an interview on 10 November, 2023 that Israel's response to October 7th with x number of rockets launch had already exceeded proportionality. 

Certainly his interviewer, or interlocutor Coleman Hugh's lost my interest by his own coverage of the conflict and his repeated assertion of a vacuous idiom 'good fences make good neighbours' which I fucking bet is the kind of common nonsense we discover to be entirely opposite in practice, like comparing I don't know - North and South Korea, East and West Berlin, the "Iron Curtain" of the USSR and Western Europe, in comparison to the virtually non-existent "fences" of the European Union and the United States - yes at one point the 'states' were individual colonies, that then united, and post union, they had this fence called the "Mason-Dixon" line that seperated free states from slave states and did that make good neighbours? Or did it make for a bloody civil war? 

And consider the relative strength of fences between the Canada-US border, and the Mexico-US border, which neighbours would Coleman Hughes consider gooder? Sorry to rant, but it was painful to see Coleman Hugh's be so fucking dumb and repeatedly mouthing this dumb platitude like it was some kind of argument.

As of recent writing, Netanyahu has now made some statement in open defiance of Israel's highest judicial branch, whatever they call it. Israel may be the only country on earth, going backwards faster than the United States, and the modern state of Israel, I don't think gets to claim any continuity with the Kingdom of Judah or its northern neighbour the Kingdom of Israel as though and certainly not the Jewish Bible's claims of settlement by exiles out of Egypt lead by Moses to the promised land over 40 years. So the Lindy effect would predict that the Israel experiment will dissolve before the US experiment, and if not that, in less time than it takes the US to cease existing as the nation we recognize.

I was always opposed to Hamas' October 7th attack, which is not the same as being opposed to a two state solution, or the de-occupation and embargo of the Palestinian territories. I oppose it because it seemed an obvious way to give grist to the mill to make everything worse. 

What I'm also open to, and have not been able to determine, is the extent that October 7th has to be contextualised in terms of what I'd call an Israeli whack-a-mole policy, which is to give a banal example, an employer doesn't like negative feedback so they take away the suggestion box, then staff email complaints to managers so they start issuing people with written warnings about complaints, and then staff post on a 3rd party website like Glassdoor their complaints, so the employer hires hackers to find out who is posting to glassdoor until sooner than fix anything people just quit their jobs.

In the same way, it is extremely plausible to me that under Netanyahu and other administrations, Palestinian's peaceful means of opposition were quashed, it's leaders seeking diplomacy jailed etc. such that all that is left are the violent extremists and violent means.

It seems very plausible, that the security wall needs to be revised as from what I can find the suicide bombing casualties it stopped seemed to number around 40 casualties, and then since 1996 it stopped all those suiced bombings, and then Oct 7th 1300 casualties 2023 which seems to maybe be an example of the concept of 'risk homeostasis' so the safer you make things, the more catastrophic the failures.

So I don't feel like I'm doing any revising here. I guess the real question is, do I feel any temptation to tell the grandkids that I was there at the protests chanting from the river to the sea? No. I was also opposed to the popular protest movements execution. I actually still strongly feel it has been by-and-large symbiotic to the Netanyahu regime, in the same sinister way that in 2008 when people protested the CCPs human rights abuses, the CCP was able to point to the Chinese people and say 'look the world hates you' and I feel confident it is a matter of fact that Benjamin Netanyahu used the global protests to entrench himself and his response to Oct 7th, deny due process of his own criminal charges within Israel.

On the converse, there's the indirect effect that the global protests in their ability to embolden Netanyahu have given him enough rope to vastly diminish Israel's standing in the world, with it now being in many places a campaign strength for a candidate to boast about their refusal of financial support from AIPAC. But the bill has likely been paid by Palestinian civilian martyrs, and I feel I would have rathered seen protesters taking to the streets and chanting 'Netanyahu resign' than 'From the River to the Sea' or Genocide or anything else.