A Few Words
The following are a few words on Israel. They do not address the most recent escalation in Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, they address instead the debauched West which thinks it will ride to Palestine’s rescue, but really can’t even rise to the occasion of rescuing itself. It addresses in short the issue of self-delusion.
The Israeli question throws into high relief all of the contradictions in the modern West. It also sums up the vacuousness of global liberalism. A world order that seeks to settle all national questions by dissolving nationality, hovers helplessly over a conflict in which all those cherished core values collide with one another. The same paradigms that cause uproar against Israeli actions are, of course, also the ones that make meaningful action against Israel unthinkable or impractical or politically incorrect. The Israelis know the game. Most of our own politicians don’t even know the venue.
Firstly, the rules. We live under global liberalism. We live under a total system; that is a system that presumes to be total; a system that views all other systems as deviations to be corrected. As you would expect, the majority of people living under a total system do not or cannot imagine what it is like to look on that system from the outside. Nonetheless, there exists large swathes of the world that remain on the outside looking in. There are other systems, other worldviews, other presumptions to totality… other minds that view us not “from the outside” as it were, but view us “as the outside.” Where is Israel in all of this? A country supposedly so unpopular and yet apparently invulnerable.
How can Israel be so unpopular and so invulnerable? The answer to that question is the answer to the modern world. Israel exists within and without the West. It does not care what the West thinks. It does not care because it is something else… its own thing… created, ostensibly by the West or by Western intelligence agencies, it looks on the West from the outside and doesn’t think very much of it.
The Israelis act in their own interests, without apology, and as such there is very little the “Free World” is willing to do against them except complain. “You’re not supposed to do that,” the West complains, or in translation, “You’re only supposed to do that for Freedom and Democracy.”
They act also from the comfort of their power bases within the United States, Britain and other Western powers. To talk about Israeli lobbies is an understatement. They are more like branches of State governance. Despite growing hostility towards Israel in most European countries, Israeli influence over the major European powers shows no signs of abating. The two party systems of Britain and the United States, for instance, ensure that if worst comes to worst, there will always be a pro-Israel side to the political spectrum.
It has become fashionable to attack Israel but that is not an end in itself. Occupy Wall Street was fashionable for a time, and in its own way, but nothing came of it. The economic system was not toppled. Neither will Israel be toppled by controlled opposition. The problem with fashionable movements is that they are fashionable, at least on college campuses they are. To say something of substance, ofttimes one must be unfashionable. One must say something that would get you kicked out of college campuses or even get you kicked out of modern Ireland.
A Few Thoughts
Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses and the mascot of Liberal Ireland, told us that a nation was “the same people living in the same place”, then qualified it to say, “Or in a different place.” Quite so. Now, here is a question for those concerned. Would Leopold Bloom… humanist icon, degenerate, adulterer, exploiter of youths, #metoo villain, mascot of Liberal Ireland, have supported the State of Israel? As an Irishman, I tend to think he would of. After all, Albert Einstein did… Meyer Lansky did… these things I think are tribal, not rational. Not that they are irrational per se but they are supra-rational. The problem is that Ulysses was published in 1922 and twenty-six years before the State of Israel was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion. Liberal Ireland does not comprehend supra-rational forces. It comprehends degeneracy, exploitation, sexual misconduct, but it does not comprehend blood and soil identity. It does not understand the Palestinians to start with, let alone the Israelis. And therefore it understands nothing of humanity.
At the heart of the whole issue there is a deep confusion. The confusion arises from on the one hand, treating Israel as a European country, liable to the same standards as other European countries, and on the other hand treating it as an exception, something outside… in fact the great exception. If honesty is the best policy, the West has strayed as far as one can stray.
We hear calls for action. But what action? Deport the Israeli ambassador? And back it up with what? Words are easy. Gestures are easy. The HSE just got taken down by a gang of hackers, supposedly Russian. You think the Israelis don’t have that kind of capability, should they decide to retaliate? When you go to war, you better go to war in full possession of your faculties. The Irish State as it stands couldn’t go to war with a Spanish trawler. You think the EU is going to back you up? Has the EU not itself been a long time financial supporter of Israel? Have Irish taxpayers not been funding Israel through the EU all these many years?
In our heart of hearts, we in the Liberal West know this, that certain countries get bombed and certain countries don’t. The United States was perfectly prepared to go to war in the Balkans for Freedom and Democracy. It was perfectly prepared to go to war with Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria and whoever else showed up… and even the people who accused the United States of war crimes never questioned the poetics of the excuse. They may have questioned the sincerity of the excuse, the sincerity of “Freedom and Democracy”, but they never questioned the ideology of “Freedom and Democracy.” They never questioned “the Good.”
Israel is not an Iraq or a Syria or a Kosovo. It is a nuclear armed appendage to the global liberal order. You might as well talk of the United States invading itself, which admittedly occasionally it has done, as talk of it invading Israel. You might as well talk of the United States sanctioning itself. And what are sanctions unless you are prepared to go all the way and starve your enemy out, which the Liberal West has not the stomach to do? Starvation tactics are reserved for Arab nationalists and European nationalists, not for the likes of Israel.
A Few Concessions
The notion I must get across here, is that the way the West sees itself is not how the rest of the world sees the West. And when I talk about the West, I don’t just mean Western leaders. I don’t just mean Biden and Johnson and Macron and Merkel… I mean the people protesting on the streets. I mean the people protesting ostensibly against power; I mean the Europeans protesting against Israel; I mean the spiritual condition of Western Man. If I can distill my argument into one sentence it is this: the Liberal West projects weakness and its enemies laugh.
What do you think people see when they look at the West from the outside? What do you think China sees or Russia sees? They see the West as wealthy, decadent, debauched, degenerate, weak, hypocritical, self-righteous, and in decline. Dangerous, yes, but getting less dangerous as time goes by. What do you think Israel sees from its entrenched position? With its nuclear arsenal and its myriad of lobby groups and its mentality of survival at all costs, how do you think they view the student protests of the dying Liberal West? Do they not laugh? And is that not the central point in all of this? Is that not the meaning of history that we must resolve within ourselves if we are to step over these enemies that assail us? You talk about saving Palestine?! Good God, can Ireland today even save itself?! Can the West rise up and save itself?!
We live in an age of sentimentality and decadence. When the West goes to war, it rationalises its aims in purely Liberal terms. The anti-war Liberal is always in pursuit of the Good War. Milošević is Hitler, The Taliban is Hitler, Saddam is Hitler, Gaddafi is Hitler, Assad is Hitler… whereas naturally Clinton is Churchill, Bush is Churchill, Obama is Churchill, Special-of-the-Day is Churchill. The Black and Tans were sent by bloody Churchill.
Nobody who looks on the West from the outside, takes the West at its word, nor should they, not in this day and age, because where other systems kill you and take your land, the West kills you, takes your lands, puts up a McDonalds and teaches your 7 year old child how to have gay sex.
The people protesting in the streets “for Palestine” are in many cases, the most liberalised of the liberal. They are as weaponised as the missiles disintegrating Palestinian toddlers. They are the most degenerated of Western mankind. The Israelis must look on at all this and smile. What do the Israelis have to fear from Western Liberalism? A few sanctions? Limited at best and they have trading partners outside the West so who cares? A colour revolution? There? Not a chance. A NATO intervention? Highly unlikely. An American invasion? Unthinkable. They have nothing to fear. A society that holds “racism” as the highest order of dishonour will never act meaningfully against the Jewish State. The West is disarmed in the face of Israel, even more so than in the face of its other enemies. The difference with Israel is the degree of ambivalence.
A Few Parting Remarks
If the key issue in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the issue of national dispossession, then the West is hardly in a position to criticise. Global liberalism is itself a machine of dispossession running roughshod over national destinies. Its idea of liberation is assimilation. People who do not support nationalism in their own backyards are in a strange position to support it in far away places. Ireland today is a poor advertisement for freedom.
The Israelis have the advantage because they look out for their own interests and we do not. How can we presume to look out for Palestine’s interests when we do not look out for our own? Is this not an absurdity? And does everyone not secretly understand that this is an absurdity? If we are not self-preservationist, then we do not have a vote in who survives or who perishes, be it Palestine or anyone else. Our vote (as it stands) is our suicide. We have voted ourselves out of existence, that is if current trends continue.
The West does not act on the basis of its own survival, only on the survival of vested interests. The Israelis on the other hand do operate on the basis that their own survival is the number-one priority. As such, they function inside the West as one such vested interest. A particularly powerful vested interest you might say, but one among many. The West is not going to war yet with corporate oligarchy, nor is it yet going to war with Israel.
To put this in perspective, the current Irish State (26 out of 32 counties) does not have as its goal, the survival of the Irish People. Explicitly it rejects that. The Irish People are considered as nothing: the free market of humanity prevails, we have a laissez-faire ethnicity subject to IBEC approval. How simple then is it for a vested interest, whether that be International Finance or an Israeli Lobby or whatever else, to overcome that? How very, very easy for he who forsakes what he is has no power over others. There are vested interests within the “Irish” State that do act for their own preservation and are quite determined to survive, even at our expense. 2008 proved that, as if it needed proving.
The Israelis have had a free hand you might say at least since the day Kennedy had his head blown off in Dallas. They did not let one Irishman get in their way, even though he was an emperor, which is what an American president in the mid-twentieth century effectively was, symbolically anyway. It will take a considerable number of Irishmen to make them quake in this day and age, and certainly not ones of the caliber that parade like degenerates in the street. Certainly not ones whose first priority is the sexualisation of 7 year olds. Whatever you think of the Israelis, they certainly don’t fear the contemporary Western Left. If you want to know what the Israelis fear, look at the countries that America has bombed and draw some conclusions. Being “pro-Palestine” is not an end in itself, nor does it amount to very much if the people holding the banners don’t amount to very much themselves. “Degenerates for Palestine” is a self-defeating slogan. If you can’t see why, you’ve lost already. And even be it a fashionable cause, fashion is its own poverty. Look to your own house before you look to your neighbor’s. Look to Ireland before you look anywhere else. Understand the world before you condemn your enemies.
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