Let’s imagine your best friend calls you up, extremely upset. You invite him over to talk. Your friend has discovered incontrovertible evidence that his wife has had a lengthy and torrid affair.
You commiserate for an hour over drinks, allowing your friend to rant. Then your friend announces coldly: “I’m going to kill her.” At first you think he must be speaking figuratively, but he pulls open his jacket to reveal a gun stuffed into his pants. Your friend then tells you exactly when and where he plans to shoot his wife dead.
It’s clear your friend is in a blind rage. He needs to be talked down from where he is. If you’re unsuccessful at doing that, you need to report him immediately to the mental health authorities. To do otherwise is to allow your friend to ruin the rest of his life. (And, even if you don’t like his wife, she probably doesn’t deserve to die. Adultery may be a grievous sin, but it’s not a capital offence.)
The absolute last thing your friend needs is for you to climb down the rage-hole with him. A ‘friend’ who would drive a cuckolded husband to Walmart to buy ammunition is no friend at all.
I would argue that anyone who considers themselves to be a supporter of Israel is currently in an analogous situation.
I suspect many of Israel’s supporters were carried away by their own rage at the carnage which happened on October 7th. Perhaps that blinded them to how dangerously out-of-control Israel was - and is.
I would suggest that Israel would be much better off today, if the United States had simply refused to provide it with the necessary weapons to flatten Gaza and slaughter tens of thousands of civilians.
Many of the hostages are now dead. Half a million Israelis have fled the country. The Israeli economy is in free-fall. Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have died, and thousands more have been disabled in the ongoing battles against Hamas. There are angry demonstrations every day, in Jerusalem, and around the world. Israel has become an international pariah, and faces charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Almost six months on, Israel remains in a blind rage. This week has seen Israel wantonly slaughter patients and medical staff at a Rafah hospital. The IDF ‘accidentally’ struck an aid convoy delivering food to the hungry - THREE TIMES. Then Israel bombed the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, ignoring a centuries-old tradition that diplomatic facilities are exempt from such attacks.
It seems likely to me that if Israel is allowed to continue on with its current mad raging, it is only a matter of time before they find themselves at war with Hezbollah. War with Iran grows more likely with each passing day. Russia and China are unlikely to stay on the sidelines if the US then attacks Iran. World War Three is increasingly a non-trivial risk.
It’s really not clear what Israel’s end-game is. It’s pretty clear to me that for every Hamas fighter the IDF manages to kill, at least two or three new recruits will volunteer to take their place. Does Israel intend to kill all the Palestinians? Or drive two million Gazans into the Sinai desert and hope the world doesn’t notice? The longer the current deteriorating situation persists, the more elusive any lasting peace will be, and the more likely a dangerous escalation becomes.
Donald Trump has said that Israel was stupid to slaughter so many Gazans with the cameras rolling. An in-your-face sociopath: what you see is what you get. Joe Biden is more cunning. Knowing it creeps people out if you display a complete absence of conscience, he pretends to have one. But Joe’s actions speak louder than any crocodile tears he might shed. Neither man will intervene before the situation spirals out of control.
It is also abundantly apparent that neither the Democratic Party, nor the Republican Party, is prepared to do what is necessary to turn Israel from the destructive path it is now on. That means it falls to the rest of us to find some way out of this mess.
For anyone who considers themselves a friend or supporter of Israel I’d ask you to think long and hard about what it means to be a true friend. If you see a friend is trapped in a self-destructive pattern, it is important to do whatever you can to try to dissuade them from harming themselves or others, in as gentle a way as you can manage. I would suggest that that is what is required here.