When a circus is in town they put up posters, you could see and know it was a circus flyer from the back of a galloping horse as you passed, you’d likely even catch the venue and date. Yet when you see a planning application stapled to a telegraph pole, that fucker couldn’t be harder to read and from the top it’s mostly nonsense about the local council. The planning form takes forever to get to the point, and that is the point. The difference between these is obvious, one is designed so that you will read it, the other is designed in the hope that you cannot be bothered.
So you get up in the morning and put the news on TV while you stuff granola into your face. Usual, nonsense about Charlie 3, a story about trump’s latest stupid remarks, MPs are taking something away from some people who are already tightening their belts so they can go easier on their fat-cat friends. There’ll be something about conflict jammed in between, but it’ll be abstract, distant, images not shown because they might upset some people (our oppressive business partner type nations are the ‘some people’). The goal here is not to be the circus poster, it’s to be the planning notification. If something happened here on our soil the coverage would drill into every detail, but if it’s in our political elite’s appetite that the something else occurred somewhere else, then the coverage will be lacking if that is what’s needed politically. Information disappears in other information and complexity over the details of method rather than the reasons of why. This is why a single poster on a notice board will catch your eye if it is alone, but a mess of posters gets read by no-one.
You stick a film on, something with some grit, and while watching it your emotions are stirred. A great modern tactic of cinema is to create an injustice and then have a hero character nobly fight through the odds to solve it. To have you feeling that something has become unbalanced, a character, one you’ve been drawn to like, is killed for instance. When we see injustice we react emotionally, wanting justice, recompense, a righting of the wrongs. It is hard to know why we don’t feel this same need with our war coverage, yet that one is no fiction. I suspect the distance is not in terms of miles but in the abstraction that we are not the same as them. This difference makes all the difference. What we tend to feel is personally thankful that it’s not us that is the victim, but our continued silence and indifference to injustice may mean that we hasten the day that we may be. The death of a TV character in a story that is not real has more emotional impact than the deaths of many children in a war we’re viewing as if it were not real. I personally feel that says something about us and our limited ability to resist being manipulated by an influenced media.
I watched Louis Theroux on Israeli settlers, a BBC program, and I was as disgusted by the Israelis, the settlers, attitude toward the people who they were displacing while building their God-given utopia, as I would expect anyone of sound mind to be. I was equally bemused by the silence of those Israelis that are not settlers, since their silence is at the very least enabling. Those persons around the world, non-Israelis, that wish to support the rights of the settlers, and are not religious zealots that reach for a book of fairy tales to act as a land registry document themselves, must be making a moral argument in favour of apartheid based on some other criteria. In this effort they would have to justify how any body of people can take the land of another body of people and not be prosecuted in some way for that action by a larger force like international politics, trade partners, or a stronger ally. The implication of taking this position is that when it would maybe come your turn to have the same imposed on you then you would have no reasonable recourse to object, since that objection would be a contradiction to what you previously agreed to, wildly inconsistent.
This is the central point of my criticism of Israel’s continued actions, that if what they were doing was done to them then it would never be acceptable to them or to us, and they would appeal to everyone else to assist them. What is actually happening is that they are blocking anyone from helping the targets of their land grab, while also playing their historical victimhood as the justification for us to pretend we do not notice their unacceptable acts, which I suspect would be described in strongly critical terms if they were enacted by another state. So it can only be justified by them believing that they can take actions upon another body of people because they are them and they are special as humans. This is the sort of thinking that lets empires act horrifically towards those they wish to conquer and subjugate. If the perspective of an Israeli zealot is that a man or woman that holds a different religious belief is less than them in human terms, then why do we not realise that we are obviously going to be categorized in the same way, since we also are not of their belief system? We are of the same value, but we just happen to be, currently, too strong a foe to take on.
This leads us, in moral terms, to to consider the justification of actions based on separations that are not supportable other than to be based on religious beliefs and adherence to scriptures, which is a prejudice of course. If we see each other as other humans, equal humans, which as a first principle we maybe should, then we can never support a persecution against one another unless we fabricate a policy of exclusion concerning that initial observation. The criteria for Israeli settlers, and those that support them, is then that those people are different because they are not Jewish. But I am not Jewish, and likely none of the people I grew up with are either (Protestant or Roman Catholic from the Christian tradition, mostly non practicing), so in truth the Israeli perspective is the same if applied to us also, and most of Britain. It is just a happenstance that their claim to real estate happens to not be focussed on where we occupy. We could easily speculate that if the British Isles were the land that their books of fables and myths cited as promised that they would be treating us no differently, had they the power to, than they are treating the peoples of the region they refer to as Judea.
So we could imagine, and we should, that each of us is smart enough to work out that what we are witnessing is not something that can be justified, and not something that we would wish to be supporters of. We might even contend, as I did earlier, that we would want to make sure that if we did know of such injustice that we would feel something concerning it, maybe we would even take some sort of action, even if that was as little as a social media comment on how we were against it. So why is there not, amongst us reasonably intelligent folks, a backlash or an outcry happening right now? The reason is simple, the media have made the understanding of the situation in Palestine into a complex issue such as the planning poster I mentioned earlier. Rather than focus on the fundamental crux of the underpinning argument, the reasoning, the first principle, we get the nuanced and convoluted arguments on the minute details concerning back and forth actions that happen daily as a result of the conflict. What hospital got bombed and why they did it, and the answer is not to justify their occupation of that region, but to justify the actions within that occupation when they are revealed. George W Bush once answered a difficult question on the conflicts of the early 21st century with “we were attacked”, as if that was enough.
We, the viewers, watch debates on Jus In Bello (just actions during conflict) rather than Jus Ad Bellum (the justification for conflict). Very few of our political actors are willing to tackle the postulate that they have the right to defend themselves with a suggestion that maybe what follows should be limited, or to question whether the Palestinian peoples of the region had any rights prior to this to free themselves from the incarceration and apartheid circumstances they had had to live under in the many decades leading up to their horrific and crude actions as a backlash on October 7th. Nobody, even those brave enough to argue strongly for the cessation of this one-sided war, condones the actions that enabled the Israeli’s to do what some would argue they have long wished to do. We have chosen to not read the poster to the end, not to gain and cognitively process the full picture. I say chosen only because we reach for certain news outlets that have certain comfortable narratives, we could chose otherwise. If we watch Louis Theroux, we see the circus poster, and by doing so cannot hide from the realisations it brings and the mental work we then have to do to find our own justifications in not getting angry at an obvious, potentially genocidal, Israeli perspective.
I am very likely going to be positioned as an antisemite by someone who reads this post, but I do not hate Jews, and I do not like Muslims, I happen to find all religious people abhorrent in equal measure. I do not hate Israelis either because it doesn’t matter where you are from if you are a bad moral actor or supporter, I have a hatred of injustice no matter who is creating and supporting it. I am universally anti religious simply because there cannot be a marrying up of morals with prescribed actions based on differences between peoples derived from slightly differing bronze-age books that have no knowledge and no morals within them. I don’t need to do any work to convince you of that, you already know these things because you don’t base the way you live your life on those mythologies, and you already strongly fear those that try to make you. Try to argue with me on that one, or open the book and do as it says and argue with yourself mentally instead. We call these people fundamentalists, they scare us with the actions they carry out, and we would not chose to live in the cultural circumstances they have created because we are already free and do not wish to be put back into the mental chains that the enlightenment and science broke long ago.
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