The one merit of the recent attacks against the Gazan Palestinians has been that any doubts regarding the Israeli government’s motivations have been torn aside, any illusions that might have lingered being brutally dispelled. At very least Palestinian life is seen as a useful political tool, far more likely it is inherently seen as a threat which requires containment or eradication.

There is clearly no longer much will towards a Two State Solution from Kadima, either way. If this was the case then we would be seeing IDF troops engaged in purging the West Bank of settlers. As it is they are occupied attempting to topple a democratically elected government, as is now the stated aim of the Israeli government. This makes it abundantly clear that the Israelis are committed to the destruction of only organisation which could possibly be capable of constructing a separate Palestinian state.

It takes nationalists to build a nation. If not Hamas then there simply exists no alternative. Anyone who imagines the clinically corrupt kleptocrats of Fatah are potential forgers of an independent Palestine has clearly not examined their record, and knows a good deal less about them than do the Palestinians. 

Purportedly the reasoning for this dedication to removing Hamas from power is to return moderates to power. This presumes that a moderate organisation (which presently exists only within the fantasy of squeamish westerners) would spring into existence after the Palestinians have endured the notoriously moderating experiences of heavy bombing, starvation, tank attacks and the use of chemical weaponry against its civilian populace.

A far likelier consequence will be the rise of the Salafists, a faction that deem Hamas overly soft.

I will not insult the intelligence of the Israeli politico-military establishment by presuming that they are unaware of this. That they do not realise the consequence of bombing mosques and shelling schools will be radicalisation instead of liberalisation. After all, this was precisely the outcome of their tactics previously when they attacked Fatah and saw them replaced with Hamas. I refuse to accept that the decision makers are ignorant imbeciles and accordingly the only conclusion possible to draw is that the sort of organisation which will not offer decade long ceasefires is the sort that they want in power.

This of course offers pretext to continue using the army upon the Palestinians instead of the West Bank settlers, with the former move being one which will shore up support for the government and the latter one which would threaten to topple it.

But what else does the stated intention of removing Hamas from power tell us? That even the supposed “centrists” of Kadima do not care for democracy. Hamas have a strong electoral mandate and to the Israeli government this is meaningless. They are not concerned with the wishes of the Palestinian and the outcome of the elections are not acceptable save when parties to their liking take power.

Obvious enough, and something which many have argued for a long time. But what are the wider implications? Well together these facts (that they would rather attack Palestinians than remove the West Bank settlers, and that they have no concern for the votes of Palestinians) give us a clear indication of the future: unless the West Bank is purged a Palestinian majority will arise shortly. It has become clear that the Israeli Right is too strong and the will of the centrists (assuming that they do not share the right’s wishes) is too weak. The West Bank will remain occupied territories.

From this point Israel is left the following three options:

1) Implement apartheid proper and deny all arabs votes.

2) Ethnically cleanse until a Jewish majority is maintained.

3) Accept the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Now from the recent evidence we have been given by the Israeli government, which of these options do you imagine they will opt for? Either of the former two, it should be clear, would be unsurprising. Both is conceivable. I know only that it will not be the latter.

But whether they implement the first or second, whether the Israeli centre holds against the right or fails to, the end of Israeli democracy approaches. The only way it can be sustained is through further ethnic cleansing of the type that originally birthed the state. It only remains to be seen if America will back the Zionist project to the hilt.

A common criticism of history prior to the modern era is that it is in some way “useless”. It helps us understand little about the world around us and serves limited value for anything useful. This is commonly known as the desire for a subject to have a “utilitarian” function, although frankly I would dispute this usage upon the grounds that if people enjoy studying history and others enjoy reading it then that makes it a fairly pleasure productive activity.

Leaving aside this and, indeed, the argument at large for a moment though I find it impossible to approach a recent argument made by the American Right (as well as much of the British) upon any other level.

Glenn Greenwald identifies this trend in an excellent article here. One of the key references is Glenn Reynolds, who argued the following:

“Cycles of violence” continue until one side wins decisively.  Personally, I’d rather that were the Israelis, since they’re civilized people and not barbarians.

Now with hindsight my reaction would be: what is a supposed “Libertarian” doing assigning traits to a side? Should he not be considering every atomised person on a one-by-one basis? But my immediate reaction was as follows:

Just what exactly does Glenn Reynolds imagine a barbarian is?

Now I don’t want to be presumptuous here, but I imagine that his usage is largely derived from the negative cultural implications of the word. It isn’t the sort of one I’d want ascribed to me, that much I know. But a vast amount of this negativity has a historical source: the barbarians are seen as the ones that sacked Rome and disbanded the Roman Empire, thus ending what many consider to be the pinnacle of human civilisation.

So barbarians are beings that destroy things of beauty and splendour beyond their understanding. They wreck the achievements of centuries and are incapable of sustaining sophistication of any kind. As Greenwald asks:

Why should a superior, civilized, peaceful society allow the welfare of violent, hateful barbarians to interfere with its objectives?  How can the deaths or suffering of thousands of barbarians ever be weighed against the death of even a single civilized person?

But the difficulty is that as historical characters barbarians seem to have gotten a hard rap. As theories go the “Decline and Fall” narrative is pretty Old School. I won’t pretend to know a massive amount on the topic (I’ve attended a lecture or two on it) but it’s been made clear to me that the new line which I am most likely to encounter from historians, after a variety of academic works and one large project which focused on the issue, is that the Roman Empire was unquestionably transformed, but not neccessarily degraded by the barbarian take over. For example:

• The languages spoken were often more complex than that of the Romans.
• There wasn’t a massive cultural decline per se, although things did certainly alter.
• Neither did religion shift in an earth-shattering way, given that almost all of the barbarians were Christians (including those behind the “Fall of Rome”).
• The decline of urban areas was also to be found in the part of the Roman Empire which remained and was not taken over by the barbarians, the Eastern portion which we now call the Byzantine Empire; rather than the scenario being one of foolish barbarians unable to maintain complex infrastructure.
  

Personally I still think that the East was superior in its achievements to the barbarian west, but largely this was due to the East being unified into a singularity that had central rule from the leadership of Constantinople instead of being ruled over by a variety of different peoples. It was not that each of the barbarian tribes were foul and philistine bunch which set about burning and raping things when they should have been collecting taxes and maintaining aqueducts.

Indeed, when the Byzantines sent a barbarian to be Their Man In Italy the cultural consequences for Ravenna were astounding, rendering it a unique and outstanding city which can still be seen there today. The Ostrogoth in question became known as Theodoric the Great, he build magnificent palaces with superb mosaics (that Justinian would later have him and all his aristocracy purged from, save some spectral hands) and managed to reconcile the believers of the Arian heresy with more mainstream Orthodox Christians, creating an oasis of religious pluralism centuries ahead of its time. Even the man’s mausoleum is one of the most impressive in the region.

So why does this matter to Reynold’s argument? Because he is attempting to wield a concept which is historical fiction. The barbarians were civilised, in claiming otherwise what is being grabbed onto is some bizarre ideal of a sub-human which exists and has existed solely within the heads of those conforming to the prejudices which stretch back either to the Romans themselves or else to the wealthy historians who got upset when there was a sudden deficit of villas and thought that that about said it all.

It can thus be shown that in support of his prejudice Reynolds has grasped for a support and simply grabbed more prejudice. The implicit insult he has hurled is in fact a backhanded compliment, while the praise to the Israelis is (by comparison) meaningless. Indeed, given that he is doubtless entirely ignorant of the fashion in which the historical debate has progressed and instead of making a throwaway comparison with any weight, was attempting to make a brief jab, blithely unaware of his absolute intellectual failure. I have little doubt that he was simply taking hold of whichever slur came to hand and letting loose.

But if you detach barbarianism from its actual past and instead opt purely for some fantastical construct what are you saying beyond “These are people which I dislike”?

But the utter absence of any appropriate term for his quarry once the myth of decline is exploded is deeply telling: there really is no immediately apparent example of a group of people who’s lives were worthless and who’s attitudes towards civilisation were entirely negative. Indeed the closest examples that spring to my mind are the restless nomads such as the Avars which plagued first the Byzantines and then Carolingians, and those were a constantly travelling set of warriors who could not be further from the helplessly static Gazans. And even then it could be their absence of written records (leaving their various enemies to tell us all we now know, which is never a good policy with regards to posterity) rather than any inherent malignity that those hunter-gatherers possessed.

Ultimately, as Reynolds should damn well know given the ideology he claims allegiance to, there are not different forms of human being that you can simply group together and embrace or dismiss out of hand. There are peoples who’s achievements exceed others but to find one which is truly worthless is a feat.

Reynolds casts up a dichotomy without a basis.

Having been encouraged by Douglas and inspired by Ali’s return of the instructions to the frontpage, I decided to give RSSing a go. I can summarise my displeasure with the experience in three words: No. Fucking. Backgrounds.

If I wanted to experience the internet with a uniform white wall behind it I’d return to the early nineties.

Freddie makes a sterling post describing the impact of the left hawks. It’s a great piece, as so many of his are. He’s a magnanimous victor, which is invariably the best kind, who makes it clear that the exact reason he proposes mercy for the hawks is that their itching desire to start purging was their worst feature. Although they occasionally reached that stage in a non sequitorious flourish things were perhaps not quite as bad, but when there is a sizable community where the entirety disputes Hugo Chavez’s claim to left affiliation we’re near enough getting there. What we lacked was an anti-war left insurgent capable of getting elected (besides George Galloway, that is, who was termed a “Maverick” by the media in what was a fairly blatant establishment cipher for “We hope that this doesn’t happen more often) and by this stage it’s rather too late.

Perhaps a further comparison to them is required, but I’m too lazy and tired to give it at present.

Meanwhile Mr. Miller 2.0 talks about “White Working Class” and the other kind. Not a word wrong, as per usual.

Here Janine talks banners and Holocausts and is correct: I saw so many on the Sunday protest they basically ended up passing me by, but that’s inflammatory stuff and I doubt it does a lot of good. The aforementioned Gorgeous George makes a distinction between “Capital H” Holocaust and, presumably, the other differently defined and less horrifying lower case h sort here (also worth a listen for his interview with *l!ver K@mm, where he calls Ka*m a “Banker” repeatedely and succeeded in pissing him off so much he made two whiny posts on the matter, which is probably as butthurt as the man is allowed to get) but I’m not quite sure that that’s good enough. GG, at least, bothers to make the distinction between an industrial attempt at racial obliteration and the deeply devastating but greatly smaller scale and incredibly more sporadic bombing of Gaza.

And finally, Craig Murray restrains himself laudably on the topic of Gordon Brown. An example to us all.