1/ For me, the most impactful horror of Israeliness at the moment does not lie with those frothing at the mouth, full of bloodlust and rage. Murderous racists exist everywhere. They are not the majority. I can't get past the normalizers, those who turn reality into tactics. ---> 2/ These are the people, the great majority of Israelis, who say and write things like, "but wait a second! There's an actual problem here! Gaza is uninhabitable. We can't have nearly 2000000 people just hanging about. Let's get creative and wokeness be damned!" --->

1/ The Israeli center-left is now beginning to spin theories about a Qatari conspiracy not just to take over the world (parroting MAGA propaganda) but to destroy Israel from within. How so? Qatar is putting in motion an Arab "Marshall Plan" for Gaza! ---> 2/ The dastardly Qataris will unite the Arab world around the cause and will then negotiate a detente with Iran without need of American (or Chinese) help, help that always comes with strings attached. But Qatar is a dictatorship! And it promotes political Islam! --->

1/ Our PM is losing it. So is his government. There is very little "state" left. We are all Auden's "children afraid of the dark". After a wave of murderous hatred comes a wave of guilt articulated as fear. We denied our part in the destruction of Gaza. We can't anymore. ---> 2/ Not when it comes to the Palestinians, of course. They are not really here; and if they are, it is wholly their problem. But we can see ourselves. We can see our prisoners returning. Deny as we may, rage as we may, we still know that we did this even if we can't say it. --->

1/ The Israeli left now attempts to explain why the images of our emaciated prisoners returning home should not be cause for a resumption of the killing. The assumption is that we are within our rights to nuke Gaza, but we shouldn't. Why shouldn't we? ---> 2/ "Because we are better than "them". Hamas is a murderous terrorist organization, devoid of any humanity or morals. They really do just want to kill us! But we are not like them. We are good. We make mistakes but we rectify them. We fight only when and if we must. " --->

1/ Pay attention to the Israelis who call the new ethnic cleansing initiative "interesting". They will shape the immediate future more powerfully than the settlers baying at the gates of Gaza. These "interested" Israelis have been the most effective genocidaires. ---> 2/ There is a symmetry apparent in the execution of the genocide and in this current, open embrace of ethnic cleansing. Both were generated and driven from a place so deep that no "plans" were necessary. We just did it. Pilots bombed, soldiers shot and burned and looted. Us. --->

1/ Israel has never planned, but Israel has always dreamed about driving all Palestinians out. What you hear coming out of Israel now - "only if it is voluntary, of course! Why would we stand in their way! They want a future!" - is as mainstream as it gets here. ---> 2/ Plans are something else. I think that when one considers our genocidal campaign in Gaza it is easily discernible that there were no plans. There was a sense of a dreamscape made accessible, an inviolable righteousness eternally validated. All "plans" failed. --->

1/ Having just written about the potential for a radical politics of being, here comes the current installment of the Trump cabaret and demonstrates the urgency of such a politics. Lies are not the opposite of the truth. Lies turn the truth into one option among many. ---> 2/ Lies are noise, a destructive plurality of "possibilities" that may or may not occur, wholly or partially. In a world of lies there is no possibility of being. Being is, first and foremost, a bond. One cannot be alone, in a vacuum or in a world of shadows and phantasms. --->

1/ A personal political thread. I am thinking a lot about the radical politics of being. The dehumanization that has become the defining feature of collective Israeliness is the driver of the our genocide. None of us deserve pity. But the genocide also shapes us. ---> 2/ The open support for genocide is one thing. We have a great many supremacist racists here. They see their dreams on the verge of realization and they are giddy with anticipation. They should be seen fascists and fought as such. Most of us are quiet enablers. --->

1/ A new initiative announced by the Israeli airforce: pilots will now join ground troops on "arrest operations", getting to know the terrain they bomb from above intimately from below. This initiative has been named "Hibur me-shamaim", literally "a match made in heaven." ---> 2/ See us circling our wagons, deepening the moat and raising our walls even higher. Our repressive machine needs to be seamless, an integrated effort without filters or reservations. No use pretending that we take precautions. We decide who loves and dies. No one is free. --->

1/ Another lesson that can and should be learned from our genocide in Gaza is a lesson about clarity. Israeli obfuscation assisted and promoted the genocide in two main, time-dependent ways. I will call the first way "revenge/existential threat". ---> 2/ After the October 7th massacre Israel began to bomb Gaza in a fashion that can only be called indiscriminate. Just about all protections for civilians were lifted in the search for "Hamas". There was little criticism but Israel was ready for it with a double-edged sword. --->

1/ I doubt many of my readers have either patience or desire to read more musings on the collective Israeli psyche. "They are evil" and that's that. I won't argue but I will suggest respectfully that evil is also human and that simply writing it off does not suffice. ---> 2/ There are lessons to be learned from Israel's behavior. There is justice to be meted out and it precedes the lessons, but the lessons are there. If they are learned by humans everywhere, perhaps it might be possible to prevent or hamper the next genocide at inception. --->

1/ Some thoughts about the hostages and the effect of their return on Israeli society: ---> 2/ The existence of the hostages allowed Israeli society to occupy a collective mental state that could both support the genocide and deny its existence. As far as we were concerned, the greatest failure of the Israeli state was allowing the hostages to be taken. --->

1/ How can I tell Israel lost its genocidal campaign? Because no one but the settlers is talking about its resumption. Instead, inquests and justifications for various war crimes are being leaked to Israeli media. We won't own our genocide, but we know it has failed. ---> 2/ We are running for the hills. Part of our denial is the escalation of lethal violence in the West Bank. It is an act of desperation. We are flogging the dead horse of "Iranian sponsored terrorism". But suddenly all of our "necessities" arw frowned upon. --->

1/ Two thoughts about Israeli land grabs and Trump. First, the Gazans and the Lebanese returning to their homes despite Israeli threats (and fire) are not simply desperate. They understand that Israel is not progressing. We are stuck. Our actions have consequences. ---> 2/ It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this understanding. They are not "testing" Israel. They are doing what they feel they should do and consider the risk from Israel to be smaller than it has ever been. They are correct. Our bluff has been called. --->

1/ The more our illusions crumble, the more we retreat into a Boschian hellscape of our own devising. If it isn't Hamas, it's Iran; if it isn't Iran it is the global antisemitic left; if it isn't the global left we'll settle for our own "radicals". The flames must rage. ---> 2/ Because this, the actual state of affairs, can't be right. It is impossible the our combined might and rectitude have amounted to worse than nothing. We foresook our own in the name of our righteousness. Now we are at the mercy of the "demons". --->

1/ The genocide and my medical issues (chemo progressing; waiting on the results of a PET CT to schedule the next operation) have made/allowed me to sever most of my social connections. I find it very difficult to have conversations with most of my countrymen. ---> 2/ Our genocide is the product of decades devoted to the willful dehumanization of the Palestinians. The Holocaust was a much quicker process in that sense. The Nazis came to power with an ordely plan and were quick to execute. We never thought we had a plan. --->

1/ I understand Palestinian mistrust of Israel and the conviction that Israel plans to resume the genocide after 42 days. This conviction is based on an assumption of Israeli strength. I believe that assumption is wrong. Israel has never been so weak across the board. ---> 2/ Everything we attempted to do has failed. We could not destroy Hamas or the Palestinians. We were powerless in preventing the Syrian revolution. We killed Nasrallah but failed to destroy Hizballah. We most certainly did not destroy the Houthis. We lost. --->

1/ Israel will do everything within its power to obfuscate the agreement with Hamas. We have nothing but pettiness and oblivion to sustain us. Still, we are spent. We tried to fulfill our fantasy - making the Palestinians disappear. We did not succeed. ---> 2/ The genocide will never "go away". Israel thought it was ascending as it jumped into a bottomless pit. We have not and will not acknowledge our responsibility for our crimes. We are pretending "normalcy" is both up to us and around the bend. Neither is true. --->

1/ Netanyahu would not have hurried to comply with an "instruction" from Trump to make a deal had the deal not suited him to a T. Netanyahu is the clearest distillation of Israeli public opinion. The deal was always a political decision. The politics are shifting. ---> 2/ Israelis have grown tired of "the war". Despite empty boasts about endless "triumphs", Israel has not improved its national security. In fact, Israel has indentured its future to a forever war. That and the documented failures cannot bode well. --->

1/ It is an amazing thing. The mood in Israel is shifting slightly. It is clear the "war" is failing. And still, Palestinians don't exist. Some rejoice when Palestinians die. They are a minority. The rest of us invest all of our energy in denying Palestinian existence. ---> 2/ As time passes this has become our defining national challenge. It isn't just the "removal" of Palestinians from Gaza or from the West Bank for "settlement". Most of us think they are limited, noisy fanatics. Israeliness is founded on silent repression. --->

1/ Watch Israel to get a sense of a world ruled by Trump and Musk. Several things stand out:
1. Human life is meaningless in its most basic form. There is no right to life. If your life gets in the way of "bigger" agendas, your life is forefit. ---> 2/ 2. There is no follow-through. Bombastic statements are made. Actions are taken. Nothing is secured, decided, guaranteed. Israel nabs 10 KMs of Syria; we destroy 40 villages in Lebanon; we build a fort in the middle of Gaza. Is there an endgame? No, despite appearances. --->