Israel, the Hermit Kingdom

            “The world is kind of deserting Israel right now,” Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, remarked after meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. “So they’re worried about that.”

            Their concern is warranted. Less than six months after Hamas attacked on October 7th, killing 1,200 people with brutality that sparked widespread sympathy as well as material support for the Jewish state, polls show that popular opinion in the U.S. and internationally has turned against Israel at unprecedented levels. The UN secretary-general is angry, the International Court of Justice is giving serious consideration to the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and even President Joe Biden—a self-described Zionist who has repeatedly visited Israel and rushed to send it weapons after October 7th—has warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that continuing his ground offensive into Rafah, the last relatively intact city left in the Strip, would cross his “red line.”

            Israelis and their supporters are confused. Why is Israel rapidly sliding into pariah status now?

            Netanyahu has forgotten that Israel is a U.S. vassal state. They don’t call the shots. We do. Bibi nonetheless has insolently rejected Biden’s ultimatum.

            Israelis’ cluelessness is understandable. They’ve been oppressing the Palestinians for decades. They’ve ignored UN resolutions requiring that they stop occupying Arab territory, they’ve sent nearly a million religious fanatics to colonize the West Bank, and they’ve run the only apartheid state in the world following the end of that system in South Africa—yet nothing bad has ever happened to them. America kept sending them billions of dollars a year, arming them with high-tech weapons and intelligence, and ran interference for them at the UN whenever the world tried to hold them accountable for human rights abuses. Why should the good times come to an end?

            The answer, of course, is two-fold. The systemic decimation of Gaza, caught in high-definition videos on social media in an act of ethnic cleansing obviously intended to be succeeded by annexation, is even more extreme than Israel’s previous crimes. Israel’s war against the innocent civilians of Gaza is the feather that broke the world’s patience and indifference…a one-ton feather.

            That the world would turn away from Israel was easy to see coming tens of thousands of dead Gazans ago.

For everyone but the Israelis, that is.

            Israelis are not stupid people. How did they fail to anticipate that they would soon be shunned and despised for what most of the world sees as a grotesque and opportunistic overreaction to October 7th? As a nation created by the UN, no other country depends as much upon international goodwill for its survival.

            Israel, you’ll notice if you visit, is along with North Korea and the United States one of the most insular countries on earth. Whereas most of the world and its news coverage is omnivorously internationalist, and floods in Myanmar or a coup in Central America makes the top of the news, Israel, like the U.S., obsesses over its own domestic affairs to the exclusion of all else with the exception of events that impact it directly—and it does so from an unabashedly nationalist viewpoint.

            Like the U.S., Israel is a melting pot of immigrants where assimilation is expected to include learning the national language. Unlike us, who have been blessed with seeing our mother tongue spread as the 20th and 21st centuries’ lingua franca, more than 90% of Israelis read and speak one of the most globally useless languages anywhere, an artificially revived form of long-dead Hebrew.  Curious Americans looking for viewpoints outside the MSM echo chamber can access the BBC and the CBC and Al Jazeera English for foreign coverage in the English language. Israelis looking for alternative news and opinions in Hebrew have no options.

            Founded in large part by Holocaust survivors, veterans of numerous wars and beleaguered by countless terrorist attacks, it is completely understandable why Israelis are obsessed with security. But security is a two-edged sword. When you keep other people out, you yourself remain inside. And you are deprived of the insights and different ways of looking at things people get when they interact with others and opinions that differ from their own.

            It’s also not very effective. Israel, a self-declared safe haven for global Jewry, is by far the most dangerous country for Jewish people.

            Consider, for example, the massive “smart” high-tech security walls Israel built to keep out residents of the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. They were remarkably effective (until October 7th) at segregating populations that Israelis have come to view as dangerous, if not as inherent enemies. At the same time, Israelis now have no day-to-day interaction with their Arab neighbors. They don’t do business together, they don’t make friends, they don’t date, they don’t talk, they can’t get each other. Walling off Gaza is such an extreme act that it cuts off Israel from the Mediterranean Sea; no country interested in its internal security or military strategy voluntarily relinquishes access to the sea. Even the Arab Israelis who comprise 20% of Israel’s population have found themselves discriminated against, isolated and alienated within their own country.

            It’s the height of irony. It’s not just the people of Gaza who live in a giant open-air concentration camp. Survivors of Germany’s camps have built their own prison camp—for themselves—and it’s the biggest, most effective one of them all.

            No wonder Israelis can’t relate to the rest of the planet. They’ve been living on the inside so long they don’t see the real world anymore. Colonialism, a distinctly 19th and early 20th century project, is an anachronism. Apartheid too. Israelis don’t see that opposing the war against Gaza isn’t the same as anti-Zionism, which itself isn’t the same as anti-Semitism. They don’t understand that, these days, even if you don’t care about the people you are killing to steal their land, you have to pretend that you do (e.g., Biden’s parachute drops of food supplies into the same place his bombs are killing the starving locals).

            A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 75% of Jewish Israelis think the country should ignore pressure from the U.S. to wind down the war in Gaza. A poll by Gallup showed that 65% oppose an independent Palestinian state. “It isn’t fashionable to trust Palestinians, any Palestinians,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert observes. That’s how white South Africans felt about Blacks during apartheid. Now, of course, they’re fine. So it would/be in a unified post-apartheid Palestine.

            Now the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the U.S., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has formally issued a Biden-approved verbal demand for regime change in Israel, saying that Israel should call new elections, which polls indicate Netanyahu might lose.

            Yet Netanyahu persists. “No international pressure will stop Israel,” the prime minister says, pledging to attack Rafah despite Biden’s warning.

            “Isolated, cloistered, militaristic and more unhinged than ever, Israel is becoming the North Korea of the Middle East,” Uri Misgav writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israelis need to tear down their paranoia-grounded security walls—not just to liberate the Palestinians, though that is way overdue!—but to free themselves.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Episode 141 | March 14, 2024: TikTok AtToked, Third Parties on the Rise, Crises in Gaza, Haiti and Ukraine

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

First off, the United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation that would force the Chinese company that owns TikTok to divest itself of the social media company within six months. President Biden says he will pass the measure if it hits his desk but its future is uncertain in the US Senate. Scott and Ted discuss the cultural, economic, legal and political implications of targeting a company purely based on conjecture and speculation with no proof that it has any plans to act nefariously.

Secondly, third and independent party presidential runs are in the news. Robert F Kennedy Junior is about to announce his choice for his voice presidential running mate. No Labels is about to appoint a committee to determine its options for president and vice president this year. Dr. Jill Stein will almost certainly be the nominee for the Green Party. And Dr. Cornel West is running his so-called jazz campaign.

Finally, five months into Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, it is very clear that Israel has overreached and is dangerously close to becoming an international pariah. Meanwhile, United States considers the possibility of military intervention in Haiti, something that has never gone well in the past. Ukraine, of course, will soon have to accept the difficult truth that it has lost its war against Russia.

 

Watch the Video Version: here.

Mixed Messages

At the same time the U.S. is supplying weapons and cash to Israel to arm and fund its war against Gaza, it is dropping food supplies to the Gazans who are starving as a result.

DMZ America Podcast #138: Alabamapalooza, Haley’s Last Stand, Two Years in Ukraine

Editorial cartoonists Ted Rall (from the political Left) and Scott Stantis (from the political Right) discuss the week’s biggest stories without the boring yell fests but with force and passion.

This week, Ted and Scott start with Alabamapalooza! Scott lives in Alabama, which happens to be the improbable center of the week’s news. After a botched execution using a novel Neue asphyxiation method, the state pronounces itself ready to do a lot more. At the same time, the State Supreme Court has declared that frozen embryos developed for in vitro fertilization are full human beings entitled to the full protection of the law, with devastating consequences for women.

In the 2024 election campaign, former ambassador Nikki Haley takes on Donald Trump in her home state of South Carolina with the polls showing her behind by about 65% to 35%. Ted and Scott wonder aloud why exactly she’s still in the race and what is her strategy. On Tuesday, the race moves to Michigan, where Muslim Americans angry about the Biden administration’s support of Israel against the people of Gaza are trying to organize a substantial protest vote against the incoming president.

Finally, it’s the beginning of the third year of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Clearly Russia has won the war. When, if ever, will American policy makers recognize the reality on the ground and reflect that with their funding decisions in Washington? What will a negotiated settlement look like? What should it look like?

Watch the Video Version: here.

Official Lies Aren’t What They Used To Be

            The government’s services keep getting worse.

Even their lies.

            The Bushies told us we had to invade Afghanistan to catch Osama bin Laden and then to go into Iraq because Saddam had WMDs. As the Pentagon knew, bin Laden was already in Pakistan; as Hans Blix and Scott Ritter told us, there was no evidence Saddam had proscribed weapons.

            Sure, they were lies. But they were plausible lies. Theoretically, UBL might have snuck into Afghanistan. Saddam might have acquired WMDs. Those things could have been true.

            Now they’re giving us implausible lies. Not only are their lies, well, lies—they say things that are untrue and can’t possibly be true and that no one, no matter how stupid or uninformed, could believe.

            Democrats go on and on about how nothing is more important than defeating Trump. Democracy itself hangs in the balance! After Trump redux, the re-deluge. Like Hitler, but worse.

            But they don’t really believe that. If liberals really actually thought Adolf Trump was going to suspend the constitution and send his enemies—them—to camps, their sense of survival would have prompted them to select the most charismatic, brilliant, popular, vigorous, 2024 Democratic presidential nominee possible. Instead, they gave us Biden.

            You can’t think Trump is dangerous and go with Biden-Harris. For Democrats, protecting their party’s corporatist status quo matters more Trump’s purported threat to democracy. That’s the truth. We all know.

            Republicans won’t shut up about out-of-control deficit spending and the $34 trillion national debt which, according to them, will tank the economy because, like a family that has to live within its means except for credit cards and student loans and car loans and home mortgages, the government can’t keep spending cash it doesn’t have even though it owns the U.S. Mint and has gotten away with it for, like, a century.

            We know that the fake deficit hawks don’t actually believe what they are saying in real time, as they’re saying it, because while they’re threatening to shut down the government every few months, they keep throwing even more billions of dollars at the Defense Department than the DOD even asks for, so much that the military sucks up more than everything else the government does combined, and that’s not including the wars they put “off the books” and the proxy wars and the wars they charge to the State Department, not to mention debt service on old wars.

            These diametrically opposed lines of rhetoric represent a dramatic shift away from old-fashioned political hypocrisy. If the military is your biggest expense by far and you keep raising it, and you claim to worry about spending, you are lying. No amount of cognitive dissonance can convince us otherwise. You know we know it’s crap yet you keep right on going.

            “Normal” communication by political elites has become prima facie impossible to take seriously.

            We used to be able to accept the announcement by a defeated primary candidate that they would endorse their rival and tour for him because primary campaigns involved incremental ideological variations and hadn’t yet devolved to bloodsport.

            No more. Even after Trump implied that Ted Cruz’s father assassinated JFK and had his surrogates impugn Ron DeSantis as a eunuch and a fey cuck, he collected both men’s endorsements. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden red-baited Bernie Sanders as an existential threat to the Democratic Party yet were rewarded with his fealty. This, we are supposed to think, is adults being adults and maybe this is so, but more than that it’s proof positive that nothing any primary candidate claims to stand for or against should ever be trusted.

            Everywhere we look, politicians are deploying lies whose obviousness is evident out of the gate. Elites will never be believed, they know it,  and they don’t care.

            Israel’s war cabinet tells its traumatized citizens that October 7th came as a surprise at the same time countless specific warnings and the IDF’s eight-hour response time (!) prove that cannot possibly have been the case. As people shout “bring them home,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he’s trying to do just that. But that’s a lie and it has to be a lie because you don’t bomb a place where hostages you care about are being held lest you kill them and anger their captors.

            Families of the doomed hostages cannot believe him and do not believe him yet they do not demand that the bombs stop falling or that those who drop them be removed from power.

            Ukraine, they say, is a fellow democracy even though it has canceled all elections forever and its press is censored and opposition parties are banned, and as a democracy it must be defended by us, who are not really much of a democracy either as Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson and others who have been denied access to ballots can attest. The idea that this famously corrupt post-Soviet republic could have posed as a democracy was cute on its face, of course…shut up and fly your blue and yellow flag.

            Taiwan, Biden says, is a country that must be defended from a Chinese invasion. At the same time, Biden also says, Taiwan is not a country at all nor should it become one, China is the One China and Taiwan is part of it so China can no more invade Taiwan than the U.S. can invade Ohio, but still, we’ll defend Taiwan but really we won’t. “Realists” call this “strategic ambiguity“ but really, it’s just one of those lies-you-see-coming.

            Gender identity, woke elites insist, is not merely psychological but physically real as well: a transwoman is a woman, period. This cannot be true; a transwoman swimmer is not generically the same as her cis female competitors but they tell us that we should tell cis female athletes to chill, it’s not an issue when clearly it’s an issue but the authorities don’t want us to take their ridiculous word for it, just as it is with DEI and its clumsy flip-replacement of one form of systemic discrimination with another, they just want us to shut up.

            The era of the lie-you-know-from-the-start may be over soon.

            Next up: insane truths without the thinnest varnish of deception.

            Though not a renowned rhetorician, our president surely deserves historical credit as the first American leader to say, at the start of a war, that we will lose. Days after the U.S. military began what it plans to be a prolonged bombing campaign against Yemen, an effort to stop the Houthis from attacking ships in the Red Sea, Biden announced that future strikes would not succeed. “Are they [US airstrikes] stopping the Houthis? No,” Biden told reporters. “Will they continue? Yes.”

            They’re not even trying anymore.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Ceasefire in Gaza, An Offer Israel Can’t Refuse—Yet It Is

            The Left is doing something right.

            And it’s something that I initially disagreed with, even though I didn’t comment in a public space.

            When Israel overreacted to Hamas’ October 7th attack on western Israel with a brutal saturation bombing campaign against the Palestinian civilian population of the Gaza Strip, defenders of human rights, antiwar activists and supporters of the Palestinian liberation movement demanded a ceasefire.

            To me, that felt like yet another example of the Left settling for too little, negotiating against itself. Ask for the stars, I usually advise, and you might settle for the moon. Ask for the moon and you might wind up with nothing. A ceasefire isn’t an armistice, much less a peace agreement. It’s merely an interruption in a war. What kind of antiwar activist doesn’t ask for an end to a war?

One of the most famous examples is the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German and British troops crawled out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land to exchange presents, play soccer and celebrate the holiday together. A day or two later, however, World War I resumed. It’s a cute story that changed nothing.

            Israel owes the people of Gaza nothing less than an immediate cessation of hostilities and official acceptance that the current conflict is a war crime for which top Israeli governmental and military officials should be prosecuted. The IDF should withdraw. Israel should pay to rebuild everything it destroyed and compensate the families of dead and wounded Palestinians. It should house everyone it has displaced on Israeli territory, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem if need be. It should recognize a free and sovereign Republic of Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital, within 1967 borders along with a safe corridor to connect the currently non-contiguous borders. The 700,000 settler-colonists should leave the West Bank and return to Israel.

            A ceasefire seems so tiny by comparison.

            Which is why it’s proving effective as a demand.

            When people confront two parties engaged in a conflict, one of their first reactions is to try to assess which, if either, is right (or at least more right). This determination is affected by such cognitive biases as whether one side looks or acts more like the person making the assessment. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some Americans have baked-in personal allegiances because they are Jewish or Muslim.

            Which leaves the other 97% of the population. Citizens of the United States are notoriously ignorant about politics and cultures beyond their borders. To the extent that they pay attention to the Middle East conflict, there has been a historical bias in favor of Israel, a fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ally President Joe Biden relied upon at the beginning of the war in Gaza. As we have seen in the past, however, Israeli overreaction has prompted the public to take a closer look and, following the usual practice, led them to a “pox on both of their houses” stance. Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland repeated that trope in 2020 when she claimed on Fox News that in “…the Middle East, they’ve been fighting for 4,000 years. It’s been an ethno-sectarian battle and psychodrama, and they’ve been killing each other for millennia. Their normal state of condition is war.” (This is not even a little bit true, but let’s leave that for another time.)

            20,000+ dead Palestinians into the latest episode of the conflict, the Gaza war has become a catastrophe too big to ignore or dismiss with glib inanities. Day after day, as Americans’ social media feeds fills with bloody images of dead Palestinian babies, initial public sympathy for Israel has given way to a feeling that the Palestinians of Gaza are victims at least as much as the Israelis of October 7th. Choosing sides is no longer easy. But one thing is clear: the carnage has gone on too long and, even if a long-term conclusion like a two-state solution is impossibly elusive, the bombing simply has to stop.

            By mid-December, three out of five American voters—with few differences between political parties—supported a ceasefire, up significantly from October. The public had caught up to the pro-Palestinian activists. By not asking for much, the Left appears moderate and reasonable.

            Meanwhile, voters keep reading headlines in which the Israeli government is refusing a ceasefire. To the contrary, Netanyahu says the war will continue for “many more months.” Israel is framing itself as rabid, overreaching and bloodthirsty.

            Because it is out of sync with public opinion, good will for Israel is ebbing like the pulse of a man bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. Although older voters still tend to support Israel, a mere 28% of voters between ages 18 and 29 told the latest New York Times/Sienna College poll that they believed Israel was seriously interested in a peaceful solution. On the other hand, half said the Palestinians do want peace.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

One Domino Theory After Another

Over and over, the military tells Americans that grave consequences would follow unless we fight and win in some overseas conflict. Yet we keep losing, and nothing terrible happens. When, if ever, will we see through the military’s fear-mongering?

Trump Will Get Rid of Democracy

Donald Trump, Biden and the Democrats warn, wants to get rid of democracy. Sometimes, however, you have to ask yourself what your government has done for you lately. When it comes to American democracy, the answer is not much.

Victimhood or Vengeance? Israel Wants, But Cannot Have, Both

Victimhood or vengeance: choose one.

You can’t have both.

Israel is about to learn that. Supporters of Israel’s government (as opposed to Israel writ large, which includes millions of Israelis who distrust their government) ask: Why are so few people still talking about October 7th? “It is striking and in some ways shocking that the brutality of the slaughter has receded so quickly in the memories of so many,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked in early November.

Hamas’ attack was vicious, claimed many victims and was so recent—how can it be that those pitiful “kidnapped” posters are falling so flat so soon?

Blame Netanyahu and his co-conspirators.

They chose vengeance over victimhood.

They had a choice. Instead of gleefully indulging themselves in an unseemly orgy of destruction and murder after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 as hostages, Israel’s far-right government might instead have embraced the role of victim: Weep. Express confusion. Witness the personal stories of the dead and the lost. Beg Hamas to return the people it had kidnapped.

No bombs, no invasion, no psychotic rants about “human animals” or officially-tolerated banners genocidally screaming “Zero Gazans” hanging from a bridge in Tel Aviv.

Turn the other cheek.

Precise violence would have been acceptable. A raid against Hamas’ leadership, say. A hostage rescue attempt.

Had Israel not attacked Gaza in a wholesale campaign so devastating that historians have already declared it one of the most destructive in the history of warfare, it would continue to enjoy the sympathy and support of a world which, before the IDF saturation bombing campaign began on October 8th, had abandoned the Palestinians and forgotten the brutality they’d endured at the hands of the Zionists. U.N. resolutions would currently be directed against Hamas, not Israel. The Palestinian liberation movement, theretofore dormant and close to dead, would be a non-entity. America would be as festooned with Israeli flags as it was with Ukrainian ones a year ago.

Victimhood comes with downsides. Like, you can’t ethnically cleanse a couple of million Palestinians you’ve always hated and whose land you’ve long coveted. You look weak.

Look, I get it. War is fun. It keeps you in office even/especially when you’re facing prison time for corruption. Not to mention 141 square miles of beachfront real estate—that’s a land grab far too tasty to pass up.

But vengeance too, Israel is learning, is not without its own costs.

Israel has the right and the duty to defend itself, but this is not that. We’re hearing this linguistic construction a lot, notably from careful politicians and pundits whom, pre-war, would have omitted the qualifier phrase. Even allowing for the president’s imprecise command of English, Joe Biden’s complaint about Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” (using mostly American bombs) was remarkable.

Israel has used 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs to kill 20,000 Gazans and make 2 million homeless by transforming their territory into a wasteland, all while penning them inside a death zone subject to typhoid, cholera and mass famine because Israel refuses to permit food trucks to enter the territory which they have occupied and subjugated for decades. If October 7th was a horror, what Israel has wrought since is that horror hundreds of times over. There must easily be least 100,000 Palestinian bodies buried beneath countless piles of rubble.

We didn’t forget October 7th. Israel eclipsed the Hamas attack, erased it, sacrificed its survivor-hostages to its war so thoroughly that it intentionally shot three of them when they managed to escape. We’re following Israel’s lead.

The U.S. made a similar call after 9/11. I wouldn’t call it a mistake as much as a conscious decision. For the most part, with the exception of the mawkish “never forget” yellow-ribboned grief porn still adorning some police stations and oversized pickup trucks driven by a certain type of right-winger, Americans accepted the erasure of their 3,000 dead in exchange for the mindless purposefulness of Bush’s Global War On Terror, deployed in the post-Cold War period to justify everything from invading Afghanistan to arming Yemen against the Houthis.

Unlike our whiny Israeli allies, we Americans know better than to ask why the world forgot 9/11. We forgot 9/11. We made our choice and we kill with it. “We are all Americans,” Le Monde editorialized the day after; we replied thanks but no thanks, we’ll kill anywhere and everywhere and Freedom Fry you wimps. That much grace and class, we have: we own our thug life and we’re totally good with the fact that the world hates us more than ever.

Meanwhile, that giant ripping sound is Israel’s blank check being torn up.

The whining is what happens when you keep doing the same thing while the world is changing all around you and then complain about it.

Since 1948 Israel has had Big Bad Sam across the ocean to fund and arm them while running interference for them at the U.N., no matter how much Palestinian land they stole or how many Palestinians they killed. After October 7th they assumed they could keep doing whatever they wanted. Biden confirmed their assumption.

Nice run. It’s done now.

Israel no longer controls the narrative. It no longer matters that Al Jazeera is censored by American cable companies because its Gaza footage is now available on social media.  Israel is no longer admired as a safe haven for Holocaust survivors because they are almost all dead and gone; for Millennials and Zoomers Israel is just another country, albeit an anachronistic, uncomfortable vestige of the settler-colonial era with a major stank of apartheid. Israel’s star is sinking.

Sympathy for the vengeful peaked out in the “Dirty Harry”-“Death Wish” 1970s, when violent retribution was expected, accepted and even admired following an unprovoked wrong. Lashing back is now as passé as old white men on a college campus.

Israel is a young country and like a teenager it wants to have things both ways, both to be loved and feared. Now that it has destroyed Gaza, love is off the table. If it is lucky, it will retain a few of its former allies as tolerant frenemies.

If you want to be admired now, you need to get yourself some victimhood status. Consider affirmative action, the politics of transgenderism and income tests for government benefits unrelated to poverty—societal benefits accrue to those perceived to have been oppressed, repressed, tortured, traumatized and brutalized by those with power, wealth and strength—the very definition of nuclear-power Israel’s status in the Middle East. After Palestinians exchanged their retributive PLO of the 1970s for an impotent PA under occupation, the global Left began to embrace their cause. October 7th, a shocking throwback to Munich and the Achille Lauro, might have shifted victimhood back to the Jewish state, at least for a time, had Netanyahu’s gang not rejected self-restraint in favor of ultraviolence and opportunism.

Israel, a nation whose architecture, general aesthetics and fashion is stuck in the 1970s, is paying the price for its failure to grasp 21st century reality:

It’s better to have people feel sorry for you than to be afraid of you.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

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