I did not.

The single deadliest day of the war, of course, was October 7, 2023. About 1200 Israelis were killed in the invasion and massacre. 1600 of the Palestinian invaders were killed in Israel, and 200 more Palestinians were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

A fucking moron figures out how to identify a fucking moron without realizing it makes him and all the people he has promoted in the last three years fucking morons. Because he's a — well, you get it.

Worth keeping this in mind in our assessment of all the contemporaneous "Ceasefire Now" and "Eyes on Rafah" campaigns.

The "cause" doesn't exist without murderous antisemitism because its goal is antisemitic murder and its only means of mobilization is antisemitic hysteria. This isn't some tactical mistake. Here is what I wrote a week after the massacre. medium.com/@shanymor/maybe-s…

With some 75,000 fatalities, the war in Gaza since October 7 has some 40% of the total fatalities in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the deadliest single day for the Palestinian people really does occur during those three years of bloody war. But which day?

Britain has faced much less than Israel and done much worse to counter it. And it kept the peace for decades afterward by threatening far worse than that even. The general denialism and moral posturing is distasteful to say the least.

The important thing to add here is that it is not an enemy that just disappears after the attack, but one that is theologically committed to continuing such attacks as long as it can, says it will do so, and whose immediate victory galvanizes its broad basis of support elsewhere.

It was the Chekhovian gun in Act 1. To be shocked that a global justice-oriented institution might be hijacked by Israel obsessives is plausible in say, 1958. But if you didn't see that in 1998, you were willfully blind.

It's worse. Even the condemnations subtly reinforce the central libels animating the violence. They wink at the baying mob, while excusing the elites that have indulged it and given it years of moral backing.

But when you can render the Hebrew acronym for it as an almost-homograph for Nazi, the temptation is overwhelming. Desperately wanting to see the Jews as Nazis is the seductive temptation of the entire "criticism of Israel" obsession, with "Naza" only the latest iteration.

And while you might be wrong about what motivates suicide bombers & Nukhba fighters, and you might be wrong about what motivates the theological passions the LRB-Guardian crowd in their transparent antisemitism, that superiority never feels false—if anything, it's reassuring.

There is shockingly little interest in the question of what Hamas actually hoped to achieve on October 7. Nearly everything written about it in the west boils down to either the “despair” hypothesis or the “trap”hypothesis, both of which are just western/Israeli projections...