The Wild Reed: Two Years of “Indescribable Horror”

The following is excerpted from an article by Branko Marcetic published earlier today by Jacobin.

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Two years ago, Hamas carried out a spree of stomach-churning atrocities against mostly Israeli civilians that left the entire world rightly sickened and enraged at the terrorist group, and with enormous reserves of sympathy for Israel. Out of the infinite options available to it, Israel chose to respond by doing exactly what Hamas had just done to earn the world’s disgust, only on a far larger scale, and in many cases – torturing doctors to death, sniping kids in the head and testicles, and burning hospital patients alive, to name a few – committing atrocities even Hamas itself had not carried out.

This is the grisly paradox of the war in Gaza. The crimes of October 7 – killing families and children, kidnapping, sexual violence – were so heinous and beyond the pale, they somehow justified being repeated and inflicted endlessly on a different group of innocent people, week after week for the next two years.

. . . Western governments have given extraordinary, unflinching backing to Israel, even as it has serially disobeyed them, carried out atrocity after atrocity that has shocked the world, and turned their own voting publics vehemently against both the war and, increasingly, against Israel itself. They have parroted with a straight face the increasingly lazy talking points from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. They have resorted to stunningly authoritarian behavior to stifle criticism of its actions, and been supported in this by a media establishment that has at times wildly violated its own professional standards in defense of the war, including handing the Israeli military censors the final cut of their reporting. They have gone to incredible lengths to avoid ending their military support for the war, right down to taking the unprecedented but ultimately meaningless step of recognizing the Palestinian statehood that they were effectively letting Israel snuff out.

It hasn’t just been Western governments. The Arab states that have historically been Palestine’s champions have the past two years served as Israel’s willing enablers.

As the Israeli military has gradually exterminated a fellow Arab population, these states have not just failed to do much of anything in response – sanctioning Israel, for instance, or even just expelling its diplomats – they have actually rewarded it: upping their trade with Israel, deepening military and economic ties, defending it from the consequences of its widening aggression, and serving as key logistical nodes to keep its war on Gaza going, including for the transfer of Western weapons. As with their Western counterparts, they’ve kept a lid on their increasingly irate populations through heavy-handed repression.

Tomorrow’s history books will have damning verdicts on this generation of political leaders, whose publics have watched them cover for and justify a genocide of largely children with the same practiced, straight-faced certainty they use to play down a budget deficit. It will not be surprising if the unseemly sight of the world’s political elite running out the clock on the crime of crimes pushes public trust in political institutions further into the gutter, and it will not be remotely surprising if years from now, the same media that convinced elderly TV viewers that Jewish-led protests against the war were neo-Nazi rallies treats it as a mystery why.

The flip side of this is the astonishing nonviolent mobilization by ordinary citizens that has bubbled and expanded across the globe against the war, bringing sometimes historic numbers of people into the streets. That mobilization has not only been sustained and actually grown, but has seen a remarkable array of tactics employed to force leaders’ hands, spanning the electorally centered “Uncommitted” movement and traditional civil disobedience like campus occupations, to the Global Sumud Flotilla’s nonviolent breaking of the Israeli blockade and a union-led general strike in Italy, with a Europe-wide dockworker rebellion brewing all the while.

When enough time has passed for us to take stock of the last two years, we shouldn’t forget that the stubborn cruelty of our supposed political betters on this war has never been mirrored in the attitudes of their populations, who, generally speaking, have been way ahead on a host of key questions like supporting a ceasefire, defining the war as a genocide, or putting an arms embargo on Israel. So often these days we’re told the anti-democratic story that it’s the untamed passions of the uncredentialed, uninformed masses that are the problem. In the post–October 7 world, the real danger has been our untamed elites.