Gaza and the Moral Collapse of the Jewish People

A wake-up call

Much of my brooding, these days, continues to revolve around the U.S.’s rapid descent into authoritarianism — or what could soon become technocratic totalitarianism, if we don’t start fighting back in earnest. My tendency as a thinker is to approach such matters from a systemic as well as phenomenological perspective. That means, among other things, I try to feel them in my body and in my memory, to the extent they belong to my lived experience and personal past.

Today, I also want to get into the unbearable situation in Gaza and what it unfortunately, tragically, reveals about Israel and, to a certain extent, about Jews and the Jewish situation, in general. Gaza is now a hellscape of devastation. Since October 2023, somewhere between 50,000 - 350,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to various estimates. More than 70% of the population—over 1.5 million people—have been displaced as Israeli bombs flatten entire neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and refugee camps. More than half of Gaza’s population now faces catastrophic hunger, with children dying of starvation in a territory where food and aid are systematically blocked or delayed. This starvation is intentional and methodical. The health system has collapsed, with most hospitals out of service, medical workers killed, and basic supplies like anesthetics or antibiotics unavailable. Yet if you protest against this inhuman devastation, you are in danger of being called anti-Semitic, or, if you are foreign, denied entry into the U.S. What has happened to our history of protecting free speech as an essential component of a democratic society?

I want to explore how we slipped or descended so quickly into a situation where genocide in Gaza and, in the US, mass deportation without any due process or the rule of law have become the “new normal.” We’ve entered a new world — an overarching “vibe shift” — where people, in general or in mass, seem increasingly numb and dissociated. Our capacity for empathy has been diminished, collectively, in ways I could not have predicted a decade ago. It feels like we are forfeiting our humanity even before we get Neurolink’d into the matrix.

I also hope to share profound concerns and uneasiness with my Jewish friends in America and other places outside of Israel. I encounter many diaspora Jews who support Israel’s continued military campaign. I suspect they are reacting out of some kind of epigenetic trauma that doesn’t correspond to the factual, evidential reality of Israel’s ongoing decimation and ethnic cleansing of a large population of human beings, many of them children, who have no place else to go. I strongly believe that American Jews need to switch gears and emphatically embrace the anti-war and anti-genocide position. (I recommend Peter Beinart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza as a helpful read.)

They should do this because it is the morally correct stance — in the past, Jews have been staunch allies of the stateless, repressed, and dispossessed. If they do not, also, the consequences for the future of the Jews, worldwide, may be severe. Anti-Semitism gains traction as the world witnesses this ongoing slaughter, despite almost universal condemnation. The brutal annihilation of Gaza exacerbates all of the negative stereotypes of Jews, empowering conspiracies which see the Jews as a secret cabal controlling the world. By sanctioning this destruction, Jews are in danger of walking into a trap that could close over us in the U.S. Anything could happen, at this point.

But first, to return to the situation in the U.S. for a bit: I’ve mentioned before that I have always had this intimation, ever since childhood, that the U.S. was ripe for fascism — that our “Democratic” system was a shallow mask or veneer, cloaking the reality of military and technocratic power. This is so strange to say but I sensed it not only in the gladiatorial spectacle of American football but in seemingly innocuous TV shows like Seinfeld as well as Tarantino films, which both fetishized and trivialized violence. Not to mention our navel-gazing fiction, film, and art. I felt the American consciousness turning in on itself, hyper-focusing on meaningless junk while ignoring deeper issues, such as our unresolved contradictions, extreme wealth inequality, class warfare, legacy of slavery and genocide, rampant militarism, and the crisis of meaninglessness. Over several decades, we experienced the claustrophobic closure of the American psyche within a self-referential prison of narcissism, cynicism, and pop culture vapidity.

Perhaps starting in the 1970s, we entered a hyper-commercial downward spiral — what now seems a doom spiral — in our culture and media. We saw this in the proliferation of idiotic sitcoms, soaps, game shows and, later, Reality TV, where the most puerile and sensationalist content held the flickering attention of the masses. As Michael Hirschorn wrote in The New York Times about Reality TV, which he helped pioneer at VH-1: “Drawing on such over-acty “lowbrow” genres as Kabuki, commedia dell’arte, British panto and professional wrestling, reality flowered into its more mature incarnation: a fully self-referential cinematic universe, artfully levered between the authentic and confected, a winking co-creation among players, producers and audience that gleefully showcased narcissism and other antisocial character traits. Its rules no longer needed to be explained.” Trump rose to political power as a result of this race to the bottom, from which media executives like Hirschorn profited.

The American people were culturally indoctrinated — entrained over decades — to reject any complex thought, reasoning, or deeper reflection. They were mis-educated, disconnected from reality, to function as compliant, complacent subjects in a consumer abyss. I remember staying in hotel rooms while touring the U.S. where there were over 100 stations on cable TV. On 100 stations, there was literally nothing worth watching; nothing that possessed any thoughtful content at all. In a sense, this was already a kind of psychological and intellectual fascism that was just waiting for its political expression.