I had to take down my first impatient attempt to write about Israel.

I think I’m not generally inclined to write about geopolitics; it’s far enough out of my comfort zone to make me impatient. The intricacies of international law and all the dramas of who did what to whom and when require expertise on the level of Jeffrey Sachs. That’s not me.

I appreciate the existence of experts in history, social movements, law, policy and politics. And I understand why the news is focused exclusively on these areas. But this focus is not mine. And yet I have to pay a certain careful, bare-bones attention to those subjects in order to step through those entanglements as carefully as I can, while trying to express a vantage point that calls all that human drama into question.

My feeling is that nothing is going to change this repetitive history of mass murder, or nation against nation, until the illusions of “who we are” dissolve. Not that identity itself would disappear. But identity ceases to be an illusion when it’s held more lightly, as passing reflections on our behavior. But when they become stuck in idolized forms, illusions multiply.

This dissolution of the illusions of identity, in my opinion, would snuff out the various fuses before any of them can lead to war, bypassing the need for political “campaigns” and social “warriors”.

Rather than constantly relighting these fuses of Us against Them, we need to allow that fuse itself to dissolve in a broader vision than us and them. Because every political or social movement starts from the same rotten assumption – namely, a belief in the reality (not mere fictional reality) of a separate Self (whether national, political, religious or racial self, and so on). It’s this belief that is the fuse. And I feel it’s a delusional belief. We are not who we think we are.

But almost everybody finds this level of criticism absurd or far-fetched or unrealistic, or even offensive, and so on. Because people primarily look at nations, tribes and other group entities as if they were real. It’s the psychology underlying this illusion that attracts my interest; not the geopolitical dramas carried out by these fictional entities.

But, again, people are overwhelmingly drawn to the level of human drama – absorbed almost constantly from morning till night by the various Netflix or Hulu dramas involving egos in conflict, or nightly news dramas between nations or demographic groups. Sure, human beings are naturally interested in this level of life, because we’ve lived in complex group dynamics for millions of years.

But that wasn’t the only level of attention we had developed over those millions of years. We also used to be even more deeply attuned to the delicate balance of the natural world; which includes the immaterial mysteries of being alive.

People had to know their relationship to that broader world beyond their petty concerns. In healthy indigenous tribes, people tended to be broad-minded and philosophical. But that sensitivity has faded, as human drama has escalated. And now I believe we’ve reached a point where our political intelligence has made us blind, because now this focus no longer leaves space for a coherent relationship to the larger natural world; and to the even larger immaterial realms, in which our identities are as insignificant as passing dreams.

The personal (whether national, racial or individual) has overshadowed the genuinely communal and the authentic cosmic. The nested hierarchy of order has been reversed to the point where we value only self-interest; which is a vantage point so benighted that it can’t recognize its own self-destructive destiny.

So, this is why I feel that these “abstract” essays are actually far more practical than constantly focusing on political, cultural and national news. We can’t find our sanity by focusing constantly on nations and other oppositional identities, as if they were real. A peace treaty is nothing but a truce. And by focusing constantly on politics, we’re only reconfirming our belief in these of images of ourselves and prolonging the foolish dramas.

So, I’m going to keep talking about these illusions, without proposing any additional solutions (which are inevitably political or social solutions). Because the solution in this case is the problem. The solution of politics is the problem because it always reinforces the illusion of separate identities; and these solutions are never any better than mere truces.

Neither Israel nor Palestine Can Be Killed

Neither Israel nor Palestine can be violently eliminated without eliminating both. And these attempts would only strengthen the illusions of both sides. And survivors would rekindle the feud. Every political solution to this “problem” creates injustice and a desire for vengeance that strengthens the illusions of identity. Until the two sides abandon the illusions of one-sided thinking, then this will never end. Because nobody ever entirely eliminates anyone without also eliminating their own decency and righteousness. Whoever “wins” will be destroyed.

But the modern state of Israel as currently constituted, or as a “greater Israel”, seems to be trying to destroy itself in this very manner.

The Violent Elimination of Gaza

The targeted killing of children. Over 18,000 children were killed in Gaza prior to last year’s violence (between 2023 and 2025. The intentional destruction of water and food delivery systems. Systemic torture of prisoners. The targeting of aid workers. Mass Israeli support for the expulsion and genocide of Palestinians. Genocide tourism. Systemic sexual assault. Settler violence.

There is no geopolitical or strategic calculation that justifies this sickening, sociopathic brutality. Any such calculations show no concern for people as human beings, only as brand name identities.

Antisemitic Elements in Israel Itself

The US partnership with Israel was not a friendship from the start. Nations are machines of one-sided thinking and self-centered violence. They don’t make friendships, only alliances. Alliances are like friendships among sociopaths. They are momentary coincidences of self-interest. We know this on a certain level, but act as if America or Israel or Iran, etc., were capable of decency. They’re not. They are only self-centered, mechanical entities with nothing but manipulative motives. People (with genuine empathy) who subsume themselves under these brand names absorb the mechanical and sociopathic motives of the institutions, just as employees absorb the sociopathic motivations of a profit-seeking corporation. The system ends up running us like toxoplasma Gondii.

So, the alliance between the US and Israel is not a friendship; and it’s particularly unfriendly to Jewish people.

I think western support for Israel is blatantly manipulative. And vice versa.

The status of Jewish people in America and Europe changed (contingently) from “non-white” to “white” right after the genocide – right after America (for one) refused to accept boatloads of Jewish refugees. And allies refused to bomb the rail lines carrying the families to the camps. This support for the modern state of Israel was merely a convenience, allowing the Jewish refugees to serve as a proxy western colonizing force in the Middle East.

This hijacking of Israel was easy because “Israel” worked on two levels – as a genuine unifying call to a people who had been brutalized and violated in the most disgusting ways; and as a cold calculation of geopolitical chess by the West, without regard for the chaos this would cause for the people in that region themselves, Islamic and Jewish.

After all, the whole middle east is an anti-Arab/Persian chessboard set up mainly by the English, who threw these various states together without regard for tribal boundaries.

Or, in fact, they were thrown together as a strategy to maintain constant conflict, which could be manipulated for western benefit. The same strategy used by Rome in Germania.

Two brutalized peoples — the Jews and the Muslims — have been made into opposing pawns to benefit the West. In the West, we’re pressured into seeing only antisemitism as the pervasive evil; as if seeing anti-Arab/anti Persian bias is itself antisemitic. But it’s a whole package. A white supremacist crusade that cares for neither side, beyond cold calculations of State power.

Israel and Judaism – a Category Confusion

The West calculated on that long-cherished memory of Israel in the Bible — -that ancient unifying vision maintained like the most precious talisman of a better world. The faith that got Jewish people through centuries of abuse was a faith in returning “Home”. But on a less romantic level this meant “returning” to a home most European Jews had never personally seen before. And a home already belonging to other people.

And because of this complex religious connection to a particular piece of land, the government of Israel became easily conflated with being Jewish. This conflation of Jewishness with the state apparatus of Israel is even true among many Jewish Americans who have never set foot in Israel.

The illusions of national identity become even more difficult to recognize when church and state are joined. The Islamic states, the Jewish state, the Christian states, all end up betraying their own religious truths, and becoming one-sided (unwholly, unholy) illusions.

In a “religious state”, the state apparatus largely replaces or absorbs the actual religious faith as a source of identity. This is like a category confusion in philosophy. Israel is the confusion of a religious world (with its faith in a mythic homecoming) with a geopolitical world, with its sociopathic faith in Real Politik. The two value systems collide. And the timescales of the various religious deeds to the land are in conflict from the start.

And it places Jewish people who absorb this category conflation in tremendous danger, because any egregious acts committed by the state can now serve as a pretext for real antisemitism.

And when the behavior of the state of Israel becomes closely aligned with “being Jewish”, this undermines the capacity for self-criticism and state restraint. Being able to love your “country” and oppose your “government” becomes more difficult. And this is why criticism of Israeli policies is often equated with antisemitism.

So, any suggestion that the state of Israel was hijacked from its origins might be perceived as a criticism of the origins of Judaism itself, because for many people, the state of Israel and Judaism have merged their identities to the point where their destinies seem tied. But much of what I learned here has come from rabbis who criticize the modern state as a betrayal of Judaism.

It is through these rabbis that my respect for Judaism has grown, while my respect for the state of Israel has plummeted. I have disengaged the two forms. In this sense, my opposition to the behavior of Israel can’t diminish my love for Judaism or for the long and righteous history of Jewish people. And it makes me want to express this difference openly, because Jewish people are being destroyed by this conflation with a brutal state apparatus.

And the same can be said of Palestinians. My love for them is unrelated to Hamas. It is the human being behind the dreamt veils of identity that are loved, not one side or another.

And this love grants access to the Palestinian perspective, and how they might reasonably perceive the very origins of the modern state as the first aggression. Even saying this might register to some as an attack on Judaism, because religion and state have so strongly converged.

But every mirror enemy depends on knowing only half the story and trying not to notice this self-deception. And every justified retaliation that follows is arguably a new starting point in the conflict.

Collectively we remain infants suckling on the Great Lies of civilization, with its one-sided liturgies of patriotic self-justification. So, we’re never able to grow into full adults, as far as I can see. The leaders of this world are big babies, periodically exploding in carpet bombing temper tantrums; while their supporters (the little people as they say) are still clinging to the malnourishing teats of these strongmen, drawing meager sustenance from their unloving, hate-spewing tits.

This is a need for love that has turned in on itself to avoid the cruelty of the world, until it becomes a need to hate; a need for enemies to define us. An identity rooted in the partnership of war.

Why Is this All So Repetitive?

Maybe this suffering goes on and on because the Holocaust (and all the other holocausts in history) were never mourned sufficiently. None of the perpetrators fell to the ground and wept with shame or vowed to give up the pretense of superiority. The perpetrators merely hid in dark corners and pretended to be innocent victims of their own “sabotaged” defeat.

The rest of us wanted to go on as if nothing happened. We didn’t openly deny what happened, but we carried on as if it had never happened. As if there was no need to change.

I can’t help imagining why it must feel necessary to recall the traumas, because forgetting becomes another form of annihilation. And yet this also can lead to stoking the embers of fear, until we become chained to the nightmare of history as if it were our salvation.

But this is a human story, not merely the story of this or that particular tribe. It is the story of becoming trapped in the one-sided view, until there is no way out of the nightmare of history without losing the very narrative thread which sustained us. A catch-22. And the ancestors peer through the veils of time to question your loyalty: will you be the broken link in one-sided loyalty that causes us to disappear?

All the world’s conflicts draw upon this ancient chain of pain. Every chained human community becomes the real religion. It’s not faith in god or faith in something larger than a nation or tribe or race or corporate logo or political party. It is faith in trauma itself, an aching need for this confirmation of suffering, which defines who we are.

That’s why peace is boring. We begin to dissolve our identities in peace.

And that’s why the fascists are always searching for injuries to their delicate egos. Hands are joined, chanting the liturgies of a foretold return of pain and betrayal, as a reminder, and – worse yet – as a way of justifying the vengeance.