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.

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 it’s a delusional belief. We are not who we think we are.

And the dissolution of these illusions of identity would snuff out the various fuses before any of them can lead to war.

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.

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 that reconfirms these opposing identities 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. And of course, the absurdity of a “Holy Land” made safe by slaughter.

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

Geopolitics can become so complex and ingrown that we lose sight of its basic simplicity as a childish game of deception and brute power. The details of who did what when and all the subtleties of different “peace” proposals obscure the basic fairy tale of a nation or a people or a history or a destiny. The pretenses of being chosen or righteous or defensive or unique are the shared fairy tales in different tellings of every nation and tribe on earth. Germany had just finished crashing to earth after its own flight of fancy as a chosen, superior and destined “race.” And England was still basking in it own fading myths of greatness and America was just getting started in glorifying itself. And every single entity ever imagined, from the individual to the racial, the tribal, to the national, to the species itself, was addicted to their own brutal performance of self-inflating make-believe and fairy tale.

And that’s how we should regard every single national entity on the planet — as self-inflating bullshit. Childish fancy gone rogue.

So, let’s cut the crap: The US partnership with Israel is not a friendship. Nations are machines of one-sided thinking and self-centered violence. In other words, they can only exist as vehicles of self-deception. They don’t seek peace, only advantages from strategic truces. 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. It’s time to quit glorifying sociopathic fairy tales and encouraging the adolescent fantasies of geopolitics. 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.

And in the colliding fantasies of these different fake entities of nations, the idea of a modern rebirth of a legendary Israel became an odd “final solution” to a Western cultural problem. And this very solution was anti-semitic, because it placed human beings who practice the Jewish faith in a tremendously dangerous predicament, making them targets merely by juxtaposition.

At the time, there were calls to make a homeland for displaced European Jews in Europe, where the crimes occurred, rather than in Palestine, which had nothing to do with what happened. There were warnings from many quarters, including many leading Jewish thinkers, like Einstein and Hannah Arrendt, that the implantation of a modern state of Israel in the midst of what was already an anti-Arab/Persian chessboard set up by the English would destabilize the region even more.

But nobody wanted the Jews in Europe or America or anywhere else. They were all anti-semitic. (Antisemitism is another self-fulfilling element of most European fairy tales of identity). America had already refused to accept boatloads of Jewish refugees during the war. And allies didn’t even bother to bomb the rail lines carrying the families to the camps. And there was already a strong Zionist fantasy gaining ground among mainly European refugees in the region, who were already trying to establish a new Israel in Palestine before 1947. So, a modern state of Israel became by default the easiest “solution” for “the Jewish problem”, as it was called.

And after a few decades, western countries who had opposed this destabilizing move began to realize the potential of Israel as a western outpost, or proxy western colonizing force in the Middle East. And Israel didn’t mind serving that role, because it gave them protective overlords and an easy way to reverse black-mail these “lords” into keeping them wealthy ad well-armed. (This is all being described here in simplified terms as a way to remember the fairy tale nature of geopolitics. Because the various political heroes who fashioned these complex chess moves and momentary peace treaties are sold to us as geopolitical geniuses, when all they’re doing from a wider perspective is reacting blindly from a script no deeper than a child’s fantasy).

And so, two brutalized peoples — the Jews and the Muslims — thereby ended up playing the roles of opposing pawns to benefit the rich, oil-hungry nations of the West.

Israel and Judaism – a Category Confusion

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 through 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 and tribal 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) hypocrisies.

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.

In other words, the mythic, symbolic and spiritual truth of “Israel” got highjacked or crushed by the modern state of Isreal.

And it placed Jewish people who absorbed this category conflation in tremendous danger, because any egregious acts committed by the state could 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 transcendent myth of “Israel” was hijacked the modern state of Israel might be perceived as a criticism 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 in their mutual nightmare of a fairy tale. 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 understand 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.

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Interesting related videos:

Israel Wasn’t a Colonial Project. It Was Part of a Global Breakup

Matthew Cooke’s “Does Israel Have a Right to Exist? Does Any Nation?”