Palestinian peace will come like Carthaginian peace and will be as useful.

Maybe there is a clash of civilizations. Americans have been calling it that since 9-11.

This being true, the killing of Palestinians is not only not evil. It is perhaps even morally correct. Children, mothers, doctors saving lives, all of them Palestinian can be murdered without mercy.

Why would you refuse a good thing when it is given to you for free? You don’t have to feel regret when an entire inhabited city was reduced to rubble. You don’t even have to pay attention. Is this not a good thing? Is this not a blessing?

Remember all this is not only good. It is necessary for our civilization. Being OK with mass murder is part of being civilized.

I am doing this all wrong? I should start with the women the Hamas raped on Oct 7^th. Those of you who don’t know: It was brutal. Civilization tells us to pay attention to this date: Oct 7^th 2023.

But then we could go back further and talk about the Khan Yunis massacre in Gaza, where the IDF lined up 257 Palestinian men, taken from their homes, by a wall and shot them. They ordered a curfew so the families could not retrieve the bodies until the next day. No one knew who had died and who had survived.

That was in 1956. Civilization tells us this brutality is less brutal than the brutality of Oct 7^th. It tells us: Forget this date.

The Palestinians do the same thing. They misremember what is uncomfortable and remember what enrages them.

 Maybe that’s what civilization wants. It wants us forgetful and angry. Like old cranks shouting at the clouds. This is good. This is a blessing.

Remember all this is not only good. It is necessary for our civilization. Being OK with mass murder is part of being civilized.

What is the alternative? Feel for the Palestinian doctor having to amputate his child’s leg without anesthetic? Feel for the Israeli woman being stabbed with a knife while she was being raped?

Feel for your enemies? Why do that? That is counter-productive.

Treat the captured with dignity no matter how gruesome your own past? What kind of a bullshit philosophy is that?

That’s not healthy for a civilization. That’s one thing I am sure of.  

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My new year resolution is to stop reading on the matter. It makes you less civilized. It makes you feel more than you should feel. I mean, what am I expecting to learn? The books are not going to tell me who is more complicit in this war. Who is more complicit in any war? Human nature is on display on our phones. We clutched at our pearls and threw a fainting fit during the Ukraine invasion, quite rightly so. But Gaza is not something we are educated enough to discuss, for some reason. We already know one party that is complicit. Us.  

We are the things we break, sure. But we are also the things we don’t make. And civilizations are capable of breaking entire continents and leaving them covered in radiation dust in the name of vengeance. But I am yet to see them produce a single memorable act of authentic forgiveness.    

Maybe this is a clash of civilizations. But from the outside, all civilizations appear to be doing the same thing: whatever it takes to survive.

Who do children call out to when they watch their friends and parents die? Now that all of us have averted our eyes. Who do they call out to? I don’t want to think.

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Let’s think of something else. Something old. Like the Punic wars.

After Carthage, Rome’s greatest enemy, had surrendered, the second Punic war ended. Carthage was stripped of all its armor and ended up being a vassal state to the Romans. Many years later, when the talents due to Rome had been paid off, the Romans used a technicality in the law and tried to force the Carthaginians to burn their own city down. Thus began the Third Punic War and the final desolation of Carthage. It is said that Rome enslaved the citizens of the city who had not been killed and then sowed the soil of the city with salt.

In the aftermath of the Carthaginian solution, a great many Romans came to believe in the Punic curse. That the needless destruction of Carthage had been watched upon by the Gods. And their anger would blot out Rome forever.

Let’s hope the future does not bring a Palestinian curse upon us. And let’s hope we don’t have to spend a lifetime hoping against it.

  

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