I just finished Douglass Murray’s latest book, On Democracies and Death Cults, and wow, is it an incredible book. Difficult to read, simply because of the grim nature of the subject, but a very powerful and very timely book.
My own thinking on Israel and the Middle East has changed a lot since the October 7th attacks. For the record, I studied Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic in college in the 00s, traveled throughout Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and Palestine / Judea & Samaria while I was pursuing my degree. I’ve kept up with geopolitical developments over the years, including during the Arab spring, and have helped some of my Arab friends navigate those developments.
The apocryphal Churchill quote that “if you’re not a liberal by your 20s, you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative by your 50s, you have no brain” very much describes my own experience. I used to be very sympathetic toward the Palestinians, but after the October 7th attacks, my position has shifted almost 180 degrees.
The thing about the Middle East is that even though it’s complex, it’s not really that complicated. Within the Middle East, there are basically three kinds of people:
- the Jews,
- the people who want to kill the Jews, and
- the people who really don’t care.
This dynamic has defined the politics of the region since at least the Babylonian sack of Jerusalem in 600 BC, and possibly quite longer. Possibly, in fact, since the very first Hebrews migrated to the region during the Bronze Age Collapse.
(As a side note, there has been a continuous Jewish presence in the Levant since our first historical records of the Jews. In other words, this is the one place in the world where the Jews are indigenous. Therefore, anyone who argues that the Jewish State of Israel is a “colonist” state is, in effect, arguing for the extermination of the Jews, because there is no other place in the world where the Jews can live and not be considered colonists. At the very least, they are laying the foundation for the ideological position that the Jews should always and everywhere be treated as subhuman.)
With the above dymanic in mind, there are only two configurations that possess any sort of inherent stability. The first is that the Jews are the people in charge of the region AND constitute the majority of the population. That way, even if all of the non-Jews fall into the kill-the-Jews camp, they are still not powerful enough to carry out their plans.
This was the state of affairs from the days of Ezra and Nehemiah basically to the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Following the Babylonian exile, the Jews returned to their homeland under the (mostly) benevolent rule of King Darius of Persia, who allowed them to rebuild the temple, which the Babylonians had destroyed. When Alexander took over the region and the Greeks began to Hellenize it, the Maccabees and other Jewish rulers still managed to hold their own.
But all of that changed when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD. They put down the Jewish revolt with utter ruthlessness, making a desert and calling it peace. They drove the main body of the Jews out of their ancestral homeland, making sure it would never be such a hotbed of rebellion again. They also renamed the region “Palestine,” after the ancestral enemies of the Jews, the Phillistines. The name “Palestine” was originally an insult to the conquered Jewish people, just like the name “Britain” (ie “land of the painted people”) was originally an insult to the conquered Celts. And just like the British came to own the term, the Jews also came to own the term “Palestine” until it was appropriated from them by the Levantine Arabs who wanted to kill all the Jews.
From 70 A.D. until the early 20th century, the Jews were a minority in their own homeland. And so long as their numbers didn’t get too large, things were relatively stable. Sure, there were plenty of people who still wanted to kill them all, but so long as the Jews mostly stayed out of sight, most of the non-Jews frankly didn’t care. It was only when their numbers began to grow that the I-don’t-care faction bled into the kill-them-all faction, leading to pogroms and mass rapes and all sorts of insane atrocities.
But then, in the 19th century, the Jews began to migrate back to the region in large numbers. This led to an inherently unstable configuration which persists to this day, where the Jews and non-Jews are roughly equal in number. The Jews formed the State of Israel with help from their Western patrons, who provided a degree of metastability. But the situation is not long-term stable, and hasn’t been for the last 150 years.
The Americans tried to solve this problem by bringing together the Jews and the people who want to kill the Jews—as if they could ever make peace. This was incredibly naive. So long as there are Jews, there will be people who want to kill them. Individuals may be persuaded to change their positions, but the ideologies of antisemitism are as persistent as the Jewish people themselves. The death cult will never be satisfied until all of the Jews are dead.
What October 7th showed us is that the three-way dynamic of the region is still very much in play, and that the kill-the-Jews faction is still far too strong. And given the way things are changing here in the United States, I suspect that the Jews have, at best, another generation before their Western patrons become unreliable, and the metastable nature of the current configuration begins to deteriorate.
The Abraham Accords are changing things in a very positive way. For once, instead of trying to get the Jews to make a deal with the people who want to kill them, we are moving away from that silly nonsense and cutting those people out of the equation by making a deal with everyone else (like we should have done in the beginning). And with the way that Iran was utterly defeated in the latest war, it looks like that might actually work. But even then I don’t think the situation is going to be long-term stable unless it ultimately leads to a mass resettlement of the Palestinians, because that’s the only thing (aside from the senseless massacre of millions of Israeli Jews) that puts us into a stable configuration.
I think the Israelis know this. And I think that Israel is going to get a lot more aggressive in the coming years, much to the consternation and perplexity of their friends here in the West who do not understand this three-way dynamic (or who think that the key to peace is for the Jews to play nice and not fight back, so that most of the non-Jews fall into the I-don’t-care camp).
Because here’s the thing that almost no one is talking about: the impetus for the October 7th massacre was the transportation of several red heifers to Israel from a ranch in Texas. In order to build the third Jewish temple, the land of the Temple Mount (where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque currently stand) needs to be ritually cleansed by the ashes of a pure red heifer. The reason Hamas called their operation the “Al-Aqsa Flood” was to appeal to their Muslim brothers to defend the temple mount.
From what I understand, most Jews do not currently want to rebuild the temple, and the State of Israel itself has taken strong measures to suppress those who do. But every time the Jews have had a commanding presence in their own ancestral homeland, they have built or maintained a temple on the Temple Mount. So once they feel they’re strong enough, they will probably do it again. And when that happens (or as it is beginning to happen, perhaps even now), I think that this three-way dynamic will become much more of a global phenomenon.
