An Attack On The Whole Of Humanity

As Israel’s imperious destruction of Gaza has progressed with impunity, “the leader of the free world” has remained an accomplice to the slaughter of Palestinians by its closest ally and proxy. Beyond the political level, I’ve wondered if the metaphysical goal behind the Netanyahu cabal’s evil has been to drive the final nail through the human heart.

This week I got my answer. As the Lebanese author Naji Bakhti has just written, “It was not purely the scale of the devices attack – substantial though it was – that caused shock and disbelief among the Lebanese, but the pervasiveness of it.”

The insertion of explosives in thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies is one of the most evil acts ever perpetrated by a state in the history of nations. So the pervasiveness of the evil pertains not just to the Lebanese, much less demonized Hezbollah, but to the whole of humanity.

As reported, Dr. Elias Warrak, an ophthalmologist at Mount Lebanon University hospital, stated that in 25 years of practice, he had “never removed as many eyes” as he had been obliged to do on Tuesday.

How many people lost their eyes, hands or were maimed for life? Whether Hezbollah soldiers, civilians and children, this was not an act of war, or even “state terrorism,” but a potentially mortal wound to the psyche and soul of humanity.

“In our living rooms, in our pockets, on our wrists, now sat intimate timebombs capable of ending or upending a life…words that were meant for partners, parents, children, had been swallowed whole by ostensible instruments of war,” Bakhti writes.

Hezbollah is a “pivotal component of the ruling elite” in Lebanon, and it was the ostensible target of Mossad. Though Hezbollah is a malevolence, it is not morally equivalent to the Netanyahu regime’s evil since the evil of October 7th by Hamas.

But parsing evil is a fool’s errand. All evildoers act in concert, and the real target of this mind-boggling individualized violence is the human spirit itself.

“If the aim of the attack was to spread fear and panic in the streets of Lebanon, then it succeeded. I saw the terror in the eyes of ordinary people who had recognized it in the eyes of others, who feared for their own lives and those of their loved ones,” Bakhti said.

Terror wasn’t the aim of Israel and the depraved Netanyahu, or even the evil that lurks in the core of human consciousness. Terror and slaughter are means to its ultimate goal, which is the complete destruction of the human spirit. The collective, man-made hatred of millennia wants every person who cares to quit on humanity.

The question then becomes, when did Israel become such a puppet of man’s collective evil? Was it sometime during the interminable reign of the revolting Netanyahu, or before?

The Jewish people have been subjected to incalculable horror, innumerable pogroms and hideous scapegoating throughout history. Has the hurt and hate been stored up in the consciousness of the people, and all the wrongs that were perpetrated on the Jewish people now being perpetrated on Palestinians, who since the Nakba have most resembled their historical oppression around the world? What a gut-wrenching irony.

The even more fundamental question is this: Are the Jewish people in Israel part of humanity as all people are, or do they see themselves and so are seen as essentially separate, removed and different?

If so, then the combination of historical repression and separateness, and the demand for total security, is the reason, at psychological and emotional level, why Israel, under Zionist ideology and an extremist regime, is reacting in the unspeakably malicious and calculating ways it has since the Hamas atrocity.

The division as “my people” vs. the others is the same essential flaw in all peoples, indeed in human nature itself. It is the ultimate source of war. But for both internal and external historical reasons, separateness is very strong in the Jewish people. It was not remedied when, with UN backing, survivors of the Holocaust drove out the Palestinians and founded Israel.

And with these acts – the genocide in Gaza and the most chillingly evil terrorist act ever devised by the mind of man – Israeli Jews have made themselves, and all of us, less human, even less than human.

There is no bottom to the evil of man, but human beings must build a bottom for humanity. Identity and identification are not immutable givens of human nature and social and political organization.

It’s long past the point for people, whatever our history, to move beyond the increasingly sophisticated evil of ethnicism/nationalism.

Martin LeFevre

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