Never Again? Or Again, and Again, and Again?

It is a brutal irony. Less than a century after the worst genocide in human history, the Holocaust that wiped out six million Jews and inspired the world to vow, “Never again!” we now witness yet a new horror, this time perpetrated by Jews themselves. Though smaller in scale than other post-WWII episodes of political mass murder—Cambodia, Uganda, Rwanda—it bears, apart from its irony, a further unique distinction: it is happening right in front of our faces, on camera, live-blogged, documented in real time. It’s impossible to feign ignorance. Or so it seems.

In fact, the ways that reality hides from view are not so different than they have always been. Herein lies the key to understanding why “Never again” is happening again, and again… and again.

I read a variety of sources about the Gaza “war”: Haaretz (an Israeli newspaper), Mondoweiss, Drop Site News, Chris Hedges, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, and, for balance, the New York Times and the Scroll (a “pro-Israel” publication that upholds a right-wing Israeli narrative about Palestine. I put “pro-Israel” in quotes because in fact, that nation is destroying itself in the name of preserving itself.) These publications (except for the last two) have extensively documented the horrors, the propaganda, the strategies, and the political history and context of the genocide. Yes, I’ll use that word, even though the goal of the war is not to exterminate every last Gazan. The pretext is to eliminate Hamas, the real goal is to ethnically cleanse the territory for Jewish settlement. Genocide is a side effect of the ruthless pursuit of that goal. So far 58,000 Gazans have died in military strikes (probably a lot more, since that number doesn’t include those buried under rubble), and countless others have perished from hunger and illness.

Despite the copious documentation of atrocious crimes against humanity in Gaza, many people—including the majority of Israel’s population—either do not believe it is happening or seem not to care. This is not because, as Caitlin Johnstone proposes, they are “shitty people” or “exhausting, insufferable narcissists.” That is a non-explanation that offers no way forward, but only a looping path back to our starting point. If the problem is shitty people, then only a fool would hope that they might change. They are not the kind of people who can be redeemed (only non-shitty people are redeemable). So, the solution is to dominate them, to imprison them, silence them, remove them, control them, humiliate them, destroy them, and make an example of them to deter other shitty people. And that is the basic mindset behind genocide. After all, most Israelis believe that Gaza is populated by shitty people too, at least judging by polls in which a large majority agree that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”

Unless you think that shitty people can be forever eliminated from this earth, then that diagnosis condemns us to experience “never again” again and again and again.

Wouldn’t it be better to understand why perfectly normal people, even kind and generous people who are happy to feed your cat while you’re away, support or tolerate heinous crimes unfolding in full view? If we understood that, maybe we could stop it.

Because the slaughter is so public, many of us take up the anguished cry, “How, how, how could this be happening? Why are they doing it? How could we allow it?” If anything is to change on this earth, these questions must be more than expressions of anguish. We must take them seriously. We must not be content with convenient, false answers that give vent to our anguish by channeling it onto hate for shitty people.

Actually, those who do not countenance the reality of what is happening are doing what humans do all the time. For them, the genocide isn’t happening in plain view, because they inhabit a narrative bubble in which it is invisible. They will say, “Those videos are staged. Those photos are faked. Those stories are Hamas propaganda. Those doctors who report from Gaza are anti-Semites.” Or, they will say, “Such things happen in war.” Or, “Gaza shouldn’t have elected Hamas, they deserve blame and punishment for October 7.” Or, “If they want the war to end, they should storm the tunnels and expel Hamas.” And they actually in all apparent sincerity believe those things, even when they are contradictory. Massacres of civilians aren’t happening, and they are unavoidable. Starvation is not being used as a weapon of war, and it is justified.

In other words, they are doing what most of us do all the time, albeit in extreme form. They select and interpret information to maintain belief, identity, and belonging. I’m sorry, but those people aren’t just a worse sort of human. I don’t mean to be patronizing with “I’m sorry, but….” I really am sorry. I wish matters were so simple. I wish the atrocities that Johnstone, Hedges, etc. so bravely and doggedly expose were just because bad people do bad things. I wish we lived in a world of clear heroes and villains, a world of orcs and elves, a Starship Troopers fantasy where the root problem is an identifiable them. But this is precisely the mindset that generates the conditions of slaughter in the first place. Who are the Palestinians, if not a them? Who where the Jews of 1930s Europe, if not a them upon whom all blame for the continent’s woes could be projected? Who were the Tutsis in Rwanda, the “counter-revolutionary elements” during the Cultural Revolution, the witches of the Inquisition?

You may say, “There is a big difference between inciting contempt for a weak, oppressed population so as to enable their slaughter, and inciting contempt for the power that is doing the slaughtering.” Certainly. But go a level deeper. What you are saying is that “So-and-so deserves contempt, because…” That is the pattern of thought. There is the contempt, and the reasons why. And so we are left with interminable arguments about who deserves contempt and who does not, which war is justified and which is not. With the agreement in place, held by all parties, that someone deserves contempt, it is a simple matter for the powerful to make the case that it is them. The agreement makes the work of propaganda easy. That is why I say, war is always justified.

We can call out genocide—or abuse, exploitation, ecocide, or oppression—without an implicit diagnosis of the perpetrator that affirms the principle that some people are a lower grade of human than the rest of us. That is the principle that justifies the creation of the next class of victims.

Us-them patterning is older than history. The pattern isn’t just “tribalism,” originating in competition for scarce resources. The us-them schism happens routinely within groups as well. It is, as Rene Girard demonstrated, the original social crisis, originating before civilization itself: cycles of vengeance, the division of society, followed by a spasm of unifying sacrificial violence whereby social tensions that could split society are discharged onto a relatively powerless, dehumanized subclass.

Habituation to us-versus-them thinking makes populations susceptible to manipulation by genuinely shitty people—the ruthless, sociopathic individuals who so often rise to power within non-transparent systems. All they have to do is point the finger at (or actually, use sophisticated propaganda and information control to identify) the Other. Mob psychology does the rest. These efforts would have little effect were it not for the ally of our inherited psychology, the ancient proclivity to designate an external enemy or internal minority as subhuman.

I know from experience that the view I’ve outlined here will attract hostility. Let me save the critics some trouble by writing the two main critiques on their behalf. I call them, “Soft on fascism” and “Anti-Semitic dupe.” Coming from superficially opposite perspectives, what they share in common is more significant by far.

Soft on fascism: Charles, you are giving israel a free pass to genocide. If the recent massacres at aid centers, or the deliberate targeting of children, or the assassination of journalists, or the use of hunger as a weapon, or the blocking of medical supplies doesn’t convince you, then nothing will. By humanizing a nation of child-killers and mass murderers, you proffer false hope that they will halt the genocide of their own accord. You are excusing and enabling sheer evil, possibly because, as a privileged white American, you are not its target. Only by calling out evil and inciting rage and disgust towards its perpetrators (who deserve nothing better) can we mobilize a mass movement to put an end to the genocide.

Anti-Semitic dupe: Charles, it is sad that you too have fallen prey to pro-Hamas propaganda. So-called “Palestinian rights” is nothing but coded Jew-hatred. What happened to your critical reasoning faculties? Israel is beset by enemies that have sworn to wipe Jews off the face of the earth. The Hamas charter says so. Iran’s leaders have said so. Islamic doctrine also says that it is forbidden for a Muslim to negotiate with a Jew except as a ruse. Islam is a religion of hate, of evil. Don’t deceive yourself, and for God’s sake don’t deceive others. Your calls for peace only play into the hands of an implacably evil enemy.

Both critics agree on the fundamental problem: shitty people. They merely disagree about their identity. The first critique also bears a common misunderstanding: that anyone who doesn’t respond with hate or call for punishment must not understand how abominable the crimes are, must be OK with them continuing. But the reason I am calling for compassion is precisely the opposite—it is because I believe the horrors are happening and that compassion—understanding of why—is the only lasting way to stop them. To understand is not to excuse.

Again, actual “shitty people” do exist, by which I mean people so sociopathic or narcissistic that they have little prospect of redemption, especially while they remain in positions of power over others. They are, however, few in number, a tiny minority. There is no society of sociopaths; there are only sociopathic societies, where historical conditions amplify humanity’s nearly universal us-them programming.

Us-them thinking isn’t just about difference. The “us” consists of full human beings; the “them” comprises those who are deficient in some essential human quality (morality, intelligence, virtue, decency). That is why they are so often compared to animals. To the extent that any of us judge and condemn others, thinking that they are made of worse stuff than ourselves, we feed the energy that takes fullest expression in genocide. Sociopathic and narcissistic leaders reflect back to us, in extreme form, the everyday dehumanization of those we judge. They are more symptom than cause of the horrors they preside over.

Us-them thinking explains why non-shitty people do shitty things.

Let us return now to the anguish of “Why are they doing this? How could this be happening in plain view?” Really the question is, “Why are so many unwilling to see?” Yes indeed. Why is it so hard to admit that one was wrong? Why is it so hard to admit that one has caused harm, or been on the side of the oppressor? The main reason, the reason that undergirds many forms of cognitive bias, draws from a primal insecurity built into us-them thinking. It is this: maybe we have got it backwards. Maybe we are the shitty people. Maybe we are less than fully human, deficient in humanity’s essential qualities. Human beings have an instinctive fear of being cast into the sacrificial subclass of not-quite-humans, of being the “other” that is burned at the stake, lynched, ethnically cleansed, or exterminated. In a climate in which one side or another must fall into the lesser-human category, how tenaciously we will fight to avoid that fate. How tenaciously we will fight to establish that we are right, good, justified, ethical, and moral.

That is the climate of belief that has to change if we are ever to redeem the promise of “never again.” When the agreement prevails that good people can participate in terrible things, then the shame that prevents us from seeing the terrible things we do vanishes. Because those no longer mean we are not good people. We are still worthy of love. We will not be cast out. We will not take the place of the other we have persecuted. And the endless cycle of history will end.

It’s not just the Gaza genocide. All the harm that power inflicts on people and planet happens behind a veil of ignorance. The narrative weave of that ignorance devalues, dehumanizes, and desacralizes whatever it destroys. But when you ask of the immigrant swept up in an ICE raid, or the Gazan, or the gang member, or the addict, or the welfare mom, or the police officer, or the soldier, or anyone you have cast into them, “What is it like to be you? What is your story?” then us and them unravels, and you realize, but for the grace of God, their story could be your own. Compassion and complexity bloom forth. You may still have opposing interests and conflicts, but your efforts to work out a solution will no longer take place in a vacuum of ignorance, the delusion that your counterpart is less human than yourself.

Us-them thinking is still deeply entrenched. People ask, “What is your solution, then, for Palestine?” I don’t have one. Well, I do (I described it last year, a version of one land two states), but it is wholly impractical in the current climate. Without a release of us-them patterning, no humane solution is practical and no practical solution is humane. We must therefore change the very ground of practicality. The ground is our beliefs, our stories, our myths, and the unfinished personal and social healing that animates them. We didn’t just blunder into dumb, untrue beliefs about us and them. There is trauma beneath them, and a whole evolutionary path of consciousness towards their transcendence.

Since us-them thinking, the pattern of othering, is so deeply woven into our cultural DNA, genocide is as well. Maybe this one will end as the Holocaust ended, with the perpetrators on the losing side of a War on Evil, and their leaders marched to the gallows amid cries of “Never again!” To win such a war, of course it helps to paint the other side’s supporters in the worst light possible. Monsters. Shitty people. But that would only end this genocide. It wouldn’t end genocide. For that, we need to complete the evolutionary journey of consciousness away from us and them, away from othering, away from Separation. We have to get serious about healing our injuries, so as not to pass them forward as resentment and revenge. And we have to harken to the avatars of that new consciousness who keep popping up in history to offer their words and their bodies to its fulfillment. “Forgive them father, for they know not what they do.”