The Most Moral Army

”[Our] army is the most moral army in the world”.

The prelude to this “moral army”’s passing is a bombed-out wasteland, a wasteland in which half of the population are children. A wasteland of husks of concrete where civilians are the main targets of genocide and forceful relocation under the guise of hunting terrorists.

And yet, to Netanyahu, his army is the world’s most moral.

An army from a nation which runs ghastly mobile gaming adverts about its indignity, or where influencers and families perform a dancing mockery of the hellish conditions that Palestinians have to try and endure in the waterless and powerless dust of wreck and ruin.

But this is all just and right, according to Netanyahu, and any critics of it “do not have a single drop of morality”.

Not the kind of morality where the moral army aim for the journalists who try to observe the war on the ground. Where Reuters reporters are actively targetted along the Lebanon border, or how journalists and their families are hunted on the ground of the strip.

Remember Shireen Abu Akleh, for she was (according to Netanyahu) shot dead in the head by the most moral army in the world.

I disagree with Netanyahu. Avid readers of these here my Wasted Words know full well the umbrage I take with the apartheid of Zionism. I’m well on record disliking occupation and subjugation on a categorical level. Killing a journalist doing their job is about the most clear draconic sign you can find in a regime, and that’s not even taking into accounts the numerous violations of International Law that Israel makes itself guilty of even in so-called peace time, much more so when at full scale war against a civilian population.

But right this second I disagree with Netanyahu not just on policy or politics, but on a fundamental philosophical level:

There is no moral army. Morality, like truth, is a first casualty in any war. There may be right and wrong, clearly cut, such as in Ukraine’s defence of its sovereign borders, or Europe’s resistance to Nazi Germany’s desire for Lebensraum, but (despite what Peter Sellers said) there’s no space for morality in the war room. Atrocities are endemic to the very idea of war; the industrialized cruelty of political will against another. No matter which side you root for (or against), there is not an armed force upon this earth, past present or likely future, which runs on morality.

If there was, we wouldn’t have need for International Law or the Rules of War.

If there was, the Law of Armed Conflict as part of the United Nations Charter would not be violated on such regular basis as it is.

There may be a moral side to a war every so often. There may even be plenty of moral soldiers in the ranks of either side. But there has never, is not, and will with all likelihood never be, a moral armed force.

And even if I’m wrong, it’s demonstrably not yours, Netanyahu, no matter how loudly you chant.

/Sebastian Lindberg 31/10-2023

An Anti-Semite Child?

The headline reads ”my foreign students believe that Jews are dangerous”. It’s quite a catch, as far as headline writing goes. Sure draws the eye. And it continues strong, with anecdotal evidence from a veteran teacher that children newly arrived from countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Somalia carry with them ideas that Jews ”burn children” and ”it’s okay to throw rocks at them”.

Sounds alarmist, right? But there are a few caveats that should be addressed if we’re to properly analyse these circumstances; a pre-requisite to properly judge these circumstances.

For starters, I know these children. I’ve taught such myself. And I know the basic background they have coming here, to little ole’ sheltered Sweden. Namely, they lack years and years of basic education. Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen have been in constant states of war for years. In Afghanistan’s case, one might argue for decades. Maybe even a century. And these children, finally at the stage of making an ”ordinary” life for themselves by western standards, simply haven’t been schooled. Illiteracy is rampant. And the one thing that festers in the lack of knowledge is prejudice. Here-say.

In the western world, and in Europe especially, the Holocaust is a still fresh reminder of the horrors of prejudice and demagoguery. It is an event that we are taught never to forget. But in our fervour to remember the most sordid parts of our modern past, we forget that it doesn’t amount to such a shattering revelation out in the rest of the world. In many parts of the world, the genocides of the Khmer Rouge, or the orchestrated famines of the Ukraine, or the Cultural Revolution of Mao, not to mention the many genocides of Central Africa, are much more cultural touchstones than the committed murder of Jews (among many other groups) during the thirties and forties in central Europe. The Holocaust, for all it’s moral lessons and human travesties, is not a pivotal point in human culture. It’s just another devastating example of deplorable human nature. There are many more examples more relevant for people from disparate parts of our world to know by heart.

It should surprise absolutely no one that children lacking years of schooling, that come from around the world, don’t innately know about our regional shames.

On to the next point of order; to explain immigrant children’s views on the Jewish ethnicity, and why the demonization thereof isn’t all that strange. They come from predominantly Muslim nations. Nations that are in varying forms part of a cultural group, upon which one nation’s predations are vividly predominant. While it is grossly incorrect that ”Jews burn children”, it is most definitely relevant to say that ”Israel kill children”. Muslim children. Children that these our pupils have much more in common with than a red-coated girl in an otherwise black-and-white movie.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Separating ”the Jew” from ”the Zionist”. The Jew, the ethnicity, and the Zionist, the colonialist expansionism on fundamentalist basis on the backs and bodies of “indigenous” people. Which is a separation that not even all Jews seem to be willing or able to make. But I will want to argue that such is the case, that there is a definite divide between the two. Because the alternative is a vile reality I would rather not have a part of. Because Zionism has mandated, over the course of some sixty years, the development of an apartheid state that periodically attack, oppress and slaughter civilian populations. At the end of the day, according to Zionist tradition, because it’s “their land by God’s decree”.

And too often does criticism of how the state of Israel enforces it’s rule, under Zionist ideology, get swept under the relevancy-carpet as anti-Semitism.

And naturally, if you’re not equipped to make a distinction between “The Jew” and “the Zionist”, it is no wonder that the fear of a nation state turns into fear of that nation state’s dominant ethnicity.

And for as long as we are so reluctant to separate ethnic Judaism from practical Zionism, is it really so surprising that children will incorrectly include the Jew in their prejudice against the Zionist? Because if you, educated and learned reader, won’t make the distinction, why should uneducated children be able to?

/Sebastian Lindberg 29/1-2019

Calling Israel by its True Name

So, the US and Guatemala are, as of the time of writing, skipping ahead in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process and moving their diplomatic ties to Israel to the contended city of Jerusalem. And while Israel has claimed the city as their own for a long time, other nations haven’t dared to aknowledge such a move.

It’s a cluster fuck of no small proportions. Not a surprise, but clustery none the less. Even though the US are supposed to be leading the peace-talks, everyone with an ear to international news should be able to piece together that they are not only not impartial, but foreign-affairs-wise the same as Israel. The two countries are, by many foreign policy standards, the same. They’re USrael. And Guatemala was one of the very few nations in the UN that supported the US move to Jerusalem, which makes it reasonable that they’d double down with an embassy move of their own.

Now, the international community knows that Israel is an aggressive, apartheid state in the making. The joint USrael political agenda has tried forcefully to hide that realisation through political pressure and a feeble attempt to control the narrative. But seeing as how Israel are slowly creeping towards a greater and greater occupation and annexation of Palestinian terriroty, it’s really hard to hide their aggression.

It’s getting even harder to rationally justify it. There hasn’t been a Jewish state on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean sea for many millennia. And arguing that they were there first is ludicrous. If we decided who should govern or own what land based on who lived there first, well then… the US should capitulate almost all their territory to North American First Nation peoples. To really hammer home how ridiculous that argument is, Swedish vikings founded Moscow. How ’bout giving us back your capital after a thousand years, Russia? See? Unreasonable arguments.

Post-Ottoman colonial powers ceded some land to Jewish refugees. They called it Israel. Since then, Israel has been aggressively expanding their territory and influence. Do they have the right to do that? About as much right as any country ever has had in forcefully taking land and displacing residents. But whether or not you think they have the right to slowly swallow another nation state’s sovereign territory, like Russia’s trying to do to the Crimean peninsula, or how the US did over the course of two hundred years to the First Nations, you should call them by what they are. An aggressive, militaristic state that expands their terriroty on the premise of ancient religious rights and arrogant notions of supremacy. That’s modern day Zionism.

And I think that’s pretty shitty behaviour.

/Sebastian Lindberg 26/12-2017