War & Genocide in Modern Times
Part 1: Glittering Images
In the 2017 film ‘Wonder Woman,’ Gal Gadot plays Diana, the heroine whose unconditional love for human beings triumphs over the ambitions of the cynical and nihilistic villain, Ares, god of war, who seeks to destroy all mankind. As I mark the one year anniversary of Oct 7th, the day that Hamas, an Islamic terrorist organization hellbent on the annihilation of the Jewish state, invaded Israel, raped, burned, and massacred 1,139 people and kidnapped 250, I find myself seeking wisdom from the world of cinema to glean insights on the human condition.
Though Ares is labeled the god of war, this is somewhat inaccurate since he seeks to end all wars. Ares is a progressive who ultimately wants a ceasefire so that he can bring an end to all war. But the only way he can do this is by committing genocide and murdering every last man, woman, and child, because as Ares rightly observes, pain and suffering are built into the fabric of what it means to be human.
This is a hard teaching.
In contrast, Diana embodies unconditional love and she ultimately triumphs over Ares who could just as easily be called “god of perfection,” since he cannot stomach Man’s corruptness, bickering or capacity for hatred. In other words, Ares cannot stomach the totality of Man. Like Lucifer in the Christian tradition, Ares is the light bringer, who can only digest the light but not the darkness in human beings; he fails to understand that light cannot exist without darkness and darkness cannot exist without light and it is his one-sided philosophy that leads, as it always does, to calls for a final solution: the destruction of all mankind.
"I used to want to save the world, to end war and bring peace to mankind. But then I glimpsed the darkness that lives within their light. And I learned that inside every one of them, there will always be both." - Diana
But Diana’s love for humans exists without caveats. There are no terms or conditions. Her love, and this is precisely what makes her Wonder Woman, is like the sun, or better yet, the yin yang principle in Taoism. It recognizes that there is always a little bit of light in the darkness and always a bit of darkness in light. And like the sun, Diana’s love shines down on the peacemaker and the warmonger alike.
In fact, Diana is capable of waging peace when it is called for and war when it is necessary. Like the Hindu goddess Kali, her loyalty is to the dance and song of creation itself, and to the assurance that as Walt Whitman put it, “the powerful play goes on” and that humans can contribute a verse. And in order for that powerful play to continue, Diana must go to war with Ares and she must defeat him. This is not a glorification of war but a tragic acceptance of its necessity in the face of injustice.
This point is really important to stress: True love isn’t Pollyannaish. Its a hard and difficult thing that must be borne out and in Diana’s case, it requires that she sacrifice her sense of herself as a pure, lily white, grand savior of the world and actually defeat Ares in war. To abdicate this responsibility would be a moral failure. Here, it is not war that aids and abets genocide; it is war that stops genocide from happening in the first place.
Part 2: Hamas and the Settlers’ Messianic Complex
Join me, [Diana] and together we can end all of this suffering. We can save this world!" - Ares, god of war
“[Palestine] escapes my words…demands new messengers, tasked as are we all, with nothing less than saving the world.” - Ta Nehisi Coates, The Message
“The goal was nothing less than to drag the entire Middle East into a war, which the Jewish Underground saw as a precondition for the coming of the messiah [savior of the world]. - New York Times
Since Hamas’s brutal massacre of festival goers at the Nova music fest and subsequent attack on Israelis in the south, there has been an increase in attention towards and criticism of Israeli government policy toward Palestinians. Much of this criticism has, for good reason, focused on Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, a reality that has been in place since 1967 and which has left Palestinians in an awful holding pattern. Because they are citizens of no state, Palestinians are ultimately subject to Israeli military rule which imposes arbitrary checkpoints and which ignores land theft (and in some cases aides and abets it) by settler extremists who do have rights and who are allowed to attack Palestinians in the West Bank with impunity.
In a three-part story told by Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti in the pages of the New York times, the authors detail how a messianic extremist faction took over the state of Israel and “moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power”:
“A sample of three dozen cases in the months since Oct. 7 shows the startling degree to which the legal system has decayed. In all the cases, involving misdeeds as diverse as stealing livestock and assault and arson, not a single suspect was charged with a crime; in one case, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach while an Israel Defense Forces soldier looked on, yet the police questioned the shooter for only 20 minutes, and never as a criminal suspect, according to an internal Israeli military memo. During our review of the cases, we listened to recordings of Israeli human rights activists calling the police to report various crimes against Palestinians. In some of the recordings, the police refused to come to the scene, claiming they didn’t know where the villages were; in one case, they mocked the activists as “anarchists.” A spokesman for the Israeli National Police declined to respond to repeated queries about our findings…
How did a young nation turn so quickly on its own democratic ideals, and at what price? Any meaningful answer to these questions has to take into account how a half-century of lawless behavior that went largely unpunished propelled a radical form of ultranationalism to the center of Israeli politics. This is the history that is told here in three parts. In Part I, we describe the origins of a religious movement that established Jewish settlements in the newly won territories of Gaza and the West Bank during the 1970s. In Part II, we recount how the most extreme elements of the settler movement began targeting not only Palestinians but also Israeli leaders who tried to make peace with them. And in Part III, we show how the most established members of Israel’s ultra right, unpunished for their crimes, gained political power in Israel, even as a more radical generation of settlers vowed to eliminate the Israeli state altogether.
- Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti; How Extremist Settlers Took over Israel
The piece is worth reading in full because it reveals a strange ideological kinship between Islamic jihadists who seek to destroy the state of Israel and replace it with an Islamist theocracy from the river to the sea — not with a Palestinian democracy — and Jewish settlers who, well, want to do the same, just with a Jewish theocracy. The fodder for both is the suffering and humiliation of their people at the hands of the other. The coping mechanism that each has reached for as a salve for their pain is a messianic complex, absolutist in its scope and final in its aims.
Last November, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad said on Lebanese television that the mere existence of the state of Israel is “the root of all violence and pain” in the world. Hamas’s charter is Mein Kampf like in its psychopathy and its beef is religious in nature. This is a point I cannot stress enough: Hamas is not fighting Israel because it seeks to create a Palestinian nation state or build democratic institutions; like all extremists religious groups, Hamas does not believe in nation states. It believes in a caliphate:
“The people have been soldiers throughout history. They are now preparing to liberate Jerusalem and the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and I am saying this loud and clear: They are preparing to establish the Caliphate, with Jerusalem as its capital city, Inshallah. Jerusalem will not only be the capital city of Palestine as an independent state – it will be the capital city of the Islamic Caliphate…” - Hamas Official Fathi Hammad, December 1, 2023.
Failure to comprehend this is a major source of moral confusion in the West, in particularly on college campuses. Students have given in to the lie of Ares; they believe that their forefathers are exclusively evil and, because they cannot stomach their own darkness they desire to rid the world of their past sins by taking up a messianic cause they believe will result in Palestinian liberation and the end of all suffering. It will not. Luckily, much of the Arab world, having been subject to persecution by these messianic complexes, is not fooled and understands that Hamas must be defeated :
“This historical narrative is essential in order to understand that the primary goal of the extremist Islamic organizations... is still to crush the nation-state. Thus, the Houthis [i.e. the Houthi Ansar Allah movement in Yemen] emerged, claiming to represent Yemen; Hizbullah [claimed it] represented Lebanon, and Al-Hashd Al-Sha'abi [Popular Mobilization Units, aka PMU and its allies [claimed] to represent Iraq. These organizations engage in taking peoples and countries hostage and entangling them in wars and conflicts that have no clear objectives besides a desire to abolish the political borders of the Arab nation-state. This is the goal pursued by the religious organizations, in order to establish... what they describe as 'the Caliphate State.'
"The Hamas and PIJ movements have no right to claim that they represent the will of the Palestinian people in order to entangle it a pointless war – just as none of the religious organizations have the right to do so. In light of the siege on the Gaza Strip, and following the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, it would be appropriate for the wisdom of the Arab collective to awaken [and recognize] the truth as it is. It is inconceivable for the nation-state to be replaced by a caliphate state... such a state cannot exist in the [current] political reality. Although today's reality is drenched in blood, it may indeed turn into an opportunity for an awakening, for reexamination, and for deciding to disengage from the legacies exploited by the extremist organizations in order to destroy all of mankind. [emphasis: mine]" - Hani Salem Mashour, UAE Al-Arab Daily
Hamas’s fundamental belief is that the entire world should be ruled by an Islamist theocracy, full stop, and that the first step to this lies in conquering Palestine. It is apocalyptic in nature and aims to subdue and subjugate Jews, Christians, and secular Muslims under the rule of such a caliphate.
Ironically, religious Jewish settlers who make up infamous movements like the Hilltop Youth in the West Bank also believe that the secular Jewish state is the root of all suffering as it “prevents us [sic] from building the temple, which blocks our way to true and complete redemption.”
How can it be that these two sworn enemies have made the same call for insurrection and share the same savior complexes? The answer is simple. Like Ares, they believe in a divine war to end all wars which they claim will bring about a golden age in which a temple or caliphate will bring about the salvation of the world. And many progressives like students protestors in the encampments in the United States and Ta-Nehisi Coates who rightly call for an end to Palestinian misery unknowingly undermine their cause when they buy into the salvific, conspiratorial framing that perpetuates it.
Here then is the paradoxical truth plainly stated: The just treatment of Palestinians is a moral imperative which if refused by Jewish extremists in the West Bank directly undermines freedom for Israelis; and the just treatment of Israelis is a moral imperative which if refused by Hamas — and all other Islamists— directly undermines freedom for Palestinians.
To win the battle against Ares then, we must fight the occupation as if Hamas’s genocidal ambitions did not exist. And we must fight Hamas as if the occupation did not exist. We must fight both. And we cannot defeat one unless we also defeat the other. This is what unconditional love amounts to in the context of Israel and Palestine.
Part 3: A note from our forefathers
In the early years of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln’s primary goal was to stop southern states from seceding and keep the Union intact, not to end slavery. He said in his first inaugural address, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.”
Lincoln later switched gears after realizing that the Confederacy’s ability to wage war was completely reliant on chattel slavery. It was the cotton generated by slaves that allowed the South to purchase war materials from countries abroad using foreign exchange and credit; it was slaves who generated food and resources for the Confederate military. It was slaves who were forced to build fortifications, railroads, and other strategic infrastructure for the confederacy. Hence, defeating the confederacy required destroying the institution of slavery. One could not happen without the other and so Lincoln came to embrace abolition as both a moral imperative and a strategic necessity for winning the war, vowing to permanently abolish it by the time he was reelected in 1864.
Why am I highlighting this? Because during the Civil War, most Northerners were not abolitionists. African Americans who fought for the Union faced racism and discrimination and were not treated as equals. Segregation was systematic and voting rights were denied. Northern Democrats, or Copperheads actively opposed the war and the abolition of slavery. In fact they advocated for a “peaceful” resolution that would allow to the South to keep slavery. And yet that “peaceful” resolution would have advanced a great evil.
Moreover, the war itself led to tragic bloodshed in the South. Atlanta was burned to the ground. Richmond Virginia was heavily bombed, resulting in many civilian casualties including that of women and children. Families in the south were displaced and many suffered death from diseases like smallpox, typhoid, and dysentery. Thousands of children were left orphaned by the death of their fathers. Many were raised in war camps.
The Civil War was hell. And yet, the prospect of slavery overtaking the union would have been an even worse hell. Failure to come to terms with this would have resulted in moral confusion and an abdication of responsibility to do what was necessary to stop that worse hell from coming into fruition.
The difficult, yet ethical choice would have been to support the North in its war against the Confederacy. In spite of its own systemic racism and superiority complexes, a greater evil threatened the United States in the form of institutional slavery.
Likewise, in spite of Israel’s systemic bigotry and mistreatment of Palestinians, a greater evil threatens the region in the form of Hamas and the nihilistic ambitions of the Islamic republic of Iran, which if allowed to continue will conduct Oct 7’s again and again and again, until Israel is annihilated and which will, in the meantime, increase the existential fears of Israelis, thus ensuring the occupation of the West Bank continues. In other words, Israel must defeat Hamas in the name of fighting antisemitism and in the name of fighting the occupation. Hamas must be defeated in the name of liberating Israelis and in the name of liberating Palestinians.
Anytime I read of a family displaced in Gaza or a Palestinian child killed in an air raid or an Israeli hostage killed by Hamas, I long for a ceasefire and for an end to bloodshed. Beyond the bitterness and rage that characterizes many of the protests I see on my newsfeed, there is a genuine sorrow and longing for an end to this war. I too long for this as well. And yet, if a ceasefire means allowing Islamic jihadists free reign to subjugate Jews, what right do I have to complain when Jewish religious extremists do the same to Palestinians?
And what right do you?
Chloé Valdary majored in International Studies at the University of New Orleans where she focused her studies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today she runs Theory of Enchantment, an alternative to DEI that teaches people to deepen their understanding of the human condition and to love.