The Fire Next Time

Blowback is coming

This is what is happening right now in the Northern Gaza Strip, according to a local reporter for Mondoweiss:

Local testimonies from inside Jabalia indicate that in its ongoing siege of the area, the Israeli army is killing most people on sight. Even civilian families, who were surprised by the invasion when it started and raised white flags in an attempt to evacuate, were gunned down by quadcopter drones.

“Quadcopter drones” are just what they sound like: remote-controlled drones with guns on them.

More:

Mothers saw their children lying on the ground and screamed without being able to reach out to them, as any of the mothers who attempted to move were either shot directly by the soldiers, or by quadcopter drones hovering overhead.

Survivors report that two ditches were dug. Men were forced to lie in one, women in the other. Children were left on the ground above. IDF vehicles then circled the ditches, kicking up dust. The Palestinians thought they were about to be buried alive. But after a few hours:

the soldiers made the women climb out of the ditch one woman at a time, ordered them to pick up a child from the ground at random, and told to walk in a predetermined route that took them south. Women were forced to pick up children who were not their own at the army’s orders and made to march on, leaving their own children behind and hoping that some other woman would pick them up.

Can I verify that these reports are 100% accurate? No, of course I can’t. Like you, I’m not in Gaza myself, directly witnessing these events. I don’t work for Mondoweiss and can’t personally vouch for their reporting. And we know from the atrocities of October 7 itself that there’s a propaganda-fueled information war being waged on top of the actual war.

But we also know that, whatever its details, Israel’s retaliation against Hamas has reached a scale of human destruction unprecedented in this century — even worse than the Syrian civil war. According to the United Nations Secretary General, 60,000 people were displaced in the last few weeks alone. The New York Times reported last week that the IDF struck a town in Gaza for the third time in just over a week, killing dozens of people in a residential building, including as many as 25 children. Even the U.S. State Department conceded that the attack was “horrifying,” but such strikes have become routine in this war, and barely register as news anymore.

It’s clear what’s happening in Gaza, and it’s been clear for over a year. In a campaign of vengeance for the October 7 slaughter of hundreds of Israeli civilians, the IDF is making Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians. At this moment, with the invasion still ongoing, we’re largely focused on the body count from direct military casualties. We have yet to comprehend the scale of death from famine, malnutrition and disease as a result of the annihilation of civilian infrastructure, let alone the mass homelessness and decades of acute population-level poverty that will arise from the leveling of neighborhoods and the total destruction of the economy. The consequences of this violence will last for generations.

This war should have no more to do with me than the ongoing genocide in Darfur does. I’m not Israeli. I’m not Jewish. I’m not Arab, Muslim, Iranian, Palestinian, or Lebanese. I am, however, an American. And as the whole world knows, this is an American war as much as it is an Israeli one. It’s financed by the United States and backstopped by our military and our diplomatic power. And the point I want to make here is that we will come to reap the crops that we have sown.

The United States is a castle on a hill, protected by two oceans, thousands of nuclear warheads, and the most lethal military force in world history. But that doesn’t make us impervious to the cycles of cause-and-effect in geopolitical conflict and in all human relations. No army on earth would go to war with ours, given a choice. But that only makes it inevitable that the price we will be forced to pay will be inflicted through other means.

I expect that in the next few years, the U.S. will be subjected to a major terrorist attack on our own soil. It may or may not rival 9/11 in its scale, but it will be an order of magnitude greater than the piecemeal horrors we’ve seen over the last two decades, such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, and the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. I don’t base this prediction on any technical or esoteric knowledge about Middle Eastern geopolitics. It’s based on the simple understanding that you cannot project this level of force and violence without provoking a response.

There is no moral justification in the world for the wanton murder of civilians. This was true of October 7, it’s true of what Israel is doing in Gaza and Lebanon, and it will be true of the next terrorist attack on Americans. But morality is beside the point. Punishing civilians for the actions of their governments is simply the way of conflict in the modern world. The post-World War 2 “rules” of war were never more than an academic exercise or a cynical political weapon applied selectively in diplomatic clashes. They didn’t restrain the United States in Vietnam or Iraq, nor did we even pretend to apply them to our client states in the Central American proxy wars of the 1980s. The lesson we should have learned from 9/11 is that the lawlessness of the international order isn’t restricted to those parts of the world within which we’ve grown used to regarding war as a more or less normal state of affairs. Americans are exposed to it, too.

What we learned instead was that the U.S. could not afford to be anything less than hegemonic on the world stage. For more than two decades, we have waged a “global war on terror,” which is to say a war on any military or paramilitary force on earth that is too weak to confront us directly but not afraid of attacking us asymmetrically. It’s gotten us to exactly the place where we began: to some vague premonition of a looming “clash of civilizations” between the West and its supposed enemies. Americans are no safer today than we were on the morning of 9/11. It’s now just a matter of time before we experience the blowback that has been mounting for an entire generation. The perpetrators will probably be young men who weren’t even born when the Twin Towers fell.

Like teenagers, we Americans live under an illusion of invincibility. Geographically insulated from our rivals and protected by a military capable of fighting against the rest of the world’s great powers at once, we assume that the rules that apply to all of humanity make an exception for us. Moreover, these distant conflicts are far removed from the experience of our daily lives. They’re waged by an elite foreign policy cabal with almost no direct accountability to voters. Their wars feel viscerally disconnected from our jobs, our families, and our physical existence in time and space. We are alienated from the violence projected in our name.

But those whose lives are turned into a living hell by the policies of our government don’t tend to see things that way. Just as, to many Americans, Muslims in the Middle East constitute some strange foreign horde that deeply despises us for some inexplicable reasons, to Palestinians, Iranians and Lebanese, Americans are the privileged and arrogant subjects of a distant imperial power, like the citizens of the Capitol District in the Hunger Games. We may not be morally responsible for the actions taken by our increasingly autocratic, lobbyist-controlled government, but the same can be said for the Palestinian families being exterminated for the crimes of Hamas. At the end of the day, it hardly matters. The “international order” is not “rules-based”; it’s tribal, and the United States is the most belligerent tribe of them all. Like every warring tribe before us, we will die by the sword we have lived by.