"There is something crazy-making about all of this: the posture of ingenuous lament by the engineers of our predicament. One wonders if this moral wakefulness is merely prelude to another nightmare. On August 8, Netanyahu’s government approved a plan to expand the war by taking control of Gaza City — ignoring the advice of its own military. As Yezid Sayigh, a Palestinian analyst in Beirut, told the London Review of Books, Israel’s leaders have cornered themselves. The civilian population in Gaza remains the principal obstacle to the colonization of Greater Israel: “Israel has set itself on a trajectory for which it has no solutions other than a final solution.”
If Israel is on the precipice of all-out ethnic cleansing, the moral plaints of western leaders appear to be late petitions for their own innocence. “People want to look like they were on the right side of history,” said Wertheim, “just before a new threshold is crossed.”
In the first week of August, Anthony Aguilar, a retired Green Beret who has said he witnessed the IDF using “indiscriminate and unnecessary force” against starving civilians in Gaza, predicted it would be “days, not months,” before Americans have a truer sense of the devastation there: “It’s going to bring the world to its knees.” It seems western leaders have summoned precisely enough political will to fail to stop a world-historic crime.
Is it actually too late? El Akkad said that of course it is and, at the same time, “there is no such thing as too late.” Despair is no use to the living."
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