1Inthought (hit the hyperlink please!)
In this striking representation, we see Netanyahu the baby sitting in the lap of mother Biden suckling a bottle of blood/milk. The mother, Biden, holds the bottle that feeds the baby with one hand while the other gently supports the baby’s head. Biden appears to be sitting, cross-legged, on the floor of a “globe” dressed in formal blue suit. As he looks at the feeding infant in his arms smiling widely, a trickle of blood appears on his lower lip, as if Biden is vicariously feeding on the blood/milk through his baby Netanyahu. With one hand, the baby Netanyahu is grabbing Biden’s arm, as if pressing him not to stop the feed, and with the other, he is holding a pitchfork that has penetrated the body of a Palestinian child. The blood/milk that Netanyahu is drinking is shown to be running through his veins as he wears an underwear of the US flag. Eyes half closed; the baby appears satiated. Underneath mother and baby, the bodies of children are scattered, with one child holding the Palestinian flag. In the background, a sign that says “Hospital” lies broken on the ground.
This representation is striking in many ways. The artist clearly wants the viewer to see the ‘bloodline” that connects the US to Israel. If it were not for the support in treasure, armor and apology, that the US has supplied Israel since October 7 without interruption-a continuous feed-, Palestinian children would not be dead in the thousands.
But what is not clear in this representation is who is murdering on behalf of who? Is it that Netanyahu is murdering on behalf of Biden which accounts for the wide smile on Biden’s face and the trickle of blood on his lower tooth? Or is it that Biden is killing on behalf of Netanyahu, whose half-shut eyes show him to have an insatiable appetite for the blood of Palestinians? In other words, is mama Biden channeling her aggression through her baby Netanyahu who is gratifying his mother’s aggressive impulses by being a murderous bully? Or is it that mama Biden has found in her lap a psychopath of a baby and she finds herself having to gratify his aggressive impulses for more milk/blood just because he is her baby? Or maybe, just maybe, mama Biden is relieved to divert her psychopathic baby away from her and towards the Palestinians offering them as feed/sacrifice?
Today, these questions are on everybody’s mind. What accounts for the fact that the US is willing to throw off the “rule-based order” it has touted for years, at least since the end of World War 2, presenting itself as its primary caretaker and upholder, on behalf of Israel? Why does the US risk a pariah status for itself on behalf of another country, and uniquely this one country, Israel? Why does it allow the Israeli military to commit horrors, it would not allow its own military to commit or at least try very hard no to? There is near consensus not just among ICJ judges, that Israel is (plausibly) committing genocide in Gaza, but also among the vast majority of people in the world. Pictures continuously streaming in straight from Gaza make this fact undeniable. The stream of horrors, day after day: indescribable horror, unbearable horror, psychopathic horror, demented and depraved horror, make the fact of genocide undeniable.
The depravity of what is going on Gaza leave the viewer thinking they are witnessing a unique sort of evil. Not killing in the dark and lying about it, but killing children en mass, in broad day light, and bragging about it! Dancing while preventing trucks of humanitarian aid from passing through to rescue a starving population of children and feeling proud! Sniping at doctors while in surgery trying to save injured children and feeling proud! Cooking lavish meals in the houses of people you have displaced, who sit nearby starving, and you pose for pictures in Haaretz! Shelling the ambulance that has been given permission to rescue a six-year-old child who had been sitting for hours begging for help amidst the bodies of her family members and killing the drivers. Killing the prisoner who was asked to go into Nasser Hospital to warn that Israel is about to destroy it on the prisoner’s way out of the hospital. On and on and on…
Israel is uniquely depraved. And yet, the US and its diplomatic core, stand alone, defending the indefensible Israel, apologizing for what Israel does, whatever it does, wherever its depravity, and it seems bottomless, leads it, at all times. Never mind the hypocrisy of in one breath apologizing for Israel’s depravity, and in the next denouncing Russia in Ukraine for acts much much less depraved.
And so the question arises: whose depravity is being enacted here? Is it Biden’s (Blinken’s, Miller’s, Kirby’s) or is it Netanyahu’s (Gantz’s, Smotrich’s, BenGevir’s, etc)?
Undoubtedly there is a “special bond” between the US and Israel. Biden himself said as much. Israel, he recently said, repeating what he had said decades ago, “Were there not an Israel, the USA would have to invent an Israel.” IN his demented old self, he sounded proud of himself, glad he was still able to trace the words he had uttered decades ago at a time his brain had more lighting synapses. It is, according to him, “the best three-billion-dollar investment we make!”
If one were to take this formulation, Israel is a good investment for the US. It is an imperial outpost in the midst of Muslim land, doing the bidding of the imperial center, and as such should be supported at all times, at all costs. Israel serves the interests of the US in this formulation, and in return it should be rewarded for its services. If apologizing for genocide is a cost the imperial center must pay on behalf of servant Israel, then so be it. Empire must be loyal to its outposts, as the outpost is practically, a part of oneself, a split-off of oneself so to speak, but located outside the self in some remote land.
But if Israel is doing the imperial center’s bidding, what exactly is this bidding now that would make the cost of genocide and starving a whole population acceptable? What is this great invaluable service that Israel is now offering the US? One could argue, following this line of thought, that what Israel is providing the imperial center is a crushing war against Hamas. Why does Hamas deserve this particular attention from the imperial center, when it is an Israeli local enemy irritant? Because the center is loath to the idea that a colonized population should resist its colonizer. When October 7 took place, Gaza had been under total siege, land, air and sea, since 2007. Any attempt at resistance should be condemned, demonized, degraded, and crushed. Hamas is as much a US matter as it is an Israeli one. Its military success bodes ill for the imperial status quo which is premised on accepting the global power structure in all its forms, including inside the territory Israel controls, because the success of one resistance movement can awaken others and that the US cannot tolerate. The very idea must be crushed before it becomes contagious.
There is, however, something missing in this formulation. The genocide in Gaza, reveals a more complicated dynamics in that it looks like it is the US that is doing the bidding of Israel not the other way round. The slavish bending over backwards by US state department to provide apology for Israel; Biden’s bizarre moral obstinacy in the face of Israel’s immoral, nay sadistic, behavior towards the people of Gaza even as the signs mount that he stands to lose his upcoming electoral bid as a result; legacy media’s constant gaslighting of the genocide in Gaza (the so-called Israel/Hamas war in which “Israelis are slaughtered” but Palestinians mysteriously “die”), all this suggest a different relationship between the US and Israel: it is Biden who is murdering on behalf of Netanyahu. In this formulation, Biden is doing the bidding of AIPAC, the most powerful lobby in the US, whose money he is the biggest recipient. Netanyahu can push his depravity as far as he wants, and Biden will just have to follow no matter how far Netanyahu goes. Biden might have moral misgivings about Netanyahu, might resent and even hate him, but he won’t do anything. Biden is bought, just as the vast majority members of the political class. The list of AIPAC’s donors, from both parties, is quite impressive.
If this is the case, then the first theory about Israel doing the bidding of the US would appear to be rationalization that makes US appear to have the upper hand, using Israel for rational and instrumental reasons.
There is no reason why we can’t combine both theories and see the picture of Biden feeding poison/milk to Netanyahu as a mutual embrace: a continuous traffic of aggression projected/introjected by both Biden and Netanyahu so that the origin of baby’s aggression might not matter at all-mother is as psychotic as baby-, so long as it is a communication between the two that binds them in a state of narcissism in which the “other”-dead Palestinian children falling to the ground-is completely invisible to either. Each is acting out the other’s aggression, each has lost track of whose murderousness it is that is being acted out, and each is rather relieved that they have been spared the aggression of the other as it is redirected to Palestinian children.
In this tight narcissistic embrace, it is almost like the baby is not born yet. For to be born is to take the first steps towards separation from the mother, it is the beginning of the long-drawn-out process in which the baby begins to discover where he ends and where his mother begins. And clearly, Israel doesn’t understand where it ends, and the US begins and the US is loath to tell it.
This means that it is not so much that Israel is above the rules (rule-based international order); it is pre-the rules. It is too symbiotically merged with the US to understand that there is a world out there in which states relate to each other through rules and in which aggression is regulated and constrained by them. In this world, murder of children is frowned upon, seen as abhorrent, legally, and morally. Israel doesn’t quite understand that because it doesn’t treat itself as subject to “our” rules. It is in a world all by itself, merged as it is with mommy the US, a very exceptional world, indeed. In this world, the baby is allowed to be a psychopath, murdering as many children as he wants and feeling proud of it; a world of an explosive id, its murderous appetite unrestrained, in which it is not clear to the baby, nor to the mother for that matter, whether all those murders were real or just creations of the baby’s sweet, sweet imagination. Just watch Netanyahu give an interview and be confronted with the mass death of children in Gaza and you know you are in the presence of a psychopath. Meantime, Biden licks his ice cream while he talks about a “possible ceasefire” while people starve.
Psychopaths!
This is a far cry from Israel’s claim before the ICJ that it is fighting a “war” not committing genocide. To fight a war a distinction must be made between combatants and civilians and the lives of the latter have to be spared except as necessary “collaterals”. But a baby merged with his mother with a continuous feed of bombs and ammunition, is barely aware of “civilians.” It has yet to distinguish himself from his mother, let alone acknowledge the existence of another outside his immediate aggressive impulses whose life needs to be spared. In that sense the cartoon, is accurate, deadly accurate-pitchfork in the body of the Palestinian that bleeds whose blood is recycled back as feed from Biden to Netanyahu in a psychopathic orgy of death and destruction.
This is why US based liberal Zionism stands helpless defending Israel. The more it attributes “reason” to Israel: Israel is fighting a war with Hamas and civilians are “human shields” that Hamas uses, therefore blame should be returned to Hamas for their death, the more Israel produces evidence to the contrary. Israel insists on its pre-rationality. It produces daily evidence of its deep pleasure in the death of children. It is like the baby that cannot help itself but brag about the gratification of its murderous impulses.
“Eat your hearts out, you can’t but I can!”
As I was writing this, news broke out that Israel killed upwards of 100 starving Gaza civilians. Fathers, having camped out all night waiting for aid trucks to arrive, running towards the trucks when they arrived in the early hours of the morning to pick up a sack of flour to feed their children only to be mowed down by Israeli fire in the tens, hundreds injured. Israeli tanks then drove over the bodies of those falling to the ground causing their flesh to pop out of their skin. Aghast, the world asks, “Who does that? What kind of depravity is involved in doing something like that?” Far from “reason” and “distinction”, we are witnesses to a pre-civilized, barbaric force that has yet to encounter “civilization,” let alone its rules of military engagement. When shortly after October 7, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,’ that was heads up that Israel’s barbarism is about to be unleashed. The world was on notice that it is about to learn what “animals’, not the enemies of Israelis, but what Israelis were. Sure enough.
The liberal Zionist story is particularly comic when Israel conducts war, as of military strategy, not against a combatant enemy with a view of concern to innocent civilians, as International Humanitarian Law would expect it and all other armies to do, but against civilians themselves with a view to breaking the will of the enemy combatant by killing off all his family (the Dhahia doctrine.) We were all given heads up early in the conflict when Israel’s president Isaac Herzog declared, “There are no innocent civilians in Gaza”. Sure enough. The “most moral army in the world”, in the words of Chris Hedges is unique among all militaries: “Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but I have never seen soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”
Liberal Zionists can scramble to attribute reason and morality to Israel, but Israel keeps saying back it was not interested.
There are things that the world is only now discovering about Israel that have been hidden thus far from view. Things that are written on the bodies, lives and discourse of Palestinians, generation after generation, ever since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 became a British imperial promise to the Zionist movement. We have always known about the utter ruthlessness and depravity of the Zionists. Unfortunately, we have been forced to keep it among ourselves as “private knowledge” for every time we wanted it to talk about it, scream it off the rooftops, liberal Zionists jacked up the gaslighting volume. It is antisemitism to speak about your pain. Shut up.
Let me propose a different way of thinking about Israel. Rather than the cartoon representation, let’s use literature. I propose we think of Israel as Frankenstein’s monster2. Victor Frankenstein, the monster’s creator, was a student scientist who was obsessed with discovering the mystery of human life. He frequented graveyards and experimented with bringing the dead back to life. Out of limbs he dug out of graves, he patched up a-6-foot-tall monster. The monster was..ugly, it was…monstrous, and as soon as Frankenstein saw him he fled. Next day, he woke up hoping his creation was nothing but a bad dream.
Israel is a monster patched up of disparate limbs.
You know Israel is a patch up of disparate limbs because it has a fascination with limbs. It blindly bombs buildings on top of residents using dumb bombs whose targets are generated by AI. Those who survive have their limbs cut off without anesthesia. Those who die have their limbs severed by the crushing weight of the collapsing building. Its snipers target children’s legs that end up being amputated. Gaza’s remaining medical facilities, after all hospitals were destroyed by Israel, are filled up with cut off limbs. Not to speak of Israel’s perverse fascination with graveyards which it keeps desecrating, unearthing dead bodies of Palestinians, with a scattering of limbs.
The dismantling of Palestine into disparate territories unrelated to each other, here, the Galilee, here, the West Bank, and there, Gaza. In the West Bank, here, this town and there, this village, all interspersed with Jewish settlements all but ensuring they are kept apart. Roads, highways and walls that cut off the various parts of the Palestinian body. Palestine as geography has been cut off into disparate limbs.
Israel keeps evacuating its image of itself onto the Palestinians like an endless diarrhea.
Israel is based on three ideas/feelings-its patched-up limbs- that keep it feeling monstrous and, like the unhappy monster of Frankenstein, it needs to go on killing everything that is “organic” so that its monstrosity is not unique to itself.
The first idea/feeling (limb): Israel was created on the basis of a lie: “a land without a people for a people without a land.’“Let’s call this lie a wish/delusion that put Zionism on a path to twist the neck of reality to force it to conform to the delusion. Of course, the Zionist movement that came up with this slogan was perfectly aware there were people on the land, it just thought of them as simply disposable. The people on the “empty land” were nothing but a bunch of peasants who would happily move on to be part of the surrounding Arab countries and had no organic relationship to this land. Every new Zionist aggression on Palestinian territory produces a renewed attempt at twisting the neck of reality which in turn produces more of this “wish” in hysterical form. “Oh, why can’t the people of Gaza just move to Egypt?!” The Zionist keeps wanting Palestinians to become foreigners in other people’s land because the Zionist himself is a foreigner in other people’s land.
The second limb of the monster Israel: the pronounced undying support for the Zionist project that came first from Europeans and then from the Americans producing a near consensus, is based on an ambiguous feeling. Is this consensus to ship off the Jews of Europe to Palestine a sign of love or is it a sign of hate? Which lover would separate from the loved one and ship her off to a remote land? Is it an end to European antisemitism or is it antisemitism in condensed form? Hard to think antisemites were disheartened at the spectacle of Jews leaving their countries to form a state of their own in remote lands. Biden recently said, “No Jew anywhere is safe without Israel.” Was that love or hate?
Germans now, as the Gaza Shoah unfolds, crack down on the faintest expressions of support for Palestinians depicting it as antisemitic. They are so fundamentalist about it creating right before our eyes a split of love and hate (if you support Palestinians you must hate the Jews) that leaves you suspecting that the middle point keeps eluding them (decrying Palestinian death is hatred for Israel’s actions not the Jews) because they remain schizoid about the whole Goddamn affair and that this avowed love for the Jews can at the flip of the coin turn into its exact historic opposite.
And the third limb: the Euro-American consensus post World War Two to displace the charge of antisemitism unto the Palestinians for resisting the Zionist takeover of their land. Every resistance Palestinians put up whether against occupation or apartheid or siege is depicted as “anti-semitic.” In this brilliant maneuver, “antisemitism” is doubly “localized”: Palestinians are uniquely chosen to become THE “antisemites”, and antisemitism is uniquely defined as the rejection of the Euro-American consensus to create the state of Israel. And if not Palestinians, it is their migrant and leftist supporters in the West who become their representatives in Jew hatred.
“Oh why does the left hate Jews so much?”
Whether formed of a psychotic delusion or confused about the love or hate of its creator, or constantly directing its rage against the innocent, the Frankenstein monster of Israel roams the land confused, hated, and angry. It is particularly enraged by the precious relationship between mother and child in Gaza as it keeps ripping at that most holy of bonds by killing one or the other or both. Having ripped the relationship of Palestinians to their own land, it has moved to rip their very relationship to existence.
The novel tell us that once Frankenstein’s monster became aware of its monstrosity, it insisted to its creator that it needed a “mate” as monstrous as he so that he does not feel alone. Victor Frankenstein, the creator, refused for why would he inflict on the world yet another monster? This sent out the monster on a killing spree, targeting every family member, friend, and lover of Victor’s, as if saying if I have to live this monstrosity alone then so shall you share my existence.
The monster, like Israel, hit at every organic relationship because like Israel, it is an inorganic monstrosity that is overwhelmed with envy and rage at every thing that is real.
The cartoon was published by the YouTube channel Inthought and seems to have been deleted.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)