Every empire falls. Its collapse becomes inevitable once its rulers lose all sense of how absurd and abhorrent they have become
There is only one country in the world right now, in the midst of Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is guaranteed dozens of standing ovations from the vast majority of its elected representatives.
That country is not Israel, where he has been a hugely divisive figure for many years. It is the United States.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu was back-slapped, glad-handed, whooped and cheered as he slowly made his way - hailed at every step as a conquering hero - to the podium of the US Congress.
This was the same Netanyahu who has overseen during the past 10 months the slaughter - so far - of some 40,000 Palestinians, around half of them women and children. More than 21,000 other children are reported missing, most of them likely dead under rubble.
It was the same Netanyahu whose government is standing trial for committing what the ICJ, the world’s highest judicial body, has termed a “plausible genocide”.
And yet, there was just one visible protester in the congressional chamber. Rashida Tlaib, the only US legislator of Palestinian heritage, sat silently grasping a small black sign. On one side it said: “War criminal”. On the other: “Guilty of genocide.”
One person among hundreds mutely trying to point out that the emperor was naked.
Indeed, the optics were stark.
This looked less like a visit by a foreign leader than a decorated elder general being welcomed back to the Senate in ancient Rome, or a grey-haired British viceroy from India embraced in the motherland’s parliament, after brutally subduing the “barbarians” on the fringes of empire.
This was a scene familiar from history books: of imperial brutality and colonial savagery, recast by the seat of the imperium as valour, honour, civilisation. And it looked every bit as absurd, and abhorrent, as it does when we look back on what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago.
From your post history, your agenda is obvious. I think your specific topics and pointed references are misplaced though.
A country is made of up of people.
A government is made up of factions of people.
A coalition is made of factions with similar ideology.
Saying “This country doesn’t appreciate X” is pretty invalid. I don’t think the entirety of Israel likes what is happening. I don’t think the entirety of the Palestinian population loves Hamas bringing this awful shit storm down on them. What we do know is that small factions of of people decided this would happen: Hamas made a choice to do this, and Israel responded by destroying the populace where few who are aligned with Hamas.
Point your anger where it belongs, at the people making the decisions that kicked this off in the first place. Don’t make generalizations about groups of people, because that’s just idiotic. In the same way Hamas is not all Palestinians, Israel’s government is not all of Israel, and the US is not all of a faction supporting current events in this war.
As far as an “Empire” falling. This is just hopium for the author and audience. There isnt a salient point in this blog that is within the realm of reality, so I’m not sure of its purpose aside from the above.
The vast, vast majority of Israel does support nethanyahu. Most of the headlines about some ministers speaking out, or some sort of unpopularity, is about him not being genocidal enough. Israel is an ideological construct. It is the thing that gets compared to Hamas, because israel needs genocide to exist. There won’t be a Palestine if there is an israel