Qwiss It bothers me that while the system of nation-states continues to determine a lot of history, humanity collectively struggles to learn and adapt. Germany engineered the Holocaust; the UK's declining empire militated the expedience of the Balfour Declaration; the United States became Israel's imperial sponsor and converted it to a partisan of its strategic games.
No one has a more intimate, practical familiarity with the huge human stakes of the state of affairs than the bureaucracies of the US, the UK, Germany and Israel itself, but these organisations among others with less power but equivalent ambitions plough on.
Officials of state power declare every day to wounded peoples "It's these other states that are to blame for your wounds", all the while gently reorienting trauma-borne hate-fuelled judgements towards inhuman strategies of profit. When the repurposed judgements of these peoples justifies strategic state violence, people themselves make sense of affairs by imagining themselves to be the subjects of a just vengeance, and confuse state power as their own.
So for instance the derangement of the polling data @Dom mentioned, where Israelis to a great extent rationalise the massacre in Gaza and even want it to go further.
I'd contrast that mad rationality with the malaise of these anonymous IDF sources. From the outset, the instrumental kernel carrying out the public fantasy of rational military action in Gaza, Israeli military officials, has been up close with the madness of the logic offered to it. The people involved always knew the IDF action in Gaza could never work, not even on its own logic.
As this malaise beneath the veneer of reason surfaces there's always a new rationality to be found, "the hostages", "the Riviera of the Middle East", "Amalek".
That's why I'm against the practice of saying "these or those states are the worst" when as objects, states stand in for both bureaucracies and peoples. That's how this works and why we can't learn.
That's how innocent Palestinians have been dehumanised as collateral damage proximate to falsely algorithmically classified "Hamas militants". All of us are still being punished by letting these false symbolic substitutions, performed to legitimise the carnage of feuding states, keep on organising shared human history. It's a delirium.
