Today X is ablaze with disgust and outrage over the media coverage of Israel’s bumbling ‘escalate to de-escalate’ strategy and rightly so. Many of you are making satirical comparisons between media coverage of Hitler’s waltzing over his neighbours or media coverage of Russia’s actions. Yes, where were the cute cuddly words like ‘incursion’ and ‘limited’ then? This drawer with defanged vocabulary only opens when Israel fires up its death machine and goes trampling some more journalists, some more doctors, more pregnant women, old people, disabled people, more kids and occasionally even someone carrying arms who, if you could look into their family history, only picked up arms because Israel drove family members from their land, locked some of them up and killed and maimed some others in previous ‘incursions’.

Israel destroys crops, demolishes building after building, wipes out entire families, makes fleeing its bombs a survival carroussel, lets its settlers terrorize anyone that stands in their way of their little Lebensraum project, causes environmental catastrophes and makes coverage of its sadistic orgies impossible, at least not through official channels. The inventor of the smartphone must have been the worst anti-semite of the lot. Meanwhile Americans bicker over which pre-selected establishment candidate can represent them with the most vigor, the snappiest, toughest sounding one-liners and the most pathos infused blahblahblah, because US politics is about who can make a significant number of voters feel powerful, it’s never really about policies.

Europeans seem not to care too much and unlike Americans don’t even get excited much about their own elections. Americans are way better story-tellers, their political spectacle has more of an addictive drama edge than the far less cultish, far more stiff and far more boring European professional hand shakers. The rush rush life of the neo-liberal rat race goes on. No time to think. Get the kids to school, to piano lessons, to karate, to guitar lessons, to art class, to tennis, to a play date arranged three months ago, sit through inane meetings, survive office politics, rush rush to the gym, take selfies with a towel, take a picture of broccoli with chicken, don’t take a picture of the box of Pringles, go ‘ooooh’ at the Netflix show about some chick marrying a Jew or some Emily getting Paris inside her, strategize to buy a bigger car than your neighbour and plan your next holiday to escape from the pressure, oh, the pressure.

Who has time to worry about the Middle Blast blowing up again? It’s far away, like really, really far away and all the languages there sound like something is always dying in their throats. Is that region, right? If you ever go there, be sure to book an all in hotel, so you can avoid the locals, cause, you know, they’ll just try to sell you stuff. We expect too much, why would anyone care about bombs exploding far away? There was a bit on the radio, ‘self-defense’, Lucas, put your damn socks on!!!, ‘return civilians to their houses in the north’, yes, Claudia, you have to wear a hat!!!’, ‘response to rockets’. Sounds pretty ok to me! The other side are terrorists. And they wear kitchen towels on their heads.

Anne-Sophie has to take little Marie-Hélène to the logopedist, has to hit the supermarket, has to squeeze in a 15 minute run through with her lover who is also her boss, hard to arrange cause officially she’s on home office, she has to pick up a new knife set for the barbecue her husband is organizing – he’s on a business trip to Italy – and she has a pedicure, a manicure and hair coloring tonight. Some lady from Ukraine is coming over to do her eyebrows for 7 euro. She’s really good and she says that the war in her country is about rich people. Nothing you could ever do about that. And it gets tiresome to keep track of all this shit. 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, yadeyadeyade, we don’t have a historical reference chart in our heads, it won’t get us a promotion at work or a discount at a spa.

Most Europeans don’t even remember when their own country switched to the euro or why they have certain state holidays. Why on earth would they be worried about people slaughtered in Beirut? Is that in Tunisia? Do they have all-in formulas? And we wonder how Israel gets away with it all. Kids ripped to shreds, parents plunged into a life long hell of mourning that never fades, politicians capitalizing on the misery, everything becoming a whirl of smoke plumes and videos with surgeons describing the worst sights of their careers, just unimagineable horror and Haaretz, ironically one of the slightly better news outlets, finds it appropriate to make its headline about ONE moderately injured Israeli. It’s a war on reality for sure.

The moderately widening canyon between those who live a life that is essentially centered around shopping and those who are confronted with all the underreported, unexplained, misrepresented horror makes living in relative comfort a surreal experience. So we have plenty of X’ers basically screaming ‘I want you to get mad!’, but without anyone wielding real power willing to stop this death march in the name of US-Israeli greed, the effect is marginal, a daily ritual to blow off steam with strangers we never meet in real life, but who are among the few who also care. Maybe we win some souls over to our side, by not shutting up. Since they’re trying so hard to stop us from doing just that, it must be a threat to Israel and its accomplices, so keep doing it.

Lebanon and Syria have the right to defend themselves against the Washington-London-Tel-Aviv regime. The Palestinians have been living under a brutal occupation for years and nothing we see unfolding now is an appropriate or even intelligent reaction to whatever happened on October 7th, it’s not about Netanyahu, he’s only doing the bidding of a nation that was born out of terrorism and cannot control its appetite for supremacy, dominance, humilation. We already have a one state ‘solution’ on the ground, it’s only that a few million Palestinians are excluded from it. So a two state solution is impossible, with the West Bank shrewdly atomized, so only a free nation of Palestine is now possible. Yes, from the river to the sea, with the nicest ex-Israelis allowed to stay, and the rest legally evicted to go and stay in the houses of their best friends, US representatives and UK MPs and other Judas types.

The evil energy required to maintain Israel will eventually run out, there will come a point that the effort to keep this US aircraft carrier posing as a nation afloat, will become too much of a drag on its allies and it will crumble. It is now trying to escalate itself out this impossible paradox: Israel needs violence and violent successes to reinforce the Israeli identity, but that need to mask its own self-doubt by looking like the strongest, is also its downfall. It creates the enemies of its own worst nightmares and if even for a short period of time it doesn’t unite the country by turning on some external enemy, Israeli citizens immediately start hating on each other. New settlers versus established settlers, religious types versus non religious types, expansionist types versus consolidation types, guilt-ridden types versus unrepentant types, those who live more than half of the time abroad versus those who tend to stay put, etc. Israeli society is only held together by the addictive thought that it’s always facing destruction from without. It can’t realize it’s its own worst enemy. The hurt Israel exports, it imports tenfold.

At the risk of sounding Haaretz-esque: We can be moderately optimistic.