Being numb is a privilege

Cheering on a war, for fun and profit

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

There’s so much to talk about that I’m breaking today’s newsletter into two pieces. This first half is something more personal, though very much connected to current events, and later tonight, we’ll have a piece for paid subscribers that packs in a whole lot of news, updates, and things worth knowing.

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Nerve-endings are conduits built to convey and forget, but there are some types of pain that linger long after the physical feeling has receded.

It’s been a dozen years since my most recent open-heart surgery, but I still retain a visceral memory of the anguish caused by the chest tubes jackhammering away on my vital organs. The only modicum of relief came with a rush of morphine that I could trigger with a button that looked like a Jeopardy buzzer.

The thing was programmed to dispense the drug only every so often, so there was a lot of negotiating over the length of the interval — the morphine wore off more quickly on younger patients like myself, so eventually we agreed to a constant drip that kept me at a consistent level of pain that was just low enough to permit me to think about something else.

The lifespan of artificial heart valves means that I’ll probably need a new one soon, and though I’ll be likely to get a far less invasive procedure this time, it’s hard not to imagine and obsess over worst-case scenarios. I’ve been thinking a lot about that pain, dreading its return, and trying to figure out how I’d get the most out of whichever drug they put into my IV.

Current events have reminded me that this is a privilege.

Referred Pain

The Israeli army, under the direction of a far-right regime opposed by much of the country, has now laid waste to just about every hospital in Gaza — 26 of them have been shut down entirely, while the remaining nine have for weeks been operating without electricity, medical supplies, or water.

Doctors have been huddling premature babies on tables lined with tinfoil in desperate attempts to keep them warm, operating on the mangled bodies of children as they bleed out on the floor, and performing gruesome emergency surgeries with no anesthesia whatsoever.

Hamas is a malignant force that must be dismantled, but the relentless campaign that Israel is pursuing is not simply targeting Hamas terrorists and supporters. Israeli officials have said that everyone in Gaza is a target, and as a result, it is the millions of Palestinian civilians that have been made to suffer. That’s an abstract word, and easy to gloss over, but try to think about any individual person being treated in one of the remaining hospitals.

The director-general of the UN’s Palestinian humanitarian mission said on Tuesday that the operation was “on the verge of collapse.” Israeli troops spent the night raiding Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, which one volunteer doctor on Tuesday compared unfavorably with hell. The place is being ripped it apart floor by floor as refugees huddle and patients scream in agony. Again, they are entirely devoid of anesthesia, turning surgeries into torture sessions.

It does not require a personal experience or connection to feel empathy, but my mind has trouble contemplating any other explanation for the bloodlust of so many politicians and militant supporters of the right-wing Israeli government’s brutal war.

Maybe the tens of thousands of people who gathered at the National Mall on Tuesday and fervently chanted “no ceasefire” just haven’t spent any time in the ICU with their buzzsawed sternums held together with metal wire and tubes rattling between their lungs, much less experienced the unfathomable pain of third-degree burns and crushed limbs without so much as a caplet of Tylenol.

Being raised Jewish, even in the most reform and secular tradition, means existing with the ever-present ghosts of the Holocaust. For me, it meant empathizing with the persecuted. The phrase “Never Again” was not meant to apply only to preventing the genocide of Jewish people, but everyone.

Because of this, the alternative potential explanations as to why the protestors on Tuesday don’t just support the war, but lent their voices and time to passionately rejecting calls for temporary periods of mercy, are even more grim. Perhaps they do understand that countless civilians are experiencing unfathomably excruciating pain, and either don’t care or see it as an unfortunate event justified by our own history of persecution. Maybe they’ve convinced themselves that security can only be won by creating thousands upon thousands of orphans and mourning parents.

Being numb is a privilege.

Yet even from a purely strategic perspective, all of this is hard to understand. I am Jewish. I have family in Israel, including a first cousin in the IDF. I care deeply about their safety and the safety of Jewish people everywhere. And I just don’t believe that killing 12,000 people, injuring twice that number, and turning millions more into refugees is going to secure the safety of Jews anywhere.

I know the counter-arguments: Israel’s government has ordered the relentless bombings and ground raid of these hospitals because it claims that Hamas is operating from tunnels underneath. That Hamas can swiftly move throughout its tunnels, but its headquarters is permanently stuck beneath each of those hospitals, so they must be bombarded from above.

But you should take that with a giant grain of salt, just as Israeli Jews seem to be doing: a brand new poll found that only 4% of Israeli Jews believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the most trustworthy source of information when it comes to this war, which he so desperately needs to continue for his own political survival.

Netanyahu’s government has produced one piece of comically shoddy evidence after another for its broader claims, and it has not offered any independently verifiable piece of intelligence to prove its claims about the hospitals, either. In fact, the NY Times just exposed the government’s false claims about Palestinians firing rockets at that hospital this week.

Hamas is ruthless and its murder of Israelis were unconscionable. We don’t know how many Israelis were killed by wild IDF artillery, but clearly it was Hamas that triggered the chaos. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and while it was supported for years by Netanyahu, its ongoing dedication to ethnic war is untenable and must be stopped. And Israeli hostages must be released to go home, even if the government has rejected many opportunities to bring them back.

Yet even if Hamas were operating beneath some hospitals, the reckless destruction of children’s cancer wards and the entire emergency care system for the more than 25,000 injured Palestinians violates all norms of war. President Biden himself, who continues to support Israel’s operations, has said that hospitals and civilians should be off-limits to such sledgehammer attacks.

Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT), the first Jewish member of Congress to call for a ceasefire, put it best in an op-ed published today:

I’m one generation removed from the horrific trauma of the Holocaust, which impacted my family and reshaped the world. Like me, there are thousands of American Jews that share a deep emotional connection to Israel because of what it meant for the survival of the Jewish people in the face of extermination. 

This same history also drives so many of us to fight for the protection of Palestinian lives. I do not claim to know how to solve every aspect of this decades-long conflict. But what I do know is that killing civilians, and killing children, is an abomination and categorically unacceptable — no matter who the civilians are, and no matter who the children are. 

Even with Hamas operations intentionally embedded among civilians, Israel cannot bomb targets in densely populated areas. The United States must demand it. 

That such compassion and grace exists is why it’s so haunting that so many people were defiantly chanting “no ceasefire,” as if they were being asked to turn the volume down on the stereo at their own birthday party, as if the mass slaughter was an entitlement. The enthusiastic disregard for the pain ripping through the bodies of tens of thousands Palestinians, the mental gymnastics so many perform to create an equivalence between a contested chant or campus protest, they make it impossible not to question whether peoples’ values are fungible, shaped by their proximity to power.

How else to explain the bizarre reality of Jewish protestor providing rapturous applause for new House Speaker Mike Johnson, whose entire adult life has been devoted to advancing a complete Christofascist takeover of American society and government? Or the shameful fact that there they were there applauding a speech by John Hagee, a pastor and televangelist who has spewed antisemitic bile for decades now, including his infamous claim that Hitler was sent by God?

Being numb is a privilege.

As for why the highest ranked Democrats in Congress stood on the same stage as those men, I think the explanation is somewhat different.

It Pays to Be Numb

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the chasm between the average Democratic voter and typical elected official was drifting wiser and wider, toward becoming the sort of intractable rift that fractures coalitions, creates ideological vacuums, and loses elections. On the national level, the outlook has not improved.

There was a brief reprieve with last week’s state and municipal election results, which were run entirely on domestic issues like reproductive rights and education. As I outlined in Monday’s newsletter, there is serious and purposeful organizing that is happening all the way down at the local and school board level, which portends well for tamping down extremism, mobilizing around quality of life issues, and fostering future leaders.

Too many existing federal leaders, however, are right now failing the most fundamental test of leadership. They don’t always have to agree with their constituents and base voters, but they damn well need to hear them out.

For too many Democratic officials, the fact that 80% of their base wants them to call for a ceasefire seems to have become a nuisance and something to performatively reject.

The look of disgust and swipe of indifference that Delaware Sen. Chris Coons gave a citizen-reporter when he deigned to ask him about a ceasefire while aboard an Amtrak train this week was stomach-curdling; that Coons likely had the reporter kicked off the train well after their encounter had ended is simply an abuse of power.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman’s decision to mock protesting veterans as they were being arrested could have maybe been chalked up to a misunderstanding if it weren’t for his new habit of flippantly dismissing anyone who disagrees with his refusal to call for a ceasefire almost exaggerated support for the Israeli regime.

The question that inevitably arises is who exactly these representatives think they are representing? To whom do they feel accountable? Undoubtedly there are some who are sincere in their unequivocal support for this war, and there is a slowly growing contingent of members of Congress who have been brave enough to call for a ceasefire, but for many others, there is a $100 million sword of Damocles now hanging over their heads.

AIPAC has lavished tens of millions of dollars on lawmakers, wined them and dined them, and taken them on trips to Israel, all to ensure that they comply with the directive that there be “no daylight” between Israel and US policy. Any divergence has been punished with expensive hit piece ads and absurdly well-financed primary challengers.

The group, which is funded entirely by right-wing billionaires and donated to 109 Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election, spent $30 million in 2022 to go after progressive Democrats. Now, it’s promising to spend a breathtaking $100 million on primarying anybody that strays from that line and advocates for anything other than total support for unending violence.

It would be an unprecedented financial outlay in Congressional primaries, more money than almost any candidate could contend against. But what makes it most pernicious is that those lawmakers under attack may not be able to count on the Democratic Party, which has traditionally gone all-out to protect its incumbents.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who is one of the biggest recipients of AIPAC money and led an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel this summer, met with progressive lawmakers for the second time on Thursday. He has remained silent as AIPAC has pummeled them with negative ads, and there’s no indication that he’ll go out of his way to defend members that have spoken out. Rep. Henry Cuellar is urging hm to do otherwise.

While AIPAC has historically targeted Muslim lawmakers, like Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, it has also gone after pro-Israel Jewish members of Congress. Last cycle, it poured money into defeating Rep. Andy Levin because he simply criticized the violent and illegal settlements outside the West Bank. Will the group also go after Rep. Balint?

Israel is now promising to bomb the southern parts of Gaza, the place where Palestinians have been trying to flee for weeks at Israel’s insistence. If this were a mission to end terrorism, the government would not be working so vigorously to ruin the lives of innocent young Palestinians, who represent half of the territory’s two million residents. None of us can understand what they’re experiencing, but those who are so callous about their suffering should jettison the painkillers next time they undergo surgery.

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