Greta Thunberg's moral resort area
After saving her life, can Israel provide the schooling she has missed?
Perhaps the most revealing moment came in a selfie clip recorded by Greta Thunberg as Israeli special forces were about to board her boat last night. “If you see this video, we have been intercepted and kidnapped,” she said. “I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me as soon as possible.”
The overall impression was of a young woman absorbed in a world of her own. The fact that she could suggest that she was being “kidnapped” with a straight face when real-life kidnapping lay at the awful heart of the story of October 7 and the subsequent war spoke volumes about her myopia. She was later pictured smiling in an Israeli life jacket and green sunhat as a commando offered her a sandwich.
Apparently, Israeli officials are going to take Greta and her comrades to a screening of the GoPro footage filmed by Hamas on October 7. Will it make a difference to her mindset? Given how closely her brand is now aligned with Gaza, and the way in which certain journalists sat through the footage with a notepad and later declared that there was a lack of “evidence” of sexual assault, I wouldn’t hold my breath. But all credit to the Israelis for treating Greta like the child she is, and attempting to provide a little of the schooling that she lacks. Perhaps the images will disturb her dreams.
In truth, the “Israeli occupational forces,” as Greta so charmingly calls them in her selfie, saved the woman’s life. I am reminded of the case of Vittorio Arrigoni, an Italian journalist and activist who worked with the “International Solidarity Movement” and travelled to Gaza in 2008, during a previous war with Israel. He was abducted by Salafists and strangled to death with a plastic cord.
All of this just highlights the most essential understanding of this war: most people in the West don’t see it. Not really. They only sees a reflection of themselves, like a vain young woman strolling past a shop window and pouting at her own image without noticing what is inside. Would the jihadis kill me for my crop-top? Of course not! I’m totally pro-Intifada.
Nothing says this more than Greta Thunberg. Stitching her identity together out of selfies, keffiyehs and a needy attempt to insert herself into the middle of somebody else’s tragedy, she is not shrieking about the Israel or Gaza of real-life. She is shrieking about herself.
I am reminded of Saul Bellow’s book about the Yom Kippur War. “Where Israel is concerned, the world swells with moral consciousness,” he writes. “Moral judgment, a wraith in Europe, becomes a full-blooded giant when Israel and the Palestinians are mentioned. Is this because Israel has assumed the responsibilities of a liberal democracy? Is it for other reasons? What Switzerland is to winter holidays and the Dalmatian coast to summer tourists, Israel and the Palestinians are to the West’s need for justice a sort of moral resort area.”
So little has changed in the past five decades. The decline has only been accelerated by social media and the slow collapse of our culture. Bellow had only one word of hope: “The great enemy of progressive ideals is not the Establishment but the limitless dullness of those who take them up.” It can’t be possible for the narcissism, superficiality and hypocrisy of the modern West to so quickly overturn centuries of civilisational development. Can it?
In the meantime, we have almost entirely forgotten the tragic necessity of violence in self-defence. We have almost entirely forgotten the hell of armed conflict, in which chaos reigns, civilians lose their lives and deprivation and trauma abounds. We have almost entirely forgotten our own values and what it means to defend them. We have almost entirely forgotten ourselves.
There's something splendidly Pythonesque in the pictures from the scene. The intrepid Resistance defy the evil Occupation forces, and are offered a sandwich and a ride home.
I have no doubt that having been shown footage of the atrocities of October 7, they'll all be in full denial mode. Or maybe they'll just close their eyes; it's worked so far.
Thank you for the insightful article about the moral indulgence that drives the liberal West. The 1973 quote from Saul Bellow was brilliant as it documented that the behavior we are seeing exhibited today is nothing new. I can well imagine that 50 years from now the Bellow quote will be unearthed and it will be as relevant as it is today.
As you point out the West has forgotten the horrors of war but I would argue that it’s worse than that. In the name of humanitarian justice we have assured, by changing the rules of war through international law , that wars like we see in Gaza will be a reoccurring event.
It used to be that there was a cost to war. If you attacked another state the price if you lost was permanent loss of territory and dislocation of population. Those consequences acted as a deterrent to starting a war. Today at the end of war under international law you just return to the same starting position as at the beginning of the fight. Sure, people have been killed and property has been destroyed but when death of civilians is just used as another weapon of war and somebody else will pay for the rebuild, under western rules there is no consequence for launching an October 7th. That’s why Israel has to fight on until Hamas is eradicated and something better is put into place. So it does not suffer deja vue down the road.