The genocidal Israeli juggernaut proved unstoppable. But it wasn’t for a want of trying. It behooves the chronicler to memorialize the noble few who, albeit in futility, stood on principle and put themselves at considerable risk to stop the killing machine. When Hezbollah opened a second front mainly targeting military installations in the north of Israel, and the Houthis blocked international shipping lanes in solidarity with the forlorn people of Gaza, the “enlightened” West reacted in shock and indignation: How dare they intrude, What business is it of theirs? But wasn’t it this enlightened opinion that not so long ago promulgated the doctrine of “R2P”—“Responsibility to Protect”? In essence, R2P denoted that, when established institutions fail to stop genocide and cognate crimes, then other entities must step in to fill the void. In the 1930s, when the enlightened West abandoned the Spanish Republic, international brigades of volunteers went there to fight the nascent forces of fascist barbarism. They covered themselves with glory. (Fully three thousand Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, more than a third of them Jewish.) This time around, Fate appointed the Party of God and the Houthis. The Houthis possessed intimate knowledge of exalted Western values, on the one hand, and Gaza’s martyrdom, on the other. The US had enabled Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen that left nearly one hundred thousand children dead and gone. Rousseau famously observed that the most—indeed, only— truly civilizing impulse in human beings is not reason but the natural, inborn capacity for pity, and that the more society “progresses,” the more refined its rational faculty, the more its natural capacity for pity is stifled. Who, in a decent world, would not choose one dagger-in-hand Houthi risking life and limb in defense of defenseless Gaza over ten thousand Harvard-educated, elegantly coiffed Antony Blinkens adroitly lubricating the gears of Israel’s murder machine?
Related