Let My People Go [Update]

One must dip into Thucydides or Arrian for accounts of warfare as practiced by Sparta or Alexander the Great or revisit the Homeric legends of the Achaians at the walls of Troy to appreciate the Israeli siege of Gaza and its 1.5 million entrapped inhabitants. The classic authors described how hoplite armies would rampage through a territory, ‘lay waste’ to crops in an attempt to starve the civilian populations, coax them out of their fortified cities to battle the foreign troops, then if victorious, arrange for surrender and incorporation of their city-state into the invaders’ empire. Or alternatively, slaughter the male population and sell the women and children into slavery.

Those were the rules, and they made ancient life even more nasty, brutish and short than would have resulted from the underlying physical conditions of their existence. We haven’t advanced very far, have we? Biped instincts for domination by force of arms survive intact, with the losers peremptorily reduced to peonage and servitude.

It is not a pretty sight to observe the New York political elite, Democratic and Republican alike, rush to the defense of the Israeli assault without even stopping for a prudently respectful silence while the dead are being buried. No doubt they are being roundly threatened by their fund-raisers if they dare to deviate from the party line—that Israel is the victim and anyone who questions it is the Middle Eastern equivalent of a nigger-lover.

Anthony Weiner, Eliot Spitzer, Kirsten Gillibrand, figures who score courage points by taking on the absurd Glenn Beck or the greedy Wall Street banks, promptly line up behind those who send naval commandos to shoot at ships carrying food and supplies to the walled-off Gazan ghetto. The Orwellian discourse is on Israel’s ‘survival’ as if people lounging on the beaches of Tel Aviv suddenly were without sufficient caloric intake. And these are the ‘liberals’.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton calls for a cooling off period and a return to ‘calm’. Imagine how tranquil she and the mediatic echo chamber would be had the Iranian Navy decided to shoot up a civilian flotilla in international waters and kidnap 800 foreign nationals? And tone-deaf Joe Biden asks, ‘What’s the big deal here?’

The Biblical stories of the Israelites chafing under Egyptian enslavement provided a powerful metaphor to African Americans in the ante bellum period as the old spirituals like ‘Go Down, Moses’ suggest. What will it take to burst the balloon of illusion and awaken us to the appalling immorality of America’s decades of enabling of these modern pharaohs?

[Update]I see that the same historical allusion occurred to the incomparably smart and knowledgeable Juan Cole.