Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

I. On the second night of Passover, in the year of our Lord 5784, a seder was held in the streets of Brooklyn, in Grand Army Plaza, a block away from the residence of Senator Chuck Schumer. The event was called the Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel. It was addressed by a number of anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and/or anti-Semitic speakers — after the wild blurring of those distinctions in the past year, the burden of clarification falls on the demonstrators, many of whose intense hostility to the existence of the Jewish state, and promiscuous political rhetoric, crossed the line into the ancient foulness a long time ago. Hundreds of protesters attended and hundreds were arrested, thereby reversing the order of the holiday and going from freedom to bondage. Their bondage, of course, did not last long; he is a fortunate man whose bondage is purely gestural.   I have not been able to establish whether anything remotely resembling a seder took place at the Seder in the Streets. (It sounds like the name of an old Richard Widmark movie.)  The political director of Jewish Voice for Peace explained at the gathering that “tonight’s Seder in the Streets will be happening on the second night of Passover, a holiday we observe every year that is all about liberation and how our liberations are intertwined with one another.” Well, not all our liberations: later in her statement she declared that “the Israeli government and the United States government are carrying out a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, over 34,000 people killed in six months in the name of Jewish safety, in the false name of Jewish freedom.”  Here, for a start, was another instance of the popular misuse of the term “genocide,” which has now become a regular feature of progressive discourse. For all of Israel’s cruelties toward the Palestinians, it is a gross historical lie that the Jewish state ever set out to eliminate every last Palestinian and every last vestige of Palestinian culture, so that the people and the culture would disappear from the face of the earth. Not even the Syrian war, before which the destruction in Gaza pales in grim comparison, was genocidal. Aren’t war crimes, or crimes against humanity, in which the charnel house of Syria abounded, evil enough? “Genocide” has become the term with which to describe the atrocity of which one most disapproves. There certainly are genocides in the world now — the Uyghurs most notably — but the left never marches for them. It never marched for Syria, either. An encampment on campus for the Rohynga? Not a prayer. Scores of thousands dead Sudanese? It appears that you have to be fighting Israelis or Jews for progressives to bestir themselves on your behalf. Anyway, the definition of genocide is not quantitative: the Hamas savagery of October 7, even though it killed “only” twelve hundred people, was in fact genocidal, owing to the anti-Semitic and eliminationist motivations that are amply and explicitly articulated in Hamas’s literature. None of this exonerates the Israelis from the high number of non-combatant deaths in Gaza. No, “non-combatant” is too cold: innocent men, women, and children. The retaliation for the Hamas attack has been ruthless; and whereas I have no idea how to compute the proportionality that is demanded by the rules of war, I am quite certain that monstrously disproportionate actions have been taken place. We have been witnessing the hell of violations justifying violations justifying violations. The Israeli government – which, to the eternal disgrace of Zionism, includes a few ministers who do think genocidal thoughts —  was dragged kicking and screaming to humanitarian assistance to Gaza; it was American pressure, that is to say, an expedient strategic consideration, that prodded the Israeli war cabinet to overcome its plain contempt for the population it was bombing. This was not the best it could have done. The Israeli notion that all Gazans are terrorists is as ludicrous as the Hamas notion that all Israelis are war criminals. The de-civilianization of others is a significant moment in their de-humanization. Yet the tendentious application of the concept of genocide was not the most egregious bit of the peacenik’s contribution to