Moreover, it has been suggested that Israel was warned by Eqypt of an attack by Hamas. An attack, not necessarily this attack, of course. (Yes, it is a grey area, like so much that has ailed the old Holy Land).

The same (that is, the prior warnings) has been said of 9/11 and indeed of Pearl Harbour.

Second, as was also the case in the autumn of 2001, the Hamas attack has given Israel permission to beat the crap out of the terrorists, with whatever civilian collateral damage is incurred. (However much the Israelis try to minimise it). War on Terror Two.

Hopkins, an old Leftie, is no fan of Israel and regards its activities in relation to Palestinians as 75 years of ethnic cleansing by a colonial power. Let us park that debate at some distance. I have no answers, and don’t even know many of the questions. The focus here is on “signs and portents”.

The global signs and portents are already dark enough.

AGGRESSIVE

We have China, despite all its medical industrial complex connections with American funders like Fauci, pursuing with aggressive intent its expansionist plays in the South China Sea and its endless cold war campaign against Taiwan.

No one should relax about China, despite the suspicion shared by many that its default, post-Deng capitalist imperialist strategy of global economic domination will do it just fine, without a hot war.

Then, of course, there is the aforementioned Ukraine, replete with a potentially lethal combination of historical bad blood, complex, bad actors (Putin and Zelenskyy, for example), senile, semi-comatose leaders like Biden, and all of the rest of the virtue signalers like Boris Johnson, his British successors and Albanese.

Virtue signaling through the provision of weapons, training and even personnel. Nuclear triggers aplenty.

And now, we have the Middle East in powder keg territory, again.

As an aside, The American Conservative has suggested that the Hamas attacks have put an end to globalisation and the previously foreshadowed end to the nation State: “The fantasy of a borderless world lies in smithereens.”

Putin did a fair old job himself of killing off that canard, of course.

Leon Hadar of TAC takes up the story: “Around twenty years ago when, despite 9/11 and the rising China challenge, the age of globalisation was still with us, I challenged in the pages of this magazine the latest fad embraced by Israeli intellectuals daydreaming about a ‘post-Zionist’ Israel and their colleagues in the West: that of a one-State solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“One State for two peoples is the idea that Arabs and Jews could co‐exist peacefully and live in harmony in a bi‐national State in the area stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea – historical palestine (the Arab view) or the Land of Israel (the Jewish perspective).

“For years following the end of the Cold War and the rise of Silicon Valley, Tom Friedman of ‘countries with McDonald’s don’t go to war against each other’ fame, the prophet of globalisation, was fantasising about peace in the Promised Land.

“He argued that, in the struggle between the ‘olive tree’ (Friedman’s metaphor for outdated nationalism, ethnicity and religion) and the Lexus (which stands for democracy, open markets, the free flow of information, people and money), the Lexus would win.”

This was the kind of fantastical thinking that also gave rise in the optimistic 1990s, fresh from the heady scenes in Berlin when the Wall was pushed over and Soviet puppet States fell to pieces in no time flat, to the “end of history” argument posited briefly by Francis Fukuyama and others.

This was the liberal version of the old Hegelian theory of history-with-purpose, history-with-direction, meaning and an end-game. Historicist bullshit, in other words. (And by “purpose”, I mean human-constructed purpose, and not the Judeo-Christian belief in the divine purpose of history).

MISERABLE

So, there is a bit to think about. When you step even a little away from liberal romanticism in international affairs, whether or not of the neocon variety, and towards realism (like that of Mearsheimer and his spiritual godfathers of earlier times, like Hans Morgenthau), you arrive quite quickly at a pretty miserable view of our current circumstances.

I wonder if our wandering, old Palestinian flag bearer in Lithgow’s Queen Elizabeth Park has thought through the broader context of his silent protest.

I wonder if his fellow protesters at the Sydney Opera House last week have thought through their own actions.

World War Three is hardly likely to break out in Lithgow. But who knows?

If the call from Hamas for a world-wide day of action this week is anything to go by, again, who knows?

When terrorists call “action”, look out. They have thought things out a little more coherently than old Charlie Manson. And they might be wanting their own Helter Skelter, only with Hezbollah, Iran and nuclear missiles thrown into the mix.

In 1914, chillingly, everyone was up for a war. Even (especially?) the rapidly recruited and dispatched ANZACs, who had no idea what lay ahead, like Gallipoli’s cliffs and Northern France’s trenches.

In 2023, the dumbest generation (as Mark Bauerlein has aptly called them) seems not to understand the first thing about world wars.

Just put a flag or a poster in the window to signal your virtue, then get back to the mobile apps and the texting. This time around, we are sleepwalking.

Slouching towards Jerusalem, perhaps (with apologies to WB Yeats and Joan Didion).

Perhaps all of us old international relations buffs should dust off our old copies of Herman Kahn’s nuclear era classic, On Escalation.

Rational actors – remember them? – would probably want to heed Thomas Sowell’s advice, as relayed by John Leake: “The great economist and philosopher, Thomas Sowell, has often pointed out that there are no final solutions to the problems that beset individual humans and civilisations, but only tradeoffs”

Tradeoffs and Middle East are not normally concepts that one thinks of as aligning, of course. When one side wants to obliterate the other, and not simply to co-exist, and the other is, itself, lukewarm about any form of co-existence, rational economists are unlikely to make much headway.

Leake’s headline question is, why are world leaders so incompetent? Punishing and deterring terrorists while avoiding World War Three is a decidedly tricky business, sadly, perhaps, above the pay-grade of the current lot.

We will just have to hope that there are enough people around in the institutions that matter with the corporate memory to heed the ghastly lessons of history, and, in particular, the risky business in which the leaders of 1914 engaged.

There are two footnotes to add.

First, might it not be Israel that is playing the role of Charles Manson? There are many shades of opinion in Israel, including in regard to two State solutions and Palestinians.

ATTACK

Some argue that Netanyahu is a hardliner little interested himself in co-existence and multiple States, and (hideously) would have all-but-welcomed the Hamas attack.

Without any doubt, he was a hardline fool (and, perhaps, worse) in what he did to his own people in relation to COVID vaccines and other pandemic policies.

All, maybe, for his mateship with Albert Bourla of Pfizer and a Jewish vet. It has been suggested that neither Netanyahu nor Hamas really want a two-State solution, despite what the Palestinian Authority and many Palestinians and Israelis want.

This is a massive complicating factor, and doesn’t help at all to assuage the fears of the sensible about the risks of global conflict.

Second, the conspiracy theorists who have been so damned correct about so many things of late, are coming out in favour of the theory that all this Middle Eastern kerfuffle is just the next stage in the military industrial complex’s war on all of us.

Those down the rabbit hole see every war in these terms. Where they go wrong is to see every act of every government and every linked-to-government player as a conspiracy, all of the time.

Like other all-encompassing explanations of political phenomena, like historicism, Marxism, neoliberalism and the rest, the conspiracists only take us part the way there, and we should be cautious about them.

And yet, so many conspiracy theories are so plausible that when we hear the next one, we should always at least pay attention, and ponder.

Think of a conspiracy theory as a timely “heads up”. Biden certainly seems up for (yet another) war in the Middle East, in contrast to his Democrat predecessor Bill Clinton, who saw his role in the Middle East as peacemaker (as indicated by the Camp David Summit of 2000) rather than warmonger.

In sum, making sense of the Middle East, of persistent, sometimes ugly, nationalism, of the motives of the bad and/or incompetent actors who are in charge of so many countries and non-State institutions, and of globalist conspiracies, is one hell of a tall order.

Having Christian hospitals in Gaza blown up, with each side accusing the other of doing the bombing and the evidence (as always) murky, doesn’t make figuring it out any easier.

Nor does being reflexively partisan, and more affectionate to one side than the other. Following prejudices rather than the facts (as we best can understand them) can also make it much harder to see beyond regional conflicts to the big picture.

But we owe it to ourselves to try.

Otherwise, the drift to something far worse than a regional conflict may come about without any of us understanding, even noticing, the steps along the way.

FAILED

Just as our predecessors in the Balkans and countries to the west and east of those old empires, a hundred or so years ago, failed totally to join the dots between a “regional” dispute and something far, far worse.

Perhaps, as a start, our inept, appalling Prime Minister might turn his attention away from loony fantasies about our Indigenous brothers and towards the real big problems we face, both here and at a distance. I suspect he will not.

Maybe Anthony Albanese is the real Charles Manson in our midst, trying himself to ignite a race war through a bloody opening gambit.

And that this is his main game. Perhaps his only game. So far, sadly, he seems on track.PC

– Paul Collits