Genocide Isn't Nice

Shallow, uneducated thoughts on an academic's deep, educated ones

My former partner on this Substack, Doctor Gavriel Martindale, has published an article on various reasons that religious Jews should not support the extermination of the Gazans. You should all go read it.

My unqualified thoughts:

First, it’s premised on a strawman. I’m not aware of anyone prominent on the right claiming that all that needs to be done to win the war is to kill a certain number of Gazans (let alone all of them.) Plenty of people have called for the obvious solution, which is to expel the Arabs of Gaza entirely. While this would be quite effective-Doctor Martindale himself lives peacefully and quietly in the Golan, whose Muslim population was expelled in 1967 and now causes problems only for the Syrian Alawites-it makes for a harder case to argue against, so he ignores it, in a sort of reverse motte and bailey.

Second, it’s incoherent. The first part is premised on the idea that what the Torah says is irrelevant, as we don’t learn halacha from the Torah, and what the halacha says is irrelevant, as since the Bar Kochba rebellion, halachic scholars haven’t had very much to say about war and how it should be fought. I’m sure Doctor Martindale is aware of the Rambam’s book on the laws of wars, but he doesn’t bother to address its existence. If asked, he would probably say something along the lines of “we’ve learned a lot about race relations since then.”

It’s undeniably true that the modern, progressive approach to moral warfare has yielded impressive results. Imagine Maimonides, alive today, being lectured on the proper, moral way to fight hordes of neighboring savages who wish to slaughter, rape and enslave you by the military jurists of a proper, moral nation like the British. What would he say to the people responsible for the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indian civilians after the 1857 revolt, the Boer concentration camps, the purposeful starvation of half a million German civilians during World War 1, the terror bombing of European cities during World War 2, if they were to lecture him on the modern moral ideals of warfare? I expect that he would be too filled with contempt to even respond.

This leads directly into the next point of incoherence. As Doctor Martindale correctly points out, the entire point of the existence of the Jewish people as a sovereign nation in its own land is to glorify God’s Holy Name among the nations of the world. Doctor Martindale states that, if we were to expel our neighbors en masse or do worse to them, the nations would recoil, resulting in a desecration of God’s Holy Name. This is because these nations have modern, progressive values, namely, that crushing your enemies is Le Bad and inviting them to live among you and prey on your people while paying them money requisitioned from your population while crushing any dissenters with draconian penalties is Le Good. Additionally, these dissenters are not only Le Bad but Le Declasse, and should be sneered at by all Decent People as they’re being preyed upon by invaders and crushed by their state.

In short, our national destiny should be steered by the exact same worldview which Doctor Martindale dismisses a few paragraphs earlier as “abjectly cringe faggotry”. By extension, if expelling one’s enemies en masse is bad because it desecrates God’s Holy Name among “abjectly cringe faggots,” making concessions to one’s enemies while suffering their depredations indefinitely is good because it glorifies God’s Holy Name among the selfsame audience. This is the exact reasoning of hasbarites trumpeting Tel Aviv hosting the largest Pride Parades in the Middle East.

Being a scholar, Doctor Martindale surely knows that the “Big Guy Upstairs” gave us a pretty clear prophecy about the way in which He will make His Name great among the nations, and that it does not involve impressing them with our scrupulous adherence to the modern progressive principles of war:
17 And thou, son of man, thus saith the Lord GOD: Speak unto the birds of every sort, and to every beast of the field: Assemble yourselves, and come; gather yourselves on every side to My feast that I do prepare for you, even a great feast, upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink blood. 18 The flesh of the mighty shall ye eat, and the blood of the princes of the earth shall ye drink; rams, lambs, and goats, bullocks, fatlings of Bashan are they all of them. 19 And ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till ye be drunken, of My feast which I have prepared for you. 20 And ye shall be filled at My table with horses and horsemen, with mighty men, and with all men of war, saith the Lord GOD. 21 And I will set My glory among the nations, and all the nations shall see My judgment that I have executed, and My hand that I have laid upon them.

Certainly, if the Torah explicitly tells us that God plans to make His Name great among the nations through a great slaughter of our enemies, then we don’t need to worry about desecrating His Name by expelling a bunch of them.

This incoherence is a feature, not a bug. It’s Dr. Martindale’s entire shtick. The entire point of the article is to set up a strawman (the alleged desire of the “rightoids” to genocide the Palestinians,) throw everything at it and see what sticks. Hence, the snide tone. Charedim are intellectually dishonest, corrupt, littering boors, reformists are “cringe faggots”, “rightoids” and “Kahanoids” are brainfried subhumans, those who believe in kabbala (95% of frum Jews) fell for “nonsense” which “should be prohibited by law” (“filth leftists” get a pass this time, but Doctor Martindale addresses them elsewhere). All these people are contemptible adherents of stupid, dishonest, vile ideologies, to each of which Doctor Martindale in turn subscribed until he used his massive intellectual integrity to gain enlightenment. Now, he is a “counter-extremism expert,” which makes sense as extremism by its very nature requires believing in some fixed set of principles.

This stance, combined with a high IQ and a decent education, has the disadvantage of making any concrete achievements, however modest, impossible. Concrete achievements, fortunately, are not the point. As Burnham writes in his essay on Dante, “it’s characteristic…of all similar treatises that there should be this divorce between formal and real meanings.” The formal meaning is to analyze how the Torah wants us to treat the Gazans, but the real meaning is just status signaling and intellectual point scoring-Doctor Martindale wants everyone to know that he is a far nicer, smarter man, with more intellectual integrity than his opponents. The result, while not Dante, is modestly entertaining and readable. So please do go become a paid subscriber and help Doctor Martindale raise the money he needs to pay for his Tae Kwon Do classes.