I’m writing about the current Israeli crisis on this site for two reasons. First, I feel my bodhisattva vows require I try to ‘engage’ them, as in the French existential sense of engagé, by entering the conversation on Gaza. “A literature of praxis is coming into being in the age of the unfindable public,” wrote Sartre in, What is Literature? Is this what moved both Reverends Thich Nhat Hanh and Thomas Merton to become holy participants in the Anti-War Movement? If by philosophical extension, the undefinable public is composed of Nagarjuna’s sentient beings who are ‘anonymous vacuity,’ then what drives the Bodhisattva, beyond the limited view of a Kantian golden rule, to help anyone—what to say everyone—especially after training in advanced meditation stages upon an ‘objectless’ compassion? The answer is a previous sacred commitment to do so. Or else live in the Buddhists’s equivalent of the existentialist’s ‘bad faith.’ The second reason (usually I don’t need any)—is because much of this blog is driven by pilgrimages to different religion’s holy sites, and my first such trip and significant experience was when I just graduated from college and went to Isreal. I didn’t travel alone then like I usually do now but partnered with my Jewish girlfriend who lived in Los Angeles. Her parents were Reform Jews, and didn’t to my knowledge believe in a literal Messiah. True to form, they felt ‘progress’ (a new ‘faith’ born in the Age of Reason) would improve life for all humans. Her father was in fact a rocket scientist who worked on America’s Explorer series at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the California Institute of Technology. So she and I, after working crazy hours in Switzerland for S.O.S. (indeed), traveled to Italy, a country I’d already been to, just out of high school, during a ‘Grand Tour’ of Europe with one of my teachers and her husband. More significantly, we left for Israel from Rome on Dec. 16th, 1973, which is a significant time-frame in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian struggle. The very next day, at Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino International Airport, “shortly before takeoff, the airport terminal and the flight aircraft [Pan Am flight 110 scheduled to arrive in Tehran, Iran, by way of Beirut] were attacked and the aircraft was set on fire by armed Palestinian gunmen, resulting in the deaths of thirty persons on the plane and two in the terminal.” It didn’t end there as Lufthansa Flight 303 was highjacked and two more people were killed. That flight ended up in Kuwait and the gunmen in the custody of the Kuwaiti authorities. A custody conundrum ensued, as Italy didn’t want to be further ‘targeted,’ and the same with other countries in the West and Middle East, which also put their “national interests” ahead of justice. Also, countries such as Egypt and Arab Emirates didn’t want to undercut their position of being against an ever expanding Israeli state by prosecuting other Arabs, such as these Palestine gunmen, who were then seeking a place from which to fight Isreal after the PLO was ouster from Jordan. The surprising fate of these men, nor the whole Rome Airport incident aftermath, is not well known or remembered due to its political complexity and a lack of news coverage. So, here it is: “They [the Rome Airport high-jackers] remained in prison until November 24, 1974, when, following negotiations further to the hijack of a British aircraft in Tunisia (carried out with the precise aim of forcing their release), the five men in the commando were released in Tunisia with the complicity of a good number of Arab and European governments and the US. Thereafter, all news of the men ceased and they were spirited away, perhaps hosted in an Arab country where they went unpunished.” In trying to keep up with the most recent iteration of the Mid-East crisis, one could expediently begin with the 1967 ‘Six Day War’ when Isreal ‘captured’ the land currently configuring their nation’s borders, minus the Sinai Peninsula. In response to Arab neighbors' apparent mobilization for war, Israel preemptively attacked and destroyed Egypt's and Syria's air forces. Israel also repelled Jordanian attacks. The third of the Arab-Israeli wars, Israel’s decisive victory included the capture of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, Old City of Jerusalem, and Golan Heights; the status of these territories subsequently became a major point of contention in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with the latter giving back Sinai and disengaging from Gaza after the Yom Kippur War in ‘73–Oct. 6th. It’s easy to forget, especially now, and certainly after Netanyahu’s Bari-llan Israeli peace-state exceptualism speech in 2009–where he laid out his militarily asymmetrical platform for a one-and-a-half state solution—there was once a fair and sane answer to what now seems a genocidal quagmire. “The first Oslo Accord, known as Oslo I, was signed on September 13, 1993. The agreement between the Israeli and Palestinian leadership saw each side recognize the other for the first time. Both sides also pledged to end their decades-long conflict.” I can still remember perhaps one of the most famous photo ops of all time: the hand shake on the White House Lawn between Yasar Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, with President Bill Clinton, chaplain-like, proudly looking on, his longs arms spread in an all-encompassing gesture around the two Middle East icons. Now, that peace process irrevocably dead “with Israel continuing its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, and the Palestinian people no closer to – and some would argue further away from – an independent state.” (Written, 13 Sep 2023, that’s now a gross understatement.) “Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. The former was the Israeli prime minister, and the latter was the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). A handshake was to follow between them – a significant gesture and the deal would lead them to both receive the Nobel Peace Prize, along with then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. All three men are now dead, Rabin in circumstances directly related to the Accords.” (aljezeera.com) Rabin’s assailant was Yigal Amir, an Israeli law student and ultranationalist who radically opposed prime minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace initiative and particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords. It’s more than reasonable to say the mantle of deadly radicalism was then passed on to other equally, perhaps much more deadly, successors. I reference here an article on who runs the current Israeli government: “Finance Minister Smotrich, also a minister in the Defense Ministry with vague powers over the West Bank that irk the army and the actual defense minister, Likud’s Yoav Gallant.” And, “Itamar Ben Gvir [who] demanded an upgrade for his Public Security Ministry (now christened the National Security Ministry; no one quite knows why), winning greater control over police forces in the West Bank once overseen by the Defense Ministry, leaving basic administrative functions in the area, now splintered across three competing power bases, once again to the endless frustration of a confused military.” The fox now guards the chicken coup that have become Gaza Strip and the West Bank as Gvir was a major player in bolstering the political will of ultranationalist settlers to remove Rabin. “In October of that year, Ben-Gvir spoke to Israeli television cameras holding up a Cadillac hood ornament, which he boasted he had broken off the prime minister’s official car during chaotic anti-Oslo demonstrations in front of the Knesset. ‘We got to his car,’ he said, ‘and we’ll get to him, too.’ The following month, Rabin was dead.” (timesofisreal.com) The mass carnage perpetrated at this very moment in Gaza is not the product of a clear-eyed vision of a safer Israeli, but rather one driven by insecure, dictatorial and power hungry, ultra-radical Zionists to whom death and mass destruction are not a problem. We all should understand this carnage is being justified by the undeniable crimes against humanity committed against Israeli citizens on Oct. 7th, which one IDF commander, General Halevi, is now bravely taking the responsibility for letting it happen. An in-depth report, investigating the massive breach in Isreal’s famed tripartite security apparatus is long overdue. One might speculate in its absence there’s a coverup brewing. And what really happened on October 7th is, similar to 9/11, up for grabs, breeding internet meme conspiracy theories in the darker recesses of popular opinion. Numerous never answered questions about fire retardant coated struts and whatnot, called into question by credible architects and anti-authority marginalists alike, persisted for years. And similar to when President George W. Bush expanded his Presidential powers and levied a civil rights curtailing Homeland Security Act— almost unanimously passed through Congress—Ultranationalist leaders may also be seeking to expand their powers. Remember, the first thing out of their mouths was, “this is our 9/11.” There is currently an investigation by the government’s comptroller’s office and “Channel 12 noted that due to the report’s limited scope, Netanyahu’s role in the missteps would not be the focus of the initial findings set to be released. Among the issues to be reviewed by the comptroller’s office were the conduct of the government’s security cabinet; the conduct of policymakers and the military on October 7 itself; intelligence preparedness before October 7; the defense posture on the Gaza border before the Hamas invasion; the preparedness of the civilian security squads in the Gaza border region before the war; the funding of Hamas; and the lack of equipment for IDF soldiers, Englman said in December…. His office was also set to study the government’s actions following the outbreak of war, including how civilians from the south and north were relocated; the evacuation of the injured and the collection and identification of the bodies of the victims; the rights of those harmed in the attack and their ability to access those rights; and the government’s public diplomacy activities…. The IDF is conducting an internal investigation with a focus on a timeframe starting from the March 2018 Hamas-led Gaza border riots until October 10, 2023, the point when Israeli troops re-established control of southern Israel following the onslaught. The findings are expected to be presented to Halevi by the beginning of June, the military said earlier this month.” Already, in independent investigative reporting by news agencies there’s damning evidence: “CNN identified 22 hospitals in northern Gaza, studying satellite imagery and footage of each site. Of those, 20 were damaged or destroyed in relentless bombardment during the first two months of the war. Satellite imagery showed craters near 11 of the hospitals were consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. The munitions were dropped near enough for the hospitals to be within the lethal fragmentation radius, which is up to 365 meters (about 1,198 feet). Fourteen hospitals were directly hit. Several, including Al-Shifa and Al-Quds, appeared to have been attacked by Israel. Imagery obtained by CNN showed that two hospitals were completely flattened. Attacks on and around the strip’s three pediatric hospitals forced them to cease services. The only hospitals offering dedicated cancer and psychiatric treatment also stopped operating after having been damaged. By the end of the period reviewed, only four hospitals were partially functioning, according to OCHA, the UN humanitarian agency. None had surgery capacity.” (cnn.com) The return to pan-collegiate, anti-war-like demonstrations, organized first at Columbia University—perhaps in some part due to the resident anti-Zionist movement historian, Professor Joseph Massad—who no doubt informed students, as I heard his views well articulated in some students interviewed. He has reported in books and articles many unseemly collaborations of Zionists leaders, in their colonialist-settlers mission, with Nazis around the time of the infamous Nuremberg Laws. As those laws would force Jews out of Germany and into a Jewish state controlled by Zionists, these laws were embraced, if not collaborated upon—or so claims Massad. It should be generally known: “Zionism has never been a uniform movement. Its leaders, parties, and ideologies frequently diverged from one another. Compromises and concessions were made in order to achieve a shared cultural and political objective as a result of the growing antisemitism and yearning to return to the historical homeland. Similarly, anti-Zionism has many aspects, which include criticism of Zionism as a colonialist, or exceptionalist ideology or through settler colonialist movement. Proponents of Zionism do not necessarily reject the characterization of Zionism as settler-colonial or exceptionalist.” (wiki.org) A more detailed history however reveals a ‘dialectical contradiction’ or opposition that’s key to understanding the present horrors in Gaza: “Zionist ideologues also talked of the need to ‘conquer’ the land and establish an exclusively Jewish economy in Palestine. This meant purchasing territory from Arab landlords and replacing Arab labourers with Jewish workers. It also meant encouraging Jewish employers to employ Jews only. This may have had limited success as a policy, but the message to Palestinians was clear: the Zionist movement wanted the maximum amount of land and the minimum number of Arabs. This was to be achieved through land purchases and immigration. But many also talked of the need to ‘transfer’ the Palestinians – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing – as a prerequisite for building a Jewish majority homeland.” (history today.) Professor Joseph Massad’s criticisms, however inflammatory, have become a poignant attempt to disentangle the Jewish people from the snare of today’s ultranationalist ruling faction within the current Israeli government. Movements like the campus Pro-Palestinian ones, serving the interests of a downtrodden minority, can’t compete after awhile with more popular, ‘neutral’ topics prioritized by corporate monetary interests, and that politics, within media cycles. The campus protest movements largely disappeared after President Biden came on TV and unduly chastised them for rampant antisemitism and lawless assemblage. This was conveniently coordinated with local law enforcement’s removal of many protestor encampments. Whatever the current state of the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the epithet Genocide Joe still sticks, at least in the MAGA crowd’s mind, and potential converts to it—or a third party—making his overwrought antisemitism complaints ring hollow, especially in the face of a tough, reelection bid. Though it appears, once again, on this day of June 2th, he has urged Hamas to accept a new Israeli proposal with three-part beginning with a six-week ceasefire to end the conflict in Gaza, saying that "it's time for this war to end.” But Palestinians are already poking holes in it—like a ‘six week ceasefire’ and not a permanent one—even though during that time humanitarian aide would flood into Gaza. Israel says it’s a nonstarter as hostages must first be returned and Hamas destroyed. But such proposals, and there’s been many of them, seem to me like trying to put the toothpaste back in tube after decades of stepping on it. That tube being the forced resettlement of an entire nation, potentially the entire Jewish one, via Zionism, upon decidedly Arab lands, dominated by Muslim peoples for hundreds of years. Certainly, the rocket scientist Jewish Reform family I eventually married into, as an ambitious young man, were only into the Kibbutzim as the mother had family on Long Island whose daughter had done a stint. Interestedly, just before leaving America on that trip, that ended up in Israel, our one night with this generous family (who drove us from and back to JFK airport, practiced Conservative Judaism out on Long Island. It turned out one of the more eye opening and exotic—at least to me—part of our entire European-Mideast foray. Conversely, in utter lack of any generosity whatsoever, after the October 7th Hamas attack, IDF Defense Minister Gallant, immediately shut down everything—transports, electricity, food, water, and communications—for two days. Then, after issuing evacuation notices, started illegally shifting (or transferring) populations of an occupied land, desperate Palestinian trying to escape relentless bombardment, to questionable safety zones, and has continued to do so for the last eight months, purposely putting them in harms way according to the International Court of Justice. Most shocking, is the number of bodies difficult or impossible to recover in decimated or collapsed buildings. Leaving no closure for relatives or anyone else who knew the victims. Burying humans under rubble, from both the religious and secular point of view, is a supreme desecration, one I believe will haunt the collective perpetrators throughout many lifetimes. My personal mission here in Cambodia—providing better, affordable housing and the reintroduction of Vajrayana Buddhism—is in no small part due to the Nixon-Kissinger administration’s illegal bombings. For which the K’mai have yet to be formally compensated by the United States. So now we have another atrocity—a burden both the state of Isreal and now the United States—must bare. The longer this inhumanity takes place, the more painful the retribution, the more onerous the rightful ‘reconciliation and inclusion of indigenous people,’ will be. Right now, it seems only a few of our leaders understand this. Bernie Sanders, along with Cornel West, who said, “both parties are enabling genocide,” seem the only high-profile political voices raising awareness and legitimate concern in the perhaps ‘baked in the cake’ Zionist genocide and ethnic cleaning in Gaza, and the West Bank. This is further validated by ultra-rightwing Israeli protestors hungry to settle a smoking Gaza right now, lending plausibility to South Africa's genocide case “brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on 29 December 2023, regarding Israel's conduct in the Gaza Strip as part of the Israel–Hamas war. Though a final ruling in the case could take years, the ICJ indicated provisional measures on Jan. 26 in response to a request from South Africa. The order enjoins Israel from violating the Genocide Convention and requires Israel to facilitate the provision of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—as of Apr 2, 2024.” (wiki.org) More recently, judges at the top United Nations court, the ICJ, its charter based on the 1948 anti-genocide and crimes against humanity act, “have ordered Israel to halt its offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah and withdraw from the enclave, in a case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide, citing ‘immense risk’ to the Palestinian population.” (jazeera.com) Now, with Rafah strategically staged for a full assault by the IDF, and over a million Gazans evacuated—some of them having already fled other unsafe zones ten times since October 7th—Israel lamely attempts to blame Egypt and UN humanitarian attempts, however heroic and fatally dangerous, for the halt in humanitarian goods. The US military’s answer to this humanitarian crisis is a floating dock and a pier attached to Gaza’s shore. ‘The Marines have landed’ is not only what I immediately thought, but also some Gazans: “I have doubts,” Mounir Ayad, a Gaza resident, told CNN near the pier. “I don’t understand this floating pier or what it indicates and what its purpose is. They say it’s for aid, but people are apprehensive. Is this aid or something else? We know that the US has never supported the Palestinian cause, so it’s implausible that it’s giving us aid without something in return.” It may be a moot point, as the last I heard, it had broken apart in rough seas, halting deliveries that were just getting going. More misery for Palestinians, as well as humiliation for the US, in its stubborn avoidance of a crimes against humanity reality check. Perhaps with the Rafah and other border gates closed, something like a floating dock and pier—also used in Cambodia’s famine—are necessarily to UN Humanitarian aid, and hopefully it’s only supplemental to all the entries into the Gaza Strip being fully open and highly functional to meet the hundreds of trucks a day necessary in the coming famine; which is rumored, in small part, to already have set-in both in the North and South. One wonders if Netanyahu and the Israeli War Cabinet, “drunk on revenge” according to former IDF soldier Avner Garyahu, in their emotional blindness, masked as national security strategy, would even consider the above historical precedents of what they’re doing? If not, here’s what’s they need to know about a famine. “Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move to try and find food and water—with many not surviving the journey.” “A famine is declared when a certain set of conditions have been met. This criteria includes at least 30% of a given area's children suffering from severe malnutrition. That means that, by the time a famine is declared, children are already starting to die because their parents cannot give them enough food to survive. It’s already too late.” Two months ago, on Mar 27, 2024, it was reported, “In Gaza, 27 people – 23 of them children – have starved to death as a result of what international bodies say is Israel's use of hunger as a weapon of war.” Before that, on Mar 18: “The Integrated Food-Security Phase Classification (IPC), whose assessments are relied on by U.N. agencies, said 70% of people in parts of northern Gaza were suffering the most severe level of food shortage, more than triple the 20% threshold to be considered famine.”(aljazeera.com) Since then many more hospitals in Gaza have already reported children dying of starvation and famine. “Children are particularly affected because they are still growing. The majority of those at risk of death are children, whether they are dying from starvation or from preventable diseases that their weakened bodies cannot fight off. The children who do survive will live with the consequences for the rest of their lives. Their growth will be stunted and they will be at greater risk of dying from future illnesses. They also tend to have a higher risk of having underweight or premature children, passing on these consequences to future generations.” (rescue.org) As all famines are not particularly the same nor are they generally different, Israeli War Cabinet Ministers should be reminded of the specifics of Cambodia’s famine. In its time it led to the largest ever humanitarian effort. Likewise, we can, and all should consider the historical parallels of our collective responsibility to the present circumstances in Israel. “The Cambodian humanitarian crisis from 1969 to 1993 consisted of a series of related events which resulted in the death, displacement, or resettlement abroad of millions of Cambodians. The crisis had several phases. First was the Cambodian Civil War between the Lon Nol government and the communist Khmer Rouge from 1970 to 1975. This phase was also marked by intensive United States bombing from 1969 to 1973 of the Khmer Rouge and sanctuaries and bases inside Cambodia of the North Vietnamese Army as part of its strategy to win the Vietnam War.” (wiki.org) Is Biden’s support of Netanyahu’s government and the US proxy bombardment of Palestinian hospitals, under which are purported Hamas bases of operations, using US munitions, similar to America’s Cambodian atrocities? Biden recently confessed: "Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those [our] bombs." This moment of conscience then prompted the delay “of the shipment of 2,000lb (900kg) bombs to Israel because of how they might be used in such a ground operation.” (May 15, 2024, bbc.com) Thanks, but it’s also vastly too little, too late. “On Sunday, a fire ignited by an Israeli strike in a tent camp for Palestinian civilians killed at least 45 people, igniting worldwide outrage.” (time.com) Bombs from US were found to be used in this latest assault, and continue to be in the assault on Rafah. “The second phase of Cambodia’s humanitarian crisis was the rule of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979. The Khmer Rouge murdered or starved about one-fourth of the 8 million Cambodian people.” (rescue.org) Will this then be similar—exact numbers not withstanding—to the fate of Palestinians within the confines of the Gaza Strip, or what’s left of it, if its inhabitants are governed by an ultranationalist (frightening to think of) ‘remodeled’ IDF? Which could also go ‘off the rails’ just as Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge soldiers did, indiscriminately holding a horrific number of auto-atrocious summary executions. “The final phase of the Cambodian humanitarian crisis was its resolution in 1991–1993. Vietnam withdrew from the country and the United Nations led Cambodia toward an elected government and repatriated 360,000 Cambodians, emptying and closing the refugee camps.” Before that, from 1979 and 1980, “the chaos caused hundreds of thousands of Cambodians to rush to the border with Thailand to escape the violence and to avoid the famine which threatened Cambodia. Humanitarian organizations coped with the crisis with the [above mentioned] ‘land bridge.’” (wiki.com) So that floating dock and pier on the Gaza shoreline to facilitate humanitarian aide in face of governmental obstruction is nothing new in the suffering continuum of America’s serial, ‘if you break it, fix it’ militarized foreign policy. I still remember that infamous 17th of April, perhaps a day or two afterward (things happen fourteen or fifteen hours earlier here in Cambodia than in California), when it was announced in our college quad that the Khmer Rouge had ‘liberated’ Phnom Penh. I wasn’t much of an activist, but before that announcement I can remember entering ‘admin’ offices and hanging out for awhile with ardent antiwar protesters. Concerning the illegal bombardment of Cambodia, continuing for six months after the signing of the Paris Peace Accord, personally and collectively, we felt sickened and were visibly depressed over it. One knew what was going on, not to the fullest extent, but we could extrapolate, as we’d been taught in our classes, and were mortified at our country’s persistence in killing thousands of innocents. Especially seeing children captured by photo journalists with their clothes shredded by the impact of US B-52 deployed BLU-82B/C-130 weapon system (nicknamed ‘Daisy Cutter bombs’)—seen running and screaming with massive burns from Dow Chemical’s napalm ordinances. Villagers were so terrified at the ‘klang’ noise and apocalyptic concussions they would become incontinent and wander around stunned for days in soiled clothes. We at antiwar colleges and universities were being given live updates, of feeble sorts, notably from Berkeley, and undoubtedly Columbia, minimally detailing what would eventually be only recently revealed: 2,756,941 tons of US bombs were dropped on Cambodia between 1969-1973, more than were dropped in all of WWII. There too, like the current carpet bombing in Gaza, where an estimated 45,000 bombs were dropped during the first 89 days of conflict—505 bombings a day, 21 bombings per hour (Source: Gaza Media Office)—there was little or no effective warnings for these villagers, especially as they were largely illiterate. Were leaflets dropped? Probably, but how many innocents would even know what they said? A convenience no doubt shared with the IDF, concerning those without cell phones, who cannot be notified of an incoming, flattening bombardment. It sounds cynical, but there may have been a need to blur the involved with the non-involved, just as the Nixon-Kissinger, illegal military commands needled to perpetrate a high kill-ratio upon perceived or imagined Ho Chi Minh abetting villagers, or young sons soon to join the Khmer Rouge, now that “the domino had fallen.” According to the recent sickening recalculation of collateral damage in ‘Bombs Over Cambodia,’ a Yale report found on Genocide Watch, Cambodians were used as cannon fodder (and we project to this day about Hamas using ‘human shields’) for withdrawing US troops as the Vietnam War wound down. As it was then in Cambodia, so it became later in Iraq, where deaths ranged between 946,000 to 1,120,000, and now again in Israel, where a similar number is threatened with starvation. From the Buddhist point of view, each war is suffered as an excruciating hell, karmically determined, laying waste to countless precious human births. This is the real optics on Mara’s mission, also similar to Satan’s, of Milton’s Paradise Lost, when he attempts to persuade Jesus to misuse his power. Is Biden now in a similar position? Biden, no doubt being preached at in all directions by Catholic family and friends, perhaps finds himself struggling like a Pontius Pilate from Scranton to preserve a proxy Christian innocence, systematically destroyed in the tens of of thousands of Palestinians martyrs. And, as martyrs are martyrs, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Jain, Hindu, or Buddhist, no matter what one’s reason decrees and excuses, ‘Ayenbite of Inwyt,’ literally the ‘again-biting of inner wit,’ or the Remorse of Conscience, eventually dawns in the faithful. But for Netanyahu, who needs to stay in power to stay out of jail, it’s different. As he can conflate his Hebrew God’s pronouncements with Satan’s or Mara’s mission to ruin or ‘destroy’ life’s innocence and purity in order to preserve his immediate self-cravings, a damning destiny he justifies by linking it to the survival of Israel’s very existence. But, as evil (nescience of goodness or a ‘golden rule’) increasingly becomes the sole legislator and guiding purpose, it overrides any notion of Kant’s moral imperative, overriding superior moral judgments for self-serving ratio-nations of a base or zero morality, as it did in the case of Eichmann executing Hitler’s horrifying vision of the original ‘final solution.’ And while only the Buddhas can claim to know karmic motivations of this dark guardian of Israel’s moral arc—now a menacing lathe of heaven—it’s not difficult to see his self-deceiving, sociopathic pride and arrogance in his bellicose declarations that fly in the face of so many countries’ call for decisions of moral conscience. As all beings, through countless lifetimes, eventually aspire to ‘do no harm’ we still must daily nudge them to do so now as this is a Bodhisattva’s call. Experts agree war is hell, but few understand it as arising with the way one views their basic nature and the arising of karmic phenomena—the accumulation of their previous suffering experiences of a hostile external world through countless lifetimes. This is one reason why Tibetan Buddhist mandalas often feature cemeteries below or surrounding Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, the Dharma, and Sangha, in pure realms or heavens, as wars and the continuous recycling of all beings’s bodies within the ‘three times’ is a constant of that suffering continuum. So while this life’s sad story is predominantly about ceaseless births and deaths, the Romantic Poet’s ‘veil of tears,’ it’s also about moral dilemmas, the weighing of karmic consequences, and the Bodhisattva’s heroic mind journey while doing so. An engaged Bodhisattva might wonder if anyone today is weighing the above cited dire consequences of genocide through weaponized starvation, orchestrated by really just a handful of men, and what can be done about them? If one is a practitioner of the Highest Yoga tantra, then one can avail themselves of the protection chakra with which most sadhanas come fully equipped, shred their enemies, or the evil one’s bodies, and transfer their consciousness to the Dharmadhatu. Regarding the Dharma, in this sense it’s law of karmic consequence, this may be the serious tantric practitioner’s best resort, as no negative karma accrues. But not all aspiring Bodhisattvas are working strictly in the pure field. In the Vietnam era, Thich Nhat Hanh promoted, if not invented ‘engaged’ (see ‘What Happened to Buddhism’ in this blog) Buddhism that, controversially, inspired some sangha members to commit self-emulation. An article was written about Tibetan Buddhists doing the same thing in protest over the Han Chinese irrevocably taking over their country. The conclusion that it was deicide, given the tantric practitioner views him or her self as a god during Vajrayana practice, was a convincing argument it was an indefensible karmic action. But then again, that dilemma captures well the moral needle’s eye a Bodhisattva’s must sometimes thread. Seeing, however, where certain kinds efforts might lead, I cannot recommend some of what the first ‘Engaged Buddhists’ did, however politically effective. Nor for that matter, any other negatively karmic course of action. Perhaps nonviolent protest and passive resistance, as Gandhi so effectively used it against the British Raj, is the best course, as it ensures the Indic religious doctrine of ahimsa (non-harming). Certainly Israeli knows how to protest, as at a recent mega protest in Hostage Square, only two people were arrested. “An estimated 120,000 people are believed to have rallied in Tel Aviv to pressure Israel's government to approve a deal outlined by Joe Biden - while two far-right ministers have threatened to resign if the proposal is accepted.” (news.sky.com) In a grievous deviance, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said they were opposed to striking any deal before Hamas was destroyed. [While] opposition leader Yair Lapid has pledged to back the government if Mr Netanyahu supported the plan. The prime minister himself insisted there would be no permanent truce until Hamas's military and governing capabilities were destroyed and all hostages released. Mr Biden's three-part proposal would begin with a six-week ceasefire in which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) would withdraw from populated areas of Gaza. The deal would eventually lead to the release of all hostages, a permanent ‘cessation of hostilities’ and a major reconstruction plan for Gaza.” (bbc.com) Nietzsche famously warned us about not becoming the monster we fight; nor gaze too long into the abyss, as it’ll gaze back into us. The Zionist movement, and the eventual birth of a nation called Israel, is a reaction born of Antisemitism, and that’s their monster, which seems to constantly morph. Of late, it’s been personified into Hamas whom ultranationalist equated to Nazis. As the holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazi party—engineered to a great extent by Adolf Eichmann—whom Zionists, along with almost everyone else, saw as a monster—then, according to Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt got it right when she spoke of him as epitomizing the soulless banality of evil—or, the abyss. Smotrich and Ben Gvir, along with Netanyahu, in their willingness to extend the war another six months, slaughtering tens of thousands more ‘noninvolved,’ innocent, mostly women and children Palestinians, have become the soulless Eichmann. Otherwise, how could they look upon what they’ve done and not see it as anything other than abysmal? Now it seems those three soulless men, stubbornly prosecuting this war on Gazans, preside over an abyss that is epitomized by the decimation of Jabalia. “One of the returnees [to Jabalia] told BBC Arabic's Gaza Lifeline programme that he and his seven-year-old son had seen ‘the bodies of martyrs scattered everywhere in the streets’ on Saturday. ‘East Jabalia has been subjected to an unprecedented devastation,’ Diab Abu Salama said. ‘All the stores in Jabalia have been destroyed, as well as the homes surrounding them…. Water pipes were destroyed... sewage channels were damaged,’ he added. ‘There is no longer one suitable place for habitation….“ (bbc.com) Here, in one of last century’s most chilling quotes, is Arendt’s judgment on Eichmann: “And just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.” This is of course how she ends her monumental book, Eichmann in Jerusalem.’ International courts, the ICC and ICJ, are—in their indictments of crimes against humanity and genocide—are affirming no less. But then the non-signatory United States and Israel shamelessly try to ignore or even target them and have a history of doing so: “[Court official] Kersten pointed out that pressure tactics are ‘nothing new’ for the ICC, with both the US and Israel having previously threatened the court. The administration of ex-President Donald Trump even ‘issued sanctions against the prosecutor and certain other ICC staff, as well as threatening to sanction their families,’ he recalled. ‘We have seen US policymakers and lawmakers say the same, that they would support literally sanctioning the only independent permanent international criminal tribunal in the world,’ Kersten added.” (aa.com.tr) Just yesterday, at the time of this writing, came another damning turn: “In the most sensitive case in the history of the International Criminal Court (ICC), on Monday, May 20, prosecutor Karim Khan sought arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and Israel for crimes against humanity committed during the attack of October 7, 2023, and the war in Gaza that followed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar, the leader of the Islamist movement in Gaza, face the same charge. This equivalence, posed by two requests announced at the same time, has appalled Israel. Among the Palestinians, however, it raised hopes that increased international pressure will put an end to the war and a sense of recognition.” (le.monde.fr) Concerning the Israel’s pathetic denial of committing internationally illegal war tactics, along with American complicity: “Spokespersons for the White House and the US State Department have explicitly conveyed that the US does not believe the ICC has jurisdiction to move against Israel, specifically because Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, the international treaty that forms the basis of the ICC.” But more just, reasonable, and mentally healthier people can perhaps take heart as “legal scholars have refuted these assertions, stressing that Israel not recognizing the ICC or not being a signatory to the Rome Statute does not have any impact on the court’s powers.” (as.com.tr) Israel’s ‘allies’—notably excluding France, walking the talk, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—have all been indignant about equating Israel’s so-called self-defense with Hamas’s so-called terrorism. Netanyahu immediately resorted to ad hominem attacks against the ICC prosecutor’s carefully worded indictment: “Benjamin Netanyahu responded with fury to the news that he might face an arrest warrant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was ‘a moral outrage of historic proportions,’ he said. Israel was ‘waging a just war against Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization that perpetrated the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust.’ In a bitter personal attack, Mr Netanyahu said Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) was one of the ‘great antisemites in modern times.’ Mr Khan, he said, was like judges in Nazi Germany who denied Jews basic rights and enabled the Holocaust. His decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and defense minister was ‘callously pouring gasoline on the fires of antisemitism that are raging around the world.’” After Joe Biden threw the full weight of his bully pulpit against the ICC’s claims, ‘Bibi’ was bolstered and spoke of prosecutor Khan now being a parish. But these mouthing’s of less than genuine politicians living in undeniably bad faith won’t ever change the truth, especially in truly liberal hearts, or their ability to legislate—perhaps at first invisibly—what is fundamentally right. The popular Pro-Palestinian student movement on dozens of campuses in American, and many more around the world, which may seem like ancient history now, delivered at its time the same message as the sixties and seventies anti-war movements, that there is never a valid justification for killing innocents and torturing them with forced relocations and famine despite what cynical world leaders, politicians, or unsympathetic commentators might say or do. Like when Bernie Sanders was rhetorically dismissed, undercutting his urgent request to halt the carnage by one of CNN’s glib media actors. So that same, sickening dread returns as in the Vietnam era, to many of us born just after World War II. And, perhaps for the first time, to other countless pure-hearted young people around the world. There is an oft told story given in Mahayana Buddhist teachings concerning the complexity and apparent breaking of pratimoksha (five liberating) vows in certain necessary actions an ‘engaged’ Bodhisattva must sometimes undertake. In brief—and there’s a number of versions—the captain of a ship out far to sea, in a moment of omniscient vision, seeing with his wisdom eye that one of the passengers is planning to sink his ship out of revenge, killing all five hundred people aboard. So he immediately threw the would-be mass murderer overboard, saving him from a heavy karma and the lives of all his passengers from untimely death. This may also remind us of the attempt on Hitler’s life perpetrated by someone with perhaps a similar omniscient view. Omniscience is the opposite of nescience, and sometimes it’s just the equivalent of good common sense and a non-selfish, outward-looking point of view. A view with which Bodhisattvas seek to solve the problems of the suffering world with its ‘self-addicted’ sentient beings. Of course, it could be argued that the Israeli War Cabinet sees a perpetual torment and death threat to all its people if they don’t first eliminate Hamas. This is a ‘tolerance’ call, similar to one we all constantly make toward beings ‘near and far’ in order to be civil and—especially true for aspiring Bodhisattvas—so we can act with loving kindness and well chosen words. In warfare, with respect at least to the spirit of international laws, it’s called having a proportionate response. Isn’t this what an eye for an eye means? This has not been practiced by Israel’s current ultranationalist government—except, curiously, in a recent reprisal on Iran, now seen as perhaps a paper tiger. Israel’s kill ration (the back and forth revenge ratio on both sides) is thirty-to-one. But who’s counting? I have, since 1973, perceiving, until Oct 7th, it was roughly ten-to-one against the Palestinians. Despicably, Americans also perceived life was equally ‘cheap’ in their razing of arable lands, forests, and populated villages during the Vietnam War era. Obviously, unlike with our Buddhist homily, the big difference between our Bodhisattva Captain’s actions and the too late, then overcompensating response of the IDF, is there was no collateral damage on Bodhisattva’s boat. Still under investigation, this ‘mysterious’ botched response shows not only a lack of wisdom, common and uncommon, but also raises issues of perhaps some kind of collusion upon some high officials’ part, reminding us of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, where similar questions were asked of Israel’s IDF and vaunted tri-agency (Aman, Mossad and Shin Bet (Shabak)) security apparatus, eventually leading some to think it was green-lit. The so-called ‘Jewish Department,’ dysfunctional in the prevention of Jewish terrorism against Palestinians under the IDF’s umbrella—with Shin Bet also handling internal security, along with the PLA monitoring Palestinians—uses, like all large enforcement agencies, espionage, counter-espionage, double agents, agent provocateurs, and other devices read about frequently in intrigue pot-boilers. Here’s a perfect example of how that goes awry: “The police brought Raviv — the Shin Bet operative known as Champagne — into custody in a Tel Aviv Magistrate Court, on charges that he had conspired to kill Rabin, but he was released shortly after. Raviv’s role as an informant later came to light, and in 1999, he was arrested for his failure to act on previous knowledge of the assassination. He was acquitted on all charges, but he has since become a fixture of extremist conspiracy theories that pose his failure to ring the alarm as evidence that the murder of the prime minister was due not to the violent rhetoric of the settler right, or the death sentences from the rabbis, or the incitement by the leaders of the opposition, but to the all-too-successful efforts of a Shin Bet agent provocateur. A more complicated and insidious conspiracy theory, but no less false, was that it was Shin Bet itself that assassinated Rabin or allowed the assassination to happen.” (NY Times, Ibid.) The Sanctity of human life in Buddhism, often spoken of within its context of Precious Human Birth, ‘a right juncture and auspicious condition,’ is said to be unfathomably rare and must always be upheld. Otherwise, only karmic devolution follows. Born a Catholic, schooled therein, and then having practiced Buddhism for over fifty years, I can appraise—make the aspiring Bodhisattva’s mandatory call—that the current degree of collateral damage in Gaza, perpetrated by this Israeli War Cabinet, is absolutely unnecessary and of the highest heinousness, carrying with it the heaviest karmic consequences only imaginable to Buddhas. Or, imperfectly, if one has studied the Buddhist hells found in the Abhidharmakoșa and sutras such as Ratnavali, Purvapranidhana, and Nagarjuna’s ‘Letter to a Friend’ (Suhrllekha), or elsewhere spelled out, often graphically, in the canon. To deny the heavy karmic retribution—instant rebirth in one of the eight hot or eight cold hells, as well their neighboring ones—for perpetrating such heinous crimes as raising a nation or city, city state—or ghetto-enclave, in this case—is a grave mistake. The teacher of my root teacher, Ngwang Lekpa Rinpoche, meditated on the hells for years in retreat, doing so until he actually began to experience them. It’s as unwise arguing against their existence as it is their nonexistence, and so, disbelieving the hells is similar to disbelieving the ultimate view in Buddhism, the Empty nature of self and phenomena, as supported by Buddha’s Doctrine of Interdependent Origination and his Emptiness teachings given on Vulture Peak. To double down on this point, as Nagarjuna stated in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, 8: When an analysis is made through emptiness,/ If someone were to offer a reply,/ That reply will fail, since it will presuppose/ Exactly what is to be proven. Such is the dynamics of truthful dialectics. Debating against a call ‘to do no harm’ is de facto a false argument. To destroy a life not out of maliciousness but an abundance of caring, as in saving many other lives, is the Bodhisattva’s call. Equally could an adherent of any world religion draw a similar supporting parallel as their beliefs also recognize the horrendous ramifications, cause and effect retributions, of taking human life, especially on a mass scale. This would be the topic for a real ‘Come to Jesus Moment,’ Biden, caught on a hot mic, alluded to concerning his “mounting frustration with Israel's leader as starvation continues to kill Palestinians in Gaza.”(aa.com.tr) The last thing we need then, given the moral significance of that real ‘Come to Jesus Moment’ between Biden and Netanyahu, is for this life saving conversation to be sabotaged by sophistry and statistical obfuscations, requiring a more honest, precise way of speaking. Seeing Israel three months after the The Yom Kippur War (also known as the Ramadan War, the October War, the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, or the Fourth Arab–Israeli War, fought 6 to 25 October 1973) and one day before the Rome Airport Incident, afforded a charged view of Israel’s existential dilemma. Strikingly, after less than ten days there, my girlfriend and I, having originally been Elie Wisel inspired pilgrims, were changed in our hearts and minds about that existence and the validity of its manifest destiny at the expense of indigenous people. Intellectually, there was a precedent as, and I was aware of cautionary statements made by Hannah Arendt. Such, as in 1955, when she said, ‘the way native Palestinians are treated was enough to bring down the world’s support for Israel and turn them against it.’ Further, while “she took pride in Palestine’s pre-state Yishuv for developing a new Jewish cultural center and socially just institutions, like the kibbutzim, Arendt lamented the Zionist movement’s embrace of the two dynamics that had proved so deadly to Jews and to the world at large: the nation-state system and imperialism. To realize the promise of Zionism, argued Arendt, the movement would need to overcome two crippling pathologies: a belief in an eternal antisemitism and an attraction to a ‘tribal’ nationalism.”(has.bard.edu) Our arguable ‘flip-flop’ was informed by two things: One, we became friends with a Jewish Berkeley scholar in Jerusalem who was fluent in Arabic and Hebrew, and was getting his doctorate in some aspect of Middle-Eastern relations. And, two, hearing negative comments from Israelis about how they felt toward the native Palestinians who along with Jews had been there, off and on, cohabitating that region for thousands of years. Specifically, on this cohabitation, Lyman Stone, using an updated blend of scientific and scholarly approaches, statistical genetic graphs, and so on, came to a conclusion in ‘Who Has Claim? 3,000 Years of Religion in the Land Between’ about what is largely the state of Israel and bordering countries today: “All Jews other than Ethiopian Jews show extremely clear signs of ancient middle eastern and generally Levantine/Canaanite ancestry. They show a stronger European admixture than Palestinians do, but it is undeniable that modern Ashkenazi Jews and modern Palestinians both have major contributions from ancient Levantine populations.” (https://medium.com/migration-
8/2/25 Before my recent flight to New Delhi, I had breakfast at the Pacific Hotel in Phnom Penh, where the experience is usually relaxed and subdued. But that day was quite different. As no sooner did I sit down with my plate full of buffet favorites, then suddenly the entire room was flooded with a large Japanese group having to mix into a much smaller Anglo one. Having just come from Siem Reap, where it’s quiet and spacious, this scene suggested to me what might be creating some of the fascist tendencies in America, and much more, now that I really start to think about it. Expansionism in the face of global crowding, was one. Resource plundering of special minerals for increasingly higher consumption of war goods and higher tech lifestyles, was another. While the expulsion of foreign nationals is simply to assuage bigotry—a return to what never really was, ‘a great America’—being a dog whistle to exercise lazy, smug, and arrogant thinking, that naturally gravitates to base...
Comments
Post a Comment