Dear Friend and Reader:
So it turns out that the pro-Palestinian student protesters of last spring were right. It was genocide.
And to decry the daily bombings and bulldozing of Gaza and the West Bank was not about being antisemitic. It was about standing up for people whose existence was threatened and who knew they were really being removed from their homes by force.
That is euphemistically called ethnic cleansing, or more bluntly, genocide.
The students — mounting the most passionate campus protests since 1970 — risked arrest, beating by the legions of riot police called into opposing them, and expulsion from their university for taking part in nonviolent civil disobedience.
They had some public sympathy, but those who accused them of being anti-Jewish got most of the legacy press coverage. Protesters were falsely accused of being rioters when most of the direct actions were pretty chill — until the police arrived.
Now we know the plan — described this week by Pres. Trump — is to remove all two million Palestinians from the territory and build a kind of self-described Israeli Riviera along that prime ocean-front real estate once known as Gaza. Golf courses, luxury villas, hotels, marinas — a regular paradise on the Mediterranean. Maybe even Trump International, why the heck not.
And the United States would own it. As what? A state? An unincorporated territory like Guam? A conquered territory like Puerto Rico? A giant Club Med?
A similar development plan was floated by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner last year. So it would seem that Gaza is prime real estate in a world where redevelopment by the billionaire class follows total devastation.
“Everybody I've spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land, developing and creating thousands of jobs with something that will be magnificent,” Trump told reporters after a three-hour meeting with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.
“I think we’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place. I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable,” he said. “And I think the entire world… will be there, and they'll live there. Palestinians, also. Palestinians will live there.”
Oh yeah, by the way, a few Palestinians. Maybe working as maids or valets. In the same breath, he said that the surviving Palestinians, now effectively all refugees, should be accepted by neighboring Egypt and Jordan.
What is so amazing is he thinks he can say this with a straight face. And he is right.
For those who look back at history and say, “Wow, how did people let that happen?” you now have your answer. It’s no mystery.
The Sukkoth Attack On Israel
To recap this most recent round of an 80-year saga,, on Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, we are told that an attack was launched on Israel right from its backyard. The perpetrator was said to be Hamas, the local political party. Somehow the world capital of surveillance, the omniscient and all-seeing eye of espionage technology, the very Mossad itself, missed that this was coming.
I guess they “didn’t connect the dots.” And we were all supposed to be very upset about this — just like on Sept. 11, 2001.
In response to the alleged conduct of whoever was said to have launched some rockets at Tel Aviv, the plan seemed to be to crush the Palestinian people. The excuse was that they voted for Hamas as their political leadership, so it was all their fault.
In the endless wars in West Asia or the “middle east” that we have witnessed for generations, the response is always grossly disproportionate: bomb society to dust and rubble. It happened in Iraq in 1991. It happened again in 2001. It happened in Afghanistan.
Just kill them, and kill them all if possible. They’re just a bunch of rag heads. During the first Iraq war (presided by Pres. Bush I), the bombing of civilians was relentless. (Please see this documentary by Ramsey Clark, called Nowhere to Hide.)
My former Holocaust studies teacher at John Dewey High School, Ira Zornberg, told me he saw no other option than to massacre the Palestinians once and for all. So much for “never again.” My father, who fancies himself a Franciscan Catholic (married to an Israeli citizen), said that even Palestinian children were hopelessly corrupt and should be killed.
And your average Jewish guy on the street — by which I mean my Jewish friends — asserted that Israeli response was justified, that it was necessary, and that (as one said) it was now inevitable that we would nuke Tehran. One was so confused, she called me a Holocaust denier when I advocated for the Palestinians.
The Only World Where This is Possible
Bad things happen. Our lives and the lives of our parents and grandparents have been lived against the backdrop of nonstop war. It just goes on and on with a shifting rationale and few seem to notice. The most powerful, influential and wealthy humans are obsessed with bombing whoever is inconvenient or whatever the last guy built.
And people often support those wars, after the action has been rationalized and the public has been groomed and prepared. However, wars are always started by a false-flag event that grabs attention and provokes horror that is then sold to the public: Remember the Maine! The Day of Infamy. The Maddox incident. And of course, Sept. 11. In the case of shifting retaliation for 9/11 from Afghanistan to Iraq, the con job went on for a year-and-a-half, every day on every channel.
That was then. Today it seems that most people are so detached from reality they will accept anything, at least so far as not meekly resisting it or possibly totally buying in. Or, it seems like another Netflix series.
Americans would not know genocide if it knocked them on the head. It already did — that’s what was going on in American society in 2020 and 2021. If you think that was about a virus, fine — just show me scientific evidence that one existed. Show me one person who died outside a hospital or nursing facility. Believing something does not count for proof. Nobody wants to admit they are ignorant or brainwashed.
The 2020 operation — just like Gaza — depended on people being so shocked out of their bodies that their biological existence was reduced to one thought: death. In digital space (where we are immortal), that is the only purpose the physical body can serve, except maybe to program a computer and eat the stuff that Grubhub delivered. (And now the computers program and design themselves.)
The Result of Living on a Disembodied Planet
For most people, to live on Earth right now is to live without one’s body. Why are people so glued to their phones? They don’t feel like they exist without them. They have that strange feeling of bewilderment and vertigo unless hooked into “reality,” which is digital space.
That’s why this kind of conduct is supposedly OK. It’s also why beating and arresting protesters is supposedly OK. And while the digital/AI/deepfake problem is the deification of disembodiment, this began in the mid-19th century with telegraph. Though there have been some truly incredible military scenes from the time before electric technology, the electric wars have become increasingly insane.
But what is more compelling is the way they are used as entertainment and hypnotic narratives that celebrate cruelty for its own sake. Passion or commitment to the cause is not required.
We might ask why this “feels good.” To those who are engaged and entertained, or even just tolerant of an unpleasant necessity, the value comes from the violence itself. When people and countries are disembodied, they reach for aggression as their first means of self-discovery. By that I mean self-actualization. People used to go to therapy for that; now they can just be mean and they feel better.
Most of us noticed early on that participation in digital space tends toward hostility. The discussion (unless curated and/or shut down in time) almost always becomes hostile. But that hostility grooms the psyche and spills over into physical life. The less humans know about themselves, the more violent they become.
Take This as a Warning
We who happen to live in neighborhoods and cities that are not blown apart — and where there is tap water and heat and trash collection — need to take heed.
Look what was done to the Palestinians, who were already living only marginally, in an enormous open-air prison. Their society was bombed and bulldozed as the world watched and the people doing it called the rest of us racist. What is going to happen to Los Angeles, and to Asheville? What about Lahaina? What happened to New Orleans after Rita and Katrina?
The people who demolished Palestinian society are in charge of American and European society. They control the money. They control the intel apparatus and the health security apparatus. They are turning their colonial instincts onto American communities that are devastated allegedly by the phantom of climate change. It shows up and takes one metropolitan area after the next, which was scheduled for conversion to a “smart city.”
It’s hard to see this for what it is, and nobody really wants to. And nearly everyone is going along with the march of “artificial intelligence” just like they went along with the iPhone nearly 20 years ago, not seeing it for the Trojan horse that it is. All that makes a human, human is their intelligence and their sensitivity. And we are rapidly delegating this to computer systems that can neither think nor feel, and which will relieve us of the seeming burden of both.
Ah yes, and then we will finally be free.
Don’t count on it.
With love,
Your faithful astrologer,
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