Counterrevolution? Counter what?
The U.S. is still processing the Civil War and its aftermath over 150 years later. When I arrived from the Midwest as a kid, southerners still tossed around yankee as a slur. Israel hasn’t had even a century to process the Holocaust and isn’t done. Now Israelis have to process Oct. 7. I’m not optimistic where this will go near term:
Six months after Oct. 7, Israelis are struggling to recover their bearings, their core, their belief that Jews are safe in Israel.
In Israel’s south and north, more than 120,000 people have been evacuated, their neighborhoods transformed into front lines. The homes sit empty, toys still scattered in front yards.
In the southern kibbutzim, where 3,000 Hamas-led fighters launched a surprise assault on that indelible Saturday morning, the residents return not to live but to serve as guides for visitors from abroad. They give heart-rending tours, recounting how 1,200 people were slaughtered and 253 hostages were dragged into Gaza, according to Israeli government figures.
Evacuees fear that their communities are becoming places frozen in time and loss. They worry that if no solution is found for them — if security is not restored along the borders they share with their enemies — the rest of the country will remain exposed, in a permanent state of existential danger.
Existential danger is going around, real and imagined. Donald Trump is hyping “stranger danger” at every rally and speech. Scary, scary brown people are coming! Diseased animals! They kill the women and rape the men!
The song is as familiar as the intractable animosities:
There is nationwide support for the military’s punishing war against Hamas, which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says most of the dead are women and children.
The images from Gaza — of shattered cities, families killed together in their homes, malnourished children — do not often appear on the nightly news here. Most of the world thinks Israel has gone too far. Most Israelis don’t think they’ve gone far enough.
Here in the U.S., we worry that Trump is the real danger, and gun culture has gone too far. His cult wants to go further and, like him, rejoices “in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” They are at war too.
Trump, by the way, shared an article that dismisses concerns about his lack of character and values (via Meidas Touch):
“We shouldn’t much care whether our commander-in-chief is a real conservative, whether he is a role model for children or says lots of silly things, or whether he is modest or dignified. What we should care about is whether he knows we are in a war, knows who the enemy is, and knows how to win. Trump does.
Hint: You are the enemy.
Trump’s shared article also turns the fear that voters have of Trump becoming “another Hitler” or a “dictator” into a positive “reason for hope.” The writer says Trump’s enemies “rightly fear” what he and his party will accomplish, calling it a “counterrevolution.” Kind of sounds like an insurrection:
“His enemies hate him with an indescribable fierceness. “Another Hitler,” they say, “elect him and he will be a dictator.” We should take this hysteria as reason for hope. The America-haters rightly fear that he and his party are on the threshold of a successful counterrevolution.”
I’m confused by this America-hater thing. The American Revolution birthed a democratic republic on this continent. And a Trump counterrevolution would do … what exactly? Or have they even thought that far ahead?
It’s all very exhausting.
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