Wherein Zionists claim that the Palestinians are people who (may be disposed of, as they) do not count

"Sure, the slaughter of the so-called 'Palestinians' is horrific and indefensible," but "who are" these so-called people, who can only falsely claim the "human rights" that only (proper) nations have (the Gypsies must have not have had them either, which should not much surprise us in a world of people who think as you do, here). You do here what all nationalists do, and Zionists are necessarily that: We are not responsible for what we do to you or them, because they as a people or population group (they are at least that) properly "belong" to this or that Leader or national state, just as we and all people, who are "proper" persons in having identities that can only be national, as Jews reactively discovered in late modernity we essentially are (as if any person or set of persons is "essentially" anything, though nationalism is impossible otherwise). So don't talk to us, you and the other Zionists say, about people who are being displaced and killed (by us) because they are not a proper people or set of persons (and so can be killed with impunity -- perhaps if they were a proper nation and thus people they would share our sanctity and could be sacrificed?). We are not responsible, you are basically saying, for what we do, because look what A and B and C etc. did or are doing, and the people whom we are bombing, displacing, and killing, whether or not this is justified by other tactics and rhetorical means, are "people who do not count." That is in effect precisely what you are saying. Not so long ago, many Jews did not count for those who were able to eliminate them. And not only because of causes and reasons that leave their descendants happily privileged (for God works even through the most horrifying evil?), with the consequences that you know very well: so affirming, consecrated into supernaturally theorized superiority, our identity as members of those people who most truly "count," for God himself, and, when push comes to shove, who alone count, truly, as anyone who is in our way or against our particular projects, even when affecting them adversely (no one can deny this, though they can distribute blame), does not count. In sum: For you and those who think as you do (and thank you for the clarification), there are people who do not count, and are disposable for that reason. Welcome to another lesser Holocaust. (By the way, to say that it is incomparable is false a priori because it is already to comment on the comparison, about which a comparability is precisely asserted: the Jewish destruction is, like some ideas of God, "the greatest." And that makes Jewish subjectivity as uniquely special as the God who theoretically is, the latter of course a defensible if easily abused claim (as in every idolatry, including this one, so popular now among nationalist and militarist Jews), and the former surely not quite so comparable. Judaism affirms the uniqueness of God in a way that does not permit an exceptionality to respect for human rights, which are universal by secular and sacred principles Jews and most Arabs (Muslim or Christian, and many, especially in Palestine, are that) agree on. A Jewish life is not less precious than an "Arab" life, but it is also not more so. The denial of this leads ultimately to the position that can only be called a Jewish Nazism: Jewish subjectivity matters so greatly that any and all non-Jews may be wiped out in the interest of our collective survival and all the power and prosperity that we associate with it and guard with every bit of force we have got or can get our hands on. Ruthlessly, unscrupulously. This is the modern idolatry, the worst known to humankind, in all of its long history. And some Jewish leaders are now are practicing it and preaching it from their pulpits. To their enormous and horrifying shame. The only privilege conferred on Jews by the covenant that stands at the center of the faith is the moral privilege of an obligation to be just that is rigorous in a way that this ruthlessness is recognizable as the ugliest and most criminally parodic perversion thereof. The Jewish God is committed to justice, even more than to the well-being of the people he legendarily asked his 'own-most' people to share. The privilege is a responsibility. It is not a unique (what would this mean?) or greater (counting more in our own eyes or those of our (often American Christian) admirers, and attributing this evaluation to divine authority) right to live, no people or nation has any unique such right, not even in Judaism. God did not create the world for the enjoyment of the Jewish people, but the Jewish people for the perfection of the world. And any leader of any nation is guilty of a crime against humanity if he says, “I will defend all of our people no matter what the cost to any outside parties, including even their annihilation (which of course we will find justified).” We may not do this on our own behalf, that of our families, our tribes, or anything else. Therefore, to the question, how many Arab (or ‘goy’ generally) lives are worth a single Jewish life, the answer is not one hundred or one thousand, but an infinite number, unlimited effects imaginable to a will that understands itself as absolute and infinite in its powers both of expression and combat or conquest, a will to self-realization that would hardly hold back in light of the possible of the possible destruction of the Other, because a priori its self-expression and this destructive, annihilating conquest are essentially identified (why not?). The denial of this may be realized in a fearful figure (of murderous fanaticism) that many Jews and Christians have attributed to their Muslim semblables and frères, but that has the horrifying appeal it does only because it mirrors a possibility of their own will, which should only be recognized in order to deny it not only to ‘the other’ but also to ourselves. Otherwise their effectively is no moral law and no justice, and, simply, might makes right, whatever the enchanted mythical rationalizations. I have thus separated myself from their company. Not from Judaism, whose ownership claim I assert they have usurped and hold in violation, but I also claim that it is not a commodity that can be held as a private property right; the text belongs to its readers, and in our late or post- modern conditions what may still make sense as either identities or at least communitarian traditions are irremediably open, not territorializable in this, literally horrible, way. Anything else is fascism. I am a cosmopolitan American who honors a very different idea of what it is to be a citizen of a nation, one that is republican and therefore necessarily cosmopolitan in part because it is not and will not be a territorial piece of property owned by a kind of tribe. The conflict between principles here has still not been fully decided; it was launched by the French revolution, which first freed the European Jews from ghetto exclusion into full citizenship, in a nation whose foundation was on political ideas, as was and is the United States, and not on any particular ethnic or religious identity. The modern secular and non-particularist state was immediately opposed by traditionalists (leading in part to modern Zionism as well as European fascism), in a history that led to Jewish and other nationalisms, with dark consequences Jews and others know very well, but unfortunately they have been invited to weaponize in the interest of a regional empire closely connected to a global one. America’s government, if had genuine leaders, would announce that we support the right of the Jewish people to live in security and peace, but not at this kind of price. It is absolutely unacceptable. Our Democratic leadership wants to please both constituencies, but it lost the chance by supporting and funding this war. The war has had the consequence, which could prove ultimately salutary, of further delegitimizing the Israeli state even in the eyes, now, of a great Americans, many Jews among them. If Jewish leaders, of whom there are few, truly, seized this as the opportunity it is, they would begin to open a discussion of how we can have a post-nationalist Jewish life, in America and in Israel/Palestine, and a Judaism no longer soldered to what always rapidly makes the people and the religion a single-issue self-interest war machine, which is the nationalist idea, redemptive, ideological, including and excluding, identitarian and communitarian, and in so many ways an idea whose time of ‘deconstruction’ and dismantling in favor of something better and actually stronger for being more just. That is what Jews today can look forward to that is hopeful and positive; otherwise, I see only destruction, and not only militarily. Many are clinging to a sinking ship; let’s build another.