Where contradiction is not irony – it’s survival. It’s death. It’s the new normal.
War has became contagious.
Above: a Palestinian man sits, seriously wounded, his wife behind him, dead, after an Israeli air attack. Palestinians in Gaza have been turning to seaside coffee shops like this for brief moments of relief amid the relentless and escalating Israeli genocide. I know of this specific coffee shop. More below.
1 July 2025 – – Over the past weekend, and for part of this week, I have been in Heidelberg, Germany.
Three tasks. The first is catching up with my oldest goddaughter who is in a Masters/PhD program in oncology at the university here, approaching the study and treatment of cancer from a rather novel direction. More about that in a Sunday Porthole post sometime this coming fall.
The second task: trolling an old bookstore here that has an enormous collection of out-of-print books, many in English. I have been searching for works by Robert Lifton who has written some very good material on the psychological of genocide, specifically the psychological principle he coined: “doubling”.
The key to understanding how Nazi doctors came to do the work of Auschwitz and other death camps, and how Nazi soldiers could become members of the Einsatzgruppen and/or executioners at the death camps is based on the psychological principle he called “doubling”: the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self. An Auschwitz doctor or member of the Einsatzgruppen could, through doubling, not only kill and contribute to killing but organize silently, on behalf of that evil project, an entire self-structure (or self-process) encompassing virtually all aspects of his behavior.
Doubling, then, was the psychological vehicle for the Nazis Faustian bargain with the diabolical environment in exchange for his contribution to the killing; he was offered various psychological and material benefits on behalf of privileged adaptation.
But it was a much larger Faustian temptation offered in general: that of becoming the theorists and implementers of a cosmic scheme of racial cure by means of victimization and mass murder.
The worst part is that as I read through this material, it echos the same diabolical training environment the Israeli government has created for its military and defense forces against Palestinians, as leaked by insiders at the IDF (Israel Defense Forces).
The problem – be you a Nazi or a member of the IDF – one is always ethically responsible for Faustian bargains – a responsibility in no way abrogated by the fact that much doubling takes place outside of awareness.
It also ties in with my third task this week, to catch-up with Aaron Goldberg, a long-time friend who lives here and with whom I have a long-running conversation about the Holocaust.
Aaron’s position has always been the Holocaust is only *unique* in its industrialization of genocide. It is a historical event that, like all historical events, can be analyzed and understood, no less, though perhaps no more, than any other historical event.
It was, he says, a series of events perpetrated by humans, for human reasons and with human motivations:
“There is no God or Satan, and even if they exist, which is very doubtful, they were not involved. As such, it is, in principle though not in practice, as understandable and penetrable as the history of the Pilsudski regime, the British policy in India, or the French Revolution.
Anything that humans do can be understood by other humans because of the similarity – not equivalence – in motivations, in contexts, and in the characters of the acting personalities. Our problem, then, is not that the Nazis were inhuman; our problem is that they were human.
In every one of us there is a grain of a Himmler and an Eichmann, which could develop into mass criminality given different circumstances, social, political and cultural contexts, family background, and so on. There is nothing mystical about it.
And you need only look at Gaza, especially this past Sunday, to realize nobody is doing a better job of making the Holocaust a mere footnote in history than the Israeli government”.
I will come back to Aaron in subsequent posts, and in my film, but let’s look briefly on the past weekend attack.
Above: this past Sunday, Israel bombed a well-known beachside rest stop.
Israel killed 30 people this past Sunday while they were at what was once a beachside rest stop — a place meant for joy, leisure, life. Before the genocide.
That cafeteria, once filled with voices and laughter, was an internet hub, a phone charging station, a desperate shelter for the displaced – because Gaza has nothing left. People went there not to rest, but to survive. To connect with their families. To upload a photo. To file a report. To say, “I’m alive”. Journalists in my network often used it to file reports, Tweet, post on Linkedin.
And Israel bombed it anyway. A missile, launched with full knowledge of who was there and why. No warning. No mercy. It killed journalists, students, children, mothers. It tore limbs from bodies and hurled them into the sea.
Some body parts disappeared with the waves. And we are expected to swallow this horror silently. Again.
Say his name: Abu Hatab, journalist, photographer, friend of many. Murdered Sunday by the U.S. and Israel.
Say his name: Omar Zaino. Journalist, loved by many, murdered Sunday by U.S. and Israel.
And say her name: Bayan Abu Sultan, not martyred but badly wounded. She is our hero, no matter how much Western feminists have repeatedly ignored her heroism.
What is this blasphemy?
The world is watching the greatest genocide of our time unfold in real-time … and doing nothing. Absolutely nothing.
The “Cafeteria Massacre” — that’s what it’s called now. Who could have imagined a place meant for seaside coffee and quiet afternoons would become a slaughterhouse? Where bodies float in pools of blood instead of sea foam.
But this is Gaza. Where genocide reshapes every concept. Where contradiction is not irony — it’s survival. It’s death. It’s the new normal.
Those inside weren’t even seeking comfort – just a signal. A bit of electricity. A lifeline.
A student trying to finish a degree remotely.
Journalists carrying the voice of the silenced.
A man checking if his wife and kids were still alive. Someone praying for the one headline that never comes: The war is over.
But the call dropped. The war didn’t.
And the cafeteria became the headline.
30 souls martyred. Dozens more critically wounded. And with Gaza’s hospitals in ruins, many may not make it.
This is the erasure of a people — live-streamed, archived, and ignored.
May the world be haunted by its silence.
But, hey. Let’s get more outraged by a bloke saying stupid things at Glastonbury than by the carnage in Gaza itself.
War has became contagious. With peaceful norms fading, new weapons (especially drones) have made conflict cheaper and easier.
The world’s lawlessness really became visible in August 2013, when Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas to kill 1,400 people in a suburb of Damascus. Barack Obama had warned that chemical attacks would be “a red line”.
But he didn’t act; the American policeman had retired. Six months later, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, taking over Crimea. Putin knew he could act with impunity.
States became outlaws, slaughtering civilians – yet paid no price. Imagine if an “international community” had punished Assad or Putin, or the U.S. for its “Global War on Terror”, or Mohammed bin Salman for the war in Yemen, or Rwanda’s Paul Kagame for becoming the Putin of Central Africa, or Israel for destroying Gaza, as they had punished Iraq in 1990.
Eh, it’s over. The UN Security Council sat out the Indian-Pakistani, Ukrainian and Gaza wars. Steven Everts, director of the EU Institute for Security Studies, said:
“The norm that you can’t use violence to solve political conflicts faded. It’s gone. And now war is contagious. We are screwed”.
America no longer even pretends to respect norms. Its bombing of Iran without the consent of Congress or the UN arguably breaches both the U.S. constitution and international law. Donald Trump tolerates all international aggressors except Iran. The only conflict zone where he has ever put “boots on the ground” is against his own citizens in Los Angeles.
More to come.