Little Boys and Grown Men

When little boys fight, they seldom do much damage. The victor goes home and brags or keeps silent. The loser goes home to his mama, who patches up his little harms and consoles him. His dad teaches him how to box, or maybe how to sucker-punch first. Life goes on.

If the truth be told, evolution has poorly endowed our species for defense or attack. Although smaller than we are, our household pets can run faster and are better endowed with sharp teeth and claws. Our greatest weapon—the most powerful in the entire animal kingdom—lies inside our crania. As grown men and women, we’ve used it to devise weapons capable of extinguishing ourselves and most life on Earth, except maybe microbes and cockroaches.

Do we use our much-vaunted brains to better our lives? Sometimes. But when it comes to getting along with each other, not so much. The most horrible war in history, which killed some fifty million of us before their times, followed the war “to make the world safe for democracy” by less than two decades. The later one involved the first use of nuclear weapons and produced the general conclusion—duh!—that their widespread use would not be a good thing.

Yet here we are, in the twenty-first century, just having maybe settled a brutal, immensely deadly conflict between two groups lusting for the same land. Each claims to have been motivated by an enduring and noble religion: Islam in one case and Judaism in the other. Yet the one slaughtered nearly 1,200 of the other (including some foreigners) on October 7, 2023. Then the other, in turn, has slaughtered over 70 thousand of the first, including tens of thousands of children, up to the current cease fire.

As any idiot knows, the motivation for the killing had little to do with religion. It was and is all about land.

The Jews are my own tribe. They wrote the First Draft of the Bible. No only does it mention almost every possible sexual deviation, including incest. It’s also replete with smiting and vengeance, lots of them.

Neither Jews nor Muslims, as such, wrote the Second Draft. Incipient Christians did. In it, a guy named Jesus promoted two radically new ideas. First, we should love our enemies. Second, we should love our neighbors as ourselves. (We Americans actually applied these brave ideas after history’s most horrible war. They helped us turn our erstwhile principal enemies into democracies and the world’s third and fourth largest economies.)

During that horrible war itself, alleged proponents of the religion of Jesus went on to exterminate sxi million or so Jews as if they were cockroaches. But never mind. Jesus’ ideas were, and still are, two of humankind’s greatest ideas. Maybe if we followed them, our species could avoid the natural consequences of little boys with tempers and designs having nuclear weapons.

One of those little boys is named Bibi. In two short years, he has managed to make the long-lived global sympathy for Jews resulting from the Holocaust virtually disappear. Yes, the Holocaust involved the untimely, deliberate and methodical murder of some six million Jews. Yes, the massacre of Gazans involved only about 70,000 untimely deaths, and most of them were not entirely deliberate. Most resulted from reckless or grossly negligent attempts to kill Hamas fighters and terrorists without killing innocent people.

But still. No one can view the photos and films of Gaza razed to the ground—or of thousands of families fleeing on foot and donkey-back from one precarious, temporary, bombarded and dusty tent-city to another—without thinking that little Bibi has done something very, very bad.

Those old photos of blasted Berlin at the end of World War II have nothing on videos of today’s Gaza. And the latter will remain a stain on the legacy of Israel and its alleged democracy as long as they last. Have 5,786 years of devout Torah study brought us to this?

Ironies abound. The sudden peace is still precarious. Its path to remanence, if any, will emerge only with time. But already we hear resounding and delirious praises for two of the least worthy leaders in human history, Bibi and our Big, Beautiful Demagogue. Each of them, in his own twisted way, is straight out of the mold of vain, selfish, self-centered, lying, duplicitous, treacherous and law-breaking monarchs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each would be personally comfortable in one of Niccolò Machiavelli’s fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century Italian city-states.

If this peace is to last and grow, let alone shift northward and eastward to the breadbasket of Europe, grown men and women will have to get involved. They must be recruited by others, for they will likely accept their mantles reluctantly, as all great leaders do. They will come from the Middle East, Europe, Africa and Asia—maybe even China—because the USA is now mostly spent. But if they succeed, they will earn the respect of a grateful humanity and their rightful place of honor in human history. They might even help save our species from self-extinction by nuclear fire or planetary heating.


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