Early Day Palestine Update 10/18/23

I’m scrambling today, but I want to get a post out this morning.

Yesterday I thought the main point of my post was the dynamics surrounding the Israeli delay of their invasion—IF that’s what’s going on—and the dynamics surrounding the repeated diplomatic rebuffs the US has received. In addition to KSA, PA, and Egypt, Jordan has now also refused to meet with Zhou. As things turned out, most of the commenting has been focused on the hospital bombing. Here is a Youtube video that gathers a lot of the data and provides some technical explanation, which illustrates how complicated analysis of these types of events can be. Hopefully this will help some commenters get beyond where debate seems stuck:

Less informative but perhaps significant:

dana @dana916

BREAKING: Israeli Channel 12 admits it was an Israeli airstrike on the hospital!

Ohad Hemo, Israeli TV's Palestinian Affairs reporter, admits Israel is responsible for last night's bombing of the BaptistHospital in Gaza resulting in hundreds of civilian casualties.

resistornewswireEUR

9:50 AM · Oct 18, 2023

Regarding US carrier battle groups assembling in the eastern Mediterranean, Putin has made some interesting comments:

Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo

The US aircraft carriers are in distance [within range] of Russian hypersonic Kinzhal missiles. -> He says it’s not a threat, but … kinda sounds like it

5:52 AM · Oct 18, 2023

So, maybe not a threat, just data points of the US to add to the mix of considerations. Or maybe a friendly heads up.

Also yesterday, I referred to Simplicius’ discussion of Jewish and Islamic “eschatology”

Eschatology; from Ancient Greek ἔσχατος (éskhatos) 'last', and -logy) concerns expectations of the end of the present age, human history, or the world itself.^[1] The end of the world or end times^[2] is predicted by several world religions (both Abrahamic and non-Abrahamic), which teach that negative world events will reach a climax. Belief that the end of the world is imminent is known as apocalypticism, and over time has been held both by members of mainstream religions and by doomsday cults. In the context of mysticism, the term refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and to reunion with the divine. Various religions treat eschatology as a future event prophesied in sacred texts or in folklore.

Big Serge picked up on that and then Will Schryver made what I consider an important additional point. So, Serge grants that many Evangelicals are consumed with eschatological considerations and speculation, but he doesn’t think “Most people in America and Europe” are:

Big Serge 

@witte_sergei

Most people in America and Europe can’t get their heads fully around the Israeli-Islam death spiral because it’s an eschatological war, and the west not an eschatological civilization.

Evangelicals, however, are highly eschatological and this helps them get fully behind Israel.

7:36 PM · Oct 17, 2023

Will Schryver begs to differ—and rightly so. In fact much of Western ideology--both liberal democratic (Right and Left) and Marxist is nothing but secularized eschatology. Or, as Eric Voegelin would put it, if Gnosticism is the spirit of the modern West, than it should be entirely unsurprising that these ideologies are consumed with secularized doomsday speculation:

Will Schryver @imetatronink

The always insightful Big Serge presents a probing argument.

But I submit that the "irreligious" cultural elements in the west are as eschatological as the most zealous Christian or Muslim. It simply takes the form of climate catastrophism, plague hysteria, overpopulation, etc.

9:34 PM · Oct 17, 2023

Voegelin points out in his writings that eschatology can take various forms. For example, it can be the terror of history (Eliade’s term) that we’re familiar with from Evangelical speculation on The Revelation to John, or the secular panic mongering about climate, pandemics, etc. On the other hand, there are the wildly visionary and optimistic types of eschatological speculation that are such a feature of our own politics in America: The Gospel of Progress, Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, New Frontier, Great Society, and much more—all pointing toward a coming end time of human perfection on earth. The Marxian Proletarian Revolution fits into that category, as well. Which gave rise to the slogan: Don’t let them immanentize the Eschaton.

In the earlier days of MiH I discussed Christopher Dawsons views on modern eschatological myths or speculation as compared to the beliefs of world religions in Progress and Religion. That book, a great one IMO, was written back in the 1930s. Mircea Eliade (especially in The Myth of the Eternal Return and Reality and Myth) also discusses in his own way the survival of eschatological myth in the modern West and even the way that it dominates spiritual life in the West—despite the supposed Western rejection of myth as a form of self expression.

But we blunder into these situations thinking that there’s somehow an obvious military solution. Or that these are really arguments about history and what God said to whom about Middle Eastern real estate.