More Blah for Your Bucks

Sound the shofers!

The latest BLAH from Israel's much-touted intellectual giant, Yuval Noah Harari, author of such ground-breaking tomes as Blah and Blah Blah. (Warning: there's now another such out and about - Blah Blah Blah).

Courtesy of the suitably worshipful (pro-Iraq War, pro-Blair, pro-Israel, anti-Corbyn) David Aaronovitch, in his puff piece, The BIG Thinker, in this weekend's Weekend Australian Magazine, here are some of Harari's undying utterances (commentary added), culled from same, to put you on your knees:

"My father... had a very big disbelief in any kind of authority... He fought in both the Six Day War of 1967 and the more existential Yom Kippur War of 1973."

Not bad for a guy who doesn't believe in authority, eh? Still, whenever things get down and existential in Israel, as they not infrequently do if you believe the hype, hey, you do what your Zionist masters tell you to, right?

"There are a lot of people today... who might actually look favourably on a scenario of creating a new race of superhumans and leaving ordinary Homo sapiens behind. And if you look at China, for example, today, it's out in the open. People speak of high-quality people and low-quality people."

So here's this bloke, YNH, in Israel, surrounded by folk who, while willingly 'serving' their country in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza, regularly hammer Palestinians because they're inconveniently standing in the way of the 'Jewish' people's brutal quest for Arabrein lebensraum, and what does he do? He fingers... China!

Howzat for chutzpah?

"How optimistic is he about our dealing with this big stuff, when he lives in a country that can't deal with its own very local, very intimate problems? Isn't big-picture thinking also a distraction... from thinking about horribly complicated problems in the here and now? He admits that Israelis have become very good at the art of just not seeing. 'Most people, they are not, like evil and malevolent toward the Palestinians. They just don't care. They don't want to know what's happening there. The mental distance is immense'."

Israel's Palestine problem? Isn't it really Palestine's Israel problem?

Israelis are not evil and malevolent towards the Palestinians... So how does YNH explain the existence of watchdog groups such as B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and others? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.) And how does he explain the ongoing electoral success of Netanyahu and his Greater Israel cronies and allies, and Israel's inexorable march to the right? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.)

They just don't care, eh? Neither, we are often reminded, did the Germans of the Nazi era. If YNH were honest, he'd admit to not caring either. In an earlier post I documented a dinner he'd had with the Netanyahus. Aaronovitch's puff piece begins with him going, not an anti-occupation action, but to a gay rights rally in the Tel Aviv bubble.