The al-Beqa Cafe Massacre

Elias Canetti and "the Sting"

I’d been planning to write and post this immediately after hearing of this event but local realities took precedence. These were small positive events in a sea of horror: the completion of the composition of my opera Substance: The Infinite Spinoza and the final proofing and indexing of my upcoming book Feedback: Translations From The IrRational.

The first of July brought the news of the bombing of the al-Baqa cafe in Gaza, a family-run waterfront gathering place for over 40 years. At 3pm in the afternoon, a missile attack from the IDF: a huge explosion and then carnage. The Israelis love to brag about the pinpoint accuracy with which they selectively destroy supposedly "strategic" targets and individual militant commanders. The reality is more complex as evidenced by the over 178 Arab journalists and media workers already killed since this latest war began. Giving further lie to the Israeli narrative is the destruction of this cafe. Why this cafe? What strategic purpose did it serve? In reality, the targeting is designed to terrorize, to kill civilians doing what people do everywhere: commune with friends and family, gather food, attempt to relax under the torment of a war that precious few of them desire. The Israelis want to make normal life for Palestinians, whether in Gaza or in the West Bank, so miserable that they will voluntarily "self-deport", a process promoted by Trmp and his ICEStapo. At the very least, this is ethnic cleansing - but it is obviously much more and much worse. In interviews, a number of Israelis, ordinary citizens, media figures, religious and government officials, have revealed that they view ALL Palestinians as "terrorists" by nature of their very existence, valid military targets worthy of elimination. It's estimated that over 57000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children, have been killed by the Israelis since this war began in October 2023. How can they, a people that experienced genocide, justify this mass murder, this genocide?

In Elias Canetti's Crowds And Power he writes of "the sting", the transmission of a command from the highest in power down the levels through the lower to the lowest. As the lines of command are transmitted, they build resentment, injury, and most importantly, the need to pass that injury of command to someone in a lesser position of power.

https://lbot.ca/post/56718384667/the-command-from-crowds-and-power-by-elias-canetti

The sting might not only take the form of a command; it can be a psychological or physical injury. The victim relieves their own pain by transferring the injury to someone below them. The Germans declared the Jews to be subhuman and thereby beneath consideration of certain rights and kindnesses that might be extended to a member of humanity. The Jews were also scapegoated for Germany’s World War I defeat and post-war humiliation. The German genocide started as xenocide: the elimination of the non-human, the stranger, the alien entity within. After World War II ended and European guilt combined with the machinations of the Zionists allowed for the creation of Israel, a new dynamic was created. The Israelis continue to label themselves the victims even as they became a dominant military power and drove out Arab populations that had lived continuously for 2000 years in what is known as Palestine. The Israelis think of themselves as "the chosen people" of their God, an identity that they believe gives them the privilege of moral superiority in all transactions while at the same time, continuing to define themselves as victims whose very existence is always threatened, the sting retained and defining their every interaction with the world.

This contradictory stance of being both "God's chosen" and the "eternal victims" creates a cognitive dissonance that suppresses any internal sense of morality and empathy. They have taken the very real abominations perpetrated upon them by the Nazis in World War II and internalized them, a process that can only be resolved by visiting the same punishments on those with less power, those that are NOT chosen, and therefore not truly human. The sting passes the violence of the Holocaust down to a new set of recipients, a population of beings that are not considered to be human and therefore not worthy of any rights, sympathy, or mercy. The xenocide leads to genocide.