The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe
The ‘Bionic Jew’ Theory of the Universe
Jews are famously self-deprecating. When we write stories about ourselves, we are depicted as the schlemiels of Chelm. When others write about us, we are mystical demigods and secret agents that put James Bond to shame.
This is especially true when it comes to Israeli technology. In season four of the finance drama Billions, the main firm wants to spy on the competition. The CEO’s “fixer” shows up with a camera that can see through privacy glass. As he opens the case to show the spy camera to his boss, he says simply, “It’s Israeli.” What more would anyone need to know?
As pagers all over Lebanon exploded yesterday simultaneously, and the apparent facts came to light, there were two reactions: What have the Israelis done? and What are the Israelis about to do?
The answer to the first question was that they appear to have intercepted a shipment of pagers used only by Hezbollah and planted remote-detonated explosives in each. The answer to the second was that today, a second-day wave of targeted explosions hit Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies.
This is an astonishingly precise operation. And if you’re a reasonable-brained person, you will interpret this to mean that Israel will always minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties when it can.
If, instead, you are prone to conspiracist thinking and paranoia about Jews, you will take this mean that Jews possess godlike powers and therefore any collateral damage caused by Israel in any conflict can be assumed to be elective. In this telling, the Jew—especially the Israeli Jew—is sadistic.
“Israel having the ability to target militant networks in this sophisticated way as well as its targeting of high level Hamas figures abroad makes its operation in Gaza look even more deliberately genocidal,” posted the liberal writer and historian John Ganz. “And suddenly my phone, our security system, my kids tablets are time bombs that detonate at the whims of one country,” wrote the Egyptian TV host Bassem Youssef. “If converting personal communications devices into IEDs isn’t an act of terrorism then I don’t know what is,” insisted law professor Heidi Matthews, who does not, in fact, know what terrorism is.
Ganz’s suggestion, that since Israel can manually blow up pagers it has physically handled and therefore does not need large bombs to penetrate fortified underground tunnels, demonstrates a slight misunderstanding of how anything on earth works. And I can confidently tell Bassem Youssef that his kids’ iPads are safe.
But it’s more difficult than you might think to talk sense into such folks because they believe strongly in the Bionic Jew theory of the universe. This goes beyond space lasers or even weather control: It’s a belief in the existence of the super-sabra. In this fantasy, Israel is a place where Jews go to have their software updated, not to learn to use weapons but to become weapons.
After all, if Israel can genetically engineer Egyptian attack sharks and radiation-sniffing Iranian lizards, imagine what can be done with human potential.
There is another, less amusing thought process at work here, however. And that is that the morality of Israel’s operations is inversely correlated with their level of success.
Israel’s critics insist the Jewish state carry out individually targeted attacks. Blowing up a terrorist’s personal pager, maiming him and him alone, is obviously in compliance with this demand. But what if Israel does exactly that to thousands of individual terrorists simultaneously? That’s no good, for reasons that are difficult to explain but which feel obvious to the public intellectuals keeping score.
You can see how this approach has been applied to Gaza for the duration of the ongoing war. If Israeli soldiers encounter an empty house rigged with explosives but which has an entrance to a subterranean tunnel system used only by the terrorist army and the hostages the IDF is trying to rescue, what can it do? The obvious answer is: it can detonate the explosives from a safe distance and then enter the tunnels. After all, the war crime here is Hamas’s, and such an approach allows the IDF to neutralize the threat without harming civilians.
But what if Hamas illegally rigs a house again? And again? “An aerial photo recovered by the Israeli military from a Hamas commander’s post shows three dozen hidden tunnel entrances marked with color-coded dots and arrows in one crowded neighborhood,” reports the New York Times. The underlying facts haven’t changed: Hamas has committed the crime, Israel is pursuing the approach most closely aligned with humanitarian concerns. But because Hamas has replicated its crime many times over, Israel will knock down many houses. Suddenly, the public criticism is of Israel’s conduct, its supposed “domicide,” its appetite for destruction.
In this upside-down world, the more war crimes Hamas carries out, the less Israel is morally permitted to do in self-defense. Hence, the problem in Lebanon is not that there are thousands of Iranian terrorists there but that Israel wants to take out all of them.
What’s the upper limit here? How many terrorists can Israel target before it violates the international humanitarian law known as It’s Enough Already?
The pager operation reportedly required a year of planning and meticulous execution, because Israel is not in fact a nation of Bionic Jews. But in the minds of Israel’s critics, the more powerful the Jews become, the more evil they automatically become. Therefore you don’t actually have to make a case against what Israel does on the merits, you merely have to assert Israel’s power and success. Which hopefully will continue to outpace that of its enemies by leaps and bounds.
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