It is a bloody train wreck and there is no stopping it.

The real question will be the lessons learned from it.

If Israel were a person, it would be a massive case of PTSD. Someone abused as a child, grown up with a serious violent streak, yet smart enough to be successful. Yet things have gone sideways in middle age, the various schizophrenias were becoming evident before Oct 7th and now it's the barricaded in the house with the hostages stage, looking to take it to suicide by cop, as the larger war that seems the only goal will leave it a smoking ruin.

The bigger picture is the West has hollowed itself out through financialization being used as a tool to drain all value out of the larger society, rather than circulating it where it would be most productive.

When that domino falls, Israel and Ukraine will be seen as much smaller precursors.

Why?

There are various conceptual fallacies built into the foundations of Western culture, some of which I try going into;

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2

Those pertaining directly to Judaism go to the fact the logical flaw in conventional monotheism is that ideals are not absolutes. Truth, beauty, platonic forms are ideals. The core codes, creeds, heroes, narratives at the center of every society are ideals.

While the universal is the elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement from which we fell. The light shining through the film, than the stories playing out on it.

To the Ancients, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Politically manifests as monarchy. Divine right of kings. Ancient Israel was a monarchy.

Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. The various conceptual idealizations, metaphors, as well as political factions competing.

The origins of the Christian Trinity go to fertility rites. The young god, born in the spring, to the old sky god and earth mother. Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus, didn't give way to Dionysus. Tradition prevailed over renewal. The old didn't bow to the young. Which provided fertile ground for the story of Jesus' resurrection to take root, as a form of rebellion against the old orders.

Though by the time Constantine adopted it as the state religion of the Roman Empire, it was the monotheism that mattered, to unify the Empire, while the origins of the Trinity were shrouded by the Holy Ghost, as the revolution was co-opted.

When the West went back to democracy and republicanism, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics.

So Israel, surfing the wave of European guilt and American hegemony, is a very convoluted construct, lacking that 2000 years of civil evolution to go along with its cultural attachment to essentially a Bronze age tribalism.

Every society is that dichotomy of the anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement, the heart and head, energies of youth and lessons of age.

Of which there is an enormous chasm, in Israel, between the religious and cosmopolitan sides and it is only by focusing on the traumas is it able to pull itself together. Barricaded in the house with the hostages.

Yet there is no real strategic depth to sustain this for long. So it's red heifers and total war.