Gaza Genocide Monday Morning Quarterbacking

Or: Apartheid Genocide Israel’s Loyal "Opposition"

In American English, the term “Monday Morning Quarterbacking” stands for “knowing best” (not really) after the fact. It also implies a certain style of “knowing best”: often pedantic, narrowly focused on “how-to” instead of “what” and “why,” and frequently missing the actual issue. Usually, Monday Morning Quarterbacking is simply annoying, one of the many ways in which small minds – or, perhaps, the smaller parts of all our minds – display the mismatch between their conceit and their limits.

But in times of genocide, everything gets exponentially, murderously worse. The ordinary cynicism and venality of our “elites” become directly lethal on a mass scale; the common hypocrisy of our mainstream media, assigning full humanity and privileges to go with it to some (say, Israelis and Ukrainians) and much less to others (for instance, Palestinian toddlers and their mothers) turns into a weapon of mass de-sensitization and, thus, mass destruction; and our usual conformism morphs from something small and ugly to a monstrosity of complicity. (Ask the Germans. Or, maybe don’t: Their response to the Gaza Genocide shows that many of their “elites,” at least, still haven’t learned a thing from the genocides their forebears committed – except, it seems, that Israel gets a free pass and Germany can take part as long as the perpetrators are Israeli).    

That rule of everything exploding in its awfulness under conditions of genocide also holds for Monday Morning Quarterbacking. And, in the context of Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, it has mutated into a Zombie version of itself (entirely brainless and very blood-soaked). It still retains its core of incompetent carping and self-important whining. Yet at the same time, it has also devolved to display specific mechanisms of dishonesty.