Planting the Blue and White

Israel’s crashed moon landing could not be more fitting in conjunction with a limp culmination to a much-publicized Knesset election. 

Likud and Netanyahu were by all accounts facing an existential challenge to their explicitly racist and genocidal governance. From one side Netanyahu is facing a hearing for corruption charges and from the other side the insurgent Blue and White party. While the name itself hints to the dismal state of Israeli politics, further inspection into the preferred candidate of all sane liberals confirms it. Blue and White leader Benny Gantz has publicly refused to enter into coalition with Arab parties and committed to “strengthen settlement” in the West Bank. A man of his word, Gantz is facing war crime accusations as he presided as chief of staff of the IDF during Operation Protective Edge, which killed thousands of occupied Palestinians as another piece in the process of ethnic cleansing. As Netanyahu is positioned to continue his particularly repulsive right-wing governance, the election’s politics unfolded as poorly as you would expect them to within an expanding settler-colonial state. 

The Cold War space race was stupid. It was a waste of money outpaced only by the more obviously malignant arms race (which at least can be used for something). The pinnacle of human progress and achievement was only one that could tower above the petty efforts to actually improve peoples’ lives. And in the mortal battle between Communism and liberal capitalist democracy, when Buzz Aldrin planted the Red, White, and Blue he claimed capitalism as the final victor of human history. 

While the Blue and White did not claim quite the same poetic victory, Israel’s crash landing concludes as equally stupid. Netanyahu will continue the transfer of Palestinians just as Gantz would have, and nothing meaningful has changed, but at least there's no way cranks can say they figured it all out by getting to the moon.