In no particular order or grouping, here’s what has been getting people worked up this last past month or so about Israel and Palestine: the American Studies Association, SodaStream, Scarlett Johansson, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifdadah, Jew-counting and Arab-counting (at the Nation, Mondoweiss, and Electronic Intifadah),Moshe Yaalon, Eric Alterman, Judith Butler, Max Blumenthal, Peter Beinart, anti-Semitism and anti-Semites, Hillel, Open Hillel, AIPAC, BDS, maps of Palestine or Israel on Chilean soccer club jerseys and JNF charity boxes, “Jewish State,” “Palestinian civil society,” Zionism, anti-Zionism, one state or two state solutions. Flooding social media and online talback for a from the right and the left, each individual word on the subject aggregates with all the others. Each iteration of that word makes one smaller and smaller, one’s viewpoint, dumber and dumber.

To invert the old boast about the British Empire, the sun never sets on discourse about Israel and Palestine. Lost is any sense of scale, complexity, proportion, and perspective. A tiny territorial strip is turned by its antagonists into a world moral emblem. No detail goes unnoticed or unpunished. No matter how prosaic or petty on the face of things, every single bit or byte is overloaded with super-symbolic, metaphysical significance. The affect is terrible. The world itself is given to pulse with moral outrage, moral posturing, self-righteousness, anxiety, resentment, reactivity, callousness, defensiveness, verbal jaundice. It’s worse than religion. Petty and small and eating itself alive from the inside, diagnosis and prognosis become the symptom of its own self-devouring.