No Quarter for Five-Year-Olds

Human needs are met differently today than they were centuries ago. Sustenance no longer requires access to common foraging grounds as it did in 5th century England.¹ Sleeping atop a warm izba² is not necessary to survive Siberian winter nights. Having a key to the privy around the corner or your own side of a hostel bed does not impart a sense of well-being. 

In 1928, Virginia Woolf quaintly suggested that to achieve independent thought a room of one’s own was required. Today, blessed with rooms of our own, few of us are concerned about independent thought, confident we possess it. What does concern us is something Woolf identified as equally essential but largely forgotten because not half so quaint: an independent income.³ Right on! And with that income, we want our own dwelling, SUV, smartphone, credit line, and career path with healthcare and pension plan. Therewith are 21st century human needs satisfied the 21st century way.

So what about self-defense? Have our ideas about that changed, too? Any new wrinkles there? Oh, wrinkles most foul. 

Self-defense involves a dynamic we intrinsically recognize, but may never see. For most of us, defending ourselves has mercifully been restricted to highly regulated domestic disputes: getting that parking space, holding our place in line while ripping back to get the mayonnaise we forgot, negotiating a raise, explaining to our terribly friendly neighbors why playing their radio in the backyard weekends while they garden and sunbathe is highly disruptive to our peace of mind. Such exchanges get testy for most of us because our well-being is highly impacted by the outcome. How we manage those maneuvers matters to us.

To watch anyone fighting for their lives is deeply shocking. Like no fight we see on stage or screen, it is a visceral, intimate affair. The person defending life and limb has been taken off guard and is desperate, frenzied, and pumped so full of adrenaline as to not be in their right mind. There are no rules, no decorum. Operating on instinct, their faces distorted with emotion, the combatants jab, kick, lunge, slide, scrape, and dodge like spastics; squelch, grunt, sob, and weep in fury; gasp for air; spray saliva on themselves; and remain keenly alert for any way out. To have your naked fear and helplessness exposed that way is also humiliating. The best outcome is both get away, and even if they do, the smell of something inorganic burning lingers in the air. That is self-defense.

With the lower life-forms largely under control, we found ourselves up against something far worse: each other.

It started simply — and horribly — enough. On emerging from the primordial stew as a species of our own, we humans found ourselves descended upon by two kingdoms at once — the plant and the animal. After scrambling for our lives to achieve an uneasy parity, we — for whom parity is never good enough — went on to tame both through the only methods that occurred to us: what we could not eat, we wiped out. With the lower life-forms largely under control, we found ourselves up against something far worse: each other.

Society worsened matters by forbidding us to go about braining each other. Lions, tigers, and bears; forests, swamps, and grasslands could be done away with in any manner we could devise. But we were not to lay rough hands on each other except in the case of self-defense. Specifically, if someone laid rough hands on us, we were allowed to lay rough hands on them. This started lively discussions about who laid rough hands on whom first, which continue until this very day, because, as it turns out, no one ever did. Start it, that is.

The United Nations inadvertently complicated matters further when it proscribed unprovoked aggression among nations. Established in 1945 in response to the ruinous world war lately concluded, the UN declared in Article 51, Chapter VII of its charter that the single instance in which a nation might use force was self-defense, but only until a superior authority stepped in to adjudicate the dispute. Article 51 is one paragraph long: 

Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.

Ever since declaring its independence on May 14, 1948, Israel has taxed the United Nations by applying the notion of “self-defense” in the most extraordinary ways to justify what appeared to be a takeover of Palestine. Proving itself equal to the task, the UN fastidiously distinguished between acts of self-defense, retaliation, reprisal, and preemptive strikes, issuing hundreds of resolutions condemning and proscribing Israel’s recurring acts of aggression.⁴ Israel ignored them all. 

The Nazis subjected their ghetto prisoners to life-threatening restrictions intended to cause starvation and introduce disease, but did not claim they were acting in self-defense.

Though the political will and strategy may be firm, ridding oneself of a population takes time. The Nazis required two years and seven months between setting up the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940 and deporting the last of the 400,000 people confined there to its camps in May 1943. Up until the time of the final removal, the Nazis subjected their ghetto prisoners to life-threatening restrictions intended to cause starvation and introduce disease. The Nazis did not, however, claim they were acting in self-defense. Israel, using identical tactics on its Gazan captives, claims it is. 

From the beginning, the newly formed State of Israel represented itself as fighting for its very existence against an enemy bent on annihilating it. That enemy? The peasant-farmers of Palestine it intended to displace. By attributing to them Nazi-like hate, ambitions, and power, Israel justified its 1948 expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians as a necessary act of self-defense. Any actions the Palestinians took to resist their expulsion, return to their land and homes, and assert their right to self-determination were cited by Israel as proof of their hostility to Israel’s existence, a mortal hostility that required Israel take ever harsher measures to restrict, control, and remove them.

As it advanced its brutal campaign to secure Palestine for itself, Israel continued to maintain that it was embroiled in a battle for its very existence and that any action it took was necessary to its survival as a nation. That beating a lone woman in the West Bank during the olive harvest causing a brain hemorrhage was self-defense.⁵⁶ That shooting a boy in the head as he rummaged in the rubble of ruined Gaza for cardboard for his mother to cook with was self-defense.⁷ That coming back to finish off five-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped in a car in Gaza City among the corpses of her aunt, uncle, and four cousins, was self-defense.⁸ As CEO Rami Elghandour protested: “Forget the genocide in Gaza. Forget the terrorism in the West Bank. Save the Children, one of the most prominent organizations in the world, says that half of the children abducted by Israel are sexually assaulted. How is this still a dialog in this country?”⁹ But it is still a dialog because we, Israel’s audience, feign confusion as we attempt to equate Israel’s increasingly extreme and sadistic acts with what it tells us is minimal but necessary self-defense. 

Israel, in its very inception, recreated for the people seeking sanctuary exactly what they emigrated to Israel to escape, a mortal enemy.

Israel’s perennial state of aggression is the result of a paranoid condition foreordained in its raison d’être: offering a persecuted people a homeland it did not possess. It first had to take that land, co-opting for that effort the very people to whom it promised personal safety, preservation of their culture, and freedom to practice their religion without constraint or fear. Thus, in its very inception, Israel recreated for the people seeking sanctuary exactly what they emigrated to Israel to escape, a mortal enemy.

As Israel’s population and land appropriations increased, so did the uneasiness of the population it was displacing. Recognizing that the native population would never accept a Zionist takeover, Zionist leaders like Ze’ev Jabotinsky concluded that a military “iron wall” would eventually be necessary to defend the Jewish homeland against the people it had displaced.¹⁰

With its fatal flaw acknowledged, specifically, the intention to acquire another’s homeland for its own and then “defend” it from the people it had expelled, Israel began its series of fabrications to camouflage the venture, perpetuating, intentionally or not, its image as victim. The first fib was saying the land Israel chose for its state was not occupied, calling Palestine “a land without a people for a people without a land.” When bystanders observed that people were indeed there, in fact, a population that had stewarded the land for centuries, Israel replied that those people did not belong there but to the neighboring Arab countries. “It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country from them,” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir fended off reproaches that the Israelis had done just that.¹¹ Her argument would justify stripping Florida of its millions of acres of longleaf pine because the trees did not have a flag. “No flag, no country,” quips Eddie Izzard about how the British took over India.¹² Neither had the Palestinians nationalized themselves, therefore Israel need not recognize them. 

Israel’s self-defense propaganda has assumed greater urgency as human rights investigations, UN reports, photos, videos, and interviews give the lie to its persecution narrative around Gaza. The publicity annoys because Israel needs Americans to believe its self-defense story. Clearing out Gaza, in addition to its widening wars in Lebanon and Iran, is rapidly reducing its stockpiles of advanced weapons. To maintain its footing, Israel requires the United States — us — to keep it supplied and funded. To keep it supplied and funded, we Americans must continue to believe its cant of persecution and self-defense. But as Netanyahu closes in to finish off Gaza, it has become more and more difficult to do so. If we acquiesce and accept Israel’s posture of self-defense even as it drives the last Palestinians into the sea, to South Sudan, or to the grave, then our concept of self-defense will have indeed changed. Along with something inside of us.

---

1. Access to common foraging grounds and “waste” land was absolutely critical for the sustenance of the rural poor in England from the Anglo-Saxon period (starting c. 450 CE) through to the 18th century. This access was particularly important for landless families who relied on the commons for grazing livestock (pigs, geese, cows), gathering firewood, and collecting wild foods. ↩︎
2. Izba is Russian for stove. “From the fifteenth century on, the central element of the interior of izba was the Russian stove, which could occupy up to one quarter of the floorspace in smaller dwellings. Often there were no beds (in the Western sense) for many members of the household, as people would sleep directly on the plaster top of the oven, or on shelves built directly above the stove.” Wikipedia contributors, “Izba,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Izba&oldid=1332005376 ↩︎
3. Though not widely recalled, Woolf believed a condition of independence was an income of one’s own. “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.” She also remarked, “Of the two — the vote and the money — the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.” A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf.  ↩︎
4. Since 1948, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and General Assembly (UNGA) have passed hundreds of resolutions addressing military actions, incursions, and territorial occupations involving Israel and its neighboring Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. ↩︎
5. https://abcnews.com/International/video-shows-palestinian-woman-attacked-alleged-israeli-settler/story?id=126732512 ↩︎
6. Palestinian Woman Beaten Unconscious as Israeli Settlers Attack West Bank Olive Farmers, Democracy Now!, October 21, 2025 ↩︎
7. https://www.democracynow.org/2026/5/7/gaza_apocalypse ↩︎
8. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-hind-rajab ↩︎
9. Canceled over Palestine: Biotech CEO Rami Elghandour on Rutgers Disinviting Him as Graduation Speaker, Democracy Now!, May 11, 2026. ↩︎
10. “About the Iron Wall,” by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, 1923.  ↩︎
11. Golda Meir, June 15, 1969. ↩︎
12. Eddie Lizard, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTduy7Qkvk8; start at 0:28. ↩︎