A neo-Marxist update: Tragedy and farce, fused into one

A MIDDLE EAST BRIEFING FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS

Karl Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” He referred to the Napoleonic era, but today’s Middle East offers an update: Tragedy and farce, irrevocably intertwined, at one and the same time.

The two seem compressed into a single reality: unimaginable suffering alongside grotesque political theater. From Yemen to Gaza to Jerusalem to New York, fools and fanatics wreak havoc while opportunists abroad turn calamity into stagecraft. The result is a region where tragedy and farce no longer alternate, but coexist.

And no few of the sad protagonists, like Israel’s diminutive but hugely self-assured “finance minister” Bezalel Smotrich, can be said, without the slightest undue cruelty, to have Napoleonic complexes of their own. This week he proposed a plan for Israel to annex almost the entire West Bank, as if he feared that the mayhem of the past two years may otherwise be coming to an end.

In today’s briefing, we shall analyze that nonsense, along with the insane situation of Yemen’s Houthis, whose implacable radicalism would be comic at a Monty Python level had they not caused the deaths of close to a half million people, the debate over genocide, and, sadly, so very much more to boot.

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