A lot of attention has been placed during the Israel-Hamas War on the vast underground network of tunnels that Hamas has developed as a means of both fighting Israel and of protecting itself against Israel. It is possible that Israel has finally developed an effective plan to neutralize this network of tunnels: the idea of flooding the network with sea water. All this discussion of Hamas’s network of tunnels started me thinking of where I had previously heard of people living underground before. The answer came to me when I started shifting my thinking from real life instances to fiction.
- G. Wells The Time Machine details a society in the distant future when humanity has evolved into two variations: the Eloi who are small and not very smart and who live the life of aristocratic contentment on the surface of the Earth, and the Morlocks who have evolved into strange creatures that look like apes and who live a hard working-class life using old machines underneath the surface of the earth. Although the Eloi have a more comfortable life style than the Morlocks, and the Morlocks do all of their drudge work, the Eloi are at the mercy of the Morlocks who eat the Eloi when they want to. Now Wells was trying to use these fictional constructs as metaphors for what people might have evolved into in England, if the class system there had continued to evolve along the pathway along which it had continued to move until that time. Now the truth is that in the States we have plutocrats rather than aristocrats, but there are enough similarities to make Wells’ observations applicable here as well. And in Latin America and in Europe and in much of Asia.
A case can certainly be made for some similarities between the Morlocks and Hamas. Now the members of Hamas have not, at least up until the present, devolved into cannibals, if for no other reason than human meat is not Halal. But there is this sense that Hamas, because of its’ savagery has increasingly evolved into a primitive tribal fringe group that lives on the edges of Israeli society and generates friction in its interactions with it. The fact that Hamas is capable of building a sophisticated tunnel system as well as using increasingly complex forms of warfare technology in no way takes away from their vicious barbaric behavior. On the contrary, it adds to it.
At the same time, in no way are the Israelis to be compared to the Eloi. The Elois, for the most part, live a frictionless life of indolence, a life where they have become immersed in an experiential vacuum, floating along with no purpose in life. The Israelis are the furthest thing from indolent as a group. They are strong, focused, and competent and every time they have fought Hamas, their Morlocks, they have succeeded in beating them back. So, who is it who is playing the role of the Eloi to Hamas? How about many of the people from the Western countries, including the States, who, to a greater or lesser extent, have taken pity on the Gazans, 90% of whom now sympathize with Hamas, and keep looking for ways to create truces and pauses and cease-fires between Israel and Hamas. This does not mean that these Westerners have physically evolved yet into the Eloi of Wells novel. It just means that they have already started to adopt some of the behavioral traits of the Eloi. Many of these nouveaux Eloi have moved beyond the stage of being apologists and peacemakers and have instead become advocates for Hamas, participating in demonstrations against Jews that gradually become more and more violent. To the extent that these Westerners start identifying with Hamas and move away from positions of peaceful neutrality, to that extent they start evolving from being nouveaux Eloi into nouveaux Morlocks. They evolve from their numb states of mind into states of mind that will pull them out of that numbness, states of mind based on a violent zombie-like antisemitism. States of mind that put them into an explosive overstimulating tension-pocket.
H.G. Wells wrote his book as a critique of capitalism. I am much more interested in using this book as a critique that shows the growing divide between different groups of people today regarding their fields of experience. There are the Israelis, the Jews, their supporters and sympathizers, on the one hand, and the Palestinians and their supporters and sympathizers on the other. H.G. Wells shows life underground with the Morlocks as definitely being something totally demeaning and inhuman for them, even though they do have access to Eloi meat, whereas Hamas has been trying to show their version of life underground as being something that is scary for their enemies, the Israelis, something that gives them a great deal of power. The Time Machine should be required reading for Israeli school children as a reminder to them to never take for granted all the successes that their country has had in building itself up the way it has. They don’t want to become Eloi.
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