Israel descends into barbarism

Solly Rakgomo | Monday May 27, 2024 09:48

Firstly, let me give a list of signs of this horrible meltdown: Establishing an apartheid State to satisfy a racist ideological doctrine, committing “probable” genocide in Gaza, committing mass executions at, amongst other places, Gaza hospitals, issuing orders to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians, torture and murder of Palestinian detainees, inducing an artificial famine in Gaza, blocking humanitarian aid, systematic destruction of most of the infrastructure needed to sustain human life in the Gaza Strip, committing increasing numbers of pogroms against Palestinian villages and towns in the West Bank.

All of this is documented in the reports of credible human rights organisations, the United Nations agencies, as well as in the decisions of the International Court of Justice. Face it, this is not a matter of opinion or perspective—be it President Biden’s or anyone else’s. It is a matter of (often televised) fact. Israeli Jews, and Zionists generally, get really mad when you cite the above facts without referencing their excuses. So, let’s run down some of them:

- Israeli behaviour in Gaza is one of self-defence in reaction to the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

The way the Israelis talk about the October 7 action is as if there never was an October 6 or, for that matter, as specifically regards Gaza, the prior 17 years running back to 2006. The history of those years helps put the lie to Israel’s claim of self-defence. In January of 2006, there was an internationally supervised national election in Palestine. Because of the corruption associated with Fatah, the party that controlled the Palestine National Authority (PNA), and Fatah’s cooperation with the Israeli occupation, Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, won the election.

Hamas’ reputation had been one of honesty and reliability and it had always insisted on continued resistance to Israeli occupation. Israel’s reaction to the Hamas victory was to arrest members of the new government resident in the West Bank. The United States and other European powers demanded that Hamas carry on the PNA’s collaborative relationship with Israel. Hamas refused. The US, Israel, and Fatah started to conspire on ways to annul the election and destroy Hamas.

By 2007, Israel, with the cooperation of Egypt, instituted a blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade was the equivalent of a process of de-development that impoverished over one million people. Periodic armed Israeli incursions into the Strip kept up the persecutional tension. The Gaza Strip was transformed into an “open air prison.” To this picture, might be added the fact that all prior attempts at negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians had been sabotaged by Israel because any compromise settlement would have undermined the Zionist ideological determination to turn all of Palestine into a “Jewish” controlled land. Under the circumstances, the only party really exercising “self-defence” on October 7, 2024 was the Palestinians under the leadership of Hamas and other allied resistance groups.

We are fighting an existential war.

That is the assertion of Yair Lapid, the head of Israel’s opposition party. He has no doubt that Hamas wants to kill Jews because they are Jews. He feels that the Israelis have only one other option than to fight the war in Gaza and that is to allow themselves “to be murdered.” Lapid is convinced that Americans objecting to how Israel fights in Gaza don’t understand the complexity of the situation.

And that includes “the betrayal of the intellectuals. Meaning the intellectuals of the West, or some of them.” He assures us: “Israel is not committing genocide. That the Israeli army is behaving honourably. Israel is not doing anything but defending itself in a war we didn’t want.”

Lapid was raised, as he tells us, “an Israeli patriot.” That translates into being raised in a controlled closed information environment. So his point of view is predictable, but also consequently, lacking in an unbiased historical context. Israeli Jews have never been at risk of being kicked into the sea.

The State of Israel has never been seriously in danger of losing a war. What has always been dubious is Israel’s status as a democracy. What is putting Zionist Israel in real danger is the growing international doubts on this score, on the Zionist state’s similarity to an apartheid state like the one South Africa used to be. Such States have no long-term future in the modern world.

The Gaza War is like World War II

This is the assertion of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. By which he means that Israel is fighting surrogate Nazis and so, reducing the Gaza Strip to Dresden in February 1945, is not a war crime. Such slaughter is just an unfortunate consequence of “self-defence.” This comparison reflects the fact that anti-Semitism, particularly in the extreme Holocaust version, has long defined the Israeli view of Palestinian motives and behaviour. However, when viewed from the outside, objectively, this borders on delusion.

This is because whatever is the desire of some Palestinians to rid the world of Zionists, they do not have the capacity to do so. On the other hand, there appears to be multiple generations of Israelis who want to rid the world of Palestinians and they do have the capacity to do it. What Prime Minister Netanyahu characterises as a struggle like World War II is actually the Israelis, convinced of their own status as victims, waging a war of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.

What we are witnessing in terms of Israeli behaviour in Gaza is yet another example of learned fanaticism. This is the type of indoctrination that, as Thomas Suarez notes, allowed the Israelis to see their own terrorism as “self-defence.” Whether based on religious myth or multi-generational, state-generated storytelling, the outlook amongst Israeli Jews has been pre-determined.

That outlook has paved the way for barbarism. Thus, concerning the Palestinians, the difference in political aims of Lapid, Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the right-wing settlers, the religious parties, etc. is one of nuance, variations on a basically apartheid theme for Israel’s future. This is not an outlook arrived at through independent reasoning. It is a community supported, indoctrinated outlook that can only be overcome by some sort of shock treatment. Success of the BDS movement and the International Criminal Court indicting Israeli leaders would certainly be steps in the right direction.