The Israeli military launched another series of air raids on the Gaza Strip
early on Monday, hours after Israel’s caretaker Prime Minister Binyjamin
Netanyahu said the attacks on the Palestinian enclave would rage on.
Explosions rocked Gaza City from north to south in a bombardment that was
heavier, on a wider area and lasted longer than the air raids that killed at
least 42 Palestinians and wounded dozens more on Sunday.
At least 198 Palestinians, including 59 children and 39 women, have been
killed in the Gaza Strip since the latest violence began a week ago.1307 badly injured, including 398 children and 270 women.
Israel has reported 11 dead, including two
children and three soldiers.
The United Nations Security Council met on Sunday to discuss the violence but failed to agree even a joint statement of concern because the United States obstructed the council from speaking “with one voice”, said China.
As Israel pounds the Gaza Strip for the nineth day in its fourth
major military offensive against its mostly refugee inhabitants in the past
dozen years, it is claiming a superior moral code of conduct.
As Israeli leaders would have it, the world should not be
distracted by the images of death and destruction, for which Hamas should
be held responsible, as it hides among the civilian population.
In fact, as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told US
President Joe Biden, “Israel is doing everything possible to avoid harming
innocent civilians.”
Indeed, Israel sends warning shots to Gaza residents so they can
narrowly escape with their lives just before it destroys their livelihoods with
bombs. The Palestinians should be thankful.
Israel also claims that it targets specific terrorist
installations, anything else is an unintended consequence. But what Israel
calls “collateral damage”, the Palestinians call loved ones: the women, men,
and children they mourn every day.
Netanyahu says that Israel targets Hamas for resistng the
occupation and the oppression targeting Israeli population centres. But while
targeting civilians, even, fascists like the Israelis, should not be condoned
or excused, the reality once again tells a different story: there is a
significant disparity between the death and destruction the Palestinians and
the Israelis face.
Israel and its enablers also insist on its right of self-defence,
when, in fact, Israel had forfeited that right by becoming an expanding
occupying power.
They say Israel only aims to defend its citizens, when in fact it
is defending the occupation and the subjugation of the Palestinians.
Israel insists it does not start wars. This is generally
false, considering it started most of its past wars. It provoked war
through assassinations, bombings, closures, evictions, land grabs, attacks on
holy sites, and unrelenting illegal settlements, etc.
The decades-long military and civilian occupation in and of itself
is a continued state of war and violence. Israel could stop the madness of
war by simply ending the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians.
Israel claims it does not seek conflict, that it seeks peace. But
throughout much of the quarter of a century “peace process”,
successive Israeli governments have insisted on maintaining total
domination over all of historic Palestine and expanded the illegal
settlements for that purpose.
At any rate, these well-rehearsed, often repeated, “talking
points” are nothing new. They have gone a long way in justifying Israeli
aggression throughout its history, even though the tragedy of war transcends
all spin.
But for a long time, they also reflected a deeper contradiction in
the Israeli mindset. Indeed, since its inception, Israel has projected a
conflicting image of being powerful but insecure, superior but needy, bloody
but humane, violent but vulnerable, and ultimately a merciful warrior and a
vicious peacemaker.
Israel has been a formidable military and nuclear power, superior
to all its neighbours combined, and yet it is the only country that
consistently obsesses about its survival.
It is because this type of insecurity is rooted not in the lack of
strength but its lack of acceptability or fitting in as a
settler colonial project in a predominantly Arab region, whose people
overwhelmingly reject it.
Israel’s insecurity was born in sin – the sin of a state founded
on the ruin of another people, the catastrophic takeover of Palestine and the
dispossession of its inhabitants by malign violence in 1948.
Although the Zionist leaders at the time lied about the causes and
the management of the war, they could not escape the truth of their doing. As Israel’s “new historians” have
documented, Palestinians did not flee their towns voluntarily, nor were they
heeding some Arab calls to evacuate their homes. Israel carried out a well-planned, wide-ranging ethnic cleansing
offensive to ensure the Jewishness of the new state.
That made many Israelis uncomfortable and conflicted. After
all, many of its early Jewish immigrants were themselves victims of horrible
atrocities in Europe and elsewhere.
But while many Israelis felt justified, others expressed
sorrow for the horrible things they “had to do”, although no one forced their
hand to occupy Palestine or maintain their control for decades
Indeed, more than a few early Zionists understood the horrific
consequence of war and advocated peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians in
one state for much of the first half of the 20th century.
The conflicted mindset was best understood in the old Israeli
expression, yorim ve bochim, literally “shooting and crying”. It is as old and
complex an expression as the state itself.
In his 1949 novel, Khirbet Khizeh, Yizhar Smilansky, an army
officer and renowned author, depicted with shocking prose the preplanned and
unprovoked destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of its
inhabitants across the border carried out by his military unit during the 1948
war.
As an intelligence officer, Smilansky knew all too well
that this was only one of several hundreds of villages and towns destroyed by
the Israeli forces. But like Micha, his novel’s protagonist, he joined his
comrades in “finishing the job”, despite his guilty conscience.
The revisionist novel was made into a movie and a TV series, while
Smilansky became a Knesset member from the ruling Mapai party in the 1950s, as
it continued to dispossess the Palestinians of their basic human rights.
It is this type of confliction between Smilansky, the writer,
and Smilansky, the politician, that shaped the writings of more than a few
leading Zionist writers, notably « liberals »like Amos Oz, who
influenced the views of millions, especially the so called “diaspora Jews”.
I’ve read much of Oz’s novels and have just finished two ofthem,
Judas and Scenes From Village Life, and they didn’t change my opinion. They
are politically hypocritical.
However, it was the late Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, who
took the hypocrisy of “shooting and crying” to a whole new level of bulls***.
In one of her infamous racist zingers, she told the Palestinians,
“We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for
making us kill yours.” That is chutzpah par excellance.
It follows, rather obscenely, that today, the Palestinians
owe Israel a huge apology for its army killing so many of them.
The hypocrisy goes well beyond fighting war into waging of peace.
In 1993, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted
of Israel’s generosity and its willingness to share a rather tiny part of “the
Land of Israel” with the Palestinians for the sake of peace. Never mind, that
it was the Palestinians who were making a historic compromise by recognising
Israel stretching over four-fifths of their homeland.
But all that is now in the past. It is indeed, passé.
After years of acting with impunity, today’s Israelis,
certainly most Israeli leaders, do not shoot and cry. They do not want to share
the land or make real peace with the Palestinians. Most are more likely to
shoot and laugh.
One of the most disturbing images I have ever seen
in my lifetime was during the Gaza war in 2014. It was devoid of
drama or tragedy, showing only a bunch of Israelis picnicking on the hills
overseeing Gaza, eating popcorn and enjoying themselves, as they watched the
Israeli bombardment of the densely populated, overly impoverished strip.
Why let the death of Palestinians ruin a great
firework display?
In the past, certain Israeli leaders may have
been disturbed by all that they have done, by the crimes they have
committed, but they reckoned the ends justified the means.
Hypocritical? Perhaps. But unlike the new generation of fanatic
leaders and their followers, they were at least conflicted and some even
remorseful.
By contrast, today, Netanyahu’s minions and partners use words
like regret and peace as props. Worse, they have an entire guidebook prepared
after the first Israel-Gaza War in 2009, guiding officials on how to portray
Israel as a peace-loving, well-intentioned victim of Palestinians’ aggression.
One could only roll one’s eyes watching Netanyahu warning
Palestinians in Israel against using violence, when they are the victims of
organised violence, when they are merely trying to defend themselves against
overwhelming police brutality and lynching by mobs of Jewish fanatics.
I wrote about this hasbara deception masquerading as confliction,
in a number of articles during the 2014 Gaza
war, here, here and here, for example.
What I found to be most instructive throughout my study of
Israel’s war and propaganda is that Israel has brought nothing new to
the art of deception, except, perhaps, a slicker delivery.
Most other previous colonial powers called their enemies
terrorists, accused them of cowardice, and of using civilians as human shields,
blah blah blah.
But what became of these colonialists and their
« hasbara »-propaganda?
It may be hard if not impossible to be optimistic about the
short-term prospects of a solution. But when the dust settles on another
sadistic Israeli war, Israelis will once again find themselves stuck with
millions of Palestinians ever more determined to regain their liberty.
Like the dozen colonial states that preceded them, notably the
white settler regimes in South Africa and Algeria, the Israelis will sooner or
later have to make a choice: to live in peace or leave in humiliation.
There is no point in postponing the inevitable and suffering in the process.
Nearly all the words and phrases used by the Democrats, Republicans and the
talking heads on the media to describe the unrest inside Israel and the
heaviest Israeli assault against the Palestinians since the 2014 attacks on
Gaza, which lasted 51 days and killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including
551 children, are a lie. Israel, by employing its military machine against
an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy,
missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S.
commitment to provide a $38 billion defense aid package for Israel over the
next decade, is not exercising "the right to defend itself." It is
carrying out mass murder. It is a war crime.
Israel has made clear it is ready to destroy and kill
as wantonly now as it was in 2014. Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz, who was the chief of staff during the murderous assault on Gaza in 2014,
has vowed that if Hamas "does not stop the violence, the strike of 2021
will be harder and more painful than that of 2014." The current attacks
have already targeted several residential high-rises including buildings that
housed more than a dozen local and international press agencies, government
buildings, roads, public facilities, agricultural lands, two schools and a
mosque.
I spent seven years in the Middle East as a correspondent, four of them as
The New York Times Middle East bureau chief. I am an Arabic speaker. I lived
for weeks at a time in Gaza, the world's largest open-air prison, where more
than 2 million Palestinians exist on the edge of starvation, struggle to
find clean water and endure constant Israeli terror. I have been in Gaza when
it was pounded with Israeli artillery and air strikes. I have watched mothers
and fathers, wailing in grief, cradling the bloodied bodies of their sons and
daughters. I know the crimes of the occupation — the food shortages caused by
the Israeli blockade, the stifling overcrowding, the contaminated water, the
lack of health services, the near-constant electrical outages due to the
Israeli targeting of power plants, the crippling poverty, the endemic
unemployment, the fear and the despair. I have witnessed the carnage.
I also have listened from Gaza to the lies emanating
from Jerusalem and Washington. Israel's
indiscriminate use of modern, industrial weapons to kill thousands of
innocents, wound thousands more and make tens of thousands of families homeless
is not a war: It is state-sponsored terror. And while I oppose the
indiscriminate firing of rockets by Palestinians into Israel, as I oppose
suicide bombings, seeing them also as war crimes, I am acutely aware of a huge
disparity between the industrial violence carried out by Israel against
innocent Palestinians and the minimal acts of violence capable of being waged
by groups such as Hamas.
The false equivalency between Israeli and Palestinian
violence was echoed during the war I covered in Bosnia. Those of us in the
besieged city of Sarajevo were pounded daily with hundreds of heavy shells and
rockets from the surrounding Serbs. We were targeted by sniper fire. The city
suffered a few dozen dead and wounded each day. The government forces inside the city fired back with light mortars and
small arms fire. Supporters of the Serbs seized on any casualties caused by
Bosnian government forces to play the same dirty game, although well over 90
percent of the killings in Bosnia were the fault of the Serbs, as is also true
regarding Israel.
The second and perhaps most important parallel is that the Serbs, like the
Israelis, were the principal violators of international law. Israel is in
breach of more than 30 UN Security Council resolutions. It is in breach of
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention that defines collective punishment
of a civilian population as a war crime. It is in violation of Article 49 of
the Fourth Geneva Convention for settling over half a million Jewish Israelis
on occupied Palestinian land and for the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000
Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded and another 300,000 after Gaza,
East Jerusalem and the West Bank were occupied following the 1967 war. Its
annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights violates
international law, as does its building of a security barrier in the West Bank
that annexes Palestinian land into Israel. It is in violation of
UN General Assembly Resolution 194, which states that Palestinian
"refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their
neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable
date."
This is the truth. Any other starting point for the discussion of what
is taking place between Israel and the Palestinians is a lie.
Israel's once-vibrant peace movement and political left, which condemned
and protested against the Israeli occupation when I lived in Jerusalem, is
moribund. The right-wing Netanyahu government, despite its rhetoric about
fighting terrorism, has built an alliance with the repressive regime in Saudi
Arabia, which also views Iran as an enemy. Saudi Arabia, a country
that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks, is
reputed to be the most prolific sponsor of international Islamist terrorism,
allegedly supporting Salafist jihadism, the basis of al-Qaida, and groups such
as the Afghanistan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)
and the Al-Nusra Front.
Saudi Arabia and Israel worked closely together to back the 2013 military
coup in Egypt, led by General Abdul Fattah el Sisi. Sisi overthrew a
democratically elected government. He has imprisoned tens of thousands of
government critics, including journalists and human rights defenders, on
politically motivated charges. The Sisi regime collaborates with Israel by
keeping its common border with Gaza closed to Palestinians, trapping them in
the Gaza strip, one of the most densely populated places on earth. Israel's
cynicism and hypocrisy, especially when it wraps itself in the mantle of
protecting democracy and fighting terrorism, is of epic proportions.
Those who are not Jewish in Israel are either second-class citizens or live
under brutal military occupation. Israel is not, and never has been, the
exclusive homeland of the Jewish people. From the 7th century until 1948, when
Jewish colonial settlers used violence and ethnic cleansing to create the state
of Israel, Palestine was overwhelmingly Muslim. It was never empty
land. The Jews in Palestine were traditionally a tiny minority. The United
States is not an honest broker for peace but has funded, enabled and defended
Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people. Israel is not defending the rule of law. Israel is not
a democracy. It is an apartheid state.
That the lie of Israel continues to be embraced by the
ruling elites — there is no daylight between statements in defense of
Israeli war crimes by Nancy Pelosi and Ted Cruz — and used as a foundation for
any discussion of Israel is a testament to the corrupting power of money, in
this case that of the Israel lobby, and the bankruptcy of a political system of
legalized bribery that has surrendered its autonomy and its principles to its
major donors. It is also a stunning example of how colonial settler projects
— and this is also true in the United States — always carry out
cultural genocide so they can exist in a suspended state of myth and historical
amnesia to legitimize themselves.
The Israel lobby has shamelessly used its immense
political clout to demand that Americans take de facto loyalty oaths to Israel.
The passage by 35 state legislatures of Israel lobby-backed legislation requiring their workers and contractors, under
threat of dismissal, to sign a pro-Israel oath and promise not to support
the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is a mockery of our constitutional
right of free speech. Israel has lobbied the U.S. State Department to redefine
antisemitism under a three-point test known as the Three Ds: the making of
statements that "demonize" Israel; statements that apply "double
standards" for Israel; statements that "delegitimize" the state
of Israel. This definition of antisemitism is being
pushed by the Israel lobby in state legislatures and on college campuses.
The Israel lobby spies in the United States, often at the direction of
Israel's Ministry of Strategic Affairs, on those who speak up for the rights of
Palestinians. It wages public smear campaigns and blacklists defenders of
Palestinian rights — including the Jewish historian Norman Finkelstein; UN Special
Rapporteur for the Occupied Territories Richard Falk, also Jewish; and
university students, many of them Jewish, in organizations such as Students for
Justice in Palestine.
The Israel lobby has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to manipulate
U.S. elections, far beyond anything alleged to have been carried out by Russia,
China or any other country. The heavy-handed interference by Israel in the
American political system, which includes operatives and donors bundling
together hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in every
U.S. congressional district to bankroll compliant candidates, is documented in
the Al-Jazeera four-part series "The Lobby." Israel managed to block "The
Lobby" from being broadcast. In the film, a pirated copy of which is available on the
website Electronic Intifada, the leaders of the Israel lobby are
repeatedly captured on a reporter's hidden camera explaining how they, backed
by the intelligence services within Israel, attack and silence American critics
and use massive cash donations to buy politicians.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu secured an unconstitutional
invitation from then-House Speaker John Boehner to address
Congress in 2015 to denounce President Barack Obama's Iranian nuclear
agreement. Netanyahu's open defiance of Obama and alliance with the Republican
Party, however, did not stop Obama in 2014 from authorizing a 10-year, $38
billion military aid package to Israel, a sad commentary on how captive
American politics is to Israeli interests.
The investment by Israel and is backers is worth it, especially when you
consider that the U.S. has also spent more than $6 trillion during the last 20
years fighting futile wars that Israel and its lobby pushed for in the Middle
East. These wars are the greatest strategic debacle in American history,
accelerating the decline of the American empire, bankrupting the nation at a
time of economic stagnation and mounting poverty, and turning huge parts of the
globe against us. They serve Israel's interests, not ours.
The longer the mendacious Israeli narrative is embraced, the more empowered
become the racists, bigots, conspiracy theorists and far-right hate groups
inside and outside Israel. This steady shift to the far right in Israel
has fostered an alliance between Israel and the Christian right, many of whom
are antisemites. The more Israel and the Israel lobby level the charge of
antisemitism against those who speak up for Palestinian rights, as they did
against former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the more
they embolden the real antisemites.
Racism, including antisemitism, is dangerous. It is not only bad for
the Jews. It is bad for everyone. It empowers the dark forces of
ethnic and religious hatred on the extremes. Netanyahu's racist government
has built alliances with far-right leaders in Hungary, India and Brazil,
and was closely allied with Donald Trump. Racists and ethnic chauvinists, as I
saw in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, feed off each other. They
divide societies into polarized, antagonistic camps that only speak in the
language of violence. The radical jihadists need Israel to justify their
violence, just as Israel needs the radical jihadists to justify its
violence. These extremists are ideological twins.
This polarization fosters a fearful, militarized society. It permits
the ruling elites in Israel, as in the United States, to dismantle civil
liberties in the name of national security. Israel runs training programs
for militarized police, including from the United States. It is a global
player in the multibillion-dollar drone industry, competing against China and
the United States.
It oversees hundreds of cyber-surveillance startups whose espionage
innovations, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, have been utilized
abroad "to locate and detain human rights activists, persecute members of
the LGBT community, silence citizens critical of their governments, and even
fabricate cases of blasphemy against Islam in Muslim countries that don't
maintain formal relations with Israel."
Israel, like the United States, has been poisoned by the psychosis of
permanent war. One million Israelis, many of them among the most enlightened
and educated, have left the country. Its most courageous human rights
campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — endure
constant government surveillance, arbitrary arrests and vicious government-run
smear campaigns. Mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth
groups such as Im Tirtzu, physically assault dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli
Arabs and African immigrants in the slums of Tel Aviv. These Jewish extremists
have targeted Palestinians in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, demanding their
expulsion. They are supported by an array of anti-Arab groups including the
Otzma Yehudit Party, the ideological descendant of the outlawed Kach party, the
Lehava movement, which calls for all Palestinians in Israel and the occupied
territories to be expelled to surrounding Arab states, and La Familia,
far-right soccer hooligans. Lehava in Hebrew means "flame" and is the
acronym for "Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land." Mobs of
these Jewish fanatics parade through Palestinian neighborhoods, including in
occupied East Jerusalem, protected by Israeli police, shouting to the
Palestinians who live there "Death to the Arabs," which is also a
popular chant at Israeli soccer matches.
Israel has pushed through a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews
that echo the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany.
The Communities Acceptance Law, for example, permits "small, exclusively
Jewish towns planted across Israel's Galilee region to formally reject
applicants for residency on the grounds of 'suitability to the community's
fundamental outlook.'" Israel's educational system, starting in primary
school, uses the Holocaust to portray Jews as eternal victims. This
victimhood is an indoctrination machine used to justify racism, Islamophobia,
religious chauvinism and the deification of the Israeli military.
There are many parallels between the deformities that grip Israel and the
deformities that grip the United States. The two countries are moving at
warp speed towards a 21st-century fascism, cloaked in religious language, which
will revoke what remains of our civil liberties and snuff out our anemic
democracies. The failure of the United States to stand up for the rule of
law, to demand that the Palestinians, powerless and friendless, even in the
Arab world, be granted basic human rights mirrors the abandonment of the
vulnerable within our own society. We are headed, I fear, down the road Israel is heading
down. It will be devastating for the Palestinians. It will be
devastating for us. And all resistance, as the Palestinians
courageously show us, will only come from the street. CHRIS HEDGES
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