Lies, Lies and Damned Lies – Part 2
Genocide, Variations on a Theme #II
Amira Hass argues[1]:
“For decades we’ve been educated to believe that only military force can ensure the state’s survival and ability to flourish, while denying rights to the Palestinian people.”
This is due to the fact that Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “Revisionist Zionism” (Netanyahu’s father was a secretary of Jabotinsky) has, sadly, triumphed. One mustn’t forget that Jabotinsky argued that only physical force could create and maintain Israel; he was, unsurprisingly, an admirer of Mussolini’s Fascists.
As a consequence, force is employed by Israel even though it’s essentially irrational and counterproductive (though highly profitable for certain people). This is why diplomacy is ruled out and war preferred, regardless of the consequences. As Norman Finkelstein puts it: there’s nothing the Israelis fear more than a “peace offensive”.
Those who’ve actually read my letters to Richard Medhurst will remember that the rationale for “Cast Lead” in 2008-2009 was to “teach Hamas and the Palestinian people a lesson”. The use of disproportionate force, the so-called “Dahiya doctrine”, which was articulated by Gadi Eizenkot, was ostensibly intended to quell Palestinian resistance for good. This doctrine has clearly failed yet it’s being applied once more. And the price for this failure (and this insanity) has been high. Gal Eizenkot, 25, the son of Gadi Eizenkot, who served in the 699th Battalion of the 551st Brigade, was killed by a Hamas tunnel bomb[2] in December. He was by no means the only one. According to Col McGregor the IDF losses are extremely high: c.3,700 KIA and untold wounded.
More importantly: the Israelis had a choice between either fighting Hamas or committing atrocities against the civilian population and opted for the latter. It wasn’t a case of the women and children being “collateral damage” or “human shields” in a war against Hamas. The genocidal IDF bombing campaign created the ideal conditions for the daring, determined and disciplined Palestinian resistance in much the same way that the bombing of Monte Casino created the ideal conditions for the defenders there. Furthermore, Hamas was protected by tunnels (Scott Ritter compares the battlefield to that of Iwo Jima) and the bombing clearly left them unscathed. Bombing residential areas made absolutely no sense at all. While the “spiderweb” of resistance tunnels remains intact, Israel is withdrawing five brigades (some say this equates to c.30,000 men), leaving Hamas in control of Gaza. The Israelis have already lost the war; the thousands of IDF casualties and the tens of thousands of women and children killed are all in vain.
Amira Hass continues:
“• We’ve erased any ‘context’ – incitement has made this word a synonym for support of Hamas and justification of its horrors.”
“• We Jews have assumed a monopoly on the suffering caused by the cruelty of the Other.”
“• We’ve chosen not to look at the unbearable pictures of trembling Palestinian children, faces gray with dust, being rescued from between bombed concrete walls. And there’s no way of knowing who’s more fortunate: those children or the ones who were killed.”
“Every mass or gradual killing that we’ve been carrying out against the Palestinians for years, every theft, humiliation and abuse passes through thousands of media, psychological and academic filters. The sifted product is our conviction that the Palestinians are better off than the Somalis or Syrians, so they shouldn’t complain.”
“• We remember every massacre of Israelis by Palestinians. We forget every massacre of Palestinians by Israelis.”
“• For decades we’ve gotten used to living in comfort while five minutes away Israel (in other words, us) demolishes Palestinian homes and builds for Jews, channels water to Jews and makes Palestinians go thirsty. All the rest is written in the reports of the rights groups HaMoked, B'Tselem and Adalah.”
“• For decades we’ve been ignoring the ‘moderate’ Palestinians’ warning that the continuous grab of freedom and land and the settlers’ violence – assisted by the state and inspired by its violence – narrow their children’s horizons and generate despair and faith in arms only and revenge.”
“• We’ve embraced an essentialist worldview: The Palestinians are terrorists because that’s the way they are. They were born with genes for hating us – the offspring of Roman Emperor Titus and the pogromists of East Europe’s Khmelnytsky Uprising of the 17th century.”
“• We’re convinced that we’re a democracy, even though for 56 years we’ve been ruling over millions of subjects without civil rights, controlling their land, money and economy.”
“• We have profound racist contempt for the Palestinians, which we developed to justify, both cognitively and psychologically, our trampling over them.”
“• We’ve been in denial of Palestinian history and the rootedness of Palestinian existence between the river and the sea.”
“• The erasure of Gaza is possible because since 1994 we have deliberately missed the opportunity – offered to us by the Palestinians – to shed some of our traits as a dispossessing and settling entity and let them have a state on 22 percent of the area west of the Jordan River (including Gaza). I wrote in July 2021 that ‘in all the heat of the talk about apartheid, a dynamic, active and dangerous dimension of it – the Jewish settler colonialism – has become dulled and blunted.’”
“According to the ideology and policies of Jewish settler colonialism, the Palestinians are superfluous. In short, it is possible, worthwhile and desirable to live without the Palestinians in this country between the river and the sea. Their existence here is conditional, dependent on our wishes and our goodwill – a matter of time.”
“The ideology of ‘superfluousness’ is a poison that spreads especially when the process of settler colonialism is at its height. ... Settler colonialism is a continuous process of grabbing land, distorting historical borders, reshaping them and then expelling indigenous peoples.”
“I referred to the ‘superfluousness’ of the Palestinians in the West Bank and warned about the intentions to expel them. I assumed then that the viewing of Gazans as superfluous sufficed with severing them from their people and their families on the other side of the Erez checkpoint that separates Gaza from the rest of the land (Israel and the West Bank).”
“But now the ‘superfluousness’ is being reflected in expulsion, disguised as voluntary under the shelling. It’s being reflected in the physical erasure of the Gazans, and in plans to return Jewish settlers to Gaza. Woe to them and woe to us.”
[1] https://archive.is/JpFaO#selection-1357.0-1433.240
[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/07/son-former-idf-chief-killed-gaza-bomb/