Another draft post from last year that I never finished
People who support the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza and more widely in the region either support the Zionist fascists who’ve stated openly that their intention is to destroy Gaza, annex the West Bank, remain in the occupied territories, and deny the Palestinians any sort of state – or they fail to challenge them.
Either way makes them supportive of Israel as an openly far-right, aggressively colonising arm of US foreign policy in the Middle East.
Who, in all seriousness can deny that the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, the occupied territories and the wider diaspora are the tragic victims of a vicious imperialist power play?
Progressive Palestinians in exile and supporters in the 70s and 80s warned of the way that the US and Israel and their allies were demonising the Palestinian left, promoting factionalism, and backing terrorism and religious extremism.
Fast forward to this century and Israel actively enabled Hamas by channeling Qatari money to the organisation, and there is compelling evidence that the Israeli state either orchestrated or let the October attacks happen to justify escalating the conflict with the aim of creating the Greater Israel that sits at the heart of the Zionist project.
Israeli far rightists state openly and proudly that there never will be a Palestinian state; the choice for Palestinians is to live in perpetual exile from their homeland, or in forms and degrees of subjugation within it.
The death of an Israeli settler in the West Bank as a result of what was effectively a suicide attack by two eighteen-year-old Palestinians from Hebron, gave rise to expressions of outrage from supporters of Israel.
Given the events of the past seven decades and the massive escalation of IDF and settler violence against Palestinians over the past two years, such expressions of outrage over one dead Israeli serve to reinforce the Zionists’ precept that one Jewish life is worth one hundred or more Palestinian lives.
It was the same with the Jewish man who was stabbed in London and the second victim who the police shot accidentally, the expectation that we should feel those deaths more keenly than the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, the West Ban, Lebanon etc.
On a personal level we should feel pity for the victims and their families, but we must also see them, not just as hapless victims of a deranged or desperate Muslim/Arab/Palestinian, but as victims of malign geopolitical manoeuvres by the powerful psychopaths and malignant narcissists who dominate politics in the region.
A wise person said the only thing Jews fear more than antisemitism, is no antisemitism.
To paraphrase Golda Meir, the Nazi holocaust gave Zionists a perpetual get out of coloniser jail free card. It serves both to create a perpetual guilt among the descendants of the perpetrators and colluders, and a sense of perpetual victimhood, fear and anger among Jews which now combines with an ideology of exceptionalism that makes Americans look positively modest.
It’s toxic and harmful to Jewish people, and it risks fuelling real Jew hatred, not the ideological confection that apologists trot out to deflect away from the Israeli state’s appalling actions.
It’s why so many progressive Jewish people would never live in Israel or support the Israeli state especially now that it has now lurched closer to actual fascism.
The fact is, most of the Jews in Israel today, including most of the illegal settlers, have not fled from anti-Jewish persecution or even a viable threat of it.
They are there because of an ideology rooted in a spurious claim of indigeneity derived from a 3000-year-old religious text. That text also served to breathe life into the patriarchal kinship arrangements that spawned many of the world’s phallocratic regimes and institutions - a fact that too many Israeli-supporting feminists choose to ignore.
The politics of the Middle East and Palestine/Israel are hugely complex but what is simple is the fact that among the ruins caused by these geopolitical machinations, millions of real people who want nothing more than a simple life in peace and security, are suffering torments.
That is the horrible truth of it all.
Zionist Israel is wrong. It was wrong in its conception and its development. It may now be so wrong, it can never be put right.
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