More on moral voids

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. I would add the rider – right-wing Jews fear that.

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 which 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. 

 

Moral Voids

In the USA’s Jim Crow era, a large majority of white citizens supported the racist status quo and either actively supported or failed to oppose the acts of terror – carried out by racist vigilantes and on occasion, the state – that were aimed at maintaining the economic and socio-political subjugation of black Americans.

In South Africa, the repressive apartheid apparatus and the racist lies on which it was built were also aimed at maintaining white economic and socio-political hegemony.

The colonialist ideologies underpinning both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were far-right and white supremacist, and the tactics used to oppress the target populations were terroristic and brutal in the extreme but the aim was not genocide or expulsion.

The same European colonialist, white supremacist ideology that underpinned Jim Crow and apartheid, had merged with the Zionist belief that the wording of the 3000-year-old founding text of their religion granted its modern-era adherents the divine right to settle in and control what they deemed to be Eretz Israel.

The flimsy leash on the genocidal potential of Israel’s form of apartheid was weakened with the current coalition of right and far-right parties under Netanyahu’s leadership. 

It was wholly removed when the Hamas attack gave the Israeli right the excuse to carry out mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza and destruction of infrastructure, moving rapidly towards military occupation of the whole of “Greater Israel” including parts of Syria, bombing other sovereign states, and even killing heads of state. 

Israeli terror tactics in Gaza have included massive bombardment aimed at the obliteration of all civil infrastructure, the use of drones, boobytrapping, and sniping in the targeting of non-combatants such as medics, journalists and aid workers, and the killing of children; the use of starvation and access to water as weapons. 

In the 1930s, the Nazis created a vicious paramilitary, routed the left, cowed the centre, and took control of the entire state apparatus. The political architects and administrators of the Nazi concentration and death camps and the high command of the uniformed death squads went to great lengths to hide their crimes, (albeit also meticulously recording them). 

Ordinary German citizens had the excuses of genuinely not knowing the full extent of what was being done by the Nazis and collaborators, and/or the fear of the fascistic apparatus being turned on them. 

There’s no get-out-of-genocide-jail-free card for Israelis. 

As so much of what the Israeli military has done has been captured on camera and broadcast hourly to the world, ordinary Israelis cannot claim ignorance of what their government is doing. 

Nor can they claim they’re silent out of fear of state reprisals given they claim to live in the only democratic, liberal society in the Middle East.

A large majority of Israelis and their global supporters (real and opportunist) have either: steadfastly denied the Palestinian genocide by claiming that documentary evidence of it is Hamas propaganda, either staged, or produced by AI; or, they have claimed what the IDF has done is justifiable and wholly proportionate to the existential threat Israel faces from Palestine as an Iranian proxy.

Increasingly, the sheer weight of incontrovertible documentary evidence of Israeli atrocities means the latter argument now dominates. 

The slaughter of non-combatants, the obliteration of infrastructure, and the proposed expulsion of all or most Palestinians are deemed to be politically, militarily and morally justifiable because October 7th proved the entire Palestinian people – even babies, small children, the elderly and the disabled – to be actual or potential enemy combatants who have to be killed or dispersed in order to ensure Israel’s security.

Both denial and justification demonstrate that a scarily high percentage of Israelis are in the grip of a moral panic of such scope and intensity it has incinerated common sense and empathy leaving a political and moral void in which anti-Palestinian atrocities are not only excused or condoned, but openly celebrated.