Gaza.


[Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images]

"Israel and I grew up together." 

So began a prize-winning essay for Israel's "birthday" that I heard read by its author, a student, as a freshman in college.   At the end of the reading, a young teacher of Syrian extraction spoke up.   He turned out to be very unhappy with the rosy pictdure presented in the essay.  This was my first inkling that there were other versions of Israel's history than this essay's picture of a pristine young nation happily established out of a void for a people with a troubled history who now had a safe haven.

The Jews had a troubled history, for sure.   But the picture of  striving young pioneers bravely making their way  in a new land had to be reconciled with other images - of land seizures, expulsion, and an   erasure of history; of an ethnic and religious state established where formerly there had been Arabs, Christians, and Jews living peacefully together.  Of a future of ethnic cleansing.

The full story is a trail of violence that has followed in the years since I was a freshman in college and heard that rosy-picture prizewinning essay.

We must understand the State of Israel in terms that are not rosy, terms of western imperialism, colonization, and repression. Zionism, the ideology that was the basis for Israel's foundation, is not a democratic concept. The Jewish state of Israel does not conform to the basic requirements of a democratic state. We can remember, as an aide-mémoire, Bishop Desmond Tutu's dramatic declaration, after a visit to Israel, that the treatment of Palestinians by the Israelis was "in many instances" worse than apartheid had been in South Africa.  He recognized the need for and justification of a Jewish state. We can understand this, although it is problematic. The Jews deserved a safe haven: just not on someone else's ancestral land, at the cost of chasing out and subjugating the indigenous people - colonization.

A similar awakening was expressed quite recently by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who went to the Occupied Territories, to Hebron and other Palestinian towns, now very poor, or wholly eradicated, and discovered that here were people he could relate to. He saw Palestinians are being abused in Israel as Black people so long have been. He saw they are treated as Other, as second-class citizens. He saw they are humiliated, above all deprived of the most important human right, the right to vote.  Ta-Nehisi Coates realized that calling Israel a "democratic state" was a travesty, a falsehood.    After his West Bank visit, Coates spoke out against Israel's "segregationist, apartheid regime" - breaking his usual rule by speaking before he had written on the subject, because this time it was too important to wait.

Coates found that all the claims of the "complexity" of the situation of Israel and the Palestinians were mistaken.  He saw for himself how the Palestinians were treated and it was very simple. They are disenfranchised. Gaza is the largest concentration camp in history - or a huge open-air prison; it has been called both by prominent Israelis. It's "complicated"? No. But one thing is complicated: the lives of Palestinians under Israeli control. Their lives are a mass of endless checkpoints, deprivations, and humiliations. (These have been depicted in many Israeli films. I have reviewed some of them.)

Why did Bishop Tutu and Ta-Nehisi Coates have to go to see for themselves? Because we are brainwashed, and congressmen have been bought out by the Israel lobby forever. But the scales are falling from all eyes now, because of the spectacle we are seeing: genocide, live-streamed.

Recently, an old cycle has been renewed.  Hamas forces coming out of Gaza surprised Israel October 7th with an  assault in which 1,400 people were killed.*  (It was a stunning intelligence failure on the part of the US and Israel, by the way.)   

Those of us who follow the region knew what would come next, even though the viciousness has been unprecedented:  revenge and collective punishment, leading so far to the killing of over ten thousand Palestinians in Gaza, whole families wiped out, nearly half of them children;  vast devastation and homelessness, two million people terrorized.  The world has declared this to be a violation of the laws of war and of humanity.  Thousands have demonstrated all over the world calling for a ceasefire and for a free Palestine.  

Why has there been no action from the West to stop the killing? Why has this gone on so long?  Because Biden supports Israel 150%.  Israel is by far the most heavily armed country in the Middle East, but he wants to send a vast increased amount of money and arms to Israel to "defend" itself from the Palestinians, a captive people. American taxpayers are paying fo this brutal assault, because we provide the aid and weapons behind it.

Who can believe that bombing Gaza day after day will "destroy" Hamas? This is a ridiculous, cruel fiction. Israel's ultra-right government is transparent about the country's long-time aim: to drive out the indigenous people and to exterminate them. They plan to do this little by little. The periodic process of killing is callled "mowing the lawn," supposedly to slowly undermine Hamas. Actually it is a policy of slowly killing Palestinians. Those who call this "war" are mistaken. Hamas can never defeat Israel; Israel can never eradicate Hamas. We are witnessing genocide. After Senator Bernie Sanders declared he could not support a ceasefire because Hamas must be eradicated, Norman Finkelstein replied with an impassioned hour-long tirade, explaining the whole history of recent events, on which he is an expert, and declaring : "when you oppose a ceasefire, you become a moral monster." He pointed out that in Israel's last "mowing the lawn" attack on Gaza, prior to the Hamas surprise assault, over 2,200 people had been killed.

Now, Israel is bombing Gaza areas where civilians were told to seek refuge. It is bombing hospitals and ambulances. Ash-Shifa, the largest hospital, is on the verge of shutting down. Vast areas have been turned into rubble, children wander homeless. At least 88 people who worked for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, have been killed since 7 October. Forty-seven of its buildings have been damaged. This assault on Gaza is ruthless and heedless. Not to speak out against this slaughter is indeed to be a moral monster. The Hamas holding of 200 hostages is no excuse. Gazans have been in effect held hostage since 2005, when the strip was closed off.

This is insanity, and people are realizing it, with Jews and others  led by JVP, the Jewish Voice for Peace (join it!) leading demonstrations unprecedented in size since 2003 opposing the right wing Israeli policy that has become blatant and extreme with the new ultra-right Netahyahu government.   Netanyahu, like Donald Trump, is a criminal, whose ersatz role as wartime leader is a godsend, protecting him from prosecution for his numerous crimes.  Though the UN motion declaring Zionism a form of racism was later revoked, Israel is clearly seen as racist and racially discriminatory by the Muslim world and the global South. It is well known that Israelis feel justified as the Chosen People and because of the Holocaust to do anything they wish. Golda Meir the US-born Israeli PM (1969-74) said this, and also declared "there is no Palestinian people." Israelis further justify their situation by considering Palestinians less than human - witness Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant recently calling Gazans "human animals."  In its untenable, artificial situation, Israel can only exist as a nation perpetually at war. Hostility, fear, and militarism are what hold Israel together.

 In this as in many other things, Washington is  out of step with American popular sentiment, still living with the dream and the delusion of a Jewish state that must be unconditionally supported, as in the prize-winning essay.

Analysts predict now that Biden will pay dearly for his current indifference to the genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. We may have to live with four more insane, incompetent years of Donald Trump because  of Biden's blindness to this crime against humanity. This is a terrible cost. But it is nothing compared to what the people of Gaza are going through. We must have a ceasefire now. We must have a free Palestine. This extraordinarily horrible moment must lead to a new awakening on the part of the world, and the US government, which holds the strings. JOIN THE JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE

CEASEFIRE NOW!
FREE PALESTINE!
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*The Israeli Foreign Ministry hs now revised this death toll down from 1,400 to 1,200.


Chris Knipp, Nov. 7, 2023.


[Fatima Shbair/AP Photo]

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.