I gave this discuss in Blackburn, England throughout a marketing campaign occasion for my good friend Craig Murray who’s operating for parliament. Like George Galloway, who was lately elected to parliament, Craig’s central marketing campaign challenge is the genocide in Gaza. He requires a everlasting ceasefire, the institution of a full and unbiased Palestinian state and backs the boycott, divestment and sanctions marketing campaign in opposition to the apartheid state of Israel.
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of everlasting warfare. It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it makes use of to justify an occupation that’s much more savage than that of apartheid South Africa. Its ‘democracy’ — which was at all times solely for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists who’re pushing the nation in the direction of fascism. Human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are topic to fixed state surveillance, arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its academic system, beginning in main college, is an indoctrination machine for the navy. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and financial elite have created huge revenue disparities, a mirror of the decay inside America’s democracy, together with a tradition of anti-Arab and anti-Black racism.
By the point Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is speaking about months of warfare that can proceed not less than till the tip of this 12 months — it’ll have signed its personal demise sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of legislation and democracy, its legendary story of the brave Israeli navy and miraculous beginning of the Jewish nation – which it efficiently offered to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital shall be spent. It will likely be revealed because the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it at all times has been, alienating youthful generations of American Jews. Its patron, the US, as new generations come into energy, will distance itself from Israel. Its standard help will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of historical Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy.
Israel will grow to be synonymous with its victims the way in which Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks. Israel’s cultural, inventive, journalistic and mental life shall be exterminated. Israel shall be a stagnant nation the place the spiritual fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who’ve seized energy will dominate public discourse. It should be part of the membership of the globe’s most despotic regimes.
Despotisms can exist lengthy after their overdue date. However they’re terminal. You don’t must be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, together with branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy while you perform a reside streamed genocide in opposition to 2.3 million folks trapped in a focus camp.
Nations want greater than pressure to outlive. They want a mystique. This mystique offers objective, civility and even the Aristocracy to encourage residents to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique provides hope for the longer term. It offers which means. It offers nationwide id.
When mystiques implode, when they’re uncovered as lies, a central basis of state energy collapses. I reported on the demise of the communist mystiques in 1989 through the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the navy determined there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the identical lassitude and apathy. It won’t be able to recruit Indigenous collaborators, akin to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers.
All Israel has left is escalating savagery, together with torture and deadly violence in opposition to unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works within the quick time period, because it did within the warfare waged by the French in Algeria, the Soiled Struggle waged by Argentina’s navy dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Eire and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. However in the long run, it’s suicidal.
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas’ resistance fighters into heroes within the International South. Israel could wipe out the Hamas management. However the previous — and present — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has carried out little to blunt resistance. The genocide in Gaza has produced a brand new technology of deeply traumatized and enraged younger women and men whose households have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They’re ready to take the place of martyred leaders.
Israel was at warfare with itself earlier than Oct. 7. Israelis had been protesting to forestall Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its spiritual bigots and fanatics, at the moment in energy, had mounted a decided assault on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity is a detrimental unity. It’s held collectively by hatred. And even this hatred isn’t sufficient to maintain protestors from decrying the federal government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hatred is a harmful political commodity. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, shall be changed by Jewish apostates and traitors. A politics of hatred creates a everlasting instability, exploited by these searching for the destruction of civil society.
Israel was far down this street on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a collection of discriminatory legal guidelines in opposition to non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Legal guidelines that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Legislation permits solely Jewish settlements to bar candidates for residency on the premise of “suitability to the neighborhood’s elementary outlook.”
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin referred to as “the conscience of Israel,” warned that if Israel didn’t separate church and state and finish the occupation, it might give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that may warp Judaism right into a fascistic cult.
“Non secular nationalism is to faith what Nationwide Socialism was to socialism,” wrote Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He understood that the blind veneration of the navy, particularly after the 1967 warfare that captured the West Financial institution and East Jerusalem, was harmful. “Our scenario will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a warfare in fixed escalation with out prospect of final decision,” he warned.
He foresaw that, “the Arabs could be the working folks and the Jews the directors, inspectors, officers, and police — primarily secret police. A state ruling a hostile inhabitants of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would essentially grow to be a secret-police state, with all that this suggests for training, free speech and democratic establishments. The corruption attribute of each colonial regime would additionally prevail within the State of Israel. The administration must suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and purchase Arab Quislings on the opposite. There’s additionally good cause to worry that the Israel Protection Pressure, which has been till now a folks’s military, would, because of being remodeled into a military of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who could have grow to be navy governors, resemble their colleagues in different nations.”
“Israel,” he wrote, “wouldn’t should exist, and it’ll not be worthwhile to protect it.”
Settler colonial states that endure, together with the US, exterminate the native inhabitants via genocide and the unfold of latest infectious illnesses akin to smallpox. By 1600 lower than a tenth of the indigenous inhabitants remained in South, Central and North America. Israel can not kill on this scale, with practically 5.5 million Palestinians residing underneath occupation and one other 9 million within the diaspora. They can not, as many Israelis want, wipe all of them out.
Israel’s scorched earth marketing campaign in Gaza means there shall be no two-state resolution. Apartheid and genocide will outline existence for the Palestinians. This presages an extended battle, however one which the Jewish State can not finally win.
Run, the Israelis demand of the Palestinians, run on your lives. Run from Rafah the way in which you ran from Gaza Metropolis, the way in which you ran from Jabalia, the way in which you ran from Deir al-Balah, the way in which you ran from Beit Hanoun, the way in which you ran from Bani Suheila, the way in which you ran from Khan Yunis. Run or we are going to kill you. We’ll drop GBU-39 bombs in your tent encampments and set them ablaze. We’ll spray you with bullets from our machine-gun-equipped drones. We’ll pound you with artillery and tank shells. We’ll shoot you down with snipers. We’ll decimate your tents, your refugee camps, your cities and cities, your properties, your faculties, your hospitals and your water purification crops. We’ll rain demise from the sky.
Run on your lives. Once more and repeatedly. Pack up the few belongings you have got left. Blankets. A few pots. Some garments. We don’t care how exhausted you’re, how hungry you’re, how terrified you’re, how sick you’re, how outdated, or how younger you’re. Run. Run. Run. And while you run in terror to at least one a part of Gaza, we are going to make you flip round and run to a different. Trapped in a labyrinth of demise. Forwards and backwards. Up and down. Aspect to facet. Six. Seven. Eight instances. We toy with you want mice in a lure. Then we deport you so you’ll be able to by no means return. Or we kill you.
Let the world denounce our genocide. What can we care? The billions in navy support flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An limitless provide. We kill kids by the hundreds. We kill ladies and the aged by the hundreds. The sick and injured, with out medication and hospitals die. We poison the water. We reduce off the meals. We make you starve. We created this hell. We’re the masters. Legislation. Obligation. A code of conduct. They don’t exist for us.
However first we toy with you. We humiliate you. We terrorize you. We enjoy your worry. We’re amused by your pathetic makes an attempt to outlive. You aren’t human. You might be creatures. Untermensch. We feed our lust for domination. Take a look at our posts on social media. They’ve gone viral. One exhibits troopers grinning in a Palestinian residence with the house owners tied up and blindfolded within the background. We loot. Rugs. Cosmetics. Motorbikes. Jewellery. Watches. Money. Gold. Antiquities. We mock your distress. We cheer your demise. We have a good time our faith, our nation, our id, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.
Depravity is ethical. Atrocity is heroism. Genocide is redemption.
That is the sport of terror performed by Israel in Gaza. It was the sport performed through the Soiled Struggle in Argentina when the navy junta “disappeared” 30,000 of its personal residents. The “disappeared” had been subjected to torture — who can not name what is occurring to Palestinians in Gaza torture? — and humiliated earlier than they had been murdered. It was the sport performed within the clandestine torture facilities and prisons in El Salvador and Iraq. It’s what characterised the warfare in Bosnia within the Serbian focus camps.
Israeli journalist Yinon Magal on the present “Hapatriotim” on Israel’s Channel 14, joked that Joe Biden’s pink line was the killing of 30,000 Palestinians. The singer Kobi Peretz requested if that was the variety of useless for a day. The viewers erupted in applause and laughter.
We all know Israel’s intent. Annihilate the Palestinians the identical manner the US annihilated Native Individuals, the Australians annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews. The specifics are totally different. The aim is identical. Erasure.
We can not plead ignorance.
However it’s simpler to fake. Faux Israel will enable humanitarian support. Faux there shall be a everlasting ceasefire. Faux Palestinians will return to their destroyed properties in Gaza. Faux Gaza shall be rebuilt — the hospitals, the schools, the mosques, the housing. Faux the Palestinian Authority will administer Gaza. Faux there shall be a two-state resolution. Faux there is no such thing as a genocide.
The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights, claimed by Israel and the US, has at all times been a lie. The true credo is that this – now we have every little thing and in the event you attempt to take it away from us we are going to kill you. Folks of shade, particularly when they’re poor and weak, don’t depend. The hopes, goals, dignity and aspirations for freedom of these exterior the empire are nugatory. International domination shall be sustained via racialized violence.
This lie — that the American empire is based on democracy and liberty — is one the Palestinians, and people within the International South, in addition to Native Individuals and Black and Brown Individuals, to not point out those that reside within the Center East, have identified for many years. However it’s a lie that also has foreign money in the US and Israel, a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.
We don’t halt Israel’s genocide as a result of we, as Individuals, are Israel, contaminated with the identical white supremacy, and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the facility to obliterate others with our superior weaponry.
The world exterior of the industrialized fortresses within the International North is acutely conscious that the destiny of the Palestinians is their destiny. As local weather change imperils survival, as pure assets, together with entry to water, diminish, as mass migration turns into an crucial for thousands and thousands, as agricultural yields decline, as coastal areas are flooded, as droughts and wildfires proliferate, as states fail, as militias and armed resistance actions rise to battle their oppressors together with their proxies, genocide won’t be an anomaly. It will likely be the norm. The earth’s weak and poor, these Frantz Fanon referred to as “the wretched of the earth,” would be the subsequent Palestinians.
“Mockery of each kind was added to their deaths,” the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of these the emperor Nero singled out for torture and demise. “Coated with the skins of beasts, they had been torn by canines and perished, or had been nailed to crosses, or had been doomed to the flames and burnt, to function a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”
Sadism by the highly effective is the curse of the human situation. It was as prevalent in historical Rome as it’s in Gaza.
We all know the trendy face of Nero, who illuminated his opulent backyard events by burning to demise captives tied to stakes. That isn’t in dispute.
However who had been Nero’s visitors 1? Who wandered via the emperor’s grounds as human beings, as in Rafah, had been burned alive? How might these visitors see, and little doubt hear, such horrendous struggling and witness such appalling torture and be detached, even content material?
There’s nothing hidden about this genocide. Over 147 brave Palestinian journalists have been murdered by the Israelis as a result of they’ve conveyed the pictures and tales of this slaughter to the world, martyred for his or her folks, for us.
We’re Nero’s visitors.
The Palestinians have lengthy been betrayed, not solely by us within the international north, however by a lot of the governments within the Muslim world. We stand passive within the face of the crime of crimes. Historical past will choose Israel for this genocide. However it’ll additionally choose us. It should ask why we didn’t do extra, why we didn’t sever all agreements, all commerce offers, all accords, all cooperation with the apartheid state, why we didn’t halt weapons shipments to Israel, why we didn’t recall our ambassadors, why when the maritime commerce within the Crimson Sea was disrupted by Yemen an alternate overland route into Israel was arrange by Saudi Arabia and Jordan, why we didn’t do every little thing in our energy to finish the slaughter. It should condemn us for not heeding the basic lesson of the Holocaust, which isn’t that Jews are everlasting victims, however that when you have got the capability to cease genocide and you don’t, you’re culpable.
“The alternative of fine isn’t evil,” Samuel Johnson wrote. “The alternative of fine is indifference.”
The Palestinian resistance is our resistance. The Palestinian battle for dignity, freedom and independence is our battle. The Palestinian trigger is our trigger. For, as historical past has additionally proven, those that had been as soon as Nero’s visitors quickly turned Nero’s victims.
