Jonathan Cook @Jonathan_K_Cook
Time to explode four, decades-old rationalisations for Israel’s inhumanity to Palestinians:
1. Israelis don’t know. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity. Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives.
2. Israelis are still coming to terms with existential fears provoked by the Holocaust. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.
3. The Palestinians lack the historical and emotional attachment to the land that Jews have, as proven by their choice to leave their homeland in 1948. Like their forebears, the people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed into ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing in panic. In Gaza’s case, they are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military that, at best, is indifferent to their suffering and their fate.
4. The Palestinians are the victims not of Israel but of their own leaders. Israel’s army is the ‘most moral in the world’, and Israel’s leaders have always prioritised the interests of ordinary Palestinians. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza – from bombing civilians to starving them – with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.
We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler-colonial project. And like other settler colonial projects – from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination. What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin. We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work. The full version of this post,
Nothing’s changed since 1948 – except now Israel’s excuses don’t work, can be read on my website at: https://jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-08-08/1948-israel-excuses/