@alon_mizrahi – 18 March 2024
Israel carried out a big attack on Al-Shiffa hospital today, and it is a good time to pay attention, because there’s a pattern here. Remember how, a few weeks ago, the next day after the initial ICJ ruling, the US announced it was cutting its UNRWA funding? Maybe you will also remember how, during the first ceasefire and prisoner exchange, when there was faint hope that this was coming to an end – that was the time Israel made its first big international push with the mass rape narrative.
There is a common denominator here.
But before I explain what it is, maybe Jordanians will remember how, a few years back, an Israeli security guard from the embassy staff in Amman shot and killed two Jordanian citizens in some private (and never fully explained) dispute. It was a big deal when it happened: a big diplomatic crisis between the two countries, and it took some days for the security guard to be extracted from Jordan. I was sure that security guard would be hidden somewhere, so as to not further embarrass the Jordanians.
But I was so wrong. Because Netanyahu made sure a public display would be created, and fully covered by the press, in which he met that security guard and hugged him extravagantly. The common denominator in all these examples, and a million more like them, is the need to perform humiliation rituals of Arabs every chance you get but, especially, particularly, whenever a chance at closeness and cooperation presents itself. At those moments Israel has to make sure to show the whole world how superior it is to Arabs, and with how much public disdain it treats them.
This is not new: humiliating Arand has been a bread-and-butter Israeli tactic for ages. And all colonizers do that: public humiliation is a brutal show of domination. And it also helps to express the colonizer’s not only position, but intention, for the colonized (for humans, humiliation is a softer form of murder, basically, and one of the most devastating experiences). But Netanyahu, in later years, has made this tactic a cornerstone of his strategy.
In this genocide, especially, every time there is some hope for calm, Israel escalates both militarily and also normatively. Every time there is pressure for a ceasefire, Israel crosses a new red line and deepens and broadens its attack on the Palestinian character, and denies more vehemently any possibility of a settlement for the dispute. – If you follow you’ll see this pattern easily. Every time there’s a danger of peace, even temporary, a new, viler attack will be carried out. Its purpose will be to shoe how little Israel cares for anyone’s opinion, and how much freedom it has to do as it pleases.
– The Europeans visiting el-Sisi today perfectly gits this method as well: they could just wire money, but no, they had to drag him to a public show of humiliation, in which he will have to kiss their hands while his brothers and sisters are being butchered across the border. And Israel’s arrest of Al-Jazeera journalists, also today, is another example of this mindset. Qatar plays a key role in the negotiations for a deal, and arresting and attacking journalists from its prime media outlet is designed to send a message like: we don’t give a damn you think, and we don’t give a damn about the deal you’re trying to cook either.
Pay attention to the political timing of Israel’s most outrageous attacks. You’ll see it. Much of it, by the way, is just saying to the world, and especially to the Americans: you can shove your concerns. We are the landlords here, and we’ll do whatever the hell we want