11-04-2023, 10:40 AM
IT IS CLEAR TO THE ENTIRE WORLD NOW THAT THE ZIONIST REGIME IS SEEKING A FINAL SOLUTION TO GAZA AND THE PALESTINIANS. IT'S NOT ABOUT ONE STATE OR TWO BUT A THREE STATE SOLUTION. THIS MEANS ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE OF THE PALESTINIANS IN GAZA, WEST BANK AND ISRAEL AND SEEKING THEIR EXPULSION TO LEBANON, JORDAN AND EGYPT.
IN THIS CONTEXT ANYONE SUPPORTING THE FANATICAL ZIONIST REGIME's RIGHT TO SELF DEFENCE IS SUPPORTING THE OPPRESSOR AGAINST THE OPPRESSED. WESTERN SUPPORTERS OF THIS USE TERMS LIKE THERE ARE NO RED LINES WHICH HAS GIVEN THESE ZIONIST TERRORISTS A LICENSE TO KILL. THEY ARE ENGAGING IN UNLEASHING DISPROPORTIONATE VIOLENCE ON UNARMED CIVILIANS AND COMMITTING MANY WAR CRIMES INCLUSIVE OF AERIAL PHOSPORUS BOMBARDMENT. THIS IS BECAUSE OF THE TEACHINGS OF DEHUMANISATION OF THE PALESTINIANS AND ARABS TAUGHT IN ISRAEL WHICH IS A WESTERN COLONIAL SETTLER STATE.
WE HAVE TO DECONSTRUCT THIS ARGUMENT AS MODERN WESTERN CIVILISATION IS NOT ONLY BARING IT'S HYPOCRISY BUT DENIAL OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN VALUES. IT IS A BARBARIAN CIVILISATION WHICH DEHUMANISES THE OTHER. IT HAS A HISTORY OF COLONIAL SETTLEMENTS BUILT ON ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE OF NONEUROPEAN PEOPLES GLOBALLY.
PALESTINIANS ARE NOT SAVAGES AND ANIMALS. THE OPPRESSED AND THE PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC RESISTANCE HAVE A DIVINELY BACKED RIGHT TO RESIST AND FIGHT BACK THE OPPRESSOR AS THEY DEEM FIT. HAMAS ARE
NOT TERRORISTS, MILITANTS OR FREEDOM FIGHTERS BUT MUJAHIDEEN. THEY ARE UNDERTAKING THE DEFENCE OF THE HOLY LAND WHICH SHOULD BE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ALL ABLE BODIED MUSLIM MALES IN THE WORLD. THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE RESPONSIBILITY IN PARTICULAR OF MUSLIM ARMIES WHO HAVE FAILED TO DELIVER.
QAWMIYYAT WHICH IS MODERN NATIONALISM HAS DEEPLY INFECTED MUSLIM CONSCIOUSNESS. IT HAS DIVIDED MUSLIMS INTO NATION STATES. THIS MEANS NATIONAL INTERESTS COME FIRST AND ANY REFERENCE TO ISLAM IS SECONDARY.
WE HAVE THEN TO ADD EUROPEAN COLONIALISM WHICH HAS LEFT A LINGUISTIC LEGACY IN WHICH MUSLIMS COMMUNICATE IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. NO COMMON LANGUAGE HAS EMERGED WHICH CAN TRANSCEND THESE DIVISIONS LIKE ARABIC WHICH COULD ACT AS A LINGUA FRANCA.
FURTHERMORE THE DEFEAT OF MUSLIM EMPIRES LIKE THE OTTOMAN, SAFAVID AND MUGHAL HAS LED TO A DEEP ROOTED SUBSERVIENT SLAVE DEFEATIST MENTALITY AMONGST MUSLIMS. THIS HAS LED TO A SITUATION IN WHICH AGENCY WAS TAKEN AWAY AND BECOMING PLAYED WITH RATHER THAN BEING PLAYERS.
WE ALSO NEED TO HIGHLIGHT THE ROLE OF THE RISE OF OIL AND PETRODOLLARS WHICH HAS PLAGUED THE GCC WITH A HYPER CONSUMER AND MATERIALIST MINDSET. THIS HAS FUELLED THE PROMOTION OF A RITUALISTIC SUNNI ISLAM WHICH SEEKS NORMALISATION WITH THE ZIONIST REGIME AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PALESTINIANS.
HOW HAMAS PLAN TO TRAP ISRAEL IN A QUAGMIRE
DR.MAHATHIR ON WAR IN GAZA
HAVE THE WESTERN MASSES AWOKEN TO THE REALITY OF PALESTINE OCCUPATION
ON THE GENOCIDE COMMITTED AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS BY ISRAEL AND THE COLLECTIVE WEST
THE DEVIANCE OF POLITICAL JUDAISM
NO EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSOR
EUROPE, JEWS AND THE MUSLIM WORLD
ISRAEL's MILITARY TO COMMENCE NEW PHASE FOLLOWING ADVANCEMENTS IN OPERATION
ISRAEL GRANTS GAS EXPLORATION LICENSES AMID ONGOING OPERATIONS
WHY GAZA IS A DEATH CAMP
EYELESS IN GAZA
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...ss-in-gaza
Six kinds of blindness prevalent in modern Israel, comprising denial of Palestinians’ existence, lack of vision of policy consequences, overconfidence in surveillance technology, inability to differentiate the enemy in war, blind rage, and shortsightedness.
W.J.T. Mitchell
Watching the debacle of the war between Israel and Hamas, I was suddenly reminded of a memorable phrase from John Milton’s dramatic poem, Samson Agonistes:
Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves,
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke;
Samson was the war machine of ancient Israel, a mighty warrior invulnerable to attack, and capable of destroying Israel’s enemies armed only with the jawbone of an ass. But Samson became complacent:
I walk’d about admir’d of all and dreaded
On hostile ground, none daring my affront.
Then swoll’n with pride into the snare I fell.
The snare, of course, is Samson’s love affair with a Philistine woman named Delilah, who cuts his hair (the secret of his strength), whence he is blinded, and enslaved by the Philistines as a mill worker.
What could this possibly have to do with Israel’s current invasion of Gaza? Could it be that Israel has lost its commitment to pure Jewish ethno-nationalism? Twenty percent of its citizens are Palestinians, and many of its Jewish citizens are quite secular. Or it is simply the arrogant confidence in its military superiority that lulled it into dropping its guard at the Gaza border, allowing Hamas militias to swarm into Israel, murder 1400 Israelis and take over 200 others hostage?
I don’t wish to press the analogy any further, except to dwell on the common theme of blindness that links ancient and modern Israel. The question is, how many kinds of blindness, with what sorts of effects? Here is my inventory of the six types of blindness, or refusals to see coupled with refusals to hear:
[/url][url=https://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/d.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&p=oi&m=1101581137416&sit=mr9dynfcb&f=efc6d103-17c3-4940-b941-50c610e89267]
1. Blindness to the existence of the Palestinians; deafness to their claims. On my many visits to Israel/Palestine, it has struck me how little Israelis know about the Palestinians who live among them or under their military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. When one asks about “those people,” roughly a quarter of the population of Greater Israel, a frequent response is that they do not see them, and they wish they would just be quiet and leave us alone. We just want peace. Why do they have to make trouble?
2. Blindness to their occlusion of the consequences of their policies on the Palestinians. Palestinian scholar Saree Makdisi has documented the way Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians constitute a kind of “double blinding,” in two stages: first the erasure of Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants; second the erasure of the traces of erasure, and their replacement by forms of reassuring camouflage. The most conspicuous example of this practice has been the “Trees for Israel” program, which conceals the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages with the veil of “ecological improvement.” The myth of “a land without people for a people without land” is the verbal counterpoint to this visual occlusion. Some Israeli officials, decrying the way that Hamas mingles with the civilian population of Gaza, using them as human shields, are now portraying the unfortunate murder of over 8,000 Gazans by Israeli violence as “collateral damage” in a just war. The next step has been to portray the mass murder of Gazans as a war of liberation from the rule of Hamas. Perhaps to be followed by a parade through Gaza City?
3. Blindness about the failure of their own surveillance technologies. Israel’s confidence in its invulnerability to attack from Gaza was based in its extensive network of cameras along the security fences and watchtowers that surround Gaza’s border with Israel. Israel’s state of the art intelligence services had supposedly created a system of surveillance so complete that there could be no possibility of a surprise attack. Hamas “put out the eyes” of this system in the early hours of October 7, using drones and snipers to destroy all the cameras simultaneously, while the supposedly impregnable wall was breached on scores of places with bulldozers. The spies who were supposed to see everything failed completely, asleep at the monitors.
4. Blindness constituted by the waging of war on an invisible enemy. Hamas is an underground army, operating from hundreds of miles of tunnels under a densely populated urban landscape. It only emerges to launch rockets or (rarely) sorties into Israel. Hamas fighters do not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from the civilian population. When Israel bombs an apartment building, hundreds of young men gather to dig out the victims. Are any of those young men Hamas fighters? Impossible to tell. As in any asymmetrical war between a regular, uniformed army and guerilla fighters merged with a population, the soldiers without uniforms are denounced as terrorists for refusing to obey the laws of war. Israel admits that it is “difficult” to distinguish Hamas fighters from civilians. A better word would be
5. Blindness of rage and the lust for revenge. Perhaps the most important blindness in Israel’s current attack on Gaza is the understandable rage that was provoked by the Hamas atrocities on October 7. Hamas deliberately staged scenes of mutilation, rape, and child-murder designed to appall anyone who saw or even heard them described. Israel’s leader, his eyes and ears already shut to the ominous threats from Gaza, promptly became the blind leader of a blind population motivated by instant revenge. The possibility of negotiating for the release of hostages was consigned to the back burner, to be replaced by fantasies of retribution. Gaza, its over two million people already under siege for the last seventeen years, its border controlled by Israel, is subjected to collective punishment (a war crime), mass expulsions of people who are already refugees with no place to go (a war crime), and mass deprivation of the basic necessities of human life (a war crime). The bombing and destruction of entire urban neighborhoods and next, the house-to-house fighting that will take numerous Israeli and Palestinian lives, make it clear that the vengeful policy of “an eye for an eye” leaves everyone blinded.
6. The refusal of foresight. Finally, there is blindness involved in the refusal to foresee the consequences of one’s own actions. Even the U.S., a thoroughly complicit partner in Israel’s apartheid policies against the Palestinians under its control, tried to suggest gently that Israel think carefully about what it would do next, after it had destroyed Hamas “once and for all.” Would it try to set up a replacement government for the devastated millions of survivors? Would it try to recruit the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank? Would it pay reparations and try to rebuild the cities it has destroyed? Or would it wash its hands of the entire disaster, rebuild its security walls, reconnect its surveillance cameras, and ask to be left alone? And what if its actions produced the foreseeable result of setting off a wider war that would bring Hezbollah and other military organizations into the battle? Israel’s blind leader of the blind tells his followers that it is too early to ponder these questions. Vengeance comes first; then we will see what follows.
Although I cannot help but be horrified by the actions of Hamas on October 7, I am struck by how perfectly it diagnosed the weaknesses of its enemy. They capitalized on its blind arrogance, and then put out its eyes with a spectacle of violence designed to produce blind rage. This leads us to ask how things then turned out for Samson. The answer is: suicide. Samson, taken to the Temple of Dagon for a spectacle of humiliation, pulls down the temple, killing himself and the triumphant Philistines. I am reminded here of a visit some thirty years ago to the ancient fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. The guide informed us that Masada is an allegory of Fortress Israel in its refusal to surrender to the Romans, insisting instead on collective suicide rather than defeat. The modern meaning, the guide assured us, is embodied in Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which guarantees that if Israel faces defeat, it will not merely commit suicide, but take the rest of the world along with it. Perhaps it is time for Israel to open its eyes and its ears.
“EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES ”
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/01/exterminate-all-the-brutes
All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.
Chris Hedges
A Bird in the Hand – by Mr. Fish
During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.
I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day – is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.
On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.
Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.
Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.
The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.
Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated. Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.
Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.
Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?
There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge. When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.
“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”
Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.
Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it.
IN THIS CONTEXT ANYONE SUPPORTING THE FANATICAL ZIONIST REGIME's RIGHT TO SELF DEFENCE IS SUPPORTING THE OPPRESSOR AGAINST THE OPPRESSED. WESTERN SUPPORTERS OF THIS USE TERMS LIKE THERE ARE NO RED LINES WHICH HAS GIVEN THESE ZIONIST TERRORISTS A LICENSE TO KILL. THEY ARE ENGAGING IN UNLEASHING DISPROPORTIONATE VIOLENCE ON UNARMED CIVILIANS AND COMMITTING MANY WAR CRIMES INCLUSIVE OF AERIAL PHOSPORUS BOMBARDMENT. THIS IS BECAUSE OF THE TEACHINGS OF DEHUMANISATION OF THE PALESTINIANS AND ARABS TAUGHT IN ISRAEL WHICH IS A WESTERN COLONIAL SETTLER STATE.
WE HAVE TO DECONSTRUCT THIS ARGUMENT AS MODERN WESTERN CIVILISATION IS NOT ONLY BARING IT'S HYPOCRISY BUT DENIAL OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN VALUES. IT IS A BARBARIAN CIVILISATION WHICH DEHUMANISES THE OTHER. IT HAS A HISTORY OF COLONIAL SETTLEMENTS BUILT ON ETHNIC CLEANSING AND GENOCIDE OF NONEUROPEAN PEOPLES GLOBALLY.
PALESTINIANS ARE NOT SAVAGES AND ANIMALS. THE OPPRESSED AND THE PALESTINIAN ISLAMIC RESISTANCE HAVE A DIVINELY BACKED RIGHT TO RESIST AND FIGHT BACK THE OPPRESSOR AS THEY DEEM FIT. HAMAS ARE
NOT TERRORISTS, MILITANTS OR FREEDOM FIGHTERS BUT MUJAHIDEEN. THEY ARE UNDERTAKING THE DEFENCE OF THE HOLY LAND WHICH SHOULD BE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ALL ABLE BODIED MUSLIM MALES IN THE WORLD. THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE RESPONSIBILITY IN PARTICULAR OF MUSLIM ARMIES WHO HAVE FAILED TO DELIVER.
QAWMIYYAT WHICH IS MODERN NATIONALISM HAS DEEPLY INFECTED MUSLIM CONSCIOUSNESS. IT HAS DIVIDED MUSLIMS INTO NATION STATES. THIS MEANS NATIONAL INTERESTS COME FIRST AND ANY REFERENCE TO ISLAM IS SECONDARY.
WE HAVE THEN TO ADD EUROPEAN COLONIALISM WHICH HAS LEFT A LINGUISTIC LEGACY IN WHICH MUSLIMS COMMUNICATE IN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. NO COMMON LANGUAGE HAS EMERGED WHICH CAN TRANSCEND THESE DIVISIONS LIKE ARABIC WHICH COULD ACT AS A LINGUA FRANCA.
FURTHERMORE THE DEFEAT OF MUSLIM EMPIRES LIKE THE OTTOMAN, SAFAVID AND MUGHAL HAS LED TO A DEEP ROOTED SUBSERVIENT SLAVE DEFEATIST MENTALITY AMONGST MUSLIMS. THIS HAS LED TO A SITUATION IN WHICH AGENCY WAS TAKEN AWAY AND BECOMING PLAYED WITH RATHER THAN BEING PLAYERS.
WE ALSO NEED TO HIGHLIGHT THE ROLE OF THE RISE OF OIL AND PETRODOLLARS WHICH HAS PLAGUED THE GCC WITH A HYPER CONSUMER AND MATERIALIST MINDSET. THIS HAS FUELLED THE PROMOTION OF A RITUALISTIC SUNNI ISLAM WHICH SEEKS NORMALISATION WITH THE ZIONIST REGIME AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PALESTINIANS.
HOW HAMAS PLAN TO TRAP ISRAEL IN A QUAGMIRE
DR.MAHATHIR ON WAR IN GAZA
HAVE THE WESTERN MASSES AWOKEN TO THE REALITY OF PALESTINE OCCUPATION
ON THE GENOCIDE COMMITTED AGAINST THE PALESTINIANS BY ISRAEL AND THE COLLECTIVE WEST
THE DEVIANCE OF POLITICAL JUDAISM
NO EQUIVALENCE BETWEEN THE OPPRESSED AND THE OPPRESSOR
EUROPE, JEWS AND THE MUSLIM WORLD
ISRAEL's MILITARY TO COMMENCE NEW PHASE FOLLOWING ADVANCEMENTS IN OPERATION
ISRAEL GRANTS GAS EXPLORATION LICENSES AMID ONGOING OPERATIONS
WHY GAZA IS A DEATH CAMP
EYELESS IN GAZA
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/20...ss-in-gaza
Six kinds of blindness prevalent in modern Israel, comprising denial of Palestinians’ existence, lack of vision of policy consequences, overconfidence in surveillance technology, inability to differentiate the enemy in war, blind rage, and shortsightedness.
W.J.T. Mitchell
Watching the debacle of the war between Israel and Hamas, I was suddenly reminded of a memorable phrase from John Milton’s dramatic poem, Samson Agonistes:
Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves,
Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke;
Samson was the war machine of ancient Israel, a mighty warrior invulnerable to attack, and capable of destroying Israel’s enemies armed only with the jawbone of an ass. But Samson became complacent:
I walk’d about admir’d of all and dreaded
On hostile ground, none daring my affront.
Then swoll’n with pride into the snare I fell.
The snare, of course, is Samson’s love affair with a Philistine woman named Delilah, who cuts his hair (the secret of his strength), whence he is blinded, and enslaved by the Philistines as a mill worker.
What could this possibly have to do with Israel’s current invasion of Gaza? Could it be that Israel has lost its commitment to pure Jewish ethno-nationalism? Twenty percent of its citizens are Palestinians, and many of its Jewish citizens are quite secular. Or it is simply the arrogant confidence in its military superiority that lulled it into dropping its guard at the Gaza border, allowing Hamas militias to swarm into Israel, murder 1400 Israelis and take over 200 others hostage?
I don’t wish to press the analogy any further, except to dwell on the common theme of blindness that links ancient and modern Israel. The question is, how many kinds of blindness, with what sorts of effects? Here is my inventory of the six types of blindness, or refusals to see coupled with refusals to hear:
[/url][url=https://visitor.r20.constantcontact.com/d.jsp?llr=iqnuv6bab&p=oi&m=1101581137416&sit=mr9dynfcb&f=efc6d103-17c3-4940-b941-50c610e89267]
1. Blindness to the existence of the Palestinians; deafness to their claims. On my many visits to Israel/Palestine, it has struck me how little Israelis know about the Palestinians who live among them or under their military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. When one asks about “those people,” roughly a quarter of the population of Greater Israel, a frequent response is that they do not see them, and they wish they would just be quiet and leave us alone. We just want peace. Why do they have to make trouble?
2. Blindness to their occlusion of the consequences of their policies on the Palestinians. Palestinian scholar Saree Makdisi has documented the way Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians constitute a kind of “double blinding,” in two stages: first the erasure of Palestinian towns and villages and the expulsion of their inhabitants; second the erasure of the traces of erasure, and their replacement by forms of reassuring camouflage. The most conspicuous example of this practice has been the “Trees for Israel” program, which conceals the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages with the veil of “ecological improvement.” The myth of “a land without people for a people without land” is the verbal counterpoint to this visual occlusion. Some Israeli officials, decrying the way that Hamas mingles with the civilian population of Gaza, using them as human shields, are now portraying the unfortunate murder of over 8,000 Gazans by Israeli violence as “collateral damage” in a just war. The next step has been to portray the mass murder of Gazans as a war of liberation from the rule of Hamas. Perhaps to be followed by a parade through Gaza City?
3. Blindness about the failure of their own surveillance technologies. Israel’s confidence in its invulnerability to attack from Gaza was based in its extensive network of cameras along the security fences and watchtowers that surround Gaza’s border with Israel. Israel’s state of the art intelligence services had supposedly created a system of surveillance so complete that there could be no possibility of a surprise attack. Hamas “put out the eyes” of this system in the early hours of October 7, using drones and snipers to destroy all the cameras simultaneously, while the supposedly impregnable wall was breached on scores of places with bulldozers. The spies who were supposed to see everything failed completely, asleep at the monitors.
4. Blindness constituted by the waging of war on an invisible enemy. Hamas is an underground army, operating from hundreds of miles of tunnels under a densely populated urban landscape. It only emerges to launch rockets or (rarely) sorties into Israel. Hamas fighters do not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from the civilian population. When Israel bombs an apartment building, hundreds of young men gather to dig out the victims. Are any of those young men Hamas fighters? Impossible to tell. As in any asymmetrical war between a regular, uniformed army and guerilla fighters merged with a population, the soldiers without uniforms are denounced as terrorists for refusing to obey the laws of war. Israel admits that it is “difficult” to distinguish Hamas fighters from civilians. A better word would be
5. Blindness of rage and the lust for revenge. Perhaps the most important blindness in Israel’s current attack on Gaza is the understandable rage that was provoked by the Hamas atrocities on October 7. Hamas deliberately staged scenes of mutilation, rape, and child-murder designed to appall anyone who saw or even heard them described. Israel’s leader, his eyes and ears already shut to the ominous threats from Gaza, promptly became the blind leader of a blind population motivated by instant revenge. The possibility of negotiating for the release of hostages was consigned to the back burner, to be replaced by fantasies of retribution. Gaza, its over two million people already under siege for the last seventeen years, its border controlled by Israel, is subjected to collective punishment (a war crime), mass expulsions of people who are already refugees with no place to go (a war crime), and mass deprivation of the basic necessities of human life (a war crime). The bombing and destruction of entire urban neighborhoods and next, the house-to-house fighting that will take numerous Israeli and Palestinian lives, make it clear that the vengeful policy of “an eye for an eye” leaves everyone blinded.
6. The refusal of foresight. Finally, there is blindness involved in the refusal to foresee the consequences of one’s own actions. Even the U.S., a thoroughly complicit partner in Israel’s apartheid policies against the Palestinians under its control, tried to suggest gently that Israel think carefully about what it would do next, after it had destroyed Hamas “once and for all.” Would it try to set up a replacement government for the devastated millions of survivors? Would it try to recruit the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank? Would it pay reparations and try to rebuild the cities it has destroyed? Or would it wash its hands of the entire disaster, rebuild its security walls, reconnect its surveillance cameras, and ask to be left alone? And what if its actions produced the foreseeable result of setting off a wider war that would bring Hezbollah and other military organizations into the battle? Israel’s blind leader of the blind tells his followers that it is too early to ponder these questions. Vengeance comes first; then we will see what follows.
Although I cannot help but be horrified by the actions of Hamas on October 7, I am struck by how perfectly it diagnosed the weaknesses of its enemy. They capitalized on its blind arrogance, and then put out its eyes with a spectacle of violence designed to produce blind rage. This leads us to ask how things then turned out for Samson. The answer is: suicide. Samson, taken to the Temple of Dagon for a spectacle of humiliation, pulls down the temple, killing himself and the triumphant Philistines. I am reminded here of a visit some thirty years ago to the ancient fortress of Masada overlooking the Dead Sea. The guide informed us that Masada is an allegory of Fortress Israel in its refusal to surrender to the Romans, insisting instead on collective suicide rather than defeat. The modern meaning, the guide assured us, is embodied in Israel’s nuclear arsenal, which guarantees that if Israel faces defeat, it will not merely commit suicide, but take the rest of the world along with it. Perhaps it is time for Israel to open its eyes and its ears.
“EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES ”
https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/01/exterminate-all-the-brutes
All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.
Chris Hedges
A Bird in the Hand – by Mr. Fish
During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international community, although 25 journalists were in the war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves, although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to respond following the of 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.
I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later. But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day – is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.
On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity. Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.
Israel’s bombing campaign, one of the heaviest of the 21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques, 120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.
Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. Palestinians are referred to as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.
The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in Gaza, were gunned down and driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who we are.
Israel’s distorted, settler colonial visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced poverty and murder to keep them subjugated. Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party said, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.
Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new Nazis”.
Think about that. A people, imprisoned in the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?
There is an historical analogy here. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge. When those who are occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.
“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing, understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”
Genocide lies at the core of Western imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness — although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.
Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from genocide now commit it.