As Israel strikes the Gaza Strip in its fourth major military offensive against its mostly refugee residents in the past twelve years, it is calling for a higher moral code of conduct.
As the Israeli leadership wants, the world must not be distracted by the images of death and destruction, for which Hamas should be held responsible, because it is hiding among the civilian population.
In fact, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told US President Joe Biden, “Israel is doing everything possible to avoid injuring innocent civilians.”
Indeed, Israel is sending warning shots to the people of Gaza so that they can narrowly escape with their lives just before it destroys their livelihoods with bombs. Palestinians should be grateful.
Israel also claims that it targets specific terrorist facilities, everything else is an unintended consequence. But what Israel calls “collateral damage,” Palestinians call loved ones: the women, men and children they mourn every day.
Netanyahu says Israel is targeting Hamas for targeting Israeli population centers. But while this is not to be tolerated or excused, reality tells another story once again: There is a significant disparity between the death and destruction that both Palestinians and Israelis face.
Israel and its facilitators also insist on its right to self-defense, when in fact Israel has renounced that right by becoming an expanding occupying power.
They say that Israel aims only to defend its citizens, when in fact it defends the occupation and subjugation of the Palestinians.
Israel insists it does not start wars. This is generally wrong, given that he started most of his past wars. He provoked the war with assassinations, bombings, closures, evictions, land grabs, attacks on holy places and relentless illegal settlements, etc.
The decades-long military and civilian occupation is itself a state of continuous war and violence. Israel could stop the insanity of war by simply ending the occupation and dispossession of the Palestinians.
Israel claims that it is not looking for conflict, that it is looking for peace. But for much of the quarter-century “peace process”, successive Israeli governments have insisted on maintaining complete rule over all of historic Palestine and have extended illegal settlements to that end.
In any case, these well-rehearsed, oft-repeated “talking points” are nothing new. They have been instrumental in justifying Israeli aggression throughout its history, even though the tragedy of the war transcends any twist.
But for a long time, they also reflected a deeper contradiction in Israeli mentality. Indeed, since its inception, Israel has projected a contradictory image of being powerful but insecure, superior but needy, bloody but human, violent but vulnerable, and ultimately a merciful warrior and vicious peacemaker.
Israel has been a formidable military and nuclear power, superior to all of its neighbors combined, and yet it is the only country that is constantly obsessed with survival.
This is because this type of insecurity is rooted not in the lack of strength, but in its lack of acceptability or integration as a colonial project of settlers in a predominantly Arab region, which the population rejects. massively.
Israel’s insecurity was born in sin – the sin of a state based on the ruin of another people, the catastrophic takeover of Palestine and the dispossession of its people through malignant violence in 1948.
Although the Zionist leaders of the time lied about the causes and handling of the war, they could not escape the truth of their actions. As Israel’s “new historians” have documented, the Palestinians did not voluntarily flee their cities, nor did they hear some Arab calls to evacuate their homes. Israel carried out a large, well-planned ethnic cleansing offensive to ensure the Jewishness of the new state.
This made many Israelis uncomfortable and in conflict. After all, many of its early Jewish immigrants were themselves victims of horrific atrocities in Europe and elsewhere.
But while many Israelis felt justified, others expressed sorrow for the horrible things they “had to do”, although no one forced their hand to occupy Palestine or maintain their control for decades. .
Indeed, more than a few early Zionists understood the terrible consequences of war and advocated peaceful coexistence with Palestinians in one state for much of the first half of the 20th century.
The conflicting state of mind was best understood in the old Israeli expression, yorim ve bochim, literally “shoot and cry”. It is an expression as old and complex as the state itself.
In his 1949 novel, Khirbet Khizeh, renowned army officer and author Yizhar Smilansky portrayed in shocking prose the planned and unprovoked destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of its inhabitants across the country. the frontier led by its military unit during the 1948 war.
As an intelligence officer, Smilansky knew only too well that this was just one of a few hundred villages and towns destroyed by Israeli forces. But like Micha, the protagonist of his novel, he joined his comrades to “finish the job”, despite his bad conscience.
The revisionist novel became a film and a television series, while Smilansky became a member of the Knesset of the ruling Mapai party in the 1950s, as he continued to dispossess Palestinians of their basic human rights.
It is this type of conflict between Smilansky, the writer, and Smilansky, the politician, that shaped the writings of more than a few great Zionist writers, notably Amos Oz, that influenced the opinions of millions of people, especially the “Jews of the Diaspora”.
I took the time during the pandemic to complete two of Oz’s novels, Judas and Scenes From Village Life, and found them literally interesting but politically hypocritical.
However, it was the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir who took the “shoot and cry” hypocrisy to a whole new *** level.
In one of her infamous racist zingers, she told the Palestinians: “We can forgive you for killing our sons, but we will never forgive you for having us kill yours. It is chutzpah par excellence.
It follows, obscenely enough, that today the Palestinians owe Israel a big apology for its army that killed so many of them.
Hypocrisy goes far beyond war to lead to peace. In 1993, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin boasted of Israel’s generosity and willingness to share a very small part of “the Land of Israel” with the Palestinians for the sake of Israel. the peace. Never mind, it was the Palestinians who made a historic compromise by recognizing that Israel spanned more than four-fifths of their homeland.
But all of this is now a thing of the past. It is indeed outdated.
After years of acting with impunity, Israelis today, certainly most of Israel’s leaders, aren’t shooting and crying. They don’t want to share the land or make real peace with the Palestinians. Most are more likely to pull and laugh.
One of the most disturbing images I have ever seen in my life was of the Gaza war in 2014. It was devoid of drama or tragedy, showing only a group of Israelis picnicking on the hills watching Gaza, eating popcorn and having fun, as they watched the Israeli bombardment of the densely populated and overly impoverished strip.
Why let the deaths of Palestinians ruin a great fireworks display?
In the past, some Israeli leaders may have been troubled by everything they did, by the crimes they committed, but they felt that the ends justified the means.
Hypocritical? Perhaps. But unlike the new generation of fanatic leaders and their supporters, they were at least in conflict and some even felt remorse.
In contrast, today Netanyahu’s servants and partners use words like regret and peace as props. Worse yet, they prepared a comprehensive guide after the first Israel-Gaza war in 2009, guiding officials on how to portray Israel as a peaceful and well-meaning victim of Palestinian aggression.
One can only roll one’s eyes as Netanyahu warns Palestinians in Israel against the use of violence, when they are victims of organized violence, as they are simply trying to defend themselves against overwhelming police brutality and lynching by crowds of Jewish fanatics.
I wrote about this hasbara deception disguised as conflict, in a number of articles during the Gaza war in 2014, here, here and here, for example.
What I have found most instructive throughout my study of the war and Israel’s propaganda is that Israel has brought nothing new to the art of deception except, can -be, smarter delivery.
Most of the other previous colonial powers called their enemies terrorists, accused them of cowardice and of using civilians as human shields, blah blah blah.
But what happened to these colonialists and their propaganda?
It can be difficult, if not impossible, to be optimistic about the short-term prospects of a solution. But when the dust settles on another sadistic Israeli war, Israelis will once again find themselves stranded with millions of Palestinians ever more determined to regain their freedom.
Like the dozen colonial states that came before them, including white settler regimes in South Africa and Algeria, Israelis will sooner or later have to make a choice: live in peace or leave in humiliation.
There is no point in putting the inevitable and suffering back into the process.
