Can The World Abide Israel?

 Can The World Abide Israel?

Jim Kavanagh

https://x.com/RamAbdu/status/1926666490893201875

There is no intellectually honest denial that what Israel is doing in Gaza Is a campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing. There is no denying that Israel has deliberately destroyed hospitals, schools, universities, civil institutions, and at least 80% of housing; has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, teachers, journalists, artists at home with their families; has deliberately targeted women and children, burning them alive in tents; and is now deliberately starving children to death.

There is no more room for denial when Israeli politicians explicitly declare: "We kill 100 residents in one night without anyone in the world caring,"  and  “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn't stopping us...This is a change of the course of history—nothing less.”

All this because, as one Zionist activist put it “You need to destroy their offspring to prevent them from creating more offspring”—echoing Heinrich Himmler who said in 1943 '"I did not consider myself justified in exterminating the men and then allowing their children to grow up to wreak vengeance on our children and grandchildren. The difficult decision had to be taken to make these people disappear from the face of the earth."

Straight-up Nazi shit. Undeniable. The pictures, the videos, the testimony from the victims and their killers is all there and all definitive. Even Piers Morgan has had to acknowledge it. Anyone who tries to deny Israel is engaged in a genocidal ethnic cleansing project Is either impossibly and inexcusably ignorant, inexcusably self-deceived by ideological attitudes that make them a complicit enabler, or a self-conscious, deliberate liar.

Of particular note, and particular shame, is Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich’s triumphal boast, quoted above, that Israel’s objective is “total destruction [which has] no precedent globally,” “nothing less” than “a change of the course of history” that “the world isn't stopping.” 

All citizens of the world, but especially those of the United States and its Western allies, need to understand the truth, and accept the challenge, of Smotrich’s words.

Beyond its horrific immediate effects on the Palestinian people, the Zionist nation-state of Israel—-along with its patron the United States, and other affiliated enablers—-is creating a civilizational crisis,  annulling foundational elements of our historical experience, of the very things we consider “us” and “history.”

The confusion, the anger, the tearing-your-hair-out, “This is impossible!” despair so many of us are feeling Is the unsettling disorientation of a time traveler. We are Michael J Foxes, watching the picture we had of ourselves being erased pixel by pixel every time a limb is blown or sawn off a child in Gaza; we are in Minnesota watching Native Americans being killed and scalped for the bounty offered by the state in 1863; we are the villagers outside of Auschwitz choking on the smoke from the ovens in 1943; we are witnessing a lynching in Mississippi in 1955; we are in Sharpeville watching the massacre in 1960.  This is not where I belong!  How do I get out of here!

We have, in fact, been thrown back into the historical and ethical past, before the major inflection points of the last century: before the defeat of fascism in World War II, before the establishment of an international community via the United Nations and its architecture of international law and human rights, before of the decolonization, civil-rights, and anti-apartheid movements.

The result of these the hard-fought victories was that the nascent international community—formally and legally among the nation-states gathered in the UN, and ideologically among the major media and educational institutions of the world—recognized, rejected, and put previously accepted practices like slavery, fascism, colonialism, apartheid, and genocide, behind us, behind a legal and historical line we must never again cross. They are now considered politically and ethically forbidden and disgraced practices, crimes against humanity.

Colonialism, specifically, is anathema because it is a form of racism/supremacism that implies genocide: colonists must consider themselves essentially superior to, and must subjugate, expel, or exterminate, the indigenous population. We know the history of settler-colonialism, and why it is forbidden and disgraced.

Today, in the 21^st Century, no person of a modern, secular, liberal cast of mind would deny that the rejection of colonialism is an irrefutably progressive historical milestone, and that any attempt at launching a colonial conquest of a supposedly “inferior” by a supposedly “superior” people on the planet earth today must be considered a crime against history itself.

Except one.

Zionism does turn back time. It lives in the past where polities and practices based on racial, ethnic (in this case, to be exact, ethno-religious) supremacism, and therefore colonialism, were acceptable, part of “normal” political discourse and practice.

Zionism originated and developed from the turn of the 20th century to the 1940s, during a time when colonialism, ethno-nationalism, and eugenics were in vogue. Zionism was the Jewish version of ethno-nationalism that, along with Italian and German fascism, drew from that ideological wellspring: For each ethnos, its own nation.

This affinity was evident in fascist Italy, with Mussolini declaring: “You must create a Jewish state. I am a Zionist,” and the Zionist National Military Organization’s (Irgun Zvai Leumi) presenting to the Nazis a “Proposal…Concerning the Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe and the Participation of the NMO in the War on the side of Germany” that posited “The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich.”

Hitler's obsessive Jew hatred put an end to the possibility of any such alliance, though that was not the only, nor was it necessarily the core, pernicious element of fascist theory. It obscured and continues to obscure Zionism’s affiliations with fascism, though these remain evident to state-financed Israeli rabbis who tell military academy students that “the Nazi logic was right” and Hitler “was the most correct person there ever was, and was correct in every word he said… he was just on the wrong side”—i.e., he failed to recognize Jewish, not Aryan, supremacy. And, indeed, we now have a “Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis.”

Zionism was “formulated,” as Edward Said said, “in exactly the same terms that Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Americans, and Russians had used for territorial expansion,” and with the same, if inverted, supremacist logic as Nazi “master race” theory—which was itself based on long-standing American white-supremacist race policy. Zionists had worked diligently since Balfour to argue that a Jewish state in Palestine would be an outpost of “Western” (White) imperialism—i.e., a “little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.” They were able to take advantage of the short period at the end of WWII (1945-8), when supremacist colonialism over “lesser,” “primitive and backward” people, including Arabs, were still considered legitimate projects for the Western victors of WWII, when Algerians were still being slaughtered en masse by the French, and Jim Crow lynching was still a regular thing in the U.S.  

Zionists were able, in that conjuncture (Ten years later it would have been impossible!), to convince the emergent imperialist power, the U.S., that the forcible ethnic cleansing of unimportant Palestinian Arabs by superior westernized Jews was righteous compensatory colonialism for what the Jews had suffered under European fascism. Compensation for the crimes of white Europeans paid by an expendable third (world) people. Compensatory and convenient colonialism. The order of the day.

As I said, ten years after 1948, the decolonization movement had already begun, and it would have been impossible to pull that off. Amazing, isn’t it, that a colonialist ethnic cleansing project that would not have been accepted by the world ten years later is still accepted 77 years later. You need a helluva time machine to pull that off.

Also helping their cause, despite the American diplomatic corps’s strong opposition to Palestine partition plans because such plans, “recognize the principle of a theocratic racial state,” were “in definite contravention to various principles…[such as] as self-determination and majority rule,” and because they “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future,” was that crucial moment in 1948 when, as related by Steve Smith, Ted Kennedy’s brother-in-law: “Two million dollars went aboard the Truman [campaign] train in a paper bag, and that’s what paid for the state of Israel.” That’s what paid for American acquiescence to the genocidal ethnic cleansing of 80% of the Palestinian Arab population—and that’s what pays for what are seeing now.

That situation of blatant Jewish/White supremacism and US/Western corruption is the moment we are living in now, the moment everyone who does not turn away from the Zionist time-machine is brought back to. You cannot claim to have got past or renounced apartheid, Jim Crow, colonialism, genocide, or fascism if you do not get past, renounce, and oppose Zionism—-which brings all of those things into our world and brings us to them.

What’s been happening in Gaza for the past year and a half has enabled many to see this  clearly for the first time (some of us saw it a long time ago), but it is not defined by Gaza. “Gaza” is not a bad policy of Zionism; it is the manifestation of its essence. However the siege of Gaza ends—whether (most probably) by the murder and expulsion of most of its population, à la 1948, or by some less apocalyptic denouement—that epoch of supremacism and colonialism is the time in which we live, as long as the world accepts the presence of Zionist Israel.

It’s not as if it would have been OK if there had been a peace agreement that got rid of Hitler (‘cause maybe Himmler wasn’t as bad?), but left the master-race Nazi regime in Germany standing as an accepted member of the world community, or if the white-supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa were kept standing with more “liberal” white rulers. These are the kinds of regimes that should not exist in modern time and in the modern, post-fascist and post-colonial “civilized” world.

If, by some circumstance of history, such a regime does come to exist—as Israel has—then it must be shunned, rejected, and coerced to disappear by all nations and citizens who want a world community consistent with and worthy of the historical sacrifices and achievements we thought defined progressive modern civilization. Such a regime is an enemy of humanity, does not have the right to exist or to defend itself, and any person or nation that accepts or urges acceptance of such a regime Is an accomplice to the crime against humanity it is.

The Western world didn’t just tolerate, it embraced and positively celebrated Israel and Zionist Jewish supremacism over Palestinian Arabs for 77 years. Isn’t it wonderful to have a Jewish state! It was able to do this because the dominant ideological apparatuses of the dominant Western world allowed and encouraged Westerners to pretend they were not seeing the racism and colonialism that was evident. The postcolonial countries had no problem recognizing the obvious, and those who tolerated Zionist colonialism did so because of their powerlessness or corruption. Those who did not, and who resisted Zionist Israel, were destroyed, or are in the process of being attacked, by Israel’s U.S. patron.

Unfortunately for the Zionists, the media and geopolitical landscape has changed. Live-streamed social media allow everybody to see what's going on, and post-colonial countries know what they are seeing: Jewish/White supremacist colonialism, with indiscriminate violence against Arabs considered to be subhuman pests. Attempts to deny it are futile and fatuous. Countries like South Africa and Ireland stand up to bring charges and sanctions against Israel. The entire world is now seeing what a mistake—indeed, what a crime—it has been to tolerate, let alone celebrate that for so long. As I’ve said, there is an unprecedented and growing, fully and explicitly anti-Zionist, movement in key countries (the U.S.) and sectors (young Jews). The long-term prospects for Israel and Zionism have never been worse.

But Israel abides, now buttressed by its own nuclear weapons as well as the still substantial though relatively fading, power of the imperial hegemon, by the persistently corrupt polities of Europe and, shamefully, the Arab world, and by the desperate censorship and repression offensive of American and European governments against anti-Zionist thought and action. And the Palestinians do not have a long term in Gaza or the West Bank.

I do not believe in inevitability. The arc of history goes where it's forcibly bent. The world is at a civilizational crossroads, a historical inflection point, much like—no, not like, it is the same inflection point we were at at the end of World War 2 (which, it turns out in so many ways, is not over). We are back there, deciding whether we are going to move into a world that ends the tolerance of Jim Crow, apartheid, ethnic supremacism, genocide, and colonialism as presently instantiated in Zionist Israel, or whether we stay put in a world which continues to normalize that regime and those crimes.

The world that we like to think of as our present, but really is only a possible future, cannot abide Israel and Zionism. If we don't find a way to make that world possible and really put the atavistic crime of colonialism behind us once and for all—-which will require ending that regime by force—-then that village next to Auschwitz, in Jim Crow Mississippi, we are living in is right where we belong.

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First and Foremost, Colonialism Must End

The Wall

Apartheid Does Not Have the Right To Defend Itself, Or To Exist

Gaza Calling: It’s the Colonialism, Stupid!