Israel’s Extremists Have a Plan for the Day after the Genocide
Image by Diana Khwaelid.
Under the slogan ‘Gaza is Ours, Forever’, a large number of Israeli extremists and right-wing politicians met in the settlement of Be’eri, near the Gaza border region, on October 20-21.
The group represented the who’s who in the Israeli right, far right and ultranationalists. They included Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, May Golan and Bezalel Smotrich, as well as ten MKs of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party.
The event, entitled “Preparing to Resettle Gaza”, was organized by one of Israel’s most extreme settler movements, Nachala, led by the notorious Daniella Weiss.
To appreciate how extremist this 79-year-old settler is, consider this: on June 27, the Canadian government, though one of the most stalwart supporters of Netanyahu and his wars, imposed sanctions on her, due to her “role in facilitating (…) acts of violence by Israeli extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians.”
The hate-filled conference, however, was but a culmination of a year-long effort to build a case of why Israel should ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the Strip and re-establish illegal settlements.
The story, however, does not start on October 7. In 2005, Israel decided to redeploy its forces out of the tiny coastal region. That was the start of the hermetic Israeli siege on the Strip, which led to multiple wars and, ultimately, the October 7 events and the ongoing genocide.
Although the number of Jewish settlers who were evacuated from the dismantled 15 illegal settlements was fairly small – 8,500 – the sense of betrayal felt by the settlers created deep divisions throughout Israeli society.
Chaotic scenes of settlers being forcefully removed from the Gush Katif settlements bloc in Gaza created a national crisis in Israel, and was compared to the forceful evacuation of the illegal Sinai settlement of Yamit, which Israel dismantled in April 1982 as part of a previous agreement with Egypt. But, why the crisis?
Israel is a settler-colonial society, which has linked its colonial expansion to religious diktats and prophecies. So the forced departure from Gaza, to most of these settlers, must have appeared to represent both national treason and a sacrilegious act.
This is why resettling Gaza became the immediate rallying cry for Israeli settlers. Compared to their limited political share of power during the redeployment of 2005, current extremists are now effectively the decision-makers.
While the army remains unclear regarding its strategic objectives in Gaza, the settlers have always been aware of the nature of their mission: the ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from Gaza and the rebuilding of the settlements.
Thus, quickly, the likes of Weiss and many of her supporters began calling on Israelis to join the recolonization campaign. “Register, register, you’ll be in Gaza,” Weiss told an audience of supporters last March, joyfully declaring that 500 families had already signed up, according to a CNN report.
Weiss and Nachala are not acting independently from the overall objective of the country’s leading politicians. For example, on the first day of the war, October 7, 2023, Netanyahu made his intentions clear: “I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now, because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”
On October 17, a position paper introduced by the Israeli Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy called for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
The report saw in the war “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip” into the Sinai desert. Later that same month, the Israeli intelligence ministry itself became involved, with the Israeli news outlet Calcalist publishing a document “recommend(ing) the transfer of Gaza residents to Sinai.”
On November 14, far-right Minister Smotrich spoke of ‘voluntary migration’. In December, media reports said that Netanyahu himself had told Likud party members that Israel’s real challenge is finding “countries that are willing to absorb them”, meaning the people of Gaza.
Conferences began to be organized to gather support around the idea of ethnically cleansing Palestinians. The first major conference was held by a coalition of settler movements last December. “A house on the beach is not a dream”, an advertisement for the gathering proclaimed. The ‘beach’ here is a reference to the Gaza beach.
Even Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, jumped on the opportunity. In March, he spoke of Gaza’s “very valuable … waterfront property”, which required Israel to remove the civilians and “clean up the Strip”.
The ongoing so-called General’s Plan, aimed at the extermination and ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, is but the military component of the settlers’ vision, that of ‘Gaza is ours, forever’.
But if Israel has failed to sustain its settlements in the rebellious Strip under more manageable circumstances in the past, will it succeed now?
The settlers are already aware of the challenge at hand. This is why they constantly link their colonization of Gaza with the ethnic cleansing of the Strip’s Palestinian inhabitants.
Israel’s success and failure, however, will ultimately be determined by this maxim: as long as the Palestinian people are fighting back, Weiss and her fellow extremists will not find safety in Gaza.
Indeed, the native population of Gaza has subsisted in that historical land for thousands of years. If genocide has not forced them off their land, nothing else will.
Israel’s Insanity
Unsplash+ and Getty Images.
This is a brief and concise exploration of a complex subject. What goes on in people’s heads to allow for this insane behavior. Are all people like Arendt’s Eichmann? Nothing in their heads? Here are some rationales that may provide insights into Israel’s insanity and its role in shifting the global order; a shift to unprecedented cruelty and danger, of planned modes of humiliation, mutilation, terror affecting the world’s people.. Here is a summary of specific history: pariah people, the nation state, the holocaust, Jewish religious texts, Israel’s foundation myths.
First I quote this long statement from Enzo Traverso’s precise work on politics and philosophy in his book on the end of Jewish Modernity. He writes about pariah people in his chapter on Arendt.
“Arendt rediscovered the ‘hidden tradition’ of pariah Judaism .”The pages she devotes to the humanity of the pariah are among the finest in 20th century literature. Lacking a personal inheritance, the pariah attributes great importance to friendship. Excluded from the public sphere and deprived of rights, he finds a ray of light in the human warmth of his neighbours. Excluded from any form of friendship, he rediscovers humanity as a universal category transcending laws and political frontiers. Love, sensitivity, generosity, the sense of fraternity and solidarity, the absence of prejudice, Arendt emphasizes, are human qualities that in these dark times find a refuge among the pariahs, the proscribed and those without rights. Such a surplus of humanity, however, is simply a reaction to the lack of rights in her essay on Kafka….. The first references go back to the early 17th century…Arendt writes that this is an eminently political category… people who lack the right to have rights….this category was far wider, denoting a figure born of the European postwar crisis, when the collapse of the old multinational empires gave birth to a mosaic of fragile national states, heterogeneous and deeply unstable, Versaille ratified the ethnic purges begun during the Great War, decided on forced transfers of populations and traced frontiers that were often artificial…There were millions who had lost their legal status and national identity in the wake of the collapse of the old European order. These pariahs, Arendt explained, were treated like outlaws not because they had transgressed but because the law did not recognise them, condemning them thus to political invisibility and worldlessness as if they were superfluous individuals.” [1]
Israel’s status as a nation in 1948 was used to justify and rationalize Israel’s right to rebuff any assaults, to defend its borders, to disregard the UN Charter specifying that the right to self-defense is subject to the permission of the UNSC, the meeting of all requirements for negotiation before any war can be launched. Israel’s right to self-defense, as on October 7, is a reversion to talion law, to an “eye for an eye justice” , revenge, the throwing out of all advances in criminal law and consideration of the background of perpetrators. There has not been investigation of the circumstances of October 7: what orders were actually given by Hamas, who perpetrated the killing and was it by order or individual reactions, how many people were actually killed by Palestinians and how many by the IDF, Many of the crimes are in dispute such as reports about rape, beheading of children. Accurate investigation is quite possible given the technical expertise of Forensic Architecture under Eyal Weizman.
What is the influence of the Holocaust? There is the ahistorical claim that the Holocaust and antisemitism is a constant in Jewish history, that the Jewish Holocaust is the only or the worst genocide in history, the omission of many periods in Jewish history of living safely and cooperatively in various societies including Arab countries.
There is idealization of Jewish humanitarian and universal values, such as by Judith Butler who in her post-modern challenge to objectivity anda facts impugns the Goldstone Report. She states that Goldstone is possibly inventing law and that Hamas plausibly may have used people as human shields. She does not report that Goldstone found that Hamas did not use people as human shields but that Israel did use people as human shields.
Precision, objectivity, and fact finding are profoundly important. Otherwise – the distortions and misrepresentations open the door to insanity.
Another important rationale is the contribution from Judaic religion. Iisrael Shahak translates Talmudic texts showing that the Jewish God specified humane treatment only between Jews, not for Jewish treatment of non-Jews. [2] The Jewish God was cruel, demanding love, obedience, devotion to the extent that he ordered Abrham to kill his own son to show his devotion to God. The Christian God did not save his own son who cried “why hast thou abandoned me?”
The Israeli foundation myths idealize the heroism of Samson and of the suicidal sacrifices of Masada. Documentary filmmaker Avi Mograbi shows how these stories are taught to all Israeli children from toddlerhood through early adulthood.
These are some of the contributions to Israeli insanity. Another factor unexplored here is the spinelessness in the universities and governments of other countries.
On the more hopeful side, there are certainly millions of people worldwide who
protest, who perceive reality, and much superb research and investigation.
NOTES
[1] Enzo Traverso, The End of Jewish Modernity, Pluto Press, 2013. P 65 ff
[2] Israel Shahak. Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years (1994).
How US Imperialism Causes Death and Destruction in Gaza and Lebanon
November 1, 2024
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The Israeli military’s horrendous massacres in Gaza extend now to Lebanon. Housing, schools, and hospitals are destroyed. Residents of Northern Gaza are being herded south, again. People starve. The U.S. government supplies the bombs, planes, and weapons.
The war’s continuation relates to U.S. strategic interests in the region and U.S. pretensions to world domination. War and humanitarian catastrophe will end with stopping U.S. assistance. Some of the war’s critics present views and emphases that distract and offer little toward ending it.
They commonly ascribe the carnage to the expansionist nature of Zionism. For a century and more, Zionism has indeed visited grief and loss upon Palestinians. But criticizing that record is more likely to reinforce intransigence than alter the course of events.
Highlighting unprecedented humanitarian disaster will not by itself stop the killing, or bring about repair. It needs to be the object of international consensus and cooperation, as mediated through the United Nations. Underfunding and Security Council vetoes are impediments.
Peace advocates may insist that the more humanitarian norms are violated, the more impactful moral, legal, and/or ethical criticism will be and the more telling will be personal witness or civil disobedience. Without mass pressure to accompany expectations, they become wishful thinking.
The war won’t end just because the war should end. It continues as long as vital interests are being served. Israel’s interests are her own. Criticism from afar is likely ineffectual. U.S. interests do warrant attention, because the war serves U.S. purposes.
According to peoplesworld.org, “Israel is completely dependent on the U.S. It would be incapable of carrying out its campaigns of aggression without U.S. help.”
The United States is bound to Israel. The two major political parties support military aid for Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress on July 24 to rapturous applause. The U.S. tie to Isreal is worth a lot.
U.S. commitment to Israel, and to assisting with Israel’s war, is measured in money: $251.2 billion (adjusted for inflation) in military aid to Israel during 66 years, $18 billion in the year prior to October 2024, and $20 billion approved by President Biden in August 2024 and being voted on in Congress in November. These are funds “that Israel must use to purchase U.S. military equipment and services.”
Commitment is such that U.S. military aid flows despite the Leahy Act (1997) requirement to “vet any foreign military unit to ensure it has a clean human rights record before it can receive U.S. assistance.”
Support for Israel is a crucial part of U.S. strategy for the entire Middle East. That strategy is one aspect of U.S. plans for arranging international affairs to its liking. U.S. backing of Israel and its war coincides with U.S. imperialist purposes.
Formerly, U.S. reactions to the Holocaust were foremost in determining U.S. support for a Jewish state. Later, relations with Israel took on an additional transactional aspect. The U.S. government would indeed support Israel’s dealings with Palestinians. But Israel would facilitate U.S. policy objectives for the Middle East.
They are: control and supervision of the region’s production and distribution of oil and natural gas, maintenance of the Middle East role as “transit hub connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa,” military force ready to intervene against so-called terrorism, and pushback against “the influence of rival great powers.”
There are other favors. Israel serves as proxy warrior for the United States, for example, in Syria and Iraq, and in the UN General Assembly provides a yearly vote for the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba (there’s usually only one other such vote).
Israel furnishes U.S. rightwing allies in Latin America with military aid, training and equipment. Israel offers attractions: a proposed canal through the Negev Desert bypassing Egypt and offshore deposits of oil and natural gas.
A side note: money is also the measure of U.S. commitment to imperialism. Because imperialism involves conflict, military capabilities are crucial, and they cost. Overall U.S. military spending is exorbitant, dwarfing outlay for the U.S. population’s social needs. In the government’s discretionary budget for fiscal year 2023, military funding amounted to 62% of the $1.8 trillion total; 38% sufficed for everything else, including housing, education, healthcare, and restoration of infrastructure.
Another side note: unfathomable human suffering will not likely deter United States from enabling Israeli massacres in Gaza. The U.S. government has returned to a nuclear arms race. Doing so signals tolerance for the worst kind of catastrophe. According to the New York Times: “General Dynamics will have “produced 12 nuclear ballistic missile submarines by 2042 — a job that’s projected to cost $130 billion … [and] the United States is set to spend an estimated $1.7 trillion over 30 years to revamp its [nuclear] arsenal.”
The U.S. government, with Israel’s help, pursues a new kind of imperialism. Distant from enslaved labor, die-offs of indigenous peoples, and occupation of foreign territories, it relies on debt dependency and cheap labor. Under neoliberalism, wealth is still being drained from the world’s peripheral regions to metropolitan centers.
Conflict remains. Rival powers are ever threatening, and the United States needs a hard-boiled and militarily competent factotum at its side. The U.S. government pays in-kind, with bombs, guns, planes and missiles.
Neither war nor U.S. weaponization of Israel will end soon. What happens will depend on priorities serving U.S. imperialism. U.S. young people and others actively demanding justice for Palestinians would do well, it seems, to prepare themselves for the long haul. They are looking at U.S. imperialism now and would come to understand its origins and know what needs to be done.
They would learn, first, that capitalism consolidated, turned aggressive, and then thrust modern-day imperialism upon the world. They would study worker exploitation and how it led to the profit-taking abundance fueling the growth of capitalism. They would explore division by social class, the necessary condition for exploitation.
Others, socialists in particular, reversed this sequence, and it doesn’t matter. Beginning with Marx and Engels’ reflections on the factory system under capitalism, they learned that workers lose out on the surplus value of the labor they provide. The inquirers became familiar with labor mobilizations and working-class struggles for political power. They arrived at Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), a study of capitalists monopolizing and making war.
The Gaza Catastrophe — Checking Israeli and Western Elites
Youtube screenshot.
Israel is determined to take over North Gaza. This explains its destruction of residential areas in the region. Schools and hospitals have also been targeted. People have been forced to flee their homes. Many who have chosen to stay behind have been killed.
Although some food and other essentials are now available, they are far from adequate. This is why the threat of starvation is still real.
As with the rest of Gaza and Palestine, scores of medical workers have lost their lives. Media workers would be another category of people who have been victims of Israeli aggression . It has been noted that a lot of children have also succumbed to Israeli bombs and bullets. This is a pattern that has expressed itself in almost every Israeli assault upon Gaza in the last so many years.
While Israeli atrocities in North Gaza fit in with its larger agenda of ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the intensity of its current aggression in that area appears to suggest that the Tel Aviv regime has other specific goals. It has been suggested that it is in a hurry to occupy the north to ensure that it will be able to control the oil and gas reserves off the Gaza coast as soon as feasible. There are analysts who have also argued that Tel Aviv wants to convert North Gaza into a buffer zone of sorts to enhance Israel’s security.
Whatever its ulterior motive, it is unconscionable that a country whose occupation of Gaza the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regards as “ illegal” should be allowed to get away with its blatant ethnic cleansing of a people and their land. True, people have protested. Citizens groups have condemned what Tel Aviv is doing in Gaza and Palestine as a whole. Segments of the alternative media have been overtly critical of what has been happening in Gaza and the West Bank in the last one year since October 7, 2023. Both these media channels and some citizens groups have also taken Israel to task for its current aggression in Lebanon which has also resulted in the death of hundreds of civilians. And yet Israel continues with its barbaric behaviour. It has chosen arrogantly to ignore the voices of the rest of the human family. It is utterly contemptuous of even balanced views of individuals and groups who are part of its own support base.
Part of the reason why Israel persists with its injustice is because there are some powerful states behind it. The US elite continues to shower Israel with money and weapons. It is also ever ready to protect Israeli wrongdoings by using its veto in the United Nations Security Council. The British elite is likewise a faithful supplier of arms to Israel. The rogue state also benefits from German weapons and support.
If American and British elites are colluding with Israeli elites in the ongoing massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese it is largely because Zionist Israel, as many of us have pointed out on numerous occasions, is a product of British and American colonial interests in the early part of the 20th century. The German elite’s eagerness to provide blind support to Israel has a lot to do with the nation’s collective guilt over the Nazi holocaust of the thirties and forties. It is an elite that fails to see how its endorsement of Israel has encouraged the latter to perpetrate death and destruction upon an innocent people who had lost their hearth and home to usurpers pursuing a bigoted, racist ideology.
This is why citizens groups and the alternative media in Germany, Britain and the US have a special responsibility to spread awareness of the plight of the Palestinians and why they and other inhabitants of West Asia are totally opposed to Israel and the politics of Zionism. If such awareness grows and reaches a crescendo, it is not inconceivable that the governments in these Western societies will also change their stance and adopt a more critical attitude towards Israel on the question of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and other victims of hegemonic Israeli and Western policies in West Asia.
Such a change will remain a dream for a long while to come because the vested interests that keep Israeli and Western elites in power are formidable. Perhaps those who are determined to see a modicum of justice in Gaza, Palestine and West Asia have to go beyond pleas addressed to Western elites and the international institutions they control such as the UN Security Council. Perhaps those who are struggling for justice should begin to harness some of the resources that they and others linked to them possess such as oil and gas and utilize certain assets within their ambit such as strategic sea routes to compel Israeli and Western elites to see reason and do what is morally right.
Settler Colonial Contagion: A Long Simmering Plague
Photograph Source: Israel Defense Forces – CC BY-SA 2.0
The fact that we are still having to contend with the immediacy and toxicity of settler colonialism in this, the year 2024 is nothing short of astounding. It’s probably amazing that we are still even here with philosophy such as this strangling our world. Almost every strain of entitlement and the brutal negating of the rights of others comes down from this short-sighted and ultimately extinction-level mindset.
Ownership entitlement barrels into neighboring bodies and lands. The literal tanks that crush bodies move forward. It is as if the world couldn’t understand the figurative so the gods decided on a visual you couldn’t deny. Tanks running over bodies. Yet, the people still say (in the manner of abusers everywhere)……well, it’s a shame they made those soldiers do that. Beware, however, of the risks involved with such behaviors– you might get PTSD and not want to eat meat if you engage in running over other humans with your tank. I usually leave bits like that unexplained as I give the reader credit for knowing of current events, but this I feel I have to elaborate on….the ever-disgusting CNN did a story looking into Israeli soldier PTSD after “seeing” bodies run over by tanks. The passive voice use was incredible and it seemed to be taken as gospel that these bodies forced the soldiers to do these acts. It was almost as if a piece was created to make you feel sorry for the executioners at gas chambers. Many of you may know that there was a similar trauma that was reported on in regard to German soldier morale during WW2. Those perpetrating atrocities like the mass shootings of Jewish people and dumping bodies in pits were committing suicide and exhibiting what we, of course, now call PTSD. This seems to have been the impetus for more mass industrialized killing in the form of the gas chambers—to spare the boys the more evident dirty work. This is a chilling fact as we see history repeating itself—we certainly don’t need to see the IDF get more industrialized with their murders (is that even possible, though?).
The notion that the murder itself is the rot never seems to be a consideration when regimes go full fascist. When your soul is gone, how do you get it back? If you’re one of these entities, I suppose you try to hide the death from your own, which is, of course, being done with the systematic slaughter of journalists in the area. With this method, your soul is irretrievably gone, but you can pretend it still exists.
In this current horror, we have the continued dehumanization of Palestinians—even infants are swallowed up as causative agents of their own doom. Americans reacted with rightful disgust and revulsion at events like 9-11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, conveniently ignoring that the Israeli military is parroting the very same types of legitimacy for targets such as these. If your perceived enemy is hiding in a place or occupies it (or you just make up a tale that they are hiding there), go ahead—the thinking goes, kill civilians to get to them. Those nutcases who did Oklahoma City were upset about what they perceived as the federal government killing civilians with issues like Ruby Ridge, and in their addled minds they thought it was fine to attack a government installation that just so happened to have a daycare center in it. When you let loose the notion that it’s okay to kill innocents because of the “reasons” you have concocted, then any type of sickness and murder becomes just fine with that mentality. The thing is, we as Americans are paying for this in the case of the Palestinian genocide At least none of us funded McVeigh and Nichols.
Americans would never stand for their hospitals being bombed, their doctors and nurses being murdered and removed from patient care because a pretend underground Doctor Evil lair is said to be under these places. Comically, it’s even being discussed that a bunch of gold is under a hospital in Lebanon, so I guess that means it needs bombing? It’s insanity.
This mirrors the United States settler colonialism mindset that decided to exterminate the bison. You see, that animal made a life with quite a lot of free time and abundance available to the tribes who lived in the same area. As most of you know, at least Americans reading this, by removing the bison, you took the means to live with dignity away from the tribes and made eradication and relocation more easily reached. It’s what they are doing when they stop aid shipments to Gaza when they bomb hospitals when the orthodox settlers burn down ages-old olive trees. Of course, this is nothing but genocide and taking ancient cultures and making their continuation impossible. The very behaviors we were horrified at by ISIS in terms of destroying cultural landmarks is going on as we speak. Then you can claim the people were savages anyway–look they don’t even have any impressive buildings or ways to sustain themselves. If that very predictable, essentially prison break/riot raid last October hadn’t happened, it would have to have been invented to achieve this sort of expansionist wet dream. Individuals like Jared Kushner and his oceanfront development plans need space to grow, like an infection in a Petri dish culture.
Many will say this is all quite terrible, but it is the way of things. Societies move in this direction and the “strong” overtake the “weak”. To that, I say, when you have a healthy individual, one able to thrive in the community and assist others—if that person becomes ill with a bacterial agent that leads to their eventual demise, would you call that biological agent the strong, overtaking the weak? No, you would rightly view it as a parasitic invader that disrupted the healthy equilibrium of that individual. This is what we have going on with settler colonialism. The mindset is toxic and like a germ that runs out of biological agents to feed on, it will ultimately die as well. There’s no eventual success or inevitability about it. It’s all malady and decay.
The notion that we can own each other or steal the ability to live and thrive from others is, of course, a civilizational sickness. Going full on epidemiological, it’s difficult to get a society healthy again when a toxic agent is let loose. In this case, we’ve been dealing with an ongoing contagion of mental derangement in the form of settler colonialism for such a long time. But to say this is the only way to live is to disregard the vastly longer time frames that humans lived in smaller collective groups and if the behavior was similar in those small groups we would have died out long ago. No, this is a creeping illness spread by the need to control and to steal. There is nothing inherently human about it; it’s simply the most sociopathic of us has been able to take over the mechanisms of power and have brainwashed the masses that this is simply how things work. Ted Bundy as Emperor. There are other ways to live; this is a rich and beautiful planet willing to allow us abundance and life, but one thing it isn’t open to is billionaires, wanton murder, and short-term thinking. That’s gonna get us all killed. The only pragmatic mindset is to realize the status quo is not tenable.
Truly, to accept that this is simply the way of the human is to sign off on our demise and I’m not quite ready to do that. I Have people that I love and I want better for them and I want better for the people across the world I don’t even know. With every plague, there are individuals for whatever reason that are immune to the agent. Outliers, if you will. I think those who fully understand the toxicity of the current system are those outliers, and it will fall upon us to continue to expose the rot and place it in sunshine and clarity.
Because deep down we all know we are living in sickness–of the soul, of the system, and the only way out is a disavowal of it all. Our empathy and true pragmatism needs to spread in just as aggressive a manner as the toxic settler colonialists spread death, contagion, and despair.
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