Let the horrors of the Gaza carnage be the last !
Purge the State of Israel of its Zionist foundations!
by Yorgos Mitralias
Hell on earth! Weeks and months go by and the martyrdom of the Palestinians in Gaza, but also those on the West Bank, continues, reaching new heights of horror day after day! All themore infamous and intolerable given that the massacre is taking place before everyone's eyes, live on our TV screens, day and night, without interruption. And, above all, with the active (USA, EU) or passive (China, Russia, India) complicity of the "great powers" of this world, who are content to play spectator, while predicting that the worst is yet to come! Horror mixed with unbearable emotion, rage, but also the deepest disgust…
Disgust for our Western leaders, who don't shy away from the most macabre ridicule, when they keep calling on Israel to... « protect Palestinian civilians », at the very moment when Israel is methodically exterminating them! And to top it all off, the American government... congratulates Israel, noting that the Israeli army is complying with American wishes to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians, while the hecatomb of these Palestinian civilians accumulates and surpasses all precedent!
Disgust too for - almost all - our media and their journalists who persist in telling us about a certain "war between Hamas and Israel", when in reality there is nothing but a well-planned war of extermination waged by Israel against the Palestinian people under the pretext of military operations aimed at liquidating Hamas, whose crime is exactly that it offered Israel this pretext with its terrorist actions on October 7. These media and their journalists who remain deafeningly silent about the martyrdom of the Palestinians, to the point of saying nothing even about their own colleagues, the 72 journalists targeted first and killed in Gaza by the Israeli army, since the start of this barbarity. These media and their journalists who feel no need to protest, even out of professional solidarity, against the Israeli authorities who threaten reprisals ranging from economic asphyxiation to closure, the few media who dare to report the raw facts and give a voice to the victims of the ongoing genocide. These are the media that we feel duty-bound to name by name, the Israeli daily Haaretz, and the TV channels that are a credit to journalism, such as the British BBC, and even more so the American CNN, and above all the Arab Al Jazeera, whose journalists pay with their lives and blood and the blood of their families, for the fact that they do what the overwhelming majority of their colleagues in the Western media, led by the French media, refuse to do: faithfully report what is happening on the ground, giving a voice to the victims but also to their executioners.
Disgust and repulsion therefore for these same media, which increasingly give the impression of being on a command mission, and which skilfully hide behind supposedly "neutral" phrases reporting Israeli "strikes", the daily reality which consists of these veritable firing exercises by the Israeli army against defenseless Palestinian civilians, terrorized, bloodied, starving, thirsty, and already decimated, who even wander on foot or on the back of a donkey (! ) under an avalanche of shells, missiles and 900-kilogram bombs, from north to south and south to north of this tiny Gaza Strip, at the whim of the sadism of their executioners armed to the teeth. A sadism that is not at all gratuitous, but an integral part of the supremacist arrogance that characterizes not only the current rulers but also their state, and unfortunately even most of Israeli society!
So here we are, at the heart of the interminable Palestinian tragedy: the nature, or rather the colonial raison d'être, of the Israeli state, which, in the absence of a constitution for the country, is none other than that defined by its founding project, the Zionist project. A Zionist project that neither advocates nor accepts the cohabitation, let alone the peaceful coexistence, of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples in a state that must be exclusively Jewish, the Hebrew state. (1) Seen from the angle of this Zionist project, everything becomes clearer and more comprehensible. Like, for example, the persistent refusal of Israeli leaders to heed the warnings of their Western allies that too much slaughter of Palestinians breeds tomorrow's terrorists. Here, it's not a question of an alleged inability on the part of Israeli leaders to understand what's really in their interest. In fact, it's precisely because Israeli leaders know exactly what's in their interest, that they do everything in their power to consciously create and permanently maintain the terrorist threat! And they do this by humiliating, torturing, imprisoning and killing Palestinians from an early age, because they know very well that when you treat someone like an animal, you force them to react like an animal! For without the enemy and the psychosis of the external threat that drives the frightened population to unite behind its leaders, "forgetting" their misdeeds and its own problems, it would be impossible for Netanyahu, for example, to stay in power, because it's well known that, once the current military operations are over, he will be tried and convicted for his corruption, and will probably end his days in prison. But beware: this is not just about Netanyahu, but about the State of Israel itself, which, more than any other, vitally needs the permanent external threat in order to keep its population, as well as the Diaspora, united around its Zionist project.
Similarly, it is only by examining it from the angle of the founding colonial project that we can understand the reason for the current murderous and destructive fury of the Israeli army in Gaza, but also in the West Bank. Once again, we are not witnessing technical "errors" or poor judgment on the part of Israeli leaders, who are supposedly blinded by their vindictive rage against Hamas and its crimes. In reality, the methodical massacre and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, which began with the liquidation of the veritable ghetto of Gaza, is being carried out with a clear conscience, as it corresponds to the historical objectives of the Zionist project: the creation, through the extermination, expulsion and subjugation of the natives, of an exclusively Jewish state on the entire land of Greater Israel!
The conclusion is obvious: such a state is by nature monstrous, inhuman and... irreformable. Monstrous not only for the indigenous people it oppresses and destroys, but also for its own Jewish citizens, to whom it promised the security they sorely lacked and... never found in Israel. And irreformable, because its internal logic has meant that its initial egalitarian and democratic illusions have been gradually replaced by successive shifts towards an increasingly racist and anti-democratic extreme right, culminating in today's religious, pogromist, obscurantist and fascist, if not fascist, extreme right, with its fanatical and messianic discourse from another age.
So, the solution is obvious: we need to change this state from top to bottom, to make it at least "normal", "like the others". In short, it must be de-Zionized. This would pave the way for the definitive overcoming of the illusory and unattainable "two-state solution", through the creation of a multi-ethnic state where the Jewish and Palestinian populations could peacefully cohabit, sharing the same rights. However, the realization of such a project is by no means easy. In the first of the two most illustrious cases that can serve as a guide, the denazification of Germany at the end of the 2nd World War was imposed by the powers that defeated it on the battlefield. In the second case, that of South African apartheid, the "purification" and "normalization" of the state was carried out from within, on the initiative of two previously enemy populations. On the basis of these precedents, we can already rule out applying the German denazification model to Israel, because it would presuppose Israel's military defeat, which would most likely lead to a terrible bloodbath of its Jewish population.
That leaves the South African variant, which assumes that Israel's de-Zionization will come from within, on the initiative of its own citizens. This perspective is not only more feasible. It is also far more realistic and effective, since it would be carried out without external constraint, and would therefore have every chance of taking root and lasting in the consciousness of the first parties concerned, its own citizens. This being said, the current state of Israeli society, which is united around its leaders and its army, and refuse to concern themselves with the fate of the Palestinians, does not at all mean that there are no Jews who have already decided to undertake the historic task, so fraught with consequences, of de-Zionizing their country. They do exist, both in the Diaspora and in Israel itself, much to the dismay of both Zionists and anti-Semites who, by common consent, refuse to accept the existence of Jews who are not Zionists. They do exist, and their humanist and internationalist activism is already bearing fruit in Israel and around the world. These are the admirable young Jewish men and women of anti-Zionist and pacifist movements such as If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace, who in the space of a few years have been able to multiply their influence beyond all expectations, to the point of mobilizing thousands of other Jews in the last two months in demonstrations and other almost daily actions in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza, in the United States and elsewhere. They are also heroic Israeli citizens like Sasha Povolotsky and his comrades, who live day and night with the Palestinian peasants of Al Farisiya village to protect them from the Israeli settler gangs, and who don't hesitate to fight against these fascist commandos and shed their blood alongside their Palestinian brothers, as they did just a few days ago, on December 4, 2023!(2)
Yes, there should be more of them today, but we must remember that South African activists were perhaps even less numerous when they began to fight against apartheid, with the success we all know. Yes, we'd like them to be more numerous, but... all the more reason to help them with all our might, to popularize their struggle and their ideas, to build solidarity movements with them and with the Palestinians who are fighting the same battle in even more difficult conditions. Moreover, as the name they have chosen for their movement If Not Now so aptly puts it, if not now, then when?
Notes
1. See Gilbert Achcar's excellent text The Zionist Project’s Duality Escaping Racist Oppression and Reproducing It in Colonial Context: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/34667
2. Haaretz, Left-wing Israeli Activists Attacked While Protecting Settler-targeted West Bank Village: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-04/ty-article/.premium/left-wing-israeli-activists-attacked-while-protecting-settler-targeted-west-bank-village/0000018c-35c4-d5f2-a5cc-77d471c10000