the RESPECT party

If I were a Jew or Gypsy, Nazi barbarity would be the most atrocious event in history. If I were a Black African, it would be slavery and apartheid. If I were a native American, it would be the discovery of the New World by European explorers and settlers that resulted in near-total extermination. If I were an Armenian, it would be the Ottoman massacres.

I happen to be a Palestinian, and for me it is the Nakba.

Humanity should consider all the above repugnant. I do not consider it advisable to debate hierarchies of suffering. I do know how to quantify pain or measure suffering. I do know that we are not children of a lesser God.

Afif Safieh – Palestinian diplomat

The UN’s controversial report into Israel’s attack on the Palestinian aid flotilla in May of 2010, when the Turkish ship the Mavi Marmara was assaulted by Israeli commandoes from both sea and air and nine passengers killed, yet again focuses the world’s attention on Israel’s ability to commit acts of piracy in international waters, state sanctioned murder, and crimes against humanity with impunity.

Worse, in a new departure for the UN an act of collective punishment in the shape of Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza, hitherto illegal under international law, has been rubber stamped, thus defacing at a stroke one of the cornerstones of international law that has been in place since the end of the Second World War.

The nine killed during Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara were Turkish citizens, and Turkey’s response to the UN flotilla report has been to expel the Israeli Ambassador. Israel has continually refused to issue an official apology to Ankara for the massacre of nine of its citizens on the high seas and consequently relations between both countries have reached an all time low.

But this latest manifestation of Israel’s disregard for international law and human rights bears closer examination. In essence its aggressive and brutal approach to those whose rights have been denied by its policies of expropriation, siege and military occupation reflects the brutal nature of its formation as a settler colonial state backed and sponsored by the West. But lost in the process of Israel’s creation, a process which involved mass ethnic cleansing and the forced expropriation of Palestinian land, have been the lessons of history.

Most empires and colonial projects fall under the weight of their own contradictions, but usually over a protracted period of determined resistance, both passive and active, on the part of its victims. At the same time the material privileges gained from the exploitation and expropriation of a colonised people acts as a slow-acting corrosive on the society of the colonising state, poisoning it with racism and hatred for those it has colonised as it seeks to justify the material privileges and psychological sense of supremacy and national pride that accrues from that colonisation. This moral decay is commonly reflected in the degeneration that takes place in the armed forces of the state in question, where the emphasis of the troops shifts from self sacrifice and heroism in support of a just and galvanising cause to personal survival as demoralisation sets in.

In other words, the day to day reality of perpetuating oppression and injustice overcomes any amount of national propaganda in support of that oppression. In this the case of American troops in Vietnam is a prime example.

There the reality on the ground of killing and being killed in a country thousands of miles from home in an ignoble war eventually proved stronger than the propaganda the troops had been fed that they were fighting in the cause of freedom. This resulted in a widespread and growing breakdown in discipline, almost to the point where the US military effort in Vietnam was in danger of complete collapse. It might even be argued that on a certain level atrocities like My Lai were informed by a projection of the self loathing experienced by more and more American troops in the field as the reality of the injustices they were committing took hold.

Another and contemporary example of this moral degeneration is the case of the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces. Last year’s previously described massacre of civilians during an attempt to ferry humanitarian aid to Gaza in a flotilla of aid ships is a case in point.Blatant and cold blooded acts of murder like this are the product of the constructed mythology that has sustained Israel since its creation in 1948. It is a mythology which combines both a biblical and political justification for the state’s existence. On the one hand it constitutes the realisation of an ancient covenant in which the land of historic Palestine was promised by God to the Israelites, the descendants of Abraham, over 2,000 years ago, while on the other hand it is the fulfilment of the Zionist postulate that in a world that is irredeemably antisemitic the Jewish people, hitherto stateless, would never find peace and security until they had a state of their own.

While the former can instantly be dismissed as obscurantist poppycock, it must be said that the second of the aforementioned philosophical arguments in support of Israel’s existence reflects a concrete historical reality in the shape of the wave of antisemitism that swept across Europe in the latter part of the 19th century, and which gave rise to the emergence of Zionism.

If anyone was still in any doubt as to the power behind the early proponent’s of Zionism’s calls for a Jewish state, as the vast majority of Jews in the Diaspora were for decades, the inimitable horrors of the Holocaust during the Second World War instantly dispelled them. Indeed, the psychological impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish people cannot be underestimated, proving fertile ground for the extreme nationalism that now emanates from a significant section of Israeli society.

Regardless, the six decades of injustice suffered by the Palestinians as a result cannot be justified on any level by the suffering experienced by the Jews of Europe, else we describe a world in which the only answer to oppression is to oppress others.

Moreover, the victims of the Nazi Holocaust share a bond of humanity with victims of every other genocide and state sanctioned crimes against humanity throughout history. It is a bond that transcends ethnicity, religion and/or nationality, and which embraces the many thousand Palestinian victims of the Nakba and the millions more subsequently rendered stateless and refugees as a consequence.

The romantic ideals attached to the pioneering spirit of the founders of Israel, along with international sympathy for a people who’d suffered such grotesque brutality at the hands of the Nazis, imbued the nascent state with a sense of purpose and destiny that helped mask the atrocities being carried out in its name.

A mythology of heroism and bravery was already being constructed when it came to Zionist militia organisations like the Haganah and Irgun. It was a mythology that continued on into the ranks of IDF when Israel was founded in 1948, embodied in the adoption of the state’s guiding ‘purity of arms’ ethos, one designed to give romantic flavour to the militarism that sits at its heart. The truth is however that the ranks of the Haganah, Irgun, and various other Zionist militia groups, along with the IDF when it was formed later, were and are filled with racist killers massacring men, women and children in order to fulfil the biblical and national destinies previously mentioned.

This toxic mix of racism and exceptionalism has led to the existence of a state that since its formation has viewed its repeated violations of international law and its crimes against humanity entirely justified. Indeed, so deeply ingrained is the biblical and historical justification for Israel’s continued depredations against the Palestinians that when it comes to international condemnation of its crimes, rather than a cause for reflection and introspection within Israeli society, for many it merely serves to reaffirm Israel’s view of itself as the last bastion of defence of the Jewish people in a hostile world.

The day to day reality of this corrosive outlook involves young Israeli soldiers, mostly conscripts, humiliating, intimidating and brutalising civilians at checkpoints, or killing Palestinians and Arabs in general in the knowledge they are able to do so with relative impunity.

But when those same soldiers come up against a determined and dogged resistance on the ground, such as they did in 2006 during the brief war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, their resolve crumbles and they are defeated. This is key to understand why Israel, just like its chief sponsor the US when it comes to its own military operations, has come to rely on an advanced arsenal of missiles, aircraft, helicopter gunships, drones, and tanks in its continuing conflict with the entire population of Gaza for the crime of exercising its right to elect a government of its own choosing.

Such would be the demoralising effect not only on the troops but also and more importantly on Israeli society at large, Israel knows it cannot afford to sustain heavy casualties during its repeated military operations against a largely unarmed population.

To put it another way, while Israeli troops are more than willing to kill to maintain the material privileges attached to living in a settler colonial state, one in which their consumer lifestyles are subsidised by the West, increasingly they have demonstrated a reluctance to die for those privileges. More significantly, the unprecedented and recent eruption of popular protest within Israel itself over rising levels of inequality is evidence that the manufactured fear of the threat of destruction at the hands of barbarous Arab hordes is no longer viable as a connecting thread and source of cohesion within Israeli society.

All in all the evidence suggests that the moral foundations upon which Israel rests are being increasingly shaken. That being said, no one should be in any doubt that as the struggle by the Palestinians for justice continues there will be more instances of attacks on civilians and more massacres as Israel feels its existence as an apartheid state threatened . More tears will be shed and more children will grow up as refugees in their own land.

Evidence of the increased pressure that Israel is under is reflected in the growing desperation of its propaganda in painting the motivation of its growing number of critics and opponents as being founded in antisemitism. But where previously such calumniation would have been suffice to silence dissenting voices, now it merely discredits Israel and its supporters and apologists further.

Throughout history humanity has been locked in struggle between oppressor and oppressed. It is a struggle that has posed the same question to each succeeding generation.

Whose side are you on?

Israel as an apartheid state has no future. Only as a state which embraces the concept of universal human rights, justice and dignity for all who share the same land can it ensure the peace and security of its people.

More than any other this is the abiding lesson of history.

John Wight - September 2011

Postscript: The Turkish Government has announced that in response to the UN flotilla report it will challenge Israel’s blockade of Gaza at the International Criminal Court (ICC).