007 Israel

It looks like that Israel has a license to kill anyone, anywhere with absolute impunity. Never before in the annals of human history such bloodbath at such scale has played out day in and day out on 24 hours live news cycle

For months on end Israeli grim reaper has been hard at work, showing no signs of slowing down, rather expanding its circle ever wider: from Gaza, to West bank to Lebanon and Syria. It visited death without discrimination upon men and women, young and old, children and infants, sick and healthy. Anyone that breathes, lives and moves in the conflict zone is a fair target for Israel. No one is safe, not even groups customarily protected in all armed conflicts:  journalists, health workers, food deliverers, teachers. Israel's blood lust respects no boundaries. At times it seemed it was killing just to make a point that it was beyond the pale, where neither man’s nor God’s law can reach. Targeting of UN observers is just an expression of that savage hubris. 

In a very insightful comment by Norman Ficklestein: it is not that Israel is not following the rules of war, but that it  is following the logic of genocide.

Yes it is the G word and only that which explains the killing frenzy of Israel. 

It is true that human nature is red in tooth and claw, and  history is replete with countless examples of savagery of man against man. So there is nothing unique in Israeli conduct, one may argue. But there is one factor that is unique, which is that this merciless killing is taking place in full view of the whole global village thanks to ubiquitous mass media of the information age. The world listlessly, helplessly and a significant part of it indifferently watching God’s chosen people playing God, and appropriating to themselves the right to decide life and death for millions of people at the mercy of their guns. Leading the charge is Israel’s Air Force, a bolt from heavens, untouchable and unstoppable by anything that its victims possess, killing from safe distances, with mythical suddenness and lethality. For the people without a state or modern air defense or means to acquire it, there is absolutely no defense against this ungodly god like satanic power. Nothing highlights the unequal nature of this conflict - an asymmetry of epic proportions - than Israeli air power. It enables Israel to kill with impunity and at will with a minimal cost. 

“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport”.

Israel indeed is engaged in wanton destruction, not just of life but anything that sustains life. Schools, hospitals, universities, residential homes, water storage and treatment plants, shops bombed to smithereens. 

Flies indeed and their nests!

 Even world heritage sites have not escaped Israeli destructive rampage. Not only present but physical inheritance from the past can stand only on Israeli terms: Zionist occupation of both present and past in the region. Land, heritage. people, all open to cleansing.

The “most moral army” in the world fulfilling a messianic role, indeed!

 

We are staring at the face of momentous, multidimensional evil at this moment in world history. It is multidimensional because it is operative at many levels, not just at the level of savagery in the killing fields of Palestine and Lebanon, which may be its most brutal and visible face, but at levels seemingly benign and far removed from them. Those who are doing the actual killing, the soldiers of IDF, may be the face of this evil but its brain and sinews spread through the capitals and news and media rooms of the western world. As the industrial power of the west provides muscular strength, so its power of controlling and shaping the narrative in global media provides the cover and justification of this genocidal machine. 

The road to the genocide is paved from very early on by no less a person than the President of the United States: he came out with most blatant lie about “seeing the pictures of beheaded babies”, enabling at the outset to frame the conflict as between the forces of civilization and barbarism. Not surprisingly, as if taking the cue from him, the dehumanization of victims was carried further by Israel’s defense minister Gallant, calling the whole population of Gaza, “animals”. This is a classical genocidal playbook regarding the people en masse as less than humans before attempting to exterminate them.  The media and opinion makers of the so called civilized world - ranging from showbiz, and sports personalities to public intellectuals to civil society leaders - with few exceptions, instead of providing some restraint  on the genocidal impulses of Israel have been largely either indifferent or cheerleading. Let there be no doubts about it: Israel, with its size, economy and manpower, cannot sustain this genocidal campaign for more than a year without support to the hilt from powerful western sponsors. The blood of Palestinans is on the hands of all western countries, but mostly on the United States, the staunchest supporter of Israel. 

What makes this western support something more sinister and deeper than just the exigencies of realpolitik  is that it is deeply embedded in the very nature of modern western civilization. It is, therefore, not surprising that those very victims of one of the greatest crimes ever committed against humanity, namely the Holocaust, are now perpetrating a Holocaust themselves with the full support of their previous tormentors. It is because this pathology now playing out in the fields of Gaza is but just another version of the  western “disease” to dominate, and colonize, variously called “Lebensraum”, “white man’s burden” in its previous incarnations. At its heart is a sense of racial superiority, and by implication, a sense of entitlement to lord over “lesser” breeds, and if need be, to eliminate them like vermins. There is the deepest affinity between a racist, both conscious and unconscious, in the western world and a Zionist. It is at bottom the same evil that stalked the land in Srebrenica, Auschwitz, Warsaw Ghetto, and now Gaza and West Bank. 

This war is removing the veneer of self righteousness from the face of western civilization. It is not only the buildings that lay in ruins in Gaza but also an edifice, assiduously built by the apologists in the name of enlightenment and objectivity, of ideological support of western hegemony and its outpost, Israel, in the Middle East. Though there has always been an undercurrent of hostility to Islam dating back to Crusades in the western world, the intricate ecosystem of sophisticated propaganda with its single minded focus on “radical, fundamentalist, Jehadi Islam” got added impetus in the aftermath of 9/11. It created strange bedfellows in its single minded focus on Islam bashing: so called independent minded renowned intellectuals like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Denettl, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens (the new atheists) , crude Islamophobes like Ayan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nirin, famous writers like Salman Rushdie ostensibly standing for the freedom of conscience and creative expression, journalists and self styled prophets of modernity like Thomas Friedman , globe trotting , manufactured symbols of resistance to Islamic extremism like Malala Yusufzai, comedians and purveyors of shallow narratives like Bill Maher, and so forth. The real nature of this ecosystem is now being unraveled and exposed thanks to the sacrifice of brave Gazans. It is now becoming increasingly clear because of how the dividend from this propaganda campaign is being appropriated by the genocidal regime of Israel and its backer in the west that its aim was never a disinterested exercise of cultural or civilizational critique highlighting the inadequacies of the societies of the Muslim heartland, but to provide a cover and justification for the imperialist domination of oil rich Muslim Middle East, and frame any threat to it as an expression of religious fanaticism. There is not a daylight between this islamophobic blitz in the west spearheaded by the just mentioned ecosystem and the IDF talking points. In this parallel universe, Israel  is fighting a civilizational war as a frontline state, holding off the hordes of Islamic barbarism bent upon world conquest in a mission to impose Sharia law. Similar tropes and acronyms are used ad nauseam: ISIS, ISIL, Jehadis, radical Islam, blood thirsty clerics dreaming about the destruction of Israel. Lost in all this gaslighting is a perfectly reasonable question: Why has ISIS or ISIL, if they are motivated so much by Jehadi frenzy against infidels, have not targetted Isreal even once, even it was engaged in a clear genocide of its fellow believers?  One does not have to be privy to a secret information to draw a perfectly valid conclusion - based on the common sense criteria of who is benefiting most - that all this sectarian killing and soup of acronyms is another ghastly creation of Israeli-US intelligence apparatus to soften the ground for Israel’s acts of aggression.  

Nowhere is the basic hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of this enterprise more evident than in the case of its high brow evangelists, the intellectuals of new atheism. In the grab of being equal offenders to all religions, and of being opposed to all forms of obscurantism , they singled out Islam as being especially toxic, as it was regarded as still culturally embedded in pre-modernist times, untouched by the waves of reformation and enlightenment that had historically transformed Christendom. Their diagnosis of conflicts in which the Muslims have been involved is simple: it is modernity vs ante-deluvian world view of Islam. The implication (tacit or overt): West needs to bring Islam to the 21st century by holding it, as it were, from the scruff of its neck. Hence, all these US led western depredations, and wars in the Muslim world, are the result of rogue elements and regimes presiding over societies congenitally hostile to modernity. The claim of these “freethinkers”  is that they are not particularly biased against Islam or any specific religion, but are opposed to religious fundamentalism per se, which they regard as the foremost source of trouble in the world. Since, in their views, it is Muslims who are mostly the carriers of this “bug”, their special ire is reserved for them. Even if one ignores their extreme naivety in ignoring the historical, socio-political and economic context of the conflict in the Middle East, one finds their selective targeting of expressions of fundamentalism as extremely biased, and intellectually dishonest. One would expect them, for example, for the sake of consistency, to condemn equally and even more forcibly the killings bordering on genocide, going on right now in Gaza, led by declared, extreme right wing government in Israel, whose fealty to the fundamentalist, Zionist ideology is no secret! But, shamefully, you would see either reticence or justification of the crimes of Zionist fundamentalism. It is not that the fundamentalist nature of Zionist enterprise is much in doubt. The whole claim stems from Biblical right to the Holy land, as promised in the sacred literature of the Hebrew Bible. If one takes religion out of the picture, there would be absolutely no grounds for any claim by European Jews living for hundreds of years in Christendom on the lands in Palestine.

Not only these ideological servants of “power” are quiet about what is going on in Gaza, but also closer at home, about an unprecedented assault on what have been the bastions of liberal and humane values, the most prestigious institutions of higher learning. It seems that there is no safe place, not even the hallowed grounds and halls of the greatest institutions of the west, when it comes to exercising one’s right to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity. There is no cow more holier than Israel in the west! 

With complete disbelief, those who still have faith in protected islands of free speech beheld a spectacle of the Presidents of Harvard, Columbia and University Of Pennsylvania being grilled on live TV, by the paid henchmen of AIPAC (front for Zionism in US), in US congress, in a fashion not unlike the kangaroo trials of Stalin’s era or of Spanish Inquisition?  If nothing else could make these “freethinkers” riled up, this accusation from the Congressman against the President of Columbia that her “school was going against the Will of God”, in allowing protest against “God’s chosen people” should have done so. But you would look in vain for any word of criticism from these “new age” atheists, these crusading zealots against religious fundamentalists, to throw  a gauntlet to this naked expression of fundamentalism in the highest corridors of power in the government. Not only that, in spite of killings of thousands of innocent women and children, three of the five “new age” atheists : Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Salman Rushdie have come out justifying Israeli murderous acts in Gaza. The other two, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, must have been turning over in their graves at missing this historic opportunity to burnish their “free thinker” credentials! 

Thanks to the martyrs of Gaza for exposing these charlatans! 

Thanks Gaza, also for exposing the limits of freedoms in the western societies. Yes, there is a Chris Hedges, a Norman Ficklestein, a Jeffery Sachs to raise a dissident voice. Yes, people can organize to protest, and there have been many marches. That is all commendable, and a fruit of freedoms won as result of a long struggle of previous generations. But it is also equally evident that powerful interests erect all kinds of barriers to ensure that the dissident voices and protests remain confined within manageable limits, not able to disturb the statu-quo significantly. Whenever there is so much as a possibility of breach being made to the inner sanctum of power, it acts with a predictable ruthlessness to nip it in the bud. Unprecedented clamp down we saw in elite American universities is a clear example of it. Mainstream media and government are already pliant, thanks to the enormous influence of Israel Lobby, and now it is the turn of recalcitrant commons outside its control that would likely be enclosed. Be prepared for some draconian legislation in the vein of Patriot Act, but going further than that, to prevent any repeat of the kind of mass protests we have seen in this Gaza war.