Israel has unleashed
hell on Gaza.
As of 6th January 631 men, women,
and children are known to have been slaughtered in air strikes
using US supplied fighter aircraft, and in the invasion and
occupation. Another 2700 are known to have been injured, and many
of those will undoubtedly die as a direct consequence of Israel’s
ongoing siege, responsible for creating a dire shortage of basic
medicines that has left Gaza’s medical facilities degraded.
In the immediate aftermath of the first
brutal air strikes, the Israeli government issued a statement
warning that this is only the beginning, that operations against
Gaza will deepen, in a reminder of the threat made earlier in the
year by Israel’s Deputy Defence Minister, Matan Vilnai, who
promised the Palestinians of Gaza a ‘shoah’, or
holocaust.
Surely now it is time to stop equivocating when it comes to this
issue. Surely now the world must stand up and take action in
response to one of the most sustained, barbaric, and brutal
occupations in modern history, in a part of the world where
crimes against humanity have been allowed to exist for too long
under the guise of exceptionalism, victimhood, and democracy.
In response to Israel’s latest outrage, the usual round of
supine statements calling for restraint have been released from
capitals throughout the West. Yet again we are being regaled
nightly by claims from Israeli spokespeople and their supporters
of the existential threat to Israel from Hamas and Palestinian
terrorists, who continue to fire rockets against civilians and
who refuse to recognise Israel’s right to exist. It is a
claim to the status of victim that has been repeated so often
through the years of this perennial struggle it has assumed the
status of received truth. Yet it is a received truth which flies
in the face of a history of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and
expropriation.
As such, one of the most disgraceful aspects of this ongoing
conflict is the way in which our mainstream media continues to
present it as a struggle between two equal sides. In fact, on the
contrary, wherever and whenever possible the media acquiesces in
Israel’s role of victim, as a courageous little outpost of
western civilisation in the midst of Arab hordes committed to its
destruction.
Alarm bells should be set ringing when we
hear such easy assertions being made by mainstream commentators
and journalists. For we've been here before, haven't we? In fact,
the entire history of empire, colonialism, and imperialism is
replete with oppressors attempting to portray themselves as
victims and their victims as terrorists and savages that need to
be either tamed, cleansed or subjugated; and, of course, always
in the interests of civilisation or security and stability. Think
British Empire, think Nazi occupation of Europe, think French and
US occupation of Vietnam, think French occupation of Algeria,
think British occupation of Ireland, think Israel’s
occupation of Palestine - the same pattern emerges.
Among the aforementioned examples, the state
of Israel has enjoyed something of an Indian summer in terms of
its ability to continue to deny the Palestinians their national,
civil, and human rights. This is due largely to the guilt which
still pervades the upper reaches of European and US society over
a European Holocaust in which the Palestinians played no part.
This guilt has combined with strategic objectives, namely oil, to
provide Israel with the economic aid which has enabled it to
amass the fourth largest military in the world, a nuclear
arsenal, and with it legitimacy for a state policy of apartheid
and ethnic cleansing.
It’s ironic, is it not, that criticism
of Israel is immediately denounced as anti-Semitic, regardless of
how much savagery and violence it brings to bear against a people
whose only crime is that they continue to exist? That the
Palestinians have managed to survive 60 years of occupation,
expropriation, economic embargo, and state terror is testament to
their courage and indomitability. But even a courageous people
can only survive such brutality for so long without succumbing
and being sent into the night.
It’s a sobering thought to consider
that 60 years ago 530 Palestinian towns and villages were
depopulated and destroyed, and that 750,000 men, women, and
children were forcibly expelled by Zionist terrorist
organisations like the Stern Gang and Irgun in the process of 78
percent of historic Palestine being expropriated. The extent of
this crime against an entire people reflected the horror of the
crime committed by the Nazis which preceded it. Those who sought
sanctuary in another’s land did so in the name of the
victims of that holocaust. But perpetrators of crimes against
humanity can never claim to act on behalf of victims of crimes
against humanity; and it is indeed a cruel irony of history that
the victims of the genocide carried out by the Nazis are wedded
to the victims of Israel’s barbarism which followed through
a bond of human suffering that transcends ties of religion, race,
or ethnicity.
The continued siege of 1.5 million human beings in Gaza is
biblical both in scale and in its atavistic cruelty. Aided and
abetted in the carrying out of this crime against civilians by
the Egyptian government and the EU, Israel’s excuse for
continuing the siege is continuing rocket attacks from Gaza into
Israeli towns adjacent, in particular the Israeli town of Sderot.
But here again we see the work of a generation of scholars in
service to Israel and its interests in the rewriting of history.
In the case of Sderot, a determined attempt has been made to
suppress the fact that this is a town established on land where
the Palestinian village of Najd once stood. Najd’s
inhabitants were forcibly expelled from their village on 13 May
1948 by the Negev Brigade of the then nascent Israeli army,
before Israel was declared a state and before any Arab armies
entered Palestine. Therefore, in accordance with UN Resolution
194, and also with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Article 13, Section 2, the villagers of Najd have a right of
return to their homes.
The village of Najd was destroyed and settled by Zionists in
1951. It has been known ever since as the Israeli town of Sderot.
The history of the origins of Sderot is one repeated hundreds of
times all over what is now the state of Israel. Therefore, the
question a world interested in justice should be asking the
Israelis is a simple one: Do the Palestinians have the right to
exist?
As we await the Israelis to answer this question, all people of
conscience and consciousness must answer the call of the long
suffering Palestinians of Gaza for solidarity.
Their cause is the cause of humanity in our time.
John Wight