The industrialized slaughter of millions of people (in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Libya, in Yemen, and in Palestine) by supposedly civilized Western nations and their allies, has in the last few decades called into question the whole Western view of a rules based system, reason, and morality. Palestine is but one example of the pointlessness of a rules based order when different rules are enforced for different populations.
In Israel, their treatment of Palestinians has resulted in generations of inexcusable abuse of an entire population, with the despicable backing of Western powers. Any claims of moral superiority or even basic humanity, any claims of reasonableness, any attempts to pretend to a moral high ground are by now seen (by any moderately well informed person) for the empty manipulative rhetoric that it is. The purpose served by making moral claims seems to be only to silence criticism while Israeli forces went about their murderous work against the Palestinians over the past decades. Rather than speaking of a Palestinian problem, It would be more truthful to say there is an Israeli problem, one of a conscienceless nation that has treated and continues to treat an entire people as sub-human.
If this was not genuinely the case, we would never have seen this current Palestinian uprising (with its tragic outcomes for both parties) or any of the previous ones, because a moral Israel would have ensured that the Palestinians were looked after, treated as equals, as fellow humans, and given freedom and dignity. There would have been no cause for Palestinians to desperately break out of their open air prison (in Gaza) in an attempt to strike out against their jailers. There would have been no panopticon-like prison to begin with. But the bitter truth is that for Israel and for their supporters there is no actual morality, only a pretence of it for public consumption. In actuality there is, it would seem, only “the will to power” of a government and an ideology that seek to dominate and bend others to their purpose (to erase Palestinian autonomy and ultimately their existence as a people with a land and a history of their own). Israel has not sought fairness or justice for Palestinians at any level, but instead has acted out and enforced policies of brutal discrimination. Dissenters and dissenting views are lambasted.
We are told there cannot be moral equivalence between Israel and Palestine. This is more proof of the moral bankruptcy of those who make such statements. Without moral equality, without assuring the rights and privileges of all, without putting aside the polemical approach of Israeli superiority, an approach which they have used for decades as a cover to behave with depravity towards Palestinians, there can only be repeated rebellions against the fascist tactics adopted by the Israeli leadership.
Israel and their American enablers have had remarkable success in rendering moral language almost entirely meaningless. Their hegemonic savagery and endless propagation of misinformation and lies in the service of national goals has achieved the dubious result of reducing their national morality and ethics into some kind of linguistic or logical error. They spin fables for their populations as if they are children who need a nice fictional bedtime story to put their political intelligence to sleep. And so, having lulled the moral and political conscience they comfortably go to their brutal tasks with speed and amoral ease. Sadly, it can truly be said that in this day and age, “Something is rotten in the state of” Israel.