What is Israel?

Israel is a State that, over the years, has normalized massacre, torture, and ethnic cleansing. The only acceptable Palestinian response in the eyes of Israel and their ideological and State supporters and financiers in the West is for the Palestinians to submit to their subjugation and to submit to the ongoing theft of their land, their lives, and their dignity.

The Israeli State functions as a whole like a war criminal that knows it has the backing of its Western enablers and so, as it has for decades, comfortably goes about committing its criminal colonial atrocities. The Western propaganda machine is gearing up to once again propagate a delusional fantasy whose only purpose is to allow the deeply violent Israeli state to continue to violate Palestinian rights and remove objections to the destruction of the few small remaining bits of Palestine.

Israel and the West exist in a self-admiring echo chamber in dialog with themselves and no interest in even seeing the people they repeatedly brutalize as human. This is a self constructed fantasy from which they do not wish to wake, but which will not hold. The Palestinians will not forever acquiesce to simply absorb the never ending violence visited upon them. Their sporadic acts of desperate active resistance is an attempt to remove the chains the world wishes to permanently bind around their necks.

Waking Israel and the West from their shared fantasy narrative is a prodigiously difficult task. The mental rot has penetrated so deeply as to be almost ineradicable. The decades of incessant and endless savagery and barbarity of the Israelis is for them a type of inverted principle or value they cling to in structuring their actions against Palestine. For the Palestinians, they have been brought to a stage where, for them, “there is nothing (remaining) for death to take away.”

Any loss of life is extremely saddening, any loss of civilian life is especially heartbreaking. But what can one say to a people driven to resist their occupier after experiencing unrelieved extremes of suffering in their own land for decades, while those with the power to settle matters in a just manner have instead enabled their occupiers and killers decade after decade.

Now, once again, Israel and America will ramp up their spin factories to erase the past that led to the current state of affairs, refuse to countenance any blame for Israel and its past brutality, shift all blame on to Palestinians, and justify their indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Gaza. UN resolutions will be violated, international law will be violated, Palestinians will be dehumanized, and the ones who suffer and are punished will be those who had nothing to do with the recent Hamas attack. The Western media will become a solid wall of anti-Palestine and pro-Israel propaganda, peppered with misleading narratives. And together Israel and the West will march onwards to slaughter those trapped in the concentration camp that is Gaza. Sadly, a nation that was supposed to be a light for the world, has become instead, one that seems intent on covering an entire region in darkness.

It is not surprising that the same nations that even today justify their unnecessary killing of millions in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, in Afghanistan, who speak about the rule of law while violating those very same rules around the world, it is not surprising that they would obscure a decades long history of abuse by Israel and once again justify the colonizer. Israel is protected while it violates every rule. Palestine must abide by all the rules. And so the cycle continues. The only option given is submit or die. And so we begin to understand the world and the brutalized future that Israel and the West wish to shape. They give no choice to the Palestinians but these two options and feign surprise when these Palestinians make instead a desperate and unfortunate choice of their own.

Hamas should be held responsible for every civilian life they may have taken. Israel should be held responsible for each and every civilian life they take over the coming days and weeks. Colateral damage is not an acceptable excuse and the perpretrators whether they are Hamas or Israel should be held to account. Of course, this will not happen. For Hamas’ action, all Palestinians will be collectively punished. For Israel’s crimes, past and present, they will be rewarded with funds and weapons and surveillance equipment and all the things they need to further subjugate and dehumanize and degrade the Palestinian people. This is the inverted world we inhabit.

Now we can only watch in mute horror at the result of the policies of the past, the policies that, it seems, the West and Israel are doubling down on. Like gamblers so addicted to their vice that they are oblivious to the self-inflected disaster rolling out the future like a pair of one eyed dice on the crap table that they have made of the world.

Also see: This Israel

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Another blog: islam from inside