Palestinians Speak the Language of Violence Israel Taught Them
Chris Hedges
The indiscriminate shootings of Israelis by Hamas and other Palestinian resistance organizations, the kidnapping of civilians, the barrage of rockets into Israel, drone attacks on a variety of targets from tanks to automated machine gun nests, are the familiar language of the Israeli occupier. Israel has spoken this blood-soaked language of violence to the Palestinians since Zionist militias seized more than 78% of historic Palestine, destroyed some 530 Palestinian villages and cities, and killed about 15,000 Palestinians in more than 70 massacres. Some 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed between 1947 and 1949 to create the state of Israel in 1948.
Israel’s response to these armed incursions will be a genocidal assault on Gaza. Israel will kill dozens of Palestinians for every Israeli killed. Hundreds of Palestinians have already died in Israel air assaults since the launch of “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” on Saturday morning, which left 700 Israelis dead.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned Palestinians in Gaza on Sunday to “leave now,” because Israel is going to “turn all Hamas hiding places into rubble.”
But where are Palestinians in Gaza supposed to go? Israel and Egypt blockade the land borders. There is no exit by air or sea, which are controlled by Israel.
The collective retribution against innocents is a familiar tactic employed by colonial rulers. We used it against Native Americans and later in the Philippines and Vietnam. The Germans used it against the Herero and Namaqua in Namibia. The British in Kenya and Malaya. The Nazis used it in the areas they occupied in the Soviet Union, Eastern, and Central Europe. Israel follows the same playbook. Death for death. Atrocity for atrocity. But it is always the occupier who initiates this macabre dance and trades piles of corpses for higher piles of corpses.
This is not to defend the war crimes by either side. It is not to rejoice in the attacks. I have seen enough violence in the Israeli occupied territories, where I covered the conflict for seven years, to loathe violence. But this is the familiar denouement to all settler-colonial projects. Regimes implanted and maintained by violence engender violence. The Haitian war of liberation. The Mau Mau in Kenya. The African National Congress in South Africa. These uprisings do not always succeed, but they follow familiar patterns. The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have a right to armed resistance under international law.
Israel never had any interest in an equitable settlement with the Palestinians. It built an apartheid state and has steadily absorbed larger and larger tracts of Palestinian land in a slow motion campaign of ethnic cleansing. It turned Gaza in 2007 into the world’s largest open air prison.
What does Israel, or the world community, expect? How can you trap 2.3 million people in Gaza, half of whom are unemployed, in one of the most densely populated spots on the planet for 16 years; reduce the lives of its residents, half of whom are children, to a subsistence level; deprive them of basic medical supplies, food, water, and electricity; use attack aircraft, artillery, mechanized units, missiles, naval guns, and infantry units to randomly slaughter unarmed civilians and not expect a violent response? Israel is currently carrying out waves of aerial assaults on Gaza, preparing a ground invasion and has cut the power to Gaza, which usually only operates two to four hours per day.
Many of the resistance fighters who infiltrated into Israel undoubtedly knew they would be killed. But like resistance fighters in other wars of liberation they decided that if they could not choose how they would live, they would choose how they would die.
I was a close friend of Alina Margolis-Edelman who was part of the armed resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in World War II. Her husband, Marek Edelman, was the deputy commander of the uprising and the only leader to survive the war. The Nazis had sealed 400,000 Polish Jews inside the Warsaw Ghetto. The trapped Jews died in the thousands, from starvation, disease, and indiscriminate violence. When the Nazis began to transport the remaining Jews to the extermination camps the resistance fighters fought back. None expected to survive.
Edelman, after the war, condemned Zionism as a racist ideology used to justify the theft of Palestinian land. He sided with the Palestinians, supported their armed resistance, and met frequently with Palestinians leaders. He thundered against Israel’s appropriation of the Holocaust to justify its repression of the Palestinian people. While Israel dined out on the mythology of the ghetto uprising, it treated the only surviving leader of the uprising, who refused to leave Poland, as a pariah. Edelman understood that the lesson of the Holocaust and the ghetto uprising was not that Jews are morally superior or eternal victims. History, Edelman said, belongs to everyone. The oppressed, including the Palestinians, had a right to fight for equality, dignity, and liberty.
“To be a Jew means always being with the oppressed and never the oppressors,” Edelman said.
The Warsaw uprising has long inspired the Palestinians. Representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) used to lay a wreath at the annual commemoration of the uprising in Poland at the Warsaw Ghetto monument.
The more violence the colonizer expends to subdue the occupied, the more it transforms itself into a monster. The current government of Israel is populated by Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists, and religious bigots who are dismantling Israeli democracy and calling for the wholesale expulsion or murder of Palestinians, including those who live inside Israel.
The Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel,” warned that if Israel did not separate church and state it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult.
“Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who died in 1994.
He understood that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war that captured Egypt’s Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Syria’s Golan Heights, was dangerous and would lead to the ultimate destruction of Israel, along with any hope of democracy.
“Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” he warned.
He foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”
He saw that prolonged occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably spawn “concentration camps.”
“Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
The next stage of this struggle will be a massive campaign of industrial slaughter in Gaza by Israel, which has already begun. Israel is convinced greater levels of violence will finally crush Palestinian aspirations. Israel is mistaken. The terror Israel inflicts is the terror it will get.
(Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019). Courtesy: Scheerpost. Scheerpost is an independent (US-based) daily news site covering issues of human rights, international conflict, criminal justice and world peace, founded and published by Robert Scheer.)
The Violence of the Oppressed
Editors, Morning Star Online
No one should cheer the slaughter in Israel. Those Israeli families in their homes, the young people at the music festival deserve to be alive. The small Israeli boy taken hostage and videoed being tormented deserves to be home and safe.
And when Jews are massacred indiscriminately it is inevitable that Jews everywhere, and not only they, will see a pogrom. Any response that does not understand the fear Jewish people feel lacks moral imagination.
But to forebear from cheering is not to condemn. When the Mau-Mau killed farming families in their beds, socialists did not cheer. They saw instead the refracted violence of British colonialism and fascist settlers denying land and freedom to the Kenyan people.
Nor did anyone celebrate when the FLN bombed cafes and concert halls in Algiers. Yet those blasts were the echo of 150 years of French imperialist brutality.
Mao Zedong famously wrote that “a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture … it cannot be so refined, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.” Nor is it a Twitter thread.
The “civilised” world prefers its illusions, and above all prefers to turn its head from the violence of the oppressed. So it is in Palestine.
The governments of world imperialism condemn the inhumanity of people whose humanity they have denied for generations, a people who they seek to write out of history by violence, by dispossession and ultimately by ignoring their existence.
The “civilised” condemn the murder of innocents, as if it was possible for the violence of the dispossessed to only reach the guilty, secure in their guarded compounds, and as if their own hands were spotless.
The civilised legitimise only their own preferred methods—ethnic cleansing through sombre jurisprudence, notionally “targeted” massacre deploying the highest technology available, the lawful imprisonment of children, starvation sanctions.
Thus attacking a police station in Israel constitutes terrorism, while bombing a hospital in Gaza is self-defence. And a British Foreign Secretary endorses the war crime of collective punishment through starvation.
Much sweeter if the oppressed always marched under the banners of Bloomsbury or Berkley, and stuck within the reservations of Western-sanctioned ideologies.
Yet the eschatological Islamism within Hamas is not down to atavistic “historic Islamist bloodlust, passed down through the generations from birth” in the shocking words of the editorial director of Jewish News this week.
Its charter anti-semitism is an ignorant, imported and inexcusable reaction to a modernity that has failed to deliver for Palestinians.
Neither is asymmetrical war attractive to look at. It is bloody, intimate, and often unspeakably cruel. But it is not the alternative to symmetrical war, which is unavailable even were it desirable.
It is the alternative to silence. Those who denounce Hamas’s attacks today also denounced the unarmed demonstrations at the Gaza border fence in 2018. 223 Palestinians died then without a gun in their hands.
They criminalise the peaceful Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign to pressurise Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. They deny the Palestinian Authority the right to seek redress at the International Court of Justice.
They demand instead that the Palestinian people acquiesce in their own historical marginalisation.
All the “civilised” will accept from the Palestinian people is silence. At most, the prisoner may be permitted to parley with the jailer for improved rations.
But perhaps the penny will drop, even among the bien-pensants of social democracy, whose own history is steeped in bloody imperial violence from MacDonald in India to Attlee in Indonesia and Blair in Iraq: if you cannot stomach the violence of the oppressed, then halt the oppression.
(Courtesy: Morning Star Online, a socialist British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. It has been functioning as an independent readers’ cooperative since 1945.)
Israel Accused of ‘Blatant War Crime’ as Human Rights Watch Confirms White Phosphorus Used in Gaza
Brett Wilkins
Human Rights Watch on Thursday said it has confirmed reports that Israeli military forces unleashed white phosphorus munitions during artillery attacks on targets in Lebanon and Gaza this week, including over a heavily populated civilian area of the besieged Palestinian strip—an apparent war crime.
HRW said it has interviewed witnesses and verified video footage shot in Lebanon and Gaza on Tuesday and Wednesday “showing multiple airbursts of artillery-fired white phosphorus over the Gaza City port and two rural locations along the Israel-Lebanon border.”
The HRW announcement came as Israeli forces continue to bombard Gaza from air, land, and sea in an assault that has killed more than 1,500 Palestinians, including at least 500 children, in retaliation for Hamas’ surprise infiltration of Israel and killing of over 1,300 Israeli soldiers and civilians.
As HRW explained Thursday:
Upon contact, white phosphorus can burn people, thermally and chemically, down to the bone as it is highly soluble in fat and therefore in human flesh. White phosphorus fragments can exacerbate wounds even after treatment and can enter the bloodstream and cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and the wounds are reexposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal. For survivors, extensive scarring tightens muscle tissue and creates physical disabilities.
WP burns as hot as 1,500°F. Water does not extinguish it.
“Any time that white phosphorus is used in crowded civilian areas, it poses a high risk of excruciating burns and lifelong suffering,” HRW Middle East and North Africa director Lama Fakih said in a statement. “White phosphorous is unlawfully indiscriminate when airburst in populated urban areas, where it can burn down houses and cause egregious harm to civilians.”
“To avoid civilian harm, Israel should stop using white phosphorus in populated areas,” Fakih added. “Parties to the conflict should be doing everything they can to spare civilians from further suffering.”
HRW previously accused Israel of war crimes for using WP munitions in densely populated areas—including over a United Nations school—during the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead invasion of Gaza. In response to a 2013 petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice filed by human rights groups including HRW, the Israel Defense Forces said it would no longer use WP in populated areas, with “very narrow exceptions” that it would not disclose.
Other countries’ militaries also use WP, most notably the United States, which fired the incendiary rounds during the 2004 battle for Fallujah and elsewhere in the so-called War on Terror.
In 2016, Saudi Arabia was condemned for allegedly firing U.S.-supplied WP munitions against Houthi rebels in Yemen. WP and other incendiary weapons have also been used by Syrian government and Russian forces fighting Islamic State and other militants during the Syrian civil war. Turkey has also been accused of firing WP rounds at Kurdish civilians in Syria.
(Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams. Courtesy: Common Dreams, a US non-profit news portal.)
