The psychopathology of a settler state
By Habib Siddiqui
This year, the Government of Israel celebrated its 70th
birthday in what may well be described as brutal, blatant, murderous, thuggish and
shameful. Through its acts of colossal arrogance and orgy of wanton killings,
once again, the settler racist state revealed that it is above scrutiny, beyond
repair and cannot be tamed by either Gandhi-style protests or the world
opinion. As the new Goliath in the world scene, it is there to stay by hook or
crook!
Welcome to the new world that we live in where conscionable
human beings are increasingly confined to becoming non-entities while criminal
acts of the powerful - the Goliaths in our midst - are either overlooked or
excused. The scholars of eschatology are calling this age the ‘pre-dawn era of
the emergence of the Anti-Christ’ where the baton in world dominance will be shifting
steadily to Pax-Israel from Pax-Americana, and Jerusalem taking the center
stage in the global arena.
To highlight this transition, on May 14, the Trump Administration opened the US Embassy in
Jerusalem, which was hailed by the US and Israeli leaders as a sign of the
enduring relationship between the two countries and of US trustworthiness.
President Donald Trump
did not attend the ceremony in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood, but in a video
message broadcast at the event he congratulated Israel, saying the opening had
been "a long time coming."
Once again, international
leaders could not sway the US President from his haughty decision to break with
international norms by moving the embassy. A new train
station to be built near the Western Wall in holy Jerusalem is named rather
amusingly after the debauch Trump whom some in Israel and within the evangelical
Christian community see as
their new messiah or as his forerunner.
France expressed its
official disapproval. South Africa pulled its envoy from Tel Aviv, while Turkey
pulled its ambassadors from both Washington and Tel Aviv. President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan rightly told an audience in London that the US prefers "to
become part of the problem rather than the solution" and that it "has
lost its role as mediator in the Middle East peace process."
As noted by TV
journalists, the celebratory air in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood, however, contrasted
sharply with the wanton murder of unarmed and stone-throwing Palestinians. Some
60 Palestinians were killed and another 3,000 injured by Israeli sharpshooters.
Their crime: they protested Israeli annexation of their ancestral land by the
Zionist usurpers.
The U.N.'s Middle East
envoy said there was no justifying the killings of scores of Palestinians by
Israeli fire at the Gaza border, and several Security Council members called
for an independent investigation.
The UN secretary-general,
Antonio Guterres, was "profoundly alarmed by the sharp escalation of
violence in the occupied Palestinian territory and the high number of
Palestinians killed and injured in the Gaza protest." Guterres added that
Israeli security forces "must exercise maximum restraint in the use of live
fire."
However, the Netanyahu
government, like its Zionist predecessors, has never been sobered by such
criticisms. It enjoys the support from the Trump administration, which wasted
no time to putting the blame on the victims. The White House deputy press
secretary Raj
Shah (an Indian-American “Hindu for Trump”) told reporters at the
White House, "The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely
with Hamas. Hamas is intentionally and cynically provoking this response and as
the secretary of state said, Israel has a right to defend itself." When
asked about the contrast between rock-wielding Palestinians and armed Israel
Defense Forces firing on them, Shah said, "This is a propaganda attempt. I
think the Israeli government has spent weeks trying to handle this without
violence."
The same absurd message
was parroted by the US Permanent Representative Niki Haley (another
Indian-American) in the UN Security Council that once
again failed to take a unified stand against Apartheid Israel.
She claimed, "No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than
Israel has. In fact, the records of several countries here today suggest they
would be much less restrained." She walked out when the Palestinian envoy
began speaking.
No informed person
will argue with Haley that the records of other mass murderers - Suu Kyi, Sissi
and Assad in places like Myanmar, Egypt and Syria – are worse. But who are
protecting these mass murderers if not the veto-wielding Brahmins within the
UNSC? Fact is: all these veto-wielding states are making a mockery of the world
body by making it a chatting theatre where the ‘unprotected’ Sudras don’t’
count! If they were to survive, they must find a Brahmin! Surely, this
all-too-familiar hypocrisy within the UNSC needs to be debunked.
State-commissioned
wanton murder of civilians is a serious crime. As such, if Haley were a
conscionable human being, she would not be whitewashing the crimes of the Apartheid
Zionist state. How in one week she is prepared to
go to war because Syrian President Bashar al-Assad allegedly killed over 40
people with gas, but remain silent in another week while dozens of human beings
are systematically murdered right before our eyes? Why this blatant hypocrisy,
Mrs. Haley?
It is worth noting
that U.N. Secretary-General had proposed a similar investigation after a deadly
protest in Gaza in March of this year, which also was rebuffed by her.
It is becoming all too
obvious that the UNSC is becoming an organ within the UN where the powerful
criminals are tolerated and protected by their big brothers. It, thus, needs to
be decommissioned in favor of the UNGA for humanity to survive and prosper.
Obviously, Haley and
her predecessors in the UN won’t talk about the suffering on the Palestinian
side since their Nakba – the Day of
Catastrophe, coinciding with illegitimate birth of the Zionist state that forced
the exodus of some 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland.
Unspoken, too, is the open-air concentration camp,
called Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians – evicted from what is today fondly
called the Jewish State of Israel - are confined with no access to the outside
world, and even by the sea. Nor would these Israel-firsters mention that those
slain Palestinians were systematically murdered by heavily armed soldiers that
turned the unarmed protesters who approached the fence to protest their
confinement and occupation into a killing zone.
The colonizer, settler state and its backers and
supporters also won’t talk about the falsity of the myth that they created to
justify their colonization project in the Holy Land (Al Quds). At the time that
the Zionists
were mounting their putsch, the Palestine landscape was populated with an Arab
Semitic population that for millennia had occupied literally all the villages and
towns. A few Jews were scattered here and there during the Ottoman Rule in the
19th century. To create their new single ethnic state (minus
the Arabs), the conniving Zionists had a problem: what to do with the
indigenous Semitic population and how to encourage Jewish migration to the Holy
Land? The answer was multi-fold. [The interested readers may like to read
this author’s articles: The Case of Israel, and the Jerusalem Question.]
A train of events quickly followed starting since
the First Zionist Conference of 1897 to the Nakba in 1948 via the infamous Balfour
Declaration of 1917 in which, according to Jewish historian Arthur Koestler, “One nation
solemnly promised to give to a second nation the country of a third nation.” That is, the Jews of Europe were promised a
homeland in Palestine by the British nation that did not own it.
What a monumental crime that would be continued to
this very date against the indigenous Palestinians who would be dehumanized on
the top being robbed of their ancestral land! After all, there is nothing
better to justify the unfathomed brutality of an aggressive colonist than to painting
the targeted people - the locals - as subhuman savages who don’t deserve our
mercy and surely don’t deserve to live in the Holy Land.
Thus, one should not be surprised to see Israeli
barbarity in recent days against the Palestinians. Nor should one be surprised
by the lies and deceits of psychopaths like Netanyahu and Trump who cannot hide
their monumental crimes.
In the
words of Ajamu Baraka, the founding executive director of the US Human Rights Network and the Green Party's nominee for Vice President of the United States in
the 2016 election, “While the bodies of men, women and even children were rushed away from
the fence after having their bodies torn to shreds by live ammunition, the
world’s elites were drinking champagne and celebrating the move of the embassy of
one racist, settler-colonial state—the United States—to the conquered capital
of another racist, colonial state, Israel.”
The Palestinians
victims are once again dehumanized, much like the German Jews in Nazi Germany. They
are expendable! In
this regard, it is worth quoting journalist Gideon Levy who wrote in Haaretz (4/5/18): “In Gaza, Israeli army snipers shot
unarmed demonstrators as if they were on a shooting range, to a chorus of
rejoicing by the media and the masses…This is what the nation wants and this is
what it will get. Even if soldiers kill hundreds of demonstrators in Gaza,
Israel will not bat an eyelid. The reason: evil and hatred of Arabs. Gaza is
never perceived as it really is, a place inhabited by people, an enormous and
terrible prison, a huge site of human experimentation. Most Israelis, who —
just like their prime minister — have never spoken to a single Gazan, only know
that the Gaza Strip is a nest of terrorists. That’s why it’s OK to shoot them.
Shocking? Yes, but true.”
What an irony and what
a charade! As expected, the
current blood-letting in Gaza has once again taught us that the majority of
Israeli citizens today has no conscience. In their distorted imagery,
the Palestinians have been transformed into terrorists and numbers, but not
humans.
Disingenuous journalists
like Thomas Friedman would lecture us that if the Palestinians had behaved like
Gandhi their problem would have disappeared long time ago. By so saying they
show their dismal hypocrisy and/or ignorance of the psychopathology of the
Zionist state. The protesters in Gaza were no more violent than those who
marched non-violent alongside Gandhi during the British Raj of India. And by
the way, they ought to know what Gandhi had said some 80 years ago: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that
England belongs the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to
impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be
justified by any moral code of conduct. Surely it would be a crime against
humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the
Jews partly or wholly as their
national home.” [Nov. 26, 1938]
One would have thought
that bullets, drones and tear gases are symbols of rules by the savages and not
civilized people. We are wrong again!
Professor
Samuel Huntington uttered the truth when he said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or
religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but
rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often
forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
Yes,
Prof. Huntington, the natives have not forgotten this truth, and thus, end up
becoming statistics and casualty figures in the killing fields to protest their
confinement and their imposed misery, and to expose the utter moral bankruptcy of
their tormentors and those who standby doing nothing to alleviate their pains
and sufferings.
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