Israel Is Captive to Its 'Destructive Process'
Dust billows as Palestinian protesters drag a ripped-down section of fence
on the Gaza border earlier this year. Seven Palestinians killed by Israeli
forces last Friday were among roughly 200 Gazans slain at the border since
protests intensified early in 2018. (Voice of America)
As protesters continue to be killed at the Gaza border, Truthdig is
reposting a July 14, 2014, column by Chris Hedges on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. A new article by Hedges will appear on Truthdig later this week.
Raul Hilberg, in his monumental work "The Destruction of the European Jews,"
chronicled a process of repression that at first was "relatively mild" but
led, step by step, to the Holocaust. It started with legal discrimination
and ended with mass murder. "The destructive process was a development that
was begun with caution and ended without restraint," Hilberg wrote.
The Palestinians over the past few decades have endured a similar
"destructive process." They have gradually been stripped of basic civil
liberties, robbed of assets including much of their land and often their
homes, have suffered from mounting restrictions on their physical movements,
been blocked from trading and business, especially the selling of produce,
and found themselves increasingly impoverished and finally trapped behind
walls and security fences erected around Gaza and the West Bank.
"The process of destruction [of the European Jews] unfolded in a definite
pattern," Hilberg wrote. "It did not, however, proceed from a basic plan. No
bureaucrat in 1933 could have predicted what kind of measures would be taken
in 1938, nor was it possible in 1938 to foretell the configuration of the
undertaking in 1942. The destructive process was a step-by-step operation,
and the administrator could seldom see more than one step ahead."
There will never be transports or extermination camps for the Palestinians,
but amid increasing violence against Palestinians larger and larger numbers
of them will die, in airstrikes, targeted assassinations and other armed
attacks. Hunger and misery will expand. Israeli demands for "transfer"-the
forced expulsion of Palestinians from occupied territory to neighboring
countries-will grow.
The Palestinians in Gaza live in conditions that now replicate those first
imposed on Jews by the Nazis in the ghettos set up throughout Eastern
Europe. Palestinians cannot enter or leave Gaza. They are chronically short
of food-the World Health Organization estimates that more than 50 percent of
children in Gaza and the West Bank under 2 years old have iron deficiency
anemia and reports that malnutrition and stunting in children under 5 are
"not improving" and could actually be worsening. Palestinians often lack
clean water. They are crammed into unsanitary hovels. They do not have
access to basic medical care. They are stateless and lack passports or
travel documents. They live with massive unemployment. They are daily
dehumanized in racist diatribes by their occupiers as criminals, terrorists
and mortal enemies of the Jewish people.
"A deep and wide moral abyss separates us from our enemies," Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said recently of the Palestinians. "They
sanctify death while we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty while we
sanctify compassion."
Ayelet Shaked, a member of the right-wing Jewish Home Party, on her Facebook
page June 30 posted an article written 12 years ago by the late Uri Elitzur,
a leader in the settler movement and a onetime adviser to Netanyahu, saying
the essay is as "relevant today as it was then." The article said in part:
"They [the Palestinians] are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be
on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who
send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons,
nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in
which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised
there."
The belief that a race or class is contaminated is used by ruling elites to
justify quarantining the people of that group. But quarantine is only the
first step. The despised group can never be redeemed or cured-Hannah Arendt
noted that all racists see such contamination as something that can never be
eradicated. The fear of the other is stoked by racist leaders such as
Netanyahu to create a permanent instability. This instability is exploited
by a corrupt power elite that is also seeking the destruction of democratic
civil society for all citizens-the goal of the Israeli government (as well
as the goal of a U.S. government intent on stripping its own citizens of
rights). Max Blumenthal in his book "Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater
Israel" does a masterful job of capturing and dissecting this frightening
devolution within Israel.
The last time Israel mounted a Gaza military assault as severe as the
current series of attacks was in 2008, with Operation Cast Lead, which
lasted from Dec. 27 of that year to Jan. 18, 2009. That attack saw 1,455
Palestinians killed, including 333 children. Roughly 5,000 more Palestinians
were injured. A new major ground incursion, which would be designed to
punish the Palestinians with even greater ferocity, would cause a far bigger
death toll than Operation Cast Lead did. The cycle of escalating violence,
this "destructive process," as the history of the conflict has illustrated,
would continue at an accelerating rate.
The late Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of Israel's most brilliant scholars,
warned that, followed to its logical conclusion, the occupation of the
Palestinians would mean "concentration camps would be erected by the Israeli
rulers" and "Israel would not deserve to exist, and it will not be
worthwhile to preserve it." He feared the ascendancy of right-wing,
religious Jewish nationalists and warned that "religious nationalism is to
religion what National Socialism was to socialism." Leibowitz laid out what
occupation would finally bring for Israel:
"
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 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
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.
Israel is currently attacking a population of 1.8 million that has no army,
no navy, no air force, no mechanized military units, no command and control
and no heavy artillery. Israel pretends that this indiscriminate slaughter
is a war. But only the most self-deluded supporter of Israel is fooled. The
rockets fired at Israel by Hamas-which is committing a war crime by
launching those missiles against the Israeli population-are not remotely
comparable to the 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs that have been
dropped in large numbers on crowded Palestinian neighborhoods; the forced
removal of some 300,000 Palestinians from their homes; the more than 160
reported dead-the U.N. estimates that 77 percent of those killed in Gaza
have been civilians; the destruction of the basic infrastructure; the
growing food and water shortages; and the massing of military forces for a
possible major ground assault.
When all this does not work, when it becomes clear that the Palestinians
once again have not become dormant and passive, Israel will take another
step, more radical than the last. The "process of destruction" will be
stopped only from outside Israel. Israel, captive to the process, is
incapable of imposing self-restraint.
A mass movement demanding boycotts, divestment and sanctions is the only
hope now for the Palestinian people. Such a movement must work for
imposition of an arms embargo on Israel; this is especially important for
Americans because weapons systems and attack aircraft provided by the U.S.
are being used to carry out the assault. It must press within the United
States for a cutoff of the $3.1 billion in military aid that the U.S. gives
to Israel each year. It must organize to demand suspension of all free trade
and other agreements between the U.S. and Israel. Only when these props are
knocked out from under Israel will the Israeli leadership be forced, as was
the apartheid regime in South Africa, to halt its "destructive process." As
long as these props remain, the Palestinians are doomed. If we fail to act
we are complicit in the slaughter.
Chris Hedges
