Israel's righteous fury and its
victims in Gaza
by Ilan Pappe
The Electronic Intifada, January
2, 2009
My visit back home to the Galilee coincided
with the genocidal Israeli attack on Gaza. The state, through
its media and with the help of its academia, broadcasted one unanimous
voice -- even louder than the one heard during the criminal attack
against Lebanon in the summer of 2006. Israel is engulfed once
more with righteous fury that translates into destructive policies
in the Gaza Strip. This appalling self-justification for the inhumanity
and impunity is not just annoying, it is a subject worth dwelling
on, if one wants to understand the international immunity for
the massacre that rages on in Gaza.
It is based first and foremost on sheer
lies transmitted with a newspeak reminiscent of darker days in
1930s Europe. Every half an hour a news bulletin on the radio
and television describes the victims of Gaza as terrorists and
Israel's massive killings of them as an act of self-defense. Israel
presents itself to its own people as the righteous victim that
defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is recruited
to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian struggle,
if it is led by Hamas. These are the same scholars who demonized
the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an earlier era and
delegitimized his Fatah movement during the second Palestinian
intifada.
But the lies and distorted representations
are not the worst part of it. It is the direct attack on the last
vestiges of humanity and dignity of the Palestinian people that
is most enraging. The Palestinians in Israel have shown their
solidarity with the people of Gaza and are now branded as a fifth
column in the Jewish state; their right to remain in their homeland
cast as doubtful given their lack of support for the Israeli aggression.
Those among them who agree -- wrongly, in my opinion -- to appear
in the local media are interrogated, and not interviewed, as if
they were inmates in the Shin Bet's prison. Their appearance is
prefaced and followed by humiliating racist remarks and they are
met with accusations of being a fifth column, an irrational and
fanatical people. And yet this is not the basest practice. There
are a few Palestinian children from the occupied territories treated
for cancer in Israeli hospitals. God knows what price their families
have paid for them to be admitted there. The Israel Radio daily
goes to the hospital to demand the poor parents tell the Israeli
audience how right Israel is in its attack and how evil is Hamas
in its defense.
There are no boundaries to the hypocrisy
that a righteous fury produces. The discourse of the generals
and the politicians is moving erratically between self-compliments
of the humanity the army displays in its "surgical"
operations on the one hand, and the need to destroy Gaza for once
and for all, in a humane way of course, on the other.
This righteous fury is a constant phenomenon
in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine.
Every act whether it was ethnic cleansing, occupation, massacre
or destruction was always portrayed as morally just and as a pure
act of self-defense reluctantly perpetrated by Israel in its war
against the worst kind of human beings. In his excellent volume
The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel,
Gabi Piterberg explores the ideological origins and historical
progression of this righteous fury. Today in Israel, from Left
to Right, from Likud to Kadima, from the academia to the media,
one can hear this righteous fury of a state that is more busy
than any other state in the world in destroying and dispossessing
an indigenous population.
It is crucial to explore the ideological
origins of this attitude and derive the necessary political conclusions
form its prevalence. This righteous fury shields the society and
politicians in Israel from any external rebuke or criticism. But
far worse, it is translated always into destructive policies against
the Palestinians. With no internal mechanism of criticism and
no external pressure, every Palestinian becomes a potential target
of this fury. Given the firepower of the Jewish state it can inevitably
only end in more massive killings, massacres and ethnic cleansing.
The self-righteousness is a powerful act
of self-denial and justification. It explains why the Israeli
Jewish society would not be moved by words of wisdom, logical
persuasion or diplomatic dialogue. And if one does not want to
endorse violence as the means of opposing it, there is only one
way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil
ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this
ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not
just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering
this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to
the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is
an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now
massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation
of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology
that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically.
Let us hope that significant voices in the world will tell the
Jewish state that this ideology and the overall conduct of the
state are intolerable and unacceptable and as long as they persist,
Israel will be boycotted and subject to sanctions.
But I am not naive. I know that even the
killing of hundreds of innocent Palestinians would not be enough
to produce such a shift in the Western public opinion; it is even
more unlikely that the crimes committed in Gaza would move the
European governments to change their policy towards Palestine.
And yet, we cannot allow 2009 to be just
another year, less significant than 2008, the commemorative year
of the Nakba, that did not fulfill the great hopes we all had
for its potential to dramatically transform the Western world's
attitude to Palestine and the Palestinians.
It seems that even the most horrendous
crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete
events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and
not associated with any ideology or system. In this new year,
we have to try to realign the public opinion to the history of
Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the best
means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current
one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come.
Academically, this has already been done.
Our main challenge is to find an efficient to explain the connection
between the Zionist ideology and the past policies of destruction,
to the present crisis. It may be easier to do it while, under
the most terrible circumstances, the world's attention is directed
to Palestine once more. It would be even more difficult at times
when the situation seems to be "calmer" and less dramatic.
In such "relaxed" moments, the short attention span
of the Western media would marginalize once more the Palestinian
tragedy and neglect it either because of horrific genocides in
Africa or the economic crisis and ecological doomsday scenarios
in the rest of the world. While the Western media is not likely
to be interested in any historical stockpiling, it is only through
a historical evaluation that the magnitude of the crimes committed
against the Palestinian people throughout the past 60 years can
be exposed. Therefore, it is the role of an activist academia
and an alternative media to insist on this historical context.
These agents should not scoff from educating the public opinion
and hopefully even influence the more conscientious politicians
to view events in a wider historical perspective.
Similarly, we may be able to find the
popular, as distinct from the high brow academic, way of explaining
clearly that Israel's policy -- in the last 60 years -- stems
from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by endless
layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable accusation of
anti-Semitism and what have you, it is time to associate in the
public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar historical
landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the oppression
of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the military
rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the massacre
of Gaza. Very much as the Apartheid ideology explained the oppressive
policies of the South African government, this ideology -- in
its most consensual and simplistic variety -- allowed all the
Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize
the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them.
The means altered from period to period, from location to location,
as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is
a clear pattern that cannot only be discussed in the academic
ivory towers, but has to be part of the political discourse on
the contemporary reality in Palestine today.
Some of us, namely those committed to
justice and peace in Palestine, unwittingly evade this debate
by focusing, and this is understandable, on the Occupied Palestinian
Territories (OPT) -- the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Struggling
against the criminal policies there is an urgent mission. But
this should not convey the message that the powers that be in
the West adopted gladly by a cue from Israel, that Palestine is
only in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that the Palestinians
are only the people living in those territories. We should expand
the representation of Palestine geographically and demographically
by telling the historical narrative of the events in 1948 and
ever since and demand equal human and civil rights to all the
people who live, or used to live, in what today is Israel and
the OPT.
By connecting the Zionist ideology and
the policies of the past with the present atrocities, we will
be able to provide a clear and logical explanation for the campaign
of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Challenging by nonviolent
means a self-righteous ideological state that allows itself, aided
by a mute world, to dispossess and destroy the indigenous people
of Palestine, is a just and moral cause. It is also an effective
way of galvanizing the public opinion not only against the present
genocidal policies in Gaza, but hopefully one that would prevent
future atrocities. But more importantly than anything else it
will puncture the balloon of self-righteous fury that suffocates
the Palestinians every times it inflates. It will help end the
Western immunity to Israel's impunity. Without that immunity,
one hopes more and more people in Israel will begin to see the
real nature of the crimes committed in their name and their fury
would be directed against those who trapped them and the Palestinians
in this unnecessary cycle of bloodshed and violence.
Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department
of History at the University of Exeter.
Ilan Pappe page
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