Os mitos atravessam as épocas, rejuvenescidos pelas narrativas que os sustentam. São uma forma de criação coletiva, que podem ser registados por este ou aquele autor, o qual vai inspirar-se e justificar-se com a respetiva narrativa original.
Se são produtos de uma cultura, de uma sociedade, como é possível que eles transcendam as épocas e geografias para se elevarem a mitos globais da humanidade?
- Esta questão pode receber respostas divergentes, mas que não se excluem mutuamente:
A UNIVERSALIDADE resulta de constantes culturais profundas, ou seja, expressões dos arquétipos profundos da psique humana, existentes nas mais diversas culturas e épocas.
A expansão dos mitos deriva da ASSIMILAÇÃO DE MODELO CULTURAL, que é trazido para novos territórios e respectivos povos, por conquista seguida de assimilação cultural ou por absorção da cultura tecnológica mais avançada pela menos avançada.
No presente, tal como em relação a outros aspetos das civilizações (como sejam as religiões), os mitos constituintes das diversas etnias podem estar esquecidos do grande público nalgumas regiões, porém nas zonas que não estão tomadas pela cultura "ocidentalizada", as narrativas mitológicas mantêm- se vivas.
Quanto às outras sociedades, as industralizadas, que são hoje a grande maioria, estas experimentam uma profusão de mitos análogos ou sucedâneos dos tradicionais: Os ídolos do desporto e da cultura "pop", nestes países, desempenham o mesmo papel de identificadores tribais e de coesão de grupo que as narrativas míticas de origens nas sociedades agrárias, ou nas de caçadores-recoletores.
Porquê estudar os mitos, em especial os mitos que são forjados e cuja narrativa é reforçada na media? Porque é com narrativas, em especial as que são emitidas pelos poderes, que é justificado para as «massas», o que estes mesmos poderes ordenam.
Ora nas narrativas correntes surgem, explicitamente ou não, as dicotomias «civilizado/bárbaro», «progressivo/ primitivo», e outras.
Estas expressões estão omnipresentes desde os textos de há dois ou três séculos, que pretendiam legitimar a «acção civilizadora» do Ocidente, ou seja, dos poderes coloniais. Uma grande parte da antropologia, no século XIX, assimilou estas «evidências», naturalizando e dando assim um estatuto «nobre», «civilizacional» aos empreendimentos brutais de pilhagem e destruição de culturas não-europeias, incluindo os vestígios de diversas civilizações milenares. Para «legitimar» esta colonização, era preciso que o «não-europeu», de uma «raça» diferente da «caucasiana», fosse tipificado como «inferior», «não civilizado», devendo ser tomado a cargo «pelo homem branco, do mesmo modo como um adulto se responsabiliza por uma criança»...
Logo se vê que o mito da superioridade do «homem branco» foi parte integrante da mentalidade colonial e legitimador, «em nome do progresso», das hecatombes, os crimes contra a humanidade, os genocídios e os etnocídios.
Que esta mentalidade colonial ainda esteja profundamente enraízada no substrato ideológico, é dolorosamente patente hoje. Veja-se a indiferença (quando não a aprovação entusiasta) por parte de uma parte do público dito «civilizado», perante o martirizado povo da Palestina, sujeito a genocídio, empurrado para fora do seu território.
A sua natural resistência, por contraste, é vista como «terrorismo», mas não são assim classificados os atos terroristas, em grande número e constantes, cometidos, por ordem do governo, pelas forças armadas de Israel.
Note-se que esta situação está imbrincada com o maior falhanço histórico da ONU, que avançou com uma «solução» ao problema de dar uma pátria aos judeus, à custa de desapossar o povo palestiniano de suas terras e aceitando que estes estivessem sujeitos a uma situação colonial, quer nas zonas designadas como territórios palestinianos (Faixa de Gaza, Território da Cis-Jordânia e Jerusalém- Leste), quer nas zonas territoriais israelitas.
Aqui, não é meu objetivo analisar a complexa situação do conflito Israelo-Palestiniano, mas pretendo ilustrar até que ponto as questões de «raça», de nacionalidade, do estatuto legal, da legalidade internacional, se interconectam entre si e com o não dito, mantido na penumbra. Nos países «ocidentais», a herança da mentalidade colonial não se extinguiu. Permanece o mito da superioridade civilizacional dos brancos, quando não mesmo da «superioridade» da chamada raça branca ou caucasóide.
É na monstruosidade disto, que radica o absurdo de se permitir (contra todo o direito e legalidade internacional), que um povo colonize outro, que o subjugue, o expolie das suas terras, das suas casas, da sua vida... E quem dá a cobertura? - Os tais «civilizados» Estados, que apoiam com armamentos e ao nível diplomático a campanha sionista de extremínio do povo mártir palestiniano.
Na nossa época, uma série de mitos foram construídos: a ONU, a legalidade internacional, os Estados modernos defensores dos direitos humanos, o direito dos povos à auto-determinação... Tudo isto desaparece, agora, nas situações em que os grandes poderes favorecem uma posição ou outra. Não agem segundo os princípios do Direito ou Legalidade Internacional, mas recobrem suas ações e omissões com narrativas ocas, em contradição direta com os seus atos.
É bastante preocupante o processo psicológico que leva grande número (não sei as percentagens) de cidadãos de Israel a desprezar a vida humana, quando se trata de palestinianos, fazendo afirmações públicas (na televisão, em sites do YouTube, em jornais, etc) de uma enorme brutalidade e indiferença, face ao sofrimento de um povo, especialmente exibindo total indiferença ao sofrimento e morte de milhares de crianças, em Gaza e noutros pontos da Palestina. Quando vimos estas manifestações de racismo descarado, ficámos incrédulos no primeiro instante, para depois nos convencermos, dadas as abundantes provas - fornecidas pelos próprios - de ódio visceral em relação aos palestinianos e, em especial, à resistência palestiniana e ao Hamas.
Creio que estamos perante uma forma de racismo supremacista, do mesmo tipo da que ocorria na Alemanha Nazi, mas com a agravante de - no caso de Israel - haver conivência internacional com o genocídio em curso.
É como se a comunidade internacional, através dos governos e representantes por eles nomeados (embaixadores, altos funcionários, altas patentes militares...) tivesse assim decretado que o Estado de Israel beneficiava duma (inexistente) "cláusula de exceção", no que toca à «solução final» para o «problema palestiniano», podendo impunemente cometer os crimescontra a humanidade que são o genocídio, a deportação em massa, a limpeza étnica e um sem número de atrocidades cometidas contra civis indefesos.
Sabemos que existem cidadãos judeus que não podem ser identificados com o sionismo, que repudiam a utilização da sua religião e etnia para fins contrários à dignidade humana e aos valores espirituais e morais das religiões (incluindo a Judaica). Mas, estes cidadãos do Estado de Israel estão duplamente isolados: a sua pertença a Israel, faz com que sejam considerados «traidores», por israelitas sionistas e «do campo dos opressores» por certos palestinianos.
Os Estados membros da ONU têm uma responsabilidade grande, sobretudo os que têm assento no Conselho de Segurança, por se negarem a exercer a máxima pressão legal possível, para obrigar o governo de Netanyahu a acabar com o cerco cruel e desumano, em que o número de camiões de ajuda humanitária autorizados é demasiado escasso intencionalmente e sujeito a nova interrupção pelo governo criminoso de Netanyahu.
É uma inércia internacional que não tem nada de natural, pois, apesar do «blackout» informativo da média corporativa, não é possível ignorar o que se tem estado a passar na Faixa de Gaza. Mais de dois milhões de civis são sujeitos a bombardeamentos, ocupação militar, cerco e corte de víveres, destruição de todas as infraestruturas como reservatórios de água, estradas, edifícios públicos, bairros inteiros, hospitais, escolas, etc. Note-se que esta destruição é dirigida especificamente contra a população civil. Este facto é perfeitamente conhecido de todas as chancelarias do mundo.
Se um governo doutro país cometesse um décimo ou vigésimo dos crimes que as tropas de Israel cometem (sob o comando dos seus generais), este país já estaria sujeito às sanções mais severas, não apenas a «apelos» para poupar os civis. Em condições desta gravidade, noutro ponto do mundo, medidas concretas seriam tomadas por todos os governos, tais como a proibição de fornecimento de armas, o isolamento diplomático, e outras medidas. Deviam ser ativados os procedimentos do Tribunal de Justiça Internacional, para que rapidamente houvesse uma sentença em relação ao governo genocida.
O sistema da ONU, onde alguns países têm o privilégio de veto no Conselho de Segurança (membros permanentes), permite que, neste caso concreto, graças ao veto sistemático dos EUA, não sejam aplicadas sanções justas e necessárias para poupar dezenas ou centenas de milhares de vidas humanas.
Não é a primeira vez que isto ocorre, tanto em relação a Israel e EUA, como noutras situações. A ONU não pode fazer valer a sua legalidade, nem aplicar a sua jurisprudência nas situações de gravidade extrema, se houver um bloqueio sistemático e ilegítimo das suas resoluções.
Se o fim do sofrimento do povo palestiniano não é colocado em primeira prioridade, não só pela ONU, como pelos governos e as agências humanitárias internacionais, estão a mostrar conivência, portanto, uma parte de culpabilidade, pois tinham os meios e obrigação moral e jurídica de impedir a continuação do genocídio em Gaza, que se arrasta há cerca de 1 ano e 9 meses.
Não admira que o poder atual de Washington não se preocupe com o respeito pelas decisões da ONU, visto que é formado a partir da facção MAGA do partido republicano, anti-globalista e nacionalista. Além disso, Trump tem boas relações pessoais com Netanyahu e com dirigentes sionistas. Mas, perante a monstruosidade do comportamento das autoridades israelitas e perante o sofrimento do povo palestiniano, os governos das outras nações deveriam (apesar dos vetos dos EUA) tudo fazer para inverter a situação.
Como este crime vai provavelmente ficar impune, dada a correlação de forças mundial, isso dará alento às forças mais retrógradas em todos os países, para agirem apenas de acordo com os seus interesses. Quando estiverem no poder não se sentirão obrigadas a respeitar minorias, sejam elas políticas, étnicas ou religiosas. A frágil construção de uma legalidade internacional, está a sofrer um enorme abalo.
Se não houver uma tomada de consciência e uma mudança de rumo, também as legalidades constitucionais dos Estadospoderão ser liquidadas, pelas punhaladas de alguns e pela ausência de reação de muitos outros.
Quando escrevia - há vários anos atrás - que estávamos a entrar numa nova «Era das Trevas», não imaginava que os acontecimentos internacionais viessem tão cedo confirmar a minha previsão. Mas, infelizmente, é o que temos diante dos olhos.
PS1: De todos os governos da U.E., que «acordaram» agora, em relação ao genocídio e aos planos de «limpeza étnica» de Netanyahu a respeito de Gaza, apenas o governo de Sanchez, em Espanha, tomou a iniciativa de proibir qualquer exportação de armas para Israel e de apelar para que os outros membros de U.E. tudo façam para pôr termo ao genocídio em Gaza.
Não é costume eu reproduzir na íntegra uma notícia, um artigo. Mas, abro aqui uma exceção com o artigo de Jonathan Cook, pois o assunto é demasiado sério. Todas as pessoas que leem este blog, sabem que tenho determinada posição ideológica e que não a escondo, embora não escreva por proselitismo, para fazer adeptos.
Com efeito, vejo demasiados sinais de um fascismo na sua pior versão - a que esconde a sua própria matriz e se reveste das aparências de democracia - que me obrigam a colocar debaixo dos olhos dos meus leitores realidades muito incómodas e perturbadoras, mas que não se podem ignorar.
É nossa responsabilidade tudo fazer para combater e acabar com este vírus ideológico, que corresponde à pior espécie de desprezo pelo ser humano. Eu sinto-me pessoalmente agredido por aquilo que se passa atualmente em Gaza, nos Território da Margem Ocidental, em Israel... mas também, na sociedade europeia e ocidental.
A indiferença face às injustiças mais flagrantes, à tortura, ao massacre de inocentes, à expulsão violenta de pessoas da terra que sempre foi sua, à destruição de vidas, tudo isso de forma premeditada e ostensiva... Com o «Ocidente» muito calmo a assistir ao «espetáculo» (como se isto fosse um espetáculo!) ou pior, a apoiar, fornecendo armas, censurando as denúncias dos crimes de guerra, perseguindo os que defendem a causa de uma Palestina independente, como se fossem estes, os criminosos???
Repudio esta «cultura», a «civilização» da hipocrisia, da duplicidade de critérios, da falsa preocupação com os direitos humanos.
Haverá algo mais monstruoso do que a conivência cobarde perante um crime contra a humanidade? Quando não apenas permitem, mas encorajam a exportação de armas para Israel, sabendo que elas vão servir para continuar o genocídio de um povo??? E não me digam que só os governos ocidentais são responsáveis; eles são criminosos, mas os que aprovam o genocídio (quer o proclamem, quer fiquem silenciosos) também o são e, além disso, são cobardes que só merecem desprezo.
Nesse complexo, a media ao serviço do poder - tanto na Grã Bretanha como na Europa continental - tem apresentado da maneira pior possível a Resistência palestiniana e tem inocentado ou ocultado os crimes do exército sionista. Este comportamento faz dela corresponsável pelos crimes cometidos pelas forças sionistas.
Pensem como seria, se a média corporativa denunciasse a campanha de extermínio de um povo, como horror e crime inqualificável. O horror do genocídio dos palestinianos, só tem paralelo com outros genocídios: Como dos Khmers Vermelhos contra seu próprio povo, dos Turcos em relação aos Arménios e dos Nazis em relação aos Judeus, Ciganos e minorias políticas e sociais. A «solução final» para os palestinianos está a ser implementada agora, no contexto da III Guerra Mundial.
As pessoas de espírito reto, com sentido de justiça, devem acordar e perceber a monstruosidade do que se está a passar: Calar é consentir.
Manuel Banet
How the War on Gaza Exposed Israeli and Western Fascism
Material and rhetorical support for the genocide of the Palestinian people is everywhere. It’s time to ask why
Nearly a year into the world’s first live-streamed genocide – which began in Gaza, and is rapidly expanding into the occupied West Bank – the establishment western media still avoid using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s rampage of destruction.
The worse the genocide gets, the longer Israel’s starvation-blockade of the enclave continues, the harder it gets to obscure the horrors – the less coverage Gaza receives.
The worst offender has been the BBC, given that it is Britain’s only publicly funded broadcaster. Ultimately, it is supposed to be accountable to the British public, who are required by law to pay its licence fee.
This is why it has been beyond ludicrous to witness the billionaire-owned media froth at the mouth in recent days about “BBC bias” – not against Palestinians, but against Israel. Yes, you heard that right.
We are talking about the same “anti-Israel” BBC that just ran yet another headline – this time after an Israeli sniper shot an American citizen in the head – that managed somehow, once again, to fail to mention who killed her. Any casual reader risked inferring from the headline “American activist shot dead in occupied West Bank” that the culprit was a Palestinian gunman.
After all, Palestinians, not Israel, are represented by Hamas, a group “designated as a terrorist organisation” by the British government, as the BBC helpfully keeps reminding us.
And it is the supposedly “anti-Israel” BBC that last week sought to stymie efforts by 15 aid agencies known as the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to run a major fundraiser through the nation’s broadcasters.
No one is under any illusions about why the BBC is so unwilling to get involved. The DEC has chosen Gaza as the beneficiary of its latest aid drive.
The committee faced the very same problem with the BBC back in 2009, when the corporation refused to take part in a Gaza fundraiser on the extraordinary pretext that doing so would compromise its rules on “impartiality”.
Presumably, in the BBC’s eyes, saving the lives of Palestinian children reveals a prejudice that saving Ukrainian children’s lives does not.
In its 2009 attack, Israel killed “only” 1,300 or so Palestinians in Gaza, not the many tens of thousands – or possibly hundreds of thousands, no one truly knows – it has this time around.
Famously, the late, independent-minded Labour politician Tony Benn broke ranks and defied the BBC’s DEC ban by reading out details of how to donate money live on air, over the protests of the show’s presenter. As he pointed out then, and it is even truer today: “People will die because of the BBC’s decision.”
According to sources within both the committee and the BBC, the corporation’s executives are terrified – as they were previously – of the “backlash” from Israel and its powerful lobbyists in the UK if it promotes the Gaza appeal.
A spokesperson for the BBC told Middle East Eye that the fundraiser did not meet all the established criteria for a national appeal, despite the DEC’s expert opinion that it does,but noted the possibility of broadcasting an appeal was “under review”.
Pulling punches
The reason Israel is able to carry out a genocide, and western leaders are able to actively support it, is precisely because the establishment media constantly pulls its punches – very much in Israel’s favour.
Readers and viewers are given no sense that Israel is carrying out systematic war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, let alone a genocide.
Journalists prefer to frame events as a “humanitarian crisis” because this strips away Israel’s responsibility for creating the crisis. It looks at the effects, the suffering, rather than the cause: Israel.
Worse, these same journalists constantly throw sand in our eyes with nonsensical counter-claims to suggest that Israel is actually the victim, not the perpetrator.
Take, for example, the new “study” into supposed BBC anti-Israel bias, led by a British lawyer based in Israel. A faux-horrified Daily Mail warned over the weekend that the “BBC is FOURTEEN times more likely to accuse Israel of genocide than Hamas … amid growing calls for inquiry”.
But read the text, and what’s truly stunning is that over the selected four-month period, the BBC associated Israel with the term “genocide” only 283 times – in its massive output across many television and radio channels, its website, podcasts and various social media platforms, which serve myriad populations at home and abroad.
What the Mail and other right-wing attack-dog media don’t mention is the fact that none of those references would have been the BBC’s own editorialising. Even Palestinian guests who try to use the word on its shows are quickly shut down.
Many of the references would have been BBC News reporting on a case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, which is investigating Israel for what the world’s top court termed in January to be a “plausible” risk of genocide in Gaza.
Regrettably for the BBC, it has been impossible to report that story without mentioning the word “genocide”, because it lies at the heart of the legal case.
What should, in fact, astound us far more is that an active genocide, in which the West is fully complicit, was mentioned by the BBC’s globe-spanning media empire a total of only 283 times in the four months following 7 October.
Campaign of intimidation
The World Court’s preliminary ruling on Israel’s genocide is vital context that should be front and centre of every media story on Gaza. Instead, it is usually unmentioned, or hidden at the end of reports, where few will read about it.
The BBC infamously gave barely any coverage to the genocide case presented in January to the World Court by South Africa, which the panel of judges found to be “plausible”. On the other hand, it broadcast the entirety of Israel’s defence to the same court.
Now, after this latest campaign of intimidation by the billionaire-owned media, the BBC will likely be even less willing to mention the genocide – which is precisely the aim.
What should have stunned the Mail and the rest of the establishment media far more is that the BBC broadcast 19 references to a Hamas “genocide” in the same four-month period.
The idea that Hamas is capable of a “genocide” against Israel, or Jews, is as divorced from reality as the fiction that it “beheaded babies” on 7 October or the claims, still lacking any evidence, that it committed “mass rape” on that day.
Hamas, an armed group numbering thousand of fighters, currently pinned down in Gaza by one of the strongest armies in the world, is quite incapable of committing a “genocide” of Israelis.
This is, of course, why the World Court is not investigating Hamas for genocide, and why only Israel’s most fanatic apologists, including the western media, run with fake news either that Hamas is committing a genocide, or that it is conceivable it may try to do so.
No one really takes seriously claims of a Hamas genocide. The tell was the world’s stunned reaction when the group managed to escape from the concentration camp that is Gaza for a single day on 7 October and wreak so much death and havoc.
The idea that Hamas could do anything worse than that – or even repeat the attack – is simply delusional. The best Hamas can do is wage a guerrilla war of attrition against the Israeli military from its underground tunnels, which is precisely what it is doing.
Here’s another statistic worth highlighting from the recent “study”: in the same four-month period, the BBC used the term “crimes against humanity” 22 times to describe the atrocities committed by Hamas on one day last October, compared with only 15 times to describe Israel’s even worse atrocities committed continuously over the past year.
Allowable thought
The ultimate effect of the latest media furore is to increase pressure on the BBC to make even larger concessions to the self-serving, right-wing political agenda of the billionaire-owned media and the corporate interests of the war machine it represents.
The state broadcaster’s job is to set limits on allowable thought for the British public – not on the right, where that role falls to papers such as the Mail and the Telegraph, but on the other side of the political spectrum, on what is misleadingly referred to as “the left”.
The BBC’s task is to define what is acceptable speech and action – meaning acceptable to the British establishment – by those seeking to challenge its domestic and foreign policy.
Twice in living memory, progressive left-wing opposition leaders have emerged: Michael Foot in the early 1980s, and Jeremy Corbyn in the late 2010s. On both occasions, the media have united as one to vilify them.
That should surprise no one. Making the BBC a whipping boy – denouncing it as “left-wing” – is a form of permanent gaslighting designed both to make Britain’s extreme right-wing media seem centrist, and to normalise the drive to push the BBC ever further rightwards.
Over decades, the billionaire-owned media have crafted in the public’s mind the idea that the BBC defines the extreme end of supposedly “left-wing” thought. The more the corporation can be pushed to the right, the more the left faces an unwelcome choice: either follow the BBC rightwards, or become universally reviled as the loony left, the woke left, the Trot left, the militant left.
Bolstering this self-fulfilling argument, any protests by BBC staff can be deduced by the journalist-servants of Rupert Murdoch and other press tycoons as further proof of the corporation’s left-wing or Marxist bias.
The media system is rigged, and the BBC is the perfect vehicle for keeping it this way.
Pressing the button
What the BBC and the rest of the mainstream media are downplaying are not just the facts of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but also the obvious genocidal intent of Israeli leaders, the country’s wider society, and its apologists in the UK and elsewhere.
It should not be up for debate that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, when everyone from its prime minister down has told us that this is very much their intent.
The examples of such genocidal statements by Israeli leaders filled pages of South Africa’s case to the World Court.
Just one example: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the Palestinians as “Amalek” – a reference to a biblical story well known to every Israeli schoolchild, in which the Israelites are ordered by God to wipe an entire people, including their children and livestock, off the face of the earth.
Anyone engaged on social media will have faced a battery of similarly genocidal statements from mostly anonymous supporters of Israel.
Those genocide cheerleaders recently gained a face – two, in fact. Video clips of two Israelis, podcasting in English under the name “Two Nice Jewish Boys”, have gone viral, showing the pair calling for the extermination of every last Palestinian man, woman and child.
One of the podcasters said that “zero people in Israel” care whether a polio outbreak caused by Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s water, sewage and heath facilities ends up killing babies, noting that Israel’s agreement to a vaccination campaign is driven purely by public relations needs.
In another clip, the podcasters agree that Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons deserve to be “executed by shoving too large of an object up their butts”.
They also make clear that they would not hesitate to press a genocide button to wipe out the Palestinian people: “If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza – every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow – I would press it in a second … And I think most Israelis would. They wouldn’t talk about it like I am, they wouldn’t say ‘I pressed it’, but they would press it.”
Relentless depravity
It is easy to get alarmed over such inhuman comments, but the furore generated by this pair is likely to deflect from a more important point: that they are utterly representative of where Israeli society is right now. They are not on some depraved fringe. They are not outliers. They are firmly in the mainstream.
The evidence is not just in the fact that Israel’s citizen army is systematically beating and sodomising Palestinian prisoners, sniping Palestinian children in Gaza with shots to the head, cheering the detonation of universities and mosques, desecrating Palestinian bodies, and enforcing a starvation-blockade on Gaza.
It is in the welcoming of all this relentless depravity by wider Israeli society.
After a video emerged of a group of soldiers sodomising a Palestinian prisoner at Israel’s Sde Teiman torture camp, Israelis rallied to their side. The extent of the prisoner’s internal injuries required him to be hospitalised.
In the aftermath, Israeli pundits – educated “liberals” – sat in TV studios discussing whether soldiers should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether to rape Palestinians in detention, or whether such abuses should be organised by the state as part of an official torture programme.
One of the soldiers accused in the gang rape case chose to cast off his anonymity after being championed by journalists who interviewed him. He’s now treated as a minor celebrity on Israeli TV shows.
Polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of the razing of Gaza, or want even more of it. Some 70 percent want to ban from social media platforms any expressions of sympathy for civilians in Gaza.
None of this is really new. It all just got a lot more ostentatious after Hamas’s attack on 7 October.
After all, some of the most shocking violence that day occurred when Hamas fighters stumbled onto a dance festival close to Gaza.
The brutal imprisonment of 2.3 million Palestinians, and the 17-year blockade denying them the essentials of life and any meaningful freedoms, had become so normal to Israelis that hip, freedom-loving Israeli youngsters could happily hold a rave so close to that mass of human suffering.
Or as one of the Two Nice Jewish Boys observed of his feelings about life in Israel: “It’s nice to know that you’re dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless, sitting in a tent.” His partner interrupted: “Makes it even better … People enjoy knowing they [Palestinians in Gaza] are suffering.”
‘Heroic soldiers’
This monstrous indifference to, or even pleasure in, the torture of others isn’t restricted to Israelis. There’s a whole army of prominent supporters of Israel in the West who confidently act as apologists for Israel’s genocidal actions.
What unites them all is the Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism.
In Britain, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has not spoken out against the mass slaughter of Palestinian children in Gaza, nor has he kept quiet about it. Instead, he has given Israel’s war crimes his blessing.
Back in mid-January, as South Africa began making public its case against Israel for genocide that the World Court found “plausible”, Mirvis spoke at a public meeting, where he referred to Israel’s operations in Gaza as “the most outstanding possible thing”.
He described the troops clearly documented committing war crimes as “our heroic soldiers” – inexplicably conflating the actions of a foreign, Israeli army with the British army.
Even if we imagine he was truly ignorant of the war crimes in Gaza eight months ago, there can be no excuses now.
Yet, last week, Mirvis spoke out again, this time to berate the British government for imposing a very partial limit on arms sales to Israel after it received legal advice that such weapons were likely being used by Israel to commit war crimes.
In other words, Mirvis openly called for his own government to ignore international law and arm a state committing war crimes, according to UK government lawyers, and a “plausible genocide”, according to the World Court.
There are apologists like Mirvis in influential posts across the West.
Appearing on TV late last month, his counterpart in France, Haim Korsia, urged Israel to “finish the job” in Gaza, and backed Netanyahu, who the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor is pursuing for war crimes.
Korsia refused to condemn Israel’s killing of at least 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza, arguing that those deaths were “not of the same order” as the 1,150 deaths of Israelis on 7 October.
He clearly meant Palestinian lives were not as important as Israeli lives.
Inner fascist
Nearly 30 years ago, Israeli sociologist Dan Rabinowitz published a book, Overlooking Nazareth, that argued Israel was a far more profoundly racist society than was widely understood.
His work has taken on a new relevance – and not just for Israelis – since 7 October.
Back in the 1990s, as now, outsiders assumed that Israel was divided between the religious and secular, the traditional and modern; between vulgar recent immigrants and more enlightened “veterans”.
Israelis often see their society split geographically too: between peripheral communities where popular racism flourishes, and a metropolitan centre around Tel Aviv where a sensitive, cultured liberalism predominates.
Rabinowitz tore this thesis to shreds. He took as his case study the small Jewish city of Nazareth Illit in northern Israel, renowned for its extreme right-wing politics, including support for the fascist movement of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Rabinowitz ascribed the city’s politics chiefly to the fact that it had been built by the state on top of Nazareth, the largest community of Palestinians in Israel, specifically to contain, control and oppress its historic neighbour.
His argument was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were not more racist than the Jews of Tel Aviv. They were simply far more exposed to an “Arab” presence. In fact, given the fact that few Jews chose to live there, they were heavily outnumbered by their “Arab” neighbours. The state had placed them in a direct, confrontational competition with Nazareth for land and resources.
The Jews of Tel Aviv, by contrast, almost never came across an “Arab” unless it was in a servant’s role: as a waiter or a worker on a building site.
The difference, noted Rabinowitz, was that the Jews of Nazareth Illit were confronted with their own racism on a daily basis. They had rationalised and become easy with it. Jews in Tel Aviv, meanwhile, could pretend they were open-minded because their bigotry was never meaningfully tested.
Well, 7 October changed all that. The “liberals” of Tel Aviv were suddenly confronted by an unwelcome, avenging Palestinian presence inside their state. The “Arab” was no longer the oppressed, tame, servile one they were used to.
Unexpectedly, the Jews of Tel Aviv felt a space they believed to be theirs exclusively being invaded, just as the Jews of Nazareth Illit had felt for decades. And they responded in exactly the same way. They rationalised their inner fascist. Overnight, they became comfortable with genocide.
The genocide party
That sense of invasion extends beyond Israel, of course.
On 7 October, Hamas’s surprise assault wasn’t just an attack on Israel. The breakout by a small group of armed fighters from one of the largest and most heavily fortified prisons ever built was also a shocking assault on western elites’ complacency – their belief that the world order they had built by force to enrich themselves was permanent and inviolable.
7 October severely shook their confidence that the non-western world could be contained forever; that it must continue to do the West’s bidding, and that it would remain enslaved indefinitely.
Just as it has with Israelis, the Hamas attack quickly exposed the little fascist within the West’s political, media and religious elite, who had spent a lifetime pretending to be the guardians of a western civilising mission – one that was enlightened, humanitarian and liberal.
The act worked, because the world was ordered in such a way that they could easily pretend to themselves and others that they stood against the barbarism of the Other.
The West’s colonialism was largely out of sight, devolved to globe-spanning, exploitative, environmentally destructive western corporations and a network of some 800 US overseas military bases, which were there to kick ass if this new arms-length economic imperialism encountered difficulties.
Whether intentionally or not, Hamas tore off the mask of that deception on 7 October. The pretence of an ideological rift between western leaders on the right and a supposed “left” evaporated overnight. They all belonged to the same war party; they all became devotees of the genocide party.
All have clamoured for Israel’s supposed “right to defend itself” – in truth, its right to continue decades of oppression of the Palestinian people – by imposing a blockade on food, water and power to Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants.
All actively approve arming Israel’s slaughter and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinians. All have done nothing to impose a ceasefire apart from paying lip service to the notion.
All seem readier to tear up international law and its supporting institutions than to enforce it against Israel. All denounce as antisemitism the mass protests against genocide, rather than denouncing the genocide itself.
7 October was a defining moment. It exposed a monstrous barbarity with which it is hard to come to terms. And we won’t, until we face a difficult truth: that the source of such depravity is far closer to home than we ever imagined.
