Chris Hedges
Colonial apartheid states have a shelf life with an expiration date. Israel is no exception
Israel will appear triumphant (at least in the media) when it ends its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank. Backed by the US, it will achieve its insane objective. Their murderous rampage and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse the Palestinians. His dream of a Jewish-only state, with the surviving Palestinians stripped of their basic rights, will come true. He will revel in his bloody victory. He will celebrate his war criminals. Their genocide will be erased from public consciousness and cast into the gaping black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel manages to decimate Gaza – Israel speaks of months of war – it will have signed its own death sentence. His façade of civility, his supposedly vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, his mythical story of brave Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in piles of ashes. Israel’s social capital will be depleted. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime that will alienate younger generations of American Jews.
Its sponsor, the US, as new generations come to power, will distance itself from Israel in the same way it is distancing itself from Ukraine. Its popular support, already eroded in the US, will come from Christianized American fascists who see in the Israeli domination of ancient biblical lands a harbinger of the Second Coming and in the subjugation of the Arabs a racism akin to white supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering – 10 times more children have died in Gaza than in two years of war in Ukraine – will pave the way to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge. Israel will become synonymous with its victims in the same way that Turks are synonymous with Armenians, Germans are synonymous with Namibians and later with Jews. The cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life of Israel will be exterminated.
Israel will be a stagnant nation in which religious fanatics, bigots, and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse. It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why white supremacists in the US and Europe, including philo-Semites like John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently support Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly veiled celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their expiration date. But they are terminal. It doesn’t take a biblical scholar to realize that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is contrary to the fundamental values of Judaism. The cynical instrumentalization of the Holocaust, which includes labeling Palestinians as Nazis, has little effect when carrying out a live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
Nations need more than strength to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility, and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. Mysticism offers hope for the future. Provides meaning. Provides national identity.
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystics in 1989. Israel’s decline will engender the same lassitude and apathy. He will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority – reviled by most Palestinians – to do the colonizers’ orders.
Historian Ronald Robinson cites the British Empire’s inability to recruit indigenous allies as the point at which collaboration turned into non-cooperation, a decisive moment for the beginning of decolonization. Once the non-cooperation of the native elites is transformed into active opposition, Robinson explains, the “rapid retreat” of the Empire is assured.
The only thing left for Israel is the escalation of violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as occurred in the war waged by the French in Algeria, in the US war in Afghanistan, in the dirty war of the Argentine military dictatorship and during the British conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.
“You could say that the Battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” observed British historian Alistair Horne, “but that the war, the Algerian War, was lost.”
The Gaza genocide has made Hamas fighters heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel can eliminate the leaders of Hamas. But the past – and current – assassinations of hundreds of Palestinian leaders have done little to quell the resistance. The siege and genocide of Gaza have produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been murdered and whose communities have been devastated. They are prepared to take the place of the martyred leaders. Israel has sent its adversary’s actions into the stratosphere.
Israel was at war with itself before October 7th. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. His religious fanatics and bigots, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism. Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unit. It is held together by hate. And even this hatred is not enough to stop protesters from denouncing the regime’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hate is a dangerous political commodity. Once one enemy is destroyed, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals”, once eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors. The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hate creates permanent instability that is exploited by those who seek the destruction of civil society.
Israel went a long way down this path on October 7 by enacting a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews reminiscent of the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law allows exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants from residency on the grounds of “fitness to the fundamental outlook of the community.”
Many of Israel’s best-educated young people have left the country for places like Canada, Australia and the UK, and up to a million have gone to the US. Even Germany has seen an influx of some 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century. Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since October 7. Inside Israel, human rights defenders, intellectuals and journalists – Israeli and Palestinian – are attacked as traitors in smear campaigns sponsored by the Zionist regime, subjected to state surveillance and arbitrary detentions. The Israeli education system is an indoctrination machine for the army.
Israeli academic Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascist cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and will not be worth preserving.”
The global mystique of the United States, after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the assault on the Capitol on January 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally. Biden, in his fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israeli lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the State Department to approve the transfer of 14,000 tank ammunition shells to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically asked Israel to minimize civilian casualties.
Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 20,000 Palestinians, 0.9% of Gaza’s population, the equivalent of some 2.8 million Americans. Another 54,000 have been injured. Half of Gaza’s population is dying of hunger, according to the UN. All Palestinian life-sustaining institutions and services – hospitals (only 11 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remain “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewage systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers , telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, UN food distribution points – have been destroyed.
Israel has murdered at least 80 Palestinian journalists along with dozens of their families and more than 130 UN aid workers along with their family members. The issue is civilian casualties. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The goal is to kill or expel 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.
The shooting of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces shirtless, waving a white flag and calling for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but also sheds light on Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. . These rules are simple: kill everything that moves.
As retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who previously headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in ‘Yedioth Ahronoth’, “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place where it is temporarily or permanently impossible to live.” … Creating a serious humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.” “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote (at least no Arab). Major General Ghassan Allian declared that in Gaza “there will be no electricity or water, there will only be destruction.” You wanted hell; you will have hell.
The colonial states that remain, including the United States, exterminate almost all of their indigenous populations through disease and violence. Old World plagues brought by colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed about 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America. In 1600 less than a tenth of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.
Biden, who ironically may have signed his own political death certificate, is tied to Israel’s genocide. He will try to rhetorically distance himself, but at the same time channel the billions of dollars in weapons demanded by Israel – including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid – to “finish the job.” He is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.
Israel is a pariah state. This was publicly revealed on December 12, when 153 member states of the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a ceasefire, with only 10 – including the US and Israel – against and 23 abstentions. Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two-state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This portends a long, very long conflict that the Jewish state will ultimately not be able to win.
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