Well, folks, it looks like the bloodbath has begun.
Israel has cut electricity and telecommunications in the Gaza Strip, plunging the world’s largest prison into darkness as it mercilessly slaughters its inhabitants.
As Caitlin Johnstone has wryly observed, murderers don’t like witnesses.
She writes:
As Israeli siege warfare cuts Gazans off from both electricity and communications, we’re seeing the lights go out in Gaza in more ways than one.
The light has been further dimmed by the rampant killing of journalists by the Israeli military. Wikipedia, whose notoriously rigged editing system tends to skew information in the favor of US information interests, still currently lists 17 journalists killed by the IDF in Gaza and another one in southern Lebanon in this current onslaught. NPR lists the numbers a bit higher, while conveniently declining to say who did the killing.
An Al Jazeera reporter named Wael Dahdouh lost his wife, son, daughter and baby grandson to a single Israeli airstrike in Gaza, saying “They’re taking their revenge by killing our children!” on the air while kneeling over the body of his dead son. He had reportedly moved them south of Gaza City following an Israeli evacuation order, believing it would keep them safe.
According to Reuters, the IDF is now telling both the Reuters and AFP news agencies that it cannot guarantee the safety of their reporters if they continue operating in the Gaza Strip. After Israel’s historically unparallelled assault on journalists these past three weeks, this can only be interpreted as a threat.
CAN WE CALL THIS “THE GAZAN HOLOCAUST”?
It’s hard to find the words to convey the horror I feel when contemplating what a living hell Gaza must be right now.
The fact is that I can only imagine. My life experience has not given me anything remotely similar to compare to what the Palestinians are currently undergoing.
My sympathy is with them, but sympathy is cheap. It seems woefully inadequate.
I don’t know what to do other than to write, to use this platform to convey more horror, to condemn these crimes against humanity, and to hopefully have some influence on the 500-1000 people who will read this article.
I am not afraid to criticize Israel. Most journalists are, despite the fact that THE ISRAELI STATE HAS MURDERED AT LEAST 17 JOURNALISTS IN THE PAST THREE WEEKS and murdered the family of one of the most prominent journalists reporting from Gaza.
The best thing that I can do to express my solidarity is to use words.
But what words could possibly capture the horror of what is currently occurring in Gaza?
WHAT ISRAEL IS DOING IS PURE EVIL.
It has been bombing the world’s largest prison into rubble. It’s deplorable, it’s disgusting, it’s unconscionable, it’s abominable, it’s atrocious, it’s evil.
Words fall short in describing the horror. I guess evil is the best word we’ve got to capture the indiscriminate slaughter being conducted by the world’s foremost rogue state. If you can’t see that this is morally wrong, it’s because you don’t consider Palestinian lives valuable. It’s because you have allowed propaganda to dehumanize the enemy to the point where murdering women and children becomes acceptable.
You have given up part of your soul if you support this.
If anyone brings up the Holocaust to garner sympathy for this massacre, please do me a favour and slap them in the face.
As the Zionists cheer on this bloodbath, we need to stop letting them playing the Holocaust card to silence their opposition.
The fact that Jews were massacred by Germans 70 years ago has nothing to do with this. We need to stop letting Jews play the victim. We need to hold them responsible for their crimes against humanity.
Before you get your panties in a knot, let me be clear that I don’t hold all Jews, or all Israelis, responsible for the crimes of the Israeli state. But if you raise your voice to defend what’s going on in Gaza, you have lost all respect in my eyes.
You are morally bankrupt, and you do not deserve to be taken seriously by decent people.
I propose that we call Israel’s current assault on on Gaza “the Gazan Holocaust” as a way of saying we will never again let you use past atrocities to justify current ones.
Shame on you for using the memories of those who died in the Holocaust to advance the Zionist cause even when it involves crimes against humanity.
A MESSAGE TO ISRAEL-APOLOGISTS
I have a message to all of you Israeli-apologists - What goes around comes around. As Chris Hedges put it:
PRIDE COMES BEFORE A FALL
Your delusional, racist ideology causes you to believe that Israel can triumph against all of its enemies because 1) Jews are a superior race or 2) Jews are God’s chosen people.
If you believe that, all I have to say is that PRIDE COMES BEFORE A FALL.
I firmly believe that the pride of the Jews will be their downfall. According to their own Scriptures, it has been many times before. And so it will be again.
What kind of God are you people worshipping, anyway? The kind of God that smiles on while you exterminate women and child in cold blood in order to steal their land? A God of vengeance and bloodlust?
If that’s your idea of God, you are either profoundly ignorant, lying to yourselves, or both.
God is universal love, the primal unity which is beyond all contradiction. If you know anything about metaphysics, the idea that God is racist makes absolutely no sense.
You are insane if you think that God sanctions your atrocities.
I’m no expert of Judaism, but I’m pretty damn sure that you know, in your hearts, that what Israel is doing in Gaza is against your own religion. It’s certainly against all moral codes I’m aware of.
If you think that God on your side, all I have to say is that time will tell. Perhaps you will live to have the chance to see coming of the Messiah. Perhaps he or she already walks amongst us.
Perhaps a great spiritual teacher will emerge to answer the need of the people for guidance, to help create a new covenant between the human race and our creator.
When the Messiah comes back, are you really going to accept his or her message, though? What are you going to do when he or she forbids usury? Are you going up to predatory money-lending in the name of righteousness and morality? Will you submit yourselves to the Will of God?
Somehow I doubt it.
Somehow I think that it’s a lot more likely that y’all getting smote.
WHY DO ZIONISTS THINK THEY CAN WIN A WAR AGAINST THE WHOLE WORLD?
It is commonly repeated that Israel has “one the most powerful militaries in the world”. But this isn’t actually true.
According to Global Firepower, Israel ranks 18th in military power, behind Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Iran.
Militarily speaking, Israel is a client state of the Anglo-American world empire.
One of the pitfalls in having such a highly advanced propaganda machine is that there is a risk that people start believing their own lies.
This seems to be the case with Israel.
IS THIS THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR THE STATE OF ISRAEL?
Personally, I doubt very much that the Israeli state will exist in 2050. I think it is entirely plausible that it could be vanquished in the next five years.
It could be thirty years, or it could be three, but Israel cannot hope to survive indefinitely surrounded by enemies.
When it is defeated, it will have no one to blame but itself.
To any Israelis reading this: Have you considered that you might actually lose this war?
Do you expect people to have sympathy for you when you showed no mercy towards the Palestinians?
Do you expect to people to welcome Israeli refugees with open arms when Israel is laid low?
Why should the world show mercy to you when you showed no mercy to the Palestinians?
My advice to Jews is this - stop identifying with the Israeli state. Even if you support its “right to exist” on principle, the fact is that it has been taken over by fanatical psychopaths.
Are you willing going to go down with the ship when that ship has been hijacked by the likes of Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and Bezalel Smotrich?
Know this - we don’t hate you because you’re Jewish. Countless Jews, amongst them Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Gustav Landauer, David Graeber and Voline, have been on the right side of history. We know that some Jews have been exemplars of human virtue. The Zionists want to make this all about race, but it really isn’t.
We deplore the crimes of the Israeli state because they are deplorable according to any decent standard of human morality.
If you actively support the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians, you have no right to expect either solidarity nor sympathy from us in your hour of need.
If you join those of us who fight for a world in which all people are free, we welcome you to renounce your allegiance to the Israeli state and join us in a movement to free humanity from our true enemies - those who claim dominion over us.
ZIONISM IS BUILT ON A TABOO AGAINST RACE TREASON
The fact is that Zionism is a racist ideology, and Israelis are programmed with this ideology from a young age.
Jewish children are taught from a young age that the world hates them and wants to kill them because they are Jewish. This is an absurd lie, and it is downright evil to teach children this.
This creates a strong group-identity based on “us-versus-them” type tribalistic thinking. Jews are taught to be to loyal to other Jews even when those other Jews are doing things objectively contrary to human decency.
Part of this is instilling a strong taboo against “race treason”. Jews such as Norman Finkelstein, who tirelessly advocate for the rights of Palestinians, are seen as traitors and as enemies to Judaism, despite the fact that Zionism and Judaism are two very separate things.
This taboo against race treason needs to be understood as a propaganda construct.
Even if there does exist some natural, deep-seated loyalty to one’s own ethnic group, Zionist propagandists exploit this loyalty to get Jews to support the crimes of the Israeli state.
Judaism is synonymous neither with Zionism nor with the Israel state.
For religious Jews, the time has come to ask yourselves if you are loyal to Israel or to Judaism. Are you loyal to Israel, or to God?
The time has come for more secular Jews to ask themselves if they are loyal to the state Israel or loyal to mankind.
In the words of the great anarcho-punks Aus Rotten:
Burn your country’s flags
Fuck your patriotic pride
Fuck the politicians and the shit they try to hide
They make you pay their taxes and they make you fight their wars
But they won't feed the hungry and they don't care about the poor
Instead they try and take you for all you’re fucking worth
And they separate with flags all the people of the earth
They exploit our different cultures and enhance our sickening greed
And they get the hatred rising which is exactly what they need
But what about the people's needs
Will they be unfulfilled?
And what of those who speak out? Will those "traitors" then be killed?
The only traitors that exist are the traitors to mankind
The ones who put the money first and the people's need behind
They say is we don't love our country then get the hell out
Should we be thankful to die in battle for what our flag's about?
Well fuck off
Fuck you
Fucking hear this
Your ignorant petty support doesn't mean piss
Don't support war, no matter what the cause!
Your fucking flags and damn religion just feed corporate claws!
I renounce my citizenship from the U.S.A. and I'd suggest the same for any country!
Because countries kill the people's will with their patriotic lie!
And every fucking day you're killing who they say
and you never even wonder why!
Why do we blindly follow what our leaders have to say?
Instead let's make them answer to the people they betray!
We don't owe our leaders anything so fuck what they demand!
Then disregard their fucking lies and bury them where they stand!
The flags will cover coffins where these fuckers will now lie
And we'll give a flag to their families when these poor bastards die
Natonalistic pride is fucking shit why can't the people see?
As long as flags fly up above us no one's really free!
The choice is up to each and every one of us to decide what side we are on.
Choose well.
- Crow Qu’appelle
So dangerous. Suicidal. Let's hope your Croatian friend is right, eh?
On a related note - I've a friend who's a historian and has a substack. I begged him to write a short history of modern Israel, kind of a how we got here from there.
It does not disappoint. Go. Read.
https://mathewaldred.substack.com/p/this-land-is-mine