Not so long ago there was a common theory to which I subscribed: that in an era of mass media and instant streaming the Zionist entity is unable to fully displace or wantonly slaughter Palestinians because of the scrutiny it would invite. You can get away with a lot worse, the thinking goes, if nobody is watching.
It’s a theory I’ve considered over the years while working in the fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies. From the beginning of this work, over 25 years ago, interlocutors stressed the importance of differences in comparative analyses. One crucial difference between Euro-American and Zionist colonization, everyone agreed, was the timeline. While colonization is ongoing in North and South America, often in situations of great struggle or tension, settlement of the so-called New World precedes the conquest of modern Palestine by a few centuries.
Those few centuries account for significant developments in jurisprudence, technology, communications, rhetoric, mobility, demographics, and diplomacy. Certain of these developments abet Zionist colonization, but others create limitations that Euro-Americans didn’t need to worry over—global outrage or international law, for example.
The other notable difference is one of scale. Even limiting ourselves to the borders of the contiguous United States, the landmass subject to Euro-American settlement is much larger than historic Palestine (along with the surrounding areas that Zionists fantasize about). Variations of geography force us to think about the impact of physical space on conquest, and, in North America, the intricacies of conquest involving hundreds of nations.
The points of comparison nevertheless grow stronger with time.
For instance, it has become clear during the past two months in the Gaza Strip that the Zionist entity is plenty capable of equaling the belligerence of the American frontier, an era of wholesale ethnic cleansing thought to be a feature of history. (“It could never happen today,” people sometimes would foolishly declare.) Colonial atrocities of the past—Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the Trail of Tears—are now everywhere in evidence. The Zionist entity is carrying out a kind of primitive violence with modern technology.
This violence fills our computer and television screens. People around the world get minute-by-minute accounts of massive destruction and widespread murder. Certain images have become horrifyingly familiar: throngs of refugees queuing for bread; ambulances dodging tank and machine gun fire; hospitals in disarray; once-dense neighborhoods transformed by aerial bombardment into kilometers of rubble. We scroll through photos of men blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, lined up on the ground like antiquities in a museum courtyard. The scrolling continues into pictures of white body bags in shallow trenches and then into videos of little girls and boys screaming trauma into the ruins of their childhood. We are perhaps the first generation to witness genocide in real time. History books about the horrors of the past are written every time somebody opens social media.
The theory that bearing witness will curtail Israel’s ability to act on exterminationist fantasies no longer holds. Information and knowledge, it turns out, aren’t reliable bulwarks against genocide. Impunity isn’t beholden to disapproval.
What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from all corners of the world?
It tells us that people serious about Palestinian liberation were right to despise the so-called radicals who laundered Zionism through celebrity activism, academic credentialism, NGO astroturf, and the Democratic Party. An entire class of influencers arose from Bernie Sanders’ failed presidential campaigns. They populate hundreds of podcasts and livestreams. They wasted incalculable energy and resources promoting a man who would go on to repeatedly justify the bloody campaign in Gaza. Now they deplore Sanders after having extracted all the clout appended to his name and having ostracized the outliers who accurately tagged him as a fraud from the get-go. It was the most noteworthy example of a timeworn practice: pursuing access to microphones and New Yorker profiles by subsuming Palestinian liberation to institutions constitutionally hostile to revolutionary politics.
It tells us that international governing bodies and legal institutions are at best useless. Despite some halfhearted hemming and hawing, the UN has been an accomplice to the Zionist entity’s genocide. The ICC will never see an American, Israeli, or EU war criminal on its docket. The Arab League pretends to care, but its performance is entirely unconvincing. Such institutions have been captured by imperialism since their inception.
It tells us that “dialogue” was always a pathway to submission. The idea that Israelis and Palestinians should dialogue as a means to peace was always dubious if only because dialogue can’t work in situations of disparate power. But now, with Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of the genocide, it should be clear that Palestinians never had anyone to dialogue with in the first place.
It tells us that Western academe was completely unprepared for the material demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand. Many among the intellectual class, including scholars of Fanon like Adam Shatz and Lewis Gordon, either disavow or diminish anticolonial resistance or ignore it altogether. Academe is where resistance goes for processing and beautification after it has been completed. It’s rarely a place for the organizing stage.
It tells us that deterrence isn’t a game of strategy played by eggheads on the internet, but an onerous project conditional on guns and rockets. Academics generally are too scared to say it, or, in an object lesson on arrogance, don’t actually believe it, but a cache of weapons will always be more important than a conference panel.
It tells us that electoralism is a sham. There is no meaningful ideological variance among U.S. politicians at the national level. In practice, they range from center-right to fascist. In the upcoming presidential election, for example, voters will get to decide between two scarcely-functional old farts with histories of sexual misconduct and a complete devotion to Zionist genocide.
It tells us that racism isn’t simply an attitude, for its origin is social violence and eventually it will become physically violent in order to perform its civic mandate. In the framework of settler colonization, racism manifests as a yearning for cultural purification through displacement of the native.
It tells us that capitalism makes death a valuable commodity. The Zionist entity isn’t merely an imperialist beachhead; it is a major player in the international weapons trade. It tests new munitions, chemicals, and surveillance technology on Palestinians. It arms reactionary forces throughout the Global South. It serves as a conduit and accomplice to U.S. policing. Because of Zionist occupation, corporations enjoy the use of human subjects as raw material for development and innovation.
It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without our extinction.
More than anything, it tells us that in the benighted West there is no democracy, no free speech, no legislative remedy, no human rights, no right even to be human. These are illusions people repeat in an effort to survive pervasive depravity, or myths they cynically invoke to gather the crumbs of deprivation. There is a ruling class and various iterations of the dispossessed and the dispossessed exist only to serve ruling class gluttony.
That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal devices without being able to stop it. We are not simply ineffectual in the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their depravity.
What can we do, then? It’s important to start by recognizing that the entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of empathy or relief. Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence.
Upon this recognition, the possibilities become clearer, albeit less convenient. But in the spirit of urgency, we can keep it simple: whether it happens in darkness or light, on screen or off, the Zionist entity needs to become an archive we browse as a cautionary tale, or else our future on this planet will be history.
Thank you for this clarity Steve.
As a former academic and anti-apartheid activists, I was hitherto struggling to articulate my feeling of limbo, disbelief uncertainty, despair, frustration, anger, etc. Your article brought some respite. But, you are one inch shy of offering a concrete solution…
I find myself thinking often of where I grew up. About an hour’s drive away from my hometown is the location of the Bear River Massacre. This is one of the single largest massacres that occurred in North America.
I never learned about this massacre in my school years. I only visited the awful colonial monument placed there much later. The language on that monument reminds me of the language the zionists and imperialists use to describe Palestinians.
Settler-Colonialism is the same scourge in North America and in Palestine. May the Axis of Resistance defeat the iteration of that menace in our liftimes!
Ahh, listen to Saul Willliams:
https://youtu.be/m8gEEI4DR_0?si=eC-GWbspTvEkdkoT
Saul Williams & Abby Martin: Israel’s High-Tech Barbarism
+–+
Richard Medhurst
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aui2Z6Nbp8k
+–+
Let’s push the academics aside. They have failed the world, BIG TIME.
Unless, well, they are: Vijay Prashad,
https://youtu.be/SIRgLtYJ-ho?si=3TmH5eowKvYM6G-T
Matteo Capasso, the Marie Curie Research Fellow at Columbia university and university of Venice Italy, Author of “Everyday politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya” and editor of Middle East Critique. His work focuses on the nature and impact of US-led imperialism.
https://youtu.be/NZDGvT04sNA?si=YX_PXq8aQxtoBQ7J
+–+
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: Interview with Israeli Historian Prof Ilan Pappé
https://rumble.com/v3zyn1s-the-ethnic-cleansing-of-palestine-interview-with-israeli-historian-prof-ill.html
+–+
Gaza, Hezbollah, Iran & Regional War: Prof Marandi & Richard Medhurst
https://rumble.com/v3uiy81-marandi-full-interview.html
+–+
Enjoy!
I get the frustration and the sense of helplessness. I feel it too. The devastation of Gaza and the destruction of many thousands of lives is happening in plain view and nothing can stop it. Some years ago I donated a substantial amount of money to purchase video cameras for citizen j0urnalists on the West Bank. It seemed obvious that once the footage of the settler and army crimes were documented and shown, the world would react with outrage and shut them down. But it didn’t.
Why does exposure not work?
1. Trump has perfected the system of overwhelming the senses with so much nonsense that the good stuff gets swamped by the lies.
2. but even before Trump, people see what their meta-narrative directs them to see. Which is why the demonstrations and other political actions are largely useless as political tool. They scream to the choir while everybody else tunes it all out.
The way forward – of there is any – is through more listening, creating more space, more calm so the horror can hit home. Conversation, friendship, listening not shouting slogans, demonstrating, mass emailing and the froth of social media.
Ahh, think Edward Bernays updated through Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and all those chaos creators. Trump was just a clown for his PR spinners, and those spinners work their dark arts for the Re-pubic people and the Demon-can’ts.
Savagery or Socialism, that is the question.
Lakoff was looking at narrative frames, but he just got that from so many minds before him.
Hmm, 1.8 percent of Jews in Israel think the Genocide is too much. That is, 98 percent want more bombing.
I appreciate the sentiment but we’ve been doing that for years. We get to choose between Socialism or barbarism. Remain or revolution. That’s it. The time for talking is over
whoever the gods wish to destroy
they first make mad
Hi Steven, this is a very insightful article and I was wondering if we at The Listening Post, Al Jazeera can interview you about themes discussed in this article and more. If so please do let me know at my email.
Take a look at this sick company: And this is reflective of post-modernism, the Cancer that is the White Race!
https://paulokirk.substack.com/p/death-to-the-infidels-nah-death-to
Zara faces backlash over its ad campaign on social media; users equate images used to map of Palestine
Global fashion brand Zara on Sunday faced backlash for its latest ad-campaign showing its newest collection, featuring model Kristen McMenamy. Some of the social media users stated that the ad-campaign showed the plywood boards arranged in the shape of a map similar to Palestine. Zara later deleted the post but has not made any official statement.
Thank you, Steve, for this clear appraisal of the very cruel nature of international capitalism, exemplified by the Zionist terror unleashed on Gaza.
There is a light that is emerging in these dark times, and it’s found in the millions of working people that have taken to the streets to assert our shared humanity with Palestine.
There was a time when the US civil rights movement seemed to face insurmountable odds against white supremacists and when South African apartheid seemed unassailable. Yet, through the mass actions of millions of people we were able to expose the truth of racist and national oppression.
We won important victories then and we can do it again if we squarely face the truth and struggle without compromise.
International solidarity has the power to free Palestine!
“The first week in December of this year was all about America’s apparent inextinguishable love for the state of Israel. After a short pause to exchange hostages for prisoners, the Israelis re-launched their drive to exterminate the Gazans and steal what remains of their land and property. President Joe Biden, ably assisted by his ever-present sidekick State Department honcho Antony Blinken, welcomed the Jewish state’s onslaught by pushing the pedal to the metal on aiding the loveable Bibi Netanyahu while at the same time suggesting that the twenty thousand dead Palestinians and counting just might be a tad too much. Of course, the suggestion was limited to demonstrating what a great humanitarian, who is up for reelection, now sits in the Oval Office and was not supported by any real consequences for Israel should it ignore the advice, which it did. Biden then demonstrated where his heart truly was by expediting through the State Department a new shipment of munitions, an apparent gesture that keeps on giving to help the war effort, with some reports suggesting that upwards of two hundred US military aircraft have already made deliveries of more than 15,000 bombs to help Bibi kill more Palestinians. “
A commentator said this article by Amira Hass in Haaretz Israeli newspaper, should be in every American newspaper.
Israel Killed Thousands of Children in Gaza. How Can So Many Israelis Remain Indifferent?
For decades we’ve been brought up believing that only military force can ensure the state’s survival, while denying rights to the Palestinians. That’s just one of many sad answers to the question
Amira Hass
Dec 18, 2023
The Gaza Strip is gradually being erased, along with its families, its people, its children, their smiles and laughter. What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to support this systematic and mass erasure?
What enables them to see it as the only suitable response to the massacre that Hamas and its accomplices perpetrated, to the military humiliation of Israel and to the indescribable suffering of the hostages, the wounded, the survivors, their families and the families of the hundreds killed?
Israel’s military is erasing the streets of Gaza’s cities and the alleys of its refugee camps. It’s erasing Gaza’s beach promenades, villages and its unexpected yet existing agricultural areas. It’s erasing its cultural institutions, universities and archaeological sites.
Hamas’ military infrastructure is being destroyed and may be destroyed entirely. Thousands of its armed men are being killed and will be killed. But the organization will be rebuilt; it and its leaders will flourish in every community and place where the erasure of Gaza continues.
What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to remain unshocked by the fact that in about two months we’ve killed around 7,000 children (a provisional figure) with the help of America’s improved bombs?
What enables most of the Jews not to gasp in horror at the crowding of 1.8 million or 1.9 million people into about 120 square kilometers (46 square miles), a “safe area” that’s constantly being bombed? What’s preventing those Jewish Israelis from screaming when they hear about the thirst and hunger of 2.2 million Palestinian civilians and the diseases spreading due to the crowding, the water shortage and the out-of-action hospitals?
What enables this erasure and the slaying of children with both our active and passive participation? Here are some answers:
• For decades we’ve been educated to believe that only military force can ensure the state’s survival and ability to flourish, while denying rights to the Palestinian people.
• We’ve erased any “context” – incitement has made this word a synonym for support of Hamas and justification of its horrors.
• We Jews have assumed a monopoly on the suffering caused by the cruelty of the Other.
• We’ve chosen not to look at the unbearable pictures of trembling Palestinian children, faces gray with dust, being rescued from between bombed concrete walls. And there’s no way of knowing who’s more fortunate: those children or the ones who were killed.
Every mass or gradual killing that we’ve been carrying out against the Palestinians for years, every theft, humiliation and abuse passes through thousands of media, psychological and academic filters. The sifted product is our conviction that the Palestinians are better off than the Somalis or Syrians, so they shouldn’t complain.
• We remember every massacre of Israelis by Palestinians. We forget every massacre of Palestinians by Israelis.
• For decades we’ve gotten used to living in comfort while five minutes away Israel (in other words, us) demolishes Palestinian homes and builds for Jews, channels water to Jews and makes Palestinians go thirsty. All the rest is written in the reports of the rights groups HaMoked, B’Tselem and Adalah.
For decades we’ve been ignoring the “moderate” Palestinians’ warning that the continuous grab of freedom and land and the settlers’ violence – assisted by the state and inspired by its violence – narrow their children’s horizons and generate despair and faith in arms only and revenge.
• We’ve embraced an essentialist worldview: The Palestinians are terrorists because that’s the way they are. They were born with genes for hating us – the offspring of Roman Emperor Titus and the pogromists of East Europe’s Khmelnytsky Uprisingof the 17th century.
• We’re convinced that we’re a democracy, even though for 56 years we’ve been ruling over millions of subjects without civil rights, controlling their land, money and economy.
• We have profound racist contempt for the Palestinians, which we developed to justify, both cognitively and psychologically, our trampling over them.
We’ve been in denial of Palestinian history and the rootedness of Palestinian existence between the river and the sea.
• The erasure of Gaza is possible because since 1994 we have deliberately missed the opportunity – offered to us by the Palestinians – to shed some of our traits as a dispossessing and settling entity and let them have a state on 22 percent of the area west of the Jordan River (including Gaza). I wrote in July 2021 that “in all the heat of the talk about apartheid, a dynamic, active and dangerous dimension of it – the Jewish settler colonialism – has become dulled and blunted.
“According to the ideology and policies of Jewish settler colonialism, the Palestinians are superfluous. In short, it is possible, worthwhile and desirable to live without the Palestinians in this country between the river and the sea. Their existence here is conditional, dependent on our wishes and our goodwill – a matter of time.
“The ideology of ‘superfluousness’ is a poison that spreads especially when the process of settler colonialism is at its height. … Settler colonialism is a continuous process of grabbing land, distorting historical borders, reshaping them and then expelling indigenous peoples.”
I referred to the “superfluousness” of the Palestinians in the West Bank and warned about the intentions to expel them. I assumed then that the viewing of Gazans as superfluous sufficed with severing them from their people and their families on the other side of the Erez checkpoint that separates Gaza from the rest of the land (Israel and the West Bank).
But now the “superfluousness” is being reflected in expulsion, disguised as voluntary under the shelling. It’s being reflected in the physical erasure of the Gazans, and in plans to return Jewish settlers to Gaza. Woe to them and woe to us.
Comment
Amira puts the Genocide before us succinctly! This article should be on the front page of the NY Times and EVERY MSM newspaper in North America. With the photo of the Palestinian mother and children staring at the readers through the ruins! The term “never again” should be banished from speech and understood as “unless we are doing it”. I always wondered how the world watched pre Holocaust Germany and ignored the Nuremberg Laws. No more!
Come on, get real. We need a deeper look at what that Isra-Hell is, where that “newspaper” is centered.
Here, a real scholar, about that racist Zionism, European Jewish Brand.
Israel has been stealing Palestine for more than 100 years. What are the roots of the genocide in Gaza? How did Zionism form? What has Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project looked like throughout history and how has it impacted Palestinian resistance today?
https://www.youtube.com/live/7j2AmxLLNlk?si=IdPVVhOy5c1NP90i
Stephen, this comment to a recent article by Gideon Levy, in Haaretz Israeli newspaper, is telling.
“Unfortunately for decades now, Israel has used the Holocaust and a fairytale book written over 2,000 years ago by a bunch of old geezers as an excuse to mistreat, torture, kill, rape, and brutalize tens of thousands of children, women, old, and innocent people, 20,000 over the past few weeks alone. I have been a supporter of Israel for most of my life, and I’m old, but over the past 20 years the more I read and informed myself about Israel and its treatment of Palestinians the less I find myself to be able to support in good conscience this wonderful idea of a Jewish homeland turned terror state. Israel supposed to be the homeland where Jews could live a safe and happy life. Unfortunately, due to the unconscionable actions of successive Israeli governments Israel is one of the least safe places for a Jew to live now.”
This interview on the Piers Morgan show is also telling.
https://youtu.be/ph9XF39yjgU?si=Q49WMYJlW1BO5Axx
thank you. thank you. thank you!!!!!!