Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the West cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the grave, grave error of al–Nakba in 1948, when began the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land. See the Toynbee reference above: Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it.
Diego Ramos, ScheerPost’s managing editor, forwarded me a video clip last week he thought I ought to see. Sending it under the subject line, “Disturbing trend in Israel,” my colleague must have reckoned I have not been sufficiently shocked by the events in Israel and Gaza since Hamas mounted an assault into southern Israel on October 7 and the Israeli Defense Forces began a purposely disproportionate response to the incursion—purposely disproportionate as a matter of official policy since David Ben–Gurion put it in place during his premiership in the 1950s.
Diego did his disturbing work. The video he forwarded outdoes it all so far by provoking a disgust as profound as any I have ever felt. It features a number of scenes wherein Israelis record themselves sadistically ridiculing Palestinians in the most cravenly cruel manner. They imitate Palestinian children dying or starving. They apply racially offensive makeup. They laugh and dance while switching lights on and off and while ostentatiously drinking water from taps—this last to mock Gazans as Israel deprives them of power, potable water, food and much else.
And I am describing the children in these videos, ranging in age from, maybe, six or seven to somewhere in their teens or early twenties. The mothers stand behind them, smiling with approval and delight. Here is the video as posted by Al Jazeera English last Thursday. I have since seen several others like it.
By common agreement among many lawyers, scholars of international law, special rapporteurs, and the like—including Israelis in these fields—what we witness daily now is by all acceptable definitions a genocide. Whether or not Israel is committing war crimes by the hour is not even worth debating. But I am taken up now by the spectacle of human beings who have allowed themselves to be destroyed in the name of an ideology that proves every bit as racist as it was when, in 1975, the U.N. General Assembly declared Zionism to be so. Resolution 3379 was revoked in 1991; it should not have been.
I am reminded of what I learned years ago when studying the Japanese Imperial Army’s conduct in China and Korea before and during World War II and the long record of the Kempeitai, commonly known as Imperial Japan’s Thought Police. Victimizers, I came to conclude with conviction, are victims, too. This holds for the people in the videos I have recently viewed and for every Israeli wearing an IDF uniform. They have been stripped of all ordinary decency by the radical ideologues of “the Jewish state.” They can laugh or sneer or pull all the triggers they like: Their lives, too, have been destroyed. Look at the videos: The evidence of this is in every frame….
https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/31/patrick-lawrence-deeper-into-depravity/
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Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
Gaza, trades unions, fascism & oppression
The world is coming apart at the seams
Is the One-Sided US Response to the Gaza Crisis a Sign of Civilizational Decline?
Israel-Hamas War: US arms industry stocks rocket (October 10)
Palestine and Israel: Historical, Legal and Moral Issues
We’re anti-Zionist Jews and we see genocide unfolding in Gaza
Standing up for Palestine is also standing up to save the west from the worst of itself
After the truth-shower 