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Narrated by Eunice Wong
Text originally published Oct. 28, 2023Subscribed
A Bird in the Hand - by Mr. FishSubscribed
During the siege in Sarajevo, when I was
reporting for The New York Times,
we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near total blockage of
food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never
endured hundreds of dead and wounded a day. We never endured the complicity
of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We
never endured Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We
never endured massive arms shipments from the U.S. and other Western
countries to sustain the siege. We never endured press reports from
Sarajevo that were routinely discredited and dismissed by the international
community, although 25 journalists were killed in the
war by the besieging Serbian forces. We never endured Western governments
justifying the siege as the right of the Serbs to defend themselves,
although the U.N. peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public
relations gesture, ineffective in halting the slaughter until forced to
respond following the massacres of
8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica.
I don’t mean to minimize the horror of the
siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares nearly three decades later.
But what we suffered – three to four hundred shells a day, four to five
dead a day, and two dozen wounded a day - is a tiny fraction of the
wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza more
resembles the Wehrmacht’s assault on Stalingrad, where over 90 percent of
the city’s buildings were destroyed, than Sarajevo.
On Friday the Gaza Strip had all its
communications severed. No Internet. No phone service. No electricity.
Israel’s goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of
those who survive into refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by
Israel to erase not only
a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of
the massive campaigns of racialized slaughter by other settler colonial
projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could make
the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole, go away. And
like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.
Israel’s bombing campaign, one of
the heaviest of the
21st century, has killed more than 7,300 Palestinians, nearly half of them
children, along with 26 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United
Nations staff. Some 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced and
an estimated 600,000 are homeless. Mosques,
120 health facilities, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets,
water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been blasted into
rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have
been bombed or are shutting down. Clean water is running out. Gaza, by the
end of Israel’s scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic
the Nazis regularly employed when facing armed resistance, including in the
Warsaw Ghetto and later Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or
at least Gaza as we knew it, will not exist.
Not only are the tactics the same, but so
is the rhetoric.
Palestinians are referred to as
animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have
no right to exist. They must be cleansed from the earth.
The extermination of those whose land we
steal, whose resources we plunder and whose labor we exploit is coded
within our DNA. Ask Native Americans. Ask Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask
the Kikuyu in Kenya. Ask the Herero in Namibia who, like Palestinians in
Gaza, were gunned down and
driven into desert concentration camps where they died of starvation and
disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask Iraqis. Ask Afghans. Ask Syrians. Ask
Kurds. Ask Libyans. Ask indigenous peoples across the globe. They know who
we are.
Israel’s distorted, settler colonial
visage is our own. We pretend otherwise. We ascribe to ourselves virtues
and civilizing qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for
stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, seizing their
land and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, enforced
poverty and murder to keep them subjugated.
Our past, including our recent past in the
Middle East, is built on the idea of subduing or wiping out the “inferior”
races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil.
ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist slurs to dehumanize them.
“Haji” “Sand Nigger” “Camel Jockey” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shoveler” And then,
because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel
licensed, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the
ruling Likud party said, to erase “the
Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”
Naftali Bennett, Israel’s former Prime
Minister, in an interview on Sky News on Oct. 12 said, “We’re
fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.
Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu described Hamas
in a press conference with the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, as “the new
Nazis”.
Think about that. A people, imprisoned in
the world’s largest concentration camp for sixteen years, denied food,
water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized
units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being butchered and starved by one
of the most advanced militaries on the planet, and they are the Nazis?
There is an historical analogy here. But
it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to
acknowledge.
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When those who are occupied refuse to
submit, when they continue to resist, we drop all pretense of our
“civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and
destruction. We become drunk on violence. This violence makes us insane. We
kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed
of being. We expose the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the
fundamental truth about Western civilization — we are the most ruthless and
efficient killers on the planet. This alone is why we dominate the
“wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom or
liberty. These are rights we never intend to grant to the oppressed.
“Honor, justice, compassion and freedom
are ideas that have no converts,” Joseph Conrad, who wrote “Heart of
Darkness,” reminds us. “There are only people, without knowing,
understanding or feelings, who intoxicate themselves with words, repeat
words, shout them out, imagining they believe them without believing in
anything else but profit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”
Genocide lies at the core of Western
imperialism. It is not unique to Israel. It is not unique to the Nazis. It
is the building block of Western domination. The humanitarian interventionists who
insist we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness —
although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be
in our national interest — are useful idiots of the war machine and global
imperialists. They live in an Alice-in-Wonderland fairytale where the
rivers of blood we spawn make the world a happier and better place. They
are the smiley faces of genocide. You can watch them on your screens. You
can listen to them spout their pseudo-morality in the White House and in
Congress. They are always wrong. And they never go away.
Maybe we are fooled by our own lies, but
most of the world sees us, and Israel, clearly. They understand our
genocidal proclivities, rank hypocrisy and self-righteousness. They see
that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power, forced to live in
squalid refugee camps or the diaspora, denied their homeland and eternally
persecuted, suffer the kind of fate once reserved for Jews. This perhaps is
the final tragic irony. Those who were once in need of protection from
genocide now commit it.
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