Pearls and Irritations

The premeditated bloodletting in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and many other largely forgotten parts of the world speaks hauntingly of the normalisation of death and destruction, largely for cruel, self-serving and illusory reasons.

What is occurring in northern Gaza right now is the most brazen and egregious example of a form of callousness that knows no bounds. It is guided by the delusionary belief that something called ‘national security’ can be achieved when the polar opposite is the case.

The so-called ‘war against Hamas’ is in fact the asymmetric and systematic eradication of expendable unpeople so that the select few can live in an illusory haven of peace. The slaughter without shame, as Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy observes, is legitimated by the flawed proposition that the demon Other can be neutralised and that the most “moral army in the world” is fighting a righteous war, when the reality is murderous, indiscriminate killing.

The contrived self-appraisal of moral superiority on the part of the Israeli state, supported by its propagandised population, amounts to what criminologists refer to as a “technique of moral neutralisation”, the aim of which is to explain away culpability.

This form of virtue signalling is the culmination of the Zionist state’s global marketing campaign, predicated upon the idea that it is a victim-state in a war of existential survival. And yet, as Stan Cohen pointed out long ago, Israel is quintessentially a state in and of denial: denial of its own role in ethnic cleansing and racialised cruelty, and denial of the historical circumstances that have produced one of the most violent nations on earth. Norman Finkelstein describes Israel as “the lunatic state”. More accurately perhaps, it is soul sick: a nation characterised by moral pathology that privileges its own exceptional needs above all others.

The Zionist state’s assertion of moral superiority rests on a racialised retelling of history to serve a deeply chauvinistic narrative. ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s infamous interview with the Trump-lite intellectual Jordan Peterson reveals the full spectrum of this self-delusion. He claims that the lands now occupied by Israel in 1948 were, prior to occupation, barren and undeveloped – an assertion starkly at odds with historical reality, and deeply insulting. This sort of settler colonial trope is part of the familiar rhetoric of conquerors.

Israel’s objective then (circa 1948) and now is to legitimate the establishment of a Greater Israel. To the north, east and west it has pummelled, assailed and forcibly removed populations to make way for air-conditioned condos, hypermarkets and big tech industries. The West Bank is already awash with such. Meanwhile, the ethnic cleansing continues apace, care of settlers, aka violent occupiers.

A license to “finish the job” of this brutal takeover has been granted by the US president-elect. All that remains is to ensure enough weaponry to achieve this end. For the Palestinian unpeople, those who suffer the grotesque realities of genocide, their rights, their dignity, their sense of humanity has been vanquished for the supposedly noble aim of peace and property. But There is nothing noble, decent or just about the slaughter of innocents.

We witness all this against the benchmarks of history. We’ve always known, have we not, of the doublespeak of nations who view themselves as the arbiters of decency but who moment less deploy the weapons and cynical rationalisations of mass murder. Why should we be surprised? These are the same nations that have mounted covert operations, toppled democratically elected governments, funded death squads, and illegally invaded sovereign states.

When these same nations seek the moral high ground, or call for adherence to human rights, justice – whatever – we will remember Gaza and the role they played in its destruction, just as we remember Chile, Iraq, Vietnam etc. We will look back too and compare the current round of slaughter with past atrocities which today’s instigators so readily condemn.

I spent much of September visiting various villages, towns and cities across Poland. I gazed at the ghoulish physical reminders of a largely vanquished people – Polish Jews. Some buildings remain, but the residents have long gone. They were murdered, and later, expelled. The Jewish Museum in Krakow, Muzeum Zydowskie, bears testimony to the countless forgotten and abandoned remnants of a disappeared people that the Polish nation has long struggled to come to terms with.

The ruins of synagogues, cemeteries; houses now occupied by others, the death factories now museums, and the killing fields deep in forests, are reminders of a past many would prefer to forget. But there’s no forgetting. Landscapes speak, memories resonate through stories and rituals. The unpeople of Gaza may one day be wholly erased, swept from their open prisons, but there’s no erasing memory. The state of Israel is literally built on the ruins of a former society. New condos, manicured lawns, fountains, supermarkets and the rest will never erase the memory of what has been lost and how this was enacted.

There will be a reckoning

It’s already begun.

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