Zionism has followed the twisted logic of a long line of modern ideologies that ended up committing mass murder.

On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself It is a question of finding out whether innocence, the moment it begins to act, can avoid committing murder.

The Rebel, Albert Camus

Dying Gazans Criticised For Not Using Last Words To Condemn Hamas.

Headline from satirical publication, The Onion

Unlike some of his other books, Albert Camus_The Rebel_is more difficult to read because it requires a knowledge of the ideological, artistic and literary movements he referenced. But it may be politically his most important as well as morally challenging work.

The moral-political problem of his time and ours that Camus presented is clear enough. It is that modern political ideologies that often begin with noble and sometimes not so noble intentions and aspirations end up committing mass murder.

Camus claim is still true today in the 21st century. Its just that many Westerners, so drunk on their high morals and humanitarian enlightenment, have appropriated and rendered him harmless so much so that he is routinely taught in North American high schools.

But at his most dangerous, Camus speaks directly, especially in_The Rebel_, to our current world predicament, namely the Wests moral and material complicity in an ongoing genocide.

Zionism

In Emily Bronts_Wuthering Heights_, Heathcliff, as Camus observes, would kill everybody on Earth in order to gain the love of Cathy, but he would never feel the need to justify murder. He would kill for love, but he wouldnt bother to make excuses for it.

Ideologists are the exact opposite. They kill while denying they are committing murder, they blame their victims for it, or else they claim nobility, necessity, or both, for the murderous act.

Ideology, a contemporary phenomenon, limits itself to repudiating other people. They alone are the cheats, Camus wrote. This leads to murder. Every dawn, masked assassins slip into some cell; murder is the question today.

Heres an excellent example of what Camus is talking about blaming the victims for their alleged moral depravity: Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. We will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.

The quote is usually attributed to Golda Meir, but researchers have had difficulties identifying the exact source of the quote. Be that as it may, many Zionists and their sympathisers thought it was a profound moral statement and referenced it approvingly.

You can see how this kind of twisted logic we kill out of love, they kill out of hate can easily end up justifying or explaining away Israeli killings of Palestinians while condemning Palestinian killings of Israelis. This is despite the fact that the former figure is always many order of magnitude higher than the latter.

Its sometimes puzzling how reasonable, intelligent and educated people can defend mass murder. But they dont frame it as such. There are word games and coded messages, propagated through powerful political and media interests, that camouflage the true nature of the deed. Thats why 40,000 dead in Gaza is acceptable to the West, but considered genocide in Ukraine.

Moreover, to the true believers, the goals and aspirations of their causes are perfectly legitimate and justified, even when the means and methods used to achieve them may be questionable. Also, they only sound dubious or immoral to their opponents. After all, a belief may be true to one person, but false to another.

There is no ultimate authority with the power to decide and enforce; international law is a toothless tiger.

Through a dialectical twist of historical fate and political circumstances, Camus has argued, the most powerful and successful of modern ideologies turned murderous at some point. It also may be said that they became powerful and successful precisely because they were ready and willing to commit mass murder. They also had to cover their tracks.

However, in the long run, it will be difficult for Zionism to escape the same judgment on those other 20th-century ideologies.

Germany and the United States

The late American historian Peter Novick asked in his 1999 book The Holocaust and Collective Memory, why the Holocaust has come to loom so large in our [American] culture and whether the prominent role the Holocaust has come to play in both American Jewish and general American discourse is as desirable a development as most people seem to think it is.

Novicks scepticism is even more justified now than back in the late 1990s. What is particularly intriguing and infuriating is that countries such as Germany and the US two of Israels most uncompromising supporters have spent the entire post-war period teaching the sacred history of the Holocaust so that their own citizens and the entire world must learn from it in order not to repeat such monstrous crimes. Or so they claim.

What a historical paradox!

Both countries longstanding uncritical and almost total support has rendered them incapable of formulating a rational foreign policy and defining their own national interests vis–vis Israel, and has caused them to distort their domestic law and civil rights such as to censor and punish Israels critics and protesters often with absurd charges of anti-semitism and hate speech. And this is to state the obvious though rarely articulated in mainstream Western news media: their unstated denial and rejection of fundamental Palestinian rights, including, yes, their right to live, to exist at all, as human beings and as a collective society worthy of independent statehood, a people not subordinate to or less human than another.

As a lifelong student of philosophy, the perverse case of the Germans especially intrigues me. Modern German thought never seems to be able to free itself from the prevailing dominant politics of the country.

Its well-known how Nazism permeated the works of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Equally well-known, though almost universally praised, is the fundamental pro-Israeli or pro-Zionist position of the Frankfurt School of critical theory during the exemplary liberal period of post-war Germany.

Its most brilliant co-originator, Theodor Adorno, famously said that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, meaning, I gather, that all human meaning was lost after the Holocaust.

In November, when the murderous nature of Israels assault on Gaza was becoming obvious, the Frankfurt Schools most influential contemporary representative, Jurgen Habermas, co-signed a public statement justifying Israels action and calling on Germany to support the Jewish state, no matter what.

It said: The Federal Republics democratic self-image, which is based on the obligation to respect human dignity, is linked to a political culture for which, in light of the mass crimes of the Nazi era, Jewish life and Israels right to exist, are central elements that are particularly worthy of protection. The commitment to this is fundamental for our political co-existence.

What of Palestinian life and their right to exist? Only secondary or even non-existent? When it comes to Israel, German-American critical theory suddenly goes uncritical, as a matter of principle!

The Palestinians

Now, consider the other side of the equation, not the oppressor, but the victim. Yes, the historical records are irrefutable: Palestinians are the victims. This is so even if you label all of them terrorists, especially if you insist on it.

To answer Camus question: can innocence resist and yet avoid committing murder? Camus thought you could, but he is not at his best philosophically when he sounds like a bleeding-heart liberal. Historys lessons have also been pretty clear as soon as you resist and fight back against your oppressor, you will have to kill. So there are innocent victims, but not all victims are innocent, especially those who choose to fight back.

However, international law recognises the right of resistance of an occupied people and that extends to Palestinians and also that the coloniser cant claim the right of self-defence by waging an offensive war against a civilian population. That is according to the latest judgment of the International Court of Justice on the Gaza war.

Today, we appreciate and sympathise with North American natives in the 19th century who had certainly fought, killed and tortured some white people. At the time and long thereafter, they were demonised and their atrocities and crimes well publicised to justify far worse crimes and atrocities committed against them.

The destruction of their lives and cultures were far too monstrous that it would be morally repugnant for us today to blame the victims who tried to say no, make a stand and fight back.

The Palestinians are no different. Whatever terrorism they have committed, it pales by comparison to the monstrous crimes being committed against them with full Western complicity. The mainstream Western media may pretend the 7 October terrorist attack was the trigger, but the injustice and suffering inflicted on the Palestinians dates back three-quarters of a century.

According to an estimate by the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has now dropped more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives mostly courtesy of the US, but we now know other weapons have also been supplied by Germany, Britain and even Canada on the Gaza Strip since 7 October. In comparison, the Little Boy atomic bomb that was dropped by the US on Hiroshima yielded 15,000 tonnes of high explosives.

As the Bulgarian-French historian and literary critic Tzvetan Todorov once wrote, When all is permitted in the fight against terror, a counter-terrorist starts to become indistinguishable from the initial terrorist.

Dropping 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the worlds most densely populated strip of land is not a proportionate response to whatever happened on October 7. But the question is really not about proportionality, but deliberation or intent.

United Nations agencies have accused the Israeli military of deliberately destroying all the schools, colleges and universities across the Gaza Strip, which has come to be called scholasticide, not to mention all the hospitals and clinics, water mains, drainage systems and agricultural sites.

Genocide is not just about physical extermination. In its most metaphysical form, it can be an extreme assertion or affirmation of the Self over the Other, as we learn from Todorovs classic study of the Spanish destruction of native peoples of Mesoamerica from the 16th century onwards in_The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other._

When you dehumanise your victim, when you make him less human than you, not just through crude propaganda, but through a self-aggrandising founding mythology of your own people and nation, doing all sorts of horrible things to him becomes acceptable, if not_required_.

However, in this day and age, you just cant kill them all. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich complained early this month.

Rather the whole point of genocide is to destroy the victims world and way of life their society and culture, and the institutions and infrastructure that sustain them such that they have no home to which to return. Its not necessary to kill him you just have to destroy his whole world.

Think of the Palestinian man, as reported in international news earlier this month, who went to get birth certificates for his newborn twins, then found that they had just been killed, along with their mother, in an Israeli air strike. His world has collapsed, the earth is not a home to him anywhere.

Death tolls in Gaza are hotly disputed. When you dont have complete bodies but only body parts, its difficult to have a precise number. Reportedly, 70kg of body parts collected in a bag is counted as one adult, half of that for a child.

They made a wasteland and called it peace. Rather than the Romans, Tacitus might as well be writing about Gaza and the Israelis.

Republished from the South China Morning Post, August 26,2024