When Someone Shows You Who They Are, Believe Them: Zionist Edition
Following the "unprovoked" incursion of Hamas into Israeli territory on October 7, the Zionist state has accelerated its program of ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and increasingly undisguised racism.
The brutality of the Israeli occupiers of Palestinian land is nothing new or novel, but the recent attacks by Hamas in response to this policy of apartheid were in particular provoked by Israel’s continued policy of condoning the violence of settlers among other more political motivations:
Hamas’s move was triggered by three factors. First, the policies of the far-right Israeli government enabling settler violence in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem led to a sense of desperation among Palestinians and growing demands for a reaction. At the same time, the rising tensions in the West Bank caused by these policies necessitated the shift of Israeli forces away from the south and into the north to guard the settlements. This gave Hamas both a justification and an opportunity to attack.
Second, the Hamas leadership felt compelled to act due to the acceleration of Arab-Israeli normalisation. In recent years, this process further diminished the significance of the Palestinian issue for Arab leaders who became less keen on pressuring Israel on this matter.
If a Saudi-Israeli normalisation deal had been concluded, it would have been a turning point in the Arab-Israeli conflict, which may have eliminated the already weak chances of a two-state solution. This was also part of Hamas’s calculations.
Third, Hamas was emboldened after it managed to repair its ties with Iran. In recent years, the movement had to reconsider the political position it assumed in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, in opposition to Iran and its ally, the Syrian regime.
The Israeli government had received warnings that the attacks were imminent but were still caught unprepared and the incursion by Hamas was unexpectedly damaging. Stinging from this embarrassment, Israel’s response has been characteristically disproportionate, as it rained bombs down upon Gaza, cut off electricity and water (which is soon to run out) to the area, ordered all civilians to evacuate to the south despite the clear impossibility of such a task (for example, how are doctors going to move the thousands of critically injured patients pouring into their hospitals?), hampered efforts by aid groups and foreign governments to deliver desperately-needed aid, and moved to criminalize Israeli protests against this kind of collective punishment. Though information is still incomplete, the humanitarian crisis spawned by these actions is undeniable:
Despite widespread protests in the west (which governments in the UK, France, Germany, and the US are attempting to illegalize alongside Zionist organizations working to publicly shame and endanger pro-Palestinian organizers, government warnings to diplomats not to even speak about de-escalation, and the intimidation and detainment of Palestinians and Muslims by the FBI) and a clear victim and abuser in this scenario, the colonial program of the Zionist state requires rationalization of this ongoing genocide and its acceleration in response to the successful attack of October 7. So far, the Israeli government and its settler enablers has been predictably harsh in its condemnation of Hamas’ attacks, but this is insufficient to justify its murderous, criminal response: the manufacturers of consent have therefore resorted to startlingly racist and incriminating statements about collective Palestinian guilt, repeated in the west by American and European politicians in a suspiciously rote and performative manner, as if they were all reading from the same Teleprompter. Israeli propaganda efforts are well-funded, undoubtedly effective, and underhanded, though not always extremely competent, as in the case of the Israeli story about Hamas forces beheading babies (still repeated throughout social media and even initially by President Biden despite a later admission that there is no evidence such a war crime ever occurred) and the following obviously faked image, accompanied oddly by a grammatically incorrect haiku:
Episode 1 of Al Jazeera’s undercover story about Israel’s dishonest attempts to influence the American government and universities
These increasingly desperate rationalizations can be expected from social media, especially on X (formerly Twitter) which has been transformed into a far-right echo chamber under the ownership of Elon Musk, rife with ignorant, offensive, and oft-repeated parroting of Zionist and other reactionary propaganda. The pervasiveness of anti-Palestinian racism on the site is a reflection the extremist, Goebbels-level propaganda manufactured by world governments and their often-pliant stooges in the both Israeli and western media; the willingness of the average user of social media to go to great lengths to justify brutality is a testament to the normalizing power of even discredited and criminal leaders (such as Netanyahu). These easily-led keyboard warriors are, after all, likely voters, settlers, IDF conscripts, and potential mass murderers themselves—their opinions have some weight as well. With this in mind, a survey of the depths to which Zionist leadership will go to justify their barbarity, paint their critics as anti-Semites, and preemptively shut down honest debate about the widespread, obligatory, and knee-jerk justification offered up in support of their apartheid policies follows, straight from the mouths of the relative power-holders and influencers of public policy in Israel and the west and their braying loyal subjects:
Statement from Sara Netanyahu’s advisor Tzipi Navon above
These Zionists are all too happy to tell us exactly who they are, and we should be clear these statements only scratched the surface of the hate being fostered actively. We should start listening to these eager apologists for genocide, lest we again repeat the costly and unprecedently violent mistakes of the post-9/11 era in which anti-Muslim sentiment drove many Americans off the deep end facilitated the disastrous wars in the Middle East, the reelection of known war criminals in 2004, and set the precedent that preemptive, oppressive violence on flimsy pretexts is acceptable.
Though much of this Zionist bloodlust is motivated by racial animus, the pull of more prurient financial interests is another callback to the War on Terror, an undertaking which was rife with no-bid contracts, a lack of oversight, and massive fraud by contractors, all widely tolerated due to the prevailing atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and reluctance to criticize military and political overseers of the wars:
Suspected fraud of millions of shekels from donation funds for soldiers
The police opened an investigation on Thursday following a tip-off that an Israeli company had attempted to defraud millions of shekels from donations to soldiers, in exchange for the supply of protective equipment to soldiers that is suspected of being defective and substandard and even life-threatening.
While the entire nation of Israel strengthens the IDF soldiers, and volunteers and donates equipment, food, and money on their behalf - there are those who abuse the situation.
A complaint was filed at the Harel police station of the Jerusalem district by a reserve officer who had worked to organize the purchase of a large amount of protective equipment such as personal protective vests for IDF soldiers from donation funds.
These opportunities for fraud, graft, and profiteering are surely tempting to dishonest businesses, especially considering the lockstep support for Israeli economic expansionism and unlikely prospect of being caught or punished for their misdeeds. We know Palestinian land, houses, and resources were stolen en masse; what other misdeeds have Israel’s crooked government and their corporate allies committed? It is likely we will never know.
There is also the similarly unacceptable religious motivation, especially among American evangelicals:
The above statements are only a sampling of the increasingly extreme views required to excuse the ongoing atrocities committed by Israel. Their self-evident desperation is a sign that the façade may be crumbling, that on some level Zionists are aware the civilized world is only willing to tolerate so much mass murder before western support possibly dries up in the face of mass Palestinian rights movements, complicating factors such as climate change and resource scarcity, potential wars elsewhere, and their own growing incompetence and complacency.
Among all of these hysterical screeds, accusation of anti-Semitism, racist rationalizations, amoral appeals to naked self-interest, prurient economic concerns, worries about one’s career, tenure, or public reputation (a new Zionist McCarthyism is rising in the US), notice that one thing is missing: a consistent, morally justifiable reason to support the existence of the current Israeli state. Unfortunately in the west, there is little we can do to help the Palestinian cause, as even the BDS movement has come under fire legally here and the US government shows no signs of wavering in its unquestioning support of Israeli atrocities. There are however worthy aid organizations for those interested in helping the victims of Israeli aggression, such as the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, ANERA, and Doctors Without Borders. In the meantime, support for these organizations is a just cause and direly needed, but insufficient for the long term survival of the Palestinian captives of Israel, whose right of return should be taken to its logical conclusion, with the Zionist entity disbanded and settlers moved elsewhere in a humane fashion. What Israelis must understand in the end is that dehumanization of others is a double-edged sword—in libeling Palestinians as animals and calling for their eradication (or merely the continuance of the ghettoization and settler program which has existed for the entirety of their history), they dehumanize themselves and present no doubt that their intentions constitute a clear and present danger to others. In justifying preemptive violence, they present themselves as rabid dogs whose position as oppressor justifies more than peaceful protest on the part of their victims or other concerned parties.
Previous articles criticizing Israel:
