Saying the unspeakable. Deported to Auschwitz at the age of 24, Primo
Levi tried. Not only to recount the torture, violence, hunger, andomnipresent death, but also to describe the difficulty of surviving and
rebuilding. The images of emaciated bodies we receive from Gaza recall
what the Allies discovered in 1945 in the concentration camps. In the
middle of the 21st century, the leaders of a country so similar to ours
have decreed that there are no "innocents" in Gaza. They organize famine
and shoot every day at a starving population searching for food. They
benefit from the support of the world's dominant forces who identify
with them. And a clear majority of Israelis want to end Gaza.
They have destroyed all the hospitals. They have probably killed more
than 100,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children. They
murdered 220 journalists, more than during both world wars, the Vietnam
War, and the Yugoslav War combined. They took selfies in front of
tortured prisoners. They played with women's underwear looted from
destroyed buildings. The French association "Israel Forever" filmed
itself blocking humanitarian aid trucks from entering Gaza.
Children are paying a terrible price. Tens of thousands of them have
been murdered or injured. Mothers ask their children to dream of a piece
of bread. Children ask their parents to tattoo their arms so they can be
identified if they are found in a destroyed building. Babies are dying
from lack of breast milk.
All of this is perfectly documented. For months, our political leaders
and most of the media, under their thumb, have been deluding us with
"Hamas terrorist attacks" or "disemboweled women and decapitated
babies." We already experienced this in Iraq over 20 years ago with
"weapons of mass destruction." And a system of mass murder has
specialized in convicting people, randomly young and Arab, for
"glorifying terrorism." This license to kill has been terribly effective.
One day, the genocide in Gaza will be taught the same way we teach the
Nazis about the Judeocide or the truth about the Rwandan genocide. In
the meantime, right-thinking defenders of Israel, even those who are
beginning to have qualms or wonder if they might be accused of
complicity, vehemently refuse to talk about the genocide in Gaza.
Fundamentally, for them, contrary to what Amnesty International, Human
Rights Watch, or all Israeli specialists on the issue of genocide
explain, the only genocide is and will remain the one suffered by the
Jews. The need to appropriate this memory is vital in trying to salvage
the image of a country that has completely collapsed.
Gaza, how did we get here?
We are often told that this "conflict" is "complicated." Not at all.
At the beginning, a "national novel" tells an incredible story: that
Jews have lived in this country for thousands of years, that "God gave
this land to the Jewish people"[1], that they were driven from their
country, that they are returning home thanks to Zionism, that there is
no Palestinian people, but intruders... This fable continues to be used
to mask a colonial conquest.
There is virtually no historical debate left. This region has always
been a land of intermingling; the "unified kingdom" of David and Solomon
has no historical existence; today's Jews are essentially descendants of
converts, and the descendants of the Judeans are... the Palestinians.
It was in Europe that Christian anti-Judaism and racial anti-Semitism
developed. It was Europeans who perpetrated the Nazi genocide. Zionism
did not fight anti-Semitism; it relied on anti-Semites to force Jews to
leave Europe. The Zionist colonial project was modeled on what Europeans
carried out in America or Australia: imprisoning, expelling, or
exterminating the indigenous people, destroying their society, and
seizing as much land as possible. And the goal of Zionism was to
transform the Jews, considered unassimilable pariahs in Europe, into
European settlers in Asia.
The Zionist institutions that dispossessed the Palestinian people of
their own country were created with the protection of British
imperialism long before the Judeocide.
It was a "left-wing" movement that created Israel. The instruments of
this conquest were the Histadrut trade union[2], the kibbutzim, the
Haganah (the forerunner of today's army), and the Jewish Agency. The
Nakba[3](1948-49) was a premeditated ethnic cleansing perpetrated with
the complicity of the victors of the Second World War. It was the "left"
that trampled on the UN resolution on the return of Palestinian
refugees. "The old will die, the young will forget," "We didn't expel
anyone, the Arabs left of their own accord"-two quotes from Ben-Gurion.
It was always the "Zionist left" that carried out the 1967 conquest and
initiated colonization. This "left" created a monster that now eludes
it, its historical role having been completed.
The Zionist right that is carrying out the current genocide has always
been a fascist right. Netanyahu's father, Bension, was Jabotinsky's
secretary, whose violent militia, the Betar, trained in fascist Italy in
the late 1930s. Yitzhak Shamir, the future Israeli prime minister,
assassinated British soldiers during the Judeocide. Israeli leaders are
not the descendants of the victims of the Nazi genocide; they are the
ideological descendants of collaborators.
Gaza has been incredibly slandered. In this small, overpopulated
territory, 80% of the population are refugees. They have been trapped by
land, sea, and air (for having voted "wrongly") since 2006. They have
suffered repeated deadly bombings, with the occupier primarily
destroying the power plant, the water treatment plant, the chicken
farms, and more. Gaza is a multitude of associations that allow society
to survive in the worst conditions. When the population demonstrated
peacefully in 2018-2019[4], the occupier machine-gunned them like at a
fair. Then, on October 7, 2023, the "pressure cooker" exploded[5], just
as it had exploded on November 1, 1954, in Algeria after 124 years of
particularly murderous colonialism[6].
My father, the sole survivor of the 67 members of the Manouchian group
arrested and tortured (by the French police) in November 1943, told me
shortly before his death: "You know, we knew that if we fought, we were
condemned to death, and if we didn't, we were also condemned to death.
So we decided to fight." Palestinians, in Gaza as well as the West Bank,
are in this situation.
Gaza, the laboratory of the coming fascism
Liberal globalization has enabled the transfer of a significant portion
of the wealth produced in the world, from employees to shareholder
dividends. The ultra-rich and corporate oligarchs are gaining supreme
power in many countries and they don't want any checks and balances.
Mafia-style governments are emerging. Elected leaders are destroying
laws to maintain their positions (Erdogan, Orban) or don't hesitate to
resort to violence (Trump, Bolsonaro, Putin, etc.).
In this new phase, international texts and structures created to
regulate the capitalist world are becoming obstacles. International law,
the UN, international courts of justice, treaties to curb extractivist
appetites-all of these must be destroyed.
As a result, what Israel is doing against Palestine has become a waking
dream for the world's dominant forces. Here is a country that represses
populations deemed dangerous (Arabs, Muslims, etc.) with infinite
violence, that offers colonial revenge to all those who are nostalgic,
here is a technology startup that manufactures the most advanced
weapons. Armies and police forces from all over the world come to train
in this El Dorado. Moreover, these weapons demonstrate their
effectiveness every day by razing Gaza and terrorizing the population.
Here is a country indispensable (along with the patriarchal and
slave-owning monarchies of the Gulf) for dominating the Middle East and
its strategic resources. This is a country that successfully uses
anti-racism (the fight against anti-Semitism) to promote supremacism and
the suppression of half the population it controls.
But above all, this is a country where Zionism and colonization have
made the far right, in its colonial and messianic form, ideologically
hegemonic. The settlers, the religious, the Jews from the Arab world,
the Russians, the army... all of them, even the
discriminated-against-the-wall, have overwhelmingly embraced a social
model that is moving further and further away from that of "liberal
democracy."
For our main political leaders and our mainstream media, unconditional
support for the Israeli genocidaires is an adherence to an
authoritarian, supremacist, and militarist model. It is the idea that,
as in 1938, the solution to the crisis of capitalism is the liquidation
of fundamental rights and social gains. The texts that a few idealists
introduced after 1945 must be torn down, just like the social compromise
established at that time. With Netanyahu and the assassins surrounding
him, there is no longer any "international law." It's the law of the
jungle and the right of the strongest. This is what Trump is expressing
with his "Riviera" project in Gaza.
There is resistance. The genocidal perpetrators had forgotten the class
struggle. Dockworkers in Marseille and Genoa refuse to ship weapons to
Israel. In this country, for the first time since October 2023,
protesters marched with portraits of murdered Gazan children. A few
anti-colonial activists and Haaretz journalists rejected the
fascistization of their society. Tens of thousands of Israelis are
leaving their country because this murderous messianism is unbearable
for them.
It has become difficult in Europe to deny the ongoing genocide. So, like
the "September resisters"[7], some are beginning to condemn the "evil"
Netanyahu and promote anything that might make Israel more presentable,
starting with the "two-state solution." Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, who
affirmed that there was no apartheid in Israel and that it was a
democracy, regrets "having remained silent for too long." Former
Ambassador Elie Barnavi, who explained in December 2023 that the ratio
of "two civilians killed for one terrorist" was reasonable, is begging
the entire world to rid Israel of its current leadership.
It took 21 months for French unions to call for a joint demonstration.
They just forgot in their call to demand the exclusion of the Histadrut
from the International Trade Union Confederation, to which they belong.
However, Histadrut General Secretary Arnon Bar David was filmed writing
(in the midst of the genocide) on an Elbit shell[8]"with the support of
Israeli workers."
It took 21 months for the French government to find it "intolerable"...
in fact, what it finds intolerable is being forced to disapprove. But
everything he could do to stop this genocide-stop arms deliveries,
repeal the European Union-Israel economic agreement, recall the
ambassador, stop criminalizing solidarity with Palestine-he won't do it.
Supporting Palestine, rescuing the people of Gaza, isn't just a soulful
gesture. It's defending our rights, fighting racism and colonialism,
refusing the generalization of the law of the jungle. It's combating a
coming neo-fascism.
Johann Chapoutot has just written "The Irresponsible," in which he shows
how the "liberal" right and left-wing forces enabled Hitler to come to
power. Meriem Laribi wrote "Here Lies Humanity," describing Gaza. Is
this 1938?
The war in Palestine is largely being fought at home. It depends on our
ability to force our complicit governments to sanction this genocidal
state. Victory in Gaza will be ours. Defeat too, if it comes.
Pierre Stambul
Notes
[1]For Ben-Gurion, "God does not exist, but he gave this land to the
Jewish people."
[2]Union of "Jewish workers" founded in 1920.
[3]The Catastrophe in Arabic.
[4]The Marches of Return.
[5]The expression is Michel Warschawski's.
[6]Read Henri Louzon's book (Editions Acratie), which shows that a third
of the population was killed between 1830 and 1870.
[7]Name given to the French who, after remaining largely silent during
the Nazi occupation, became more resilient than the resistance fighters
after the liberation of Paris in August 1944.
[8]Main Israeli arms company.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4486
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