February 27, 2024
Alexander the Great razed Gaza to
the ground in the 3rd century BC. He was in a towering rage because Gaza, unlike most of the other
cities he passed through on his way to
Egypt, had been defiant, and had closed
its gates. The King was further
incensed by the skill of Gazan raiding parties: they sped out of
the city gates on their light Arabian horses, across the sand, which encumbered the feet of the heavy Macedonian
steeds. They were superb archers,
and a Gazan arrow made a serious wound in Alexander’s shoulder.
Alexander slept with a copy of the
Iliad under his pillow. He had recently
visited the ancient city of Troy, where
he’d appropriated the armor of Achilles. He wore this into battle.
After five months his army finally penetrated Gaza’s formidable defenses. In his fury, Alexander seized the governor, and re-enacted Achilles’
revengeful desecration of Hector, by piercing
his ankles and dragging his body behind his chariot three times around the
city. Then he put all the men and boys to the sword, and sold the women and
children into slavery.
Alexander inhabited a legendary
universe which existed a thousand years before he was born. In this
world, gods mingled and consorted with humans. His own paternity had been laid open to question, by
rivals seeking to dethrone him. Having
just cut the Gordian knot, a fabled act that conferred promises of
omnipotence from the gods, his belief in
his own deity was reinforced. The oracle
at Delphi had told him he was invincible, and the renowned Egyptian sibyl at
Siwa was about to tell him his father was Zeus/Amon. This, together with his
own native charisma and brilliance as a general, drove his zeal to possess
the world which, he did not doubt, belonged to him.
Alexander the Great and Benjamin Netanyahu would seem to have very
little in common. But their respective revenges on Gaza display the same
wrathful obsession with retribution. Both,
possessed by ghosts, consort with spirits which have lingered in the world for three thousand years, since the
thirteenth century BC.
The architects of their imaginary
worlds are warriors long dead. Alexander in his imagination, was the
near-immortal hero Achilles. The echoes of Netanyahu’s ghost world resonate from even farther, from Jehovah’s intimate
communication, and commitments
concerning a promised land, with Moses,
three thousand years ago.
The insult that brought Alexander’s
rage to a frenzy was the near-fatal shoulder wound. It proved to him that he
was not immortal.
October 7th profoundly humiliated Netanyahu before his
own people and before the world, as the
famed Israeli defense network, military
intelligence system, Aman, with its Iron Dome, Mossad, and Shin Bet, the national security system, were incapable of
protecting its people against 3000 Hamas fighters on Chinese minibikes.
Netanyahu’s religious beliefs are
private, though apparently he has said he is an atheist. He professes secular Judaism, a persuasion which
exalts cultural and ethnic, rather than
devotional, elements of Judaism.
However, his psychic architecture grew
out of a deep eastern European Ashkenazi
cultural root, comprising the Torah, the
Talmud and centuries of European Jewish culture, canonical
scriptures, literature and law. The
nucleus of this culture is
Jehovah’s promise that Palestine would belong to his
chosen people. Secular Judaism does not question this promise. Netanyahu is a thoroughly
Americanized Israeli. His excellent American education taught him that most
of the Bible is accumulated myth and folk tale. In modern political history, the creation of
Israel cannot be disguised as anything
but neocolonialism. Nonetheless Netanyahu
believes in Jehovah’s promise.His speeches ring with Biblical events, and the ghosts of Moses,
Joshua, King David, and Sampson
obsessively haunt the recesses of and maintain the thoroughfares of
his consciousness:
“I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom
thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee…I
will not drive them out from before thee in one year, lest the land become
desolate and the beast of the field multiply against thee… but by little and
little I will drive them out before
thee, until thou be increased and inherit the land. And I will set thy bounds
from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto
the river, for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and thou shalt drive them out
before thee”.
…Exodus 23
verses 27-31
This promise was fulfilled for a
period, during the last part of the
second millennium BC. When a Jewish kingdom, insignificant in comparison to the
mighty empires of the times, existed in the area designated by Jehovah. However
all but a few Jews in Palestine were driven into a diaspora after the
destruction of the Second Temple in 63 AD. Since then, Palestine has been
populated or ruled by waves of different empires, lasting various lengths of
time, until 1948.
At that point, the geopolitical
interests of the US and Europe coincided
with the Mosaic promise, to allow the Jews another chance at a nation state.
The catastrophe which brought this about was the holocaust.
By the beginning of WWII 57% of the
world’s Jews lived in Europe. Six million
were destroyed during the war, leaving three and a half million
survivors looking for place to go. Their prewar property had been confiscated and repossessed, their home towns
were more often than not hostile and
dangerous, and no nations in the world wanted to take more than a small number
of Jewish immigrants (the Dominican Republic
was an exception).The British mandate of
Palestine was therefore a ready solution for relocation. Moreover, it
had an additional advantage. During the late forties and the fifties, when
a tide of decolonialization was sweeping the globe, an
armed nation state of Israel
would provide a well-placed foothold for the victors of WWII to maintain
military and economic supremacy. The creation of a nation state, Israel, in the
turbulent Middle East, would be
reimbursed with fealty to the empire, and could
provide anti-terrorism services in the region and in Africa.
In a deeply ironical postscript, it
could support anti-communism and racism
as well.
At that time, in 1948, the Arab
population of Palestine was about twice
the size of the Jewish population, one million and 550,000 respectively. Huge numbers of Jews arriving from Europe, with an entirely
different cultural background and language, created deep anxiety
among the indigenous Arabs ,who had lived there for millennia. Moreover
the new immigrants made it clear they
wanted nothing to do with the indigenous population of Arabs. They
wanted the Palestinian land in
order to create a Jewish nation state.
Netanyahu’s grandfather wanted to
build an “iron wall” between the Jewish and
non-Jewish inhabitants, as the Bible instructed:
“Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods…they shall not
dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me…”
Exodus 23 vs.32-33
Israel embarked upon a program of
ethnic cleansing in Palestine after the
UN partition agreement, and established the state of Israel when the
British withdrew in May 1948. Civil war and
chaos intensified by foreign interference, had already cleansed 750,000
Palestinians from their homeland. There was,
however, still a majority of Arabs in Palestine.
The Biblical Jehovah had
said, “ I will not drive them out before thee in one year…but little by
little”. However, the European immigrants to Palestine had a model
for removing undesirable populations on a more businesslike time
frame, drawn from recent history, which
provided incremental steps to ease the
process. The history was their own destruction
in the holocaust.
By means of about 400 laws, policies and decrees passed in Germany from Hitler’s accession to
power and until the end of WWII, an itinerary was built for the enactment of ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews,
Russians, Roma, Communists, and weak and undesirable members of the community.
These same steps can be delineated
clearly in the new Jewish nation state of Israel, from its clearly apartheid origins. They are 1)
definition (listing the characteristics
of the aliens) 2)isolation ( denial of
access to schools, businesses,
citizenship withdrawal, and, in the case of the Nazis, an
identificatory yellow star) 3)
emigration, spurred by property and land seizures and threats 4) ghettoization,
enforced by walls 5) deportation (relocating to prison camps, in the Reich, and
in Gaza to the occupied territories and refugee camps, and 6) mass murder (in
the Reich and invaded territories, by
Einsatzgruppen, which were mobile extermination organs, and death camps; and in Gaza, by Israeli settler violence, bombings,
shooting demonstrators as in the Great
March of Return, and after October 7th,
death camps and death marches.
If these steps were taken
efficiently, the result would be the configuration of the Volksgemeinschaft,
the “people’s community” which conformed
to racial ideals and standards, the
dream of the Nazis and of the Jewish state of Israel as well.
It was obvious to the world that
Israel, created in 1948, would be
an apartheid state (which is in
itself a crime against humanity ). The memes, “People without a land, land without
a people” and that “Israel made the desert bloom” were utter fiction, as
detailed by Miko Peled, a 63-year-old professor born and raised in Israel,
former IDF officer, and son of a famous
Israeli general, in many lectures. When
the refugee Jews arrived from Europe, they found a Palestine blooming with cultivation: oranges, cotton, barley, and olive oil produced for domestic
consumption and export. There were cities alive with culture, and, as a sacred
place for three of the world’s most populous religions, sites for deeply reverent tourism, from many countries
of the world.
The incremental advances of the WWII holocaust and its intended Final
Solution, had branded the hearts and
minds of anyone who had lived through it, or had shivered with fear for
those who did not escape. The arriving
European Jews knew, through their own experience, how to deal with a population it recognized as alien. Emigration of non-Jews from the promised land was
facilitated by the civil war of 1947-9, and extended through increased armed
conflict. As in Nazi Germany, race was the determinative characteristic
defining an Israeli: as in Germany,
based on race of grandparents. Any Jew
with the right formulaic bloodlines can be an Israeli citizen on demand, through
the Law of Return. ( Non-Jewish Palestinians have no Right of Return).
Ghettoization was accomplished on a large scale through wars, and on a neighborhood scale through bulldozing,
settler violence, and walls. Arabs were
further isolated by civil rights
restrictions, inferior schools, travel, jobs, and bureaucratic checkpoints. In
southern Israel, where 300,000 Bedouins live, Arabs are not permitted to be
farmers or dig wells. Phones and water can be turned off at any time. Although
the Palestinian population of Israel is
larger than the Jewish, it is
allotted only 3% of the water resource.
Gaza has been described for decades
as an outdoor prison camp. And now the analogy has reached a grotesque replica
of the Final Solution: calorie and water restrictions, herding into smaller areas, death marches, bombing
hospitals and refusal to allow medical care or means to curtail the spread of
diseases, and extermination.
Miko Peled reminds us, in a sharp
admonishment, that anyone in the US who pays taxes “has a dog in the game” of
the ongoing extermination of Gaza. Indeed.
Without the billions of dollars
which flow from the US to Israel, the genocide would be impossible. With our
lockstep Congress and media-managed
public we are what we once loathed when it existed in WWII Germany: a popular permission for genocide. Resistance is punished:
the world-famous Ai Wei Wei ‘s exhibits are cancelled, because he
criticized Israel. Freedom of speech is
severely curtailed. Protests and marches are harassed or forbidden. Workers
in several states have been asked to
sign loyalty oaths to Israel (!) and have been fired if they refuse.
Miko was stopped quickly from
pronouncing the words “from the river to the sea” in a
speech he gave at a library in Delmar New York, and the peace group sponsoring him was banned from
making presentations at the library for a year.
A truly monstrous resonance between the Nazi and Israeli states can be seen in their
patriotic songs. Music can confer
the enormous power of spiritual and ideological penetration, whether for good or evil. It is used as a weapon.
The Nazi regime reveled in song.
Thus, the official song of the Hitler Jugend (the boys’ and girls’ physical and ideological war
preparatory division) can be watched on
youtube, where sung by sung by earnest
little clear-eyed fellows, flagged
and in uniform:
Forwards! Forward! Our flag flutters before us
Into the future we are marching side
by side
We are marching for Hitler
It guides us to Eternity
The flag is more to us than death!
The second most popular song in
Israel can currently be seen on youtube
as well. The children
are beautiful and innocent, some
appearing as young as five:
Autumn night falls over the beaches
of Gaza
Planes bomb, destruction,
destruction
Look, the IDF is crossing the line
To annihilate the swastika bearers
In another year there will be
nothing there
And we will safely return to our
homes
Within a year we will annihilate
everyone
And then we will return to plow our
fields
And we will remember everyone
The pretty and the pure
And will never let our hearts
Forget a friendship like that
Love sanctified by blood
You will return and bloom among us
We have now run out of words
Our soul still cries out
Our soul not only sings
Today our soul also fights…
Reproduced in Owen Jones’
commentary:https://altcensored.com/watch?v=WHmGntCUQ4o
And independently from other youtube
sources, where it tends to disappear
Baldur von Schirach, who managed the deportation of
hundreds of thousands of Austrians to death camps, and who was one of the twenty-two defendants at the International
War Crimes Trial in Nuremberg, remarked
in 1938, “The real, great educational act for a people lies in ingraining in
youth blind obedience, unshakeable loyalty, unconditional comradeship and
absolute reliability.”[1]: Ch 11
Netanyahu accused President Luis
Ignacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, of trivializing the genocide in progress in Gaza, when he
compared it to the Nazi holocaust. However, the patterns and motivations are clearly
similar. At one point, during the articulation of the Final Solution, Hitler
was doubtful whether the Einsatzgruppen, his SS executioners on the eastern
front, would be up to the task of
killing women and children. However, he exclaimed later that they
performed the task enthusiastically and
wonderfully.
The two- state solution will not
work. The one-state solution will only work in a different world. However it is blindingly clear that the colonial project of the state of Israel needs
to be terminated.
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