Israel’s Genocidal, Human Rights Violating and War Criminal Answer to the Palestinian Question, Part 1
Abstract: In Western mainstream media, Israel is regularly portrayed as a victim or as an about equally responsible party in the allegedly ‘complicated’ and ‘both-sidesy’ Israel-Palestine conflict. In this article series and following the May 2021 ‘clashes,’ I would like to show that and why Israel is instead very clearly the main responsible party and perpetrator in this conflict. The article series also serves the purposes of documenting Jewish-Israeli-Zionist crimes against Palestinians and of deconstructing the usual pro-Israel propaganda.
Part 1 deconstructs the propagandistic myths that a) the Israel-Palestine conflict is ‘complicated’ and b) ‘both-sidesy’ and that c) Jews and Israel are the permanent victims who are d) only ever defending themselves.
(Warning: The following article series contains material that might be disturbing for some viewers and that is usually not shown in mainstream media. I sometimes also use an ironic, satirical or cynical tone which is mainly directed against relativising, rationalizing, veiling, looking away from, playing stupid or remaining silent about Jewish-Israeli-Zionist crimes against Palestinians)
(links to: the older, significantly shorter and all-in-one German version; the more recent and in-depth English article series, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8)
The Israel-Palestine conflict: A complex or complicated issue?
A common belief in the decades-old Israel-Palestine conflict, recently also shared by foreign politics expert Professor Gerhard Mangott, is that this is allegedly a complex or complicated issue in which one cannot easily or quickly make judgments. Over the course of recent events, the world-famous satire magazine The Onion confirmed that as follows:
Due to massive power asymmetries and as explained above by Tom London or below by political commentator and analyst Michael Brooks who died an early death, the actual and general state of affairs is a relatively simple and obvious one:
Expressed in a first deductive argument:
Premise 1: The more power, the more responsibility.
Premise 2: Israel has much more power than the Palestinian Territories and Palestinians which it occupies.
Conclusion: Therefore, Israel is much more responsible for the Israel-Palestine conflict than the Palestinian Territories and Palestinians.
The common “both sides” position, although correct at its foundations, will consequently need to be regarded as one of the many propagandistic concealments via which it is pretended that both sides are about equally responsible. Among others, John Oliver and the makers of Art House Politics deconstructed this propagandistic tale as follows:
To make clearer how wrong the “two sides” position is, let us imagine that Nazis murdered civilians in the Warsaw Ghetto or in occupied France as retaliation for a few losses suffered by resistance fighters. Let us further assume that politicians or diplomats from different countries would “condemn the violence on both sides” — is there something about that or similar statements that does not appear to be entirely kosher?
The epistemic and moral problem with that statement is that it completely neglects the power relationships and other factors: Nazis were not only far more powerful than these resistance fighters, but they were also the aggressors, invaders and occupiers which oppressed the native and local population. It furthermore appears as intuitively obvious that the native population has a right to resist the hostile occupiers, whereas the occupiers do not have a right — aside from the archaic ‘right’ of the more powerful — to do whatever aggressors and occupiers usually do with the native population. The use of violence to get rid of the unwelcome occupiers therefore appears as morally justified; the use of violence to oppress, displace and murder the native population as entirely unjustified and unjustifiable. Professor Noura Erakat explains it in this interview:
The former Israeli soldier Eran Efrati concurs:
There is even point 2 of the UN resolution 37/43 from December 3, 1982, which explicitly grants in particular Palestinians the right to defense and resistance “by all available means, including armed struggle” (note that this particular resolution was removed from the UN homepage and that it is also not listed on Wikipedia in a respective list of UN resolutions):
All of that is being ignored though by an undifferentiated or even cynical “both sides” position, which explains why that position is highly unfitting and misleading for the Israel-Palestine conflict.
As also correctly analyzed by Brooks in his comparative thought experiment, people also constantly use two very different measures: If that what Israeli Jews/Jewish Israelis do to Palestinians were done by Palestinians to Jews, there would have been sanctions and “responsibility to protect”-related military actions against the perpetrators a long time ago. But the dominant US-empire is allied with Israel and was never really interested in human rights aside from using them propagandistically. In Western mass media, Palestinians are consequently not sold as noble “freedom” or “resistance fighters” but rather as “extremists” or “terrorists,” and since this propaganda works very well in general, twofold measures and massive asymmetries usually go unnoticed by many.
The myth of the permant and merely self-defending victim
There are two further interwoven propagandistic tales of Israel and Western mass media which milk the Holocaust of Jews for what it’s worth. These two myths are that Israel is only ever the poor pitiful victim and that Israel only ever makes use of “its right to defend itself.” There is a genuine “cult of victimhood” going on in this respect, as explained by the independent Israel-Palestine journalist Jonathan Cooke or by the Jewish-Israeli journalist Gideon Levy during his guest talk at the Vienna Bruno Kreisky Forum a couple of years ago.
So when Israel and its colonial occupation forces were massacering themselves through occupied Gaza in 2014 during “Operation Protective Edge,” Israel was supposedly no more than a ‘self-defending victim’ according to offical propaganda. The following numbers and asymmetries tell us the exact opposite though:
The following UNO-statistics which show a 20:1 relation of injured and a 22:1 relation of killed Palestinians vs. Israeli from the years 2008 to 2020 once again reveal that Zionist Jewish Israelis are the perpetrators here and not the poor self-defending victims:
When Israel intentionally killed children, handicapped people, journalists or medics at the ‘border’- or rather prison fences during the 2018–2019 Gaza ‘border’ protests — killings which the UN clearly condemned as “serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law” — then it was allegedly again just a ‘self-defending victim’:
The fundamentally same type of events and propaganda are currently repeating themselves: No matter what Israel does, it is decided in advance that, for historical reasons, Israel is always the ‘self-defending victim.’ Israel can impose apartheid laws, disown Palestinians — most recently in Sheikh Jarrah — or provoke *in the Al-Aqsa mosque in the middle of Ramadan* by firing teargas and causing facial injuries with potentially lethal rubber-coated steel bullets (see part 3) that should not even be aimed at people’s faces:
And idiotically, the clear reactions of Palestinians or of Hamas to Israeli provocations are once again falsely portrayed as offensive actions against which the poor victim Israel is supposedly only defending itself. But the facts are otherwise, as for instance explained by Husam Zomlot, Palestinian Ambassador to the UK:
The Israeli apartheid regime leader and state terrorist Benjamin Netanyahu lied about that as usual and as follows:
The prominent Jewish anti-Zionist professor Norman Finkelstein recently also explained the facts for those who are still living in the past, who still regard Palestinians as “Untermenschen” (i.e. subhumans) and who are not willing to grant them equal rights or human rights:
The progressive journalist Alan MacLeod concurs:
So then what do you do to reduce tensions if the storming of Al-Aqsa mosque and the tear-gassing of praying muslims by Israeli blackshirts led to tensions? Exactly: You just storm Al-Aqsa mosque a second time(!) because this time the result is surely going to be different:
On July 18, 2021, one day before Eid al-Adha (the celebration of Abraham/Ibrahim intending to sacrificing his son Ishamel/Ismail to God/Allah) and as the third round of provocations, it was then the Jewish settlers who resumed the harrassment of Palestinians in the Al Aqsa compounds together with the Israeli occupation forces:
On Sunday, almost 1,600 Israeli settlers entered the compound amid condemnation from Palestinians, Jordan and other countries such as Pakistan.
Dozens of Israeli police officers raided the site on Sunday through the Chain and Moroccan gates, before assaulting Palestinian worshippers attending prayers and making way for the entrance of hundreds of settlers, Palestinian news agency Wafa reported.
Some Israeli groups had called on the settlers to force their way into al-Aqsa Mosque on Sunday, as Israeli Jews fasted on Tisha B’Av, a day that marks the destruction of temples in ancient Jerusalem.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett thanked security officials for “preserving freedom of worship for Jews on the Mount”, referring to the Al-Aqsa compound.
As shown by the following three tweets, the opinion that Israel is not the victim but the main perpetrator in the Israel-Palestine conflict is far more common than it might appear. But contrary to an increasing number of people like Finkelstein, MacLeod or also myself, there are still many who are not yet courageous enough to use their own mind or understanding — a demand of the enlightener Immanuel Kant — or to state the obvious about the Israel-Palestine conflict, such as that the clearly naked emperor is actually wearing no clothes:
The situation is similar in Germany: There are many people who are too scared to state their true opinions about criminal Israel:
[continue to part 2]
