Palestine and Israel, the old story of History: conquest, extermination, uprooting and mass migration.

Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.
John Donne

The name of my country will pass into 
obscurity. All is scattered far and wide,
and hapless Troy has ceased to be.
Euripides

Nothing teaches more about the primal, that which lies beneath the human capacity to separate itself from the instinctive brutality of other species, than pure conflict; the moment when men believe that, if they do not kill, they die; that, if they do not exterminate, they are exterminated; that if they do not uproot, they will be uprooted.

We are undoubtably capable of such a separation. We can indeed move forward, perhaps through what a brilliant author called, decades ago, dynamic adaptation. But the remarkable asymmetry between the slope of ascent and the slope of relapse is frightening. When instinct takes control of human acts, the different levels of the social edifice are laid bare, and all the layers of the ideological construct that adorn, or conceal them, vanish.  With them, the mirage of social harmony fades away, and the haughty, strong, vindictive structure of Power is exposed, while the struggle of interests manifests itself disrobed of the veils of false piety. The will to love and preserve gives way to the determination to do away with the other, and otherness rises, terrifying, like the shadow of Asensio Juliá’s Colossus, crossing the barrier we thought we had erected, impregnable, between us and our most despicable past.

 «Never again!» we used to say. Should we remember that cry with sadness, or with hope? There is hope in the fact itself that the expression «never again» represents a major ideological break from the thread of blood that binds the centuries. But how much distance still separates that yearning from our reflex action, from our normal behavior? Will it be enough for us to persevere? Human history is hundreds of thousands of years old. How many more will it live?

Despite the high flights of rational thought, the history of humanity remains the history of a struggle between creation and destruction, dominated by ruins; and the struggle for coexistence, dominated by war, extermination, and expatriation.

That is, at least to a large extent (if not as a preponderant portion) the root of the migrations that have populated, depopulated, and repopulated the regions of the planet. That is the story of the current conflict in Palestine, and the main reason why it would take a qualitative leap in human consciousness, in the conquest of the beast within, and in the elevation of love and rationality over terror and fury, to avoid what the experience of thousands of years points to as more probable futures:  extermination of one group by the other, expatriation and migration of one of the two; or, this outcome, which technological progress makes possible: mutual extermination.

As painful as these ruminations are, it must be understood that they can have no other origin or reason than the hope entrenched in the conscience (is hope the conscience?) that we will interrupt the course of what seems inevitable. It is not enough, for this purpose, to declare oneself in a state of goodwill. We must traverse the torment of History, and walk the Calvary of Truth, the only possible way of salvation. There is no Deus ex machina except when the impossible yields to the illusory. And the illusory distances us from the truth, which is where human motives lie, where the passion of war reigns. Only the soil of truth has nutrients for the seed of peace to germinate––if it can do so.  «Love of destiny,» proclaims Nietzsche (or succumbs?) is «human greatness.» Amid all the pain that one contemplates, of the impotence in the face of so much that occurs, there is nothing left but to exclaim, disconsolately: «I wish that fate be kind.»

Dread and Terrorism as the Beginning of Dread and Terrorism

A Jewish friend, a liberal, a humanist, surprises me with this question: «And what would have happened if those who  [by the power of the European-American imperial mandate, the force of their arms, their courage, and the thrust of their desperation], imposed a Jewish state [in the midst of the multi-ethnic, but predominantly Arab and Muslim universe of Palestine] had lost the war?» His own answer: “They would have been victims of genocide«.

We cannot (as a matter of method) be certain that a genocide would have taken place, though it is of course a very reasonable supposition. Surely, many of the defeated Zionist rebels would have have been killed. It is less clear, though, whether a policy of extermination would have been possible (or pursued) against the communities of Palestinian Jews, historically minority residents, scattered throughout the region. By all indications, in the years leading to 1948, most inhabitants of Palestine, as well as world opinion, perceived the Zionist movement as foreign to the region, and extreme in its goals and methods. Its leaders, part of a recent migration of Jewish Europeans, were bitterly condemned from within their own cultural universe by figures like Einstein and Hannah Arendt, for seeking what the critics called «the partition of Palestine».

Indeed, for many centuries, under the sovereignty of different empires, the region had been an integrated space where a relatively peaceful coexistence among different cultures took place. Almost all the political violence recorded in its history consists of either uprisings against the rule of a foreign power or the struggles of foreign forces disputing the place in the guise of a sacred act. Political violence was, thus, mostly an imported phenomenon, until the beginning of a systematic campaign by the most violent factions of the Zionist movement, which resorted to terror to frighten the locals and make their way into the territory (i.e., seize property and goods). Nonetheless, my friend’s question is legitimate, and it illustrates precisely, not only the beginning of a tragedy that will soon be a century old, but also its place in the trail of extermination and terror that I described earlier in the essay.

The Deep Roots of Feeling, the Deep Roots of Conflict

Jewish Europeans cannot be blamed for attempting a definitive escape. What were they fleeing? The world of Christendom, which from the Iberian Peninsula to the dominions of the Russian Tsar seemed possessed throughout the centuries by the spirit of the Adversus Iudaeos of John Chrysostom, declared a Saint and recognized as Father of the Church. Chrysostom (from the Greek: «mouth of gold») was the instigator, from his high and enduring authority, of the spirit of social ostracism against the Jews, and of the need to separate them from the «true Christians.»

He lambasted them mercilessly for murdering the Messiah. In this he was not an innovator, but merely a spokesman for what was already a tradition – which the leading preachers of the (several) Christian churches promoted – by the time Theodosius gave Christianity the status of religion of the empire. But the Saint, it must be said, enriched this tradition with particularly macabre touches, recognizable in the faces of anti-Semitism to this day. «They killed Christ, they raised their hands violently against the Master, they shed their precious blood,» he said. And the fatal verdict: «That is why they have no possibility of atonement, excuse, or defense.»
For the curious reader, a few more examples: «Shall I tell you of their plundering, their covetousness, their abandonment of the poor, their thefts, their cheating in trade?«… «Though these Jews were called sons, they fell into kinship with dogs…»; » Their condition is no better than that of pigs or goats, due to their … gluttony. They only know one thing: to fill their bellies and get drunk»; [they’re like] «wild calves that are not fit for work but only to be slaughtered»; «demons inhabit their souls»; and, therefore, they are murderers, since «the devil is a murderer… [and] the demons who serve him are murderers as well»…»Even if there is no idol there… [the synagogue]… demons do inhabit the place.» 

I still remember, in my childhood, hearing from the mouths of people the narrative of the «wandering Jew,» punished for having put Christ to death. “Deservedly punished”, of course, was the thinly veiled subtext. Such narrative was, through the centuries of Christendom, a convenient rationalization for politicians in search of scapegoats, escape valves, and counterfeit coins to swindle people into consent; it left ––this is not remembered enough–– a bloody trail of pogroms, campaigns of extermination that flew like sparks from one village to another, from one region to another; of cruel expulsions and expropriations, such as the one decreed and enforced in Spain (which the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón had only just unified through blood and sword) by one of the most sinister power couples in history, Isabel of Trastámara and her cousin and husband Fernando (Ferdinand and Isabella). Both were blessed, in political exchange, by the Valencian Alejandro Borgia, then in possession of Vatican power as Pope Alexander VI, better known as Alexander Borgia. His Holiness, a notorious pervert, was pleased to grant Ferdinand and Isabella the title of Catholic Majesties. They had been crucial defenders of the papacy against the power of France, and installed in Spain (Seville, to be exact) the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, which already existed in much of Europe. Many (the exact number is not the subject of this essay) perished and suffered at the expense of the tribunal, which the Catholic Monarchs and their heirs used to complete the task of extirpating non-Catholics from the peninsula, especially the «Marranos» (converted Jews whose Christian conviction was always doubted), and the “Mudéjares”, whom they stripped of their right to practice Islam.

This world, which in the ever forgetful mind of the human race appears only in sporadic milestones (it has forgotten Chrysostom, remembers the Inquisition as an almost folkloric anomaly, ignores the genocidal nature of the rule of Ferdinand and Isabella), had periods and places of relative calm for the Jews, who could, however, take it for granted that at any moment there would be a new spasm of blood, a new catastrophe; it fostered anti-Semitic discrimination, open, in most cases, barely concealed in others, as in the famous Dreyfus trial at the end of the nineteenth century, in liberal France; and it prepared the cradle for the most traumatic episode that shocked our presumptuously industrialized modernity,  one on a scale made feasible, precisely, by the industrialization of anti-Semitism: the Nazi holocaust.

Jewish Europeans cannot be blamed for attempting a definitive escape, when the political, economic, and technological realities that created, in the twentieth century, the greatest tragedy, also created the opportunity. If «Christian» Europe, the Europe that had also overthrown the despotism that claimed divine origin and pompously embraced the values of the Enlightenment, the Europe that in 1914 had fought «the war to end all wars,» the Europe that for the first time in the history of the world was taking the first steps to create – more in concept than in practice,  though the march begins with one step–– a worldwide human community («The League of Nations»); if this Europe, instead of putting an end to anti-Semitic persecution, had brought it to its zenith; if the Church of Rome itself (which had not yet made official repentance for the Inquisition; that would not come until the papacy of John Paul II in the 1980s,  that is to say, 500 years late) could not or did not want to put its being at risk (not even its «well-being«) and protect Jews (and homosexuals, the disabled, communists, socialists, gypsies, etc.) from the Nazi massacre; if the United States, by then already a proud «arsenal of democracy» lacked sufficient will, not just to prevent genocide, but even to give refuge to those escaping it; if the whole world (what today some, with touching naivety, others, with cynical impudence call «the international community») abandoned the Jewish Europeans to extermination, can it not be understood that they felt compelled to find an escape route, any escape from the «civilization» that, first under the banner of «Christianity,» and then under the affable mask of democracy, tormented them for centuries?

The imperial relay, Calvary.

At the end of the World War, in 1945, the inventory of material losses is atrocious but uneven. Germany lies in ruins, dismembered by Allied occupation. England has also suffered a visible share of destruction, but its physical wounds are comparatively minor. It is, however, financially exhausted. It is still the titular owner of a great colonial empire, but it has become clear that it could only win in the shadow of the power of its former American colony, which had become an industrial giant, and, for the first time, a military giant. The U.S. has not suffered damage to its production infrastructure; on the contrary, war has made it flourish, and the years of self-sufficiency place its State in the dominant position of creditor vis-à-vis the victors as well as the vanquished of the European continent. Without the imperial paraphernalia, it is already an empire, it is already able to imprint its vision and its rules on new international agreements. It is Empire, but its self-consciousness is not fully imperial, or at least it has not yet become fully aware of the space it now influences. Nonetheless, its rise tarnishes the gloss of colonial legitimacy of the English crown. It is scarcely a matter of time–a short time, less than an instant in the history of the world–for the power of the United States to occupy the ground left by English attrition; for the appetite of American politicians to grow, particularly after their Asian conquests, and flex the powerful musculature they have developed. They are still somewhat rustic when wielding their power, which once overwhelmed neighbors of much lesser strength, such as the aboriginal nations, Mexico, and the anachronistic remnants of the Spanish empire. But the baton is already in two hands, that of the weary English athlete, and that of the impetuous American relay, who will soon run the next leg of the endless race for power. For the time being, they face the threats to their authority, in the world they have conquered, with two hands. Two-handedly, they seek to build, in the image and likeness of their vision (their «values») and interests, the new architecture of world power. It is clear to them that this requires another tweak in the design of borders, and they resort to the European colonial tradition of imposing political maps with only minor consultations with regional elites whose goal is that of all postcolonial elites: to inherit as much as possible, on behalf of those who have not granted them any representation. To inherit for themselves.

In this repairing, building, and recomposing, the Anglo-American alliance faces another problematic legacy, «the Jewish problem.» As a starting point, they draw from the moral inventory of the conflict that has just been overcome the most comfortable of the Manichean conclusions: the Holocaust is attributable to the anomaly of Nazism, evil, defeated by the Europe of goodness, that of democracy. Thus, they choose to ignore the history that for many centuries flowed like a river of blood toward its inevitable destination: the sea of Auschwitz. Still, the evil perpetrated against Jewish Europeans (little is said of the rest of the victims) is so monstrous, and the eradication of their communities so widespread, that the search for a new «home» for them becomes acceptable, and the Zionist movement agitates until it becomes imperative.

Finding Jewish Europeans a «national home» would have a double benefit: it would satisfy any lingering sense of guilt, and it would free the new order from the danger of a recurrence of tensions between the continent’s majority Christian culture and that of its Jewish inhabitants.  Many of these – the cream of their culture – have already emigrated, if not killed in Hitler’s «Final Solution.» It is in this context that the victorious powers, hand in hand with the United States and the British Empire, take the fateful decision (fateful because it is the carrier of a Gordian embryo) to approve the establishment of a Jewish state in the middle of Palestine, without consulting, of course, those who had already inhabited the old house since time immemorial. The moral justification for such an omission: a state was being built, not for immigrants, not for newcomers, but to give official status and protection to those who «returned» to their supposed ancestral home, after a forced absence of centuries, more than a millennium, almost two.

It was not, then, according to the official narrative, a question of Jewish Europeans, of Europeans who, because of their Jewish culture and religion, had been unjustly persecuted in and by Europe, but of Jews who had been temporarily outside their homeland, to which they now had the right to return as owners of a state that would impose their rights on a territory assigned by Europe,  subordinating, if not abolishing, the inherited rights of current residents. The state would be Jewish, that is, by definition, aligned to a specific faith; The aboriginal population, which was already suffering from expropriatory violence and terrorism, would have to accept this new reality, or leave for other territories, losing their ancestral properties. Only the imperial arrogance of the victors of the Second World War could blind them to the recipe of calamity that their new political map, fancifully rationalized as an epic and just return, was destined to create.

Destruction and replacement

The cathedral of Mexico has in its basement the remains of the Templo Mayor of the Aztecs. Violence, in that case, preceded substitution. In the case of the State of Israel, the rationalization of the Euro-Anglo-American plan, apart from being implausible under the weakest ethnic “magnifying glass” (an ethnic origin rationalization underlies the political blueprint), is also implausible because of the grotesquely naïve reversal of the cruel sequence that is the norm in human history.

Is it possible that politicians and bureaucrats did not foresee the future that imperial design made inevitable?  The history of Palestine and the State of Israel since then is nothing but the consequence of that decision. The first outcome, about which my Jewish friend speculated, was what the Palestinians call the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, the eviction of hundreds of thousands of residents by the victorious forces of the Israeli Army in what Israelis call the «War of Independence» of 1948.  From there, the predictable cycle of conventional wars, guerrilla attacks, state terrorism by Israel (and now, more often, by so-called «settlers»), and terrorism by Palestinians who oppose the State of Israel.

Cruelties galore, of course. What else can happen when human beings are reduced to the primal, which, as I mentioned earlier, underlies the human capacity to separate itself from the instinctive brutality of other species? Does the reader believe that her country, and herself, is incapable of resorting to violence if convinced of the need to kill to survive?

Do you believe yourself incorruptible by violence? One can condemn «all violence» with a stern or angelic face, with a stentorian or mellifluous voice, with sincerity or hypocrisy. It’s not enough. It will not suffice; it will not make human patterns of behavior disappear in conflict situations. This does not mean that we can morally legitimize that someone take the lives of unarmed people, torture them, and subject them to cruel agonies, as the Hamas members who entered Israeli territory have reportedly done. Of course not. Such conduct is unacceptable, such acts are crimes against humanity, and must be punished.

But above all, such conduct must be prevented and avoided, and it is an almost hallucinatory delusion to believe that this can be done without resolving the underlying conflict in a rational manner. There is no peace without justice. Violence, when perpetrated repeatedly, becomes increasingly unjust and brutal. 
At this point, realism forces us to contemplate how the human drama, repeated so many times in history, unfolds before us, as the tragedy of a preordained destiny; how the Rationalist dream collapses along with the humanist yearning that it has accompanied it; how we could be in Troy, in ancient Rome, in Carthage, or in the middle of the night of History, in a cave, witnessing a duel from which there is no way out unless a victor emerges that destroys the vanquished.

Hell, the Play

The actors of the drama are in their places. Every one of them follows the script meticulously. They have no alternative. They are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the first participants of the 1948 mise-en-scène. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Europeans who immigrated in the Zionist wave before, and especially after, the colonial imposition of the State of Israel. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Palestinians who survived the occupation and did not leave and are now inmates of an «open-air prison», as Human Rights Watch has denounced.

Both sides are on a stage that is a scaffold for both, gladiators condemned to kill until they die.  «Hell is the others» recurs in my musings. I think about what it means to be born in Gaza; living from childhood under the overwhelming weight of a foreign occupation supported without qualms by the economic and military forces that dominate the planet; subdued without recourse and forced into the humiliating barter of obedience for survival. I think about what it means to be born under Jewish-Israeli identity, trained since childhood to believe that it is impossible to survive without holding captive millions of human beings who demand their right to a home; that they must be kept enclosed behind gigantic walls, because each one of them is a potential bomb. I think about how it is impossible, in such hell, not to think of the other as a murderous beast.

I think of how it is impossible that, in such a hell, the clash between impotence and arrogance would not erupt thunderously. The collision of the two is their mutual nourishment. The resulting sparks ignite fires which incinerate the fragile moral scaffolding painstakingly built over the centuries to preserve the life of the other while seeking to make one flourish. But, even in the hell where all are trapped, there is inequality. Some play the role of preferred gladiators, encouraged, and armed, by the emperor. Others are there to fight without such help. It is expected that they will do so as best they can ––such is life’s dictate––, but they are not expected to succeed. The cage is guarded from the outside by higher powers. By powers that speak of freedom, of human rights. Powers that deny the existence of the cage and pretend to be astonished that nihilism appears among those who feel that they have nihil to lose (or to win) and replace their goal of freedom with the cruel desire to turn the victimizer into a victim. To descend, that is, below creatures who know no inclination to vengeance. To reduce themselves to a smallness from which there is no return. The behavior of the preferred gladiators is equally predictable: the social ascent of violence, the praise of enemy annihilation, the sublimation of murder into a legitimate act, presumably carried out not only for themselves but for the civilization they claim to defend, threatened by the blind force of the other. The civilization (another irony) that for centuries victimized them.

How can we expect blind hatred not to reign in such a hell? How, if from the stands of civilization, the choir sings in favor of the preferred, turns its eyes away from the violence they practice, and is piously indignant when the others display their violence? The civilized choir is a chorus of death. The civilized choir fans the embers of hatred. The civilized choir is none other than the harmony of the old colonial powers and the voice of a younger imperialism, but one that is no different in its ambition to rule and in its fear of losing spaces of influence. That is why they can’t think, to use the familiar expression, «out of the box«, outside the historical logic of power, and apply their immense strength to at least imagine a solution that might avoid disaster.

On the contrary, they accompany the slippage towards an outcome that is not the chronicle of a tragedy foretold; rather, it is a chronicle of all the chronicles of all the struggles for an indivisible and unique object, such as one’s own home. Because it is indivisible and unique, it resists the officially proposed solution, that of two States living side by side in peace or, given human geography and military arts, one within the other. The so-called «two-state solution» is thus highly unlikely, if not impossible, as far as the eye can reach space-time. Hatred has taken deep root, US-European military hegemony shows no signs of collapsing (it is not possible to predict the collapse of an empire), the State of Israel is, backed by billions of dollars in US support, the most powerful military force in the region; the governments that oppose the State of Israel have not been able to articulate, in seven decades, either the necessary geopolitical vision, nor the economic, military and political power to push back Zionism, but they have positioned themselves in such a way that they are also not trusted by the leaders of the colonial side. Some, like Iran, fund groups that have no qualms about resorting to terrorist tactics. Others rehearse the almost impossible contortion of cultivating friendship with the United States and showing enough animosity toward Israel to placate the sentiment of «the street»; They fear that, if it reaches a boiling point, “the street” will jeopardize their authoritarian regimes.

All these conditions point in the same direction: there could only be two states administering the Palestinian-Israeli region if one submitted to the other. Because of the foreseeable correlation of forces, only Palestinian politicians who accepted a situation of colonial tutelage on the part of Israel could be seen as acceptable by Israel in a two-state scheme. But to adopt such a stance means abandoning belligerent resistance and ceasing the demand for restitution of the descendants of the Nakba. It means, therefore, – especially if one rules out, as is reasonable to assume, a meaningful recovery of Palestinian territory, and a shared-control arrangement on Jerusalem – that the leaders of a Palestinian state truncated into submission would lack legitimacy and would be rendered powerless, both before political movements that could overthrow them, and groups that would use the territory of the weak state as a platform for attacks against Israel. In other words, we would be back to square one.

And what about coexistence in a single, democratic, and secular state? There is no choice but to repeat it: it would take a leap in human consciousness, in the elevation of love and rationality over terror and fury. Such leap is hard to imagine, but it cannot be discarded as impossible, and one can only hope that the keepers of the cage discover in this hitherto “unrealistic” path a possible gain, or the mitigation, or avoidance, of the irreparable loss that in our age of portentous instruments of mass destruction and rapid communications lies implicit in war.

Sadly, but predictably, the statesmen currently involved do not commit themselves in such direction. On the contrary, they promote, ever closer to the abyss, the continuity of a regional power distribution that is unsustainable, and which may lead to an even greater catastrophe than what has already occurred. Why do they do it? Because they believe the long term may simply be an extended short term; that the future can be managed from the present as a succession of short terms, each under the control of their current power. None of this is new: it’s politics, and it is imperial politics. And in imperial politics, the U.S. (and Europe as well) sees in today’s Israel an entity qualified to act as a kind of armed wing of its «national» interests: a government loyal to the political West, armed to the teeth (presumably even with a nuclear arsenal), ready to defend strategic borders and dominant interests in Europe and the U.S.  at a relatively low cost to them, especially in human lives. A vassal kingdom, you might say, a satellite state that extracts, in exchange for loyalty to its masters, large material, military, technological, and even moral concessions.

The latter is crucial, given the intersection of geopolitics and human rights, or, rather, the collision between them: Washington and many European capitals support Israel even at the expense of Western-driven treaties and rules, even at the cost of the safety of ordinary citizens in their countries, because, when it comes to international affairs, the fundamental task of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic is not the well-being of ordinary men and women, but the interests of powerful political and economic groups that have more money than votes.

The March to Extermination

The horizon in Palestine is a reddened sea. The events that there take place are only a variation of the history that has taken place everywhere, and always; the dynamics of the conflict between the State of Israel and the non-Jewish Palestinians seem to be a concatenation of reflex movements, as if driven by a genetic code. As if the inheritance had already been decided, and a clumsy hand transcribed it to execute the will.

Everything moves towards another iteration of the denouement that is reached when a human group, escaping from a conqueror, migrates and conquers a territory until then held by another, and forces the latter to face the same crossroads that it has just left: captivity, extermination, or forced migration. It happened, for example, during the «barbarian» migrations from Asia and Central Europe to the Latin Mediterranean; it was repeated in the migratory waves of the peoples of the Mexican highlands to Central America before the Spanish conquest.

The traces of this human tragedy are scattered in thousands of uninhabited ruins that the dust of time hides until the archaeologists do their strange task. It is also scattered in the remnants of memory: legends and narratives that float as vague echoes of lost civilizations, and in the collective unconscious of humanity, drifting from tribe to tribe, from language to language, from age to age.

Today we call it «ethnic cleansing», an ironically sordid term that condemns what has hitherto been the human norm, because the extermination of the vanquished, their captivity or forced and massive uprooting have been, from time immemorial, the instruments of the victors to clear the conquered ground. 
Until very recently there was no moral doubt about these practices among victors; and even the vanquished were incapable of anything other than fatalistic resignation. The absence of moral doubt was not, of course, absolute, but it had little or no effect on the adjudication of triumph and defeat, of oppression and freedom.

Has anything changed in our era? In Western Christendom, the powerful and inflexible religious justification that condoned certain forms of violence has vanished, and the creed of human rights (a broader umbrella) has become the official cult. This means that the powerful need a greater effort to mobilize the consent of societies to acts of violence that were previously routine, and implicit in the legitimacy of power. This is no small feat, and points in the direction of a more humanistic ideological construct, but it is still far from enough, and fragile in the face of money and political ambitions. Sadly, the primary dynamic still prevails, the crude and brute force barely concealed by some democratic and human rights paraphernalia, which becomes empty and transparent when conflicts intensify. The emperor, after all, ends up riding naked. But the child of the fable lives today multiplied in international public opinion, still embryonic, manipulable, with little institutional muscle beyond national borders, but capable of acting as a sounding board for those citizens who have a voice and vote in their respective States. 

The child is hope, but he is still a child. Will it grow up in time to make Palestine-Israel a watershed in human history? Doubtful, but not impossible. We can already see some signs of moral repugnance, of rejection of the acts of extermination underway. Such rejection is sometimes immature, and incoherent, denouncing some of those who are guilty while excusing others. But this hypocrisy is, itself, progress, because it reveals that the need to respond to the requirements of a morality that clashes with habit is beginning to be felt. Hopefully, this tension will become unbearable. Hopefully, it will soon reach its elastic limit, like the one that made it possible for slavery to be universally outlawed. How far or how close are we to this happening? Impossible to know. We just know that we’re not there. Meanwhile, in Palestine, the will to exterminate is growing, and the will to peace is receding.

Trumpets that foretell the past

«Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist… because there is no other option to guarantee the security of the State of Israel… 
Israel needs to create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, forcing tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in Egypt or the Gulf. For this to happen, Israel needs to demand… With more determination than ever:

1. Let the entire population of Gaza move to Egypt or the Gulf. From our point of view, all buildings in Gaza known to have Hamas headquarters, including schools and hospitals, are considered military targets. 

2. Any vehicle in Gaza is considered a military vehicle transporting fighters. So, there’s no vehicular traffic, and it doesn’t matter if you’re transporting water or other critical supplies.»

Giora Eiland, Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Research Studies
National security; former head of Israel’s National Security Council.

«The claim that it’s illegal for Jews to build in Jerusalem is as absurd as saying that Americans can’t build in Washington or that the French can’t build in Paris,» Keyes said. «The Palestinian demand to ethnically cleanse Jews of their future state is outrageous and should be condemned by the United Nations rather than accepted by it.»

David Keys, Spokesperson for the Prime Minister of Israel

«Ethnic cleansing in exchange for peace is absurd. It’s about time someone said that. I just did it.»

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel

There is more, of course, but these references will suffice to make two comments. The first is that Netanyahu perversely subverts the meaning of «ethnic cleansing» to reject a halt to the advance of the colonization of Palestinian territories by Jewish Israelites. Returning stolen land to its rightful owners would be, in this new Orwellian twist on Zionist discourse, «ethnic cleansing.» The second is that, if threats of extermination from the enemies of the State of Israel (often tinged with anti-Semitism) are not cited here, it is not to bias the text, one of whose central propositions is, on the contrary, that the conflict in the Middle East is a human drama, rooted in the depths –– in something primal–– of our malleable nature. There is no doubt that all human groups are capable of the same heights, and of the same baseness, of goodness and evil; And there is no doubt that, given the choice between killing and dying, they kill.

But for decades, and for the foreseeable future, the balance of military forces has overwhelmingly favored the Israeli side, and that is why it is necessary to show that its grossly disproportionate, brutal, annihilating response to Hamas’ violence corresponds to the desire for extermination expressed by its leaders. It is the strategic path that they have chosen; the pace, breadth, and mode of action are tactical matters, depending on the circumstances of the moment. Questions such as whether they will stop the current bombing campaign against Gazans (not «against Hamas» as the pro-State of Israel chorus repeats in the American media); whether this will be the time when they will invade and occupy Gaza; whether they will open up the supply of water, fuel and electricity or cause famines and epidemics among the population, with the indifference of much of the world and the complicity, accompanied by unconvincing expressions of reserve and calls for prudence, of the United States government.

The political-ideological reality in that country, and not only (or, perhaps, despite) the will of the current administration, tilts the terrain abruptly in favor of giving broad license to the State of Israel. The same public opinion and the same media that raise their voices and cry out against Russia’s destruction of cities and attacks on Ukrainian civilians, seem to have stopped their collective clock on October 7, when Hamas murdered nearly 1,400 civilians; they refuse to count the more 7,000 Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli army bombardments in the following three weeks. They have even given rise to the unheard-of and shocking slogan of «No ceasefire!«

The dramatic scenes of the suffering of the Gazan population have not yet stirred the nerve of empathy of a public that evangelical fundamentalism has anesthetized with the idea that the State of Israel is now an instrument of the Christian God. Major economic powers express their «solidarity with Israel», going so far as to threaten to blacklist students who, for example, spoke out in favor of the Palestinian people at Harvard.

Biden shouts his assent to Netanyahu but whispers his call for restraint. When the Palestinians and the Arab world accuse Israel of bombing a public building (in this particular case, a hospital), the President of the United States, who amid a political crisis has traveled to Israel to confirm his pro-Zionist credentials, appears contrite, mutters, head down, next to the prime minister of the client state, and speaks in an almost inaudible voice that «it seems that this is the work of the ‘other team‘». It’s not that the accident to which Israel’s government attributes the deadly explosion didn’t happen. In the fog of war, anything is possible. But all the independent analysts quoted in the media (even if their words are buried in a few lines of texts whose headlines contradict them) indicate that it is impossible to be certain. What is certain is that the Israeli army is ruthlessly bombing an extremely densely populated city, that its inhabitants are unable to escape, that they are subjected to a medieval siege with military technology of the 21st century, in what cannot be called, if integrity is worth anything, anything other than genocide. 

The proportionality required in international law is seen by the Israeli government as an unnecessary hindrance. Proportionality of Judaic origin, «an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth», too. Biden’s gesture of celebrating as a «great success» of his visit to Israel the entry, through the Egyptian border, of 20 trucks carrying humanitarian aid, while allowing ––because he has the power to restrict–– Netanyahu to destroy Gaza’s structure of goods and services, is both pathetic and cynical. It is tantamount to repeatedly stabbing a person, and then «gifting» them blood transfusions at intervals.

From outside the U.S. ideological-political bubble, the incongruity is evident. The fact that it is not perceived as such from the inside says a lot about the current degree of Islamophobia in society, and about the power wielded by the fusion of evangelicalism with the far right in the United States. The same can be said of the media’s applause for Israel’s warning to the people of Gaza to vacate part of the city and stop serving as «human shields» for Hamas. Such a call is as close to an overt declaration of intent for «ethnic cleansing» as can be heard from a UN recognized government. It is also a declaration of intent for more territorial annexations.

More outrageously, the State of Israel’s rhetoric has successfully normalized a concept that could well appear in a hypothetical manual of occupation of Nazi troops during the Second World War. The image of a «human shield» turns every hapless inhabitant of the city into the shadow of a terrorist. Since Israeli forces have the right to defend themselves against them, they have the right to destroy their «shields».

As I write this, hundreds of police and National Guardsmen are pursuing an American terrorist who killed dozens of people in the city of Lewiston, Maine, and its environs. If he is not located, one can say, following the logic of the State of Israel, that the terrorist «is using the people of Maine as human shields”.

The long, slow reiteration of destiny: is there any hope left?

It is painful and difficult to conclude this bleak narrative, as it describes an unfinished ordeal, and because (as I have warned before) there are more crimes and more responsibilities than what can be inventoried and made sense of in a few pages. The history of this tragedy is, like all human tragedies –– or even more, because Palestine is the crossroads and cradle of so many events –– punctuated by greed, opportunism, the subordination of the lives of others to self-interest, and the pettiness of the consciences of multiple human beings who, from power or against it, seek to satisfy their interest.

The facts narrated and interpreted here constitute, for this author, the fundamental thread of the story. Unfortunately, the predictable future from that thread is dire. The conflict between the State of Israel and Palestine moves before our eyes like a slowed-down film that tells the story of any of the thousands of clashes in which one human group exterminates or banishes the other. As of today, and during the past seven decades, what seems to be underway is the total expulsion of the Palestinian population from their ancestral lands by a population of foreign origin and recent settlement, to whom the complex movement of power in history has enabled to develop an overwhelming military and political superiority over the vanquished.

If the historical «gesture», to use Ortega y Gasset’s language, has not yet been concluded, might perhaps be attributed to the fact that, for the first time in the human race’s journey on this planet, genocide, extermination, and mass expatriation have ceased to be (in principle) morally acceptable practices. But they are still well anchored in the scaffolding of power; we have not yet transitioned from ethical discomfort, from a certain gaseous nausea to a solid rejection of crimes against humanity.  We may not complete the transition (if we ever manage to do so) in time to save the Palestinian people. Indeed, the horizon is a reddened sea in Palestine. If it has a future, perhaps it will be ruins buried in dust and archaeologists trying to understand how the end of that world once called Palestinian came about («so abruptly»–– they would probably add).