The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world
The destruction of Palestine is breaking the world
The rules of the institutions that define our lives bend like reeds when it comes to Israel – so much that the whole global order is on the verge of collapse
Israel’s war in Gaza is chipping away at so much of what we – in the United States but also internationally – had agreed upon as acceptable, from the rules governing our freedom of speech to the very laws of armed conflict. It seems no exaggeration to say that the foundation of the international order of the last 77 years is threatened by this change in the obligations governing our legal and political responsibilities to each other.
We are all watching a holocaust live on TV, perpetrated by the victims of a holocaust 80 years ago
Gaza is the latest in a long line of atrocities committed by countries ostensibly committed to a law of armed conflict.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria... hell the US interventions in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were as horrifying as they were criminal. Sometimes we can find an exigent threat that gives us permission to use overwhelming force to brutalize the bad guys - as in Iraq '91 with the Kuwaiti invasion. Other times we just have to make some shit up, as with Grenada or Vietnam.
But this idea that we've had an international order for any of the last 77 years is more a reflection on the quantity of our propaganda than the quality of our international ethics. The total war Israel is conducting in Gaza, while the US hovers overhead threatening to flatten any Egyptian or Jordanian or Lebanese who attempts to intervene, has been historic in the degree to which far more cushy liberal rhetoric has been replaced with full-throated endorsement of ethnic cleansing.
But the policies themselves? We manufactured a famine in Afghanistan shortly after withdrawing the last US troops. We have repeatedly blocked countries with socialist governments from accessing international markets to obtain relief, such as Bangladesh in '74 and Ethiopia ten years later. Somalia has been under near constant assault by US Navy vessels "policing" the most lucrative fishing territories, driving up rates of piracy as a substitute for traditional subsistence farming. Then you've got the '91 famine in N. Korea and the '94 Cuban hunger crisis, both the consequence of US blockades.
Any one of these would be considered a modern-day Holodomor from the perspective of an objective outside observer. Unfortunately, Americans only get to hear about Gaza - and even then only in dribs and drabs on social media or alt-news publications - as they turn away from the traditional corporate-friendly press venues.
The Jewish people of the world deserve apology from the government of isreal for using their suffering as a political tool in service of genocide.
In conflating politics and imperialism with lineage and race, the political movement of Zionism sows incalculable hatred into the world in the name of Judaism, so that they can reap it later, when Jewish people suffer as meat shields, as justification for expansionism, and forever-war. Down with this theocratic shell game.
The victim is now the abuser
Such a shame that doing anything about it, including asking nicely, would be rabidly antisemitic.
Edit: also acknowledging that it's both happening and a problem is antisemitic. You are allowed to day it would be bad if it did, and youre allowed to acknowledge whats happening only while you sing the popular zionist childrens song 'exterminate the brutes'.
It's hard to find a more Nazi way of doing it. Never forget, Zionists signed the Haavara Agreement with Hitler. You can look up Hitler's quotes on Zionists to find that his problem with them was that *"It doesn't even enter their heads to build up a Jewish state in Palestine for the purpose of living there" *- that they weren't being imperial colonialist enough and were just all talk. It's sad to see the meaning of genocide twisted so much to use the genocide of the past to protect the genocide of the present. Hitler's problem with Jews in Germany is that they were staying in Germany, it was not with the Zionists who were trying to take over the reigns of Mandate Palestine.
Sort of what we are seeing now, radical far right groups sticking up for each other even when at face value ideologically they should be opposed - because it's not about the lie they are peddling, it's about forcing people out and conquering occupied territory to take their wealth and resources. Not that these far right leaders will ever admit it, but the shifting stream of excuses, justifications, and contradictions create the outline of what they've even lied to themselves about. They are not people of character.
This may be a stupid question, but why did we need to create Israel in the first place? If my memory from my shitty American education serves me, they had all these survivors of the Holocaust with nowhere to go, so they created Israel for them to live peacefully, fuck whoever was already living there.
But why couldn't they all just go back home? I know everyone was shipped off across Europe to the camps but like... surely they remembered where they lived before? Everything was bombed to hell but that's the same for whoever lived there, Jewish or not. Am I missing a piece that makes the need for their own country to make sense?
Our imaginations have always fallen short with regard to World War III. The only thing anyone can visualize is total nuclear destruction, but this world definitely has another actual world war left in it where conventional forces fight it out across multiple fronts, largely through proxies but orchestrated by the major powers. The world economy will plunge into chaos for a decade or more. The political situation in every country around the world will turn to shit. Fascism will bloom and commit mass atrocities. Oh shit… that’s all already happening.
The next world war
Will have no rules