The psychopathology of a settler state called Israel

The Knesset

This year, the Government of Israel celebrated its 70th birthday in what may well be described as brutal, blatant, murderous, thuggish and shameful. Through its acts of colossal arrogance and orgy of wanton killings, once again, the settler racist state revealed that it is above scrutiny, beyond repair and cannot be tamed by either Gandhi-style protests or the world opinion. As the new Goliath in the world scene, it is there to stay by hook or crook!

Welcome to the new world that we live in where conscionable human beings are increasingly confined to becoming non-entities while criminal acts of the powerful – the Goliaths in our midst – are either overlooked or excused. The scholars of eschatology are calling this age the ‘pre-dawn era of the emergence of the Anti-Christ’ where the baton in world dominance will be shifting steadily to Pax-Israel from Pax-Americana, and Jerusalem taking the center stage in the global arena.

To highlight this transition, on May 14, the Trump Administration opened the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which was hailed by the US and Israeli leaders as a sign of the enduring relationship between the two countries and of US trustworthiness.

President Donald Trump did not attend the ceremony in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood, but in a video message broadcast at the event he congratulated Israel, saying the opening had been “a long time coming.”

Once again, international leaders could not sway the US President from his haughty decision to break with international norms by moving the embassy. A new train station to be built near the Western Wall in holy Jerusalem is named rather amusingly after the debauch Trump whom some in Israel and within the evangelical Christian community see as their new messiah or as his forerunner.

France expressed its official disapproval. South Africa pulled its envoy from Tel Aviv, while Turkey pulled its ambassadors from both Washington and Tel Aviv. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan rightly told an audience in London that the US prefers “to become part of the problem rather than the solution” and that it “has lost its role as mediator in the Middle East peace process.”

As noted by TV journalists, the celebratory air in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood, however, contrasted sharply with the wanton murder of unarmed and stone-throwing Palestinians. Some 60 Palestinians were killed and another 3,000 injured by Israeli sharpshooters. Their crime: they protested Israeli annexation of their ancestral land by the Zionist usurpers.

The U.N.’s Middle East envoy said there was no justifying the killings of scores of Palestinians by Israeli fire at the Gaza border, and several Security Council members called for an independent investigation.

The UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, was “profoundly alarmed by the sharp escalation of violence in the occupied Palestinian territory and the high number of Palestinians killed and injured in the Gaza protest.” Guterres added that Israeli security forces “must exercise maximum restraint in the use of live fire.”

However, the Netanyahu government, like its Zionist predecessors, has never been sobered by such criticisms. It enjoys the support of the Trump administration, which wasted no time in putting the blame on the victims. The White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah (an Indian-American “Hindu for Trump”) told reporters at the White House, “The responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas. Hamas is intentionally and cynically provoking this response and as the secretary of state said, Israel has a right to defend itself.” When asked about the contrast between rock-wielding Palestinians and armed Israel Defense Forces firing on them, Shah said, “This is a propaganda attempt. I think the Israeli government has spent weeks trying to handle this without violence.”

The same absurd message was parroted by the US Permanent Representative Niki Haley (another Indian-American) in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) that once again failed to take a unified stand against Apartheid Israel.

She claimed, “No country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has. In fact, the records of several countries here today suggest they would be much less restrained.” She walked out when the Palestinian envoy began speaking.

No informed person will argue with Haley that the records of other mass murderers – Suu Kyi, el-Sisi and al-Assad in places like Myanmar, Egypt and Syria – are worse. But who are protecting these mass murderers if not the veto-wielding Brahmins within the UNSC? Fact is: all these veto-wielding states are making a mockery of the world body by making it a chatting theatre where the ‘unprotected’ Sudras don’t’ count! If they were to survive, they must find a Brahmin! Surely, this all-too-familiar hypocrisy within the UNSC needs to be debunked.

A state-commissioned wanton murder of civilians is a serious crime. As such, if Haley were a conscionable human being, she would not be whitewashing the crimes of the Apartheid Zionist state. How in one week is she prepared to go to war because Syrian President Bashar al-Assad allegedly killed over 40 people with gas, but remain silent in another week while dozens of human beings are systematically murdered right before our eyes? Why this blatant hypocrisy, Mrs. Haley?

It is worth noting that U.N. Secretary-General had proposed a similar investigation after a deadly protest in Gaza in March of this year, which also was rebuffed by her.

It is becoming all too obvious that the UNSC is becoming an organ within the UN where the powerful criminals are tolerated and protected by their big brothers. It, thus, needs to be decommissioned in favor of the UNGA for humanity to survive and prosper.

Obviously, Haley and her predecessors in the UN won’t talk about the suffering on the Palestinian side since their Nakba – the Day of Catastrophe, coinciding with the illegitimate birth of the Zionist state that forced the exodus of some 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homeland. Unspoken, too, is the open-air concentration camp, called Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians – evicted from what is today fondly called the Jewish State of Israel – are confined with no access to the outside world, and even by the sea. Nor would these Israel-firsters mention that those slain Palestinians were systematically murdered by heavily armed soldiers that turned the unarmed protesters who approached the fence to protest their confinement and occupation into a killing zone.

The colonizer, settler state and its backers and supporters also won’t talk about the falsity of the myth that they created to justify their colonization project in the Holy Land (Al Quds). At the time that the Zionists were mounting their putsch, the Palestine landscape was populated with an Arab Semitic population that for millennia had occupied literally all the villages and towns. A few Jews were scattered here and there during the Ottoman Rule in the 19th century. To create their new single ethnic state (minus the Arabs), the conniving Zionists had a problem: what to do with the indigenous Semitic population and how to encourage Jewish migration to the Holy Land?  The answer was multi-fold. [The interested readers may like to read this author’s articles: The Case of Israel, and the Jerusalem Question.]

A train of events quickly followed starting since the First Zionist Conference of 1897 to the Nakba in 1948 via the infamous Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which, according to Jewish historian Arthur Koestler, “One nation solemnly promised to give to a second nation the country of a third nation.” That is, the Jews of Europe were promised a homeland in Palestine by the British nation that did not own it.

What a monumental crime that would be continued to this very date against the indigenous Palestinians who would be dehumanized on the top being robbed of their ancestral land! After all, there is nothing better to justify the unfathomed brutality of an aggressive colonist than to painting the targeted people – the locals – as subhuman savages who don’t deserve our mercy and surely don’t deserve to live in the Holy Land.

Thus, one should not be surprised to see Israeli barbarity in recent days against the Palestinians. Nor should one be surprised by the lies and deceits of psychopaths like Netanyahu and Trump who cannot hide their monumental crimes.

In the words of Ajamu Baraka, the founding executive director of the US Human Rights Network and the Green Party’s nominee for Vice President of the United States in the 2016 election, “While the bodies of men, women and even children were rushed away from the fence after having their bodies torn to shreds by live ammunition, the world’s elites were drinking champagne and celebrating the move of the embassy of one racist, settler-colonial state—the United States—to the conquered capital of another racist, colonial state, Israel.”

The Palestinians victims are once again dehumanized, much like the German Jews in Nazi Germany. They are expendable! In this regard, it is worth quoting journalist Gideon Levy who wrote in Haaretz (4/5/18): “In Gaza, Israeli army snipers shot unarmed demonstrators as if they were on a shooting range, to a chorus of rejoicing by the media and the masses…This is what the nation wants and this is what it will get. Even if soldiers kill hundreds of demonstrators in Gaza, Israel will not bat an eyelid. The reason: evil and hatred of Arabs. Gaza is never perceived as it really is, a place inhabited by people, an enormous and terrible prison, a huge site of human experimentation. Most Israelis, who — just like their prime minister — have never spoken to a single Gazan, only know that the Gaza Strip is a nest of terrorists. That’s why it’s OK to shoot them. Shocking? Yes, but true.”

What an irony and what a charade! As expected, the current blood-letting in Gaza has once again taught us that the majority of Israeli citizens today has no conscience. In their distorted imagery, the Palestinians have been transformed into terrorists and numbers, but not humans.

Disingenuous journalists like Thomas Friedman would lecture us that if the Palestinians had behaved like Gandhi their problem would have disappeared a long time ago. By so saying they show their dismal hypocrisy and/or ignorance of the psychopathology of the Zionist state. The protesters in Gaza were no more violent than those who marched non-violent alongside Gandhi during the British Raj of India. And by the way, they ought to know what Gandhi had said some 80 years ago: “Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.” [Nov. 26, 1938]

One would have thought that bullets, drones and tear gases are symbols of rules by the savages and not civilized people. We are wrong again!

Professor Samuel Huntington uttered the truth when he said, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Yes, Prof. Huntington, the natives have not forgotten this truth, and thus, end up becoming statistics and casualty figures in the killing fields to protest their confinement and their imposed misery, and to expose the utter moral bankruptcy of their tormentors and those who standby doing nothing to alleviate their pains and sufferings.