Children in a car in the Khan Younis refugee camp in southern Gaza. Photo: Mohammed Abed

Exterminate all the brutes

7 min read CHRIS HEDGES

CHRIS HEDGES

During the siege of Sarajevo, when I was reporting for The New York Times, we never endured the level of saturation bombing and near-total blockade of food, water, fuel and medicine that Israel has imposed on Gaza. We never endure hundreds of deaths and injuries a day. We never tolerate the complicity of the international community in the Serbian campaign of genocide. We never tolerated Washington intervening to block ceasefire resolutions. We never endured the massive shipments of weapons from the United States and other Western countries to maintain the siege. We never had to endure press reports from Sarajevo that were systematically discredited and dismissed by the international community, even though 25 journalists were killed by besieging Serbian forces during the war. We never had to endure Western governments justifying the siege as the Serbs' right to defend themselves, although the UN peacekeepers sent to Bosnia were largely a public relations gesture, ineffective in stopping the carnage until they were seen forced to respond after the massacres of 8.000 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica.

I do not intend to minimize the horror of the siege of Sarajevo, which gives me nightmares almost three decades later. But what we suffer - three to four hundred shells a day, four to five dead a day and two dozen wounded a day - is a tiny fraction of the wholesale death and destruction in Gaza. The Israeli siege of Gaza is more similar to the Wehrmacht assault on Stalingrad, where more than 90% of the city's buildings were destroyed, than it is Sarajevo.

On Friday, all communications in the Gaza Strip were cut off. Without Internet. No telephone service. Without eleectricity. Israel's goal is the murder of tens, probably hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the ethnic cleansing of those who survive in refugee camps in Egypt. It is an attempt by Israel to erase not only a people, but the idea of Palestine. It is a carbon copy of the massive campaigns of racialized killings of other settler colonial projects who believed that indiscriminate and wholesale violence could wipe out the aspirations of an oppressed people, whose land they stole. And like other perpetrators of genocide, Israel intends to keep it hidden.

Israel's bombing campaign, one of the most intense of the 7.300st century, has killed more than 26 Palestinians, almost half of them children, along with 1,4 journalists, medical workers, teachers and United Nations staff. Around 600.000 million Palestinians from Gaza have been displaced and an estimated 120 have been left homeless. Mosques, XNUMX health centres, ambulances, schools, apartment blocks, supermarkets, water and sewage treatment plants and power plants have been reduced to rubble. Hospitals and clinics, lacking fuel, medicine and electricity, have been bombed or are closing. Drinking water is running out. Gaza, at the end of Israel's scorched earth campaign, will be uninhabitable, a tactic the Nazis routinely employed when faced with armed resistance, including in the Warsaw Ghetto and later in Warsaw itself. By the time Israel is done, Gaza, or at least Gaza as we knew it, will be no more.

Not only are the tactics the same, but so is the rhetoric. They refer to Palestinians as animals, beasts and Nazis. They have no right to exist. Their children have no right to exist. They must be cleansed of the earth.

The extermination of those whose land we steal, whose resources we plunder, and whose labor we exploit is encoded in our DNA. Ask the Native Americans. Ask the Indians. Ask the Congolese. Ask the Kikuyu of Kenya. Ask the Herero of Namibia who, like the Palestinians of Gaza, were gunned down and driven to concentration camps in the desert where they died of hunger and disease. Eighty thousand of them. Ask the Iraqis. Ask the Afghans. Ask the Syrians. Ask the Kurds. Ask the Libyans. Ask indigenous people around the world. They know who we are.

The distorted and colonial image of the Israeli settlers is ours. We pretend otherwise. We attribute to ourselves civilizing virtues and qualities that are, as in Israel, flimsy justifications for stripping an occupied and besieged people of their rights, taking away their lands, and using prolonged imprisonment, torture, humiliation, forced poverty, and murder to maintain them. subjugated

Our past, including our recent past in the Middle East, is based on the idea of subduing or annihilating the “inferior” races of the earth. We give these “inferior” races names that embody evil. ISIS. Al Qaeda. Hezbollah. Hamas. We use racist insults to dehumanize them. “Haji” “Sand Black” “Camel Rider” “Ali Baba” “Dung Shovel” And then, because they embody evil, because they are less than human, we feel entitled, as Nissim Vaturi, a member of the Israeli parliament for the ruling Likud party, to erase “the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”

Naftali Bennett, former prime minister of Israel, in an interview on Sky News on October 12 said: “We are fighting Nazis,” in other words, absolute evil.

Not to be outdone, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described Hamas in a press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as “the new Nazis.”

Think about it. A people, imprisoned in the largest concentration camp in the world for sixteen years, deprived of food, water, fuel and medicine, lacking an army, air force, navy, mechanized units, artillery, command and control and missile batteries, is being massacred and starved by one of the most advanced armies on the planet, and it's the Nazis?

There is a historical analogy. But it is not one that Bennett, Netanyahu or any other Israeli leader wants to acknowledge.

When the occupied refuse to submit, when they continue to resist, we abandon all pretense of our “civilizing” mission and unleash, as in Gaza, an orgy of slaughter and destruction. We get drunk on violence. This violence drives us crazy. We kill with reckless ferocity. We become the beasts we accuse the oppressed of being. We unmask the lie of our vaunted moral superiority. We expose the fundamental truth about Western civilization: we are the most ruthless and efficient killers on the planet. For that reason alone we dominate the “wretched of the earth.” It has nothing to do with democracy or freedom. These are rights that we never intend to grant to the oppressed.

“Honor, justice, compassion, and freedom are ideas that have no converts,” reminds us Joseph Conrad, author of “Heart of Darkness.” “There are only people who, without knowing, understanding or feeling, become intoxicated with words, repeat them, shout them, imagining that they believe them without believing in anything more than benefit, personal advantage and their own satisfaction.”

Genocide is at the basis of Western imperialism. It is not exclusive to Israel. It is not exclusive to the Nazis. It is the cornerstone of Western domination. Humanitarian interventionists who insist that we should bomb and occupy other nations because we embody goodness - although they promote military intervention only when it is perceived to be in our national interest - are useful idiots of the war machine and global imperialists. They live in an Alice in Wonderland story in which the rivers of blood we generate make the world a better and happier place. They are the smiling faces of genocide. You can see them on your screens. You can hear them spouting their pseudomorality in the White House and in Congress. They are always wrong. And they never disappear.

We may be deceived by our own lies, but most of the world sees us and Israel clearly. They understand our genocidal tendencies, our hypocrisy and our arrogance. They see that the Palestinians, mostly friendless, powerless, forced to live in squalid refugee camps or in the diaspora, deprived of their homeland and eternally persecuted, suffer the kind of fate that was once reserved for the Jews. Perhaps this is the final tragic irony. Those who once needed protection from genocide now commit it.