Gaza: if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

“If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us don’t, we die? If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” is one of the most powerful dialogues in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. It falsifies the present-day imperialist construct of Judo-Christianism manufactured by the West, a paradigm shift in the newly built power relations.

The European hegemonic powers abhorred Jews and treated them as subhuman beings. This history not only dates to the inquisition of Muslims and Jews in Spain, but even further in the past.

The anti-Semitic culture was integral to feudal and later semi-capitalist Europe. Since culture belongs to the ruling classes, and “it exists because freedom does not”. This culture of unfreedom was introjected into the minds of indoctrinated masses of the West to divert their attention from the real socio-economic issues.

“All culture,” Adorno insists, “share the guilt of the society. It ekes out its existence only by injustice already perpetrated in the sphere of production”. This culture of hatred was borrowed and embraced by the Zionist hierarchy for political ends. It took it to the level of stylized barbarity by twisting the facts by blaming Muslims instead of Nazis for creating and spreading anti-Semitism among the Western masses.

The meeting of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a single senseless soul with Hitler is presented as a watershed in the history of Jews. Hitler, Netanyahu alleges decided to initiate the Nazi holocaust after meeting him. Can there be any bigger and more vulgar jest of history than this?

The shallowness of the argument suggests that it wasn’t the capitalist accumulation and lack of realization that took the international capitalist class to an imperialist war that killed 50 million human beings including six million Jews, but the Nazis’ destructive nihilism that threw the Jews out of the productive process, making them irrelevant before killing them.

The self-contradictory nature of that claim was exposed when even during the “nihilistic process”, Jews were forced to produce the surplus value not only for their living but to sustain the provision of commodities for the Nazis and Wall Street.

One of the labour camps in Auschwitz manufactured chemicals and pharmaceutical products for I. G. Farben, a conglomerate created by merging six companies including Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, The General Chemical Industry, and Weiler-ter Meer. All those companies were financed by Wall Street, General Motors, Ford, and Morgan Stanley Chase Bank.

To counter the Zionists’ narrative against Muslims, I have already written somewhere that “the word ‘ghetto’ came from Venice, a place where the Jews were kept in a secluded area under the malignant gaze of Christian guards. ‘Pogrom’ – meaning riots or to wreak havoc – was adopted from the Russian language.

However, the word was not meant for the Jews alone but for all ‘undesirable’ communities, but like ‘anti-Semitism’, it was monopolised by the Zionist ruling class as a best-selling commodity. ‘Auschwitz’ happened in Poland and not in Palestine, where the process is repeated by the Jews to the Palestinians. A tyranny of the once powerless minority over the equally powerless native majority“.

Without war Hitler, could not kill the Jews. An unelected leader and the beneficiary of Hindenburg’s benevolence who appointed him as German Chancellor, Hitler facing awful inflation with a paralysed and massively indebted economy hostage to the Allies turned to the lower- and middle-class Jews as convenient victims, for creating the German economic crisis. He unleashed the German middle class living a drab existence upon them.

However, before that, he assured the massacre of the entire Communist Party, the second biggest in the country, and made sure that the rich Jews such as Oppenheim Bankers remained unharmed. In addition, numerous soldiers, and 77 officers in the Third Reich army were Jews or married to a Jew, which included “Two generals, eight lieutenant generals, five major generals and 23 colonels” (Los Angeles Times, 24/12/1996).

Unlike Ben Gurion (David Green) and Netanyahu (Benzion Mileikowsky) Hitler never intended genocide of the Jews. He even offered the Western democracies his readiness to pay an amount of 1000 marks and a ship to every Jew to leave Germany to settle in their democracies.

In one of his speeches, Hitler complained, “They assure us: we cannot take them unless Germany is prepared to allow them a certain amount of capital to bring with them as immigrants”. At one stage, Eichmann proposed Joel Brand, a Hungarian Jew, to help Germany barter ten thousand trucks with hundred thousand Jews with Allies. The proposal was rejected by Lord Moyne, British minister for states for the Middle East.

When both Adorno and Horkheimer were mourning the state of Jews as “a group that, in practice and theory, drew to itself the annihilatory urge” Franz Neumann, maintaining his Marxist position, rebuked them. He insisted that one could offer an account of National Socialism without attributing a central role to the Jewish problem.

He also stated that anti-Semitism had receded as a central ideological tenet of National Socialism and insisted on the primacy of economic factors in understanding the capitalist order.

Leaving ordinary Jews aside, Zionists, the believers of Nazis’ Blutund Boden ideology, built a unique relationship with both the Nazis and British imperialism. Balfour’s declaration arrived on the eve of the Soviet Revolution when Western powers decided to create a frontline state in the Middle East against communism.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a right-wing Zionist close to Mussolini, openly supported the genocide of the Palestinians. Moshe Dayan, the former Israeli defence minister, and Netanyahu’s father were among his protégés.

The moment the UN decided to partition Palestine giving 52 % of the best cultivable land and developed cities to 6% Jews and the rest largely backward areas to the 94% the process of Palestinians’ genocide started as planned.

The question remains: where is the 48% area reserved for Palestinians since by then the West Bank and Gaza were the parts of Jordan and Egypt, respectively, and not the historic Palestine?

Settler-colonialism cannot survive without brutal violence. The US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and most of the Latin American countries that annihilated the native population knew it precisely.

Hence the Nakba/massacre of Palestinians and their expulsion from their native land wasn’t new to them nor their indifference to the occupation of the native land was exceptional. What is flabbergasting for them is the organized armed resistance put up by the oppressed against the invincible force that is refusing to die.

For eight months the US tried to deny the Israelis’ horrible atrocities against the Palestinians as false, but now the horrors have become obvious and indefensible. John Kirby of the State Department justified it by confessing to committing identical war crimes by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mathew Miller confessed to Israelis killing the civilians and declared it as their right. “No one dies of fatal truths nowadays,” Nietzsche says, “there are too many antidotes”.

Marcuse anticipated the rise of fascism in the US. “I see in the United States today,” he wrote, “the historical heir of fascism”. “There is no more apartheid in South Africa” Malcolm X stated, “than in the United States”. “Should fascism become a powerful force” Adorno stated, “…it would parade under the banner of traditional democracy”.

Biden overtly claims himself a Zionist, and so does Noam Chomsky albeit one is an unapologetic supporter of Israeli terrorism while the other, an anarchist –a contradiction itself— who rejects the concept of a nation-state, especially the Israeli entity, and is forbidden to enter Israel.

Whether it is Biden or Trump, the fascistic tendencies have been triumphant in the US and so are the class consciousness, its dialectical opposite. Its unequivocal support to the Israeli grisly campaign against the Palestinians, the reaction of the global south, and the heroic resistance of the Palestinians have turned the US and Israel into pariah states.

Palestinians are heroes but they are humans, the world is watching their determination but must feel their despair too. No one knows the outcome of this genocidal war, but Mahmoud Darwish has rightfully claimed that “The Palestinians have triumphed over the plan to expel them from history”.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024