The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.“ (Dante)
Thus spoke Netanyahu, in the US Congress, and applauded by the equally imperious and impious creatures. “The devil” Shakespeare succinctly states, “can cite Scripture for his purpose”.
“An evil soul produced holy witness”— the pious words carrying little or no piety in them— “is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart: O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath”! However, the falsehood of Netanyahu had an ugly face from the onset.
“No civilian died in Gaza,” he stated arrogantly. The statement was nothing more than the repetition of Israeli President Issac Herzog’s false pretension made immediately after October 7 that Gaza had no civilians but only combatants that took and shook Israel by surprise.
“We are fighting against human animals,” the defence minister Gallant in a not very gallant statement added his gall to the venom already vomited by other Zionists.
Gallant’s statement always takes one back to the era when Jews were the victims, and the only purpose of their lives was to hide their identity. Especially those propertyless Jews who were powerless and were sent to the concentration camps.
Adorno, agonizing, Hamlet-like, stated “Auschwitz happens when they look at the slaughterhouse and say they are animals” (Minima Moralia) or subhuman beings.
On October 7, when the most oppressed people of the world were confined to their ghettos in Borges’ words “to plant their own gardens and decorate their own souls, instead of waiting for others to bring them flowers”, by taking matters into their own hands, did Gallant and his Zionist colleague ever dare to compare their uprising with one that occurred in the Auschwitz? If they did, have they viewed the Jewish uprising, as an insurgency against the Weimar republic and considered the Nazis’ response of slaughtering the Jews just? Had the Nazis halted food, water, and medicine supplies to the insurrectionist Jews which they did not do, would the Zionists consider that brutal Nazi response justified?
Nazis’ major crime was to turn the proletarian Jews into slave labour to earn a surplus for the international capital which the Zionists are repeating with impunity to the Palestinians’ labour.
“For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together,” Netanyahu said, “because when we stand together, something very simple happens. We win. They lose”. Netanyahu stated. (.www.timesofisrael.com › were-protecting-you-full-text-of We’re protecting you: Full text of Netanyahu’s address to.
No one knows why history refused to caress his bloody mind. “The US had a poor track record of offering asylum to the Jews during Nazi domination of Germany and Europe”, Ilan Pape continues, “the most notorious example and consequence of this callous policy occurred in June 1939 when the German ocean liner St Louis and its 937 passengers almost all Jews were turned away from the port of Miami back to Europe. Most of them died in the Holocaust”. (Ilan Pappe: Lobbying for Zionism on both sides of the Atlantic)
In 1938, 125,000 German and Austrian Jews applied for US migration, but their quota was fixed at 27,000.
Now the same Jewish Zionists are trying to protect a Judo-Christian civilization, a capitalist construct, from non-existent Palestinian barbarism. This is exactly what the Zionist premier stated amid the thundering applause of genocidal Americans, whose war machine has massacred human beings on an unprecedented scale, transcending the tragedy and trauma inflicted by them upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The latter have become caricatures of the barbarism of the 21st century, the globalization of indifference.
“Courage,” the UN Special Repertoire, Francisca Albanese said on March 30th, “is a heavy gift to carry, but not as heavy as 13,000 small coffins weighing on our conscience”. By now, “the death of 90,923 citizens, the majority of whom were children and women, and the injury ofothers, while thousands of victims remain under rubble and on the roads where crews cannot” https://una-oic.org/en/palestinians/2024/07/30/The-bodies-of-20-martyrs-were-recovered-from-Rafah-and-towns-A/. “Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37?396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186?000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza”(https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext). “In 1936, during the Spanish civil war”, Eric Fromm writes, “General Millan Astray - “a cripple, a war invalid” - had overtly advanced his favourite motto: “Viva la muerle” (long live death). One wonders if there is any difference between the two Millan Astray and Netanyahu.
It’s only in a symposium of warmongers where a mercenary akin to the Israeli premier practicing a stylized barbarity can lecture about civilization.
The sickly man who himself is a Freudian face of discontented civilization. “Civilizations” for Aijaz Amed “are not real entities but discursive and performative categories, with immense plasticity, so that the politically motivated civilizational discourses of our time are essentially acts of bad faith” (In Theory: Classes, Nations & Literature).
Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations was sheer grotesqueness. All Muslim countries, irrespective of the nature of their ruling hierarchy, follow the capitalist civilization.
While the barbarism in the world is led by the forces of decadence and its capitals extend from Tel Aviv to Riyad and from Washington DC to London and Paris. Wasn’t it Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli premier who said, “It’s better to be a Judo-Nazi than being a saint”? Certainly, “There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously also of barbarism” (Walter Benjamin).
By simplifying and paraphrasing Herbert Marcuse, (One-Dimensional Man) One can understand the concepts of civilization and barbarism besides the struggle the Palestinians are waging against both, for both are the continuation of an identical phenomenon.
For Marcuse, drawing simplistic parallels between barbarians threatening civilization damages the issue. The second phase of barbarism may well be the continuation of the civilization itself. Still, chances are that the most advanced consciousness of humanity meets with the most exploited force, meaning that the possibility of subalterns achieving class consciousness is likely to become a probability.
However, the critical theory remains negative, making no promise of success. It wants to remain loyal to those who (like Palestinians) without hope have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.
In Congress, a symposium of idiocy comprising genocidal supporters, a single sane voice revolted overtly. When the process of dehumanization of thought and Palestinians’ sacrifices for liberation was going on, amidst the applause Rasheeda Tlaib was denouncing the irrationality applauded as rationality.
Holding a placard of a war criminal in one and guilty of genocide in the other valiantly she was making humanity proud of her conduct.www.wxyz.com › news › rep-rashida-tlaib-holds-up-war-criminalRep.
Rashida Tlaib holds up ‘war criminal’ sign during… “The existence of one solitary “unreasonable” human elucidates the shame of the entire nation”. Her “existence” Horkheimer states, “testifies to the relativity of the system of radical self-preservation that has been posited as absolute” (Eclipse of Reason).
Antisemitism isn’t the “poor man’s snobbery” as Sartre made us believe, it’s the weaponization of Zionism’s gimmickry and “impassioned imperialism of” unreason. Netanyahu called the anti-war protesters “Iran’s useful idiots” (Speech in Congress).www.timesofisrael.com › were-protecting-you-full-text-of We’re protecting you: Full text of Netanyahu’s address to…
What can be more irrational than opposing peace especially when the Israeli entity is trapped in a four-pronged attack— a fierce resistance from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah and from Yemen to Iraqi Syrian rebels? Akin to the White South African regime, it has already become an international pariah with a limited capacity to fight without the arms and intelligence supplied by the US, UK, and Germany.
Not only the myth of its military might has been exposed to the world, but its legitimacy as a state is also being overtly questioned. Unlike Putin, Netanyahu is fortunate that despite being a war criminal whose arrest warrants from the ICC are delayed under the command of the US is walking scot-free delivering his hateful speeches and mocking the Congressmen’s intellect, which it scarcely has, openly.
Both Netanyahu and the US warmongers sitting in Congress have again proved Herbert Marcuse right. “For the world of human freedom cannot be established by the established societies, no matter how much they may streamline and rationalize their domination” (One-Dimensional Man).
The capitalist institutions created and developed to make life a struggle for existence cannot tolerate a peaceful existence. Gramsci has narrated the same thought in different words. Paraphrasing him, one can state that the absolute humanism of human history does not aim to resolve existing contradictions in history and society peacefully instead it is the very essence (theory) of these contradictions. (On the philosophy of praxis).
The theory of antisemitism, the chosen people, and the right of Israeli self-determination reinforces the allegations levelled by Bruno Bauer. The Jews/Zionists are egoists. While living in Germany before being Jews they were Germans first. If they sought their emancipation as Jews, how could they have overlooked the emancipation of Germans and humankind as a whole? “Why should the Germans be interested in the liberation of the Jew, if the Jew is not interested in the liberation of the German?” (Jewish Question) www.marxists.org › archive › marx On The Jewish Question by Karl Marx - Marxists Internet Archive) He asked a question that can be posed even today albeit differently.
Why do Zionists expect to be recognized universally as chosen people if they condemn the entire humanity as goyim, the children of a lesser god? Why should their right to self-defence be recognized when they don’t recognize the right of Palestinians’ self-defence and statehood?
Netanyahu’s speech simulates the attack on Israel as an assault on the US, an attempt to share its enemy with the US overtly proving the imperialist nature of the existing conflict, which is not between the people of Palestine and Israel but between the people of global Palestine and global Israel.
Despite the tyranny of the mighty enemy, the Palestinian fighters are resolute, unswerving, and human. Their treatment of their enemies is indicative that “a fighter’s weapon is his humanity” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth).
“The greatest conquest of the class struggle” for Marx “is the spiritual growth of the oppressed” (The Capital). For the first time, people of Palestine feel empowered. “Powerlessness,” Tony Cliff says,“does not give the opportunity for such growth(https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1987/09/oppressed.html).
By brokering a deal between sixteen different sections of the Palestinians fighting against Zionism, President Xi of China has broken the ice.
The Palestinian Authority, an Israeli instrument of dominance, a decadent and regressive force, has also joined hands with the rest, especially with Hamas.
Theoretically, it is a breakthrough, but its success on grounds is anyone’s guess yet hope as Brecht states is latent in this step.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024