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To destroy Gaza completely and utterly

Gaza devant l'histoire / Israel a failed society, a failed state
Forfatter: Enzo Traverso /Morten Thing
Forlag: Lux /Solidaritet (Canada /Danmark)
PALESTINE / The Israeli army has dropped more than 70.000 tons of bombs over the area. That's more bombs than in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the Second World War – and three times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. What happens to concepts like democracy, rights and justice in light of the genocide in Gaza?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

After more than a year of intense bombardment of Gaza, an area the size of Mors in Denmark or Mjøsa in Norway, the number of dead is somewhere between 40.000 and 186.000 Palestinians. We are talking about the most intense bombardment of an urban area in history. The IsraelSwedish army has dropped more than 70.000 tons of bombs over the area. That's more bombs than in Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during the Second World War – and three times the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. And it certainly happened in an area that Amnesty International and B'Tselem describe as one open prison without exits. During the long military campaign, the highest number of journalists has ever been killed in an armed conflict, as has the number of UN staff. Schools, universities, libraries, museums, mosques, churches and hospitals have been bombed, blown to pieces or razed to the ground by bulldozers. The UN calls the Israeli army's destruction of educational buildings, but also the killing of hundreds of lecturers and teachers, a 'scholasticicide', i.e. the deliberate destruction of the opportunity to get an education.

How can the Holocaust legitimize a genocide 83 years later?

The overwhelming suffering, the single-minded zeal to destroy as much as possible in Gaza, and the steely and seemingly unwavering Western support for the genocidal state of Israel tends to leave any leftist with an acute case of militant depression. Because what can we do in a situation where criticism of the state of Israel is dismissed as anti-Semitism, and where past political engagement in favor of decolonization and global justice has been replaced by purely humanitarian efforts?

In light of the genocide

The Italian historian of ideas Enzo Traverso has written important books about both totalitarianism, the connection between colonialism and Nazism as well as on modern Jewish history. He tries in his new book, Gaza before history, to zoom out a little in the midst of all the suffering, all the protest marches, the trials against demonstrators in countries like Germany and Denmark and the heated defenses of Israel's right to self-defense. Traverso quietly asks what is happening to concepts such as democracy, rights and justice in light of the genocide in Gaza. What happens when you defend the indefensible? Where is the Western Enlightenment project in 2024 – in the light of Gaza after the events of October 7, 2023?

Traverso's book is largely written as a counter to the discourse that prevails in most Western media and among European and American politicians, who not only uncritically pass on false information about the attacks by Hamas on October 7 – the stories of bestial killings of pregnant women , and Israeli children who were burned alive or beheaded. These go to great lengths to justify the actions of the Israeli army, including repeating its rhetoric of being "the most democratic army in the world", which uses various sophisticated AI systems to select targets. Where the Israeli army is consistently described as a professional and rational actor that makes a sea of ​​analyzes and calculations, it is described Hamas not just as a terrorist organization, but as backward Islamists who harbor an abysmal hatred for Jews and therefore attack Israel. We have a blank opposition, where Hamas are barbaric anti-Semites, and Israel (again) the victim of a pogrom.

The terrorist attack on October 7 is to be understood as a symptomatic reaction to decades of asymmetric violence, not as a cause.

Hamas's action on October 7 is sought to be reproduced as a direct extension of the Holocaust. As a Jewish state, Israel is forced to defend itself against an anti-Semitic monster. We have heard this again and again not only from Netanyahu and his government, but also from most Western politicians. As Traverso describes, any historical context disappears, and the constant reference to Nazism's attempt to carry out a systematic extermination of Europe's Jews legitimizes the destruction of Gaza and paradoxically risks relativizing the significance of the Holocaust historically and politically. Because how can the holocaust legitimize a genocide 83 years later? The fact that Jews were victims of Nazism does not justify Israel as a Jewish state committing an assault on the Palestinians who are in Gaza, which has been under Israeli blockade since 2007.

Tjeerd Royaards (Netherlands). Gaza Falls. © Libex.Eu

The orientalizing discourse

men den orientalizing discourse, which is hegemonic in the West, leaves no room for either doubt or reflection: Hamas are not legitimate enemies, but bloodthirsty animals. And the thousands of civilians being killed in Gaza are just that collateral damage. In fact, it is Hamas's fault that so many civilians lose their lives, because Hamas, like a kind of cancer cell, has penetrated so far into Gaza that one cannot really distinguish between military and civilian targets. Therefore, it is both necessary and legitimate to destroy Gaza, to turn it into a pile of rubble. That the intention of the Israeli army's campaign is to destroy Gaza completely and utterly leaves the most extreme members of Netanyahus government no doubt about. They have repeated this time and time again, and they speak openly about the need for the expulsion of all Palestinians and an Israeli recolonization of Gaza. If the state of Israel was not born as a colonial power and an outpost of Western imperialism, that is what it has ended up being. The many incantations of Israel as a democracy not only ring hollow, but are completely meaningless after October 13, when Israel began to bomb the area in droves.

We are in the paradoxical situation that the Palestinians today they occupy the position that Jews have historically occupied in Europe: they are a radical foreignness that must be fought one way or another. As a Jewish state, Israel is now part of the «Judeo-Christian civilization». As Traverso writes, Jews have thus become 'white'. And they now assume the role of an outpost for the West in a hostile Middle East populated by fundamentalist Muslims. Hamas's action on October 7 must thus be understood as an attack on Western civilization. An attack that shows how barbaric the Palestinians (and the Arabs and all the foreigners) really are.

A genocide is legitimized through the use of old-new xenophobic tropes, where the perpetrators become victims.

Traverso continuously refers in his presentation to Edward Said#'s analysis of Orientalism from 1978, which is very current. We see the old racializing stereotypes being used by both politicians and journalists. If anyone thought we were in a post-colonial world, the genocide in Gaza and the unreserved support of the West have effectively buried that illusion. A genocide is legitimized through the use of old-new xenophobic tropes, where the perpetrators become victims. Traverso clearly rejects the narrative of Israel as a victim, where Israel is just reacting to Hamas' terrorist action, and where everything begins on October 7. He insists on the long historical process, which is about the establishment of the state of Israel as a settler colony in Palestine, about Israel's expulsion of thousands of Palestinians in 1948 and about decades of oppression of the Palestinian people. The terrorist attack on October 7 is to be understood as a symptomatic reaction to decades asymmetric violence, not as a cause.

The problem is not Hamas

The problem is not Hamas. Hamas is undoubtedly an authoritarian and fundamentalist organization, but it channels legitimate Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonial rule, which now manifests as total war. This is violent colonial government, which provokes the counter-violence of the colonized. The analysis of the situation in Gaza and in Israel/Palestine before October 7 and after that date must start with this relationship: the structural violence of colonialism. It is the pre-history of October 7 that must of course be factored into any analysis of the events of that day and of Israel's subsequent military destruction of Gaza.

Today, Zionism is nothing more than a settler colonialism dedicated to the destruction of the Palestinians, their history and culture.

As Traverso puts it, Gaza as a tragedy has been methodically prepared for a long time by those who want to appear as victims, namely the radical Zionists who now have a decisive influence on Israel's politics. The extermination of Palestine culturally and physically is now official state policy in Israel. If Zionismn once was a political ideology with a vision of a state that was not defined as ethnically and religiously exclusionary, this is no longer the case, notes Traverso. Today, Zionism is nothing more than a settler colonialism dedicated to the destruction of the Palestinians, their history and culture. In that project, the Shoah is included as an institutional legitimization of Israel as an aggressor ethnostat. In this way, colonial violence lives on, Europe's responsibility for the Shoah has been bizarrely channeled into a new racial supremacy, which generations of Jews, including Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi, warned against long ago.

Israel's self-image

The Danish cultural historian Morten Thing, who has written a large number of books on Judaism and the history of the Jews in Denmark, published shortly before 7 October the book Israel, a failed society, a failed state, where he brilliantly describes how the Zionist movement from the start has been blind to the Palestinian population that already lived between the river and the sea. By describing them as 'Arabs' who happened to live in the land of the Jews, the foundations for the ongoing genocide were laid. Thing, who is Jewish himself, and among others took on kibbutzophold as a young man in 1965, describes how he was explained during his stay that Palestine was a land without a people, why it was natural that the people without a land, i.e. the Jews, settled in this land. This narrative structures Israel's self-image to this day. As Thing explains, the state of Israel is a colonialist one ethnocrats – the project has always been to appropriate another people's land. And as long as we do not start the discussion about Israel-Palestine there, we will not move forward.

The 'others', 'the strangers', 'the colored', the lower classes and the poor, are constantly sorted out and placed in camps.

It is the background that Gaza is now a picture of the continued colonialism of Euromodernity, where the 'others', 'the strangers', 'the colored', the lower classes and the poor, are constantly sorted out and placed in camps. The capitalist economy constantly pushes people out of its metabolism. These the state can imprison, place in ghettos and slums or kill, as is happening in Gaza now. But also as happens every single day on a much smaller scale in the Mediterranean, when 'illegal' migrants try to reach Europe's shores.

One bi-national secular state

For Traverso and Thing, there is no doubt: the race is short, and any notion of the Palestinian state that the Oslo agreement otherwise promised has been destroyed. But with this, the notion of Israel as a Jewish state has also collapsed. that's it Netanyahu-government is the ultimate expression of: only as a brutal colonial power can Israel exist. And whatever deals he makes with neighboring dictatorships like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, it will be necessary to keep the Palestinian population locked up or killed.

The only political solution that makes any sense after Gaza is to establish one bi-national secular state for Israeli Jews as well as for Palestinians and all the others who live and work «from the river to the sea». Only in this way will it be possible to move forward. If any talk of justice and rights is to have any meaning today, the current situation of colonization must stop and Israel be rechristened as a Jewish nation-state.



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Mikkel Bolt
Mikkel Bolt
Professor of political aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen.

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