We all know them. Those pro-Israel fanatics (mistakenly called “Zionists”) who will defend anything Israel does, not based on rational debate or argument, but out of some religious fealty to their Holy State. Israel shells a school killing 40? Well, there were militants inside, they say. Israel uses banned white phosphorous? Well, it’s only lighting the way of the soldiers, they say. Israel bombs civilians and murders hundreds of children? Well, Hamas brought it on their own people. Israel bombs the UN aid agency? Well… we’ll wait for this rationalization.
These people aren’t only spokesman for the Israeli government. They are everywhere, all over the media and governments of the West. There seems no cognitive dissonance as they unleash their invective against Hamas, the democratically-elected government of Gaza, while saying nothing about the Inferno being bought on the Gazan people by Israel. But I’ve been wondering recently, as I’ve read these peoples writing and watched the pro-Israel demonstrations: What would have to happen before these people actually criticized their Holy State?
It seems that nothing so far has worked: the use of illegal weaponary, the targeting of civilians, the banning of journalists, the sealing of the borders, the sub-Saharan African levels of malnutrition, the mowing down of civilians. All of these are swatted away by co-opting the big, ever-present boogie man: Hamas.
So, really, what would have to happen? I honestly believe that if Israel started carpet bombing the 1.5 million population of Gaza, the fanatical apologists, including many columnists on mainstream newspapers, would rationalize it by saying something like, “Well, Hamas is the democratically elected government, and it’s a terrorist organization, so that makes the population of Gaza terrorists, by their own voting record.” That sentence doesn’t sound as mad as it should when put next to the Israel apologists. Max Blumenthal, a Jewish-American journalist, went to the pro-Israel demonstration in New York and interviewed people who said things that would make Adolf Hitler blush [Watch this disturbingvideoby following thelink after this story]. “We should wipe out the Palestinians,” one told him, while another said, ““They are not distinguishing between civilians and military, so why should we?”
Then you go to the newspapers in Israel. “This is a just war and we don’t feel guilty when civilians we don’t intend to hurt get hurt, because we feel Hamas uses these civilians as human shields,” Elliot Jager, editorial page editor of The Jerusalem Post, told the New York Times. Just a war? Maybe for him as he sits in his air-conditioned offices in Jerusalem, but for the thousands of people murdered and maimed in Gaza it must seem more than “just a war”. But, of course, those deaths are Hamas’ fault. No need to look in the mirror.
In the same article, Moshe Halbertal, apparently a “left-leaning professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University”, wonders, “Israelis feel like the tiny David faced with an immense Muslim Goliath. The question is: who is the David here?” Maybe we are mad in the outside world, but over a 1,000 Palestinian deaths to 14 Israeli deaths would seem to give a good indication of who was the David and who was the Goliath.
In the New York Times, pro-Israel fanatic Thomas Friedman opines:
“In Gaza, I still can’t tell if Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas or trying to ‘educate’ Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population. If it is out to destroy Hamas, casualties will be horrific and the aftermath could be Somalia-like chaos. If it is out to educate Hamas, Israel may have achieved its aims.”
By educating Hamas he means carrying out substantial civilian casualties like in Lebanon in 2006. He lauds that adventure for pummeling “Hezbollah and, while not directly targeting the Lebanese civilians with whom Hezbollah was intertwined, to inflict substantial property damage and collateral casualties on Lebanon at large.” He adds, “It was not pretty, but it was logical.” So for Freidman he is not only excusing a high civilian death toll, but actually calling for a higher one. For this fanatic there is obviously no line.
Then there is pro-Israel fanatic par excellence, Alan Dershowitz. Like the good apparatchik he is, Dershowitz will virulently defend the Israeli government’s party line whatever it is. His role as Israeli attack dog in the Western media is one he has embraced with relish. For him the civilian death toll is simply a lie:
“The number of civilians killed by Israel is almost always exaggerated. By any objective account, the number of genuinely innocent civilians killed by the Israeli Air Force is lower than the collateral deaths cause by any nation in a comparable situation.”
He doesn’t make the point that no journalists are allowed into Israel to take a body count, and there are probably hundreds more stuck under rubble. For Dershowitz, and his ilk all over the US media, it is Hamas’ fault that Israel are murdering Palestinians at a genocidal rate. In this pathology there is nothing that Israel can do that is wrong, because it is always the fault of Hamas. No logic, but its a good way to rationalize mass killing.
For those on “the Left” that support Israel with religious devotion, they turn not to defending the murder of civilians, but sublimate the massacres by saying that anti-Israel voices are collaborating with anti-Semites and Islamic fundamentalists. This changes the subject nicely, and means that this mental barrier of actually looking at Israeli actions rationally doesn’t have to be breached.
David Aaronovitch does exactly this in the Times, when he picks up the completely subjective point about comparing Israel with the Nazis and writes a whole article about it, which his sycophants applaud. He claims, “[T]his ahistorical hyperbole is the product of a kind of binary thinking, the belief that there can only be two kinds of anything, and two possible responses: there’s the good and the bad; there’s the victim and the murderer”.
That might or might not be true, but going off on this rant about semantics does definitely help him avoid the article he could be writing denouncing the major crimes and violations of international law committed by Israel. Now he can just pick on some rhetorical flights by a few individuals. Easy.
Sunny Hundal does the same in the Guardian. Under the subheading, “Israel’s actions are indefensible. But when Hamas are portrayed by the left as brave freedom fighters, it sticks in my craw,” he fulminates about a non-existent leftist association with Hamas. He provides no evidence in the article but plays into the propaganda narrative that all those opposed to Israel’s barbarism automatically sign up to become a member of Hamas, apparently it’s like a two-for-one. It was the same diversion that was used during Iraq which tried to tar all those opposing the invasion as Saddam Hussein sycophants. It’s a good tactic to change the subject, to appear like a principled and decent member of the left, brave enough to speak out against his own tribe etc., but, away from egos, it’s not the issue. The issue is the massive civilian casualties in Gaza and nothing can or should detract from this.
So across the political spectrum many different tactics and rationalizations and sublimations are being used to excuse what are patently crimes against humanity. It keeps people thinking this conflict is complicated, that both sides have valid arguments, that there is some equation. But if Hamas suicide shelled a UN compound in Israel, or bombed a school in Tel Aviv, would you see the mainstream papers inundated with op-ed’s about Israel bought it on themselves by their years of terrorism against the Palestinians? Of course you wouldn’t. No one would defend such barbarism. But for the pro-Israel fanatics their country can do no wrong, and this is a dangerous situation, like a collective madness, that has led to genocides even worse than the one currently going on in Gaza.
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Video: Supporters of Israel celebrating Gaza Attack in New York 11 Jan 2009
WARNING: MILD SWEARING