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Palestine then and now: an unending cycle of resistance, rebellion, and death
Here we are again, watching one of the most powerful and technologically advanced military’s in the world setting about the ‘heroic’ task of murderously assaulting one of the most subjugated, oppressed and immiserated.
Those brave warriors of the IDF — soldiers, airmen and sailors — constitute the armed wing of an apartheid state whose brutality and savagery is compounded by the claims of its various representatives at home and supporters further afield, professional liars all, to be acting in the name of security.
‘The crimes pile up until they become invisible.’ So said Bertolt Brecht and how right he was.
A world that allows apartheid, ethnic cleansing and military occupation to become normalised is a world headed for ruin. And a world that condemns a people for daring to resist this inordinately cruel oppression is a world downing in hypocrisy and cant.
There is no moral equivalence between the violence of an oppressed people and that of their oppressor. Israel is an oppressor state which came into being on the back of a programme of mass ethnic cleansing of indigenous Palestinians in 1948, and which has existed at their negation every single day since.
The occupation of the West Bank is illegal under international law. Settlements and evictions are illegal under international law. The siege of Gaza, tantamount to collective punishment, is illegal under international law. The targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza is illegal under international law.
Yet to listen to apologists for Israel in the West, you could be forgiven for believing that it’s the Palestinians who are the occupier; the Palestinians guilty of ethnic cleansing and apartheid and siege. This is how debased Western political and mass media culture has become when dealing with this issue.
Albert Camus, it was, who proclaimed: “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
