Atrocities in the Promised Land
Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli
journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in 'moral collapse.'
Originally Published palestinechronicle.com/
Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for
years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of
1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the
horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those
who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and
media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.
But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster,
and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do
nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by
continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.
A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically
dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all
costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any
other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect
itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular,
intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any
sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.
The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in
Israel. “This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral,” wrote Israeli intellectual and
anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society. Israel
knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow
Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up
resisting Israel’s arrogance.
We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that
automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts
Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on
a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four
years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.
A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife
and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.
A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she
threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada
began -- is not a society with a conscience.
A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime
of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government
with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London
Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out
of a coma.)
Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli
journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in “moral collapse.”
Michel Warschawski writes of an “Israeli madness” and “insane brutality,” a “putrefaction” of civilized society, that
have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a “gang of hoodlums,” he
says, a state “that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the
strength to survive.”
As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to
support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.
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-Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the
author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She is a contributor to Ramzy Baroud’s latest book:
The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle. She can be reached at
kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.