Stop Genocide: Israel’s Final Solution to the Palestine Problem
Photo by Steel Brooks.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result” Attributed to Einstein
This is a short communication about a huge topic. The focus is the obvious steps to end the Gaza genocide, Israel’s Final Solution. The current Israeli protest is not about the genocide but about the Hannibal Policy directive to kill Israeli hostages so that these hostages cannot be used to bargain in prisoner exchanges. Here in fact is a report about what is concurrent to protests — Israel’s escalating massacres in the West Bank and Gaza.
In these times the most dire world situations worsen: Palestine, climate, nuclear weapons. See for example and re Palestine, nuclear weapons, climate.
Here is just one day of repetitive representative news about this genocide since Oct 7, reported by Democracy Now https://www.democracynow.org/
August 27, 2024: the insanity of inefficacy, of “doing the same thing” over and over again ostensibly to stop genocide.
* News U.N. Forced to Halt Aid in Gaza Amid Dire Humanitarian Needs Due to Nonstop Evacuation Orders
* U.S. Has Sent Over 50,000 Tons of Arms and Military Equipment to Israel Since Genocide Started
* Israeli Forces and Illegal Settlers Continue Deadly Attacks in Occupied West Bank
* Palestinian Healthcare Workers Chained, Starved, Sexually Abused: New HRW Report on Israeli Prisons
* A July study by the Lancet, published in Counterpunch, estimates that the more accurate death toll at that time was 186,000.
This article is about three topics: immediate measures to stop the genocides (particularly Israel’s “final solution” against Palestinian people, and also applicable to other current genocides in Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, DRC. Secondly, I describe the measures that have not been effectual, that have not prevented one murder, and Third – offer some interpretive comments.
Jeff Halper, anti-Zionist Israeli political activist who puts into practice and effects real change as founder of Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), has just published a new book on dismantling settler colonialism. He writes about “summoning power” to implement a realizable and effective political agenda that is revolutionary in scope. But genocide is a different order of magnitude: It demands immediate action and effective intervention. There is no reconciliation or reparation – death is final and it brings intense suffering and misery to surviving relatives.
First, here are the obvious feasible (that should not be dismissed as “utopian”) and necessary essential actions to actually stop the killing, Israel’s “final solution”:
Immediate provision of water, food, emergency medical supplies.
Immediate provision of polio vaccine, basic medicines, emergency equipment including surgical and diagnostic tools, and providing essential medical personnel
Restoration of power supplies to ensure potable water, food including fresh vegetables and fruit and sources of protein, sanitation equipment (toilets, privacy, soap, baby supplies like diapers), shelter and blankets, some laundry facilities.
Permanent ceasefire and cessation of weapons transfers and trade.
Withdrawal of all Israeli and P.A. military and police forces from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem and provision of UN monitors and observers to ensure compliance.
End the occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the siege of Gaza.
Open borders.
Clean-up crews with equipment to remove rubble and to begin detoxifying the environment.
Second, the ineffectual measures:
This includes the ineffectual UNSC, UN General Assembly calls for ceasefire, the International Court of Justice rulings are not enforced by any action, the worldwide protests that unfortunately have not affected political action, the semblance of negotiations by major nation states which has proven to be what former Israeli minister Dov Weisglass outlined as strategy for putting the peace process into formaldehyde. It is questionable whether any of these measures have prevented one murder of a Palestinian.
Third, interpretive comments
I have been reading the brilliant sociologist-historian Boris Kagarlitsky whose understanding of Russian/Ukraine and causes of WWI fits the current global descent into devastation. Such “cataclysms are in fact the natural results of earlier processes.” He writes that “politicians are now beginning to behave as though they had gone out of their minds. …an example of such madness, even more dramatic than the fit of insanity that seized the politicians and monarchs of the Old World in June 1914…It should be remembered, meanwhile, that just a few weeks before the catastrophe all these people had the reputation of being completely rational and experienced political actors.” He goes on to state that “what the diplomatic historians fail to discuss is the fact that everything was occurring against the background of a growing economic crisis, of increasinglyg acute social conflicts and of the obvious failure by the ruling classes to work out any programme for implementing overdue social reforms…conservative governments inevitably begin reacting with panicked aggression, trying to solve internal problems using foreign policy mechanisms, and socio-econimc problems through military foreign policy mechanisms…(p121-122)
From Freud and later Freudians is a breakdown of what’s “crazy.” Misunderstood is the centrality in Freud of the capacity to observe reality and to be rational and objective. From his first works Freud conceptualized the irrational logic of dreams and of early childhood, and of the maturational capacity for logical and factual thinking.
In primary process thinking, there is a confusion of cause/effect relationships, a blurring of the distinction between human and non-human (as in calling Palestinians “little snakes”, and between animate and inanimate as in calling human beings “elements” or “numbers”.
There is confusion about words and actions – as if words themselves are actions and thus can be dangerous as in criminalizing “BDS”, or that words are effective actions in themselves as in judicial opinions that are never implemented – as if it’s sufficient to say “ceasefire”.
In primary process thinking there is an irrational concept of time… a loss of perspective about the duration of time, or the conflation of two entirely different time periods as in the merging of ancient and modern Palestine.
These aspects of primary process thinking are “crazy” and generally unidentified departures from reality. They are found in post-modern challenges to the possibility of objectivity, found across the political spectrum such as in the historical idealizations of Judith Butler about Judaism having a universal humanitarian morality although this was manifested at exceedingly short periods of history.
Where now? As I’ve written before, this is the worst genocide: perpetrated by the vast majority of Israel, by an affluent and well-educated people who are knowledgeable about the Nuremberg Code prohibiting compliance with orders contravening international human rights laws, perpetrated with particular acts of individual sadism, targeting children in particular with killing, maiming, terrorizing with sonic booms, humiliating parents in front of their children, withholding necessary medical treatment and imposing horrendous conditions such as amputations without anesthetics, kidnapping and imprisoning children in adult facilities often involving torture.
Are Israelis and Jewish people truly terrified? There is substantial evidence of Israeli strategies of fomenting fear. There is the widely circulated photo of Sderot residents sitting on lawn chairs enjoying the spectacle of white phosphorus fireworks dropped on an UNRWA school in Gaza.
Consequences for genocidaires: investigation into who did the killing? What actually happened on October 7 – what are accurate figures? People killed by the IDF or under Hamas orders? The Hannibal Directive to prevent using soldiers as hostages for prisoner exchange, and the Dahiya Doctrine of scorched earth and mass slaughter.
Crime and punishment? Investigating background and motivations of perpetrators in accord with modern criminal law. Immediate sanctions and limits: freezing bank accounts and revoking passports to bar travel and escapes, prohibit unsupervised contact between Israelis and Palestinians, particularly children. Education: international human rights laws, history of genocides, accurate accounting of Israeli and Jewish history.
The moral dimension. Explore these a-historical beliefs about Israel and Judaism: Israel as Light onto Nations, most moral army, People of the Book and Law, people of universal humanitarian values. Aharon Shabtai in his poem J’Accuse, writes of “technicians of slaughter, bastards in whose eyes morality is a pain in the ass… long-term solutions can be found for any and every problem when it’s no longer breathing.”
What to do? Political action. All means of civil disobedience, coupled with explicit demands for immediate action and enforcement and revue of effectiveness: has it stopped any killing?
NOTES
[1] Jeff Halper. Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, settler colonialism, and the case for One Democratic State. Pluto Press, London, 2021.
[2] Boris Kagarlitsky The Long Retreat: strategies to reverse the decline of the left. Pluto Press, London, 2024.
[3] The small dissenting Israeli opposition: The signatories to the Olga Document, Ilan Pappe, Tanya Reinhart, Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Avi Mograbi, Uri Avnery, Haim Bresheeth-Zabner, Meron Benvenisti, Neve Gordon, Eyal Weizman, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Aharon Shabtai, Israel Shahak, Tikva Honig-Parnas, Ruchana Marton
posted by Satish Sharma at
04:26
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