Retreat from Reason: Palestine in the Time of Monsters

 

M. Reza Behnam

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Our times are fraught.  This is especially glaring in the Middle East as the United States wrestles to maintain its control over this rich and complicated region.  

 

Today’s ethos of convulsion is aptly reflected in the words of 20th century Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

 

We are indeed living in a time of monsters.  Israel’s contemptible leaders, empowered by the United States, have done their utmost to erase Palestinians and all memories of Palestine.

 

In Gaza, Israel has killed a reported 43,972+, wounded 104,408+ and has left the Strip in ruins.  At least 17,400 children have been killed in Gaza and in Lebanon,

more than 200 children, an average of three a day, have died since Israel began its bombing campaign two months ago.  

 

Unabated, the Tel Aviv regime continues its unremitting crimes against humanity.  Its leaders have given the world what the Romans called “digitus impudicus.” 

 

The international community can no longer remain passive. The fate of the Palestinians is now tied to the fate of global justice.  That sentiment was correctly articulated by the prime minister of Malaysia, Anwar Ibrahim, at the 11 November 2024 Arab-Islamic Summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia:

 

“Israel no longer belongs within the civilized community of nations, and its barbarism demands nothing less than decisive action to safeguard not just  the Middle East but the entire global order….the severity of Israel’s assault on humanity’s most basic rules of the international compact deserves  consideration of a more serious response.  For the sake of not only the                     Palestinians but of humanity itself, we must punish and deter Israel’s repeated violations of international law and norms.  We should, therefore,  build a consensus towards suspending or even expelling Israel from the United Nations itself.”

 

Israel is not and has never been a “normal” state.  The racism and supremacy inherent in its fabric has its roots deep in the ideology of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist movement which culminated in the establishment of Israel by force on Palestinian land in 1948—and in its relationship with Western imperialism.    

 

Zionist ideologues believed that an independent separate Jewish state was the solution to centuries of European anti-Semitism.  Ironically, by opting for Jewish separatism, Zionists adopted the arguments employed against them by their anti-Jewish European oppressors, who argued that because they were different, Jews, as a group, were unassimilable.  Ironically, the only difference between the two arguments was that the anti-Semite added that Jews were not only different, but also inferior.  On the other hand, the Zionist position implied or stated explicitly that Jews were superior.  

 

Zionism has not afforded security to the Jews who discarded their nationalities in favor of a Jewish one; it has, however, turned the once oppressed into oppressors.  

 

The United States, as an extension of its imperium, has helped Israel become the subjugator and regional predator it is today.  Washington’s indifference to the death and devastation Israel has inflicted on Palestinians and on the Lebanese is a testament to its similar predatory and racist nature.  

 

For Washington, Arab and Muslim lives are apparently expendable.  Researchers at Brown University’s Watson Institute have documented that disregard in their “Cost of War Project.”  According to the report, America’s post-9/11 wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen and Somalia) have resulted in the deaths of at least 4.5 to 4.7 million, including both military personnel and civilians.   

 

Washington’s callous indifference was revealed again in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview on 12 May 1996 with then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright:

Interviewer Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq:  “We have heard that half a million children have died.  I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima.  And, you know, is the price worth it?”  

Madeleine Albright:  “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”    

 

U.S. and Israeli wars in the Middle East have not only killed and maimed millions; they have also contributed to the deterioration of political cultures, economies, health care, and have caused long-term ecological contamination and damage.  

 

In January 2021, newly-elected President Joe Biden told the nation that he aspired to “restore the soul of America.”  He departs in 2025 leaving America’s soul in tatters.

 

Sixty-one years ago this month, the nation’s soul was tattered after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  To a nonplused American polity, Nation of Islam leader, Malcolm X, asserted that the president’s death was a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”

 

What Malcolm knew is that turmoil in and out of the country were linked.  Today, America’s trail of brute power and violence—from Vietnam to Gaza—have come home to roost in the election of the Trump regime grounded in right-wing populism, authoritarianism, ultraconservatism, racial supremacy, xenophobia and anti-immigration sentiment.  

 

On 20 January 2025, President-elect Donald Trump will take office with the goal, as he said, of “finishing the job” in Gaza; a job that Biden made possible because of his cooperation with a regime intent on entrenching Zionist supremacy, exterminating Palestinians and annexing all of the West Bank.  The Trump agenda, with regard to the Middle East, portends to be an exemplar of the horrific Biden policy taken to its extremes.

 

The cast of characters Trump has selected to be in charge of U.S. foreign policy, are, like their counterparts in the Biden regime, pro-Israel war hawks, committed to apartheid, settler-colonialism, occupation and it appears, annexation of the West Bank; although their brutal intentions are barefaced.

 

Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, Congressman Mike Walz (R-FL), a fierce Israel advocate, wrote in an Economist essay, “The next administration should, as Mr. Trump argued, ‘let Israel finish the job’ and ‘get it over fast’ against Hamas.”  And his candidate for U.N. ambassador, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY) in an address before the Israeli Knesset called for wiping those responsible for 7 October “off the face of the earth.”  

Former Arkansas governor and Christian Zionist, Mike Huckabee, Trump’s nominee to be ambassador to Israel, declared that Palestinians, “settlements” and the occupation do not exist, and that Israel should annex the West Bank.  In service of the U.S. imperium and his religious beliefs, Huckabee, like most Israelis, appears willfully blind to the commandments of the Hebrew Bible—thou shalt not murder; thou shalt not steal; and thou shalt not covet.  

Both Biden and Trump have shown no concern for the suffering of Palestinians.  While Biden has had the power to end the carnage, he has instead encouraged it. And while Trump has said he wants to stop the wars, it is the war hawks who will have his ear.   

 

Israel, empowered by the United States, has gone beyond the pale, beyond reason and beyond humanity.  Palestine is a test of our morality.     

 https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/22/retreat-from-reason-palestine-in-the-time-of-monsters/