My radicalisation

How is it possible to sleep through the night knowing what Israel is doing in Gaza? How does it feel waking up knowing the nightmares won’t stop in the daytime?

The images are searing: wounded, speechless fathers stumbling in the ruins, carrying the fragments of their sons and daughters in a sheet; weeping children tugging on the lifeless bodies of their parents. A girl who is first trapped in a car, then murdered by soldiers who riddle the vehicle with hundreds of bullets.

Ongoing atrocities 

Since October last year, Israel has massacred at least 40,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. People buried under the ruins have not been counted, and those who die because of lacking medical care are not included either. Israeli soldiers have slaughtered infants in their cribs and hospital incubators, killed mothers, old people, teachers, students, doctors, patients, UN aid workers, journalists, peacekeepers, refugees. Snipers have shot children in the skull.

Nothing is accidental about it. With shells, bombs, missiles, drones, incendiaries, explosive charges, Israeli soldiers have levelled entire villages and cities – destroying houses, hospitals, schools, universities, ancient structures, religious places – often with people inside them. Videos of pulverised cities make northern Gaza look like Hiroshima.

Israeli forces have driven Palestinian survivors from the smoking remains of their homes straight into makeshift refugee camps where they are bombed and blockaded, starved, deprived of water and medicines.

Along with their homes and cities, entire Palestinian families have been wiped out, leaving no members or descendants. Survivors are systematically eradicated.

More and more governments, international organisations and agencies are now finally calling it what it is – genocide. Most strikingly, prominent Israeli holocaust scholars do so too: Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg and Raz Segal.

Zionist soldiers have raped, tortured, burned and looted refugees and prisoners. They’ve capered and pranced in the rubble, dressed in the clothes and underwear of dead Palestinian women. We know of these barbarities not because daring journalists slipped past censors to alert the world, but because the perpetrators themselves have been gleefully sharing videos of their crimes.

Internet evidence

By now, Israel should know its biggest enemy isn’t Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran, it’s the Internet, which allows a horrified world a full view of Zionist atrocities. It’s the world’s first continuously livestreamed extermination. 

People who knew nothing about Gaza, who had no stand on the matter, have been revolted and outraged. Shock has prodded people around the world to at last read up on the details of Gaza. Many have probably discovered things like Israeli laws specifying that any Palestinian in the West Bank who throws a stone can be jailed for 20 years, while any Jews in the same place can throw rocks and the military will arrest those they threw the rocks at. They will also have learned about “security measures” that restrict Palestinians’ free movement in the West Bank. In Hebron, for example, they are not allowed to use a street, so they have to cross rooftops. 

Israel is being praised as the “only democracy” in the Middle East. It is actually running a system of segregation, with some 7 million Jews ruling some 7 million Arabs, of whom only 2 million are entitled to vote as Israeli citizens, but do not enjoy equal status according to a Basic Law which declares Israel to be the state of Jewish self-determination. Five million Palestinians in the occupied territories constantly live under military rule and are denied basic rights. The occupation has been going on since 1967. Israel’s government is adamant that there will be no Palestinian state. Three years ago, B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, stated in very clear words: “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid.”

Many people are beginning to realise Israel is a colonial state, built on racism and engaged in ethnic cleansing. It is true, of course, that Israel did not conquer Palestinian land to expand the empire of some European power. Jews built settlements because they wanted refuge from persecution. But so did the Pilgrim fathers who settled in Massachusetts and other New England states. They were puritans who fled from the Church of England and planned to build perfect communities. That was colonialism too – and proved disastrous to the native people. 

Today, Israeli officials gloat over the massacres, promising to obliterate Palestinians, who they publicly call “animals.” They’ve exported their murderous frenzy to the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, a country they seem bent on provoking into a war – with the US taking the point. Israel’s military is now aggressively hitting targets in Syria, a country that desperately needs peace after the fall of the Assad regime.

The International Criminal Court has belatedly issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli leaders. Yet the extermination continues. This is because – we are solemnly assured by Israel and its western supporters – this is a “just war on terror”, a response to the terror attack of Hamas on October 2023.

In what way is it a “war” when only one side has soldiers, weapons and vehicles while the other consists almost entirely of fleeing unarmed civilians? How is it a war when the goal is clearly to mass murder babies and children and eradicate an area of all inhabitants and structures, wiping out families, leaving orphans, the starving and the mutilated? There is a lot more going on than mere self-defence. Do Israel’s allies take note at all of the members of Israel’s cabinet who plan new Israeli settlements in Gaza in public meetings?

State terrorism

Before this year, the word “terrorism” would have automatically made me think of Iran or Syria, ISIS, Taliban, but now “Israel” has jumped to the top of the list. What terrorist horrors can Hamas and Hizbollah possibly commit, that haven’t been exceeded a hundredfold by Israel – a country, when you think about it, run by fanatics who have nuclear weapons with no restrictions on their use?

If you read the mainstream press and listen to the leaders of the western powers, you’re supposed to believe the Israelis are terrified victims cowering in their shelters before the fury of Hamas. Firsthand reports and images from Israel show something totally different. “A genocidal state out of control” is a phrase you’d expect to find in a propaganda screed, but it accurately describes today’s Israel. 

Instead of the genocide (which they deny), what do Zionists and their backers condemn? The wearing of keffiyehs. The display of the Palestinian flag. Hillary Clinton is only one of many western politicians who declare that chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is an act of genocide against Israel. The factual truth, of course, is that it is Israel’s government that is enforcing full control from the river to the sea, after denying Palestinians any real homeland for decades. Annexation of the West Bank is a declared goal of the current government. It also wants to expand settlements on the Golan Heights, which, according to international law, belong to Syria. 

The leaders of the western powers provide diplomatic cover for Israel. Faced with global outrage, their faces turn to stone, they look the other way. They unleash the police to gas, beat and jail protesters. They are trying to pass regulations forbidding criticism of Israel and Zionism. Those who call for a halt to the merciless bombardment, those who plead for the lives of the civilians, are instantly called “antisemitic”, and painted as terrorists.

One cartoon shows a Palestinian mother weeping over the broken body of her child in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike. A western reporter rushes to her with the most urgent question of all: “Excuse me ma’m, do you condemn Hamas?”

New definitions of antisemitism and antizionism

Israel has weaponised the term antisemitism in ways that make whatever it does seem legitimate. Many Jews are appalled. One Holocaust survivor remarked, “an antisemite used to be a person who disliked Jews, now it is a person who Jews dislike.” Another has adopted the slogan: “An anti-Zionist is a liberal Zionist who’s been mugged by Israeli reality”. Kenneth Roth, the former director of Human Rights Watch and a Jew himself, has warned that using notions of antisemitism as a cover for war crimes makes it more difficult to protect people who are really threatened by antisemitism. 

When I was a boy, like most of my fellow Filipinos, I was an unquestioning fan of Israel. Back then, we got our information entirely from western, English-language sources: Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, US TV network news, Hollywood. These flooded us with pro-Israeli material.

Filipinos, many of whom are ignorant of history and geography, sided with Israel for two other reasons: race and religion. We’re a mostly Catholic country, which means we’re neutral at best to Islam and suspicious of Arabs and Arabic. The Palestinians are the weird other, the faceless numberless horde.

For years we were made to believe Israelis were scrappy, cheerful outnumbered heroes fighting against terrorists. Speaking for myself, I no longer believe that. As western leaders would say, I’ve been radicalised.

Through its blind support of Israel – for reasons of state, or racism or whatever – the west has damaged its standing and image tremendously. The concepts it claims to stand for – international criminal justice, human rights, rules-based order, humanitarianism – are turning out to be conditional. If the acts committed by Israel were committed by Russia, or Iran or China they would be roundly condemned.

Imagine any extremist Arab leader likening a community living today to one that God demanded to be exterminated in the Koran? Western media would be absolutely outraged. But it did not bother them when Benjamin Netanyahu reminded Israeli soldiers of Amelek before the invasion of Gaza last year. The biblical demand was to entirely eliminate the Amelekites – killing every man, every woman, every child and even their animals.

Omer Bartov wrote in the Guardian that it pains him to see how the attitude of Israeli soldiers today resembles the one of German soldiers who invaded the Soviet Union Russia in World War II. As the Holocaust scholar explains, Hitler’s troops knew that they were causing so much suffering that Russian revenge would be terrible, so any possibility of revenge had to be prevented. Their fear or retribution thus reinforced their brutality.

Alan C. Robles is a freelance journalist based in Manila. 
alanrobles@gmail.com

Links

Omer Bartov: As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov

Amos Goldstein: Yes, it is genocide
https://thepalestineproject.medium.com/yes-it-is-genocide-634a07ea27d4

B’Tselem: This is apartheid
https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid

Raz Segal: A textbook case of genocide
https://jewishcurrents.org/a-textbook-case-of-genocide