Israel’s double standards and loss of moral compass
JVL Introduction
In an excoriating opinion piece in Haaretz, the doyen of Israeli satirists, B. Michael, lashes out in a fury at his country’s indifference, double standards and loss of moral compass.
In the face of this indifference, he poses many questions, not to get answers but as an abrasive, to irritate the thickened skin that has led Israelis to lose all sensitivity: “To once again expose the nerves.”
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Wed 17 May 2023. Read the original here.
75 years of Israeli cruelty have not deterred the Palestinians
I have a question: What’s the difference between a terrorist who murders a mother with her two daughters, and a state that murders – in a single night – a mother and her 4-year-old daughter, parents and their son, a 12-year-old girl and her 8-year-old brother, and another two sisters who are neighbors? What exactly is the difference between them? And why is the murderer a terrorist, and not the state? Where does it say that a state can’t be a terrorist? And how many innocent people is a state allowed to kill before being called a terrorist state? And how many children?
And why were a mother and her two daughters who were murdered by an evil man victims of terror, but the mothers and children who were murdered in the same night are only “collateral damage in combat activity”? And if in the car in which the mother and daughters were murdered there had also been an important general and the police commissioner and the head of the secret service, would their murderer also be permitted to describe the women as “collateral damage in combat activity” and be considered a righteous man?
And why, in God’s name, are the various commanders convinced that the terror they are activating will increase the sacred “deterrence”? And that we would be deterred if they killed our political and military leaders? On the contrary. We would only become prouder and our determination would be sky-high. But we, our leaders are sure, aren’t them. We are us. They are only them.
How much arrogance and racism and condescension do our commanders have? For the past 75 years we’ve been beating them with inhuman cruelty, for 56 years even more intensely. And still they aren’t deterred. They repeatedly return to fight their war of liberation.
And why this stupid war at all? It should be called “Operation Peace for Bibi”. It contains not a drop of purpose, logic, hope or benefit. Only evil and cold politics. As usual.
And why have we become accustomed to a daily dose of two Palestinian dead, and sometimes more? Why do they wander to remote corners in the newspapers and to the margins of the news reports – not far from the feature stories – on television? Why do bands of wild boys, like bands of wild dogs in nature films, attack speakers of Arabic and punish them?
And why are some of them wearing tzitzit, as required by halakha, and grow sidelocks that wave during a pogrom? How long will it take until they also force the Arabic speakers to sweep sidewalks with toothbrushes? Why in hell am I paying for the non-education of these disgusting punks? Why has revenge turned into the only sacred principle of Israeli policy? Why don’t residents of the Gaza “envelope” [the populated areas of Israel that are within 7km of the border – JVL ed] understand that they have to demonstrate in favor of the residents of Gaza, who are suffering far more than they, rather than against them? Why are they repeatedly led astray by profiteers in blood, who conceal all their failures behind their frightened backs?
And why do the evil, criminal settlers in Judea and Samaria let off steam by chopping down thousands of olive trees belonging to the owners of the land that they have plundered? Are they really so panicked by the sight of an olive branch?
And why and why and why … All these questions weren’t asked to get answers. There are no longer any answers. They were asked to be asked. To scrub our thickening skin with them. To peel off the horny coating that insists on accumulating on it and causes it to lose its sensitivity. To once again expose the nerves. And the flesh that is still living. And the blood and the pain and the anger and the shame.
Those living in a swamp should do that occasionally. To remain human. To not become a rhinoceros.
Reading the last paragraph of this article, my mind flashed to a (half-heard) programme on JB Priestley and his comment that human life was about Admiration, Hope and Love. The advice to “Hope” was offered “because Despair is useless”.
B. Michael’s continued questioning in the middle of rational despair is a practical demonstration of Hope in action, I think. Sometimes such transient flickers are all that we have. We have to trust they’ll be enough to build a better future.
These are the questions that should appear on the front pages of every country that sits in silence and sits complcit in the atrocities that have long been and continue to be perpetuated against the people of Palestine.Sadly they will not indeed they will be erased entirely from the MSM.
The money and weapons will flow into the country.the distasteful hypocritical fawning will continue and any criticim or form of punishment will be reserved in equal measure for those who dare to question why this is so.
I am sick and tired of being told that making any kind of comparison with the Germany of the 1920s and 30s is anti-semitic. The parallels are plain to see. They have been plain for a long time now, and this deeper descent into violence of the Israeli right does little more than underline those parallels. Where I come from there’s a saying: a spade is a spade, not a shovel. Israel is not,and has never been, what it has always claimed to be; but it has been able to delude many into thinking that it is. Now Israel is no longer making any serious attempt to conceal what kind of state it really is, it is time that drawing attention in this context to the history of Hitler’s Germany is not just permissible, but necessary: and those Jews who feel the connection between their history and that of the Palestinians should no longer be frightened of saying so. This treacherous Israeli state is betraying the history of the Jewish people as well as the future of Palestine. It is driving the Israeli people towards a very dangerous destination. Can we possibly hope that they will see what is being done to them before it’s too late? The Germans found no answer to the fundamental question Hitler was asking them: how far will you follow me in my search for racial supremacy? I hope against all hope that the Israelis find the right answer to the very similar question the tunnel-visioned zealots who now govern them are asking.
BRILLIANTLY PUT!
I want everybody to read it. The reported day to day horrors, allowed and respected by the conventions Western politics, is corrupting our humanity, our longing to speak truth to lies. I found it a relief to read this articulate expression of my on-going anger. We should never forget Rachel Corrie – that was 2003 – and a supposedly, a shocked world, which has done nothing to change what she gave her life for. Thank you, Michael Haaretz
It’s difficult to add more, either to B.Michael’s passionate piece or to the comments above. What I should like to do is pose the questions raised to the “third party Zionist”, Sir Keir, and ask him his views as a (supposed) human rights lawyer.