Israel is not defending itself. Obviously.
A rewrite of the last newsletter because 'prophetic poetry-satire' is not for everyone. And possibly not a thing.
My last newsletter may have been too subtle and too confusedly ironic. Here’s a breakdown of what I meant, paragraph by paragraph:
Despite what the Israeli propaganda machine (which has intimidated and bribed its way into UK and US political leadership) tells you, solidarity with Palestine is not outlandish, it is not synonymous with support for terrorism and it is not anti-Semitic. Israel may claim to be defending itself, but saying so makes as much sense as the Apartheid regime in South Africa saying it was defending itself. That is to say, there is no moral legitimacy in an oppressor ‘defending itself’ against those it is oppressing. Analogously speaking, Israel is not Ukraine in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but has way more in common with Russia, as a massive military (and nuclear) power, attacking a weaker neighbour.
Israel invokes the right to defend itself even though it’s attackers have much weaker munitions, but Israel’s strength (and the damage it regularly inflicts on Palestinian civilians as well as militant targets) is exponentially greater than anything Palestinians have. And Israel uses this superior military power against wholly inappropriate targets, employing an Airforce, artillery, drones and tanks, as well as sophisticated rifles, against people who are often only throwing stones. Israel claims to be defending itself when it intimidates, abducts, imprisons and kills those who merely speak or post on social media in resistance to Israel’s brutal Occupation. In response to even the weakest attempts to resist, Israel wipes out entire family bloodlines and thinks of it as righteous, often conveying a biblical tone to its motivations.
To resort to that kind of disproportionate violence is not self defence.
Against this backdrop, Israel paints those who have resisted its Occupation over the decades as terrorists, motivated by hate and madness, ignoring the legitimate grievance a people that was dispossessed of their land and subjected to decades of oppression. The world tends to go along with the narrative that all Palestinian attacks on Israel are unprovoked, ignoring the continual violence and repression all Palestinian attempts at peaceful resistance face. And it classes all Palestinians, regardless of whether they are actually resisting, as part of whatever it deems ‘terrorist’ at the time. Civilians in Gaza may not be Hamas members, but they voted for Hamas. They are related to Hamas fighters, so, in Israel’s logic, they are guilty by proximity. And by that monstrous logic, civilians become targets. Even though most are too young to have voted for Hamas, not everyone in Gaza did vote for Hamas and, more importantly, real democracies don’t punish people for voting for the wrong government. We don’t condone attacks on America when they vote Republican, and yet Israel and its allies think Palestinians become legitimate targets by this logic.
Israel justifies its violence against a civilian population this way. It justifies killing old people and children because they are assumed to have no loyalty to the state that oppresses them, and so, in a sickening self-perpetuating logic, are its enemy. Israel justifies destroying infrastructure and targeting humanitarian and medical personnel and buildings by the logic that they might have provided help or shelter to its enemies, and sees innocent deaths as a price worth paying. Israel has no qualms about bombing Christian places of worship, a fact Western Christianity ignores, and it is very comfortable with destroying Muslim places of worship because it has so demonised Muslims as terrorists, terrorist sympathises and willing human shields for terror. There is no evidence for this bigoted caricature of Muslims, but the West has been pushing that propaganda narrative for decades, so it goes unquestioned.
Israel calls it self defence but its actions directly lead to the deaths of babies in incubators. Israel shoots little boys who throw stones and more regularly imprisons them. It imprisons girls for posting thoughts the Israel State disapproves of on Instagram. And it presses others to end the careers of TikTok creators, actors and politicians (particularly attacking the Muslim women politicians) who dare to speak the obvious truth that Israel is committing atrocities.
What Israel does, when it faces criticism, is to claim that Israel is being held to standards other nations aren’t. This is obfuscation. Western nations, and western allies, are indeed given more leeway than countries the West views as enemies or competitors. But Israel benefits from this. And the reasons so many people around the world focus on Israel’s crimes is precisely because Israel is enabled in its crimes by our governments, who consistently block international efforts to hold Israel to account. Israel is also not above weaponising the very real suffering of the Jewish people in history, as if 20th century European violence against Jewish people made killing journalists and medics in 2023 okay.
We must notice that Israel uses multiple narratives to justify its actions. When the suffering of Palestinian civilians comes to light, especially the horrific injuries to children, Israel departs from the narrative that its military takes sophisticated care to minimise ‘collateral damage’ and throws its hands up saying ‘shit happens in war’. This tactic seeks to paint anyone showing empathy for Israel’s victims as naïve and childish. But as recent reports have revealed, Israel has a good idea of the civilian cost of its operations. It just does not mind killing, blinding and maiming Palestinians, of whatever age. Israel will use this and other narratives to cover the fact that they are moving a population from its land, which is not only nota natural part of war, but a war crime. Anyone not leaving an area Israel is bombing is blamed because they are there. But Israel, in brutal cynicism, still shoots and bombs those who move. The aim is ethnic cleansing of the land. and violent terror is the way the job is done.
Do not ignore the cynicism of Israel’s regular appeals to what happened on October 7, which it regularly uses to justify the deaths of people who had nothing to do with the Hamas attacks. The primacy given in Western media to Israeli victims of violence is a tool to manufacture our consent for vengeance under the guise of security. Israel’s corruption-controversy-riddled Government is enacting violence partly out of hurt pride and cynical clinging to power. These are wildly inappropriate reasons to kill unarmed people.
People in Gaza are being terrorised out of their homes and having their families wiped out as ways of clearing the Gaza strip of people. This is justified in terms of Israel’s ‘security’ which has nothing to do with civilians living their lives in Gaza. Israel has said out loud it wants Palestinians, many of whom are already refugees from the Nakba, to leave their homes and land and move into Egypt. We know from history that Palestinians are never allowed to return. This is part of a land grab but also part of Israel’s stated anxiety over demographic dominance, wanting people of Jewish identity to outnumber non-Jewish people. This preoccupation is why many have called Israel an Apartheid state. The latest violence in its service is why many have used the term genocide.
Israel, as part of this programme of uprooting Palestinians from the land, recently destroyed Gaza’s national archive building, obviously not a military target, but the repository of records, deeds and Palestinians’ history in Gaza. Israeli officials have spoken repeatedly about building illegal settlements in Gaza, a realistic prospect now that much of Gaza has been rendered unliveable for Palestinians. Israel has a history in Gaza of killing Palestinians as a way of maintaining control through terror and systematic weakening of a population’s ability to self-sustain. These regular attacks, like Operation Cast Lead in 2008, have been called ‘mowing the lawn’ by Israeli officials. Keeping Palestinian life at a low, manageable level for the Occupiers, these euphemisms are as hollow and sinister as euphemisms used by proto-fascists in the USA like Donald Trump. Israel regularly employs slogans, repeated like mantras by its desperate apologists: “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” even though it has been identified over and again as an Apartheid state by human rights charities and international bodies. “Israel has the most moral army in the world”, the rhetoric goes, while its soldiers regularly shoot unarmed people and have in recent weeks shown horrific callousness as they trampled over the broken remnants of Palestinian lives. So, as Israeli soldiers raise their flags over a Palestinian territory, we must recognise that what they are doing is not self defence, it is conquest. And conquest of a mostly unarmed internment camp.
We are regularly told that we must support Israel as it ‘defends itself’, even though standing with Israel means harming civilians, denying anaesthetic and electricity to hospitals as they perform surgeries. Even though standing with Israel means standing with a military that demonises, jails and kills children. Even though standing with Israel means standing with a military that attacks refugee camps. Israel does this while denouncing the liberation chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, ignoring the fact that Israel stood at the UN and showed a map of its reason that featured Israel’s borders as the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Ignoring the fact that Israeli officials have regularly spoken of Israel’s borders including portions of Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, far beyond the River and the sea. Standing with Israel requires swallowing this level of hypocrisy and accepting violent expansionist plans from a State with a history of violence and flouting international law.
Doesn’t Israel have more in common with the invader and occupier in history than with the nations who rose up to defend their soil? It is an occupying army on conquered land and, at its inception, was thought of and spoken of by Zionist leaders as a ‘colonial’ project. So Israel is like Britain brutalising India, like the invaders of Poland in the Second World War, and like America in Vietnam and its more recent wars for imperial domination. Israel, like the US and Britain before it, might invoke quasi-religious or even fully religious justifications, but history will show, like international law shows, that resisting an occupying force that brutalises the population is justified, according to the articles of war.
And when Israel claims it regrets civilian deaths, remember that it has one of the best equipped and informed armies in the world, receiving billions in funding every year from the USA. Killing thousands of civilians, even risking one’s own citizens being held hostage in the areas you bomb, is a choice. And the fact that America also has blood on its hands from Iraq and Afghanistan is not a justification. Neither are the attacks of October 7. No matter how many times people act as if all of this began then, the fact is that Hamas did not start this violence, because Israel was killing Palestinians, humiliating, abducting and oppressing them, long before October 2023.
To justify killing civilians by the argument that ‘war is messy’ is to be disingenuous and biased. Only one side has the ability to inflict these casualties. Most of the victims are civilians. The overwhelming majority of those who have suffered and died are Palestinian. Allowing the killing to continue is to condone the slaughter of non-combatants. That is not self defence. That is butchery.
Every possible niche in Western society is being targeted with Israeli propaganda narratives. One of the most cynical has been appealing to LGBTQ+ and Feminist principles, painting Palestine as backwards, unenlightened savages, while painting Israel (with its own patriarchy problems apart from its theocratic and ethno-nationalist issues) as progressive and more 'like us’. It has been beautiful to see members of the Queer community reject the rainbow-washing of a genocide that seeks to make our respect for human life contingent on that life agreeing with our politics. It has also been instructive to see intersectional feminists shed light on Israel’s own sexual assault problems and remind the world that Israel is killing women, too, in Gaza. It’s hard to claim you stand in sisterhood with women while you support those women being killed by a military, regardless of how many women are also pulling the triggers. And the attempts to paint all Palestinian men as savages have not worked. We know that most are civilians. And the majority who take up arms do so as a last resort, as Ukrainians do against Russia, not out of bigotry, envy or mindless hate, but as an instinctive response or resistance. And we do not have to support their methods or condone their actions to recognise the racist, orientalist tropes at play in trying to make us hate Palestinian men. And just having American backing does not give those narratives legitimacy.
Israel’s leaders are telling their citizens that the only way to be safe and secure is by violence. But violence breeds more violence. The majority are showing immense patience and restraint, going out of their way to make it clear that they do not hate Israelis (or Jewish people, despite the Israeli Government’s attempts to conflate the two groups). They do not hate, mindlessly. Which is a miracle considering how the white Western world wend mad after 9-11. But it would be naïve to imagine that the wholesale slaughter Israel has visited on Gaza has not sown seeds of bitterness. Which is another reason why it has to stop. You cannot kill all your enemies, because every person you kill has the potential to create more anger. As many Jewish, Palestinian and other activists, as well as Israeli protestors have said, killing Palestinians creates more of a threat to the security of ordinary Israelis, not less.
Israel’s Government is levelling Gaza to remove its Palestinian population as part of a land grab, a demographic war, an ethnic cleansing and public face-saving exercise. It is not defending itself. It does not want us bringing up the civilians it has killed unjustifiably. Israel wants us silent and accepting. Israel is hoping that we whose voices have not yet been silenced will just get bored, get tired of speaking out. But we must keep speaking, keep posting, keep writing to our representatives and reminding them that we will vote them out if they do not have the basic moral courage to try to stop ethnic cleansing, genocide and collective punishment.
Israel is not defending itself. We must make sure everybody knows.
Why rewrite it?
Whenever you find yourself thinking: I’m writing prophetic poetry, you may actually just be a bit of a dick. When I wrote Israel has a right to defend itself earlier this week, I definitely thought of it as prophetic poetry. A kind of blend of irony, satire of the confused logic and oft-repeated mantras of Israeli propaganda, sown with seeds of doubt in the form of increasingly unjustifiable justifications for Israel’s massacre of Palestinians in Gaza.
But that doesn’t work for everyone. And satire (or, indeed, prophetic poetry) like that needs to be pretty damn good to get the message across. And I’m honest / insecure enough to recognise the piece may just not have worked. So I went through it, paragraph by paragraph, careful to start with the same word each time, and tried to capture what I was trying to say.
It turned out to be quite a lot. But there it is. You’re welcome?
On the podcast: Crisis in Congo
We have a new episode of the Beer Christianity podcast out. This one is for anyone who wants a better handle on another humanitarian catastrophe that’s unfolding because of international cynicism and a history of injustice: the mass slaughter, sexual violence and displacement in the East of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Episode 89: Congo crisis explained, with Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo is out now (and really very good if we do say so ourselves).
The end bit
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The end end bit.
So the American Government lost its mind and officially declared anti-Zionism to be anti-Semitism. Despite large protests from Jewish groups calling bullshit on that conflation. That’s depressing. Like Labour and Democrats offering no substantive alternative to their right-wing opponent parties when it comes to Palestinians being killed. It’s easy to get exhausted, I know. I’m fucking exhausted too. But don’t stop talking about this. Don’t stop doing what you can. Today could be the day you switch someone’s mind. It only takes getting 3.5% of a population on side to achieve significant social change. We can do that. Surely we can do that. Keep praying for Palestine (and Congo and Yemen and Sudan and Afghanistan). Keep giving money to those who are helping. Keep speaking out. You are loved and you are doing God’s work. Also, sorry if the last email was confusing or this one was lame. xoxo Jonty