John Rose
The response in Israel to the attacks on Gaza has exposed a society consumed by the violence implicit in the Zionist enterprise.
As the famous Israeli novelist David Grossman put it, Israel’s “huge use of violence” causes a “depth of internal poison”.
Noga, an Israeli student at university in Britain, told Socialist Worker about the impact of Zionism, the racist doctrine that binds together the Israeli state.
“I was only five years old, playing at a friend’s house in an Israeli neighbourhood,” she said. “Her mum got us to play a game, running round the house chanting, ‘Death to all Arabs!’
“This chant is typical,” she added, “you hear it everywhere.”
Noga’s grandparents came from Iraq and spoke Arabic. They were Arabic Jews, like a third of Baghdad’s citizens before the creation of Israel in 1948. They later faced racist abuse in Israel.
Three years after Israel’s creation, Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz wrote that the new state was “to become the watchdog…for Western powers”.
From that moment Western powers, especially the US, armed and funded Israel.
Watchdog
Is Israel’s genocidal behaviour today in Western interests? Or has the watchdog escaped its owners’ control?
Certainly the US is weaker in the Middle East than ever.
The US wants a tiny, pliant Palestinian state.
But increasingly the Israeli government and most Israelis reject this option.
The pressure is on to eliminate the Palestinian problem. US diplomacy will try and manage this bloody contradiction to buy time for an illusory “peace deal”.
The so-called “two state” solution was always an illusion.
The majority of Palestinians, refugees forcibly ejected in 1948, could never return home.
Israel itself refuses to “share” Jerusalem, and occupies so much West Bank territory that only a meaningless rump is left.
The watchdog is not yet off the leash. It still has a mighty appetite for US dollars and military hardware. But the leash is weak and the chaos and carnage can yet turn into something far more dreadful.
The need to fight for a single state of Palestine is urgent. Without it, the barbarism we are witnessing will intensify.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Independent News with permission or license.