Israel’s Reality Principle
Where force dominates as a State of aggression
Mary Turfah
Foundational to Israel is an ideology, irredeemable, that justifies ethnic cleansing. Were Israel to see Palestinians as equals and to reverse its post-1967 settlements—as per the recent ICJ ruling—Israel would no longer be Israel. The idea of Israel shifting course belongs to a hypothetical world that will never be ours. It constitutes the fantastical basis of the United States’ so-called “Peace Process,” a prolonged distraction to buy Israel time to move its anachronistic settler colonial project farther along than what they hope would be realistically reversible. From the standpoint of its victims, Israel will always be reversible.
There are two ways for a stolen thing to become unstolen. One is through a performative act, often a speech act, where the original owner cedes ownership to the thief, such that suddenly, the thief is no longer a thief. Given that the basis of Israeli identity is supremacy, they would never consciously relinquish the moral legitimacy of the Zionist state to its victims. Even so, since before 1948, Israel has lacked any sort of secular moral or ethical basis, relying instead on a transposed (geographically or otherwise) sense of guilt. In today’s world, overt settler colonialism is retrograde. Israel, accordingly, has no recourse for explaining itself, beyond what is now understood as religious bigotry and unfiltered racism. Instead, Israel and its backers insist on axioms: the sky is blue, and Israel has the right to defend itself, to secure its borders, to exist. And as long as its eliminationist project remains incomplete, Israel—and especially its supporters—like to hear the occupied say it like they mean it, that Israel has these rights over them.
If we accept time as a relevant variable, then it matters that the existence of Israel was made possible by the attempted elimination of Palestine and, more importantly, its people. The reverse cannot be said about Palestine or Palestinians. This helps us understand why the framework of “pro-Palestine” versus “pro-Israel” feels deceptive: these aren’t horizontal enemies but mutually exclusive realities—oppressor and oppressed—where only one ‘side’ exists literally on top of the other’s graves. Palestinians, Lebanese, and others to whom the land rightfully belongs can imagine a horizon after Zionism because their roots tether to a land before this time. They do not require external validation of their “rights” to the land, least of all from the Zionist state.
“This helps us understand why the framework of ‘pro-Palestine’ versus ‘pro-Israel’ feels deceptive: these aren’t horizontal enemies but mutually exclusive realities—oppressor and oppressed—where only one ‘side’ exists literally on top of the other’s graves.”
The other way for a stolen thing to become unstolen is through its return. In this instance, since the thief has no reason to hand anything back, the principal agent of guaranteeing it must be the victim themselves. Those from whom something is stolen have the right—given to them by God or goodness, not by the United Nations—to get it back. Whether they have the means to do so is a different issue. As the history of settler colonialism shows us, this often becomes a matter of time.
While Israel’s attempts to empty the land of its people were not as successful as the early Zionists had hoped, this didn’t discourage them. Today, where the people of the land continue to draw their legitimacy from history and a shared—and, I believe, innate—sense of right from wrong, Israel relies on force. And force, for decades, was enough.
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In the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust—the first case of genocide recognized by international law—many Zionists looked at the victims and recoiled at their weakness. They committed themselves to “never again,” even if it meant perpetrating a genocide to avoid being perceived as such. However, this motivation did not dictate the timing or rationale behind the displacement of Palestinians; the settler colonial project was already well underway by the 1930s. Instead, this outlook informs how today’s Zionists see themselves.
The Zionist redemption arc mythologizes the Nakba. In their version of events, plucky, poorly equipped militants rose up against their British occupiers and, after a period of fierce resistance, declared their independence. This narrative accommodates both victimhood and a self-reliant strength—David taking on Goliath. In this telling, the roles of the British, French, and Americans—the Zionist state’s main sponsors, in their order of arrival—are obscured. Similarly, after the Six-Day War, or even Six-Hour War, Zionists present what was by then called ‘Israel’ once again as the underdog, ganged up on by its Arab neighbors. Zionism’s mythos depicts Israel as both surrounded by a sea of savage hostility and able to withstand it, allowing the state to both frame itself defensively and justify its dominant position.
In 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in an operation named “Litani”, after the river it had for decades tried to fold into a future state. In the 1920s, during border renegotiations between the colonizing “Mandate powers” of Lebanon and Palestine, Zionist leaders had requested their British patrons secure the land around the exceptionally arable Litani River as part of Palestine. Despite the operation’s name, Israel insisted that its 1978 objectives were about security: they sought to end Palestinian guerrilla attacks against Israel by removing the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) from southern Lebanon, up to the Litani.
Of course, no one could dictate what actions Israel would take on its side of the border with Lebanon or how heavily it could militarize its territory. Questions about what Palestinians were doing in Lebanon at all, why they weren’t in Palestine, or what had happened to Palestine, were not considered by Israel’s supporters. Two realities in parallel: In one world, Palestinians were trying to liberate their land. In another, Israel was threatened—by hate-driven Arabs—and it had the right to defend its territory, even if it meant invading and occupying a sovereign nation.
Around this time, Israel (and the United States) started to invest in a proxy force—an offshoot of a fascist Lebanese party whose early leaders had traveled to Nazi Germany during the Berlin Olympics and became enamored with fascist ideology. The force called itself the South Lebanese Army, or SLA, and declared its commitment to a southern Lebanon liberated from, well, Lebanon. . . and allied with, yes, Israel.
In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon again, this time advancing all the way to Beirut in an operation called Peace for Galilee. Naturally, the operation opened with a casus belli: an assassination attempt against Israel’s ambassador to the UK, which Israel attributed to the PLO. The PLO denied responsibility and condemned the attack, and it was later determined that the gunman was an assassin-for-hire on the payroll of—at different points throughout his decorated career—Saddam Hussein, the Mossad, and the CIA. None of this would matter. Before an investigation could be launched, Israeli planes were on their way to target Beirut’s civilian airport, sports stadium, the major trauma hospital for Beirut’s Palestinian refugee camps—called Gaza Hospital—and two school buses full of children.
This was only the beginning of a months-long assault. Israel’s complete siege over Beirut would last until August, during which the city was starved, deprived of water and medicine, and subjected to bombings of medical clinics. Hundreds of Palestinian doctors and nurses were arrested. At the same time, Israel established its military occupation in southern Lebanon, intended to last indefinitely. All of these actions, it claimed, were aimed at forcing the PLO to surrender.
The purpose of Israel’s Peace was multifold. The first facet was to occupy southern Lebanon. The SLA, trained and armed by Israel, protected the buffer zone imposed by Israel south of the Litani. Israeli goods flooded southern Lebanese markets, where they were reexported to other countries from Lebanese ports. A torture prison called Khiam, nominally operated by the SLA, held at any given time hundreds of people accused of resisting the Israeli occupation. Their interrogation and torture were escalated to the Israeli forces, as the Israelis deemed necessary.
Another reason for the invasion of Lebanon was to exact an excruciating cost on the concept of resistance—not just the PLO or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but the broader idea of resistance, muqaawama, itself. The price had to be high enough that Palestinians and their supporters would not dare to dream of Palestine again. To ensure this, the price would be paid by the very people for whom the resistance was fighting.
Israel pulls this strategy from the pages of the Colonial Playbook, where effective counterinsurgency tactics against national liberation movements target the popular cradle—the people from whom the fighters come—rather than the fighters themselves. In terms of inflicting maximal, terrorizing harm, this makes sense: the fighter has accepted martyrdom, but their neighbors, friends, and family have not. The fighter fights for the future of their loved ones. When their loved ones are killed, it undercuts the possibility of this imagined future. This sows hopelessness and makes them question what they’re fighting for.
“In terms of inflicting maximal, terrorizing harm, this makes sense: the fighter has accepted martyrdom, but their neighbors, friends, and family have not.”
The PLO agreed to leave Beirut for Tunisia in August 1982. They did so under the guarantees of the so-called international community that their loved ones, the Palestinian refugees in Beirut, would remain protected by a multinational peacekeeping force. The PLO fighters’ withdrawal was completed by early September. For Israel, this withdrawal wasn’t enough to satisfy Peace. Two weeks later came the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Over one thousand five hundred Palestinian refugees, as well as Lebanese who lived in these camps, were slaughtered by the Israelis and their proxies in the span of just a couple of days. Those with the means to defend them were gone; those left behind had no weapons or training. Most of the martyrs were women, children, and the elderly. Hundreds of mutilated bodies, many of which were never identified, were placed into mass graves. In 1982, Israel showcased its ruthlessness to assert its control over Palestinians’ fates and to teach those who resisted a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget.
In this respect, Israel succeeded. Hezbollah emerged officially with a manifesto in 1985. Its founding members were raised under the constant threat of Israeli airstrikes against southern Lebanon. They were often introduced to the struggle against the Israeli occupation by joining the ranks of Palestinian militias operating in their neighborhoods. Many cited Sabra and Shatila as the moment that clarified their understanding of the nature of Zionism, distilled to its barest bones. Were their country to have any future chance at life, moments like these crystalized the need to prioritize resistance against Israel above all else.
After almost two decades of fierce resistance helmed by Hezbollah, most of Lebanon was liberated from Israeli occupation in 2000. Israel declared its unilateral withdrawal and abandoned its positions overnight. Embarrassed by the perception of weakness these scenes conveyed, Israel would later claim that it was merely, and finally, complying with a UN resolution from 1978.
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May 25, 2000, the date that commemorates Israel’s forced withdrawal from Lebanon, is marked in Lebanese government calendars as “Resistance and Liberation Day.” This designation reflects not a merging of ideals to celebrate, but an articulation of cause and effect. On that day, the people of the south stormed Khiam. Shaky videos document the moments they made it inside—videos I return to often, which remind me of both the goal and its costs. In one clip, prisoners angle their heads to look upward through a slot in their cell, anxious to discern the source of the screams and the sound of metal clanking against metal flooding the narrow hallway leading to them. In their expressions, the viewer can see a shift: they recognize the sounds do not come from their sadistic prison guards but from their families. What separates them has been resolved in an instant: only a door. And, before this door opens, they are already free. The first time I came across these videos online, tears welled in my eyes before I had consciously processed what I was seeing: liberation. I am far from alone; these images, and what they meant coming from southern Lebanon, helped inspire the second intifada in Palestine.
Israel’s efforts to portray its will as divine and inescapable were crushed. What it maintained over its enemies was the fear of what it might do to their people. After Israel’s retreat from southern Lebanon, Khiam was turned into a memorial. Former prisoners conducted tours, where they mapped personal testimonies of Zionist brutality onto the prison landscape—its blood-stained walls and electricity poles—and onto their own bodies. I visited the facility with my family as a child, and I can still recall my stunned, adamant refusal to accept even the possibility of the cruelty our tour guide described. I told myself he must be lying. It took me years—until 2006—to believe him.
In July 2006, after Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers, whom they hoped to trade for Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel, Israel vowed to return its prisoners by force and to destroy Hezbollah. The image Israel projected (and needed) had been disrupted, and it sought to restore this by setting for itself impossible goals. For thirty-four days, Israel pummeled southern Lebanon and Beirut, formalizing what came to be known as the Dahiya doctrine—a policy of “disproportionate force.” This doctrine involved demolishing as much civilian infrastructure as current technology would allow in order to crush the will of the people who dared to support resistance. Of course, the policy was not new, and certainly not new to Beirut. Where the declared target had previously been the PLO, now it was Hezbollah. In both instances, the targets were, in fact, civilians. The 2006 campaign simply provided an opportunity to make of them a latest example. To their enemies, the Israelis signaled, “What we did to the Dahiya”—the heavily targeted southern suburb of Beirut—“we will not hesitate to do to you.”
In the southern Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, every single house around my maternal grandfather’s was destroyed. It was only by a stroke of luck that his was spared. Khiam prison—refashioned by the people of the land into evidence of their strength, something Zionism could not allow—was targeted and largely destroyed. Near my paternal grandfather’s home, in the town to which his family had fled in the aftermath of the Nakba, Israel bombed a bridge. A chunk of concrete, the size of a dinner table, tunneled into the garden outside his house. It remains there today, poking out from the red dirt, between two citrus trees.
Israel failed to achieve its declared, maximalist objectives. A prisoner exchange followed the end of those 34 days. Over one thousand one hundred Lebanese civilians were killed, and hundreds of thousands were displaced. Still, as soon as the ceasefire was called, the people of the land flooded south again. They would not leave it emptied of its people; they knew their enemy better than that. Condoleezza Rice described the July war as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” a bizarre conflation of eliminatory violence with life, exposing America’s extractivist aims in the region. In a direction opposite to what she intended, she was not wrong to identify July 2006 as a turning point. Already, most people recognized Israel as the aggressor. Now, on a mass scale, they understood that Lebanon’s liberation in 2000 was not a fluke. Although once synonymous in the minds of its victims with the ability to aggress unimpeded—and despite its enduring capacity to kill and kill and kill—Israel could no longer simply impose its will.
“Israel bombed a bridge. A chunk of concrete, the size of a dinner table, tunneled into the garden outside my paternal grandfather’s home. It remains there today, poking out from the red dirt, between two citrus trees.”
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The year prior, in 2005, Israel declared its “disengagement” from Gaza. Years of Palestinian military operations—conducted by various militant groups across Gaza and often in concert with operations in the West Bank during the second intifada—had rendered Israeli settlements in Gaza unsustainable. Israel’s Operation Rainbow, during which it besieged Rafah and razed hundreds of Palestinian homes to the ground, had failed to save face—that is, it had failed to re-instill paralyzing fear into the local population. Still, Israel presented the “unilateral withdrawal” of its soldiers and settlers from Gaza—as it had in southern Lebanon—as a product of its own volition. Cast as a preemptive response, Israel said it was defending against “the demographic threat” posed by the “Palestinian womb,” fearing that Gaza's population might become incorporated into the Zionist state. Many Israeli settlers refused to leave; some were literally carried out by Israeli soldiers, who were themselves in tears as they carried out their orders.
In 2006, Hamas was elected as the government of the occupied Palestinian territories. Israel and the United States had not anticipated these election results—it’s said that Rice fell off her treadmill when she heard the news. Along with Israel, the United States attempted to stage a coup to replace Hamas with a government favorable to Israel. The coup failed, and in 2007, with Egypt’s help, Israel besieged Gaza’s two million residents by land, air, and sea. The blockade was part collective punishment, part recipe for an insurrection—an opportunity to try once again to install a government friendly to Empire in Hamas’s place. Israel’s “border barrier” with Gaza, first erected in 1971, was upgraded. Nothing and no one could go in or out—above ground, at least—without Israel’s blessing. Israel placed two million people in a cage.
The tunnels emerged as a rejection of Israel’s right to restrict a people’s movement and its right to impose its will at all. The militarization of the tunnels was a consequence of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, not a justification for it.
For the seventeen years since the start of the siege, Israel has restricted the entry of basic civilian goods (e.g., chocolate, fishing rods, cement, chemotherapy drugs) and regulated the number of aid trucks allowed to enter Gaza. These mechanisms for slow death provide the infrastructure, when the time comes, for something more accelerated. For the past several months, humanitarian aid entering into Gaza—its life-sustaining IV drip, especially through UNRWA—has been denied entry by Israel. Gaza’s rapid descent into famine today is entirely by design, with the groundwork laid over many years to execute a moment exactly like this one.
Israel’s various military campaigns have punctuated this slow death with what Israeli officials call “mowing the grass”—the Dahiya doctrine, which involves the deliberate, large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure and the massacring of civilians, calibrated to the moment’s demands and imposed on different geographies. The brutality of Operation Cast Lead, which started at the end of 2008 and bled into 2009, was, in part, an attempt by Israel to reestablish the deterrence its vaunted military had lost in Lebanon in 2006.
Israel’s bombing campaigns since then—in 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022, and the scattered attacks in between—have similarly served a dual purpose, using Gaza to signal to Lebanon: “Don’t mess with us.” Early in Israel’s current extermination campaign in Gaza, Israel’s defense minister summoned the specter of genocide to threaten the north, warning while near Israel’s armistice line with Lebanon, “What we’re doing in Gaza can also be done in Beirut.” Since 2007, Israel has violated Lebanese airspace over seven thousand times, often on its way to bomb Syria. Israeli jets break the sound barrier over southern Lebanon, sometimes multiple times a day, often in the middle of the night, shattering glass and producing enough force to rupture eardrums. These actions terrorize civilians in their sleep to try to regain an impression of an omnipresence that is irrecoverable.
“In 2006, Hamas was elected as the government of the occupied Palestinian territories. It’s said that Condoleezza Rice fell off her treadmill when she heard the news.”
Consider that in Gaza today, Israeli soldiers do more because they can. They unearth the graves of those they’ve freshly killed as a means of asserting dominance; to signal to Palestinians, and to themselves, that Zionism will haunt the native beyond the grave. Additionally, corpses have organs for harvesting. Consider that, over the last nine months, Israel has disappeared twenty-one thousand children or more in Gaza—whether as captives, bodies trapped under the rubble, bodies mangled beyond recognition, or lost to unmarked graves. Consider that Israelis are, at the time of this writing, debating on a national level their right to rape Palestinians, with the pro-rape contingency winning. The soldiers arrested for rape have since been released. One of them was interviewed on an Israeli television channel, masked to protect his identity. He was so emboldened by the positive reception he received, that he later posted a video of himself performatively unmasking and identifying himself and his unit, asserting that neither he nor the Israeli military has anything to hide or be ashamed of. For seventy-five years, these are the methods by which they have sustained their necropolitical regime. Consider that they will never, can never, have anything else.
Deterrence is a function of both perception and actual military potential. Israel has some of the most advanced military technology in the world, largely thanks to the United States and its own military industrial sector. Still, it is the perception of its military as having no respect for any sort of international law or morality that Israel has relied on to sustain its existence. Except, this perception of the Israeli military has only strengthened the resolve of those who have suffered its aggression. As the military capacities of these affected groups have grown, so have the risks they are willing to take.
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Israel's genocidal violence in Gaza today reflects a self-image that relies on total impunity. Although this ability to act without consequences no longer exists, Israel and its allies have tried to restore this veneer through increased brutality. Since October 2023, various state and nonstate actors have worked through diplomatic, economic, and military channels to try to exert pressure on Israel to stop its genocide in Gaza. Bolivia and South Africa have severed their diplomatic relationships with Israel. Ansarullah—also known as the Houthis in Yemen—have declared that no ship traveling to or from Israel will pass through the Red Sea, effectively creating a naval blockade that has driven Israel’s Eilat Port to declare bankruptcy. On October 8, Hezbollah opened Israel’s northern front, aiming to divert a large portion of the Israeli military’s human resources—especially its more elite forces—away from Gaza and to undermine Israel’s capabilities to target Lebanon again in a future war. That the Lebanese initiated these attacks does not mean they aggressed against Israel: from the standpoint of its victims, Israel is a state of aggression.
Israeli officials and their supporters continue to discuss reoccupying southern Lebanon, as they did in 1982. At an April 2024 protest in Haifa demanding the explicit settlement of Lebanon, an Israeli reporter covering the event asked a curious passerby whether she thought such a settlement was possible. The woman replied no, offering instead a different solution: perhaps an area “in which neither we nor the Lebanese residents will live.” Israeli military officials today, as always, continue to demand a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon up until the Litani River. While the Israelis dream of their day-after in Lebanon, Hezbollah’s escalated targeting of Israeli military installments has emptied the north—including the two settlements built atop my paternal grandfather’s home—this time of its occupiers. For the first time since 1948, a buffer zone has been established inside Israel.
The United States and its allies have risen to Israel’s “defense”—which is to say, to preserve its ability to carry out a genocide, because they know Israel’s self-image depends on it. The United States declared the Houthis a terrorist group and, together with the United Kingdom, launched the theatrically named Operation Poseidon Archer. To try to end a naval blockade that aims to end a genocide, they have bombed Yemen and killed Yemenis on Israel’s behalf. In July, Ansarullah launched a drone strike on a building in Tel Aviv to pressure Israel into negotiating a ceasefire. To escalate the consequences for Yemenis who continue to support Ansarullah’s efforts to stop the genocide, Israel bombed Yemeni oil tanks and a nearby electrical station.
The U.S. envoy to Lebanon has “urged de-escalation” between Israel and Lebanon by threatening that the United States will fully endorse Israel—economically, militarily, diplomatically—should an all-out war occur. Meanwhile, mainstream Western media often frame the actions of Ansarullah, Hezbollah, and other state and nonstate actors in the region as driven by different shades of bloodlust against Israel, often without any mention of the genocide in Gaza. This makes sense, as the primary function of these media outlets, at present, is to manufacture consent for the ongoing genocide.
“From the standpoint of its victims, Israel is a state of aggression.”
To roaring applause and multiple standing ovations, the prime minister of Israel announced before America’s Congress in July that “the hands of the Jewish state will never be shackled.” He chose “shackled” over “tied” deliberately. “Shackled” conjures the image of the prisoner—recalling Nazi concentration camps and the torture and genocide carried out by the ancestors of many of those clapping—to invert genocide into a defensive posturing and a redemptive force. The prime minister of the Zionist state continued, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job faster.” “Tools” is a utilitarian euphemism for weapons of mass destruction, while “finish the job” is a euphemism for genocide. Congresspeople collapsed air bubbles with their palms because they see themselves reflected in their glorified military base and because they share these values, this right to American-style “self defense.”
Rhetoric aside, Israel’s hands are tied. Despite months of the Israeli military threatening to do so, Israel has not yet entered Lebanon. This does not reflect restraint from a state famous for acting without any, nor does it reflect a bare minimum of strategic foresight to limit for the sake of its future its present assault on Gaza. Israel hasn’t gone into Lebanon because it can’t yet. Israel knows it won’t win a war with Lebanon now and that it would need the intervention of the United States for this to be possible in the future. At the time of writing, the United States remains uninterested in endangering its assets in the region through a broader war.
On July 27, at the tail end of Netanyahu’s America tour, a missile struck Majd al-Shams in the occupied Golan Heights, killing Syrian children playing football on an open field. Israel, spearheaded by an emboldened Netanyahu, was quick to blame Hezbollah and vowed revenge. Hezbollah firmly rejected the allegation and condemned the attack. (In the past, most recently in 2006, the group has acknowledged when their rockets inadvertently killed or harmed occupied peoples and issued formal apologies to the families. In addition, strategically, it makes no sense for Hezbollah to target Syrians, especially those who support their movement.) Eyewitnesses claimed that the incident was consistent with an Iron Dome interceptor misfire. The Druze of Majd al-Shams, many of whom have refused Israeli citizenship and whom Israel was strangely and suspiciously quick to claim as its own, refused the condolences of Israeli government officials at their loved ones’ funeral services. They explicitly rejected the weaponization of their loss to justify killing more Arabs, which was Israel’s obvious aim. It seemed that Israel was either covering up a mistake or priming Western media for a pretext, as it has done in the past, for an attack to come.
U.S. officials asked Hezbollah not to respond to a possible Israeli attack. A few days later, Israel targeted a building in Beirut, destroying it completely and killing or injuring seventy-four people, including a Hezbollah commander. This was “in retaliation,” according to Western media, for the Majd al Shams massacre—in a land the media did not clarify belongs to Syria according to international law. The United States has since expanded its military presence in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, for Israel’s sake, to try to deter a retaliatory strike by Hezbollah.
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In an interview from March 2024, the Israeli writer—biotech developer, and descendant of the author of what is, according to The Guardian, the “very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba”—Zeev Smilansky admitted that in Gaza,
“There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages. . . . There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution. . . . I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity. . . . It’s not just Hamas, it’s all Gazans who agree that it’s OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause. . . . With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologi[z]ed and paid reparations. . . . We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance.”
By distance, he must mean more time to commit genocide, as his government already has literal walls separating him from the people they are slaughtering. He cannot claim ignorance. He openly admits to what he labels as a “humanitarian disaster,” one that is rhetorically “shocking” without touching his conscience. He does not consider that perhaps he doesn't love humanity, and there’s a high chance this thought will not cross his mind, because as far as he is concerned, he does love a version of humanity, one where there are no Palestinians. Their annihilation would be tragic, intellectually, and he is already emotionally well-adjusted for such a future. The price, most importantly, would be worth it, if Israel could recover what it cannot.
What Israel is protecting in Gaza is not Israelis or their hostages, but Israel’s right to put Gaza in a cage. Because Palestinians in Gaza will try to break out of their cage again, Israel has to try to end Palestinians in Gaza. The means are the ends. Israel is protecting Zionism, its founding right to dominate and eliminate, now through genocide. Israel hasn’t stopped its genocide in Gaza because here, too, it cannot—because when it does, it will have lost. In wars of national liberation, the colonizer loses unless they crush resistance totally. The colonized wins as long as they survive. Of course, the longer the genocide lasts, the greater the political, social, and legitimacy crises that will overwhelm Israel after a ceasefire is called.
“What Israel remains unable to extract from the people of Gaza—what they will never take because it is not, despite generations of trying through torture and humiliation, within their reach—is their karamah, their dignity.”
What Israel remains unable to extract from the people of Gaza—what they will never take because it is not, despite generations of trying through torture and humiliation, within their reach—is their karamah, their dignity. In the Quran, human dignity is inherent and can only be lost if we choose to surrender it ourselves. Zionism demands the surrender of this dignity from its adherents, in exchange for a self-worth conditional on total supremacy over the native. This sense of self-worth has been irrevocably disrupted, perhaps even destroyed, since October 7, despite Israels’ resort to genocide in an attempt to redeem an image of themselves they want to recognize.
It’s been like this since before 1948. Consider what it takes to build a society that recognizes the cessation of genocide as an unmitigable loss. Consider what it takes to sustain such a society. Consider that if you’re reading this from the United States, you live in such a place. Israel’s existence, like that of all settler states, relies on its ability to act without consequences—that is, to massacre and dispossess a native who cannot meaningfully fight back. While this was largely true for a couple of decades, a different reality has emerged in recent years—especially since 2000—where Israel’s accumulated aggressions elicit a response that Israelis feel. The ongoing genocide in Gaza reflects Israel’s refusal to accept this new reality. The thing about reality is that it’s there whether one accepts it or not.