The terms generally in use today about the situation in Palestine, and Gaza in particular, don’t come close to describing what is actually happening on the ground.
Terms like “settler-colonialism”, “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide” all seem woefully inadequate to convey the litany of unprecedented cruelties that Israel, as the tip of the US imperial spear, continues to carry out with impunity on a daily basis.
If we don’t even have adequate terms to describe the reality in Gaza, how can we hope to engage in any meaningful struggle for change – particularly in the US, with its mind-numbing media saturation and immoveable political duopoly?
In his article “Shock without awe: Zionism and its horror”, Palestinian political theorist Abdaljawad Omar describes this moment clearly: “Today, Israel’s hope is not that the world will soon forget this current phase of the conflict. Nor does Israel seek to encourage the world to recognise itself in its carefully cultivated image as a lone liberal democracy holding back a sea of Arab and Muslim barbarians. Instead, it now hopes that the world will soon catch up with its stark monstrosity, and cement its collusion in all the horrors that ‘total victory’ might require.”
Indeed, this has been happening around the world, from Israel’s training of police forces in the US and other countries, to India’s crackdowns in Kashmir. Almost anywhere you look, you can see Israel’s “battle-tested” brand of security – a globalised model of control that increasingly pits governments against their people.
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Analyst Fadi Quran has previously described incarceration as a universal form of social control, while differentiating the Israeli and Palestinian prison systems from others globally because of three key characteristics: “existential angst, teaching helplessness, and a culture of societal betrayal”.
In the US today, the levels of betrayal increasingly felt by many citizens are off the charts, as the Trump administration shreds the Constitution in order to pamper a foreign Jewish supremacist country whose population is roughly the same as that of the state of New Jersey.
Collective conscience
This sense of betrayal hasn’t been so visceral since 1971, when a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War staged a demonstration in Washington, with hundreds of army veterans standing in line to hurl their war medals onto the Capitol steps.
While this operation, named Dewey Canyon III, was among the most radical and moving collective acts of conscience by former soldiers, many Americans have no idea it ever happened. It is preserved mainly through personal accounts, photographs and several minutes of documentary film.
Israel’s culture of genocide is spreading globally. We must build an alternative
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In his 2015 book War Against the People, American Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper describes the comprehensive and systemic shift that intensified after 9/11 and the “war on terror”. Through what he calls the “integrated MISSILE Complex: Military, Internal Security, Surveillance, Intelligence-gathering and Law Enforcement”, he demonstrates the “Palestinisation” of global space through “pacification” and “securitisation” based on the Israeli model.
While there are many possible routes as to how we got here, the most direct might be for Americans to view themselves through the eyes of those at the receiving end of US policies.
The use of the atomic bomb by the US against Japan in 1945, for example, served no real military purpose with regards to ending the war, but was rather a message about postwar power relations – an emphatic announcement by Washington of its own unconstrained impunity and willingness to use any means to achieve its hegemonic goals.
This was soon followed by the massive US recruitment of German and Japanese personnel from the military, intelligence and scientific sectors, many of whom were considered war criminals by their former adversaries.
As the Office of Strategic Services morphed into the CIA, the US intervened around the world in every way imaginable, as the state ostensibly worked to “contain Communism” – a pretext for cementing American hegemony and fomenting perpetual war.
Pivotal moment
The ferocity of the resistance to the Vietnam War, on the ground in Vietnam and domestically, led the US to intensify its focus on the Middle East. The June War of 1967 marked a pivotal point. As author Melani McAlister put it: “Israel, or a certain image of Israel, came to function as a stage upon which the war in Vietnam was refought – and this time, won.”
US citizens became immersed in deeper forms of domestic propaganda and intelligence operations. Civil rights movements, given their identification with Third World liberation struggles, were accused of “antisemitism” for supporting Palestinians.
Given this framework of collusion, what can be done to stop the genocide of Palestinians?
On the other hand, Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and Israel’s Kach party, was accused of working alongside American intelligence services. Kahane contributed to the development of a manipulative identity politics, driving a wedge between Jewish and African American communities to promote Jewish identification with Israel.
The US defeat in Vietnam in 1975 led to radical changes in US military doctrine. In the years that followed, US wars in Central America and elsewhere would be fought covertly. This shifted again with the First Gulf War in 1990.
Media reporting of conflicts would also undergo radical changes, as reporters became embedded with US forces, allowing the army to more easily conceal the true nature of the carnage on the ground. At the same time, the massive destruction wrought by sanctions in Iraq, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, could not easily be reduced to an image.
In Gaza today, it is similarly difficult to find words or images to adequately represent the scale of the suffering. Perhaps even more alarming at this crucial moment in history is Israel’s entwinement – with the full backing of the US – in the securitisation and pacification of civilians by their own governments in countries around the world.
Given this framework of collusion, what can be done to stop the genocide of Palestinians? Does anyone truly believe that “international law”, without the military power to enforce it, can stand in the way of this lawless juggernaut – or that the seizure and annexation of more land, displacement of more Palestinians, and destruction of Al-Aqsa Mosque are not on the agenda?
Will more citizens in the “free world” have the courage, as some have already displayed, to take greater and greater risks – such as by physically preventing arms shipments – to disrupt business as usual, until this unspeakable carnage is brought to an end?
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
