By Jeremy Salt

Public support for Israel in this western hinterland was once high but against the backdrop of genocide, it is plummeting.

Israel is plunging the Middle East into hell.

The scenes from Gaza and Lebanon are apocalyptic. The bunker bombs and the slaughter of the innocent open up some secondary but critical points for consideration, namely Israel’s ‘Right to Exist’

This is the second strand of Israel’s ‘right’ to defend itself by attacking Gaza.

It has no such right, of course.

October 7 was retaliation against occupation, and the crimes committed under that particular heading, including the attacks by Israeli politicians and settlers on the West Bank and the Haram al-Sharif and the thousands of Palestinians Israel has slaughtered in Gaza over the years.

Cooped up in Gaza like battery hens, caged ahead of the kill, the Palestinians struck back on October 7 in a way that hurt, irrespective of whether Israel really was taken by surprise or whether the attack was allowed to go ahead by Netanyahu as the first stage of a planned assault already drawn up to settle the ‘Palestine question’ once and for all. Or to simultaneously destroy Israel’s other enemies, all the way to Iran, and establish Netanyahu as one of the greatest heroes in Jewish history.  Incidentally, or not, also pull him out of trouble on the domestic front.

If Israel had ever obeyed international law it would never have had to ‘defend’ itself on October 7 in the first place.

The Palestinians driven out of their villages in 1948 would still be there, instead of on the other side of razor wire in the Gazan pocket of their homeland. Furthermore, while Israel will defend what it has taken, it has no ‘right’ to defend occupied land, let alone the ‘right’ to kill tens of thousands of people and destroy their cities and towns, their schools, universities, libraries, hospitals, mosques, water works, sewage plants and much more.

As for Israel’s ‘right’ to exist,  no state now or at any point in history has ever had such a right. States do not exist as of right. They exist for other reasons.

The Hinterland

History teems with dead states. Many states that existed even a century ago no longer exist. This doesn’t mean that the people no longer exist, only that the states don’t.

Taking ‘right’ out of the situation, one of Israel’s problems in defending itself is a lack of strategic depth, geographically and demographically.

Without outside support, it cannot fight long wars. It could not even fight short ones.

It is a small state with a small population compared to its active or potential enemies and thus has only a limited ability to replenish dead or wounded soldiers.

Another problem is the hinterland. The Palestinian hinterland is centred on the Arab and Muslim worlds, total population of more than two billion people, all of them hostile to this state of ten million.

Israel’s hinterland is thousands of miles away, in Europe, North America and Australia.

Whatever the US and other governments might say about the ‘special relationship’ and shared interests the support of the hinterland cannot be taken for granted, although Israel frequently does just that.

Basically, it is a hinterland of governments and the money and weaponry they can deliver, not people.

The people are not coreligionists, bound to Israel for that reason alone (and even Jews are breaking away). Public support for Israel in this western hinterland was once high but against the backdrop of genocide, it is plummeting.

If this continues, as it probably will, sooner or later governments will eventually have to modify their policies accordingly, against Israel’s interests.

The Arab Street

By comparison, Arab and Islamic public opinion in support of the Palestinians has reached a boiling point.  Even autocratic governments have had to respond.

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman says there will be no diplomatic relations until the Palestinians have their own state. He is fickle but the crimes committed by Israel are so enormous that even governments that signed on to the ‘Abraham Accords’ have had to back away.

A country like Jordan, created by the West, reliant economically on the West, ruled by the latest scion of a dynasty despised by the people, 70 per cent of them Palestinians who stand with their people in occupied Palestine, not with the king, is especially vulnerable to dramatic change.

The so-called ‘Arab street’ has consequences, as we have seen in the Middle East, North Africa and Iran throughout modern history.

The ‘street’ was the backdrop for the revolutions of 1921 and 1952 in Egypt, for revolutions in Iraq in 1958, Iran in 1951 and 1979 and for the final ejection of the French from Algeria by 1962.

Similarly, ‘the street’ and resistance in southern Arabia, after defeat in the Suez War of 1956,   forced the withdrawal ‘east of Suez’ by Britain in the 1960s.

Egypt has a ‘peace’ treaty with Israel that has never led to a peace in the minds of the people for one reason – Palestine.

Sisi is holding down public opinion the same way as Mubarak did but as the atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere multiply, the pressures on him to respond will also multiply. The masses surging into Tahrir Square in 2011 and the overthrow of Mubarak cannot be too far from his mind.

In their immediate location ‘between the river and the sea’ the Jewish and Palestinian Muslim or Christian populations are about the same – 6.5 million each – with the Palestinians expected to pull ahead demographically in the years to come.  Irrespective of outside pressures,  this is not a problem that can be overcome democratically.

The fact that this is a problem goes to the heart of what Israel is about.

Over a long period, Israel has made its choices – land over peace and a Jewish state over democracy. This is the choice made by the ‘chosen people.’ Is this what they were chosen for?

Crimes of the Past

In Afghanistan invading armies bombed wedding parties, and in Iraq by fighting ‘the enemy as a system’ so that no matter how big the military, it cannot fight when the civilian infrastructure has been destroyed, when there are no highways, bridges, water, electric, gas and sewage systems.

In Iraq, ten years of war and sanctions (1991 – 2002) led to about 500,000 ‘war-related’ deaths and that was before the wave of killing in the second war began in 2003.

The 1990s UN humanitarian affairs coordinator, Denis Halliday, described the sanctions as genocidal.  The people in the aggressor states voted on none of this, so who and what were their governments really representing in these wars?

As no one responsible was punished for these catastrophes, there was obviously nothing to learn, allowing the crimes of the past to be repeated now in Gaza and Lebanon by a long-term protégé of the West.

The US alone could stop Israel’s current apocalyptic rampage. Just stopping the arms supply would do it. Other states could send ambassadors home (as a few have done) or cut off diplomatic and trade relations.

They could initiate moves to kick Israel out of the UN.

They could send a multinational ‘peacekeeper’ force to Gaza to intervene between the Israeli military and the Palestinians: totally unlikely of course, but it is one of the many things they could do or at least try to do if they were serious about ending the war instead of just talking about ending the war.

They are doing none of this, not because they can’t but because they don’t want to. Their calls for restraint and a ceasefire are not matched by actions, with the exceptions of an honorable few.

They have sat by while Israel has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and now Lebanon.

Amidst all the evils of modern history, the mass murder of children by missile, tank and sniper fire is surely something we never thought we would have to witness.

‘Human Animals’ and ‘Amalek’

The dead children are among Yoav Gallant’s “human animals” and Netanyahu’s Amalek.

Livestreamed, we see them wrapped in bloodstained shrouds, lying on bloodstained hospital floors and being pulled grey-faced and grey-haired from the concrete dust of their homes.  Some can be clawed out alive from under the rubble, most are dead.

Nearly 20,000 survivors of these onslaughts have no parents, no siblings, no aunts and uncles and grandparents because all have been killed. They form a unique separate category of their own.  Entire extended families have been wiped out so that the name no longer exists in the population register.

None of this has any noticeable impact on the politicians who represent us beyond ‘concern’ at this ‘tragedy.’

There is concern about what is ‘happening’ in Gaza and Lebanon as if it is just ‘happening.’ There is concern at the ‘loss’ of ‘too many civilian lives,’ as if there is some number that would be acceptable.

There is concern that too many are ‘dying,’ not that they are being reduced to fragments of flesh from an Israeli missile or tank shell fired into an UNRWA shelter or the foreground of a hospital or that thousands of children have had the arms and legs ripped from their bodies in these missile ‘strikes.’

There are calls for restraint long after Israel has shown it is not interested in restraint. There are pontificating statements that a two-state solution is ‘the only answer,’ when the politicians must know unless they are entirely stupid that Israel has no intention of accepting a Palestinian state.

It settled more than 700,000 people in the 1967 occupied territories as a physical barrier against such a state ever being established. There is now a Knesset law against it.

‘Not a Moral World’

The politicians refer endlessly to October 7 as if this is the only date that matters.

They reach for anything that will conceal what they intend to do when they stop talking, which is to support Israel as before.  They can hardly bring themselves to criticise Israel, let alone condemn it.

The one element missing from their reaction is outrage at the crimes and depravity we are seeing, but then their world is not a moral world.

Its parameters are not 17,000 murdered children or starvation, besieged and destroyed hospitals and the other vicious instruments of Israel’s ‘war’ on civilian populations but their political interests, the numerous strategic and corporate ties that are the glue in the western collective and of course fear of the lobby.

For the junior partners, what the US wants is paramount and as what the US wants is what Israel wants, the circle is completed.

‘Cogito ergo sum,’  Descartes’ formula –  ‘I think therefore I am’ – is much more than just that. I am emotional because I am.  I am angry because I am.  I am outraged because I am. I am horrified because I am.

If the politicians are none of these things, in the face of such inhumane crimes, what are they?  Truly human, or windup replicas with a key in the back?

Cognitive Dissonance

Most Israeli Jews are 100 per cent behind the war on Gaza, now extended to Lebanon.

Many want even more war than they are already getting. Wiping out the civilian infrastructure and massacring the people is not enough. They all have to go. A talk show panellist talks of what he would do if he had the chance. Give me the button, I’ll press it and whoof!! They’ll all be gone.  The others laugh.

It is not that Israelis don’t have a conscience. They do. They demonstrated in their hundreds of thousands, night after night, month after month for more than a year against the trickery of Benyamin Netanyahu.

The cause was his attempt to put the judiciary under the control of parliament.  Then there’s the hostage situation and the demonstrations over the government’s failure to negotiate their release.

What there has not been is even one demonstration against the mass killing of civilians in Gaza. Even if Hamas is the enemy, how can the killing of 17,000 children, to take just one awful statistic among many, be ignored, be treated with indifference, be justified as someone else’s fault?

Even cemeteries and agricultural land are bombed.  Are they also the enemy, to be destroyed along with everything else?

In 1973 the Hungarian Jewish orientalist Raphael Patai wrote a book called The Arab Mind,  followed a few years later by The Jewish Mind.  There is no such thing as an Arab mind or a Jewish mind, of course, but there is a mindset which can be shaped and used for nefarious purposes, as German minds were in the 1930s.

After 1945, Germans said they did not know about the concentration camps.

That might be true because they lived in a state with a press and radio network totally controlled by the state but Jewish Germans were being removed from their midst so they knew at least that much and had to wonder where they were they were being sent. They had to hear the whispers.

Excuses are made for the Israelis on the grounds that their media suppresses the full horror of what their military is doing in Gaza and Lebanon but in an age of social media these excuses are not remotely credible.

The Israelis do know.

Yet far from demonstrating against the horrors being committed in their name, they are urging their government and military to keep going and strike the Palestinians even harder.

As for the history going back to 1948, Israelis either do know the truth but can’t admit it because it would destroy the moral foundations on which their state has been built,  or denial and life-long indoctrination have been so successful that they live in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance.

The ‘Palestine Problem’

Benny Morris,  the Israeli writer, said the ‘Palestine problem’ would have been solved if only Ben-Gurion had finished the job in 1948 and got rid of all the Palestinians. Getting rid of them was the imperative from Herzl onwards.

Now that Netanyahu is trying to finish the job he is being cheered on even by his enemies.

In every category Israel is racking up firsts: the most children killed, the most wounded, the most property destroyed,  the most medics and the most journalists killed in war.

Netanyahu, his government and the military command are the architects of some of the worst crimes in modern history. The disregard for human life is accompanied by sneering at the UN even as Netanyahu steps onto the rostrum with his usual mixture of bluster, threats and lies.

Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has requested a warrant for the arrest of Netanyahu on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation, wilful killing, intentionally attacking a civilian population, extermination, persecution and “other inhumane acts.”

Yet Sharri Markson, of the Sky Australia news network, can still gush after sitting down with Netanyahu for a personal briefing: “Imagine the chance to sit down with Winston Churchill during his fight against the Nazis. That’s what this was like.”

The questions that arise from this statement must be the substance of other articles: no room in this one. 

In The Fate of the Jews, Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht wrote of “a people torn between Israeli power and Jewish ethics.” In the 40 years since the book was published, Israeli criminality has multiplied a thousandfold.

Feuerlicht writes that in Israel “Jews have once again made a covenant with death.”  She refers to a subliminal ‘death wish.’ Others have said the same. Certainly, Israel could scarcely have done more in the past 76 years to antagonize the people with whom it says it came to live in peace.

For Feurlicht, Israel is not the Messiah “but the Golem. Created to save the Jews it has turned on its creators, corrupting and destroying them by its very success at making them a nation like all other.”

The Golem is a clay or iron avatar of death and destruction in Jewish mythology, also one possibly of hope.

The death and destruction is what Feurlicht means but Israel is not a state like any other. It is a state that has progressively isolated itself from the rest of the world by its wild and lawless behavior.

It is not Israel that is out of step with the rest of the world but, in Israel’s eyes, the rest of the world that is out of step with Israel. Armed and encouraged by the US, it marches relentlessly towards its fate.

(The Palestine Chronicle)