Israel’s march to madness

‘My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her hometown in Germany; a German soldier shot her dead in her bed. My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.’
Gerald Kaufman MP, speaking in the UK House of Commons, 16 January 2009

On 1 January this year, the Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni made a flying visit to Paris to meet President Nicolas Sarkozy on the seventh day of her army's bombing campaign of Gaza. At the end of the meeting, according to the French press, she expressed satisfaction at the ‘comprehension’ shown by the French president regarding Israel's position, adding graciously that Israel was under attack from Gaza because it stood for ‘the values of the free world, to which France too belonged’.

A few days later, in keeping with the values of that ‘free world’, the Israeli ground attack of Gaza began under a total media blackout. In defiance of the Israeli supreme court, no journalists could cover the destruction of Gaza and the daily carnage of its defenceless, starving civilians, most of them women and children.

This is rather ungrateful of the Israelis, considering the decades of faithful service provided by the West's vast media network, always ready to promote Israeli versions of every aspect of the Palestinian conflict, no matter how far from reality those versions may be.

Livni's patronising remark about her country and France belonging to the same exclusive club called the ‘free world’ is typical of the Israeli mindset; other such qualities this racist, military society claims for itself are ‘democratic’, ‘advanced’, ‘civilised’ and so on. Most importantly, Israelis believe that, in common with other parts of the West, they constitute the civilised world. Indeed, they are the very guardians of European and American values against backward Arab hordes who are Muslims, or ‘Islamic fundamentalists’ to use the current label.

This line of thinking will be familiar to those who remember the struggle against apartheid in South Africa under racist Boer rule. The Afrikaners also claimed that they were part of the free (white) world, and that they were in Africa to uphold European values and to try and civilise the natives – the indigenous black populations – preferably down the barrel of a gun.

The Afrikaners also believed that they had come from Holland to Africa by divine design, that their presence there was sanctified by the Almighty who had led them to this ‘promised land’. Thus it was their God-given mission to colonise and occupy the land, to domesticate the black man, to use him as a beast of burden and to promote Christianity in its purest form, that of the Dutch Reformed Church.

This type of deification by a group of its own experiences of exile and settlement in the ‘new world’ was also common to the European settlers of the 17th century who left home for religious reasons to go to North America and South Africa. Upon arrival, they found lands ‘empty’ of European-type societies and so devised another ‘mission’, namely through possessing these territories as providential, God-given ‘homelands’ and dispossessing their original inhabitants.

The subsequent land-grabs, population displacements and genocide visited upon the indigenous populations in these countries were also justified on religious grounds and over time, notions of racial, cultural, intellectual and physical superiority, civilising missions and so on developed into a form of collective megalomania.

In South Africa, the Afrikaner sense of identity soon became detached from the original European heritage and engendered a sense of uniqueness in being the ‘white tribe’ of Africa. The belief in racial exclusiveness, purity and superiority became the basis of all Afrikaner thinking and the ethos of their entire range of institutions and political organisations. This process evolved over centuries to become a racial state or ‘volkstaat’ in Afrikaans.

In Israel, the same ‘herrenvolk’ (master race) syndrome was already deeply installed in the psyche of the European Jews who came to settle in Palestine even before 1948, the date the UN (with an exclusively Northern membership) ‘created’ the Jewish homeland. The experience of the holocaust (another singularly European episode) gave a decisive motivation to this idea of a ‘homeland’, as did the geographical re-location of a religious tenet: a biblical ‘chosen race’ finding its ‘promised land.’ European Jews seemed to believe the land of Palestine was theirs before they had even reached it.

Similarly, sixty years later, the continuing land and water-grabbing, racial persecution, physical brutality and ethnic cleansing directed at the Palestinians have been – and continue to be – justified on the basis of divine dispensations.

In the name of God, the Israeli ‘volkstaat’ protects the rights of Jews from all over the world to grab Palestinian houses, farms and land while treating the Palestinian people as refugees in their own country. When the latter resist such treatment they are called ‘terrorists’. Israeli occupation of Palestine subsequent to 1948 has received total support from Europe, for obvious reasons, and from the US, itself originally a settler society. The Afrikaners, on the other hand, were not so lucky.

After the end of the Second World War, Africa's ‘herrenvolk’ faced a rude awakening when the rest of the continent began the struggle for independence. As early as 1960, the Pretoria government was forced to withdraw from the hitherto all-white Commonwealth because of its racist policies, and over the next decades it acquired pariah status for the same reasons, in particular at the UN and the major international sporting organisations. As a result, the Boer state became more racist at home and apartheid became an ideology, then an obsession and eventually a source of paranoia.

When the liberation movements of southern Africa, including the ANC, began to pose a serious challenge, the Afrikaners reacted with violent repression against the black population on the grounds that the militants were ‘terrorists’ and worse, communists. And when faced with criticism from anti-apartheid circles in capitalist Europe, the Boers pulled out the classical mantra of ‘European values’ which they claimed they were defending on behalf of the West against the blacks and their Marxist masters. The idea that the black majority population was fighting for its freedom in its own country was neither comprehensible nor acceptable to the ‘white tribe’.

This is exactly the same argument that the Israelis have always used, and did again, as they butchered Palestinian infants with illegal bombs in the current siege of Gaza. Consequently, many Europeans are now confused at this link being made on their behalf between their humanist, egalitarian values and the barbaric and cowardly onslaughts of the soldiers of the ‘chosen race’ against civilians.

The South African writer-poet, Breyten Breytenbach, living in exile in Paris in 1987, brilliantly dismantled the theory being purveyed at the time by the rulers in Pretoria that they were the champions of European values. He cautioned Europeans and Americans against this discourse. The Afrikaners may superficially resemble contemporary Western society in that they possess a certain level of intellectual accomplishment, a certain type of economic development and an impressive mastery of technology. However, Breytenbach explained, in reality they are living in the past and in total ignorance of the revolutions and changes in European thought and consciousness which have occurred over the last three centuries.

The Boers, having left Europe centuries ago, had not participated, for example, in the age of Enlightenment, the debate over slavery, the scientific revolution under Darwin, the separation of church and state, the period of industrialisation and so on, all of which changed the way Europeans thought about the world and their place within it.

Consequently, wrote Breytenbach, there was no way the Afrikaners could defend European values because they had no idea what these were. They were defending what they believed in, namely racial superiority, separate development, slavery and a primitive idea of Christianity that had also vanished from Europe ages ago.

This analysis holds true for the Israelis who have succeeded in deluding the Europeans for the last six decades (the rest of us do not matter to them) because of the guilt over the holocaust. The automatic reaction this guilt produces in Europeans and Americans of all generations blocks their sense of objectivity.

In Africa, Asia and Latin America, people remain lucid in the face of the dispossession and massacre of the Palestinians by the Israeli settlers and occupiers, as indeed was the case in the struggle of the people of South Africa.

All stakeholders of the ‘herrenvolk’ worldview share the same pathology; they do not live in the real world. They either live in the past, like the Boers, or in a special fantasy enclosure of their own where they take their myths and legends for political realities, as do the Israelis.

In this day and age, can a society seriously claim that it has been ‘chosen by God’ and that it can colonise and occupy a land because ‘God has promised it to us’ and still be considered mentally sound?

How can an Israeli prime minister say that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian; they do not exist’, as Golda Meir once did, and not raise questions about that minister’s sense of reality? The same must be asked of Foreign Minister Livni who said ‘there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza’, ignoring the total blockade inflicted on the place, ignoring the daily shooting of ambulances and aid-workers, and ignoring the bombs dropped on homes and schools where children sheltered.

What planet and which century are Israeli leaders inhabiting? Is the rest of the world to be held hostage to a people so obsessed with their own prerogatives and rights that they can no longer tell right from wrong?

In their flight from rationality, the Israelis, like the Afrikaners during apartheid, have forgotten that like the rest of us, they are a product of human history, not of some supernatural or extra-terrestrial event! The persecution of the Jews of Europe under Nazi Germany came out of the history of that country and the state of Israel came about as a result of the Balfour Declaration, which was a decision over the British empire's carve-up of Palestine.

Exactly like the Afrikaners, the Israelis have come to Palestine from Europe with convictions about their own uniqueness and superiority which they have imposed on the local inhabitants on pain of death and destruction. The Jewish ‘homeland’ may have started out as a refuge for the persecuted but it has now become a law unto itself, a fanatical fortress to which no international standards and obligations apply.

For the last three weeks, the Israeli army has descended into an orgy of blood-letting in Gaza, especially of children and infants. The intensity of the hatred for Palestinians which inhabits the army and apparently the whole nation is surely a sign of racist paranoia. As Mahmood Abbas, prime minister of the Palestinian authority has said, ‘The Israelis want to wipe out our people.’

The desire to ‘wipe out’ an entire people is a common trait of the ‘herrenvolk’ mindset; this is what Golda Meir meant when she uttered an obvious (to her) truism: ‘There is no such thing as a Palestinian.’

The attack on the Gaza strip is not a war on ‘terrorists’; it is madness and a march of folly of a people locked in a world of their own.

* Annar Cassam, a Tanzanian, is a former consultant at UNESCO/PEER Nairobi and former director of the UNESCO Office, Geneva.
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