ALWAYS A TIME FOR WAR & TERROR
“It is time for war”, says Netanyahu. “The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies”, Genghis Khan is supposed to have said. The Guardian reports with some glee that ‘Large-scale warfare occurred in Europe ‘1,000 years earlier than previously thought’. It would have been depressing to think that there was a distant time when there was no warfare. The Green Party Vice Chancellor of Germany, Robert Habeck says “Israel’s Sicherheit ist deutsche Staatsräson” (Israel’s security is German raison d'être). He argues that the Holocaust necessitates post-war Germans to do whatever is necessary to support Israel’s security, and her right to defend herself against Hamas, including a reoccupation of Gaza. And since Hamas is the elected government of Gaza, a war against Hamas is a war against Gaza, just like the Allies fought a war against the Nazis, meaning Germany. Bombing the hell out of Dresden – killing mostly civilians – obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki – killing mainly civilian – were, and still are, considered, if not justified but at least necessary to avoid prolonged bloodshed. As such contemporary Germans (and Japanese for that matter) always seem to be in a difficult position, having to justify the defeat of their evil ancestors. So, if Hamas gets defeated, will the people of Gaza have to justify their own suffering, their own defeat, since they were governed by a terrorist organisation that attacked and murdered Israeli civilians? Didn’t the Nazis enjoy a measure of popular support amongst the German population? Doesn’t Hamas enjoy popular support from the people of Gaza? Are the people thus to blame, and do they deserve everything that is coming to them? Worse, any German civilians that did not support the Nazis were either murdered by them or used as human shields. Same for Hamas? This constant analogy made by German and Israeli politicians in power is of course highly questionable but cannot be questioned. The historical contexts are clearly miles apart and as such not comparable in any way. All that seems to count is the present context: a terrorist attack that requires revenge: you killed 1,400 of us so we kill 14,000 of you – randomly selected, as the Germans did with the partisans. It sounds totally insane but there is method in the madness: if you manage to randomly kill civilians you demonstrate that the state (as the tsar in Russia) cannot guarantee the safety of his subjects, a revolution might be triggered. Hamas saw the Israeli mass demonstrations against Netanyahu and might have calculated that this is the right time for a ‘terrorist’ attack, triggering regime change in Israel. Obviously, it was a terrible miscalculation, at least in the short term. People who insist on the Nazi-Hamas analogy will ascribe the even more insane statement by Hitler and Co. that all Germans deserve to die because they failed miserably in the noble effort to ‘vanquish their enemies’. If there are any historical similarities between the 3rd Reich and Israel, it is the tragic descent into genocidal racism: Nazis defining the Jewish race as sub-human, and in a repeat of the cycle of violence, Zionists defining Palestinians (and Arabs in general) as less than human. The Palestinian journalist Arwa Mahdawi asks in a Guardian headline “Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so.” The propensity of so-called humans to de-humanize a perceived enemy may be some sort of primitive defence mechanism lurking just below the thin veneer of civilisation, and if so, the meaning of life is reduced to the ‘survival of the fittest’, a never-ending fight to the death, defending against disease, pestilence, vermin, weeds, wolves, witches, and the knives aimed at our backs. Unfortunately, the history of mankind is littered with evidence to support such a sad notion. A sideline of this evidence is the undeniable fact that such de-humanization is often accompanied by religious fanaticism which elevates the stakes to the level of divine retribution, what with martyrdom as the ultimate cause célèbre. That we, as humans, have been doing this for at least 5,000 years – evidenced by mass graves and broken skulls – is testament to the saying that we learn nothing from history – only to repeat it again and again. Given the technological advances in the weaponry employed – not to speak of the technologies that rape the earth – one must be sympathetic to a deep depression amongst people who harbour a faint belief that a better world is still possible. A faint belief in the peaceful coexistence of humans, joyfully accommodating mother nature as far as she showers us with her bounties of food and shelter while keeping a scientific eye on everything that can go wrong, with the motto of prevention being better than the cure. But wait a minute, there is no time now for such clichés, my friend, for now is time for war – as always.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtAtsdco-8
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/07/palestinians-human-rights-israel-gaza
