WALSH – A Harsh Spotlight on the West’s Moral Bankruptcy, Part 2

(Image: Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona, Unsplash.com)

MANY OF US want to protect Israel’s right to exist, but not while allowing another nation’s people to be destroyed.

It’s already unacceptable that since Oct. 7, Israel has killed more than 21,000 Palestinians caged in Gaza. And now Israel is killing displaced Gazans huddled in refugee camps in the West Bank, too.

Is this the real face of Israel? Has the Zionist agenda always been hidden just below the surface for the majority of Israelis? Has this deep-seated racism, cruelty, and exceptionalism from Israelis always been there, waiting to explode?

Everything changed on Oct. 7. Up until then, most Israelis had been detached, ignorant, and unconcerned about the ongoing, brutal and illegal military occupation in Palestinian territories.

Now, up to 83 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population favours removing the entire Palestinian population from Gaza. What will the hard-right racist Netanyahu government do to restore faith in Israel’s high-tech security apparatus?

Which option will Israel choose?

Will Israel stop the occupation and negotiate for a two-state solution, wipe out as many Palestinians in Gaza as possible, or forcibly relocate the remaining Palestinians to other parts of the world, never to return to their indigenous homeland?

How did this one attack change people’s values and humanity so easily?

The Hamas attack was an atrocity, no argument. But the wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians is also an atrocity.  How can one be condemned while the other is justified? I have no words to describe this but as a form of insanity.

The real criminals here are not Hamas. They are the Zionist Israeli government, the U.S. and the rest of the West, which ignored and enabled 75 years of oppression, apartheid, and cruelty and allowed occupation and land theft to go on unchecked. This allowed the persecuted to become the persecutors, the victims of genocide to become the victimizers.

Imagine living in a cage under constant attack and persecution for over seven decades. Apartheid is always going to engender violence. The Oct. 7 attack was likely a foregone conclusion.

The former head of Israel’s Secret Service and commander-in-chief of the Israeli navy, Ami Ayalon, squarely blamed his own country and the U.S. government for the Hamas attack and called out Zionist Israel as a terrorist state.

“Our government does not recognize the Palestinians as a people,” he said, offering as proof a Sept. 22, 2023 UN meeting in which Israel PM Benjamin Netanyahu held up a map of the “Greater Land of Israel” which completely erased the existence of Palestinians and dismissed any pretense of a two-state solution. https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/article-760189.

President Joe Biden participates in a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, Wednesday, September 20. 2023 at the InterContinental Barclay in New York City. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)

In order to destabilize Palestine, Israel has long had a policy of ‘divide and rule’” aimed to prevent Palestinians from having a unified leadership so that Israel’s leaders could say, ‘nobody to talk with, nothing to talk about,’ when talk about a two-state solution is raised.

To this end, Israel “enhanced and assisted Hamas, transferred money, etc.,” so that Hamas could go on controlling Gaza while the Palestinian authority controlled the West Bank and the two fought each other, said Ayalon. A human disaster in Gaza would create a state of chaos, a vacuum Israel could move in to fill. “This is exactly the theory of the most radical, fundamental Muslim organizations; this is exactly the theology and the strategy of ISIS and of Al Qaeda,” said Ayalon.

In Ayalon’s assessment, “70 to 80%” of Palestinians just support Hamas because it is perceived as the only administration fighting against Israeli occupation and for Palestinian freedom, while Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are perceived as “Israeli collaborators.”

Added to this, the U.S., already supporting Israel with $billions in war materials, lately offered a new Middle East plan that completely ignored the Palestinians. This was “a major mistake” and one of the prime causes of the Oct. 7 atrocity, said Ayalon.

“The Palestinians see themselves as a people, a nation… They felt that they had nothing to lose and this was the only way for them to show to the world ‘you will not be able to create stability in this region if you will bypass Palestinians,’” he said. (Video of original interview. https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/12/11/israeli-hamas-war-intelligence-strategy-and-day-after-event-8208).

Hamas attack didn’t occur in isolation

The Hamas attack did not occur in isolation. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy said, “If one attack pushes so many Israelis to become inhuman, imagine what it does to Palestinians who live under those attacks for decades.”

Once we’ve exhausted the “but Hamas!”, “but Oct. 7!” and “but Israel has a right to defend itself!” excuses to justify Israel’s deliberate butchery of civilians via airstrikes and siege warfare, we need to look in a mirror, as our basic humanity is all that separates us from predatory animals.

People ask what they can do, what difference can they make?  We must speak up.  Especially in the face of an overwhelming UN ceasefire vote which Israel and U.S. are ignoring, we must demand that our politicians continue to propose a cease-fire, facilitate immediate humanitarian aid and establish a two-state solution as soon as possible.

This is a significant barometer of humanity right now. You don’t have to be a Middle Eastern Arab to empathize with the plight of Palestinians suffering under Zionist apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now this genocide.  You only have to be human.

In the end, it’s about the people – those who suffer, those who are responsible, and those who care enough to take a stand. Silence in the face of injustice is complicity.  – John Pilger.

Denis Walsh is a former three-term Kamloops City councillor. He chose not to run again in 2022, convinced that City councillors should step aside after a maximum of three terms to allow others to serve and to experience being on the “outside looking in.”