Wounded Knee in Gaza

There have been many awful and deliberately incorrect & frankly retarded analogies made to the attack on Gaza (What if Milton Keynes launched rockets at Coventry? You’d attack wouldn’t you?) usually rendered in such a sublimely ignorant way so as to ignore the preceding siege and original ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Not to mention prior to the latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks. However one analogy does seem apposite, Chris Floyd–

…what we have been witnessing in Palestine over the past several decades is a remarkable echo of the dispossession and destruction of the Native American nations by the United States. There are myriad differences, of course, but the broad outline is basically the same: a people denigrated as primitive and inferior are being stripped of their land, driven into poverty and desperation, and killed in large numbers by another people who believe that their “manifest destiny” and moral superiority justify violent conquest and repression. Any violent resistance to the conquest is treated as barbaric terrorism — and another justification for yet more repression, for even harsher tactics to grind down the conquered, secure “the frontier” and make it safe for “settlers” and the “civilization” they bring.

One reason that Israel persists in its harsh policies of decimation and destruction against the Palestinians is that such methods very often work: you can dispossess another people, destroy all but an ineffective remnant of their society and colonize their land to your own lasting profit and advantage. And you can do it in such a thoroughgoing manner that there will be no realistic possibility of the conquered people ever rising again to take back what was theirs. This is the example that the United States has set for Israel. It is unlikely to work in the same way or with the same degree of success for Israel in 21st century, for a number of reasons. In fact, it can — and probably will — end in disaster. But it is not an irrational policy; it does have many successful historical precedents — including the history of Israel’s chief benefactor.

He links to an article from The London Review of Books by Henry Siegman [director of the US/Middle East Project and a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme at SOAS. He was a senior fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 to 2006.] entitled The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam–

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’.

I suppose those who stand with Israel right or wrong see themselves as standing against historical Nazism, the Holocaust and contemporary anti-semitic groups and terror gangs. The problem is that self image is just that, an image, a fiction that misuses historical victimisation to claim its current bullying is still actually victim-hood and to oppose it is to side with historical evil and current extremism, a very Manichean Bush-like proposition. But supporting atrocities and domestic repression within Israel is mistaking a label for an ethos, Chris Hedges–

The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity are being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians betrays the memory of those killed in other genocides, from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not—no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against—you are culpable.

“The state of Israel, like any other state,” [Uri] Avnery said, “cannot tolerate having its citizens shelled, bombed or rocketed, but there has been no thought as to how to solve the problem through political means or to analyze where this phenomenon has come from, what has caused it. Israelis, as a whole, cannot put themselves in the shoes of others. We are too self-centered. We cannot stand in the shoes of Palestinians or Arabs to ask how we would react in the same situation. Sometimes, very rarely, it happens. Years ago when Ehud Barak was asked how he would behave if were a Palestinian, he said, ‘I would join a terrorist organization.’ If you do not understand Hamas, if you do not understand why Hamas does what it does, if you don’t understand Palestinians, you take recourse in brute force.”

Uri Avnery:- Nearly seventy ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called “the Red Army” held the millions of the town’s inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands. Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it the Blitz. This is the description that would now appear in the history books – if the Germans had won the war.

However the scales are falling from the eyes of many, although American politicians remain utterly moribund (I never found Franken that funny anyway, have you seen that Stuart Smalley movie? If it weren’t for Vincent D’Onofrio it’d be unwatchable). Outside of the carefully biased US corporate media the truth of the extremism now loose in Israel is getting through, wingnut Avigdor Lieberman not so subtly calls for Palestinians to be nuked-

Jerusalem Post– Operation Cast Lead must continue until Hamas “loses the will to fight,” Israel Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman said on Tuesday. “Israel won’t be secure so long as Hamas is in power, and therefore we need to come to a decision that we will break the will of Hamas to keep fighting,” he said during a speech at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University.

“We must continue to fight Hamas just like the United States did with the Japanese in World War II,” Lieberman added. “Then, too, the occupation of the country was unnecessary.”

In 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the US following two atomic bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A ground invasion of mainland Japan had been prepared at the time, but was avoided due to the Japanese capitulation after the bombings.

Of Avigdor Lieberman Jonathan Cook says-

“is the likely face of Israel’s political future. He has been publicly promoting, and garnering support for, the expulsion of Israel’s Palestinian minority, a policy that has been secretly formulated by more mainstream leaders for some time.”

It is clear IDF forces are killing Palestinians without care to any concept of war crimes. Keeping the narrative on Hamas, security, terrorism masks the true motor of this slaughter, racism in the service of a colonial project.

If your only answer to what the cavalry did is-‘ah yes but the injuns killed some settlers’ not only do you fail to see the big picture but you fail to be an ally of the oppressed, sabotage all of the lessons of the Nazi genocides & the dispossessions of indigenous peoples of their lands throughout history. (Also zionism is a political/religious ideology the absolute merging of ‘church & state’ yet oddly is carelessly supported by most US politicians who often find their votes from people who insist on the separation of religion and government, it’s amazing the compromises imperialism will foster).