source: thewe.cc
By Chris Hedges
Israel has been poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war.
It has been morally bankrupted by the sanctification of victimhood, which it
uses to justify an occupation that rivals the brutality and racism of apartheid
South Africa. Its democracy—which was always exclusively for Jews—has been
hijacked by extremists who are pushing the country toward fascism. Many of
Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens—1 million of them—have left the
country. Its most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and
journalists—Israeli and Palestinian—are subject to constant state surveillance,
arbitrary arrests and government-run smear campaigns. Its educational system,
starting in primary school, has become an indoctrination machine for the
military. And the greed and corruption of its venal political and economic
elite have created vast income disparities, a mirror of the decay within
America’s democracy.
And yet, the hard truths about Israel remain largely
unspoken. Liberal supporters of Israel decry its excesses. They wring their
hands over the tragic necessity of airstrikes on Gaza or Lebanon or the
demolition of Palestinian homes. They assure us that they respect human rights
and want peace. But they react in inchoate fury when the reality of Israel is
held up before them. This reality implodes the myth of the Jewish state. It
exposes the cynicism of a state whose real goal is, and always has been, the
transfer, forced immigration or utter subjugation and impoverishment of
Palestinians inside Israel and the occupied territories. Reality shatters the
fiction of a peace process. Reality lays bear the fact that Israel routinely
has used deadly force against unarmed civilians, including children, to steal
half the land on the West Bank and crowd forcibly displaced Palestinians into
squalid, militarized ghettos while turning their land and homes over to Jewish
settlers. Reality exposes the new racial laws adopted by Israel as those once
advocated by the fanatic racist Meir Kahane. Reality unveils the Saharonim
detention camp in the Negev Desert, the largest detention center in the world.
Reality mocks the lie of open, democratic debate, including in the country’s
parliament, the Knesset, where racist diatribes and physical threats, often
enshrined into law, are used to silence and criminalize the few who attempt to
promote a civil society. Liberal Jewish critics inside and outside Israel,
however, desperately need the myth, not only to fetishize Israel but also to
fetishize themselves. Strike at the myth and you unleash a savage vitriol,
which in its fury exposes the self-adulation and latent racism that lie at the
core of modern Zionism.
There are very few intellectuals or writers who have the
tenacity and courage to confront this reality. This is what makes Max
Blumenthal’s “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel” one of the most
fearless and honest books ever written about Israel. Blumenthal burrows deep
into the dark heart of Israel. The American journalist binds himself to the
beleaguered and shunned activists, radical journalists and human rights
campaigners who are the conscience of the nation, as well as Palestinian
families in the West Bank struggling in vain to hold back Israel’s ceaseless
theft of their land. Blumenthal, in chapter after chapter, methodically rips
down the facade. And what he exposes, in the end, is a corpse.
No comments:
Post a Comment