Nothing but the truth. Even if against me.

Nothing but the truth. Even if against me.

Wednesday, November 8, 2023

Israel's Deep but Silent Guilt over its Creation

 The Associated Press has an interesting article on how Israelis feel about the carnage in Gaza entitled,

Israelis overwhelmingly are confident in the justice of the Gaza war, even as world sentiment sours

https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-hamas-palestinians-war-mood-0cebcbcf0550ee08c0d757334f69851d

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The fact that Israelis overwhelmingly approve of their army's genocide in Gaza stems, of course, from a need for revenge for the Oct 7 Hamas attacks.

But for those left-wing Israelis who had been calling for peace and understanding with the Palestinians to now revert back to becoming so hateful of the Palestinians to the point of accepting that their army is murdering children by the thousands, reveals something else.

These peaceniks of Israeli society assumed that the ethnic cleansing and rape of Palestine by their parents and grandparents in 1948 could somehow be buried and forgotten if only we gave the Palestinians a semblance of reparation, a semblance of dignity, and perhaps a semblance of a state of their own.

What the Hamas attack has done is to unravel the illusion of peace and bring back under question the entire construct of the state of Israel over the ashes of Palestine to its ground zero: The 1948 forceful and barbaric displacement and massacre of the native population in order to create a Jewish state. 

The Hamas attacks have resurrected the criminal and fundamentally unjust creation of Israel in the minds of the older generation of Israelis. But for the younger generation who did not live through the murderous terror campaign their elders prosecuted back in the 1940s, this is a new trauma. It not only exposes them to the lies and propaganda that tried to justify the rape of Palestine as a necessary evil to create Israel, but it makes them question why it has all been buried under a pile of silence. Older Israelis wanted to forget and move on and take the murderous birth of their country to the grave with them. But younger Israelis and American Jews do not understand the neceessity of such evil being inflicted on another people.

Israelis are hiding their confusion about their genesis and identity. For now. Some had begun to try and deal with the dirty secret, e.g. the Israeli doctoral student who studied the rape of the seacoast Palestinain village of Tantura by the Israeli terrorist "pioneers". I expect that the younger Israeli generation will go through a wrenching soul-searching once the dust settles. For now, they cannot fathom living like they have for decades under constant threat of war, which is something that is likely to continue for a long time. 

Clearly, the Israelis realize their very existence is based on a crime against another people whom they thought they could shove in a corner and forget about. But like Kurt Vonegut once said about a similar situation (I think it the second Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq): It's as if there is this party attended by snotty upper class people, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, yet there is this stench coming from somewhere that everybody notices by says nothing about. 

Palestine is this stench that will never go away from the nostrils of the Israelis.

 [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/02/tantura-israels-independence-as.html]

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