[News] Israel Commemorates Nakba with Mass Murder at the Gaza Fence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/17/israel-commemorates-nakba-with-mass-murder-at-the-gaza-fence/ 



  Israel Commemorates Nakba with Mass Murder at the Gaza Fence

by Ajamu Baraka <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cuxere/> - May 17, 2018
------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the essential features of European colonialism were the 
boundaries drawn between Europeans and so-called Western civilization 
and everyone else. Even during the European enlightenment, the accepted 
philosophical justifications for human inequality in Western liberal 
thought meant that women, the colonized, the enslaved and non-property 
holders occupied different rungs on the ladder of humanity and were 
excluded from demanding same inherent rights as the White, male bourgeoisie.

The “othering” of human beings on the basis of race, gender, religion, 
class and later nationality was embedded in the collective consciousness 
of Europe. But in the colonial context, the process of othering wasn’t 
just psychological but also physical.  In that context the 
stratification of humanity into those categories of people who had 
rights that were recognized and everyone else, had deadly consequences 
for those individuals and peoples who fell into the category of “other.”

Barbed wire, apartheid walls, railroad tracks, fences guarded by armed 
officers of the state, and the reservation system perfected in the 
United States as part of its conquest and containment of Indigenous 
nations, were some of the boundaries used to police difference.

It is at one of those colonial separations between the “fully human” 
Israelis and the Palestinians where the latest colonial outrage is 
taking place. In one day at a fence on a barren strip of land in Gaza 
that separates “Israel” from the open-air concentration camp where 1.5 
million Palestinians are confined known as Gaza, over 50 Palestinians 
were systematically murdered by heavily armed soldiers positioned 
elevated on mounds of dirt that turned the unarmed protesters who 
approached the fence to protest their confinement and occupation into a 
killing zone. This happened the day before the 70th anniversary of the 
Nakba, or /catastrophe/in Arabic, when 750,000 Palestinians were 
displaced and turned into permanent refugees.

While the bodies of men, women and even children were rushed away from 
the fence after having their bodies torn to shreds by live ammunition, 
the world’s elites were drinking champagne and celebrating the move of 
the embassy of one racist, settler-colonial state—the United States—to 
the conquered capital of another racist, colonial state, Israel.

Watching those scenes of horror, I couldn’t help but wonder about the 
psychological health of anyone who could find a way to reconcile 
themselves to that kind of madness. How one could somehow explain away 
the brutality. How one week you can be prepared to go to war because 
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad allegedly killed over 40 people with 
gas, but remain silent while dozens of human beings are systematically 
murdered right before our eyes. The events in Gaza reminded me once 
again of the insight James Baldwin provided that has become the 
recurring theme of my writings, and that is the psychopathology of white 
supremacy.

“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, 
and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their 
slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children 
whenever and wherever they decide that their ‘vital interests’ are 
menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death; these people are 
not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human 
life, or the conscience of civilized world.”

One would think tear gas and bullets today would tear away any semblance 
of civilization that gave cover to the Israeli colonial project. But 
that pathology is too deeply ingrained in the collective imagination and 
thinking of the West to be jettisoned by one incident of brutality when 
the West has been destroying whole nations over the last decade and a 
half in the Middle East.

On the 70^th anniversary of the Nakba, the “catastrophe” that resulted 
in the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and the theft 
of their lands, homes, and even their household possessions, the message 
today was clear: the Israeli state is prepared to maintain its apartheid 
state by any means necessary.  The catastrophe for the Palestinians was 
the birth of Israel and was celebrated by the Israeli state with tear 
gas, bullets and the blood of Palestinians.

For those of us, confined to the zones of non-being with Palestinians 
and all of the other victims of this 500-year-old nightmare, we have 
always known what Samuel Huntington openly admitted:

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or 
religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) 
but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners 
often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

For the de-colonized, we have always understood that simple fact. Our 
experiences with the horror of European imperialism has steeled us 
against those same very same horrors.  So, we are not surprised or 
shocked by the brutality and the moral hypocrisy of Gaza, because we 
understand Hitler and Nazism. We have had an intimate relationship with 
Hitler and Nazism for over 500 years.

Hitler came to the Americas in 1492. He traveled with the conquistadors 
as they destroyed the Aztecs and then the Incas. He oversaw the 
Transatlantic Slave Trade, then went to the Congo and reduced the 
population by 5 million. He rode with U.S solders at Wounded Knee and 
advised the French, British and Portuguese to attempt to keep their 
colonies after the second imperialist war in 1945 no matter how much 
native blood was shed.

Aime Cesaire captured the historic travels of Hitler and Nazism, the 
Nazism we see today in Gaza and in the halls of the U.S. Congress.

“They say: ‘How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And 
they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that 
it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums 
up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before 
they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated 
that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut 
their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been 
applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that 
Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the 
whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, 
it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack. Yes, it would be 
worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and 
Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very 
Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being 
aware of it, he has a Hitler inside of him, that Hitler /inhabits /him, 
that Hitler is his /demon,/that if he rails against him, he is being 
inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is 
not /the crime/in itself, /the crime against man,/it is not /the 
humiliation if man as such, /it is the crime against the white man, the 
humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe 
colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively 
for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘niggers’ of 
Africa.” )

Zionism aligned itself with the European colonial project and adapted 
its methods, embraced its white supremacy and in the process has written 
its future. Zionism is Hitlerism, as is the capitalist European colonial 
project and so Israel’s fate is sealed as the day of reckoning with the 
500-year European project as it faces its inglorious end.

/*Ajamu Baraka* is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for 
Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party 
ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda 
Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch magazine. /

-- 
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