[News] Zionist massacres are livestreamed to the masses in high definition and still nobody can stop them.

[Anti-Imperialist News]

stevesalaita.com <https://stevesalaita.com/scrolling-through-genocide/>
Scrolling Through Genocide - Steve Salaita
December 10, 2023
------------------------------

Zionist massacres are livestreamed to the masses in high definition and
still nobody can stop them.

Not so long ago there was a common theory to which I subscribed:  that in
an era of mass media and instant streaming the Zionist entity is unable to
fully displace or wantonly slaughter Palestinians because of the scrutiny
it would invite.  You can get away with a lot worse, the thinking goes, if
nobody is watching.

It’s a theory I’ve considered over the years while working in the fields of
Native American and Indigenous Studies.  From the beginning of this work,
over 25 years ago, interlocutors stressed the importance of differences in
comparative analyses.  One crucial difference between Euro-American and
Zionist colonization, everyone agreed, was the timeline.  While
colonization is ongoing in North and South America, often in situations of
great struggle or tension, settlement of the so-called New World precedes
the conquest of modern Palestine by a few centuries.

Those few centuries account for significant developments in jurisprudence,
technology, communications, rhetoric, mobility, demographics, and
diplomacy.  Certain of these developments abet Zionist colonization, but
others create limitations that Euro-Americans didn’t need to worry
over—global outrage or international law, for example.

The other notable difference is one of scale.  Even limiting ourselves to
the borders of the contiguous United States, the landmass subject to
Euro-American settlement is much larger than historic Palestine (along with
the surrounding areas that Zionists fantasize about).  Variations of
geography force us to think about the impact of physical space on conquest,
and, in North America, the intricacies of conquest involving hundreds of
nations.

The points of comparison nevertheless grow stronger with time.

For instance, it has become clear during the past two months in the Gaza
Strip that the Zionist entity is plenty capable of equaling the
belligerence of the American frontier, an era of wholesale ethnic cleansing
thought to be a feature of history.  (“It could never happen today,” people
sometimes would foolishly declare.)  Colonial atrocities of the
past—Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, the Trail of Tears—are now everywhere in
evidence.  The Zionist entity is carrying out a kind of primitive violence
with modern technology.

This violence fills our computer and television screens.  People around the
world get minute-by-minute accounts of massive destruction and widespread
murder.  Certain images have become horrifyingly familiar:  throngs of
refugees queuing for bread; ambulances dodging tank and machine gun fire;
hospitals in disarray; once-dense neighborhoods transformed by aerial
bombardment into kilometers of rubble.  We scroll through photos of men
blindfolded and stripped to their underwear, lined up on the ground like
antiquities in a museum courtyard.  The scrolling continues into pictures
of white body bags in shallow trenches and then into videos of little girls
and boys screaming trauma into the ruins of their childhood.  We are
perhaps the first generation to witness genocide in real time.  History
books about the horrors of the past are written every time somebody opens
social media.

The theory that bearing witness will curtail Israel’s ability to act on
exterminationist fantasies no longer holds.  Information and knowledge, it
turns out, aren’t reliable bulwarks against genocide.  Impunity isn’t
beholden to disapproval.

What does it tell us that the Zionist entity can conduct this genocide in
high definition, with no credible deniability and amid condemnation from
all corners of the world?

It tells us that people serious about Palestinian liberation were right to
despise the so-called radicals who laundered Zionism through celebrity
activism, academic credentialism, NGO astroturf, and the Democratic Party.
An entire class of influencers arose from Bernie Sanders’ failed
presidential campaigns.  They populate hundreds of podcasts and
livestreams.  They wasted incalculable energy and resources promoting a man
who would go on to repeatedly justify the bloody campaign in Gaza.  Now
they deplore Sanders after having extracted all the clout appended to his
name and having ostracized the outliers who accurately tagged him as a
fraud from the get-go.  It was the most noteworthy example of a timeworn
practice:  pursuing access to microphones and *New Yorker* profiles by
subsuming Palestinian liberation to institutions constitutionally hostile
to revolutionary politics.

It tells us that international governing bodies and legal institutions are
at best useless.  Despite some halfhearted hemming and hawing, the UN has
been an accomplice to the Zionist entity’s genocide.  The ICC will never
see an American, Israeli, or EU war criminal on its docket.  The Arab
League pretends to care, but its performance is entirely unconvincing.
Such institutions have been captured by imperialism since their inception.

It tells us that “dialogue” was always a pathway to submission.  The idea
that Israelis and Palestinians should dialogue as a means to peace was
always dubious if only because dialogue can’t work in situations of
disparate power.  But now, with Israelis overwhelmingly in favor of the
genocide, it should be clear that Palestinians never had anyone to dialogue
with in the first place.

It tells us that Western academe was completely unprepared for the material
demands of decolonization despite its popularity as a professional brand.
Many among the intellectual class, including scholars of Fanon like Adam
Shatz
<https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies>
and Lewis Gordon <https://x.com/lewgord/status/1715141192357200012?s=20>,
either disavow or diminish anticolonial resistance or ignore it
altogether.  Academe is where resistance goes for processing and
beautification after it has been completed.  It’s rarely a place for the
organizing stage.

It tells us that deterrence isn’t a game of strategy played by eggheads on
the internet, but an onerous project conditional on guns and rockets.
Academics generally are too scared to say it, or, in an object lesson on
arrogance, don’t actually believe it, but a cache of weapons will always be
more important than a conference panel.

It tells us that electoralism is a sham.  There is no meaningful
ideological variance among U.S. politicians at the national level.  In
practice, they range from center-right to fascist.  In the upcoming
presidential election, for example, voters will get to decide between two
scarcely-functional old farts with histories of sexual misconduct and a
complete devotion to Zionist genocide.

It tells us that racism isn’t simply an attitude, for its origin is social
violence and eventually it will become physically violent in order to
perform its civic mandate.  In the framework of settler colonization,
racism manifests as a yearning for cultural purification through
displacement of the native.

It tells us that capitalism makes death a valuable commodity.  The Zionist
entity isn’t merely an imperialist beachhead; it is a major player in the
international weapons trade.  It tests new munitions, chemicals, and
surveillance technology on Palestinians.  It arms reactionary forces
throughout the Global South.  It serves as a conduit and accomplice to U.S.
policing.  Because of Zionist occupation, corporations enjoy the use of
human subjects as raw material for development and innovation.

It tells us that we wasted a whole lot of time trying to convince the
oppressor that we are worthy of life when the oppressor cannot live without
our extinction.

More than anything, it tells us that in the benighted West there is no
democracy, no free speech, no legislative remedy, no human rights, no right
even to be human.  These are illusions people repeat in an effort to
survive pervasive depravity, or myths they cynically invoke to gather the
crumbs of deprivation.  There is a ruling class and various iterations of
the dispossessed and the dispossessed exist only to serve ruling class
gluttony.

That’s why countless people can deplore a genocide zoomed into our personal
devices without being able to stop it.  We are not simply ineffectual in
the world of policymaking; policymakers are taunting us with their
depravity.

What can we do, then?  It’s important to start by recognizing that the
entire political class, from presidents to online pundits, has no regard
for us—detests us, in fact—and is therefore never a reliable source of
empathy or relief.  Denizens of this class do not want our feedback; they
want us to scroll through the debris of their malevolence.

Upon this recognition, the possibilities become clearer, albeit less
convenient.  But in the spirit of urgency, we can keep it simple:  whether
it happens in darkness or light, on screen or off, the Zionist entity needs
to become an archive we browse as a cautionary tale, or else our future on
this planet will be history.
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