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<div class="header reader-header" style="display: block;"
dir="ltr"> <font size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/17/israel-commemorates-nakba-with-mass-murder-at-the-gaza-fence/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/05/17/israel-commemorates-nakba-with-mass-murder-at-the-gaza-fence/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Israel Commemorates Nakba with Mass
Murder at the Gaza Fence</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/cuxere/"
rel="nofollow">Ajamu Baraka</a> - May 17, 2018</span></div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>catastrophe</em>in
Arabic, when 750,000 Palestinians were displaced and
turned into permanent refugees.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>On the 70<sup>th</sup>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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 <em>inhabits </em>him, that Hitler is his <em>demon,</em>that
if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and
that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is
not <em>the crime</em>in itself, <em>the crime against
man,</em>it is not <em>the humiliation if man as
such, </em>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.” )</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p> <em><strong>Ajamu Baraka</strong> 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. </em> </p>
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