Israel's Motto Is "We Can Have Peace Tomorrow If We Just Kill A Few More People Today"

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Israel’s permanent national security doctrine is basically “We can have peace tomorrow if we just kill a few more people today.”

But it’s always today. Tomorrow never comes.

Israel never succeeds in killing its way to peace, because that’s not actually a thing.

You can’t murder, oppress and tyrannize people into obedience. You can kill off the people who oppose you, but in doing so you just create more people who oppose you. You can scorch the earth killing off every member of Hamas and Hezbollah, but in so doing you just ensure the birth of more Hamases and Hezbollahs.

The only way to murder a population into submission is to kill everyone. To turn the entire middle east into a barren wasteland of death and destruction, so there’s nobody left living to oppose you. That’s the only way “kill today to have peace tomorrow” can work.

And in fairness it did work for other western settler-colonialist projects. In North America and Australia the white man just killed and killed and killed and killed until the opposition was exterminated and the few who remained were broken.

But the indigenous population of historic Palestine is different, in that it doesn’t stand alone. They are surrounded by ancient civilizations who have a longstanding relationship with them, and a kinship of religion and culture. Any move to exterminate the indigenous population like other western settler-colonialist projects have done draws hostilities from surrounding nations, as we are seeing today.

So in order for Israel to kill its way into peace, it needs to not just kill off the Palestinians but kill everyone in the surrounding region who would oppose its doing so. And the Israelis know this, which is why you hear some far right Zionists talking about the need for a “Greater Israel” whose territory extends far beyond Israel’s current borders.

So Israel will always exist in a continuous state of war until it either (A) ceases to exist in its present tyrannical iteration or (B) kills or breaks all its enemies throughout west Asia. That’s the only way the dust can ever settle on the killing.

And that’s why Israel cannot continue to exist in its present iteration. It was a very, very bad idea, just like all the many other very, very bad ideas throughout history, like slavery.

In order for the killing to end, the murderous settler-colonialist project known as Israel must end. This is a big task, but so was freeing the slaves. The only alternative is to plunge further and further down along this trajectory toward more and more killing, drawing in more and more powerful military forces and exponentially expanding the death toll in the process.

A massive war between Israel’s powerful western allies against Iran and its partners in the region would kill millions upon millions of people and devastate the world economy. But that’s precisely the trajectory that western support for Israel’s killing campaigns has us on.

I find this an untenable prospect. It would be much less devastating to dismantle the apartheid state of Israel and make arrangements for the west to absorb anyone who wishes to flee from a state where everyone would have equal rights. It would be difficult, it would be inconvenient, but it would be much, much easier and more ethical than helping Israel continue enacting its “kill today to have peace tomorrow” doctrine.

Nobody has ever presented an argument for why Israel should continue to exist in its present iteration that is both logically and morally defensible. It’s just a crazy, stupid thing we are doing, the same as all the other crazy, stupid things we’ve done throughout history. One day this will be seen clearly by everyone.

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Featured image via the IDF.