This Is Israel

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

This is Israel. This is what the Zionist project looks like. The dead kids. The blown-out hospitals. The desperate, starving civilians. This is it.

There is no alternate version of Israel where these things are not happening. The liberal Zionist vision of a two-state solution and a just and peaceful Israel exists solely in the imaginations of the people who envision it. Nothing like it has ever existed. Everything about the modern state of Israel is unyieldingly hostile to that vision.

You either support the existence of the Israel you see before you, or you support the end of the apartheid Zionist entity. There is no hidden third option. There are no other positions on the menu. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy land.

You either want to burn children alive, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately starve civilians, or you don’t. You either want to bomb hospitals, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately assassinate Palestinian journalists while forbidding foreign journalists entry into Gaza, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately massacre civilians and systematically destroy civilian infrastructure in order to force the removal of Palestinians from a Palestinian territory, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you must oppose the state of Israel.

That’s Israel, the state. Not just Netanyahu. Not just extremist settlers. Not just “far right elements within the Israeli government”. Israel itself. Because everything we are seeing Israel do is the result of everything Israel is as a state.

Everything Israel is doing is the result of everything it has always been. As soon as the west decided to drop a settler-colonialist state on top of a pre-existing civilization wherein the new immigrants would receive preferential treatment over the indigenous inhabitants who were already living there, it became inevitable that Israel would wind up in the condition it’s in today.

Because there was no way to uphold that status quo without mass displacement and nonstop tyranny, violence and abuse. There was no way to set up a tiered society where one tier is placed above the other without indoctrinating the public to accept that apartheid system by systematically dehumanizing the members of the disempowered group.

Set up a status quo of dehumanizing a group of people and manufacturing consent for violence and abuse against them, and you will inevitably wind up with a far right apartheid state which is committing genocide, as surely as dropping a stone off a building will result in a stone falling to the ground.

What we are seeing in Gaza today was baked into the state of Israel ever since its inception.

All those dead kids on your social media feed are the fruit of a tree whose seed was planted after the second world war. That tree has been bearing more and more fruit, and it will continue to for as long as it remains standing. Because that’s just the kind of tree it is. The only kind of tree it ever could have been.

Saying “I support Israel but I don’t support the actions of Netanyahu in Gaza” is like saying “I like this apple tree but only when it sprouts coconuts instead of apples.” That is not the kind of tree it is. The apple tree will only produce apples, and the genocide tree will only produce genocide.

Israel’s supporters avoid confronting obvious truths like these. Support for Israel depends on mass-scale psychological compartmentalization. Everything about it revolves around avoiding unpleasant truths instead of deeply and viscerally reckoning with them.

Averting the eyes from the video footage of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. Averting the eyes from the contradictions between the values they purport to hold and everything Israel is as a state. Averting the eyes from the mountains upon mountains of evidence staring us all in the face. That’s the only way support for Israel is able to continue.

In order to become a truth-driven species, we need to stop hiding from uncomfortable truths. And one of our favorite hiding places for uncomfortable truths at this point in history is the modern state of Israel, and the western empire’s support for it.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my mailing list, social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Feature image via Wikimedia Commons/IDF.