Condemning Hamas
I wish to express my utmost admiration for Jewish culture. My family are what’s sometimes called “Lutheran Jews” which refers to Jewish families who at some point converted to Christianity. Which creates a kind of cultural dualism.
I enjoy deli foods and klezmer and I can speak some Yiddish… BUT, if a mohel comes anywhere near me with a scalpel then I will defend myself.
Point is: I kind of have a horse in this race. This is about the culture of my ancestors… that being said, another branch of my family tree were Slavic Muslims. So get ready for some nuance.
Because I do wish to condemn what is the biggest crime against Jewish people since the holocaust. Namely, Zionism.
Because make no mistake, Zionism is colonialism. Not just colonialism of Palestinians, but also colonialism of Jews. Often we talk about human shields when it comes to these kinds of conflicts.
For the most part it’s just NATO writing a blank cheque to deploy what’s called “Free Fire Zones.” Which is basically when you tell a machine gunner to shoot anything that moves in an effort to terrorise people.
Truth is that killing civilians has been NATO’s doctrine for decades, based on the tactics used in the Eastern front by their founding chairman, Adolf Heusinger.
Killing civilians means that you halt economic productivity, army recruitment, infrastructure and just social organising in general. If a military strategist says “Killing civilians is not very effective” then you’re talking to a propagandist who is planning on killing mountains of civilians.
But if you want to discuss human shields then forget Israel and Palestine. Zionism means the United States uses the entire Jewish people as a human shield. Physically, culturally and intellectually.
By putting the star of David on their colonial tanks and colonial troops, they can use antisemitism and religious sectarianism as a way to deflect culpability. But make no mistake: Israel is a US-Backed colony that aims to turn war into money, no different from when the British Empire created conflicts between Hindus and Muslims for the same reason.
Zionism and Judaism are polar opposites, and drawing a star on an American tank or an American fighter jet does not make it any less American.
As you can see from this, Israel turns Jews into fat racists who steal other people’s land. Another way to describe this would be to say that Israel is turning Jews into Americans.
Look at him. The culture that gave us the finest tailors in Odessa and East London is being relegated to sweatpants. Which of course has a lot of utility, but this man doesn’t strike me as a jogger. This is what America does to cultures. They destroy them from within. Poisoning them with cheap mass production from third world slavery. Turn people into a mockery of their ancestors.
Who take the legacy of a diasporic and nomadic people, who are known for being peaceful and civilised, and corrupt them with imperial ambitions.
Israel is not the promised land. Rather, it is a Pharaonic state, sending people into stateless exile. It is a vile and miserable parody of Judaism, and this damage should not be unaccounted for either.
When I heard about the attacks against the Kibbutzniks I was not surprised. To the uninitiated idiot (or tourist if you want to be polite about it), a Kibbutz is a fun little gap year out in nature, an idyllic getaway from metropolitan consumer capitalism. The promise of a simple life with wholesome values.
But to the Palestinian kids who work the fields, sometimes as young as 10, the Kibbutz is a different story. To them it’s a slave plantation, where they spend their formative years being beaten, abused, humiliated and worked to the bone. I am not surprised those kids grow up and join Hamas. I certainly would. (Or maybe the PFLP, I’m worried how the daily prayers would affect my scoliosis.)
A lot of people have talked about the hostages. Some 200 people who were abducted and taken into the Gaza strip.
And I will be the first to condemn such a crime. There is nothing more barbaric, undemocratic and despicable happening in our times. I can think of no greater act of cruelty than forcing someone to live in the Gaza strip. So let me be the first to wag my finger at Hamas.
But this also raises further concerns of culpability. Yes, Hamas is responsible for 200 people suffering under the inhumane and miserable conditions of Gaza.
But what about the other 2 million? The 500,000 children? Who forced them into Gaza? For every time we condemn Hamas, let us not forget to condemn Israel 10.000 times.
So let us not fall victims to bad accounting. Let us remember that Israel is, by the basis of their own moral notions, ten thousand times as savage as the rebelling slaves.
Let us also not forget that Hamas is the only democratic force in the region. They were elected by the Palestinian people, and according to former president Jimmy Carter who was there to oversee the elections, they were perfectly legitimate in doing so. Hamas didn’t have to rig votes or strongarm people. All they had to do was to point to Tel Aviv and say “Remember what they did to you. Remember what they are going to do to your children.”
Then we have the concert. And that reminds me of a place in Brooklyn. Namely, the 29th street. A few decades back there was a gang of cholos there known as the 29ers. For obvious reasons.
Let me ask you this: Do you think 29th street has a lot of Klan rallies? Do you think the Aryan Brotherhood can walk there safely at night?
And if there was klan rally on the 29th street, would we feel a lot of sympathy for how they would be neck deep in pissed off Mexicans with guns?
Next time you’re attending a concert intended to basically mock a bunch of poor people in a segregated ghetto, then maybe don’t be an idiot? Maybe go to literally any other concert? But if you don’t, if you do decide to hold a torch rally on 29th street, then maybe accept the risks you’re taking? Maybe accept that the first step to catching a bullet during a slave rebellion is to hang around in places that exploit slaves.
I didn’t get killed by Hamas, and I believe that my secret is that I didn’t force small children to grow carrots for me while I’m LARPing as some sort of Talmudic hobbit.
(Seriously, I cannot stress how fucking stupid the Kibbutz doctrine is. It’s not some ancient tradition, it was invented in the 50s by a bunch of British people who wanted free real estate in the West Bank.)
We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country — this old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them; anyway, we thought that there shouldn’t be employers and employed at all. There must be a better way.
- Yosef Baratz (Israeli Politician who was part of the early Kibbutz movement prior to the British mandate.)
Plus, I live on what is, according assholes who run travel agencies, a “party island”. And between the drunkeness, the football hooligans, the sex trafficking and the extremely loud music at 3 AM I think I speak for everyone local to my town when I say that we’ve all at the very least entertained the thought of killing all the tourists.
That being said, I’m not completely callous and of course I understand that innocent people died. But I also understand how a lot of those innocent people did in fact have it coming. Not everyone of course, but it’s a bit like when people forget how the world trade centre had a substantial amount of Wall Street bankers in their offices.
I would be happy to grieve (figuratively speaking) the victims of these attacks, but I do maintain some standards of what qualifies as victimhood.
If you’ve ever referred to an indentured, underpaid Palestinian mother toiling in your fields as a “Fatima harvester” then to speak quite frankly I hope Hamas will get you next. That’s just making the world a nicer place for smart people.
What gets me is the double standard. How we skipped past the first 2 million people who suffered far worse for far longer, only to put down a microscope on the comedically tepid retaliation carried out by the rebel forces.
If anyone can find a criteria for terrorism by which Hamas is condemned and Israel is not, then that person has found the oldest lie ever told.
Israel has attempted to justify the wholesale slaughter of an entire ethnicity by pointing to the British firebombing campaign of Dresden. Saying that since the British were allowed to senselessly kill civilians, they are allowed too.
But what would the people who actually carried out the Dresden bombing campaign say?
The root of the evil was the doctrine of strategic bombing, which had guided the evolution of Bomber Command from its beginning in 1936. The doctrine of strategic bombing declared that the only way to win wars or to prevent wars was to rain down death and destruction upon enemy countries from the sky.
This doctrine was attractive to political and military leaders in the 1930’s, for two reasons. First, it promised them escape from their worst nightmare, a repetition of the frightful trench warfare of the First World War through which they had all lived.
Second, it offered them a hope that war could be avoided altogether by the operation of the principle that later came to be known as “deterrence.” The doctrine held that all governments would be deterred from starting wars if they knew that the consequence would be certain and ruinous bombardment. So far as the war against Germany was concerned, history proved the theory wrong on both counts. Strategic bombing neither deterred the war nor won it.
There has never yet been a war that strategic bombing by itself has won. In spite of the clear evidence of history, the strategic bombing doctrine flourished in bomber command throughout the Second World War. And it flourishes still, in bigger countries, with bigger bombs.
Bomber Command was an early example of the new evil that science and technology has added to the old evils of soldiering. Technology has made evil anonymous. Through science and technology, evil is organized bureaucratically so that no individual is responsible for what happens. Neither the boy in the Lancaster aiming his bombs at an ill-defined splodge on his radar screen, nor the operations officer shuffling papers at squadron headquarters, not I sitting in my little office in the Operational Research Section and calculating probabilities, had any feeling of personal responsibility. None of us ever saw the people we killed. None of us particularly cared.
The last spring of the war was the most desolate. Even after Dresden, through March and April of 1945, the bombing of cities continued. The German night fighters fought to the end, and still shot down hundreds of Lancasters in those final weeks. I began to look backward and to ask myself how it happened that I let myself become involved in this crazy game of murder. Since the beginning [p. 31] of the war I had been retreating step by step from one moral position to another, until at the end I had no moral position at all.
- Freeman Dyson (British scientist and WW2 veteran involved in the Dresden bombings)
Hamas is often accused of hiding among civilians, but that’s because they are civilians. They live among the people because like most rebel forces, they sleep at home, not in an army base. Just look at the founders of Hamas. I wonder which one was scarier to the Israelis, the paraplegic guy who ran a charity or the children’s doctor?
I ask because they were both brutally murdered by Israeli death squads.
These men are not monsters. In fact, quite the contrary. Palestine had a nonviolent civil rights movement inspired by Gandhi and Dr. King. What made Hamas gain prominence was when, during Operation Protective Edge, the zionists massacred thousands of innocent civilians in Palestine.
How do you peacefully protest against people who run your loved ones over with jeeps and tanks, and mow them down with machineguns?
It would seem that America’s definition of a terrorist is any person who does not greet the GIs with a friendly “Hello! Come in to my home. Please, rape my wife while I put my children to work at the sewing machine. Maybe I can get you a glass of water? Or wash your humvee? I’ll even wax it so that it won’t rust from the blood of my friends and neighbours.”
I hate to tell you the bad news, but if you have even a semblance of backbone or sense of integrity, then you’re a terrorist too. You just don’t have anything that the US is looking to steal. (At the moment.)
Unless you’re daydreaming about being a Kapo at a concentration camp, then you’re what America would profile as a terrorist.
And this is because America defines terrorism in the same way that Heinrich Himmler defined partisan activity.
Israel is the USA’s newest state, and like any American, they have a delusional sense of entitlement when it comes to other people’s willingness to die.
