“Best Palestinian Dead or Gone” Sally Campbell
“This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us. The best Palestinian for them is either dead or gone. It’s not where they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.” (Edward Said, in The Pen and the Sword: Conversations with Edward Said, by David Barsamian, 1994.) This may sound like a rather dramatic overstatement by Said, but current events underscore the truth of what he said way back then. We are witnessing a 2nd Nakba, another catastrophe, this time in many ways worse than the one in 1948. Palestinians say that the Nakba against them has never ended, it has been ongoing since ’48. It is now worse because of the sheer numbers of people killed, over 34,000 at this point and counting. The number injured is over 77,000. Every single person in Gaza is suffering the trauma of their losses – their dead and missing family members, their home, and their world. Difficult and uncertain as it was, that world is now gone. It’s worse because these Gazans have not only lost their homes and means of making a living, they’ve lost their schools, museums, cafes, universities, libraries, mosques, shops, clinics & hospitals, and everything in them. The purpose is to erase Palestinian history, rituals and ways of life. Even their morgues have been destroyed. We learn of people being buried in mass graves, bodies showing signs of torture and dismemberment by the Israeli army. Palestinians are living and dying in genocide, ecocide, and sociocide*.
We don’t hear and see the daily murder toll as much as before because Israel has targeted & killed over 100 Gazan journalists, 1/10th of their total number. (Jonathan Cook, May 5, 2024).
In the meantime, Israel has been throwing every distraction it can summon at Western media in an effort to get people to look away from the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. Its bombing and killing of 16 people at the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, was just such an example. It was naturally followed by retaliation by Iran, with missiles and drones they sent over Jerusalem. The reason that only one person, a Bedouin child, was injured in that “attack”, was that it was all carefully orchestrated with the US, according to seasoned investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, who knows the game well. (April 17th, 2024, Hersh, Substack) The fact that belligerent Israel would risk a regional war and that the media would present that risky behavior as precipitated by Iran rather than by Israel shows the degree to which our media are embedded in the War System.
I hear many people blame Israeli PM Netanyahu for the current crisis, and it reminds me of a friend’s confident statement: “Oh, they just have to get rid of the current right-wing government under Netanyahu.” That was in 2014 just before the vicious summer assault on Gaza which killed 2,200 and injured thousands – “mowing the grass” as the Israeli government labels it. The Israeli government has become far more right-wing since then; current Minister of Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a direct ideological descendant of Meir Kahane, whose party was banned from the Israeli Knesset for its Zionist extremism. Kahane’s disciple, Baruch Goldstein, attacked and killed 28 worshippers at prayer inside the Ibrahaimi Mosque in Hebron (Al-Khalil). Reportedly, Ben-Gvir kept a framed portrait of Goldstein on his living room wall until his
political advancement required its removal. Netanyahu is merely a symbol of the state of mind of the populace. He is now the longest serving Prime Minister in Israel’s 76 year turbulent history.
Here is Dahlia Sheindlin, Israeli columnist for Haaretz and public opinion pollster: “Beware of giving Netanyahu too much credit. The roots of today’s catastrophe for Israel and the Palestinians far predate Netanyahu. And if Israel’s current opposition figures are anything to go by, these problems will continue to torment the region in the future.” (Haaretz, May 1st, 2024) In the words of Hamlet’s Marcellus: “Something is rotten in the State of ”.
We now learn that polls in Israel show that the vast majority of Israelis support the war against Gaza (over 70%) and a substantial percentage don’t think the military is going far enough; they want Gaza completely destroyed and the Palestinians “gone”. Although this stretches credulity, it shows how susceptible humans are to inflicting cruelty on others when they feel themselves to be in a state of existential threat.
What can we do? We need to support the voices of dissent across campuses and elsewhere. This genocidal war could not continue without the support of the US and its acolytes, just as the war in Ukraine could not continue without the US sending billions in weaponry, and NATO engaged in training & logistical support. Instead of the reflexive blaming of Hamas, Netanyahu, Putin – you name it, there’s always a villain out there – we need to examine how we contribute to the War System, both locally and globally, and step up to oppose rather than enable!
*This term comes from Wittenberg University Professor Emeritus Keith Doubt and his book:
Sociocide: Reflections on Today’s Wars (2020).
