How Jewish leaders kill for Jewish votes
By
Gilad Atzmon
<http://www.redress.cc/zionism/gatzmon20081230>
<http://www.redress.cc/zionism/gatzmon20081230#gatzmon20081230_bio>
<http://palestinethinktank.com/>
30th December 2008
Israeli-born musician and writer Gilad Atzmon, who has renounced his Jewishness and Israeli nationality, explains Israel's massacre of Palestinians in Gaza in terms of Israeli culture, which is imbued with racism and a murderous hatred of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.
In order to grasp the latest devastating and murderous
Israeli expedition in
Gaza, one must deeply comprehend the Israeli identity
and its inherent hatred towards anyone who is not Jewish and
towards Arabs in particular. This hatred is imbued in the
Israeli curriculum, it is preached by political leaders and
implied by their acts, and it is conveyed by cultural
figures, even within the so-called "Israeli left".
I grew up in Israel
in the 1970s. People of my generation are nowadays leaders
in the
Israeli army, politics, economy, academia and the
arts. We were trained to believe that "a good Arab is a dead
Arab". A few weeks before I joined the Israeli armed forces
in the early 1980s, General Rafael
Eitan, the chief of staff at the time, announced that
the "Arabs were stoned cockroaches in a bottle". He got away
with it; he also got away with the murder of many thousands
of Lebanese civilians in the first Lebanon
war. In a word,
Israelis manage to get away with murder.
Luckily enough, and for reasons that are still far beyond my
comprehension, at a certain stage I woke up out of that
lethal Hebraic dream. At some point I left the Jewish state,
I evaded the Jewish hate-mongering, I had become an opponent
of the Jewish state and any other form of Jewish politics.
However, I am utterly convinced that it is my primary duty
to inform every being that is willing to listen about that
which are we up against.
Although the central purpose of Zionism was to transform
Jews by "giving them a state of their own" and making them
like any other people, it has failed miserably. The Israeli
barbarism that we saw this week and too many times before is
far beyond bestiality. It is killing for the sake of
killing. And it is indiscriminate.
Fews people in the west are aware of the devastating fact
that killing Arabs and Palestinians in particular is a very
effective Israeli political recipe. The Israelis are indeed
a confused people. As much as they insist upon seeing
themselves as a "shalom-seeking" nation, they also love to
be led by politicians with an astonishing record of
murderous activity. Whether it was Sharon, Rabin,
Begin, Shamir
or Ben Gurion,
Israelis love their "democratically-elected leaders" to be
belligerent hawks with their hands dripping with blood and
backed by a solid record of
crimes against humanity.
We are weeks before an election in Israel and it would seem
that both the prime ministerial candidates of Kadima and
Labour,
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defence
Minister
Ehud Barak, are trailing well behind the Likud
candidate, the notorious hawk Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu.
Livni and Barak need their little war. They must prove to
the Israelis that they know how to engage in mass
slaughter.
Both Livni and Barak have to provide the Israeli voter with
some real exhibition of devastating carnage, so that he
Israelis can trust their leadership. This is their only
chance against Netanyahu. Seemingly, Livni and Barak are
throwing tons of bombs on Palestinian civilians, schools and
hospitals because this is exactly what the Israelis want to
see.
Unfortunately, Israelis are not known for mercy and grace.
Instead, they are appeased by retaliation and vengeance,
they are cheered by their own limitless brutality. When
former Israeli Air Force commander Dan
Halutz was asked how it feels to drop a bomb on a
highly populated neighbourhood in Gaza, his answer was short
and precise. "It feels like a light bump on the right wing,"
was his reply. Halutz's cold, deadly manner was enough to
secure his promotion to armed forces chief of staff shortly
thereafter. It was General Halutz who led the Israeli
army into the second Lebanon war. It was this man who
perpetrated the destruction of Lebanese infrastructure and
large parts of Beirut.
Seemingly, in Israeli politics Arab blood is translated into
votes. It would obviously be very reasonable to charge
Livni, Barak and the current armed forces chief of staff,
Gabriel Ashkenazi, with first-degree murder, crimes against
humanity and obvious breaches of the Geneva Conventions. But
it would be far more meaningful to take into account that
Israel is a "democracy". Livni, Barak and Ashkenazi are
giving the Israeli people that which they want: it is called
Arab blood and it must come in vast quantities. This
repetitive murderous practice, conducted by Israeli
politicians, reflects on the Israeli people as a whole
rather than just a few politicians and generals. We are
dealing here with a barbarian society that is politically
driven by bloodthirstiness and lethal inclinations. There
should be no mistake: there is no room for these people
among civilized nations.
Why the Israeli people are so remote from any notion of
humanism is a big question. The generous and naïve
humanists among us may argue that the Shoah, or Holocaust,
left a big scar in the Israeli soul. This may explain why
Israelis are obsessively cultivating that very memory with
the support of their Diaspora brothers and sisters. The
Israelis say "never again" and what they mean is that
Auschwitz should never reoccur. This somehow allows them to
punish the Palestinian for the crimes committed by the
Nazis.
However, the realists among us do not buy this argument
anymore. They are now beginning to acknowledge that it is
more than possible that the Israelis are so incredibly
brutal just because this is how they are. It goes far beyond
rationality or pseudo-analytical assumptions. They say:
"This is what the Israelis are and there is not much we can
do about it any more". The realists among us have come to
admit that killing is how the Israelis interpret the meaning
of being Jewish. Gravely, many of us are coming to admit
that there is no alternative humanist secular Jewish value
system to replace the murderous Hebraic one. The Jewish
state is there to prove that Jewish national autonomy is an
inhuman concept.
I grew up in post-1967 Israel. I was raised in the wake of
the Israeli mythical victory. We were trained to worship the
"Israeli who shoots from the hip", the platoon commando who
shoots his Uzi automatic rifle in the direction of the Arabs
and manages to win against four armies in just six days.
It may have taken me two decades too long to understand that
the Israeli who "shoots from the hip" was actually the
master of indiscriminate killing. Barak was one of those
1967 heroes, he was a master indiscriminate killer.
Apparently, the Israeli cabinet has just approved his plan
for the biggest raid on Gaza since 1967. Livni is more or
less my age and, as we know from the news, she has
internalized the message. She is now accumulating the
necessary credentials as an indiscriminate murderer. Both
Barak and Livni are taking Israel and Palestine into an
election campaign of slaughter. Arab and Palestinian blood
is the fuel of Israeli politics.
I may just suggest to Livni and Barak that it may not help
them in the polls. Netanyahu is a genuine, authentic hawk.
He doesn't have to pretend to be a murderer, and as much as
I despise him, he has yet to take Israel into a war. He
probably understands better than them what the power of
deterrence is all about.
