“When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” — Raphael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, New York Times, April 14, 1983.

“[The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” — Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, ‘Begin and the “Beasts”’, New Statesman, 25 June 1982.

“’What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’” — Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979

There can be no clearer example of the inherently racist nature of Western ‘civilisation’ than the events of the past week. And if anyone doubt the power of language to shape our perception of events let them look no further than the alleged exemplar of ‘objective’ reporting, the BBC and its treatment of the genocidal policies of the state of Israel.

Elsewhere, other writers have highlighted the actual language used to reduce the actions of the Palestinians to those of some kind of sub-human not worthy of consideration.[1] No doubt there are some who feel so embarrassed by the latest actions of the Zionist state that they will protest, and sections of the ‘liberal’ media will bleat but do little else. By next week, it will be last week's 'news'. What's the deaths of a few more non-people in the Western scheme of things?

“The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war.” — Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha’aretz, 19 March 1972.

But the real issue is about power and how the ideology of racism serves to justify the actions of the powerful. Thus the BBC and the other mouthpieces of imperial power serve to present events through the prism of decades of Zionist propaganda that has presented the Palestinians as non-people. Even their actual existence is denied, therefore how can non-people be murdered and their land taken from them? Sure, they die but ‘only’ as a result of being Palestinian, of being in the ‘wrong’ place.

Palestinians, just like the victims of drought or natural disaster, can be pitied, money collected to keep them alive (just) but never admit to our collective responsibility for allowing such a situation to come to pass! The EU and the US are party to a war crime of staggering dimensions, the collective punishment of millions of people, denying them the basic rights that we (almost) take for granted.

Instead, we are bombarded with the image of a single Israeli soldier whose life is obviously worth more than the entire population of the Occupied land of Palestine. A vast propaganda machine swings into action, and the Western media obliges, after all it serves those who have even more at stake than those who rule Israel.

“How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” — Golda Meir, March 8, 1969.

It’s an awful, Fascist logic, one the Zionists took literally from Nazi Germany’s ‘legal’ obliteration of the Jews, Communists, Roma and homosexuals.

“Hitler’s legal power was based upon the ‘Enabling Act’, which was passed quite legally by the Reichstag and which allowed the Fuehrer and his representatives, in plain language, to be what they wanted, or in legal language, to issue regulations having the force of law. Exactly the same type of act was passed by the Knesset [Israeli’s Parliament] immediately after the 1967 conquest granting the Israeli governor and his representatives the power of Hitler, which they use in Hitlerian manner.” — Dr. Israel Shahak, Chairperson of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, and a survivor of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, Commenting on the Israeli military’s Emergency Regulations following the 1967 War. Palestine, vol. 12, December 1983

Ultimately however, the actions of the Zionist state would not be possible without the support of the US and the UK, support which goes back almost one hundred years,

“In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country” Lord Balfour in a private memorandum to Lord Curzon, 11 August 1919.

In order to secure access to vital resources and markets, it was first necessary to destroy the Arab nationalist movements. Critical to this process was Zionism and the concept of the state of Israel, a literal fifth column inserted by force into the land of Palestine. Obviously, the inhabitants objected forcefully to being ejected from their homeland but non-people have no legitimate voice, therefore how can their objections be taken seriously?

That the Jews have been made into the creatures of imperialist strategy is obvious to anyone who cares to look, it’s in the historical record. It is also a terrible logic of history that the ‘civilisation’ that is the home of anti-Semitism, Europe, should be foremost in promoting the most anti-Semitic ideology of all, Zionism.

So successful has been the West’s promotion of Zionism as a substitute for Jew that few, even the most ‘liberal’ of observers find it impossible to speak the truth for fear of being labelled anti-Semitic. But this is only a part of the equation, for without a culture which devalues all human life that it does not regard as ‘civilised’, such twisted and obscene logic would be impossible to promote.

Thus, the war crimes of Israel go unmentioned; its programme of genocide goes not only unreported but unrecognised as a war crime. Starving the Palestinian people into submission is considered a small price to pay just as the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the twelve years of sanctions was, according to Madeleine Albright, secretary of State under Clinton who thought that, “the price was worth it.” But what is it that's worth the deaths of half a million children? Their combined weight in oil that's what.

Further Reading

1. Another Escalation from the Palestinians Israeli “Retaliation”
and Double Standards By JONATHAN COOK

KIDNAPPED BY ISRAEL – The British Media And The Invasion Of Gaza

An In-Depth Report from Palestine 29/6/06

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