The End of Zionism

Moral principles are supposed to be universal and unconditional. The obliteration of the Gaza Strip with full political and logistical support from almost all Western nations shows why the work of reason cannot be delegated.

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Introduction

When a femicide is perpetrated, the murderer’s heartfelt excuse is always something to the effect of “She made me do it!” Glossing over his relentless abuse and harassment, he is totally dishonest and entirely sincere at the same time. In his mind, he is the victim. The self-reinforcing pattern of reactive emotions he has regularly indulged in has shaped the reality of his life—or what seems like it to him.

All war propaganda efforts in history rely on this powerful capacity for self-delusion. If people are convinced of their righteousness or victimhood, the most brutal violence will soon appear legitimate. This is why a country’s alleged right to defend itself must answer a clear aggression and respect proportionality between military targets and collateral civilian damage. If a government does not conform to this bare minimum, its behavior is akin to that of a psychopath unable to relate to anyone but himself.

Israel’s supporters and allies argue that since it is a democracy, the country necessarily fights the good fight and merely defends itself against its aggressors. They are oblivious to the fact that Zionism—Israel’s foundational principle—runs at the exact opposite of the democratic ideal. Settlers logically enjoy full citizenship from the state that represents them, but natives are either second-class citizens or live under apartheid while their land is continuously stolen from them. Whether at a low or high level of intensity, war is thus inherent to Zionism’s colonial endeavor, whose violent history did not start with the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th, 2023.

Genuine peace does not do away with the principle that all men are born equal in rights; it is founded upon it. In this regard, forcefully replacing one population on their ancestral land with another is not what freedom and justice for all look like. Acting this way requires a high dose of self-delusion and a solid propaganda apparatus. By contrast, the courage of lucidity is the first step toward lasting peace. If anything, the deliberate genocide perpetrated in Gaza after 10/07/2023 should be one’s wake-up call to exert it.

1. Defeating Hamas

Duplicity

Given the little chance most of them had to come back alive, the Hamas militants who committed the slaughter of hundreds of Israelis and abducted 251 people from Israel to the Gaza Strip on 10/07/23 were most likely unmarried young men. This means that they had spent almost all of their lives in what some Israeli officials themselves called a “concentration camp,” referring to the blockade put in place by Israel after Hamas was elected as the governing body of the Gaza Strip in 2006. 10/07/23 did not happen in a vacuum, and the fact that Gazans have lived for years on end in an open-air prison gives the event of that day its definite context.

To understand more precisely how, let’s remember that a blockade is aimed at creating a state of deprivation, obstructing all opportunities for economic development, and barring people from moving outside of the blocked area. Concerning the Gaza Strip, moreover, it had constantly been maintained at the highest level of severity possible, to the point that the Israeli administration used to joke about putting Gazans “on a diet” by restricting food aid to the least amount of calories humanly viable.

Another aspect is as crucial. Since Gazans were trapped in an open-air prison, they were also left at the mercy of their wardens. “Mowing the lawn” was another amusing way for the Israeli administration to label what it saw as a duty: the collective punishment of Gazans in retaliation for Hamas’ sporadic attacks on Israeli citizens. These killing sprees resulted in thousands of Palestinian deaths between 2008 and 2022. The blueprint of savagery had thus been handed down to the 10/07/23 perpetrators. Deprived of a decent future and with no choice other than a slow or quick death under Israeli rule, what did they have to lose?

This context explains what happened; it does not justify it. Nothing can. Strangely, however, the Israeli government holds that this self-evident moral principle can work in reverse according to who it is applied to. Nothing can justify the October 7th, 2023 massacre, yet the event of that day justifies everything in Gaza.

How can the universality of moral values be enforced in polar opposite ways? Quite simply because, as Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said at the outset of Gaza’s destruction, Israelis are facing “human animals.” The classic excuse for genocide indeed, which in the present occurrence makes a duty to coordinate the shelling of an entire civilian population (including in designated “safe zones”) with their deprivation of food, fuel, water, and electricity. More than direct killings, starvation added to the spread of diseases due to the destruction of all sanitary infrastructure will surely “finish the job.” This expression used by the present Israeli government refers to the ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in the wake of the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. There is no doubt that the job is presently done with great enthusiasm when watching the sick videos casually shared by Israeli soldiers on social media.

The obscenity of trying to justify the unjustifiable when it comes to Palestinian lives also leads Israeli officials to forget that logic does not take sides. If the assumption is that there are no innocent Palestinians, as President Herzog sternly stated, why should there be innocent Israelis in the eyes of Palestinians? Wouldn’t the same type of hallucinated conclusion find that much more apparent legitimacy in what has been done to them for decades in the Israelis’ name? As for Hamas, Israelis can hardly lament today that the organization fails the most basic principles of morality when their government has maintained for 17 years an avowed policy of indiscriminate violence against all Palestinians in Gaza.

Before the ongoing operation in the aftermath of the 7th of October 2023, Israel launched four military assaults on Gaza. Here is how the numbers stack up for Palestinians:

Data are from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (OCHA).¹ For the same period (2008-2021), the number of Israeli fatalities in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel totals 344, compared to twenty times over for Palestinians with 7,118 deaths (both numbers include civilians and fighters).

If only for coherence’s sake, when the most potent contender kills 20 times more on average,² it cannot feign surprise that its lesson will be followed in return. Even more significantly, resorting to violence at such a disproportionate rate implies that it is not about something that could ultimately be defended with the tools of reason but about something that bears no questioning. The heavy and disproportionate use of weaponry signifies to the other side that there is nothing it is allowed to argue about. In that respect, bullets, tanks, and missiles are speech; the more they are used, the more meaningful the speech is. Said otherwise, Palestinians have nothing to defend in their own right, and their voices do not matter. For good measure, it will be added that violence is all they can understand anyway.

As demonstrated by all similar situations of oppression in history, the name of the game is indeed to dehumanize the “other.” The reason is simple: to get a moral pass to do what you want, you need to be the one who, by contrast, infallibly stands on the side of humanity. This manufactured unquestionable innocence results from the same psychological process at play when, to the astonishment of witnesses, a burglar caught red-handed cries, “It’s not me. I didn’t do anything!” To justify the unjustifiable, first and foremost in their own eyes, all criminals use logic, reason, and morality in reverse. They start with the result or gain sought from the beginning and, with all the required dignity to make their case seem all the more legitimate, work their way back from their flawed premise. Entitlement is their sole and ultimate justification.

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This is why, despite all its posturing about merely being the victim of retarded savages, Israel has a coherence issue when it comes to the universality of moral principles. To avoid openly self-contradicting itself, its government must resort to the trick used by dictatorships and warmongers of all stripes: playing the “terrorist” card. Labeled as such, opponents they do not want other people to hear and question about are upfront denied any legitimacy. All there is to know about them is that they are “terrorists,” which means that they simply need to be eliminated.

Purposely vague but emotionally powerful, the “terrorist” label can be used pretty extensively. After all, Nelson Mandela stayed in jail for 27 years because he was a terrorist. This name-calling is not fundamentally unjust by trying to mask genuine political issues; it is also widely counterproductive. Though Hamas is not a pacifist movement, how can putting Gaza under total siege this time around and carpet bombing its inhabitants be the proper strategy to defeat the organization? How hard is it to figure out that, on top of signaling an utter disregard for human dignity, this sets the moral standard to exert revenge?

Aware of the contradiction of supposedly chasing terrorists by creating more of them, Israel’s officials have resorted to the other trick used by bad-faith violent actors: lying to their teeth. Against all evidence to the contrary, they have systematically asserted that they precisely and exclusively target actual terrorists. Consequently, it is just unfortunate that Hamas nefariously hides among the population of Gaza, thus rendering the rule of proportionality in military actions almost inapplicable.

In other words, it is Hamas’ fault if women and children become fair game in the fight against terrorism. Per this “human shield” bogus logic, moreover, the weakening of Hamas’ capabilities is consequently proportionate to the number of civilian deaths, whether through starvation or military assault. Though the goal was never officially stated as such, some in the Israeli government were not shy to confirm that as many Palestinians as needed would be killed to, supposedly, get rid of Hamas. So long for the precise targeting and the laws of war.

Does this mean that human life is not sacred to these officials? Of course not. The truth is simply that there is no “moral equivalence” between terrorists massacring innocents on Israeli soil and the IDF doing the same to a much broader extent in Gaza. Said otherwise: When Hamas kills, it is terrorism; when we do, it is self-defense. How could anyone miss that?

This kind of auto-justification can only emanate from people emboldened by the influence acquired on the world stage over the years and the quasi-certitude of impunity. As a result, their truth has become practically indisputable, even though the industrial scale of destruction and suffering they subject an entire population to can have neither moral nor logical justification. Indifferent to the necessity of cohesive arguments, their will to power is right in and by itself. This is how Benjamin Netanyahu feels free to insist that the goal must and can be to “eradicate” Hamas. A bold statement that is nothing more than a call to indistinctly murder all and any Palestinians, given that Hamas is nowhere and everywhere among them.

An important point in such a perspective remains hidden for most people. Namely, once the constraints of moral principles are abandoned, friends as well as foes bear the consequences. This is what the Israeli people seem to have a hard time understanding when crying out for a ceasefire deal to obtain the liberation of the remaining hostages.

In the official narrative that most of them endorse, Hamas is the arch-enemy exclusively bound to destroy Israel. From there, no long-term peace can be found, and the organization would most certainly take advantage of a ceasefire to regroup and plot other violent incursions on Israeli soil. Besides, since it was officially decided after October 7th, 2023 that such a thing will never happen again, the priority is to defeat Hamas “once and for all.” This goal’s fuzzyness means that the war has no assignable end; its radicality means that this is a war with no reprieve, whatever the cost. In that logic, there is no moral, political, or tactical room to negotiate the liberation of Israeli hostages.

At least, this is how Benjamin Netanyahu sees it. Staying in power as the strong man who can defeat Hamas—and, incidentally, keep his judicial predicaments at bay—comes first for him. In that respect, the so-called negotiations in Qatar have so far been used as window dressing to both placate the ire of those who hope for the liberation of the hostages and allegedly prove that negotiating with Hamas is to no avail. Whatever his calculations might be, he is nevertheless not wrong about the implications of a narrative that only makes sense in the Israeli mythology. It is up to Israeli citizens to know where they stand exactly.

Unfortunately, war is rarely, if ever, rational or reasonable. Its rallying cry will always meet popular success, only to be followed by the complaint that there are victims on both sides. Wilfully contradicting ourselves, we are, in that sense, our own dupes. This contradiction is particularly glaring when it comes to the hostages: how can one ask for the liberation of those sequestered by Hamas while forgetting about the thousands of Palestinian held hostages with no charge in Israeli jails³ and wishing hell to their families in Gaza or elsewhere? If our moral standards are this weak that we cannot reciprocate the mercy we are asking for the ones we love, in the name of what are we speaking? What is the value of a plea that is indifferent to the suffering of others?

To be followed.

1. Data on casualties. This interactive map allows one to apply filters by time, area, context, and affiliation of the casualties.
2. Not so incidentally, disproportionate retaliation was formalized as the Dahiya doctrine by former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of General Staff Gadi Eizenkot during the 2006 Lebanon War
3. See Israel doubles number of Palestinian prisoners to 10,000 in two weeks, by By Zena Al Tahhan, Al Jazeera, 21 Oct 2023; Why Does Israel Have So Many Palestinians in Detention and Available to Swap?, by Omar Shakir, Los Angeles Times, Nov. 29, 2023; Administrative Detention, B’Tselem; What Palestinian Children Face in Israeli Prisons, by By Armani Syed, Time, December 15, 2023.