OT - *** Israel #2

The Insane Brutality of the State of Israel
By KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
former CIA analyst

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors
Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the
Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times
over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of
Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But
the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S.
political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified
-- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity
that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in
the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from
caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out
Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time
for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for
them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and
its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally
by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against
the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over
all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional.
Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to
maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come
to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential
threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential
threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect
itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly
paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited.
Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a
crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of
its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a
mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. "This
society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral,"
wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski
in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society.
Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt
to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is
being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse
to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel's arrogance.

We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by
Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some
trick of the imagination, converts

Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a
military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential
apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping
civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that
operates by civilized rules.

A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the
middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their
children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a
moral country.

A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer's brutal
murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers
at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered
by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a
conscience.

A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several
hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and
running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she
entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This
story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported
in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran
away and was convicted to 18 months in prison after she came out of a
coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing,
nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy
talks of a society in "moral collapse."

Michel Warschawski writes of an "Israeli madness" and "insane
brutality," a "putrefaction" of civilized society, that have set
Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist
enterprise; Israel is a "gang of hoodlums," he says, a state
"that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run
in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive."

As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral
boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who
make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their
moral compass.

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