The Eleventh Hour | In which we discover that our oppressors have no humanity
Israel has revealed that its motive is simply to consume Gaza, the West Bank and all that is left of Palestine, no matter how far into the future it takes.
Hamas, in its brilliant operation to try and break out of the concentration camp that Israel has made of the 25 mile-by-5 mile Gaza Strip — and it did successfully break through the wall — assumed that taking hostages from Israel would be a means to negotiate.
But the ruling strata in Israel showed it has absolutely no humanity whatsoever, and not only kills tens of thousands of Palestinians alongside hostages; not only regularly bombs residential areas full of civilians; not only upholds ~17 years of the air, land and sea blockade on Gaza and stops food, electricity and fuel from reaching the people of Gaza; not only attacks hospitals and people seeking food aid; not only constantly tries to justify its invasion and occupation of Palestine with the grossest of lies; but does all this on top of decades of massacres, murders and raids on Palestinians and their homes, their resources & their means of sustenance and their land.
For those living in settler-colonial states, the senseless slaughter and violence that we see Israel carrying out constantly rings with familiarity.
In Canada, they discover mysterious mass graves of hundreds of Indigenous children under schools. In Australia, they discover Indigenous children stolen from their parents and placed onto institutions to be trained as slaves (correction thanks to Jim Kable's comment below), and they are always finding out about more and more massacres. In the United States, they kept the Indigenous peoples on concentration camps that they call barrios and reservations. All of these were in the aftermath of brutal invasion and occupation, aimed at annihilating the Indigenous population altogether even after all the land was taken control of.
Even if the current pace of the slaughter and endless genocide drops after international condemnation, Israel has shown that it will resume whenever it thinks it can take the chance. Whether that is a few months afterwards, a few years afterwards, a few decades afterwards — it doesn't matter. It will not hesitate.
Israel is betting that within a few generations, it will have successfully not only occupied all of Palestine, but keep other areas that it has stolen and occupied too, for example the Golan Heights from Syria.
There is no ceasefire that will stop Israel, if Israel did not stop even when hostages from its state are among those that it will target.
The current rampage on Gaza did not come from nowhere. The tiny strip, packed with more than 2 million people, the most densely-populated place in the world and more densely populated than Tokyo, where more than half of the population is children as a result of being born into the place where no one could go in and out for more than a decade, where 80% of the population are refugees or descendants of refugees displaced in their own homeland after the still ongoing Nakba in which the Israelis began killing and driving Palestinians from their land, is a construction of Israel.
After driving the surviving population into pockets of land and then blocking them off from all access to the outside world, to Israel, Gaza is just an inconvenience to eliminate, that can slowly be ground down over decades until there are hardly any survivors left.
Those in settler-colonial states have a very good inkling of how the Israelis will treat any surviving Palestinians and their descendants generations far into the future.
Israel is yet another brutal white settler-colony. Immigrants who wish to build for the settler-colony will be welcomed while the Indigenous population is erased and confined to the lowest strata of society, and continues to be put under the tightest of restrictions like Palestinians still are under apartheid in the rest of Israel.
In the far future, maybe Palestinians who have "made it" in the Israeli settler-colonial society will be hailed as proof that if there is room for successful Indigenous individuals, the Israeli regime is not so brutal after all. And if these individuals try to bring up ANY aspect of the preceding slaughter, the settler-colonialists will be ready to hound them out of public sight, like they recently did with Stan Grant in Australia.
They might make tourist guides of the Indigenous population like they do here and in Hawai'i and in the Amazonia.
You might get sympathetic colonisers who will start droning on about "Welcome to Country," like they do in Australia nowadays.
Maybe after a century, you will also get a sympathetic prime minister who will make a great "Sorry" speech to the indigenous peoples just for one aspect of the slaughter, like there was in Australia in 2008.
And you might also get a puffed-up prime minister who thinks he was doing the indigenous population a big favour by trying to amend the colonial constitution to make room for them. How sweet.
And the settler-colonial state will be a vassal alongside all other colonial states to serve the collective needs of the colonial powers.
No amount of workers' power or electoral reform or ""diversity"" can change that. See how Australia is right now – it has party constructed from organised labour that is in power in all mainland states, territories and in the federal government; it has a prime minister who likes to tell of how he grew up in public housing; and it has an Asian Australian foreign minister — and they can't seem to utter a word in condemnation of or lift a finger to depart from the colonial consensus.
You would think that the Australian prime minister would be able to say something in condemnation of the Israeli genocide in Gaza or that the foreign minister could continue aid for UNRWA. But no. As I have said, nothing can be said in public circles in Western public life without it being framed as self-interest in some contorted way. Take a look at this headline, for example:
"COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE", say the bold words on the video thumbnail by the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC. The video headline reads, "Albanese demands 'full accountability' from Israel over…"
Over the genocide of Palestinians? Finally, a sentence, really? I thought incredulously.
But no. Take a look at it:
"Albanese demands 'full accountability' from Israel over death of Australian aid worker," says the full video headline. "Australian killed in Gaza" is put in small print above "COMPLETELY UNACCEPTABLE" in the video thumbnail.
WHAT THE HECK ARE YOU SO AFRAID OF? WHY CAN YOU NOT UTTER EVEN A SINGLE SENTENCE OVER 30,000 GAZANS MURDERED OVER THE PAST 6 MONTHS?
I don't understand what he is afraid of. His party is comfortably in power across the whole country, and his party has a rule that stops the leader from being ousted if there isn't more than 50% of the party behind a new leader, so he can't be afraid of being ousted.
Why do you puff out your chest so much on a single Australian being killed — as despicable as Israel's attack on the World Central Kitchen aid truck was — when you can't even say anything remotely resembling that for all the Gazans killed and displaced by Israel in recent months, let alone actually trying to stop it?
Even take a look at some recent Guardian headline over AUKUS, as reported on RT the other day:
Everything must be framed in terms of self-interest because the settler-colony, having forged itself in rivers and oceans of others' blood, is simply incapable of empathy.
So this is what might become of Occupied Palestine.
To stop this from happening, we cannot depend on international Western-controlled institutions from stopping the slaughter of Palestinians, and we cannot depend on the oppressors and murderers from finding some speck of humanity inside themselves to stop.
We need to help the Palestinians fight back. We need a international coalition prepared to help Palestinians fend off invaders on their homeland.
We need to stop the policy of Whites Über Alles, whereby whites, Europeans and Westerners can decide to waltz into any place on Earth, carry out massacres and claim everyone's land and labour as their own.
