“Gaza should be wiped clean with bombs”

12 Replies to ““Gaza should be wiped clean with bombs””

1. Good choice on ‘tune for the day’ Phil.
   Love it. Sensitive and to the point: end the killing.
   Jim

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   • I agree, James, the song is perfect. The story of an airforce man who is falling to his death from his plane after bombing Dresden, and knowing that so many innocent people had been killed or burned to death in the resulting fire storm. His last dream was to have no one ever killing children again. I cannot put into words how utterly sick I am at what is being said in my name by Sunak, Starmer et al. And how completely heartbreaking the evil unfolding for so many being bombed, deprived of food, water, freedom and dignity. And I must be naive as I am shocked all over again by the quotes you have given us Phil. Thank you.

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     • You’ve likely seen Caitlin’s post this morning, Anne. She begins:

       The premise behind this current onslaught and those which preceded it is that you can bomb people into consenting to oppression and apartheid. That you can abuse them into accepting abuse. The whole entire argument is that if you bomb and shoot and teargas and beat and imprison enough Palestinians with enough aggression, eventually they will see the error of their ways and accept the status quo you are trying to impose upon them.

       This is of course stupid, and it is of course a lie. The idea was never really to abuse Palestinians into accepting abuse, that’s just the cover story; the real goal has always been to abuse them to the point where you can justify eliminating them. To push an inconvenient people into an impossible corner and then when they push back hard enough say “Well, we did all we can and we learned you just can’t help these savages. They’re going to have to go.”

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     • Steel city tunes come and go, while comments are immortal. The song James and Anne speak of is Pink Floyd’s The Gunner’s Dream …

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2. A country of thieves and criminals (yes, all of them, to summarize Scott Ritter’s view), that deserves what’s coming, which is to live under fear of retaliation forever.

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   • Not all of them. Definitely not all of them, and Scott Ritter assuredly doesn’t think that either.

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   • Can’t agree to that kind of thinking & I know Scott Ritter would not have expressed such a view.

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     • 

       I recall a white university colleague telling me she’d been on a job interview panel, here in UK, where one candidate had been a white South African:

       Well of course we weren’t going to appoint him!

       Why not? Leaving aside the inappropriateness of such criteria, for all she knew the man had taken huge risks in the struggle against apartheid. She implicitly claimed a moral superiority based on her heroic decision not to be born in South Africa …

       Just as white opponents of SA apartheid – disproportionately Jewish as it happens – showed remarkable courage, we can claim similar for those heroic Jewish Israelis opposed to Zionism. To imagine the fury they face, as “traitors to Israel”, Brits need only look to the viciousness of anti IRA sentiment in our country at the height of “the troubles”. Six years ago I wrote, in a post on George Monbiot and Syria:

       … defence of the Provisional IRA was tougher for British socialists than defence of an ANC whose program and leaders were equally flawed. Conversely, it’s why white South Africans in the ANC were truly heroic – likewise Israeli Jews fighting their own apartheid state …

       Emphasis added.

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3. What seems truly astonishing is that these vicious sentiments can be – and usually are – blended in with a mountain of sanctimonious bleating that manages to merge assumed victimhood with a veneer of humanitarian concern. When surveying the oceanic extent of pro-Israel verbiage on social media, the weird balancing act is a wonder to behold. Another ingredient is an infantile spattering of fairy tale rhetoric e.g. “Palestine always chose hate” – as if “hate” was some kind of mysterious metaphysical entity. But it may be that this is a common factor in the US i.e. a country that still seems to be dominated by the crassest Biblical fundamentalism whilst enjoying a happy isolation from the indecorous attributes of actual war. Final ingredient: an addiction to visual entertainment that can no longer be distinguished from real life.

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   • Don’t blame the Bible. The US has always been the spring from which racism, of the sort to be seen in Israel, came.
     I hope that Philip doesn’t mind a link.

     https://redsails.org/the-international-origins-of-nazism/

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     • Nope, I’ve never minded a link, bevin. Or even two. With Xmas a-coming, feel free to buy me this pair of white gold with diamond inset cuff links …

       On a more serious note here’s something I said in the context of my fight against former employer Sheffield Hallam University:

       Sheffield Hallam took no pleasure in harming me. It loved me for the operational flexibility. No, SHU mistreated me because (a) it believed it could get away with it and (b) it was rational to do so. Which brings us to the distinction between exclusion and exploitation.

       The two are linked, but not the same. In early capitalism, contempt for certain groups – African slaves, native Americans/Antipodeans and Asian ‘coolies’ – was driven and aggravated by the need to legitimise their exploitation or dispossession. But by the fifties and sixties, racism, once ideologically vital to colonialism, had passed its sell-by date. Worse, it was getting in the way and would continue to do so as advanced capitalism moved to forms requiring a more sophisticated workforce and high levels of consumerism. One aspect of the shift was an erosion of the business case for racism. Why limit upward mobility on such arbitrary grounds as skin colour? Why continue to deny access to the Good Life to any social – as opposed to economic – grouping within the West on the basis of identity traits it was no longer useful to hold in contempt?

       Social exclusion is rational only insofar as it underpins exploitation. It will outlive exploitation, sometimes in even more virulent, darkest-before-dawn forms, but its days will be numbered. Exploitation on the other hand is always rational, albeit at times short-sighted.

       But the above assumes business-as-usual capitalism. The unique nature of Israel means all bets are off. It’s not that rationality doesn’t apply. More that the rational must factor in an irrationality borne of extremity. I’ve known a good few Israelis, some very well. I’ve seen highly intelligent Israeli men and women – journalists .. computer programmers .. a clinical psychologist – switch into a different zone the moment Palestine is mentioned. They’re not some exotic species. Just ordinary folk like you and me. But ordinary folk have a propensity, always dismaying and at times terrifying, to behave like adolescent chimpanzees when certain buttons are pressed.

       No disrespect to chimpanzees, you understand …

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4. I have read that Hitler admired the European arrivals in America for their extermination of the Native Americans.

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