Chicago – March 28, 2024
Six months into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the atrocities the IDF has committed against Palestinians are too numerous to name. Israel is staging a prolonged assault on the Palestinian people’s very means of existence—destroying homes, hospitals, sanitation infrastructure, food and water sources, schools, and more. To understand the genocidal campaign unfolding before our eyes, we must examine the roots of Israeli society. Israel is a settler colonial state whose existence depends on the elimination of Palestinians. Accordingly, Israel is a deeply militarized society whose citizens are raised in an environment of historical revisionism and indoctrination that whitewashes Israel’s crimes while cultivating a deep-seated racism against Palestinians.
The Israeli army, known as the Israel Defense Force or IDF, is integral to understanding Israeli society. Nearly all Israelis do three years of military service, most continue to serve in the reserves until middle age. Its generals often retire to occupy senior positions in government and industry. The dominance of the military in Israeli society helps explain why war, militaristic nationalism, and violence are so deeply embedded in Zionist ideology.
Israel is the outgrowth of a militarized settler colonial movement that seeks its legitimacy in biblical myth. It has always sought to solve nearly every conflict; The ethnic cleansing and massacres against Palestinians known as the Nakba or catastrophe in the years between 1947 and 1949, the Suez War of 1956, the 1967 and 1973 wars with Arab neighbors, the two invasions of Lebanon, the Palestinian intifadas, and the series of military strikes on Gaza, including the most recent, with violence. The long campaign to occupy Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse Palestinians is rooted in the Zionist paramilitaries that formed the Israeli state and continue within the IDF.
The overriding goal of settler colonialism is the total conquest of Palestinian land. The few Israeli leaders who have sought to reign in the military, such as Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, have been pushed aside by the generals. The military setbacks suffered by Israel in the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, and during Israel’s invasions of Lebanon only fuel the extreme nationalists who have abandoned all pretense of a liberal democracy. They speak in the open language of apartheid and genocide. These extremists were behind the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israel’s failure to live up to the Oslo Accords.
This extremism has now been exacerbated by the attack of October 7, which killed about 1,200 Israelis. The few Israelis who oppose this militaristic nationalism, especially after October 7, have been silenced and persecuted in Israel. Genocidal violence is almost exclusively the language Israeli leaders, and now Israeli citizens, use to speak to the Palestinians and the Arab world.
Israel, like all settler-colonial projects, is built on lies. The lie that the land historically belongs to the colonizers. The lie that Palestinians have no national identity. The lie that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. The lie that a peaceful settlement is thwarted by the Palestinians rather than the apartheid Israeli state. This mendacity is especially prevalent when Israel carries out its murderous assaults against the Palestinians, including the current genocide in Gaza.
As much of the world recoils in revulsion over Israel’s slaughter in Gaza, which includes carpet bombing hundreds of dead and wounded – Mostly civilians – A day, the weaponization of starvation, and infectious diseases, hasbara has gone into overdrive; Beheaded babies, mass rapes, group executions in a nursery, children hung from clotheslines, infants incinerated in ovens, and pregnant women having their stomachs cut open and the fetus knifed in front of them and their other children. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, is a hotbed of Hamas, and hospitals in Gaza that serve as Hamas command centers, all make them legitimate in the eyes of Israel’s targets.
Most of the media, including The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and The Intercept have swallowed this propaganda and spat it back to their readers or viewers as fact. Only a handful of publications – Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone, Mondoweiss, and Al Jazeera – Have doggedly exposed the lies spread by Israel’s vast disinformation campaign, often forcing mainstream publications including The New York Times to retract or backpedal on their reporting.
