Would you like to live in a country that looks like Israel, segmented by endless kilometres of walls, watchtowers, cameras and checkpoints to divide its citizens; with an army as its chief unifying institution and military-grade weapons carried by its dominant ethnicity in the streets; ghettoes and mass graves at its edges?
Would you like to live in a democracy like Israel, preventing half of those over whom it wields power from voting while the fascists compete with fundamentalists for the sizeable psychopath vote?
Would you like to make your fortune in a securitised economy like Israel’s, marketing the technologies of population surveillance, separation and containment; testing its weapons on trapped human beings?
Would you like the power to signal like Israel, to invent allegations while knowing that you won’t be asked for evidence? Such signals they send – Hamas headquarters, UNRWA neutrality, minimise civilian casualties – while the world’s most moral army rolls over human rights and civilian protection.
Would you like to live in a world that operates like Israel, a world of states that shop for their police and call the preservation of apartheid self-defence – all with one eye on their own inconvenient populations and the other eye on thoses hordes at the doorstep?
We already inhabit a world that complicit. Glissando, Zionism has slid us from being consumers of Jewish supremacy to enablers of genocide. If you doubt that, try reversing the ethnic roles in the news.
Imagine reading that Jewish-Israeli babies were deprived of oxygen for their incubators or Jewish-Israeli children were deprived of anaesthetics for amputations, or that the bodies of Jewish doctors with bound hands were being lifted from mass graves still wearing their scrubs. Imagine that Palestinians were at the same time circulating offers to purchase Israel’s beachfront property now that the houses had all been blown up. Imagine your preferred media outlet uncritically rebroadcasting statements that Jews are less than human, or that calling Jews animals insults animals, or that there are no innocent Jews. Would you sit quietly while two million Jews were penned up behind a wall and deprived of food for six months?
This onslaught is unthinkable unless the objects of the violence are Palestinian. That measures the success of Zionism’s radical dehumanisation. Even as Israel’s most loathsome settler thugs entered Cabinet, our own government acknowledged only a deterioration; not a disaster.
Genocide is always this numbing gradation of violence. Glissando – we are arming, trading, normalising; we are invested in genocide.
Netanyahu has spent years positioning Israel at the brazen, profitable edge of a White supremacist, anti-democratic, securitised new regime of power. Zionism was wrapped up in Jewishness to give it cover. Now, in Gaza we see its real outlines.
We are concerned for our Jewish community. Netanyahu and his cohort have seeded confusion about the boundaries of Judaism, Zionism, and antisemitism. They have made all Jews vulnerable to the anger provoked by Israel’s actions. Damn them. Some Jews fear their friends because they have been told so often that protest stems from hatred and constitutes a local threat. They are wrong.
The manipulation of antisemitism is not a reason to stand back and let the slaughter continue. It is a reason to keep educating while we try together to save lives. Genocide is continuing unchecked, and we must make that stop.
Just look at the movement spreading on campuses and in Aotearoa: Jews arm in arm with Palestinians, tangata whenua, labour unions, human rights activists, health workers and angry young people. Do we evince fear of the people next to us? No, we protest because we fear a world that acts like Israel: scholasticide, econocide, domicide, genocide.
What do we want? Ceasefire. Stop doing business as usual with a genocidal regime.
When do we want it? Right now. Today.
Marilyn Garson and Fred Albert