With the mounting death toll, especially among civilians and children, in the carnage Israel has perpetrated in the Gaza Strip, the Zionist project has reached a point of no return.
I am not referring to the loss of the last shreds of legitimacy in the Israeli discourse of self-defense and protection of its own civilian population. (Who are the citizens of Israel protected from by the bombardments of Gaza? School children? Infants born and killed under fire?) I have in mind, instead, the political atrocity of creating the world's largest concentration camp in the most densely populated place on Earth and proceeding to slaughter, indiscriminately, the Palestinians who live there.
It is in this sense that Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, with whom I co-edited a recent book titled Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics, noted in an interview to the Italian Radio 24 that Israel is a little "worse than Hitler". Nazi Germany, too, used the rhetoric of victimization in the aftermath of World War I so as to give itself a carte blanche for ethnic and religious extermination of Jewish people as well as Gypsies and other minorities.
It, too, couched the issue in terms of the need for protecting the country's population. And it, too, consistently flouted international law and diplomatic agreements. What is "a little worse", however, is that the current killings are taking place about 65 years after the United Nations ratified its Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a rejoinder to the atrocities of World War II. Not to mention that the current mass murder of civilians in Gaza is carried out by a state that was formed as a result of these same atrocities.
This is where the historical immunity of Zionism (and, by implication, of the State of Israel that deems itself above international law) ends. Traditionally, Zionist ideology has attempted to immunize itself against criticism by referencing the genocide of Jews in Europe as the precipitating factor for the establishment of a "safe haven" for survivors in Palestine.
Whatever line of conduct the State of Israel pursued, it was seen as justifiable by the desideratum of preventing another catastrophe. In addition, by associating the anti-Zionist stance with anti-Semitism, Zionism has tried to besmirch political opposition with the charge of ethnic or religious hatred.
In other words, it aimed to depoliticize its opponents by treating their critique as a moral crime.
One way of immunizing political decisions against criticism stopped working, as soon as it became obvious that, in the name of preventing another catastrophe, the State of Israel was perpetrating mass murder of a displaced and imprisoned neighboring people.
Another method of immunization is collapsing now that an increasing number of Jewish critics of Israel are joining the chorus of international condemnation of this state's actions. Hence, the change of strategy by the Zionist apologists for the ongoing atrocities: they resort to the trick of blaming the victim and claim that the whole population of Gaza is used as a "human shield" by Hamas.
Additionally, they portray the Jewish opponents of Zionism as traitors -- and their non-Jewish adversaries -- as clandestine anti-Semites. None of the English-language news agencies that reported Vattimo's remarks, for instance, quoted the words he uttered on the Italian broadcast, to the effect that "Israeli Zionist bastards have nothing to do with the Jews [bastardi israeliani sionisti che non hanno niente a che fare con gli ebrei]." Instead, he has been accused of spearheading the trend of Leftist academic anti-Semitism in Europe.
Were Zionists to display a modicum of good sense and sobriety, they would have realized that their own conduct that endangers the future of Jews in Israel and around the world and that the vast majority of their non-Jewish adversaries are not evil anti-Semites.
In medical practice, vaccines are effective only when the infection introduced into the bloodstream is weak enough to [not] provoke a full-blown illness but strong enough to trigger an immune response. Israel's immunity no longer works because neither of these preconditions is in place.
The violence unleashed by this state against stateless Palestinians is too severe to provide a latent defense to its own body politic and the historical claim of victimization is too diluted against the backdrop of the latest military technologies and invasions of Gaza on the ground, from the air, and from the sea. Rather than state immunity, what is at stake is the contrast between the academic study of the Shoah and the actual news reports coming in, daily and hourly, from Palestine.
When the inhabitants of Gaza are not killed by bombs or tank missiles, their existence is imperiled by the destruction of civilian infrastructure, such as the water and electricity supplies. Behind the staggering numbers of Palestinians who fell victims to the Israeli invasion are countless others who are denied the basic conditions necessary for life.
Besides being robbed of their freedoms and dignity, means of subsistence and basic security, Palestinians in Gaza are deprived of the elemental horizon of life itself. Nothing short of institutionalized sadism, Israeli forewarnings about the bombardments of specific areas in the Strip are given to people who have nowhere to go, who do not even have the luxury of becoming refugees, as in the case of the civil war in Syria. They are shackled to a place that is no longer inhabitable, cut off from a flourishing relation to the earth, to sea and fresh water, and to the sky.
Above all, Israel has lost its historical immunity because, in the summer of 2014, universal identification with the suffering victim singularly pertains to Palestinians, not to Jews. But this immunity will truly come to an end only once diverse voices from all over the world proclaim, "We are all Gazans now!"
I am not referring to the loss of the last shreds of legitimacy in the Israeli discourse of self-defense and protection of its own civilian population. (Who are the citizens of Israel protected from by the bombardments of Gaza? School children? Infants born and killed under fire?) I have in mind, instead, the political atrocity of creating the world's largest concentration camp in the most densely populated place on Earth and proceeding to slaughter, indiscriminately, the Palestinians who live there.
It is in this sense that Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, with whom I co-edited a recent book titled Deconstructing Zionism: A Critique of Political Metaphysics, noted in an interview to the Italian Radio 24 that Israel is a little "worse than Hitler". Nazi Germany, too, used the rhetoric of victimization in the aftermath of World War I so as to give itself a carte blanche for ethnic and religious extermination of Jewish people as well as Gypsies and other minorities.
It, too, couched the issue in terms of the need for protecting the country's population. And it, too, consistently flouted international law and diplomatic agreements. What is "a little worse", however, is that the current killings are taking place about 65 years after the United Nations ratified its Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a rejoinder to the atrocities of World War II. Not to mention that the current mass murder of civilians in Gaza is carried out by a state that was formed as a result of these same atrocities.
This is where the historical immunity of Zionism (and, by implication, of the State of Israel that deems itself above international law) ends. Traditionally, Zionist ideology has attempted to immunize itself against criticism by referencing the genocide of Jews in Europe as the precipitating factor for the establishment of a "safe haven" for survivors in Palestine.
Whatever line of conduct the State of Israel pursued, it was seen as justifiable by the desideratum of preventing another catastrophe. In addition, by associating the anti-Zionist stance with anti-Semitism, Zionism has tried to besmirch political opposition with the charge of ethnic or religious hatred.
In other words, it aimed to depoliticize its opponents by treating their critique as a moral crime.
One way of immunizing political decisions against criticism stopped working, as soon as it became obvious that, in the name of preventing another catastrophe, the State of Israel was perpetrating mass murder of a displaced and imprisoned neighboring people.
Another method of immunization is collapsing now that an increasing number of Jewish critics of Israel are joining the chorus of international condemnation of this state's actions. Hence, the change of strategy by the Zionist apologists for the ongoing atrocities: they resort to the trick of blaming the victim and claim that the whole population of Gaza is used as a "human shield" by Hamas.
Additionally, they portray the Jewish opponents of Zionism as traitors -- and their non-Jewish adversaries -- as clandestine anti-Semites. None of the English-language news agencies that reported Vattimo's remarks, for instance, quoted the words he uttered on the Italian broadcast, to the effect that "Israeli Zionist bastards have nothing to do with the Jews [bastardi israeliani sionisti che non hanno niente a che fare con gli ebrei]." Instead, he has been accused of spearheading the trend of Leftist academic anti-Semitism in Europe.
Were Zionists to display a modicum of good sense and sobriety, they would have realized that their own conduct that endangers the future of Jews in Israel and around the world and that the vast majority of their non-Jewish adversaries are not evil anti-Semites.
In medical practice, vaccines are effective only when the infection introduced into the bloodstream is weak enough to [not] provoke a full-blown illness but strong enough to trigger an immune response. Israel's immunity no longer works because neither of these preconditions is in place.
The violence unleashed by this state against stateless Palestinians is too severe to provide a latent defense to its own body politic and the historical claim of victimization is too diluted against the backdrop of the latest military technologies and invasions of Gaza on the ground, from the air, and from the sea. Rather than state immunity, what is at stake is the contrast between the academic study of the Shoah and the actual news reports coming in, daily and hourly, from Palestine.
When the inhabitants of Gaza are not killed by bombs or tank missiles, their existence is imperiled by the destruction of civilian infrastructure, such as the water and electricity supplies. Behind the staggering numbers of Palestinians who fell victims to the Israeli invasion are countless others who are denied the basic conditions necessary for life.
Besides being robbed of their freedoms and dignity, means of subsistence and basic security, Palestinians in Gaza are deprived of the elemental horizon of life itself. Nothing short of institutionalized sadism, Israeli forewarnings about the bombardments of specific areas in the Strip are given to people who have nowhere to go, who do not even have the luxury of becoming refugees, as in the case of the civil war in Syria. They are shackled to a place that is no longer inhabitable, cut off from a flourishing relation to the earth, to sea and fresh water, and to the sky.
Above all, Israel has lost its historical immunity because, in the summer of 2014, universal identification with the suffering victim singularly pertains to Palestinians, not to Jews. But this immunity will truly come to an end only once diverse voices from all over the world proclaim, "We are all Gazans now!"
