It seems easy – and bloodless – to sit in front of a keyboard and philosophise while, 400 kilometres to the south, a St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre takes place daily for 232 terrifying nights. But is it really like this?
Is the information war less “innocent”, more moral, more neutral, less bloody and dirty than the “analogue” war? Is our contribution or complicity in this massacre truly negligible as we fire off words from the safety of our ideological trenches? I’m not so sure.
Everyone defends their own position, guarding their personal worldview. But nothing falls on deaf ears. Words become bullets and bombs; every keystroke, like a butterfly effect, eventually turns into a deadly weapon that kills civilians.
We don’t need to refer to the worldview of the ancient Greeks to confirm that hubris and insolence will inevitably be punished. History has taught this lesson countless times, and we, the rotten sapientes sapientes, have received this lesson repeatedly and harshly, even if we are incapable of learning from it. We are filled with tragedies and farces, yet devoid of prudence.
I will keep referring to Robert Fisk’s statement, a journalist who has witnessed many conflicts and disputes around the world, especially in the Middle East, that war is not a drama of opposites, and there are no winners or losers, only slaughter. However, the powerful have always sought to divide the world into camps.
Thus, the “Al-Aqsa Flood” demanded a disproportionately “Iron Sword,” and the deadly vicious cycle continues. Only this time, the Israeli leadership, with a messianic neo-Zionist air and the hypocritical backing of a powerful international gang bent on widening a fictitious “clash of civilisations,” appears more than determined to pursue a “final solution.”
Israel’s far-right government – and those who support its practices – has “earned” through its actions a blasphemous comparison to the industrial-scale atrocities of the Nazis, which the Jews experienced firsthand. However, there is one fundamental difference. The Nazi beasts did not suffer from victimhood; they did not pretend to be the victims in order to impose their iron fist.
Israel’s propaganda mechanisms, though they would make even Goebbels proud, fail to conceal the definitive nature of its official policy. In this endeavour, the complete lack of empathy for the devastation and famine endured by Palestinians encounters a blasphemous moral elitism, desperately seeking to capitalise on the indisputable historical sufferings of the Jewish people.
In a way, the goal is Lebensraum, “living space,” and in the official ideological direction of the Israeli government, this cannot be achieved without getting rid of the Palestinians. It’s a matter of survival, in their minds. And after Gaza, the West Bank will follow.
It is a coordinated ethnic cleansing, the only difference being that it is not a Holocaust. That is, they do not necessarily want to exterminate the Arabs because they consider them “racially inferior” and “vermin,” but to strategically ensure the historical desire for “maximum land, minimum Arabs.”
They don’t want to eliminate them; they just want them gone. Hence, not only the return but even a brief visit by displaced Palestinians who took refuge in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, etc., remains a red line for the Israeli state.
Apart from the tragic fact that the once-victim has begun to resemble the executioner, what is tragically ironic is that this militaristic machine of ethnic superiority inevitably captivates Islamophobic white nationalists, the so-called “anti-Semitic Zionists.”
Not to mention the sad chapter of self-proclaimed “defenders of the Western way of life” with their outrageously à la carte sensitivities. All of them are guilty notes in a discordant operetta of Pontius Pilate-like indifference, which would be amusing if it weren’t for the cover-up of a modern-day genocide.
The propaganda machine starts with the isolation of the slogan “from the river to the sea,” taken out of context to justify and whitewash, if you please, the very same… full implementation of this slogan in practice by the other side (!), that of Israel. A distorted slogan as a moral counterweight to a genocidal campaign and the scales are presented as balanced.
At the same time, if you dare to point out that the Palestinian people have lived in a legal vacuum for 75 years, that their very existence is under constant threat, that the right to self-defence cannot be equated with indiscriminate vengeful rage, or that collective responsibility for any people is unacceptable, you are branded as an anti-Semite.
The same goes for even whispering that those who consider themselves “civilised” and believe they hold the moral high ground should not respond to horror with carnage.
Don’t call for peace, don’t call for a ceasefire and an end to the relentless slaughter, or you may be labelled an apologist for terrorists.
If this bloody co*cktail of indifference and hypocrisy isn’t hubris, then what is?
