Let’s speak bluntly since diplomacy takes too much time. It’s too tedious to search for polite ways to say ugly truths. If you believe Israeli propaganda justifying ethnic cleansing, you don’t just have rocks in your head or cognitive dissonance or dissociative disorder; you need a guardian to handle your affairs.
The crackpots are now running the show in the hasbara factory. Just a review of the idiocies: Israel used a Patriot missile to shoot down a Hamas drone aircraft headed for Tel Aviv; Hamas was using specially trained skydivers for terrorist attacks in Israel; Hamas was rigging up suicide donkeys; Hamas rockets headed for Israel miraculously reversed course & landed in Gaza; Hamas has rocket launchers & tunnel accesses in homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, marketplaces, even UN-refugee centers. And the pièce de résistance of foolishness? According to Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, Palestinians booby-trap toasters & fridges in their houses.
The Exodus baloney only takes you so far, Israel. When people believe Palestinians use their children for human shields, it only shows the depth & power of racism. It exposes that Israel draws on its roots in 19th century colonialism & racism to vilify the colonized as less than human. It links Israel to modern neoliberal colonialism, the barbaric phase of capitalism, where dispossession & plunder have created millions of homeless & forced them to travel the planet looking for a home & where those who resist are shot down like animals.
But when Israel blames Palestinian children for getting killed by getting in the way of a bomb, we haven’t just entered an Onion or Mad Magazine reality. We’ve entered the Twilight Zone; we’re entering the historic moment when the Exodus myth was stripped bare of romance & exposed as colonial racism.
Look at the mountains of cement rubble that now mark Gaza & ask yourself what was Israel’s intent? To take out rocket launchers destroying Israel & menacing it’s population? After nearly four weeks of relentless carnage in Gaza, Israel has yet to produce a single photo documenting property damage in Israel from Hamas rockets. And when we say document, we do not mean a 20-second grainy image of what might just as well be an unrepaired pothole.
(Photo of Beit Lahiya by Adel Hana/AP)