Settler colonial states have a terminal shelf life. Israel is no exception.
Birth of a New Nation – by Mr. Fish.
Israel will appear triumphant after it finishes its genocidal campaign in Gaza and the West Bank.
Backed by the United States, it will achieve its demented goal. Its murderous rampages and genocidal violence will exterminate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
Its dream of a state exclusively for Jews, with any Palestinians who remain stripped of basic rights, will be realized. It will revel in its blood-soaked victory. It will celebrate its war criminals.
Its genocide will be erased from public consciousness and tossed into Israel’s huge black hole of historical amnesia. Those with a conscience in Israel will be silenced and persecuted.
But by the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence.
Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation, will lie in ash heaps.
Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as an ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel the way it is distancing itself from Ukraine.
“By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare — it will have signed its own death sentence.”
Its popular support, already eroded in the U.S., will come from America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and white supremacy.
Palestinian blood and suffering — 10 times the number of children have been killed in Gaza as in two years of war in Ukraine — will pave the road to Israel’s oblivion. The tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ghosts will have their revenge.
Israel will become synonymous with its victims the way Turks are synonymous with the Armenians, Germans are with the Namibians and later the Jews, and Serbs are with the Bosniaks.
Stagnant Nation
Israel’s cultural, artistic, journalistic and intellectual life will be exterminated. Israel will be a stagnant nation where the religious fanatics, bigots and Jewish extremists who have seized power will dominate public discourse.
It will find its allies among other despotic regimes. Israel’s repugnant racial and religious supremacy will be its defining attribute, which is why the most retrograde white supremists in the U.S. and Europe, including philo-semites such as John Hagee, Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene, fervently back Israel. The vaunted fight against anti-Semitism is a thinly disguised celebration of White Power.
Despotisms can exist long after their past due date. But they are terminal. You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism. The cynical weaponization of the Holocaust, including branding Palestinians as Nazis, has little efficacy when you carry out a live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million people trapped in a concentration camp.
“You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar to see that Israel’s lust for rivers of blood is antithetical to the core values of Judaism.”
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend.
Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers.
Joe Biden with Abbas and two Palestinian children presenting flowers at the U.S. president’s arrival in July 2022, at the Palestinian Presidential Palace in Bethlehem. (White House, Adam Schultz)
The historian Ronald Robinson cites the inability to recruit indigenous allies by the British Empire as the point at which collaboration inverted into noncooperation, a defining moment for the start of decolonization. Once noncooperation by native elites morphs into active opposition, Robinson explains, the empire’s “rapid retreat” is assured.
All Israel has left is escalating violence, including torture, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship and during Britain’s conflict in Northern Ireland. But in the long term it is suicidal.
“You might say that the battle of Algiers was won through the use of torture,” the British historian Alistair Horne observed, “but that the war, the Algerian war, was lost.”
Section of Algerian Casbah after French dynamiting, Oct. 8, 1957. (Saber68, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The genocide in Gaza has turned Hamas fighters into heroes in the Muslim world and the Global South. Israel may wipe out the Hamas leadership. But the past — and current — assassinations of scores of Palestinian leaders has done little to blunt resistance.
The siege and genocide in Gaza has produced a new generation of deeply traumatized and enraged young men and women whose families have been killed and whose communities have been obliterated. They are prepared to take the place of martyred leaders. Israel has sent the stock of its adversary into the stratosphere.
At War With Itself
Israel was at war with itself before Oct. 7. Israelis were protesting to prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s abolition of judicial independence. Its religious bigots and fanatics, currently in power, had mounted a determined attack on Israeli secularism.
Israel’s unity since the attacks is precarious. It is a negative unity. It is held together by hatred. And even this hatred is not enough to keep protestors from decrying the government’s abandonment of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
Hatred is a dangerous political commodity. Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian “human animals,” when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors.
The demonized group can never be redeemed or cured. A politics of hatred creates a permanent instability that is exploited by those seeking the destruction of civil society.
“Once finished with one enemy, those who stoke hatred go in search of another. The Palestinian ‘human animals,’ when eradicated or subdued, will be replaced by Jewish apostates and traitors.”
Israel was far down this road on Oct. 7 when it promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish settlements to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.”
Many of Israel’s best educated and young have left the country to places like Canada, Australia and the U.K., with as many as one million moving to the United States. Even Germany has seen an influx of around 20,000 Israelis in the first two decades of this century.
Around 470,000 Israelis have left the country since Oct. 7. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — are attacked as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system is an indoctrination machine for the military.
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The Israeli scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its occupation of the Palestinians, it would give rise to a corrupt Rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Israel,” he said, “would not deserve to exist, and it will not be worthwhile to preserve it.”
The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally.
The Biden administration, in its fervor to unconditionally support Israel and appease the powerful Israel lobby, has bypassed the congressional review process with the Department of State to approve the transfer of 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to Israel. Secretary of State Antony Blinken argued that “an emergency exists that requires the immediate sale.” At the same time he has cynically called on Israel to minimize civilian casualties.
Palestine’s Civilian Casualties
Israel has no intention of minimizing civilian casualties. It has already killed 18,800 Palestinians, 0.82 percent of the Gazan population — the equivalent of around 2.7 million Americans. Another 51,000 have been wounded.
Half of Gaza’s population is starving, according to the U.N. All Palestinian institutions and services that sustain life — hospitals (only 11 out of 36 hospitals in Gaza are still “partially functioning”), water treatment plants, power grids, sewer systems, housing, schools, government buildings, cultural centers, telecommunications systems, mosques, churches, U.N. food distribution points — have been destroyed.
Israel has assassinated at least 80 Palestinian journalists alongside dozens of their family members and over 130 U.N. aid workers along with members of their families.
Civilian casualties are the point. This is not a war against Hamas. It is a war against the Palestinians. The objective is to kill or remove 2.3 million Palestinians from Gaza.
The shooting dead of three Israeli hostages who apparently escaped their captors and approached Israeli forces with their shirts off, waving a white flag and calling out for help in Hebrew is not only tragic, but a glimpse of Israel’s rules of engagement in Gaza. These rules are — kill anything that moves.
As the retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland, who formerly headed the Israeli National Security Council, wrote in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth,
“[T]he State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in …. Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieve the goal.”
“Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” he wrote. Major General Ghassan Alian declared that in Gaza, “there will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell; you will get hell.”
Settler colonial states that endure, including the United States, exterminate through diseases and violence nearly the entirety of their indigenous populations. Old World plagues brought by the colonizers to the Americas, such as smallpox, killed an estimated 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America.
By 1600 less than a 10th of the original population remained. Israel cannot kill on this scale, with nearly 5.5 million Palestinians living under occupation and another 9 million in the diaspora.
The Biden presidency, which ironically may have signed its own political death certificate, is tethered to Israel’s genocide. It will try to distance itself rhetorically, but at the same time it will funnel the billions of dollars of weapons demanded by Israel — including $14.3 billion in supplemental military aid to augment the $3.8 billion in annual aid — to “finish the job.”
It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project.
Israel is a pariah state. This was publicly on display on Dec. 12 when 153 member states at the U.N. General Assembly voted for a ceasefire, with only 10 — including the U.S. and Israel — opposed and 23 abstaining.
Israel’s scorched earth campaign in Gaza means there will be no peace. There will be no two state solution. Apartheid and genocide will define Israel. This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
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…..WORD!!!!… “It is a full partner in Israel’s genocide project,” Chris Hedges
i.e., “IT” is the “Eagle.”
The naked truth is our national bird, the Mighty Eagle, aging miserably, his two right wings tattered torn and pissed on. Shuffles through the crises. Always, looks, dazed, confused, medicated & angry! Still, decades later, The Eagle’s all about war!
Heads Up! Mr. Fish’s got the *…“grinning, smiley-faced serial killer.” “That horrifying grin, stretched over” the Eagle’s bloody, dirty, grubby bone, errr, peeping through. Soooo, f/creepy!!! AND, Spot f/On, Mr. Fish!
*…“How Does An Eagle’s Claw Compare To The Human Hand?”
“Eagle claws are optimized for capturing prey, with thicker scales, sharper talons, and greater clamping force than human hands.” AND, Mr. Fish’s got this, too!
Today’s Eagle, is grounded in the West Bank’s/Gaza’s/Israel’s/the Nation’s muck, mud, & misery. The Eagle’s blackened, stumped, infected talons are proof! (See Above). Imo, 100% infected from his decades of marinating in deception, destruction, and death. The Eagle’s DNA is infected. The Eagle is grounded! He/She NEVER was ready for prime time.
Soooo, WHO is? Blinken? Sullivan? Austin? Or “The Marine that carries the box that can blow up the world ” calling the $hots b/c everybody, knows, “A bird that is not flying does not know where there is harvest.”
What I$rael knows, is “the Eagle’s commitment to I$rael is engraved in the rock!!!” And, “Human hands excel at fine manipulation, w/opposable thumbs, shorter fingers, and weaker claws than eagles.” Advantage, I$rael.
Hence, “Birth of a Nation,” imo, the album cover for the dirge being written in the Middle East. Btw, what was the Charlottesville chant that freaked the old man out & put him on a mission to “Re$tore the Soul of The Nation?” ..hmmmm. I digress….
TY, *Caitlin Johnstone’s, the genius, who got this right f/on @ “The US Empire Is A Smiley-Faced Serial Killer;” AND, * Dr. Jane Smith @ “How Does An Eagle’s Claw Compare To The Human Hand?” @ duckduckgodot com.
TY, CN. “Keep It Lit!” Ciao
…p.s., My apologies, for missing the point! @ “Hence, “Birth of a Nation,” imo, the album cover for the dirge being written in the Middle East,” is missing, the most significant point, “NEW.”
It’s the “Birth of a New Nation” – by Mr. Fish. Therefore, going forward, the ol’ ‘Copy & Paste’ to get it right! Imo, it matters!
TY. Onward & Upwards!
The blood lust and genocide reflects intense hatred and racism of Israel compounded by the arrogance and superiority complex of the population-Israel is virtually mad without any sense of humanity or morality.
To say that Israel has a right to defend itself is duplicitous in view of the killing and destruction of the civilian population of Gaza. This what the Israelis and their lap dogs in the us are very good at.
Any time I hear about Israel’s right to defend itself, I say that’s like saying a kidnapper has the right to defend himself against his victim when the victim fights to get free.
55+ years of occupation means there’s no right to self defense.
Wait, I just got a call from the Comanche Nation, they want Texas back.
I have to agree. How long are the “shelf lives” of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, etc?
“Israel’s death” as a nation-state of Zionist fascists isn’t so
much of a loss, but the Judeo-Christian twin pillars of
Western Civilization surely is.
From Judaism humanity received the truth of one God
ruling the world; from the Christian faith, that this one God
took on human being (Eph.2.6-8), and so gives all believing
humanity access to an eternal life.
Such a belief will surely be missed. For without this truth,
no empire, nation-state or people can live together in peace.
Much less have joy in being alive together.
I beg to differ. Maybe it’s the centuries-long squabbling over gods and religion that made it so difficult to live in peace in the first place. Maybe we can evolve our thought-processes. Or maybe not. But it’s worth it to try.
I think you may want to read history from non western source. There was no “centuries-long squabbling over gods” in the middle east when Islamic empire and Ottoman ruled. In the late 1800s Ottomans even brought Jews from russia when they were persecuted. Jews left Spain to go to muslim lands when Islamic empire fell. They were always safe in the muslim lands. You can talk to any orthodox Jew whose ancestors lived in palestinian land prior to 1948. Only when the European Zionists came with their weapons and started ethinically cleansing native population that the problem started. This issue has nothing to do with religion since all religious people lived here in peace prior to 1948. Only religious angle is that Zionists are using Jewish persecution in Europe to grab land in Palestine and ethnically clean the native population. Zionists are usually atheists or secular.
The death toll in the Yemeni war is over 300,000 and counting. How about a little rage and vitriol?
Connect the dots: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and add siege warfare (so called sanctions) on Venezuela, Cuba etc. and we have…millions dead and displaced. The Genocide Of Palestine is part of this picture. . It is all part of the Suicide-Death-Cult of US foreign policy.
And yet Yemen is the only nation trying to do what it can to stop Israel from continuing the slaughter. From what I’ve read, they managed to block Israeli ships from entering the Suez Canal. They’ve also launched weapons at Israeli ships causing damage.
The downtrodden of the earth are beginning to push back against the abuse of their people. Talk about David vs Goliath. Every bit of damage they do is a stand for justice.
There seems to be something missing from this article, as its sole attempt to provide a solution seems to be to wait until Palestinians and the rest of the world provide sufficient pressure on Israel to make it shape up rather than wait until its genocidal behavior has accomplished its purpose.
I.e., just waiting is no solution at all to the immediate problem. What kinds of immediate pressure might accomplish an actual solution? E.g., immediately starting to destroy all Israeli settlements might well get Israel’s attention, along with any Israeli ‘defense’ activities that might oppose any such action and any support for them, thus eliminating Israel’s ability to continue the behavior it has proven dedicated to pursuing over many decades despite its manifest illegality according to international law and U.N. treaties.
Talk is cheap and has so far accomplished nothing in the face of this long term and clearly escalating genocide. What about a ‘coalition of the willing’ if the U.N. can’t come up with a way to go about it?
Who will join the Genocide Fleet?
The call has gone out. The world’s navies have been called to come and protect the Genocide. Those evildoers are trying to stop our Genocide, and someone must teach them a lesson. Set sail today for the Red Sea, and add your warships to the Genocide Fleet.
Excellent article. The UK is also complicit in this genocide. This vassal country of mine is as corrupt and morally bankrupt as its master across the pond. AUKUS countries have 100% been captured by the Corporate Zionist lobby from which I can’t see no escape.
suggestion … strike ‘Zionist’
Saying ‘captured by the Corporate Lobby’ says it all.
There is an escape route. The Americans once knew about it, but apparently have forgotten it exists. The edit at least helps to clarify what stands in the way.
Tha Auzzies blunder big when they jumped on the anti China bandwagon. They had better trim their sails quick before they get the stupid treatment Uncle Sam gonna be very busy and won’t neb available to save you. China & Russia are going to be beyond the U.S. & it’s NATO GNOMES…. Any non nuclear bomb country is helpless when the gloves cum off… Better to get along Than to get nuked…
Whatever hastens the The Death of Israel – the murderous/heinous apartheid entity – (especially by it’s own hand), is most welcome
If I remember my Bible from Sunday School, in the past God itself has been made so angry by the Israelites that God banished them from ‘the Holy Land’. It has happened before. The Bible tells me so.
“…This presages a long, long conflict, one the Jewish State cannot ultimately win…” says Chris.
Well that is in one sense a truism. In the end even the powerful long lasting Roman Empire lost its power and then its reason to exist. But if we are looking for this process to overtake Israel we have to look at the American Empire. As long as that is a powerful entity so will be Israel. The American Empire is indeed fading but in that long process its protege or perhaps even its master Israel will sadly stay strong and cruel until the last.
Maybe … or maybe the collapse will be as Hemingway described the way people go bankrupt: “two ways, gradually, then suddenly” …
In journalism, it seems—-Chris Hedges is one of the few who claim to be journalists—and he is a journalist.
His presentation is always clear and fair, and he’s willing to speak TRUTH—which in America seems to be dying away.
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people is so—-Nazi like. Why America— are we giving so much money to a country that seems to have nothing to do with Judaism? And along with that, a US President who seems to want to war with against the Palestinians too..
Sadly it seems American has turned into a nation where presidents who have never been in a war—want to start a war. Are they insane or delusional? it’s difficult to say. But Joe Biden and Blinken—as you trash humanity, you are doing NO ONE any favor.
I can not vote for you, Joe Biden—as you don’t represent what a democracy should be—but then too– so many of the elected ones seem to act in the same disturbing way. It seems too that the quality of presidential material has wasted away—-and so will America. : (
And sadly I do wonder—-how long will America last—or how long will the planet last—–it all seems that those who seek to rule—really have so fews skills to do that. And WAR never is the answer.
Great comment. The degradation of the political class is a world-wide phenomenon. We are seeing around the world a growing discrepancy between the direction of public opinion and the decisions of policy makers. This is particularly marked in the three AUKUS partners, None of us have parties of the left any more,
Although many see banning political donations, along with public financing of elections as the answer, that won’t stop corruption. And as long as politicsl office remains so lucrative, we will continue to attract self centred mediocrities into politics.
I believe that the root of the problem lies in excessive corporate power and obscene levels of inequality which fuel undemocratic practices and extremism.
I applaud this article and the courageousness of the journalism behind it. I just take issue with one thing and that’s putting Serbs on the list with Hitler and Armenia. I feel like that’s coming from some bias. You could just have easily pointed to the ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Zagreb. There are a hundred events that belong on that list before piling on Serbs, a majority of which are due to the United States. Serbs were demonized by the West and you seem to be playing into that by putting them on this short list.
Agreed. Serbs are unfairly depicted
100% agree
Hedges always says this. I don’t know why he promotes the US/Nato imperial narrative this way.
Perhaps he forgets the 10 (or was it 100?) Serbs hanging from lamp posts for each German killed by the resistance during WWII.
In the 90’s Chris Hedges was the Balkan Bureau Chief for The New York Times, working in Bosnia in charge of developing anti-Serb propaganda. Though he seems to have recovered from his NY Times indoctrination and redeemed himself on many topics, particularly on Israel, he seems to have never properly educated himself on the Balkans. It’s a shame that he gains credibility among the true left on topics like Israel and then uses that credibility to spread establishment lies against other oppressed peoples like the Serbs.
Thanks for this very relevant background. Maybe another part of the explanation is that his theological/religious formation is getting in the way of his understanding. It’s a shame that writers whose analysis can be relied upon are so very rare. (We lost one such with the death of Glen Ford, in my opinion.)
Agreed. His religiosity is disqualifying. “The global mystique of the U.S., after two decades of disastrous wars in the Middle East and the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, is as contaminated as its Israeli ally.” TDS much, Chris? How dare he reference genuine genocide and bumbling entrapment in the same sentence.
I thank you so much for this. As soon as I see Hedges mouthing anti-Serbian propaganda, I stop reading, so I usually stop reading fairly early in his writing. (No matter the subject, he has to bring up the fact that he was a NYT correspondent in Yugoslavia.) He should read the comments under his articles and maybe learn something from us plebes out here.
I didn’t at first see the grinning skull behind the star of David in Mr. Fish’s “Birth of a New Nation”. It’s very macabre. But also very apt, as the entity named Israel is committing acts which can only be deemed as macabre.
And yet, the US has somehow “survided” and prospered despite a 70 plus years of illegal war, mass slaughter of innocents, innumerable regime change efforts, and crippling sanctions against those who do not comply. Sure, money and power prevent their being called to account. Yet this failure to be held liable tells us something about the world’s response to Gaza as well. With each generation, there is a new normal. The lessons of the past are ultimately lost upon the young. I hope my cynicism is unjustified. Bravo to Chris for fighting the good fight as always.
I agree, but am not sure that the US as a whole is prospering. Levels of inequality, homelessness and imprisonment, along with deteriorating infrastructure, access to health care and education appear to indicate a society in terminal decline, Too much of the wealth has been sucked up from the people to the uber rich, who appear to be psychpathic in their indifference to the suffering they create.