Palestinians are today’s Helots to Israel’s Sparta, condemned to be trampled on. When the response to genocide is more genocide, you are what you claim to be against. Exterminating children as the world looks on results, writes John Wight.
Gaza, October 2023. (Saleh Najm and Anas Sharif/Fars News/Wikimedia Commons)
By John Wight
Special to Consortium News
Israel is less a state than an experiment in ethno-supremacy. Death, not life is its leitmotif. In a grim irony, as we commemorate the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, Hitler triumphs in the actions of Israel’s leaders.
Benjamin Netanyahu and his clique of murderous Zionist extremists are completely and criminally impervious to the extreme suffering of the Palestinian people — including women and children — in the name of Western civilization. This is how the pristine injustice of the past 19 months has to be understood.
Not satisfied with reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble and its subject population to a condition of abject ruin, the settler-colonial State of Israel — having entered its mad-dog days — has now declared its intent to “capture” Gaza and cleanse it of its people. All, of course, in the supposed name of destroying Hamas.
An extremist in a tailored suit is still an extremist — and in Israel extremism has been allowed to flourish in the name of revenge for a European Judeocide in which the people of Palestine played no part.
Bluntly, Israel has no place in the realm of human affairs, while Zionism has no place in the realm of Jewish affairs. The former is the bastard child of Hitler’s perverse conception of the human race, while the latter is evidence that we remain, as a species, forever imprisoned within the walls of ideological turpitude.
Drilling deeper, throughout history there have been moments in which the actions and modes of existence of certain states have refuted the notion that the human story has followed a pattern of uninterrupted progress. Stretching back to antiquity, the evidence is inarguable instead that murder as a virtue and justice as a vice has regularly punctured this idea.
The Helots of Israel
Slaves in ancient Greece. Painting on Corinthian terracotta plaque, 5th century BC. (Huesca/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons)
Among the earliest examples are the famed city states of Sparta and Athens in ancient Greece. Sparta, in the affluent eyes of mainstream historians, is deemed notable for the martial spirit of its people — the ascetic and simple lives they led in service to strengthening the mind, body and spirit.
Less remarked upon are the Helots, a Grecian people deemed inferior in caste and character and enslaved by the Spartans, condemned to serve them on pain of death. The Spartan polis declared war on the helots every autumn, permitting them to be killed and abused like Israel’s periodic “mowing the lawn” massacres of Palestinians in Gaza.
Similarly, Athenian democracy is still held up today as the foundation stone of all democratic societies and polities. This great experiment in people power, we are taught, stood apart from all others when it came to unleashing great thinkers, philosophers and builders.
Less remarked upon is that at its historical zenith, more than half the population of Athens were slaves whose lived experience was that of untermenschen, mistreated accordingly.
The U.S. Confederacy, Nazi Germany, white Rhodesia, apartheid South Africa — all fall into the malign category of states set up on the basis of racial, religious, cultural and/or ethno-supremacy.
The State of Israel today is arguably the most egregious example. This is precisely because the others exist today as a warning of barbarism and mad slaughter, the inevitable consequence of allowing such a state to exist.
The Palestinians today are the Helots to Israel’s Sparta. They’ve been condemned as a people to exist in the mud to be trampled upon at will. Children being exterminated as the world looks on has been the result.
The screams of children slaughtered by the Nazis at Auschwitz are indistinguishable from the screams of children slaughtered in Gaza.
Primo Levi, an inmate of Auschwitz, visiting Buchenwald after the war in this undated photo. (Unknown/Wikimedia Commons)
The ocean of Palestinian blood spilled since 1948 stands as a withering indictment of an international community — a tiresome code for the collective West — which operates not on the basis of international law, but on the principle of might is right. We in the West are, in this regard, but savages for whom the slingshot has been replaced by the F-16 and the Merkava tank.
This twisted conception of a world fashioned by might and racial hierarchy has throughout history produced monsters.
Netanyahu and his fascistic crew of frenzied fanatics are merely the latest in a long line. He’s claimed tirelessly to be acting in the name of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust with Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
In truth, the actions of his regime and military have placed him and them closer to the guards than the inmates of Hitler’s camps.
Put more simply, when your response to genocide is more genocide, you become precisely that which you claim to be against.
Ultimately, Israel’s murderous assault on the people of Gaza — with the full material, diplomatic and political support of the collective West — has been tantamount to witnessing a rabid dog ripping the flesh from the bones of what many allowed themselves to believe was a world worth living in.
It is not.
Instead it is a world that has learned nothing and forgotten everything when it comes to the barbarous history and legacy of the human race.
Israel, not Palestine, has lost its right to exist. Israel, not Palestine, belongs in a museum.
Let us end with the chilling and prophetic words of Primo Levi, Jewish inmate at Auschwitz whose survival was a gift not only to himself and his loved one and friends, but to everyone.
Levi:
“A new fascism — with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude — can be born outside our country and be imported into it, walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names, or it can loose itself from within with such violence that it routs all defenses…Even in this contingency, the memory of what happened in the heart of Europe, not very long ago, can serve as a support and warning.”
The warning of which Primo Levi spoke has clearly and woefully gone unheeded. The ethno-fascist State of Israel in the year 2025 leaves no doubt of it.
John Wight, author of Gaza Weeps, 2021, writes on politics, culture, sport and whatever else. Please consider making a donation in order to help fund his efforts. You can do so here. You can also grab a copy of his book, This Boxing Game: A Journey in Beautiful Brutality, from all major booksellers, and his novel Gaza: This Bleeding Land from same. Please consider taking out a subscription at his Medium site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Athens is frequently held up today as the foundation stone of the modern republic, this is true. But it would be a terrible mistake to continue to legitimize this notion.
The founders of the modern republic coming out of the American and French revolutions were in general explicitly hostile to Greek democracy and in a very deliberate fashion chose Roman oligarchy as the basis of their new model of government. It is only through an unfortunate etymological inversion that happened at the end of the 18th and the early 19th centuries that we’ve arrived at the completely Orwellian notion that modern “democracies” have anything whatsoever to do with the original conception of democracy. In truth they have much more in common with the historic rivals of Greek democracies like Sparta and (later) Rome.
Ancient democrats considered elections to always select from a small stratum of society–rule by the few. It’s easy enough to observe this feature in every modern republic, even the ones that try their best to level the playing field in campaign resources. That’s why the Athenians selected almost all of their government officials through a system of random lot. In fact it was this particular feature of the Athenian system that was the basis for the definition of democracy for millenia. Aristotle writes “It is accepted as democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when they are filled by election.” Likewise, one of the other pillars of Athenian democracy was its very large juries where the jury is sovereign in court. They would have been completely appalled at the idea of unelected judges that rarely face public accountability having total control over the court room.
I also think it’s always important to be mindful of historical context when judging the hypocrisy of the Athenian system. Slavery was a ubiquitous institution throughout the Mediterranean during the Greek Classical period, most city-states did not allow women to participate in official politics, and in trade hubs like Athens there was often an immense population of foreign, free adult male residents who were also not allowed to be citizens and participate in politics. For that subset of society comprising the population of free adult male citizens, democracy was still a radical departure from other forms of government in the ancient world.
One important difference between Israel and Sparta was that the Spartans did not seek to eliminate the Helots, whose numbers overwhelmed those of Sparta, even though kept down through periodic “culling of the herd.” Rather, the intent was to keep them in a controlled state in which they performed all of the manual work, especially involving agriculture, for the Spartan master class. I would also add that to the author’s list of ethnically-based states should another be included, that of post-2014 Ukraine.
Not mentioned by the author is the Helots’ status as a “Grecian people” is disputed by historians ancient and modern (which before one makes the comparison to Israeli dispute of the Palestinians being a people, the situation is clearly the opposite, since not a single historian thinks Palestinians not to be a people or for “Palestinian” to mean something else). The word helot means “captive” and was used by ancient authors to refer to a class rather than a people, and variously said to be made up of multiple or different peoples at different times by different authors.
“Spartan” is also a neologism; they were Laconians, as were many helots. (Greek, as an aside, some would say is a neologism–I disagree as it was used as a Latin-derived endonymn in Koine Greek, i.e Graikós, contrary to what some Greeks today seem to think and who call themselves Hellenes; but it certainly was not one in the Laconians’ day.)
Their valour and virtue are indeed wild and bizarre fictions, and their treatment of helots was monstrous and is little acknowledged. (The next time someone speaks of “Spartan martial prowess,” remind them each Laconian warrior was assigned an entire group of helot slaves that had to serve them and protect them with their life.) But it seems a rather forced and not particularly accurate comparison to the present situation of occupied Palestine.
Likewise, the comparison of Athenian slaves to the treatment of Palestinians reads to me as forced, as is the implied comparison to how the helots were treated; and this comparison serves not to enlighten, but to endarken understanding of ancient Greek slavery, which was altogether quite a different thing from today’s apartheid “Israel.”
A more interesting Greek-Israeli comparison might be to that of most ancient Greeks being foreign conquerors that subjected and enslaved Greece’s populations. The Athenians were considered notable in actually being autocthons.
The rewriting of history to befit present mores and understanding is the mark of the authoritarian. The oppressed of history are rarely understood in its own terms, something Walter Benjamin expressed very well (hxxps://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html).
The comparison of the permitted autumnal culling of Helots with Israelis “mowing the lawn” is in no way “forced” and is completely apt but you somehow ignored that example as it did not fit your rather pedantic polemic. Are you also implying that the author of this piece is an authoritarian?
European jews HAVE NO BUSINESS in Palestine. Never were and never will be so-called SEMITES. And the day will come when israel will reap that which it has been sowing…and I shall not shed a single tear.
WHAT??? have Palestinians got to do with the Holocaust during WW 2??? Since 1930 the Zionists knew they were eventually going to eliminate Palestinians to make room for a ‘jewish state’. The European jews are NOT semites, so they don’t have any right to claims in Palestine. And yet…our Western ‘educated, cultured’ world remains silent. And one day israel will reap that which it has been sowing…and I shall not shed a single tear.
The Zionists were also Nazi Holocaust collaborators during the war. Ironically, that is the only connection between the Palestinians and the Holocaust: Zionists collaborated to save themselves to go ethnically cleanse Palestine!
It should be noted this is not revisionist history, but was actually understood this way at the time to be “Jewish lebensraum” in Palestine. Rosenberg famously supported it; yet thought ethnically cleansing Palestinians “with the help of British bayonets” was unrealistic. Streicher offered (in a fit of madness) to lead a Jewish Einsatzgruppe in Palestine during the Nuremberg Trial, while saying Hitler surely would have come to respect them; per Gustave Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diaries account.
Rudolph Vrba was one of the only Auschwitz inmates to escape, and he managed not only to escape, but to flee the Third Reich and warn the concentration camps were death camps; and thus of the Holocaust. Zionists saw it as an opportunity, and promptly went to negotiate terms with the Third Reich and demand the freedom of their own relatives (to leave—to occupy Palestine, of course!) in exchange for their silence. He wrote a remarkable book of his experience, which is not taught anywhere. Unsurprisingly Vrba was a vocal anti-Zionist critic of Israel, which he said reminded him of the Jewish Councils (that were timid Nazi collaborators).
The elephant in the room is AIPAC’s complete takeover of the USA including Trump and the billionaire zio cabinet he picked!!!! It’s the unmentionable Zio controlled USA calling the shots !!!
Re “Bluntly, Israel has no place in the realm of human affairs, while Zionism has no place in the realm of Jewish affairs. The former is the bastard child of Hitler’s perverse conception of the human race”
Uh, no.
In our outrage, horror, and despair, we must still stick to history.
We must be honest now, before all else.
Hitler does not exonerate a single Zionist, a single murderous Israeli who finds ever new pretexts to justify his or her greed.
In the aftermath of WWII, the CIA swooped in to hire, and save from prosecution, some of the worst of the Nazi architects of the Holocaust and Germany’s plans for domination. Frugal, victorious America was not prepared to let perfectly good psychopaths go to waste…
However, we see now where that leads. American, Western(?), culture seems to cultivate and elevate socio and psychopaths as a matter of course. Whether it is psychology, karma or force of habit however, we inevitably reap what we sow.
Israel’s Zionist leaders are similarly leading their country and society to destruction. The cry of the Holocaust was “Never forget!” This authentic appeal was captured and corrupted by the Zionists who turned it into eternal victim-hood and resentment and built a distorted and malign society and culture upon it. It has now blossomed like a cancerous tumor in the body of humanity.
From now on, “Never forget!” will be the cry of Gaza and the Palestinians while Israel fades like a bad dream.
My mother was in a labour camp in Germany during the war. By age around 50 she could not watch any war films or TV serials. Too traumatic.
One thing she told me was that the Nazis had priorities in killing – it was communists, Jews and gipsies. Many communists/trade union officials were Jewish. This group were mistreated a bit more than other workers.
The Israeli govt is dishonouring those Jews who were in this political category.
Re Palestine- cannot find words – western world plus all comfortable with the situation. Plus good arms sales, yes? How do these world leaders sleep at night?