Israel is a country that, when you get down to it, is little more than the left over pretension of British colonialism, hopped up on narcotic of unquestioning American support, and covered in the hush-toned blanket of pre-emptive anti-Semitism. Claiming to be surrounded by enemies, its diplomacy matches that of using an electric prod to guide an elephant through a garden full of ceramic pots; that is, when dealing with other countries, Israel will use them rather than befriend them, seeing it as their privilege to kill this or that person in the name of “democracy”, “freedom”, or “survival”. They have milked every bit of sympathy they can get their hands on, and when that does not work, they whine to their American patrons with childish wails and shouts of ‘anti-Semitism’ for good measure. Israel is a kid in the store, throwing itself down, using a scab on the knee from months ago to justify their meltdown over not getting what they want. They deserve nothing less than a reprimand, a swat on the behind, and to be taken home for more severe measures.
Israel has built itself up from a country built on a promise in response to a genocide into an imperialist power that replicates its own trauma onto Gaza and Palestine; they do not wish to establish protection, they wish to establish dominance. As Sartre notes in Critique of Dialectical Reason, violence permeates history, but when it does, we ought to name that violence as what it is, because there is no lack of violence on either side, but each side has different forms of violence; Palestine’s violence is that of rebellion and self defense, the gasping violence of someone on the edge of death. But for Israel, their violence is torture; the gleeful, hateful, exacting violence upon a people that begins with humiliations--like bulldozing, destroying, and using jet fighters to destroy buildings, as well as their planned nationalist ‘Jerusalem Day’ parade -- and end with brutality meant to quell the human instinct to fight back when oppressed -- as when they killed children, and used their police to brutalize protesters. The violence of Palestine is a gasp, a flash, a light before the dying body, and Israel’s is little more than a sadistic glee in the face of what seems to be sheer boredom since their last attempts tomess with peace in the Mid-east.
In the face of imperialist torture, police brutality, and a disproportional response to a people’s resistance to acts of illegal occupation, the term ‘anti-Semitism’ is a word that dissolves in the haute temperature historique; those who put guns in the faces of children, follow the shadows of Nazis, and thus will find their shouts of ‘anti-Semitism’ to be dead and ashen. The shanda of Nazism belongs to the imperialists, and the cri de coeur of oppression belongs to the Palestinians.
