Leaders of the Israeli entity in Palestine will do well to heed Abraham Lincon’s now iconic admonition to those who resort to duplicitous talk to define objective reality: “You can fool some of the people all the time and all the people some of the time”, he said, “but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
The unparalleled magnitude of catastrophe that afflicted Jewish history will likely go into rewind if Israelis, or at the very least their leaders, continue to embrace what Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, believed about the efficacy of the Big Lie: If you are a victimiser, tell the world you’re a victim, and if you repeat that lie often enough, people will believe it and even you will come to believe it yourself. That sinister Nazi figure was, of course, wrong. You may come to believe your own lies but sooner or later those lies, whose aim is to demonise your victim, will be exposed. People around the world will then be revolted by your subterfuge and turn away from you in nauseated disbelief — and that includes people like John Kerry, the American Secretary of State, who, at an unguarded moment late last week, evinced that very sentiment.
Consider one of these lies: The hundreds of civilians killed by Israeli bombing raids, during Israel’s current war on Gaza, are not its fault. Israel is the injured party in this dispute! It is only defending itself. These civilians were killed and maimed because Hamas, that “heartless organisation”, has deliberately and calculatedly positioned its rockets in the middle of populated areas, using civilians as “human shields”. Israeli offcials even concocted a pithy mantra, that they repeated to reporters almost to the point of litany, saying: “We [Israel] use our missiles to protect our civilians, while they [Hamas] use their civilians to protect their missiles.” Catchy sound bite, true, but also puerile.
These officials are clearly projecting. The therapeutic community defines “projection” in the current context as a form of pathology, where a person with, say, a bent for cruelty, will defend himself against that characterisation by denying its existence in himself while attributing it to others. Who is really using one’s people here as “human shields”? Consider how Israel sends its civilians to settle the land as colonists in the West Bank, which is Occupied Territory, and it is recognised under international law that any occupied territory is a battle zone. You don’t send your women and children to a war zone for sooner or later these civilians will be shot at. In order to “create facts on the ground” and to further its Zionist ambitions of territorial expansion, Israel has been willing all these years to do just that — effectively using its civilians as human shields.
And who, among all those international observers, journalists, human rights activists present there, will ever forget that macabre time in Jenin in April 2002 when Israeli soldiers, during their drive through the town’s refugee camp, brazenly picked up, at random, Palestinian civilians and literally used them as human shields?
Like the Nazi officials in the Third Reich before them, Israeli officials are master manipulators of language, adept at turning words upside down to enforce innumerable falsehoods. Look at the way they subvert and twist. Shejaiya, where Israeli troops perpetrated a massacre last Sunday, was not a neighbourhood in Gaza where thousands of Palestinian families lived with their children, but a “terrorist stronghold”. And, yes, Israel, out of the very goodness of its heart, always “alerts” residents of a neighbourhood to evacuate their homes before a bombing run, in order to “save lives”. In like manner, the devastating war it waged against Palestinians in Lebanon in 1982, that ravaged the country and culminated in the slaughter at Sabra and Shatila, was dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee”. And so it went, from Deir Yassin in 1948 to Qibya in 1953, from Kiffir Kassem in 1956 to Jenin in 2002, and from Qan’a in 2006 to, well, Shejaiya last Sunday.
And each time Israel’s circle of violence, its vindictiveness, its disregard for all that is human closed in on Arab civilians — whether in Palestine or Lebanon — this snowdrift of lies always thickened to a frantic blizzard. This is the kind of language that Nazis used in their heydays, that Israel has appropriated to run and justify hell, getting the habits of hell rehabilitated into its own syntax.
Kerry was overheard on the phone late last week being sarcastically dismissive of Israel’s claims that its bombs, which killed close to a hundred people that day, were dropped “with pinpoint accuracy”, by definition avoiding civilian casualties. Kerry’s retort: “It was a hell of a pinpoint operation.” That was the same Kerry who, several weeks ago, had warned that Israel was well on its way to becoming an apartheid state. Sorry, Mr Secretary, that prediction requires no prescience on any one’s part.
Well, guess what? People everywhere have, as we say in street lingo, had it up to here with this upstart entity and with its barbarous cruelties.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
