“I am in blood,” Macbeth says, “stepped in so far that should I wade no more,/returning were as tedious as go o’er”. It’s not Macbeth alone, but akin to Freud, Shakespeare alluded not only to the individual but to the collective imperialist psyche, and to all those nurturing hideous genocidal designs. The US with its hands drenched in the Palestinians’ blood is the modern Macbeth.
“History,” Marx says, “repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and then as farce” while simultaneously believing in history’s spiral upward evolution.
Following the Holocaust which included Jews, communists, gypsies, Roma, and vulnerable people, but later was monopolized by the Zionists to justify a “promised land” and to fulfill the hegemonic designs of US imperialism, the world is now watching a bigger and much grislier phenomenon repeating itself both as tragedy and farce in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Western civilization is based on holocausts, genocides, and expropriation of the oppressed people of the world. Despite this established fact, every student of history knows that the tragic event of the holocaust was never a popular theme among the Jews, and how could it be? The weak people, meekly shepherded to their graves, weren’t thought to be an ideal image of the Jews. “In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust” Finkelstein states “wasn’t cast as a uniquely Jewish—let alone a historically unique— event”.
The 1967 war was another watershed in Zionist history. To justify the occupation and massacre of the people of Gaza and the West Bank, the Nazi holocaust became “the Holocaust” of the Jews alone, and soon it morphed into a highly productive industry.
“Holocaust awareness” for Boss Everon, an Israeli left-wing writer and journalist, “is not an understanding of the past but a manipulation of the present.” It helped to manufacture consent among American Jews previously indifferent to the Israeli state. The money began to flow to the latter’s coffers straight from the White House and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a highly affluent Zionist organization, which now decides the fate of American presidential elections.
Holocaust and Anti-Semitism, both being purely European phenomena, gave Zionism tools to undermine and run amuck with every crime they committed against humanity from supporting the white minority South African regime to the genocide of the Palestinians.
The phenomena led to an infamous pact between two former enemies, Europe, especially the West Germans, the executioners of the Nazi holocaust, and the newly carved settler colonial entity of Israel. In a futile attempt to conceal its barbaric past, and eager to become a “civilized nation”, in 1950 the West German government signed an indemnity agreement with Israel, paying the apartheid state a reparation of USD 60 billion. The process continues to this day with unconditional support for the genocide of the Palestinians.
Germany is also the third-biggest provider of weapons to the Israelis. Anti-Israel protests are outlawed in Germany, one of the most developed democracies of Europe.
It’s not a coincidence that the government of Nicaragua has taken the German government to the ICJ for being an accomplice to the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. France has decided not to stay far behind the Germans, while the Netherland has inaugurated a holocaust museum amidst the Palestinian genocide. In the graveyard of Hague Spinoza, a heretic Jew, must be convulsing in his grave.
Despite all attempts to stifle the voices of dissent, the unbearable plight of the Palestinians has shaken the conscience of the world. Barring a few exceptions, people from Africa to the Middle East and Brazil to South Africa are showing their anger on the streets. The US and Europe are no exceptions.
The student protests starting from Columbia University are spreading like wildfire. The intimidation, torture, and arrests by the highly militarized police are in vogue.
Nevertheless, the virus of resistance is contagious and is not only afflicting other American Universities but also the Australian and French Universities with nonchalant ease. It’s reminiscent of 1968 when the Parisian students, caressed by the new sensibility that helped them to transcend the culture of conformation, blockaded the roads and demanded a new economic system, and had almost embraced the victory but for the failure of the Communist Party to intervene and wrest the power from the capitalist regime.
The students of the world have proved their revolutionary consciousness once again. They have invalidated the concept of “Utopia” by denouncing the imperialist designs, making the impossible, possible, and bringing what was once elusive within reach. No one knows about the fate of their struggle, but it’s happening at a turning point in history, forcing it to turn away from the era of coercion and imperial domination, which is itself a most significant event.
It hardly matters how different the aims and objectives of this struggle are from the one that erupted in Paris in 1968, and it scarcely matters how effective or self-destructive this movement proves to be, and how distant it remains from the life and death struggle of the wretched of the earth living and dying in the slums of the US or slaughtered in Gaza in the broad daylight, the one thing common in both, is the depth of great refusal, the refusal to live in a society based on coercion and repression.
Alarmed by this cross-creed unity of the students, Netanyahu is crying “wolf”, blaming (the non-existing) anti-Semitism, eating the corpse of Zionism, and the world is smirking because anti-Semitism has been interred long ago in the Western world.
Why the imperialist powers are denying the right to Palestinians’ freedom is an existential question. They know that the fate of the oppressed people of the world depends upon the liberation of Palestine, which isn’t confined “from the river to the sea”, as the slogan states, but includes Syria, Lebanon, and the entire Transjordan.
Once the greater Palestine or Syria wins its freedom, the map of the entire Middle East will change. Not only the rentier state of Israel which, for Anderson, “is kept by the US as its imperialist bridgehead” will vanish, but imperialism itself is destined to lose its grip on Eurasia.
All Arab monarchies and the remaining dictators will fall like ninepins. The world will look far better, brighter, and more humane which is no longer possible in “a pseudo-democracy of a free Orwellian world”, because “the world of human freedom” Marcuse argues, “cannot be built by the established societies, no matter how much they rationalize their domain”.
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