~ by Massimo De Angelis ~
These days I watch Al Jazzeera. Its reports from Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank show colourful images of children smeared with blood, they show destroyed operating theatres, schools, universities, and libraries, they make one visually travel inside burning tent cities. One also hears the sound of tank shells being fired at a besieged hospital and then the screams of desperate women and men in the rubble, their faces pulled tight. But those images of the endless columns of refugees forced to leave their homes made me hallucinate, brief, but very clear and distinct, black and white hallucinations.
I had already seen those images and heard similar stories, in the films of my childhood and adolescence, in the stories of adults, in the pictures in school books, in the magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms, or on the shelves of some municipal library: Jewish refugees expelled from the ghetto, whole cities in rubble, people tortured, starved, slaughtered or used as human shields.
Both the images rendered in colour by the app on the tablet, and the memories of those in black and white, evoke the same emotions, but with different intensities. It may be the age difference, it may be the fact that colour images amplify realism and emotional impact, making the atrocities more tangible, while black and white creates detachment, encouraging a more abstract and symbolic reflection on the event. But if I leave room for a modicum of empathy, I certainly cannot perceive any substantial difference in the experience of the protagonists of those images and stories, whether they are in colour or black and white, whether they are from Palestine or Lebanon today, or from somewhere in burning Europe at the time of my parents and grandparents. And if I leave room for a modicum of honest thought, I see no difference in the vicious callousness of the executioners and their generals and rulers. Yes of course, there is more technology today. There is the artificial intelligence that chooses targets, there is the fact that drones de-sensitise the soldier who drives them. But it is since the war in the Balkans and then Iraq that we have discovered that modern warfare has video-game characteristics. And the men who bombed the villages in the Apennines in World War II did not perceive the horror of their action as having an immediate impact. I believe then, that from the point of view of the relational experience of executioners and victims, Nazism and its war, and Zionism and its war are the same thing. As are so many other wars.
And from the point of view of the profit the executioners hope to derive from it? The official reason is the same, the necessity and the right to defence, even if the actual force used in defence is so disproportionate as to reflect a desire for domination, and indifference, contempt and loathing for the populations attacked. It is about territories, resources and an order of things befitting the perpetrator people. The official reason given by Nazi Germany for waging war in Europe was the need to ‘defend itself’ against alleged aggression and threats. In the case of the invasion of Poland, which took place on 1 September 1939, Adolf Hitler’s regime justified the action with the so-called ‘Gleiwitz incident’, a false flag operation (an act committed with the intention of disguising the actual source of responsibility and placing the blame on others) organised by the Nazi forces to make it appear that Poland had attacked first. Israel has been bombing a defenceless population in Gaza for more than a year and morally justifies it with the right to defence, even though Hamas’s albeit horrifying 7 October progrom cannot hold a candle to the tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of wounded, maimed, orphans left in the ruins in Gaza.
Adolf Hitler also advocated the need to expand the ‘Lebensraum’ (living space) for Germany, justifying territorial expansion as necessary to ensure the survival and prosperity of the ‘Aryan race’ and the hegemony of the Reich. Netanyahu and his government are clear about what Israel’s living space is. His ministers talk of recolonising Gaza, his army has been killing, threatening, abusing in the West Bank for decades, his settlers seize land, eradicate olive trees, take away Palestinians’ livelihoods, or now push into Lebanon. And they do this with a sense of justice, as if they were a chosen people, fully entitled to do this, because all that land, from the Jordan River to the sea, is theirs. Their god seems to have told them this, even though in Judaism, the ‘chosen people ’ are chosen by god for a moral and spiritual mission, not out of superiority or a spirit of colonisation and abuse, but to serve as an example of justice and faithfulness. Election implies responsibility and not exclusivity, with continual adherence to the commandments, promoting justice and mercy, and, hear hear, serving as an ethical example to humanity, illuminating the world as a ‘light unto the nations’. Alas, just the opposite of what happens on the ground. And what happens, and how it is justified, is much more akin to what the Nazis thought about the election of the Aryan race.
Yes, because the Nazis also considered the ‘Aryan race’ to be a kind of ‘chosen people’, although it was a secular and racial conception of ‘election’ that departed from religious traditions, such as Judaism or Christianity, which interpreted election as a divine call to a moral or spiritual mission. In Nazism, Aryan election did not have universal ethical implications, but was a justification for violence, discrimination and totalitarian rule, which were considered legitimate means to fulfil the historical destiny of the German people. Even in the words of the interviewed settlers who support the Israeli government, there is no trace of spiritual election. When they answer ‘who cares’ about the fate of the Palestinians, ‘we don’t care’, ‘go where they want, just get the hell out of here because this land is ours’, and say this not only in words, but also with the force of an army armed to the teeth, they have proclaimed their historical affinity with Nazism.
When Netanyahu then presented his two maps to the public, as he did at the UN recently, one also understood the connection to the order compatible with this ‘election’. The first map represented the ‘blessing’ of Israel and its Arab allies, described as ‘a land bridge connecting Asia and Europe’, which could have included infrastructure such as railways, power lines and fibre optic cables. No, there was no sign of Gaza or the West Bank in that map. Everything was swallowed up by Israel. The second map, called ‘the curse’, illustrated the ‘arc of terror’ created by Iran with its allies. ‘On one side, a bright blessing, a future of hope. On the other, a dark future of despair,’ he said. Black and white, no internal ambivalence, the blessed living space of a new regional order, the crucial node of a world order, with the chosen people at its centre, freely spanning its borders from the Jordan River to the sea.
Al Jazeera also reported that some 6,000 airlifts in one year allowed Israel to carry on its death factory with deliveries of ammunition and armaments. 6,000, the majority of them with US and British aircraft, and from bases all over Europe, including Italy. 6000, that is 16 and a half flights a day. Not counting transport by ship. So we are no longer just talking about Israel and Palestine here, but we are talking about a great productive, commercial and systemic machine that finds in war both an enormous source of profit and a battering ram in the struggle to redesign the world order, the myth of a new ‘Reich’ of economic and consumerist prosperity, a symbolic expression of the collective unconscious of a (real or aspiring) middle class of the West that is impossible to realise.
So what changes between the colour images of the genocide in Gaza and the black-and-white ones in my memory (apart from the historical context of course)? Basically one thing. In Al Jazzeera, and other international media that are on the ground and have a minimum of professional and editorial honesty, and social media, the horror is broadcast live, day after day, and if you go looking for them, there is no shortage of graphic images. Images that question us on a daily basis, that say ‘hey, what the fuck are you doing, you who is watching? ‘And what do you do, you who is changing channel?’ I’ll tell you what I do, I live a daily life connected hand and foot with this carnage. And it just doesn’t make me feel good. It would take a hundred, a thousand, a million collectives like the Greek dockworkers who recently blocked the bullets going to Israel saying: ‘We will not be accomplices’. The little things in life that you just hope can become big, big things.