Palestine Defines Us

Palestine is the perfect illustration of the West’s astonishing hypocrisy. The Gaza genocide defines us because it is us.

Citizens of past nations that committed genocides woke up each morning focused on the challenges of daily life, not the people their leaders were slaughtering. Awareness of the slaughter varied, depending on whether the victims were located on different continents or within a single population, but propaganda and dehumanization were the constant balm for uneasy consciences and political cover. Those who rose above the brainwashing were hampered in their willingness to challenge their leaders, and faced consequences—often brutal ones—if they did so.

Yet, to varying degrees, posterity holds the country as a whole morally responsible. Whatever the mitigating circumstances, posterity views the phrase “we did not know” with skepticism.

So imagine yourself, a history PhD student in 2124, researching the archives of that dark stain on the former Western Empire known simply as the Palestinian genocide. What would you see?

Today’s genocide is not being perpetrated by an individual renegade nation, nor by an empire in the traditional sense, but by a consortium led by the United States. We, too, citizens of the consortium, wake up every morning with our own problems, not those of the peoples being slaughtered in our name. We, too, are being manipulated by racist propaganda designed to make us willing partners in this consummate crime, from the crude lies of Fox News to the insidious manipulation of the New York Times to the self-righteous arrogance of PBS. We, too, are prisoners of the power structures in which we live.

But there is a qualitative difference between the genocides of the past – Belgium murdering the Congolese, the Ottomans murdering the Armenians, the Nazis murdering the Jews and others – and today’s genocide, the murder or erasure of every person who is not Jewish in historic Palestine. We cannot claim any equivocation. This genocide is our full responsibility. And as ruthless as the backlash may be, opposing it is not a death sentence, as it was, for example, in Germany in the 1930s.

Unlike past genocides, we are watching ours unfold in real time on our phones. But we have been watching our genocide from the beginning. The Israeli state is based on a supremacist ideology whose inevitable end is genocide, its most honest politicians openly confirm this intention, and the history of the state has been continuous and uninterrupted proof of this for seventy-six years.

But we – the so-called “West” and especially the United States – remain passive thanks to the illusion of freedom and democracy, and the sense of moral assurance they provide. Whatever our faults, we are an open and modern society, guided by informed debate and a political structure based on the rule of law.

To immerse ourselves in this illusion, we allow free speech within an artificial spectrum calibrated to exclude anything that challenges it. As Palestinians are slaughtered, we rejoice in being able to say whatever we want, from one extreme of this artificial spectrum to the other. The truth beyond is not censored per se; it simply does not exist. The fact that those who venture to its upper limits are subjected to abuse and have their careers destroyed under the hatchet of “anti-Semitism” confirms the illusion that they have spoken to the limits of what could be.

So for seventy-six years, we have been busy defying this prescribed ceiling. We talk about Israel’s actions and what the state does, lamenting the ravages of the disease while protecting the disease itself. The purveyors of genocide are happy because its real cause—the existence of the Israeli state itself, a state whose very foundation is genocidal—is not named and not talked about.

We engage in our political system with the same dishonesty, a two-party monopoly presented as a “democracy.” What’s your cup of tea when it comes to genocide? Do you prefer the genocide of Woke or the genocide of the threat to democracy itself?

Palestine is far from the only sin committed by the United States and its ilk, but it is the defining injustice that encompasses all others. It is not an incident, a coup, a military action, a war, a foreign policy, a political quagmire, but a messianic obsession that permeates our psyche, an addiction to genocide for which we are willfully destroying ourselves. For much of the world, Palestine is the “line in the sand” of our astonishing hypocrisy. This genocide belongs to us. It defines us. It is us.

November 2024, election month, marks 107 years since Britain’s Balfour Declaration and 77 years since the United States adopted UN General Assembly Resolution 181 (Partition). In both cases, it was well understood that these documents were meaningless and that we were institutionalizing the ethnic cleansing, and ultimately genocide, of the indigenous population of Palestine from river to river.

Now that genocide has shifted into high gear, we are doubling down on our self-righteous illusions: “No to genocide” is not an option on the U.S. election menu in November, any more than truthful reporting on Palestine is finally an option in the mainstream media. Unless there is a radical and immediate awakening through mass uprisings across the country and the world, “genocide” will be our epitaph.

Thomas Suárez is a London-based historical scholar and a professional violinist and composer trained at Juilliard. A former resident of the West Bank, he has published three books on the history of cartography and four on Palestine, most recently “Palestine Hijacked – how Zionism forged an apartheid state from river to sea.”

Translation: JB for

Source: Mondoweiss