Daily Times

“Auschwitz happens when someone looks at the slaughterhouse and thinks they are animals”. One wonders how Adorno would have reacted to the recent not-very-gallant statement of Yoav Gallants, the Israeli Defense Minister who, while besieging Gaza and denying the people food, fuel, and electricity, has declared them human animals.

In his moment of nihilism, watching those marching to the concentration camps pensively in a state of resignation, Adorno failed to imagine another kind of people, chained and dehumanized inmates of another slaughterhouse, capable of finding their humanity in inhuman conditions by throwing down their gauntlets to their enemies demanding death or liberation. That was precisely what happened a few days ago when the Palestinian freedom fighters broke through the barrier around Gaza, the open-air prison, and marched out of the dungeon to take control of several parts of their own land grabbed by a settler colonial state, refusing to yield and suffer under the wrath of the oppressor’s whims quietly and somberly.

Struck by the delicacy of the planning and flabbergasted by the subtlety and nimble footedness of the Palestinians’ assault, the world’s most equipped army was left bewildered. The dazed Zionist settlers attacking the Al-Aqsa compound with impunity were found running amok in fear must have given Hollywood another favorite and delectable scene to show in the movies as Syrians running from the atrocities of Assad’s army. Turning reality on its head is the art taught by the 20th Century Fox and the rest of its ilk is now perfected by the US media. Saddam, as they said, threw the infants from the incubators, but it was for Medallion Albright to starve and kill them.

Hamas and its allies have claimed to have captured more than a hundred prisoners of war, including the IDF soldiers, itself a gigantic achievement. How easily the IDF capitulated is not strange. Going down history lane, Hezbollah comprehensively defeated and disgraced the IDF in 2006. For Norman Finkelstein, a distinguished academic, the Israeli armed force is a petty bourgeois army that can hardly fight a ground war.

Struck by the delicacy of the planning and flabbergasted by the subtlety and nimble footedness of the Palestinians’ assault, the world’s most equipped army was left bewildered.

The argument about Hamas being an offshoot of the Israeli state haunting the left has lost its validity. In the absence of Marxist forces, the struggle for liberation does not stop. Once the consciousness of servitude, a precondition to freedom takes firm hold, people start to fight and even the most reactionary groups coerced by the historical necessity metamorphose themselves into a revolutionary force. Marx himself has alluded to this phenomenon, “It is the rule of historic retribution that its instruments” he states, “are not forged by the offended but by the offender himself”.

Lots of crocodile tears are shed in the West on Palestinians’ revolt against the state of Israel, in fact, a territory forcefully stolen from the Palestinians by the gruesome massacres of Hagana, Lehi, and other terrorist Zionist organizations. The entire genocide of the Palestinians was predetermined, which took place in 1948 in the presence of the British army. Later in 1967, when the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem were illegally occupied the entire displaced Palestinian population was pushed into Gaza where 2.3 million Palestinians are still living in inhuman conditions, in a strip not bigger than 25 miles.

Mads Gilbert, A Norwegian surgeon working with the UN, wrote “At least 57 percent of Gaza households are food insecure and about 80 percent are now aid recipients. Food insecurity and rising poverty also mean that most residents cannot meet their daily caloric requirements, while over 90 percent of the water in Gaza has been deemed unfit for human consumption” (On Palestine).

“The situation in Gaza is hideous,” Gilbert writes, “Children are suffering immensely due to man-made blockade by Israel”. Nearly 72.8 % suffer from anemia. There is widespread wasting and stunting. Approximately 35% of children are underweight. When Israel is behaving nicely, Noam Chomsky states, “More than two Palestinian children are killed every week, a pattern that goes back over fourteen years”. The human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, who lived in Gaza, described the mental state of the people in Gaza as sullen and depressing. The widespread feeling was “to die with dignity than to be slowly strangled by the torturer “(Ibid).

“Since 1994,” the distinguished Israeli historian Ilan Pappe writes, “even before the rise of Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, it was decided that collective punitive action could only be an operation of massive killings and destruction-in other words, of a continued genocide…. Downsizing the number of Palestinians all over historic Palestine is still the Zionist vision” (On Palestine).

When the terrors of life outweigh the terrors of death” Schopenhauer says, “only then a man puts an end to his life”. Is it any wonder that Gaza exploded? A lot of discussion about the apocalyptical consequences is echoing. Hamas’ adventure is being dismissed and the naysayers are sounding death and disaster for the Palestinians living in Gaza. But when did death spare the people of Gaza? Like a predator, it hunted and haunted them every day. Gaza is a concentration camp, an infernal society in which the Palestinians have been shoved. In a time of helplessness,” Sartre reminds, “the murderous rampage becomes the collective unconscious of the colonized”.

In Gaza people have not only exposed the unpleasant sight of Western humanism’s striptease, a one-dimensional circus but broken the myth of the impregnability of a nuke-holding state which despite its Pegasus and intricate spyware could not detect the volcanic explosion of a simmering cauldron and failed to detect the ascendence of the freedom fighters. The US is rushing to send military aid to its satellite state, condemning indigenous violence so much of Israeli invincibility.

Violence, as a principle, cannot be condemned, for it condones institutional violence. Walter Rodney succinctly asks “By what standard of morality can the violence used by a slave to break his chains be considered the same as the violence of a slave master? “No indulgence,” Sartre says, “can erase the marks of violence: violence alone can erase them”.

The unequal “war” has entered the fourth day and IDF is still fighting to control the southern Negev area, destroyed more than a hundred times by the same army under the pretext of illegally occupied land by the Arabs. On the other hand, Gaza under aerial attack is going through another holocaust. Thousands are dying of indiscriminate bombing. Since half the population comprises children, they are doomed to suffer the same fate as their parents.

“Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members that has itself died,” Adorno says, “can inflict it administratively on innumerable people”. This is the true picture of the Israeli society afflicted by necrophilia that following Franco’s Phalangists cries “Long live death”. In its mania of seeking revenge, it will not care for the safety of its hundred-odd captives held as prisoners-of-war by the Palestinians. “Fascism”-and Zionism is no different- “is itself less ‘ideological’, as it openly proclaims the principle of domination that is concealed elsewhere”.

This “war” is heading to unpathed waters. If death and devastation by Israel keep pounding Gaza it may drag Hezbollah into the fray. Even the reluctant Sudi leadership keen to embrace the apartheid state formally may have to retreat. If the blue-eyed state of the US has failed to defend itself against the small numbers of freedom fighters, how can the Israeli-US nexus guarantee the security of Saudi tinpot dictators? The situation is grim and is likely to take the entire Middle East into its grip. The Israeli tourists have already been killed by a local policeman in Egypt. War, Marx says, is a midwife of revolution and it is turning the Middle East into something new and different. What it would be, only time will tell but one thing is certain Israel will not remain as it is. The existence of an apartheid state in the 21st century is a historic aberration, a vestige.

It would be” only “advisable to think of progress in the crudest most basic terms”, Adorno says “that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz”- and no more Zionists declaring their victims’ human animals.” Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies”.

The writer is an Australian-based academic and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com.