The psychology behind Israeli apartheid

Apologists have a habit of blaming victims for inviting violence upon themselves: she was wearing a short skirt, she was being provocative, she wanted it – she was asking for it!

In this respect, apartheid states are not so different.

Seventy years ago some 750,000 Palestinians were displaced from their land, forced into exile, rendered impoverished, homeless and stateless. In recognition of that historic crime, many of the descendants of that diaspora took part in The Great March of Return, a slow rolling flow of people moving toward the Israeli-Gaza border, toward the region of their former homes, towards the ghostly memory of a once bright future snatched away.

The image of those protestors, shabbily clothed, huddled by fires in the desert night, is one which evokes both great dignity and pity. For the Israeli state, however, it elicited only a cold murderous contempt, and in the weeks over which the protest unfolded, that state positioned soldiers and snipers at the border, weapons trained on the huddling human masses. Thousands were shot.

The Palestinian resistance to the slick, fortified Israeli killing machine is utterly heroic but utterly ineffective. The only thing Palestinians have left to sacrifice are their lives. Dozens have been killed including a number of children. Not a single Israeli soldier has been injured.

And yet, despite the utter disparity, the rapacious Israeli state is still prepared to inform us—without any hint of irony—that the responsibility for mass murder falls upon the victims themselves.

The protestors, you see—all "250,000" of them—were "violent rioters". They had been infiltrated by the “armed terrorists” of Hamas. They were being provocative. They had invited what happened to them. They were asking for it.

Erasing Palestinians

Martin Luther King once noted that the "arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Perhaps that will prove true for the Palestinians. Their deprivation, for so long invisible in much of the mainstream media, now seem to be garnering a greater amount of coverage and—gradually, tentatively—seems to be swinging more in their favour.

Recently the Hollywood actress Natalie Portman, herself an Israeli and an American, declined an invitation to receive the Genesis Prize in an apparent response to the slaughter of scores of unarmed protestors which occurred in Gaza at the outset of the Great March of Return.

But while Portman’s intervention is welcome, and fundamentally significant, it misses the point.

Portman and her ilk support the Israeli state. They simply wish it would not be so brutal and repressive with regards to the displaced Palestinians and indeed the Arabs living within its borders. They consider such unmitigated oppression morally unsound but also bad for its image, and hope for a more reasonable, tolerant and constructive leadership.

This common position overlooks the endemic nature of the violence of the Israeli state.

Israel was founded on an act of ethnic cleansing—an act which remains within living memory—a physical displacement of an indigenous population and the usurpation of land. Such an obscene act of violence and expatriation requires in the ideological realm a corresponding act of ablution. Here one should recall Israel’s oft repeated mantra, the raison d'etre which underpins its own historical genesis: "a land without people, for a people without a land".

The birth of Israel, therefore, is indelibly fused with a special kind of narrative, one which requires the invisibility of a whole people. Thus, the Palestinians are meant to simply fade away.

But the Palestinians will not and have not remained invisible. The presence of the Palestinians, lingering on the periphery—brutalised, ragged, rebellious, infirm, angry, resilient and grief-stricken—becomes the defiant and persistent reminder of a crime which won’t go away. A crime which is written out in the code of a militarised, apartheid state.

The ongoing and illegal constructions of new settlements continue on the occupied West Bank – often on the grounds of ruined, demolished Palestinian villages. Sewage from Israeli settlements flows into Palestinian streams and contaminates drinking water. The unlawful detainment of thousands of Palestinians from the occupied territories without charge or trial continues,  along with the sporadic but relentless eruption of large-scale military operations and the aerial bombardment and killing of thousands of civilians.

At the same time the conditions of Arabs within Israel itself are often inhuman; the scores of laws which limit the rights of Palestinians in terms of education, political participation, housing and land rights, and legal rights during detention.

The rich filigree of systematic and cultivated oppression represents more than just reactionary whims. It represents the need to gradually undermine all remaining Palestinian autonomy until all that is left is the ghostly husk of a people that once was, a displaced bodiless remainder that lacks all visibility and presence and can no longer intrude on the saccharine, narcotising fiction of that free, democratic state which has made the desert bloom.

But the fiction is a fragile one. On the day in which Ivanka Trump opened the new US embassy in Jerusalem surrounded by the “great and the good” the images of Gaza’s oppressed, besieged, wounded and shot, provided a poignant contrast. It provided the truth, the tragedy, behind the fiction.