Israel continued to carry out massacres in Gaza. (Photo: via social media, QNN)
By Haidar Eid 
“Now we all have one common goal – erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth. To wipe out Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us … Don’t leave a single child there…” Nissim Vaturi, Deputy speaker of the Knesset (Israeli parliament)
This piece is an attempt to understand the (il)logic of Israel’s war crimes, genocide, starvation, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and the bombing of hospitals, shelters, schools, mosques, and churches in Gaza.
No other country in the world considers all its conflicts to be existential, other than apartheid Israel. In Gaza, in Iran, and in previous confrontations with Arab states, Israel has waged its conflicts existentially, i.e., nihilistically. For the Jewish state, these are absolute conflicts that do not subscribe to political solutions.
Political solutions are based on bargaining, compromise, and mutual concessions, and therefore exclude the annihilation or extermination of the opponent. In apartheid South Africa, for example, it was about the exploitation of the natives of the land by the white settler community. Annihilation, by contrast, is embedded in nihilistic existential conceptions of conflict.
The Nazis waged a genocidal attack against the Jews of Eastern Europe because they viewed them as an existential threat targeting the German nation and the Aryan race. The Israeli genocide in Gaza is based on a similar mindset that affects the Palestinian people as a whole: the view of Palestinian existence in historic Palestine as an existential threat to Israel.
Golda Meir, Israel’s Prime Minister from 1969 to 1974, famously said: “There was no such thing as Palestinians!” Annihilation need not mean killing everyone, but rather lowering the existential status of the enemy, or removing the perceived enemies from the war and, consequently, from politics. This is more than the racism of apartheid, it is rather, a form of subhuman creation, just as the Nazis thought of the Jews.
The irony of Israel’s limiting all its conflicts to existential ones is that it effectively keeps Israel’s existence contested. Its ongoing existential struggles make its very existence a conflict. Of course, there is no guarantee that all of its conflicts will always be victorious.
That is, Israel is the one that keeps alive the question of its existence and the right to it, and the aspiration to eradicate it; hence, the threatening question raised all the time, “Do you recognize Israel’s right to exist?!” It is a question that stems from a deep sense of illegitimacy, one that no other state Israel is in conflict with seems to raise.
These states, most of which happen to be Arab, of course, suffer from political legitimacy problems, numerous institutional shortcomings, and authoritarian and corrupt regimes, but none of them is obsessed with an existential anxiety that casts doubt on their chances of survival, as Israel does.
This is not due to Arab rejection, a significant portion of whom want to see it disappear. On the contrary, the reason Arab rejection persists is Israel’s inherent behavior, rooted in the very fabric of the Zionist project as a hegemonic, genocidal settler-colonial project that protects itself with superior military might and recognizes no equality with its direct Palestinian victims or with the Arab world.
In the Zionist Israeli project, in all its versions, an ingrained Jewish supremacy, far superior to the arrogance and haughtiness of the apartheid regime, intersects with a unique Jewish victimhood, which also surpasses the victimhood of native Africans and all the victimhoods we know.
The result is a state of institutionalized paranoia, defining policy but not defined by it, a mixture of grandeur and of persecution, based on a persistent imbalance in the relationship with reality, and preventing the entry into a healthy relationship with any partners in the world. This structure is what ultimately makes real peace with Israel impossible. It is a suicidal structure, slaughtering many to escape its own suicide.
This is not to deny the fact that Israel’s relationship with colonial, Western powers is strong, albeit abnormal, not of the usual type of relationships between states, and not even an alliance. It is based on a sense of debt and guilt (the Holocaust and previous persecutions), one that has been normalized, and in which the Palestinians occupy the position of obligatory existential victim. No wonder an Israeli soldier who helped carry out the genocide admitted to Israel’s major newspaper Haaretz: “I felt like a Nazi … it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they (the Palestinians) were the Jews”.
Israel’s existential confinement leads to an endless accumulation of means of power, including weapons of annihilation such as nuclear warheads. Because of this, Israel is today engaged in a nihilistic struggle with Iran, which, like Israel, knows how important these weapons are to its existence and survival in today’s world, and how depriving them threatens it with nonexistence, as a system, and perhaps as an entity.
Sadly enough, states possessing nuclear weapons enjoy a superior existence compared to states without them, a declining existence, and diminished sovereignty.
This is not to defend the possession of nuclear weapons by any country. On the contrary, it is left to sane countries of the global South to rectify the nuclear Horror of our time, starting by creating a nuclear-free Middle East! And the only Middle Eastern country that happens to have nuclear weapons is none other than apartheid Israel.
– Haidar Eid is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature at the Al-Aqsa University, in the Gaza Strip. He is a research associate at the Center for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.