After another bout of brutal attacks on Jerusalem’s occupied holy sites, the Israeli propaganda machine is trying to shift the world’s attention to the rockets being launched from the besieged Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon. Western journalists, academics and commentators, of course, dutifully embrace and propagate this discourse.
Despite yet another attempt to cover up Israeli crimes, those of us committed to truth, justice and decolonization must always keep our eyes on the only violence that explains the reality of the situation: Israeli colonial violence.
Israeli violence is primarily structural. It is about the dehumanization of the Palestinian people in Israeli culture, education and politics; the checkpoints the apartheid wall; the siege of the Gaza Strip; the destruction of homes the permit system; the economic hardship faced by the Palestinians; the restrictions on Palestinian access to health and social services; the imprisonment the denial of freedom of movement; the limited access to holy places; stealing Palestinian land; the construction and expansion of illegal settlements, and so on.
In short, this structural violence refers to Israeli legal, political, cultural and economic structures designed to deprive Palestinians of their sovereignty and freedom, deny them basic human and political rights and expose them to unrestrained state military violence.
Israeli violence is also perpetrated by identifiable agents: the military strikes; the raids on Palestinian towns, villages and places of worship; torture in prisons; violence by settler militias; shootings and beatings by the police, and so on.
These lists are not exhaustive for all forms of Israeli violence that fall under these two general types. Israel is saturating the world of Palestinians with colonial violence by settlers. There is no pause, no relief, no room to breathe, no time to recover.
But despite the barbarity, brutality and destructiveness of pervasive Israeli violence, mainstream Euro-American public discourse defensively highlights armed Palestinian resistance as the cause of the latest “escalation”. Israeli structural violence is not identified as violence, but is instead normalized and legitimized.
The reality, however, is that there is no Palestinian equivalent to the above list of structural acts of violence. Israelis are not subject to or experience any form of structural violence from the Palestinians. No. And when we compare the violence of identifiable agents, we see that Israel unleashes much more violence against the Palestinians.
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the number is victims as of 2008 “those resulting from confrontations between Palestinians and Israelis in the context of the occupation and conflict” are 6,269 Palestinians and 293 Israelis, with 146,613 injured Palestinians compared to 6,147 injured Israelis.
In addition, we must take into account the hard-to-quantify but massively destructive consequences that Palestinians are experiencing directly as a result of structural Israeli violence – in their mental and physical health, in their inability to live freely, in economic hardship and poverty, in lives and livelihoods, etc. – compared to zero Israelis in this category because there is no Palestinian structural violence.
If one wants to equate Palestinian and Israeli violence after this, for example to suggest that 6,269 equals 293 as a new mathematical equation, then they are stupid or ignorant at best, but more often than not a liar, propagandist, apologist, violent colonialist and racist.
In a recent interview with the BBC, Palestinian activist from Jerusalem occupied Mohammed El Kurd responded brilliantly to other speakers who tried to shift the focus to the rockets from Gaza. El-Kurd reminded viewers that the discourse of these speakers bears no relation to the reality of the situation, and he carefully compared their right to speak about Palestine to that of the racist British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, who paved the way for its colonization.
Like the Balfour Declaration of 1917, by which the British government promised statehood to Zionists, their discourse is a violent discourse that erases the experiences and perspectives of the indigenous Palestinian people, thereby supporting colonial violence.
When Palestinians are disgusted and annoyed by such Euro-American intellectuals, politicians, policy analysts and journalists, it is on the one hand because they look at this immense Israeli structure of violence, but find these apologists and propagandists for the Israeli state fixated. on the other hand about Palestinian armed resistance. It is truly baffling to hear people centering the missiles in the context of massive Israeli violence being deployed on a daily basis.
Palestinians are constantly being killed, abused, bruised, beaten and scarred, yet they are the ones who are asked how their violence is causing an “escalation”.
These talking points are indefensible on an intellectual and moral level. They are not fair questions or arguments. They do not bring us any closer to understanding fundamental causes. In fact, these are questions and arguments designed to distract us from understanding those root causes precisely because the Israeli settler state, aided and abetted by its imperial sponsor the United States, does not want to expose or change them.
Since the early days of the Zionist movement, Zionists have always known that they were carrying out a project of colonial aggression against the Palestinians. Of course, the Zionists understood the strategic advantage of portraying themselves in the international arena as the victims of “blind terrorist hatred and the brutality of the Arabs,” but they knew full well that they were the political aggressors and that the Palestinians simply defended. .
You don’t have to be an academic to understand that when a country is already inhabited by a people, the Palestinians, who must remove settlers to create a new state, Israel, this is essentially an aggressive colonial project. Everything has always sprung from this fundamental fact.
None of this is new. People in powerful positions, whether in the media, politics, or academia, also know this reality, but refuse to acknowledge it.
So this is not a matter of people who “don’t know”. This is a matter of people deliberately blurring because they think Palestinians are an acceptable sacrificial lamb and simply aren’t powerful or important enough to matter.
I wish they would have the courage to speak their true point of view loudly and honestly. Say it: that you do not believe that saving Palestinian lives from Israeli violence is a priority because Palestinian freedom does not advance Euro-American imperial interests. The clothes these emperors wear are so sheer, they might as well take them off already.
What is happening now in Palestine is not an “escalation”. Rather, these are times when Israeli violence intensifies even further.
And when “clam” returns, let’s not forget that we are talking about a return to a still high level of violence against the Palestinians. Despite all odds, the Palestinian people will persevere and one day be free. And all these “intellectuals” and “journalists” will be remembered for the cowardly, violent, racist and colonialist individuals that they are.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.