By Ranjan Solomon
In 2023, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in the City of New York wrote, and very sharply, that “{the reason Zionists have the full support of European and US leaders is because the genocidal drive to ‘exterminate all the brutes’ is embedded deep in their psyches.” As millions of Palestinians trapped in Gaza were facing starvation and mass murder, Israel’s invading army made sure to film themselves enjoying “rejuvenation complexes”, where they were lavished with “concerts, massage chairs, buffet, and more. It is surreal to watch Israelis being pampered while slaughtering Palestinians in their own homeland. Dabashi makes a comparative note:
In North and South America, Australia, Asia and Africa, European settler-colonialists have left behind the evidence of their psychotic genocidal practice. The European transatlantic slave trade may have halved the population of Africa, some historians believe. The US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and many African colonies were all built on the systematic extermination, displacement and internment of the original inhabitants.
What the Israelis are doing in Palestine is what the French did in Algeria, the British did in India, the Belgians in the Congo, the Americans in Vietnam, the Spaniards in Latin America, the Italians in Africa and the Germans in Namibia, another chapter of European genocidal history. Zionism is the Jewish version of the racist US doctrine of manifest destiny, a belief in the racial superiority of white people and definitive to the American colonial conquest of the Native Americans and other groups they exterminated.
Zionists believe Palestine was their promised land, that it was destined and promised to them by their God, and that the native inhabitants were a nuisance that must be brutally eliminated.
Palestinians are up against a formidable enemy right across the West whose racist pretensions are ones they much prefer to conceal. What the Israeli army is doing in Gaza is the Zionist version of “the great replacement theory” which holds that people of colour are replacing white people and that the process must be reversed.
Everything about the occupation, apartheid, settler violence is about legitimising this theory on-the-ground. This political domination when one considers how French knew just how their colonies were captured and administered, Likewise in Vietnam and Algeria. Or, how the Russians carried out their crimes in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The West knows that Israel’s war(s) are blatantly outrageous and are committed in the modern capitalist phenomenon of progress, civilization, democracy and the market. Nonsensical claims- each of these. The barbarians were the conquerors – in the most recent instance, the Zionists.
Ranjan Solomon is a political commentator
10 September 2024
Source: countercurrents.org