The Malignant Devastation of Gaza

The Narcissists Broken Mirror

Erasing the True Semites

The war on Gaza is a war of greed and resources that has become a war of identity. The ongoing attempted “erasure” of the true Semites, the Palestinians, by the usurpers and pretenders - a motley assortment of criminals and misfits masquerading under the “identity umbrella” of Zionism – represents a victory for the latter.

In silencing, “removing” and killing off the Palestinians by any means possible, the genocidal “Israel” seeks to bury Palestinian identity and to replace Palestinians as “rightful owners” of the land. “Israel’s” extremist religious rhetoric, utilizing scripture to “legitimize” the genocide of the Palestinians, is part of this masquerade.

But let us be absolutely clear, and I will repeat this in every post: this is not about Netanyahu or his right-wing cabinet, and it is not about the current “Israeli” house of representatives. This is not about “going too far”, being “disproportionate” or “reacting”, and this did not start in the past year, or two years, or even the past decade.

The truth is this: “Israel” has always been an illegitimate, criminally established entity based on a racist ideology. A settler-colonial project premised on the othering of the indigenous people, and based on lies like “making the desert bloom” and “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

These blatant lies and distortions that underpinned the Zionist project from its inception, were part of a larger vision that is now being implemented, in its entirety, on the world stage, as Zionism reaches its true apotheosis and the fulfilment of its ultimate aim: killing the native Semites in order to replace them - and turning Gaza into a land without a people.

Ripping Apart the Social Fabric: Hatred of Palestinian Resilience

The hatred of narcissistic “Israel” towards the people that it wishes to see annihilated – indeed, to make disappear, as if they had never existed in the first place – has from the start, placed the Palestinians within a polarized dynamic of the ultimate “other”.

It is “Israel” – and its genocidal sponsor the US – that casts Palestinians as a Muslim entity so that they can establish a false religiously characterized war and consequently invoke the smokescreen of “anti-semitism” in order to justify their actions, projecting their own hate onto others and creating hypothetical enemies to disguise their own perpetually genocidal motives.

“Israel” doesn’t just want to remove the Palestinians from their land – it wants to foment hate, to brutalize the very underpinnings of their collective identity and to shred their dignity; it seeks to rip apart the social fabric of the Palestinians, and to reduce them to their most basic, animal needs; to actualize the the only type of “creation” that a colonial narcissist is capable of: utter devastation.

The genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza (and the concomitant slower genocide in the West Bank) consists of systematic destruction of all educational institutions, healthcare and civilian infrastructure; of the removal of any means of self-sufficiency, comfort - physical or psychological - and of any of the resources needed to sustain a population. This is combined with manifold ways of causing maximum pain and misery.

10,000 Palestinians languish in “Israel’s” prisons, mostly without sentence, up to half of them children, many of them Doctors, teachers, family men, just ordinary people – but most press and media bodies are too afraid to call them hostages, just as they were too afraid to call what “Israel” is doing a “genocide”, for fear of repercussion. “Israel” employs the most vicious methods in these torture camps, including systematic rape, particularly of men and boys.

The aim is to break Palestinian resilience, crush the Palestinian spirit and annihilate their identity. To “teach them a lesson” that they will never, ever forget and that will be imprinted into their identity – a lesson that will filter down successive generations so that the Palestinians will forget about ever fighting back. This is “Israel’s” aim: to break a people.

One in ten children in Gaza is an amputee; the rest are severely traumatized from multiple displacements. WCNSF is an acronym specific to Gaza: Wounded Child No Surviving Family. And now “Israel” is starving the Palestinians, a three-month total blockade with deadly GHF distribution points where Palestinians have to duck bullets to get food.

The footage of desperate Palestinians reduced to their most survivalist behaviours, feeds the colonizer’s sense of superiority, and provides twisted ammunition to their casting of the Palestinians as somehow inferior. “Israel” in particular, has always wished to reduce Gaza to a wasteland - the broken mirror of its own malignant soul.

Trauma Bonding and the Site of a Wound

The people of Gaza have been increasingly, traumatically bonded to their land, tied to it as the location and site of all their heartbreaks and trauma, their pain and suffering; as such, it becomes even harder to detach from.

In the same way that individual families who have been displaced multiple times, become even closer – so that when bereavement happens, the wound is so much greater. In this way, Gaza, the site of a collective wound, bleeds into and intermingles inextricably with the Palestinian identity.

Aerial shots of Gaza are heart breaking. For the past two years, they have shown a landscape of grey rubble and ash punctuated with smoke and occasional fires from explosions. A landscape of pure destruction.

Gaza is physically a wound or scar on the earth’s surface, so aggressive has been “Israel’s” bombing campaign, pushing out tons of pollutants and chemicals, battering this small strip of land with no consideration as to the wider consequences on the ecosphere.

But Gaza is also a psychological wound: an injury to our collective morality. It is a “testing ground” for the hi-tech weaponry of the Western imperial powers, the paradox of billions worth of the most sophisticated weaponry shuttled in to devastate a civilian population with at most, tiny rockets to launch back; yet it is also a test for our collective humanity.

There are those that stand with Gaza and always have; there are those that still stand with “Israel”; and there are those who will say that they were always against it, or who are now moving to cover themselves and fabricate their defence, legitimise their previous stance. This includes politicians, news outlets, other public institutions pushing the line that “Israel has gone too far” rather than admitting that “Israel” is the problem - and always has been.

But to admit that “Israel” is the problem, is to admit that colonialism is the problem; and it is to thus undo all the underpinnings of the colonial identity that is based on erasure of the indigenous and a stance of superiority towards the “rest of the world”.

Note that the UK, US and their belligerent military outpost “Israel” were the last to disengage from their support of Apartheid in South Africa. The colonial overlords who are deeply invested in aggressively asserting dominance, upending international law and jurisdiction and spreading their knotweed over the entirety of the globe, will always stand for colonial criminality.

For the people who are invested in Gaza and haunted by the scenes we see on our screens each day, the larger wound represents a persistent background injury through which our individual pains are fed; when something small happens, it is impossible not to somehow “filter” it through this ever-present dark cloud.

And for the people of Gaza, what is happening to them is trauma overlaid with trauma; an ordeal that it will take generations to ever heal from.

Free Palestine from the River to the Sea and Globalize the Intifada.