GET ISRAEL OUT OF GAZA

 

We must demand that Israel gets out of Gaza — and we must get Zionism out of our institutions. By Marilyn Garson.

AT EACH  step of its genocidal campaign, Israel’s leaders have accurately assessed the world’s indifference, played on it and nudged it further. Over a period of decades, they eased the world from a settler-colonial theory that implied Palestine’s erasure, to a blockade that ensured Gaza’s strangulation. Now, over a period of months, they have been enacting Gaza’s death by genocide in plain sight.

Today Israel’s elected government acknowledges that Israel will, again, still, once and for all, fulfil its fantasy of Greater Israel by stealing Gaza. They already occupy it, as courts have repeatedly affirmed. Now they judge that they can snatch it, displace Gaza’s population and get away with it. They judge that we have given up.

We say no. We say, get out. Get out, stay out, and begin the accounting. Gaza must live, and Gaza is Palestine. Two million human beings must be fed and protected, their bodies restored insofar as is possible after this torture. We concede nothing.

‘Intensifying criticism’? Every diplomatic shuffle distracts from the hourly deterioration of conditions in Gaza. Ever complicit, our governments buy time with their talk while the slaughter continues.

 ‘Widespread condemnation’ – so what? Not one child can eat these words, and neither can starving children digest the wholly inappropriate foods being distributed by the GHF. States are not taking the slightest meaningful action, although they are watching Israel deprive the children of Gaza of the nutrients they need if they are to have any chance to assert their right to life.

Even as they say, ‘We can no longer remain quiet,’ Jewish leaders are refusing to contemplate meaningful change. Spokespeople for the Zionist NZ Jewish Council still dare to outline the conditions that Palestinians must meet, in order to qualify for their fundamental human entitlements. It is not the task of Palestinians to satisfy the genocidaires of anything. Nonsense. The Jewish Council is trying to distance itself from the present crimes while preserving the core condition of October 6: a Jewish supremacist regime.

We study the indifference of states to the rise of Nazism. We’re past that. We talk about international indifference to the Holocaust. We’re beyond that. The only parallel now can be with the liberation of concentration camps. In those starving Jewish bodies, people glimpsed and felt overwhelmed by the scale and the inhumanity of Nazi crimes. That’s where we are. We see Israel’s inhumanity toward defenceless Palestinian children.

There is no avoidance but wilful avoidance now. The problem is not Netanyahu. The problem is baked into Zionism, and it cannot be redeemed.

Those children living in the most grotesque pain, those canyons of destruction, those deranged elected officials leading genocide; those are real, actual Zionism. Zionism is the system that produced Netanyahu, not the other way around.

We say, get out. Get Israel out of Gaza, get Zionism out of our institutions.

Feed Gaza – right now, this day. Start the engines, drive the trucks in.

 This article was first published by Sh'ma Koleinu – Alternative Jewish Voices (NZ).