You sometimes wonder how far injustice can extend before you begin to realize that it is in fact happening. I wrote before how wonderful it is that Israel can be both a holiday destination and a violently colonized area. That cocktails can be served in Soho House Tel Aviv and no one is reminded that it was built on stolen land. How effectively the conscience was washed clean was also proven by the fact that it was possible to dance a few kilometers from the border of the Gaza Strip. The images of the Hamas invasion, the fleeing young people who ended up from one moment to the next in a hell of blood and death, made a great impression, including on me. Another thought immediately occurred to me; organizing a festival so close to an area that has essentially been a large prison since the closure of the borders in 2007 and where people live in appalling conditions – I could call it cynical, but that would not do justice to the outspoken arrogance that speaks out.
Gaza looks suspiciously like a concentration camp. In recent decades, the resistance of the Palestinians has been successfully sold to us as terror, the Palestinians themselves as wild beasts. The fact that the Gaza Strip is a closed area suits the people who closed it off in the first place. History has always taught us that those who manage to corral their enemies into a confined space can exterminate them efficiently.
As I write this piece, reports are coming in about an impending ground offensive, about illegally used white phosphorus. Phosphorus, you should know, eats its way through the skin and through the flesh, down to the bone. It cannot be extinguished with water, because it bonds with water. It is a weapon that is illegal under international law to use against civilians because of its unprecedentedly brutal consequences. Israel already used it against Palestinian civilians in 2009, and now again.
It is not inconceivable that by the time you read this, Israel will have destroyed the Gaza Strip. Israel’s warning to Palestinians this weekend to flee sounded like a civilized gesture only to the most naive observer. After all, everyone knows they can’t go anywhere. Their prison has been hermetically sealed for decades by the same people who are now firing the rockets. Egypt – which borders it – would see fit to admit them. It reminds me of how the Netherlands, when the first Jews crossed the border with Germany, knowingly sent these refugees back. It made no difference that returning meant certain death.
Too few people are still willing to acknowledge that two truths can coexist, namely that Hamas carried out a horrific terrorist attack on Israel and that Israel has a violent, oppressive and racist regime over Palestinians. It is preferable to promise weapons and moral support to Netanyahu, someone who once stated that it was not Adolf Hitler who wanted to exterminate the Jews. Hitler, in Netanyahu’s words, had only wanted to drive out the Jews. It was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had inspired Hitler with the idea of genocide.
Without the Muslims, Netanyahu’s point, Hitler would never have come up with the idea of genocide. The message was clear: the Muslim is evil. Worse even than the greatest evil a Jew can imagine.
Every time you think it couldn’t get any crazier with brainwashing the public, another unimaginable step is taken. What remains is a fearful realization of how cynically history repeats itself. How cruel, too.
Karin Amatmoekrim is a writer and man of letters. She writes a column here every other week.