It is based first and foremost on sheer lies transmitted with a
newspeak reminiscent of darker days in 1930s Europe. Every half an hour
a news bulletin on the radio and television describes the victims of
Gaza as terrorists and Israel’s massive killings of them as an act of
self-defense. Israel presents itself to its own people as the righteous
victim that defends itself against a great evil. The academic world is
recruited to explain how demonic and monstrous is the Palestinian
struggle, if it is led by Hamas. These are the same scholars who
demonized the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in an earlier era
and delegitimized his Fatah movement during the second Palestinian
intifada.

But the lies and distorted representations are not the worst part of
it. It is the direct attack on the last vestiges of humanity and
dignity of the Palestinian people that is most enraging. The
Palestinians in Israel have shown their solidarity with the people of
Gaza and are now branded as a fifth column in the Jewish state; their
right to remain in their homeland cast as doubtful given their lack of
support for the Israeli aggression. Those among them who agree —
wrongly, in my opinion — to appear in the local media are
interrogated, and not interviewed, as if they were inmates in the Shin
Bet’s prison. Their appearance is prefaced and followed by humiliating
racist remarks and they are met with accusations of being a fifth
column, an irrational and fanatical people. And yet this is not the
basest practice. There are a few Palestinian children from the occupied
territories treated for cancer in Israeli hospitals. God knows what
price their families have paid for them to be admitted there. The
Israel Radio daily goes to the hospital to demand the poor parents tell
the Israeli audience how right Israel is in its attack and how evil is
Hamas in its defense.

There are no boundaries to the hypocrisy that a righteous fury
produces. The discourse of the generals and the politicians is moving
erratically between self-compliments of the humanity the army displays
in its “surgical” operations on the one hand, and the need to destroy
Gaza for once and for all, in a humane way of course, on the other.

It is crucial to explore the ideological origins of this attitude and
derive the necessary political conclusions form its prevalence. This
righteous fury shields the society and politicians in Israel from any
external rebuke or criticism. But far worse, it is translated always
into destructive policies against the Palestinians. With no internal
mechanism of criticism and no external pressure, every Palestinian
becomes a potential target of this fury. Given the firepower of the
Jewish state it can inevitably only end in more massive killings,
massacres and ethnic cleansing.

The self-righteousness is a powerful act of self-denial and
justification. It explains why the Israeli Jewish society would not be
moved by words of wisdom, logical persuasion or diplomatic dialogue.
And if one does not want to endorse violence as the means of opposing
it, there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this
righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities.
Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke
for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way
of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not
only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is
an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive
massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present
massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that
policy and justifies it morally and politically. Let us hope that
significant voices in the world will tell the Jewish state that this
ideology and the overall conduct of the state are intolerable and
unacceptable and as long as they persist, Israel will be boycotted and
subject to sanctions.

But I am not naive. I know that even the killing of hundreds of
innocent Palestinians would not be enough to produce such a shift in
the Western public opinion; it is even more unlikely that the crimes
committed in Gaza would move the European governments to change their
policy towards Palestine.

And yet, we cannot allow 2009 to be just another year, less significant
than 2008, the commemorative year of the Nakba, that did not fulfill
the great hopes we all had for its potential to dramatically transform
the Western world’s attitude to Palestine and the Palestinians.

It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in
Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that
happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. In
this new year, we have to try to realign the public opinion to the
history of Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the
best means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current
one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come.

Academically, this has already been done. Our main challenge is to find
an efficient to explain the connection between the Zionist ideology and
the past policies of destruction, to the present crisis. It may be
easier to do it while, under the most terrible circumstances, the
world’s attention is directed to Palestine once more. It would be even
more difficult at times when the situation seems to be “calmer” and
less dramatic. In such “relaxed” moments, the short attention span of
the Western media would marginalize once more the Palestinian tragedy
and neglect it either because of horrific genocides in Africa or the
economic crisis and ecological doomsday scenarios in the rest of the
world. While the Western media is not likely to be interested in any
historical stockpiling, it is only through a historical evaluation that
the magnitude of the crimes committed against the Palestinian people
throughout the past 60 years can be exposed. Therefore, it is the role
of an activist academia and an alternative media to insist on this
historical context. These agents should not scoff from educating the
public opinion and hopefully even influence the more conscientious
politicians to view events in a wider historical perspective.

Similarly, we may be able to find the popular, as distinct from the
high brow academic, way of explaining clearly that Israel’s policy —
in the last 60 years — stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called
Zionism, shielded by endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the
predictable accusation of anti-Semitism and what have you, it is time
to associate in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now
familiar historical landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of
1948, the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of
the military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the
massacre of Gaza. Very much as the Apartheid ideology explained the
oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology —
in its most consensual and simplistic variety — allowed all the
Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the
Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means
altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the
narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern
that cannot only be discussed in the academic ivory towers, but has to
be part of the political discourse on the contemporary reality in
Palestine today.

Some of us, namely those committed to justice and peace in Palestine,
unwittingly evade this debate by focusing, and this is understandable,
on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) — the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Struggling against the criminal policies there is an urgent
mission. But this should not convey the message that the powers that be
in the West adopted gladly by a cue from Israel, that Palestine is only
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and that the Palestinians are only
the people living in those territories. We should expand the
representation of Palestine geographically and demographically by
telling the historical narrative of the events in 1948 and ever since
and demand equal human and civil rights to all the people who live, or
used to live, in what today is Israel and the OPT.

By connecting the Zionist ideology and the policies of the past with
the present atrocities, we will be able to provide a clear and logical
explanation for the campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions.
Challenging by nonviolent means a self-righteous ideological state that
allows itself, aided by a mute world, to dispossess and destroy the
indigenous people of Palestine, is a just and moral cause. It is also
an effective way of galvanizing the public opinion not only against the
present genocidal policies in Gaza, but hopefully one that would
prevent future atrocities. But more importantly than anything else it
will puncture the balloon of self-righteous fury that suffocates the
Palestinians every times it inflates. It will help end the Western
immunity to Israel’s impunity. Without that immunity, one hopes more
and more people in Israel will begin to see the real nature of the
crimes committed in their name and their fury would be directed against
those who trapped them and the Palestinians in this unnecessary cycle
of bloodshed and violence.