Entry of Alexander into Babylon by Charles Le Brun (1665)
Alexander the Great razed Gaza to the ground in the 3rd century BC. He was in a towering rage because Gaza, unlike most of the other cities he passed through on his way to Egypt, had been defiant, and had closed its gates. The King was further incensed by the skill of Gazan raiding parties: they sped out of the city gates on their light Arabian horses, across the sand, which encumbered the feet of the heavy Macedonian steeds. They were superb archers, and a Gazan arrow made a serious wound in Alexander’s shoulder.
Alexander slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow. He had recently visited the ancient city of Troy, where he’d appropriated the armor of Achilles. He wore this into battle. After five months his army finally penetrated Gaza’s formidable defenses. In his fury, Alexander seized the governor, and re-enacted Achilles’ revengeful desecration of Hector, by piercing his ankles and dragging his body behind his chariot three times around the city. Then he put all the men and boys to the sword, and sold the women and children into slavery.
Alexander inhabited a legendary universe which existed a thousand years before he was born. In this world, gods mingled and consorted with humans. His own paternity had been laid open to question, by rivals seeking to dethrone him. Having just cut the Gordian knot, a fabled act that conferred promises of omnipotence from the gods, his belief in his own deity was reinforced. The oracle at Delphi had told him he was invincible, and the renowned Egyptian sibyl at Siwa was about to tell him his father was Zeus/Amon. This, together with his own native charisma and brilliance as a general, drove his zeal to possess the world which, he did not doubt, belonged to him.
Alexander the Great and Benjamin Netanyahu would seem to have very little in common. But their respective revenges on Gaza display the same wrathful obsession with retribution. Both, possessed by ghosts, consort with spirits which have lingered in the world for three thousand years, since the thirteenth century BC.
The architects of their imaginary worlds are warriors long dead. Alexander in his imagination, was the near-immortal hero Achilles. The echoes of Netanyahu’s ghost world resonate from even farther, from Jehovah’s intimate communication, and commitments concerning a promised land, with Moses, three thousand years ago.
The insult that brought Alexander’s rage to a frenzy was the near-fatal shoulder wound. It proved to him that he was not immortal.
October 7th profoundly humiliated Netanyahu before his own people and before the world, as the famed Israeli defense network, military intelligence system, Aman, with its Iron Dome, Mossad, and Shin Bet, the national security system, were incapable of protecting its people against 3000 Hamas fighters on Chinese minibikes.
Netanyahu’s religious beliefs are private, though apparently he has said he is an atheist. He professes secular Judaism, a persuasion which exalts cultural and ethnic, rather than devotional, elements of Judaism. However, his psychic architecture grew out of a deep eastern European Ashkenazi cultural root, comprising the Torah, the Talmud and centuries of European Jewish culture, canonical scriptures, literature and law. The nucleus of this culture is
Jehovah’s promise that Palestine would belong to his chosen people. Secular Judaism does not question this promise. Netanyahu is a thoroughly Americanized Israeli. His excellent American education taught him that most of the Bible is accumulated myth and folk tale. In modern political history, the creation of Israel cannot be disguised as anything but neocolonialism. Nonetheless Netanyahu believes in Jehovah’s promise.His speeches ring with Biblical events, and the ghosts of Moses, Joshua, King David, and Sampson obsessively haunt the recesses of and maintain the thoroughfares of his consciousness:
“I will send my fear before thee, and will destroy all the people to whom thou shalt come, and I will make all thine enemies turn their backs unto thee…I will not drive them out from before thee in one year, lest the land become desolate and the beast of the field multiply against thee… but by little and little I will drive them out before thee, until thou be increased and inherit the land. And I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines, and from the desert unto the river, for I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and thou shalt drive them out before thee”.
…Exodus 23 verses 27-31
This promise was fulfilled for a period, during the last part of the second millennium BC. when
a Jewish kingdom,insignificant in comparison to the mighty empires of the times, existed in the area designated by Jehovah. However all but a few Jews in Palestine were driven into a diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple in 63 AD. Since then, Palestine has been populated or ruled by waves of different empires, lasting various lengths of time, until 1948.
At that point, the geopolitical interests of the US and Europe coincided with the Mosaic promise, to allow the Jews another chance at a nation state. The catastrophe which brought this about was the holocaust.
By the beginning of WWII 57% of the world’s Jews lived in Europe. Six million were destroyed during the war, leaving three and a half million survivors looking for place to go. Their prewar property had been confiscated and repossessed, their home towns were more often than not hostile and dangerous, and no nations in the world wanted to take more than a small number of Jewish immigrants (the Dominican Republic was an exception).The British mandate of Palestine was therefore a ready solution for relocation. Moreover, it had an additional advantage. During the late forties and the fifties, when a tide of decolonialization was sweeping the globe, an armed nation state of Israel would provide a well-placed foothold for the victors of WWII to maintain military and economic supremacy. The creation of a nation state, Israel, in the turbulent Middle East, would be reimbursed with fealty to the empire, and could provide anti-terrorism services in the region and in Africa.
In a deeply ironical postscript, it could support anti-communism and racism as well.
At that time, in 1948, the Arab population of Palestine was about twice the size of the Jewish population, one million and 550,000 respectively. Huge numbers of Jews arriving from Europe, with an entirely different cultural background and language, created deep anxiety among the indigenous Arabs ,who had lived there for millennia. Moreover the new immigrants made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the indigenous population of Arabs. They wanted the Palestinian land in order to create a Jewish nation state.
Netanyahu’s grandfather wanted to build an “iron wall” between the Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants, as the Bible instructed:
“Thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor with their gods…they shall not dwell in thy land, lest they make thee sin against me…”
Exodus 23 vs.32-33
Israel embarked upon a program of ethnic cleansing in Palestine after the UN partition agreement, and established the state of Israel when the British withdrew in May 1948. Civil war and chaos intensified by foreign interference, had already cleansed 750,000
Palestinians from their homeland. There was, however, still a majority of Arabs in Palestine.
The Biblical Jehovah had said, “ I will not drive them out before thee in one year…but little by little”. However, the European immigrants to Palestine had a model for removing undesirable populations on a more businesslike time frame, drawn from recent history, which provided incremental steps to ease the process. The history was their own destruction in the holocaust.
By means of about 400 laws, policies and decrees passed in Germany from Hitler’s accession to power and until the end of WWII, an itinerary was built for the enactment of ethnic cleansing and genocide of Jews, Russians, Roma, Communists, and weak and undesirable members of the community. These same steps can be delineated clearly in the new Jewish nation state of Israel, from its clearly apartheid origins. They are 1) definition (listing the characteristics of the aliens) 2)isolation ( denial of access to schools, businesses, citizenship withdrawal, and, in the case of the Nazis, an identificatory yellow star) 3) emigration, spurred by property and land seizures and threats 4) ghettoization, enforced by walls 5) deportation (relocating to prison camps, in the Reich, and in Gaza to the occupied territories and refugee camps, and 6) mass murder (in the Reich and invaded territories, by Einsatzgruppen, which were mobile extermination organs, and death camps; and in Gaza, by Israeli settler violence, bombings, shooting demonstrators as in the Great March of Return, and after October 7th, death camps and death marches.
If these steps were taken efficiently, the result would be the configuration of the Volksgemeinschaft, the “people’s community” which conformed to racial ideals and standards,
the dream of the Nazis and of the Jewish state of Israel as well.
It was obvious to the world that Israel, created in 1948, would be an apartheid state (which is in itself a crime against humanity ). The memes, “People without a land, land without a people” and that “Israel made the desert bloom” were utter fiction, as detailed by Miko Peled, a 63-year-old professor born and raised in Israel, former IDF officer, and son of a famous Israeli general, in many lectures. When the refugee Jews arrived from Europe, they found a Palestine blooming with cultivation: oranges, cotton, barley, and olive oil produced for domestic consumption and export. There were cities alive with culture, and, as a sacred place for three of the world’s most populous religions, sites for deeply reverent tourism, from many countries of the world.
The incremental advances of the WWII holocaust and its intended Final Solution, had branded the hearts and minds of anyone who had lived through it, or had shivered with fear for those who did not escape. The arriving European Jews knew, through their own experience, how to deal with a population it recognized as alien. Emigration of non-Jews from the promised land was facilitated by the civil war of 1947-9, and extended through increased armed conflict. As in Nazi Germany, race was the determinative characteristic defining an Israeli: as in Germany, based on race of grandparents. Any Jew with the right formulaic bloodlines can be an Israeli citizen on demand, through the Law of Return. ( Non-Jewish Palestinians have no Right of Return). Ghettoization was accomplished on a large scale through wars, and on a neighborhood scale through bulldozing, settler violence, and walls. Arabs were further isolated by civil rights restrictions, inferior schools, travel, jobs, and bureaucratic checkpoints. In southern Israel, where 300,000 Bedouins live, Arabs are not permitted to be farmers or dig wells. Phones and water can be turned off at any time. Although the Palestinian population of Israel is larger than the Jewish, it is allotted only 3% of the water resource.
Gaza has been described for decades as an outdoor prison camp. And now the analogy has reached a grotesque replica of the Final Solution: calorie and water restrictions, herding into smaller areas, death marches, bombing hospitals and refusal to allow medical care or means to curtail the spread of diseases, and extermination.
Miko Peled reminds us, in a sharp admonishment, that anyone in the US who pays taxes “has a dog in the game” of the ongoing extermination of Gaza. Indeed. Without the billions of dollars which flow from the US to Israel, the genocide would be impossible. With our lockstep Congress and media-managed public we are what we once loathed when it existed in WWII Germany: a popular permission for genocide. Resistance is punished: the world-famous Ai Wei Wei ‘s exhibits are cancelled, because he criticized Israel. Freedom of speech is severely curtailed. Protests and marches are harassed or forbidden. Workers in several states have been asked to sign loyalty oaths to Israel (!) and have been fired if they refuse.
Miko was stopped quickly from pronouncing the words “from the river to the sea” in a
speech he gave at a library in Delmar New York, and the peace group sponsoring him was banned from making presentations at the library for a year.
A truly monstrous resonance between the Nazi and Israeli states can be seen in their patriotic songs. Music can confer the enormous power of spiritual and ideological penetration, whether for good or evil. It is used as a weapon.
The Nazi regime reveled in song. Thus, the official song of the Hitler Jugend (the boys’ and girls’ physical and ideological war preparatory division) can be watched on youtube, where sung by sung by earnest little clear-eyed fellows, flagged and in uniform:
Forwards! Forward! Our flag flutters before us
Into the future we are marching side by side
We are marching for Hitler
It guides us to Eternity
The flag is more to us than death!
https://altcensored.com/watch?v=WHmGntCUQ4o
The second most popular song in Israel can currently be seen on youtube as well. The children
are beautiful and innocent, some appearing as young as five:
Autumn night falls over the beaches of Gaza
Planes bomb, destruction, destruction
Look, the IDF is crossing the line
To annihilate the swastika bearers
In another year there will be nothing there
And we will safely return to our homes
Within a year we will annihilate everyone
And then we will return to plow our fields
And we will remember everyone
The pretty and the pure
And will never let our hearts
Forget a friendship like that
Love sanctified by blood
You will return and bloom among us
We have now run out of words
Our soul still cries out
Our soul not only sings
Today our soul also fights…
Reproduced in Owen Jones’ commentary
And independently from other youtube sources, where it tends to disappear
Baldur von Schirach, who managed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Austrians to death camps, and who was one of the twenty-two defendants at the International War Crimes Trial in Nuremberg, remarked in 1938, “The real, great educational act for a people lies in ingraining in youth blind obedience, unshakeable loyalty, unconditional comradeship and absolute reliability.”[1]: Ch 11
Netanyahu accused President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil, of trivializing the genocide in progress in Gaza, when he compared it to the Nazi holocaust. However, the patterns and motivations are clearly similar. At one point, during the articulation of the Final Solution, Hitler was doubtful whether the Einsatzgruppen, his SS executioners on the eastern front, would be up to the task of killing women and children. However, he exclaimed later that they performed the task enthusiastically and wonderfully.
The two- state solution will not work. The one-state solution will only work in a different world. However it is blindingly clear that the colonial project of the state of Israel needs to be terminated.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ellen Taylor.
Ellen Taylor | Radio Free (2024-02-27T06:55:17+00:00) Gaza and Ghosts of the Bronze Age. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/02/27/gaza-and-ghosts-of-the-bronze-age/
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