So what has been happening over the past few days? Some Arabs – almost certainly not from Gaza – attacked Israel, killing a number of soldiers and possibly a number of civilians. Israeli censorship has been in full force, muffling any accurate count of the nature of the dead. Israel responded correctly, meaning that departing from Israeli premises – that it is in a race-war against Arabs, that Israelis are superior to the surrounding sea of sub-humans, and that all Arabs are a blobby indistinguishable mass – its “retaliation,” as Al-Jazeera referred to the shelling of Gaza, was logical.
The attack against Gaza is a twofer: as Hamas put it, Israel “is trying to export the crisis that has befallen it, and transfer it to Gaza.” The crisis consists of the fractures running across and through Israeli accumulation. When the people struggle for bread, better they focus on bombing Arabs. Only 5000 people came out to Saturday’s protests in Israel. So much for #j14? I don’t know, and that is not schadenfreude. The connections between occupation, militarism, and neoliberalism are real. The question is if Israelis are capable of making them. Certainly, Israeli elites are, which is why Netanyahu has seemed so joyous at the pretext/promise of attacking Gaza in retaliation for the Eilat attacks.
The Haaretz editorial board referred to the killing of IDF soldiers as a “terror attack.” Much remains unclear about the attack on the buses: crucially, who died and what the attackers knew. I have seen some speculation that the bus which was attacked is basically used for ferrying soldiers to and fro. In any case, a “terror attack” is not how most in the region see it. When your army targets civilians and your country has no borders, only armistice lines, killing your soldiers will never be understood as terror. But killing theirs will be, which is why a crowd of thousands of Egyptians cheered wildly as a lone climber ascended the 20 stories to the top of the building in which the Israeli embassy in Cairo is bunkered, and put an Egyptian flag in place of the Israeli flag. Consider it a portent. Consider the video below (extremely graphic) what Israel and those Americans who support its actions consider an acceptable price to pay before Israel ends its occupation and discrimination. And if you are able to even describe what happened to the second pile of flesh that used to be a human being, let me know. I watched the video three times and couldn’t figure it out.
Video by Mohammed Majdalawi
This post originally appeared on Max Ajl’s blog Jewbonics.
