Palestine defines us

The citizenry of past nations engaged in genocide woke up each morning focused on the challenges of everyday life, not those of the people their rulers were butchering. The victims may have been across continents or within the same population, and so awareness of the slaughter varied, but propaganda and dehumanization were the ever-present balm for uneasy consciences and political cover. Those who rose above the brainwashing were limited in their ability to challenge their rulers, and faced consequences — often brutal — if they did. 

Yet to varying degrees, posterity has held the country as a whole morally responsible. Whatever any mitigating considerations, posterity has judged “we didn’t know” skeptically.

Imagine yourself, then, as a doctoral history student in 2124, researching the archives from that dark stain on the old Western Empire known simply as the Palestinian Genocide. What would you see?

Today’s genocide is perpetrated not by an individual renegade nation, nor by an empire in the traditional sense, but by a consortium, led by the United States. We, the consortium’s citizens, too wake up every morning to our own problems, not those of the people being massacred in our name. We too are manipulated by racist propaganda intended to make us willing partners in this consummate crime, all the way from the crude lies of Fox News, to the insidious manipulation of the New York Times and the self-righteous arrogance of PBS. And we too are prisoners of the power structures under which we live. 

But there is a qualitative difference between past genocides — Belgium murdering the Congolese, the Ottomans murdering the Armenians, the Nazis murdering Jews and others — and today’s, the murder or erasure of anyone in historic Palestine who is not Jewish. We cannot claim any equivocation. We own this genocide outright. And as ruthless as the blowback can be, opposing it is not a death sentence, as it was, for example, in 1930s Germany. 

Unlike past genocides, we watch ours play out in real time on our phones. But we have been witnessing our genocide all along. The Israeli state is predicated on a supremacist ideology whose inevitable end is genocide, its more honest politicians bluntly confirm the intent, and the state’s history is seventy-six years of continuous, unbroken proof. 

But we — the so-called “West” and above all the United States — keep ourselves passive via the illusion of freedom and democracy, and the sense of moral self-assuredness it imparts. Whatever our failings, we are an open, modern society guided by informed discussion and a law-based political structure.

To immerse ourselves in this illusion, we permit freedom of speech within an artificial spectrum calibrated to exclude anything that challenges it. As Palestinians are slaughtered, we bask in our ability to say whatever we wish, from one extreme of this artificial range to the other. The truth that lay beyond it is not censored per se; it simply doesn’t exist. That those who venture to its upper limits suffer abuse and destroyed careers under the hatchet of the “antisemitism” smear, affirms the illusion that they spoke at the limits of what could be.

And so, for seventy-six years we have been kept busy braving that prescribed ceiling. We talk of Israel’s actions, and what the state does, bemoaning the disease’s ravages while safeguarding the disease itself. The purveyors of genocide are happy because talk of its actual cause — the existence of the Israeli state itself, a state whose very foundation is genocidal — is nowhere to be found.

We engage in our political system with the same dishonesty, a two-party monopoly presented as “democracy”. Which flavor of genocide is your cup of tea? Do you prefer Woke genocide or threat-to-democracy-itself genocide?

Palestine is hardly the only sin committed by the U.S. & Co., but it is the defining injustice that encapsulates all the others. It is not an incident, not a coup, not a military action, not a war, not foreign policy, not a political quagmire, but a messianic obsession that permeates our very psyche, an addiction to genocide for whose sake we are willingly destroying ourselves. For much of the world, Palestine is the “line in the sand” to our staggering hypocrisy. We own this genocide. It defines us. It is us. 

November 2024, election month, marks one hundred and seven years since Britain issued the Balfour Declaration and seventy-seven years since the United States pushed through UNGA Resolution 181 (Partition). In both cases, it was well understood that the documents’ words were empty and that we were institutionalizing the ethnic cleansing, and ultimately the genocide, of Palestine’s native population river-to-sea. 

Now that the genocide has switched to high gear, we double-down on our self-righteous delusion: “no genocide” is not an option on November’s U.S. election menu, nor is truthful news about Palestine finally an option in the major media. Short of a radical and immediate reckoning thanks to the mass uprisings across the country and the world, “genocide” will be our epitaph.