Israel's inversion of reality linked to its reversal of morality
Insult to intelligence; insult to injury
Thursday, more than a hundred Palestinians were shot dead by the Israeli army, the IDF. More than 700 were wounded. The people, starving, were waiting to get food from an aid convoy. By all accounts, it was a massacre.
Well, not all accounts. The IDF, for its part, gave conflicting descriptions. In one account, it justified the shooting, saying that the crowd had advanced on a checkpoint “in a threatening manner.” This is the Israeli version of “he was reaching for his waistband.”
The other account accompanied drone footage released by the IDF, which Western commentators noted had been edited by the IDF but which they aired anyway. That storyline had it that the people had trampled each other, being so crazed and out of control, and the IDF shot them in short order.
Surely, shooting cannot control a crowd, only subdue it in the bloodiest way possible.
But this account has the added benefit of blaming the victims, saying that what befell them was a fault of their own making. Channel 4 News in Britain had the courtesy to remind viewers of the context: that these people were desperate because they were starving. The correspondent, however, neglected to note that this famine was and is manmade, that all of what we saw goes back to the actions of the state of Israel.
In a sickening twist, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli Minister of National Security, praised the heroism of the IDF forces and said this incident is exactly why all aid shipments to Gaza should be stopped. Do you hear that? The Israelis slew a crowd of starving people in cold blood and it is for that reason that aid should be stopped! This is merely the inversion of reality meant to justify malevolence.
Ben-Gvir was also the one who last month praised the special forces group that infiltrated Jenin Hospital, a civilian hospital in the West Bank—not in Gaza, where the fighting is—and assassinated a non-combatant in his hospital bed while he slept, killing his two bedside companions as well. Ben-Gvir portrayed this act of murder as the highest service.
They are changing the words.
Victor Klemperer, author of The Language of the Third Reich (1957), wrote of the Nazi’s corruption of the word ‘heroism’ and how that affected an entire generation at its core level, the level of language:
“I have observed again and again how the young people in all innocence, and despite a sincere effort to fill the gaps and eliminate the errors in their neglected education, cling to Nazi thought processes. They don’t realize they are doing it; the remnants of linguistic usage from the preceding epoch confuse and seduce them. We spoke about the meaning of culture, of humanitarianism, of democracy and I had the impression that they were beginning to see the light, and that certain things were being straightened out in their willing minds—and then, it was always just around the corner, someone spoke of some heroic behaviour or other, or of some heroic resistance, or simply of heroism per se. As soon as this concept was even touched upon, everything became blurred, and we were adrift once again in the fog of Nazism. And it wasn’t only the young men who had just returned from the field or from captivity, and felt they were not receiving sufficient attention, let alone acclaim, no, even young women who had seen any military service were thoroughly infatuated with the most dubious notion of heroism. The only thing that was beyond dispute, was that it was impossible to have a proper grasp of the true nature of humanitarianism, culture and democracy if one endorsed this kind of conception, or to be more precise misconception, of heroism.” (pp. 2-3, emphasis added)
Later, he conjured a dialogue with one of these misty-eyed youths, Klemperer himself first saying, “A war of conquest, and especially one which perpetrated such atrocities as Hitler’s, has nothing to do with heroism,” followed by this rejoinder:
‘But amongst my comrades there were so many who were not involved in any atrocities, and who were firmly convinced—we were never told otherwise after all—that, even when attacking and conquering, we were only engaged in a defensive war, and that our victory would also bring salvation to the world.’ (p. 5, emphasis added)
Benjamin Netanyahu has proclaimed more than once that his so-called war (it is not a war) is one upon which the whole of Western civilization rests—that the continued life of the West depends on what happens in a strip of land about twenty-five miles long and five miles thick, against a stateless and defenseless people.
Former director of the Bureau of Overseas Intelligence within the U.S. Office of War Information, Leonard Doob, in Patriotism and Nationalism (1964) said this about one of the “human justifications” for entering into hostilities:
“23. Revenge: ‘We are doing this because they started it.’ [...]
“Revenge occurs, in brief, in connection with actions not otherwise to be tolerated and consequently, however psychologically sweet, is very rarely admitted to be the primary objective. [...]
“In the sphere of feelings, where factual evidence is difficult to gather and where the projection of one’s own impulses cannot easily be detected, revenge frequently is admitted but again in the company of other justifications. ‘They hate us and therefore we must protect ourselves.’ Or counterhatred is uttered with a note of sadness: ‘Unfortunately we must hate them because they hate us.’” (pp. 197-198)
The language of self-defense allows heroism to come to the fore—and in the funhouse mirror of revenge, hatred is a virtue, one that elevates atrocity into ecstatic celebration.
The reversal of morality, a phenomenon rarely seen in everyday life, often accompanies the commission of genocide. Kjell Anderson (“‘Who Was I to Stop the Killing?’: Moral Neutralization among Rwandan Genocide Perpetrators,” Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2017) describes this inversion:
“Normally, crime represents a break from the social order. The normative nature of genocide derives from both cultural discourse and messages issued by the state and other perpetrators. These forces drive a reversal of morality through the coercive authority and perceived legitimacy of state power.” (p. 43)
“Ideology and notions of duty can contribute to the reversal of morality, as can the projection of negative characteristics onto the victims.” (pp. 45-46)
“[T]he findings indicate that transgression is eased or even erased by the enabling moral environment provided by state ideology (messages of inspiration and authorization).” (p. 58)
Anderson explains that one technique used to further or to justify genocide and that facilitates reversal of morality is denial of the victim.
“Denial of the victim justifies perpetration by depicting the victim as a threat. Often, this is closely related to a survival discourse in which the victim is seen as a perpetrator and a threat to the survival of the perpetrator group.” (p. 48)
It is clear that denial of the victim is at work in the IDF’s explanation of what happened at the food depot. When asked if Israel takes responsibility for the mass shooting, Lt. Col. Lerner of the IDF told Channel 4 News,
“No, of course not. . . . The mob stormed the convoy, bringing it to a halt. In the state of chaos on the site, people were being pushed, trampled, and in some cases run over. . . . The incident on the convoy this morning was nothing to do with Israel. . . . It got out of hand as people were looting the trucks.”
Israeli officials have repeatedly equated everyday Palestinian civilians with Hamas; thus, in the language of the Israeli state, the violence perpetrated on starving, emaciated, energy-deprived innocents is justified because their presence evokes Hamas through this mental equation. Their hungry behavior, brought into being through Israel’s intentional famine, is entirely human, and it is this display of humanity that the IDF finds so threatening—that these people are human at all.
“Perpetrators see themselves as victimised. In this context, all perpetrator actions are interpreted as self-defence, and hence as morally legitimate. In the words of one Rwandan perpetrator, ‘I felt they were enemies of Rwanda and myself’, and thus, according to another, ‘there was no problem’ killing them. This reversal of victimization is frequently invoked in genocidal propaganda. Denial of the victim may also take the form of alleging that the victim had the power to escape his or her suffering but chose not to do so, because of a stubborn character, greed, or passivity.
“A final variation of the denial of victims is the ‘just-world hypothesis’, which posits that because we live in a just world the victims must have done something to deserve their suffering. . . . Just-world thinking effectively reverses the burden of proof.” (pp. 48-49)
Ervin Staub, another expert on genocide, adds this to our understanding of reversal of morality:
“Subverting the feeling of responsibility for the welfare of other human beings is another important aspect of the psychology of direct perpetrators. To a greater or lesser extent, most human beings learn that they are responsible for the life and welfare of others. A feeling of responsibility is central to helping and not hurting others[.] One way to subvert such feeling is to exclude certain people from the realm of humanity, to define them on various bases as subhuman, or as representing danger to oneself, to one’s way of life and values. At the extreme, a complete reversal of morality may take place, so that the murder of some human beings becomes what’s morally good, a service to humanity.” (“The Psychology of Perpetrators and Bystanders,” Political Psychology (1985), Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 77)
Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men, has echoed all of these urgencies and concerns. In a talk where he spoke about his book, a landmark in genocide studies, he said:
“What the indoctrination provided was a buffet of rationalizations . . . so if you needed to frame this as a military operation, you could take that part of the claim: Jews are partisans, and partisans are Bolsheviks, and this is all part of the war, and you’re simply engaged in a military anti-partisan move as you’re shooting down women and children that are totally unarmed.
“But, somehow, to fit it into a framework that you consider valid, or to dress it up as a kind of historic mission, that this is a point in history when things are at stake, and the Nazi genocide is basically a self-defense against the Asiatic Bolshevik Jewish threat, and they will get us and they’ll shoot our children if we don’t get them first. And so it allows them to pretend what they’re doing is self-defense.”
“Ordinary Men as Holocaust Perpetrators: A Reappraisal After Twenty-five Years” — CMU History (October 23, 2018), ~55:20
Browning went on to say:
“The result, then, is that it creates a world not in which Germans went to kill because they enjoyed it, because they couldn’t wait to kill Jews or whatever, but it created a world in which killing Jews and killing any other enemies of the Reich were not considered criminal or amoral. They did not consider themselves criminals when they were doing this. And neither during the war and . . . neither after the war did they see what they had done as amoral and criminal, because they had created, in a sense, a moral world in which the victims were outside the protection of normal morality.” (~1:02:23)
Dr. James Waller, in a trenchant presentation about the transformation that a person undergoes from ordinary citizen to génocidaire, referred to court testimony dating from World War II:
“There’s this one moment of lucidity where the prosecutor asks this perpetrator, ‘How did you come to think it was right to kill Jews?’ And—evidently without any hesitation, because the stenographer doesn’t note hesitation—the perpetrator says, ‘It’s not that I thought it was right to kill Jews. I thought it was wrong if I didn’t kill them.’
“Do you see the difference between that? It’s not right to kill them; that’s not the issue. The issue is, if I didn’t kill them, I was actually doing something wrong. I was doing something maybe even sinful in some of [everyone else’s] eyes if I didn’t kill the victims.”
“Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing” — Microsoft Research (August 11, 2016), ~ 1:04:50)
Israeli historian Idith Zertal, in Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (2005), spoke of the mythbuilding of national sacrifice that was so central to the establishment of Zionism at the founding of Israel as a nation-state.
“The promise of eternal life for the young men and women who fell in battle for the homeland; their sanctification in memorial rituals and the worship of the dead were what George Mosse defined as the creation of a new civil religion in the nation-state of the early twentieth century. They also served as an instrument for mobilization and preservation of a martial, conquering society, and were intended to compensate for the repressed feelings of guilt generated by the ‘murder’ of the sons; continual, self-aware ‘murder’ which sanctified and at the same time justified itself in and through the permanent state of conflict and combat.” (p. 19)
She explicitly evoked heroism as a driving force:
“Another reason for the process of ‘Zionization’ of the ghetto uprisings, which was set in motion in Palestine, was the need to incorporate the ghetto resistance into the chain of Israel’s heroic battles for its homeland and the ‘Zionist’ wars, so as to render the Jews of the Diaspora both worthy of being part of the struggle for a Jewish state, to lend the Zionist fight a global dimension and construe it as a life-and-death struggle, and to establish an uncontestable link between the fate of European Jewry in the war years, and the right to a Jewish state in Palestine after the war. Speaking to the Elected Assembly in October 1943, [David] Ben-Gurion stressed this direct link between fighting in the ghettos and the relentless struggle for ‘a right to a homeland,’ the right to existence, and the right to self-defense.’” (p. 32)
As long as self-defense can be raised as a banner, Israel will ever find justification for its genocide by placing it in this grand struggle for determination and by hoisting its murderers on its figurative shoulders, extending laurels to the slayers of starving innocents.
Make no mistake: every time a Western government claims that what Israel is doing is self-defense, even at this late date, is participating in the genocide. They directly involve themselves in the perpetuation of denial. Denial is the final stage of genocide, the last of ten (as formulated by Gregory Stanton, president of Genocide Watch).
They’re changing the words.
Claims of self-defense here should be viewed as an attempt to obscure the self-evident genocide that is plainly and obviously visible.
Why? Because Israel in this instance is the occupying power; and, by international law, self-defense is not a concept that applies. While Israel has a right to maintain its security, it does not have the right to go into occupied territory and perform wholesale destruction. Israel, in fact, has a positive duty to provide care for those under its jurisdiction.
By redefining genocide as self-defense, these governments who are running interference, the United States chief among them, attempt to shield Israel from ramifications of their commission of the crime of crimes but, in so doing, render the definition of genocide itself mutable and arbitrary; and the act a freely electable choice. Simply, this cannot stand.