There is no Promised Land

We are now very far down the dark road. From the arts to academia to healthcare to schooling to the public sector to the media, the ongoing effort to purge anti-Zionism (and, by association, people of Middle Eastern and North African heritage) from Australian life has reached McCarthyism levels.

Federal and state governments are falling over themselves to strip away the foundational elements of democratic society — freedom of expression, the right to protest, the right of due process — in the name of “social cohesion”. The country’s largest news organisation is trying to instigate violent confrontations on city streets for clicks and publishing long screeds about how Australian multiculturalism has failed.

While Zionist lobby groups defend the world’s richest man as he throws Nazi salutes and addresses far-right political parties in Germany, blame for antisemitic attacks is now assigned to the pro-Palestine movement by rote. For all intents and purposes, the official definition of “antisemitism” is now anti-Zionism — so much so that Jewish people themselves can be “guilty” of it.

The institutions set up to protect religious and ethnic minorities are silencing their own employees for speaking up in defence of religious and ethnic minorities. The country’s foremost vehicles of creative expression are now leading the crackdown on creative expression. Vice-chancellors of universities that call the cops on student protesters are giving lectures about the importance of democracy on campus.

This absurdity is deliberate, of course. The assault is designed to discombobulate — to confound its targets with the audacity of its sheer nonsense. As Donald Trump has figured out in the United States, there are few better ways to overwhelm and demoralise your opponents than by cranking the bullshit meter up to 11 and snapping the handle off.

Against this backdrop, stochastic violence against Muslims and people of Middle Eastern and North African heritage is skyrocketing. As imams are nearly run over in the street, as Palestinian-owned businesses are set on fire, as hijabi women are beaten in public, as people leave homemade bombs on people’s cars for flying the Palestinian flag, and as Palestinian activists are violently assaulted in elevators, institutions from the Prime Minister on down signal indifference at best.

What makes all of this even more infuriating, at least to me, is that it is all for nothing. No one — and I include the Zionists and their supporters in this — will ultimately benefit from all this hideous and hateful effort. It is all waste.

For the sake of argument, imagine the worst for the moment. Imagine Israel successfully annexes the Gaza Strip. Imagine Israel annexes the West Bank. Imagine Israel annexes East Jerusalem. Imagine Israel establishes, in fact as well as in the Likud Party’s founding charter, the self-proclaimed Jewish state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Go further. Imagine Israel, by means of war and expansion, successfully establishes the “Greater Israel” stretching from the Nile in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq as described in the Book of Genesis, dreamed of by Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, and outlined more recently by Israeli politician Avi Lipkin.

Imagine, in other words, that Israel gets everything it wants — even the things it can barely conceive of in its wildest fantasies. The question I have never seen any Zionist seriously entertain — for fear, I think, of the answer — is: what then?

With Israel established as a continent-spanning regional superpower — the Palestinians, the Egyptians, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Jordanians, the Iraqis, the Druze, the countless people and peoples of the Levant and its surrounds dead, exiled or absorbed into the new Greater Israel’s apartheid architecture — would Israel finally, then, be at peace?

I imagine the answer is as obvious to you as it is to me: fucking no. Of course not. There is no end point at which Israel can arrive and be at peace with itself. There will always be another enemy — another barbaric Middle Eastern country teeming with Muslim savages, ready to threaten our peace and security, that we must pre-emptively annihilate. Another campus protest filled with secret antisemites whom we must drive from public life. Another Palestinian flag flying from a window to be torn down. Only then will we finally be at peace.

Israel cannot beat its enemies because without the “enemy”, there is no Israel. A society founded on occupation can never know justice. A society built on war can never know peace. There is no arriving in the Promised Land. Israel could kill or expel every last Palestinian from within its borders, but it can never kill the Palestinian in its head.

Denied any Palestinians, Israel will invent new ones. A few days ago, Florida man Mordechai Brafman tried to kill two people, firing 17 shots at them with his semiautomatic handgun. He later told police that he “saw two Palestinians and shot and killed both”.

As it turns out, the men he believed to be Palestinians were Israeli tourists, Ari and Yarin Rabey. According to posts they made on social media immediately after the attempt on their lives, the father and son believed they were attacked for being Jewish.

“Death to the Arabs,” Ari posted.

Ari and Yarin are Mizrahi — Jews of Middle Eastern or North African descent. Designated as backwards, half-Arab “orientals” by modern Zionism’s predominantly Ashkenazi political and intellectual leadership, Mizrahi Jews face appalling levels of discrimination in Israeli society. One of the few consolations available to Mizrahi Jews in Israel is that they still sit on a higher rung of Israeli society than the Palestinians.

Ari and Yarin can chant “death to Arabs” all they like. It won’t stop Israel from making them the new Arabs as need dictates. Israel will consume them, because Israel cannot do anything else. When it runs out of “enemies”, it will call itself enemy, and consume itself.

It is for the sake of this ontologically doomed project that our governments and institutions are debasing themselves. People are being criminalised. Laws are being rewritten. Cell doors are swinging open. All in the name of something that was doomed to failure before it was born.

Fundraiser for Noor and Hoor Hammad

Noor and her family have applied for passports, and soon will be applying for tourist visas to come to Australia. If you’ve got anything to spare, please consider giving some money so they can finally get out of Gaza.

Also, both Noor and her husband are qualified clinical nutritionists, and Noor’s English language skills are excellent. If you know of any work opportunities they could pursue in Australia, please reach out.

Incidentally, Noor’s birthday is in five days.

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What I’m looking at

• Guardian Australia — ‘This is censorship’: Palestinian flags covered up in major exhibition at National Gallery of Australia

• Mondoweiss — One month into Israel’s West Bank offensive, violence and uncertainty are the new normal

• Al Jazeera — Unchilding Palestine’s children