To dispute the Shoah is to kill the dead a 2nd time by denying their memory. Fortunately, the law prohibiting this is there to forbid it and remind Le Pen and co. that this is no “detail of history”. We are struck by the refusal of Jewish leaders to face up to the scale of the war crimes committed by Israel in Gaza and the occupied territories of the West Bank. Unfortunately, it’s the same for the majority of Jews in Europe and the US: “The Israeli army is the most moral in the world and does everything to avoid killing civilians”, they say over and over again. All you have to do is understand Hebrew and listen to what Netanyahu and his henchmen Ben Gvir and Smotrich are saying mezza voce: the Arabs will have to go elsewhere, this country must become “Arabenfrei”, and killing children is normal because one day they will become terrorists. This is directly akin to “prospective revisionism”, denying the massacres and suffering of those who have died and those who will die anyway.
After killing more children than in any recent war, and killing or arresting more journalists than in any war past or present (see my previous blogs), Israel continues on its course. Israel flouts international law (1), condemned by the International Court of Justice for Gaza and the West Bank (2) accelerates the colonization of occupied territories, including Unesco-listed villages (3) tortures and kills health professionals (4). Unfortunately, the majority of Israelis want the hostages back, but are not opposed to Netanyahu’s policies (5), which will ultimately transform this country into an illiberal, theocratic state. Israel leads the world in cannabis consumption (41% of 18-25 year-olds) and is the world’s leading importer. There has been a 25% rise in the consumption of narcotics, one Israeli in 4 has increased his or her consumption of addictive products since October 7, and a third of soldiers treated for post-traumatic stress disorder. The dialectic between war and drugs is clear here as elsewhere (6). The photo of a Gazan woman weeping for her slain daughter was awarded the world press 2024 grand prize(7) and that of Mahmud Hams the visa pour l’image de Perpignan 2024 (8).
A fascinating testimony from an Israeli/American Jew, an expert on Nazism, who also did his military service in Israel and took part with brilliance in the Yom Kippur War, and has his family living near Gaza. He attests that this war is a genocide, despite his compatriots’ accusations of treachery (9). Other links attest to the precipice towards which Israel and its neighbors are hurtling (10), or to an article by the Lebanese writer Dominique, as always brilliant in her analyses (11). It’s quite astonishing, as Le Monde did recently, to note the scale of targeted assassinations around the world – Mossad’s impressive efficiency in killing their targets and only their targets; compare this with the thousands of “collateral damage” in the attacks on Gaza or Lebanon (12). Clearly, the aim here is to kill as many Palestinians as possible in order to make living in Gaza impossible, produce yet another migration of Palestinians and build marinas in GAZA .
Links:
9. https://orientxxi.info/magazine/un-historien-du-genocide-face-a-israel,7577
Photo by Emad El Byed on Unsplash
