A significant number of Zionist trolls plaguing the comment sections of my posts were, as I was, raised on Zionist hasbara i.e., outright lies.
As I grew up, and later visited Israel, I was repulsed, as the son of a Holocaust survivor, by the Third Reich-adjacent mindset of Israelis; by their by-rote bigotry; by the military hagiographic palaver they have internalized e.g., the glorification of war criminals such as the Irgun/Stern gang terrorists, the latter among the principal founders of the Zionist state; the self-justifying lies in defense of ethnic cleansing of the true and rightful heirs of the land — the Palestinian people. Moreover, the reprehensible legacy continues, to this very minute, by means of the IDF’s genocidal rampage through Gaza and the settler-colonialist land theft being perpetrated in the West Bank.
All the above, Israel’s apologists continue to declare are defensive in nature, but are the diametrical opposite of self-defense. To wit, Israel’s agendas, on a historical basis, have come to be known as Lebensraum (i.e., “the territory that a state or nation believes is needed for its natural development, especially associated with Third Reich era Germany.”)
Then there is this, dear trolls, you are mistaken: I don’t loathe myself; I loathe the mendacious conflation of Judaism and Zionism and its attendant claim that the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria and beyond are the birthright of the Jewish people. I loathe the soul-defying, self-serving fiction from the same precincts of my soul from which I harbor contempt for the aforementioned European settler colonialist/Third Reich concept of Lebensraum.
Being on the wrong-as hell side of history is the reason Zionist apologists react with reflexive hostility to and are attempting to (disingenuously) claim as anti-semitic the declaration:
“Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.”
It comes down to this: Unless the Zionist boot is lifted from the collective neck of Palestinians, Israel will continue to exist as a crime against humanity disguised as a nation.
Regarding crimes against human beings committed on a personal level: It should go without saying that the Hanukkah mass shooting in Australia was a horrific display of evil. There cannot be any justification for the mindless hatred that engenders the senseless slaughter of innocent human beings.
For two years now, day after day, innocent men, women, and children in Gaza have been subject to slaughter on a mass scale and in vastly larger numbers than the unforgivable carnage perpetrated at Australia’s Bondi Beach.
Yet, by the hour, Hasbara trolls swarm my posts attempting to justify Israel’s acts of mass murder.
Can we agree on this: All human beings, regardless of who they are and where they dwell, should not be subjected to collective punishment, whether at the hands of a deranged gunman or a lawless government?
Yet emblematic of the toxic naivety of all too many “well-meaning” liberals regarding Israel is this declaration from my comment section:
“If they had lived peacefully side by side in Israel and Gasa[sic] in the first place[,] this wouldn’t be happening.”
Has this person been living in a bell jar their whole life?
The essence of the tragedy: The crackbrained notion that the creation of Israel, i.e., a state founded by terrorists, a highly militarized, settler-colonialist, ethno-supremacist state, would remedy the historically fraught plight of the Jewish people. To wit, I ask the following as a Jewish person: How is it possible that we could free ourselves of being the objects of bigotry by becoming a nation of bigots?
Israel has proven the following, as the (non-Western world) has watched in mortification: The Zionist state does not possess any desire to live in peace with its neighbors. Israel’s actions speak loudly and in volumes, and its intent has been apprehended by all but the willfully deaf and belligerently ignorant.
Israel is the troubled stepchild of Western imperialism. The US and Western Europe do not care a fig about the welfare of the Jewish people, but the existence of a highly militarized client state in the oil-filthy region to do their bidding — now that appeals to the cupidity of Western economic elites.
Also from my comment section:
“Because of the Holocaust, we Jews are entitled to a Homeland of our own,” goes the justification for the establishment of the Zionist ethno-supremacist state.
Then give us Jews the Rhineland of Germany; you know, where my family of Ashkenazi Jews dwelled for generations. But be careful, given the Zionist proclivity for occupation via Lebensraum, we might claim Bavaria next as part of our Jewish homeland.
Image: My ancestors promenading in the medieval fashion trends of the day.
In the tragic case of the perpetrators and apologists for genocide, one wonders, do these individuals recall the death of their soul, or did it rot away slowly and then was dispersed in the ill winds howling through their dismal worldview?
The Gaza ceasefire is a lie of the Western collective mind. The IDF‘s blood-drenched activities continue. Israel’s objective was never self-defense; it was land thievery, by means of ethnic cleansing, per always. Whatever tattered remains of the Western soul that existed before Gaza have been dispatched to the abyss where the West’s moral conscience was mislaid.
Of course, the vast fortunes of Western civilization were gained by smash-and-grab thievery on a global basis. The Zionist state presents an emblem of Western (criminal) modus operandi: The US military has slaughtered over four million people of the Islamic faith since the early 1990s alone…that after leaving the same number of corpses throughout Indochina during the US’s imperial campaign known as the Vietnam War.
Why the soul-defying lack of outrage regarding Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and its perpetration of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank? Because the victims of the aggression are the perennial victims of Western avarice via conquer lust; withal, they suffer and die because they exist in the path of the bottomless cupidity of the beneficiaries of unchecked power.
Why do I write about the subject with such conviction? I am buffeted by the injustice of it all down to my DNA: The beneficiaries of unchecked power, i.e., the Nazi, stole my maternal family’s money, worldly possessions, including their house in Berlin during the rise of the Third Reich. (Subsequently, my mother and older sister were placed by my grandmother on a Kindertransport to the UK, with a few small family valuables sewn into the lining of their clothing.)
It would be a betrayal of my Jewish heritage if I neglected to address such abominations. Therefore, I am compelled to speak in a voice of sacred vehemence by engaging all the tenacity my soul can summon.
Pictured: My son and I standing in front of our family’s purloined house in Berlin.
Finally, this volley of prose in which I attempt to reach the seemingly unreachable:
Dearest Trolls,
Like a wounded animal, both US empire and its client state, Israel (including their apologists) resemble a dangerous beast as it staggers into its end-stage period.
Fear and displaced anger are the reflexive reactions to the threatened collapse of sacred beliefs in the face of impending realities. Donald Trump and his slavering gallery of grotesques and their Israeli doppelgängers in a death cult-rancid mindset, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Itamar Ben-Gvir et.al., and i.e., unhinged emblems of the psychopathy evinced when nations are careening towards the abyss.
The men cited above are beyond redemption, yet, on a personal basis, we as individuals are granted the choice of refusing to be ruled by the worst, most reactive aspects of our nature; instead, we can embrace the uncertainty of the moment and regard the ordeal as a moment of rebirth.
One’s internal demagogue can be dispatched into exile, and his empire of shit-dust’s conscripted soldiers, under siege, fighting to preserve the dismal and deranged status quo, can be disbanded and study war no more.
Of course, apologists for the indefensible (hasbara-reeking trolls; MAGA soreheads reveling in Trump’s short attention span theatre of cruelty) feel under siege. True, you are under siege — by your own (hidden from yourself) uncertainty about the shoddy beliefs (that you lie to yourself) you are certain about.
In avoidance of painful extant realities, you have taken flight into yourself. Tragically, you have transformed your being into a citadel of belligerent obtuseness.
But this is what you will encounter at the farthest recesses within you…the same looming outward reality you are fleeing — and you can hate it — you can rage at the very air around it. Yet looming change is not going to retreat at your command because at its approach, you become stricken with angst.
I know my pleas, or even the scorn of the world, are not going to have the effect of changing you, from your insular mind to your decaying soul. Yet, it, I promise you, without malice nor fear of reproach, would prove propitious to risk opening your (spite-hardened) heart to even the regret and sorrow attendant to the soul-reviving choice. What you remain in denial of, you will meet, time and time again, and you will call it fate.
Anselm Kiefer , The Orders of the Night (Die Orden der Nacht)
The post End Stage Zionist Hasbara And Its Trolls: The Israel as victim canard, it’s all over but the shouting first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Phil Rockstroh.