Israel, the Jews and Gaza: The Lies of BHL posted by Richard Seymour

“Under cover of "the defense of Palestine," thousands gathered in Paris on Sunday to blame the Jews once again. These imbeciles intermingled with haters (or the other way around) need to be reminded, for what it's worth, that conflating Jews and Israelis in the same condemnation is the very principle of anti-Semitism, which, in France, is punishable by law.”

“They need to be reminded that no indignation, no form of solidarity with any cause whatsoever can excuse, much less justify, the pogrom-like act of forced entry into a synagogue.”
“These imbeciles intermingled with haters (or the other way around) need to hear that rallying behind cardboard Qassams representing the rockets fired blindly at women, children, and seniors -- in short, at Israeli civilians -- is not an ordinary act but a gesture of support for a terrorist enterprise.”
“To those among them, if any there be, who truly had the cause of Gaza at heart and who paraded under banners condemning the dozens of innocents killed since the Israeli counteroffensive began, it would perhaps be too cruel to ask why they are never there, never, on the same streets of Paris, to deplore not the dozens but the tens of thousands of other innocents killed in the past four years in another Arab land, Syria.” 

“I do not know what permits us to tell BHL that the demonstrators who filled the streets these last days did not mobilize for other causes.  I know those among them who have done much to denounce the Syrian regime.  But it is true that the Palestinian cause is emblematic, not for the number of victims, but for the fact that it is the last colonial conflict.  I have for a long time explained in De quoi Palestine est-elle le nom? (Of What is Palestine the Name?) why it was the symbolic conflict, along the line of division between Orient and Occident, of North and South.  “But one will observe that, for these murdered ones, for the dozens of women, children, elderly persons: in brief, civilians, who, if the criminal flight in advance of Hamas is not stopped, will be, tomorrow, hundreds, there are not one, but two responsible parties: the pilot who, sighting a ramp of Iranian missiles hidden in the courtyard of a building, touches by mistake the adjacent building; but also, certainly at first, those monsters of cynicism who, to the pilot’s message announcing that he is going to fire and inviting the neighbors to leave the neighborhood in search of shelter, invariably respond: “No one move.  Everyone stay where they are.  That 10, 100 martyrs offer their blood for the sacred cause, inscribed in our charter, of the destruction of the state of the Jews.”     

“And as for the others ... as for the newspapers and TV stations that do not cease to evoke in a circular fashion Israeli “aggression,” or the “prison” that Gaza has become, or the “spiral” of acts of “violence” and “vengeances” supposed to feed this war without end, one may object to them:”
“1. That there has been no aggression, but a counter-attack by Israel in the face of the hail of missiles that, once again, press down upon the cities and that no nation in the world would have tolerated for so long.”    

“2. Although Gaza is, in effect, a kind of prison, since the Israelis cleared it more than ten years ago, it is hard to see how they could be the jailers — but what, in contrast, about Hamas, which holds the enclave in its grip, which treats its inhabitants like hostages and which, although a single word would suffice, or, in any case, a hand extended in order to end the nightmare, prefers to go to the limit of its criminal folly?”  

“3. That between the acts of violence and vengeance that are presented to us as “symmetrical,” between the murder of three Jewish teenagers who were kidnapped and found murdered near Hebron and the murder of a young Palestinian burned alive, two days later, by a gang of barbarians who bring shame upon Israel’s ideals, there is a difference that changes, alas, nothing about the mourning of the four families which, for those who have the opportunity and, thus, the obligate to keep a cool head, changes everything: Israel’s political, judicial, and moral authorities were horrified at the second, condemned it without reserve, and arranged it so that the presumed guilty persons were tracked down and arrested without delay; for the first, which the authors are always pursuing, it was necessary to have very sharp ears to hear each word that was sounded in the ranks of the Palestinians — if, all the same, a phrase like that of Khaled Mechaal, “congratulating” the “hands” which have “kidnapped” three young people, brutally re-qualified, for the occasion, as “Jewish colonists.”   

“I doubt whether these observations will have any effect on the Sunday jihadists, the same crowd who deplore one day that they are deprived of the right to laugh with Dieudonné [a French comedian who became subject to a storm of controversy for reputed anti-semitism, in part because of a television depiction of an Israeli settler as a Nazi. -Trans.], the next that they are prevented from paying their respects to Mohammed Merah, the killer of seven children in Toulouse, and the day after that that French foreign policy does not line up solidly behind the pro-Hamas protesters.”

“As for the rest of France, for the millions men and women of good will who have not given up the dream of one day seeing that land peaceably shared, it would be wonderful if they could break the cycle of disinformation and lazy thinking. Between Israel and Hamas, the wrongs are not equally distributed. Hamas is a fascislamist organization from the grips of which the inhabitants of Gaza, among others, must urgently be liberated. As for the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, who calls on the United Nations to apply "pressure" on Israel, would it not be more logical, more dignified, and above all more effective for him to demand of the religious zealots who, in the last few weeks have once again become his partners in government, that they immediately lay down their arms.”


“Would withdrawing the weapons, as BHL demands, lead to peace?  It was around ten years ago, after the death of Yasser Arafat, that Mahmoud Abbas negotiated with Israel, pursued a security cooperation with the occupation army, a cooperation he referred to as “sacred.” Hamas did not take part in the negotiations and will not in the future as it is not the Palestinian government that negotiates but the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).  And what is the result of these negotiations?  More settlements, more settlers, more repression, an absolute refusal to return the territories occupied in 1967.  As for the “fascism” of Hamas, recall that there are among the factions in the Israeli government those that, which were they elected in any European country, would be denounced by BHL, and he would refuse to receive them.  Is an Israeli Jewish fascist more acceptable that a Dutch or Austrian fascist?”