By Xavier Villar
The images of death and destruction resulting from the Israeli regime’s unchecked aggression on the besieged Gaza Strip reveal how deeply rooted the propensity for cruelty and racism is in the Zionist entity.
Acts of brutality against the Palestinian population have become a social and political norm over the years, embraced, accepted, and repeatedly reaffirmed by the settlers in the occupied territories through their institutions.
This drive towards cruelty manifests in various forms and manifestations and is evident in the insistence that any challenge to Zionist occupation, no matter how small, is met with forms of collective punishment designed to inflict maximum suffering on the families and localities of the perpetrators, as noted by American anthropologist Charles Hirschkind.
This cruelty, permeating throughout the Zionist political body, reveals that colonial occupation and the benefits derived from it are something from which all Israeli settlers or citizens benefit.
In other words, all of them, without distinction between supposed conservatives and progressives, reap benefits from colonial occupation and brutality inflicted on Palestinians.
The immediate effects of Zionist brutality are evident and include the naturalization of extermination, expropriation, domination, exploitation, premature death, and conditions worse than death, such as ruthless torture.
It is important to note that all these actions take place consistently, not in response to specific conflicts. That is to say, they are part of the racial system through which Zionism seeks to maintain its worldview.
From the perspective of the colonized Palestinians, this translates into living in anticipation of death or what has been defined as conditions worse than death. The colonized individual lives anticipating degradation, humiliation, and murder.
As explained by Puerto Rican philosopher Nelson Maldonado-Torres, life is experienced as being in a torture chamber, giving existence an overwhelming sense of being worse than death. Similarly, being colonized involves living in constant anticipation of the possibility that one’s own body may be violated by another, by the colonizer.
Today, in the Zionist entity, the majority of public opinion seems to converge on a call to eradicate the “Palestinian threat.” Just a few months ago, some liberal voices tried to explain how “progressive Israelis” took to the streets to protest against a “judicial reform” that “put democracy at risk.”
However, as seen in recent days, these Zionists preferred to continue living in the fantasy of an “endangered democracy” without thinking about Palestinians and, more importantly, without questioning their own privileges. These privileges are maintained through the oppression of others.
That protest movement cannot be interpreted as a struggle for the preservation of “democracy,” but rather as a struggle to continue enjoying rights that are based on the deprivation and oppression of the Palestinian people.
Given the reality of the Palestinian genocide, it is evident that the difference between progressive and conservative Zionists is irrelevant to Palestinians and their suffering.
Neither PM Benjamin Netanyahu nor the so-called “progressive Zionists” can offer a just and non-racist response to the oppressed Palestinians. Zionism, by its nature, acts as a colonial and racial machinery, sowing death and destruction among those it identifies as “others.”
There is no other political possibility for Zionism; no “progressive” solution can eliminate the intrinsic connection of Zionism with colonialism and the physical suppression of those it has constructed as non-humans.
Hence, the policy of both Netanyahu and the so-called “progressive Zionists” towards Palestinians is the same: “exterminate the savages.” Statements from Zionist politicians in recent days highlight that the category of “savage” is interchangeable with other dehumanizing terms such as “sub-human,” “cockroaches,” “a cancerous manifestation,” “parasites,” or “human animals.”
All this discursive deployment, in which the entire Zionist society participates and benefits to varying degrees, is built upon the physical and ideological elimination of any Palestinian vestige.
The ‘eradication of the savage’ is ultimately what unites the Zionist society against the colonized, especially against those who refuse to accept the colonial status quo of death and destruction.
This colonial violence once again highlights, in brutally clear terms, the links between Zionism and the Western project. The ideological roots of the Zionist project are deeply embedded in the inherent violence of the Western endeavor.
It is against this system of death and destruction that the Palestinian resistance fights. It is a movement of revaluation of Palestinian life, a political quest to present themselves as humans in the face of an illegitimate political system that repeatedly excludes them into the realm of non-being.
Xavier Villar is a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies and researcher based in Spain.
(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV)
