German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, This Is What’s Really Disgusting

Beyond international law and without borders – this is Israel’s infinite space where it conducts its prolonged war against the Palestinian people.

“Our” Holocaust lasted 12 years, and Zionism has been benefiting from it ever since. The Palestinians’ non Holocaust has already been going on for 75 years. And the world – in other words the United States and Europe, headed by Germany – doesn’t simply sit on the sidelines.

The self-defined enlightened countries repeatedly give Israel a green light to carry on with the non-Holocaust it has been perpetuating for so long. Their occasional limp condemnations, absent diplomatic warnings and punishment, only signal to Israel that it can continue to abuse, humiliate, crush and torture, bomb and kill and imprison and expel, steal land and water. And all that while disgracefully and cynically exploiting our families who were murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. Honorable German Chancellor Olaf Scholz – are you disgusted? That is what is really disgusting.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz would have stopped the process of outlawing seven Palestinian civil organizations, had he known that the European countries would impose a single sanction against Israel. Israeli armed burglars would not have broken into the offices of those organizations last Thursday and looted their contents, had a senior official in U.S. President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration ordered Gantz ahead of time to refrain.

But Europe and the United States are strong and capable and effective at imposing various sanctions on the nation that is occupied, dispossessed, expelled. As though they believed the antisemitic libels that Israel (as the modern umbrella organization of all the Jews) is an omnipotent and multi armed octopus that they must take care not to anger.

Israel is constantly opening new fronts in its prolonged war against the Palestinian people, and chooses as many targets as possible. It has inexhaustible resources for that purpose – money, soldiers, legal experts, yes-men, citizens who don’t give a damn and falsehoods that it wraps in mantras of security and classified material.

There is no need to wait 50 or 60 years until the archives are opened and documents reveal some other secret government plan behind a horrific act allegedly perpetrated by individuals (like the massacre in Kafr Qasem), or intentions that differ from those that are declared (like the Military Rule imposed on Israel’s arab citizens from 1948 to 1966, and which was designed to prevent their return to their lands and to complete our grab of those lands).

Even without documents we know why Israel is forbidding the existence of seven Palestinian civil organizations, including prominent human rights organizations:

1. The activity of the organizations strengthens Palestinian sumud, or steadfastness, in the face of the occupation and its invasiveness.
2. The information, testimonies, documents and analyses provided by these organizations are an important data base for any Palestinian claim against the Israeli occupation in international legal forums, now and in the future.
3. The organizations and their activists also level criticism against the Palestinian Authority, its oppressive practices, its failures in areas of social justice and its neo-liberal policy. Israel’s pursuit of them intensifies the suspicions and questions of whether the PA also wants them closed. Sowing suspicion and mutual accusations among the Palestinians is a common practice of Israeli intelligence organizations.
4. The organizations preserve and nurture the Palestinian spirit of unity that supersedes the hamula, or extended family – thereby contravening Israel’s intention and activities to disband and erode Palestinian society, so that each person, or at most each family, will be alone in their confrontation with the built-in cruelty of Israel’s coerced rule.

While publicly adhering to the “two-state solution,” European countries did not suspend diplomatic relations with Israel in response to its devouring of the remaining Palestinian land in the West Bank, in violation of UN resolutions and international law. They did not return their ambassadors, as a means of forcing Israel to stop imprisoning over 2 million people in the detention facility called the Gaza Strip. They haven’t suspended trade agreements with Israel, because since the first day of the Oslo Accords, Israel has been violating the basic principle on which the accords are based: The Gaza Strip and the West Bank are a single territorial unit.

These countries are not cancelling trade agreements related to weapons and spyware, because Israel has crushed and is crushing Gaza with its weapons and using science fiction like means to spy on every Palestinian from the age of one hour until after death. They do not restrict the entry of Israelis into their territory in response to the long-standing restrictions on movement that Israel imposes on Palestinians and their spouses.

Israel keeps destroying and confiscating humanitarian equipment (solar panels, water pipes and mobile structures) funded by European countries, and is well aware that there will be nothing more than a toothless verbal condemnation. Israel also allocates the land and water it has stolen from the Palestinians to the Jewish citizens of Great Britain and France, the United States, Canada and Argentina, with the assurance that those countries would punish no one for this rapacity.

After the closing of the seven organizations, Israel and its obedient Jewish citizens, who profit from this official robbery, will keep going, and cross other red lines, persecute other civil society groups and silence other activists, with a license from Europe and the United States.