A Rupture in Time
October 30, 2024 at 06:30PMSarah Aziza’s piece marking the anniversary of the beginning of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza does far more than reflect on the preceding 365 days. It considers the future, not just as time yet to come but also as a conceptual framework subject to definition. For Zionists, Aziza argues, the future is trap of their own making:
For the perpetrators of the genocide, temporality is something to be mastered, bent. As Netanyahu escalated his campaign against Gaza, he called on Western leaders and media for their endorsement, casting the Israeli project as a fulcrum of history. “We will not realize the promise of a better future unless we, the civilized world, are willing to fight the barbarians,” he declared last October. “We cannot give immunity to the savages.”
This statement was not merely an appeal to Western, Islamophobic anxieties but an invocation of core Zionist ideology. In 1896, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism wrote of his vision of settlement in Palestine: “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” More recently, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak proclaimed the Zionist state a “villa in the jungle,” while Israeli Knesset members have called their desire for Jewish-Arab segregation “natural” and likened Palestinians to sheep and dogs. It is a familiar colonial logic: establishing the legitimacy of the settler through contrast with a denigrated native, one cast as both dangerous and trapped in a timeless, vulgar past.
It is a distinction Israel has sought to manifest with transparent and manic force. For the better part of a century, the state has sabotaged Palestinian “development” with instruments of both bureaucracy and war. Meanwhile, the Zionist state has increasingly taken comfort in its material advantages, mistaking weaponized technocracy for superiority. October 7 shattered this paradigm, as the state-of-the-art nation was briefly overthrown by the crude weapons of the dispossessed. Since then, Israel has attempted to bomb Gaza into barbarity, swearing to reduce the Strip into a “desert island” fit for its “human animals.”
Now, after a year of quagmire in Gaza, Israel is seeking new horizons for performing dominance—as in Lebanon, which it threatened to bomb back “into the Stone Age.” As Netanyahu took the podium at the United Nations on September 27, Israeli attacks had killed over seven hundred Lebanese in the preceding week alone, while displacing half a million more. Having just rejected another ceasefire call, and hours before ordering two-thousand-pound bombs to be dropped on a residential sector of Beirut, the Israeli prime minister stood before the General Assembly and called his Arab opponents “savage murderers [who] seek to destroy our common civilization and return all of us to a dark age.”
For years, and increasingly the past twelve months, we have seen how these primal projections extend into the ranks of the Israeli military—as when soldiers filmed themselves burning food supplies in famine-stricken Northern Gaza, proclaiming, “We turn on the light against this dark place and burn it until there is no trace of this whole place.” Yet none of this rabid cruelty—nor the attempted cultural genocide via the destruction of Palestinian educational infrastructure, heritage sites, libraries, and archives—has succeeded in imprisoning Palestine in an imagined, primitive past. Rather, Israel’s relentless vitriol and violence erupt from an indignation over its own, arrested futurity. Beneath its gloss of modernity, the Zionist state—not Palestine—is the anachronism.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/30/a-rupture-in-time/
via IFTTT
Watch