LETTER: Convenient historical rewrite by Israelis

SIR – Forget about humanity and compassion or any broad notion of enlightened collective purpose. Israel has reduced these cornerstones of fundamental decency to fabled fiction … a narrative of perverse existence that crushes truth and justice as little more than tedious impediments to its own, now decades-old, ethnic and racial pogrom against others.

Israel is good at its slaughter, torture and endless detention and land theft; these are givens, what it really excels at is the grand lie … the convenient historical rewrite; no crime too extreme, no offence too offensive. Always, of course, cast in the talisman of survival. It’s a skill … a dodgy political artform that converts inconvenient truth into self-serving dogma with all too predictable deadly consequence.

Israel has perfected its crafted control of selective reality in time-tested ways nothing short of masterful. Long before UN anthropologists discovered a European state in the midst of an Arab history, Zionists mastered the skill of expedient deception.

Thus, almost a hundred years ago, European terrorists became celebrated freedom fighters as they slaughtered Palestinians asleep in their beds and cribs. The Nakba, a forced stampede of almost a million Palestinians sparked by mass rape and murder, recast with historical ease to become a voluntary transition … a move by restive villagers to find a better time in a better place.

Kibbutzim, those enlightened socialist communes that, with magic-like remake, blossomed from long-barren deserts. Could that be the rubble of age-old villages and decomposed remains just below the veneer of the sand?

Settlements, an employment opportunity for a troubled work force in need of purpose and discipline. The siege of Gaza … not at all a premeditated embargo of food, medicine, water, electricity and movement to break the will of its two million people, but rather a generous helping hand to liberate them from the limitations of their primitive vision and Hamas terror.

Advancing itself as a democracy under siege, Israel has long since abandoned any pretence of equality and justice in its limitless thirst to seize what little remains of Palestine as it exalts a racist de jure Jewish state in its quest.

Over the last 30 days, that faux moral perch has begun to collapse as the winds of truth have blown away the mask of hate that is very much Israel. During this time, tens of thousands of peaceful unarmed demonstrators marched on the barricades of their Gaza prison only to be met by carnage.

Not before has Israel’s indifference to international law been so clear, so visible, so compelling as it has been through the lens of its repeated slaughter, over these 30 days in Gaza, as thousands of civilians have simply marched and marched in peace to say ‘enough.’

Today, more than 70 years after the judgments at Nuremberg, we are witness to an undeniable paradox as those victimised long ago by notions of racial, religious and political superiority have themselves become willing accomplished adherents of that same evil doctrine.

Yours sincerely, 

Daniel Teegan, 

Union Hall.