Shamelessness, Hypocrisy, and Cowardice
Yesterday, it was reported that a suspected war-criminal, by the name of Benjamin Netanyahu, appealed to international law to condemn the Iranian bombardment of an Israeli hospital in Tel Aviv. The first reaction of many was (justifiably) disbelief: you cannot make this up. Israel has bombarded all hospitals in Gaza out existence. (The same obviously goes for any appeal to international law regarding attacks on civilian populations, those too have been razed to the ground by the Israeli Government.)
Most people in the world now laugh at Israeli justifications of their cynical military aggression and genocidal tactics as “self-defence”. Israel, not Iran, has nuclear weapons. Israel, not Iran, is in constant violation of international law. Israel, not Iran, refuses to sign any treaty on the prevention of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Israel, not Iran, is a major threat to world peace. Of course, this is not real laughter, as the consequences of what many have described as the worst crimes against humanity since the Shoah, are exceptionally disturbing.
Because every recent Israeli war crime that has been recorded in Gaza and the West Bank has been surrounded by repeated attempts at deception and misinformation by the Israeli government, the latter have now become the object of scorn and ridicule world wide. In response to Israeli war crimes in Gaza, indicted war-criminal Benjamin Netanyahu stated: “I’d rather have bad press than a good obituary.”
It is of course very unlikely that he will ever get a good obituary, but the very fact that he phrases the price to pay for war crimes in terms of “bad press” should have triggered major concern. In Israel, the suffering caused and the war crimes committed in the name of national security are merely equated with bad publicity. This expression of a moral corruption that runs so deep through the arteries of self-valorization should be invoked when contemplating the question: “does Israel have a right to defend itself?”. The question itself must now be understood as morally corrupt, because it excludes three obvious elements: (1) the expense at which such alleged self-defence takes place and (2) the factual reality of the threat it presupposes to be defending itself against and (3) the assumption that it is actually defending itself.
This moral corruption is above all exemplified by the shamelessness with which it is expressed. This has several aspects. First of all, Hasbara – which is a euphemism for Propaganda – no longer pretends to have any rational or legal argument. It is stuck on clichés such as the aforementioned “Israel has a right to defend itself” and “October 7th” and “we cannot allow food and water into Gaza because the terrorists will take it”. The wafer thin veneer of reason which envelops these monotonous repetitions has worn off. There is no logos left. Hence, we shift to the pathos of inculpation: if you criticize Israel you must be an anti-Semite. If you say “free Palestine” you must mean that all Jews should be killed (inadvertently admitting that Zionism does not tolerate the realization of a multi-ethnic democracy).
What personally bothers me most about Zionist Hasbara is that it assumes that we are all stupid. It is a gross and offensive infantilization of those it seeks to influence and an insult to collective intelligence. That is a second sense of shamelessness. It does not even make an effort to develop a coherent argument. It simply lies, invents facts, denies and then changes the narrative when being exposed, Its shameless disregard for intelligence, logic, facts, evidence, and above all acting in good faith, defines this modality of shamelessness. It knows that the emperor has no clothes, but it happily parades around naked because it believes we all want to see its potbelly, man-boobs, saggy-wrinkly ass and flaccid penis.
This brings me to the third dimension of shamelessness of Zionism: its inherent collective malignant narcissim. The vast majority of Israelis who identify as Jews wholeheartedly support the collective punishment imposed on the population in Gaza, including women and children, because they have been inculcated with the conviction that terrorism is an ethnic trait of Palestinians. Just as Hasbara has tried to infantilize the world, so has Hasbara infantilized the Israeli population that identifies as Jewish through an inculcation of entitlement. Jews are entitled to disenfranchise Palestinians because they are the chosen people and Palestine (of course now called Israel and planned to become Judea and Samaria) is their promised land.
Collective malignant narcissism enables one to believe that one is chosen, exceptional, unique and therefore entitled to claim whatever you deemed you are worthy of. Its malignance appears in the form of sadistic jouissance when your claim to entitlement causes the suffering of others. This is very obvious when observing the behaviour of settlers on the West Bank. Their narcissistic shamelessness is extremely difficult to witness because it is so obvious, so blatant, so unrestrained. There is no decency in how it conducts itself. It is indeed utter self-abasement while it basks in the imagined glory of its own reflection. Perhaps it even knows how ugly it is, but this merely amplifies its own sadistic desire.
The collectivized narcissism of shamelessness helps to explain something that most people (except perhaps in Germany) will immediately recognize when being exposed to Hasbara: hypocrisy. Netanyahu’s fake tears over the Iranian bombing of a hospital that I mentioned above are a prime example of this. Even the least intelligent of streamers are able to point this out. Zionist hypocrisy is often very easy to identify because of the collective malignant narcissism of shamelessness. In a similar vein, the Israeli war crime (one of many) of pre-emptive strikes against Iran because they may be developing nuclear weapons performed by Israel, a nation-state that has nuclear weapons and did not sign the multilateral treaty prohibiting the proliferation of nuclear arms, is equally astonishing in its blatant hypocrisy. Not even many brainwashed Americans are buying it. Instead they have actually started wondering why the USA is being dragged into a war with Iran. Too little too late but still …
Hypocrisy however is more than merely shameless. The justification of this pre-emptive strike with “better a bad press than nice obituaries” is exactly the same logic as the one with which the Third Reich approached the “Jewish Question”. The Nazis had deployed old anti-Semitic tropes that are deeply rooted in European popular culture and used them to mobilize a collective fear of an imagined enemy-within. By framing it as something that sounded intellectual (“Die Judenfrage”) and pretending that there was anything serious to be discussed under this heading, it had already reified this anti-Semitic abstraction. This is hyperstition: the transformation of superstition into something is real in its consequences.
If you replace “Jewish” with “Arab”, you enter into a doppelgänger of Nazi propaganda. Zionism is in that sense a Doppelgänger, the uncanny reflection of radical anti-Semitism. Just as the Nazis believed that the Aryans are the Übermenschen, so do Zionists believe that they are the Chosen People. This explains why the accusation of hypocrisy is so ineffective as a critique of Zionism. A critique of hypocrisy suggests that the starting conditions are the same for everyone; i.e. a fundamental equality in terms of, for example, the rules of the game. Zionism does not believe that all humans are equal. Instead it is based on the assumption that Jews are not just defined as a religion but – more importantly – as a nation of chosen people. Their god is the one and only True God, who promised their Ancestor Abraham the land then known as Canaan. Jewish exceptionalism disarms any critique that draws on accusations of hypocrisy because they do not need to adhere to the same standards and play by the same rules as the gentiles.
Hypocrisy is being disarmed because Zionist logic is exactly the same as National-Socialist logic. Killing enemies, real and imagined, in the name of self-defence does not require evidence or due process. However, it goes further that that. It also extends to sacrificing your own people for the sake of nationalism.
When Ben_Gurion stated that:
“If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz‑Israel [Palestine], I would choose the second—because we are not only accounting for these children, but also for the history of the Jewish people” (quoted in Shabtai Teveth’s biography, Ben-Gurion: The Burning Ground, pages 855–856),
he made it clear that the sacrifice of 50% of Jewish children was a price worth paying for the realization of the Zionist project. This statement, allegedly made during the Holocaust, highlights that Zionism does not believe that the Diaspora, in which Jews have lived for hundreds if not thousands of years, was not adequate for preserving Jewish history, despite the overwhelming historical evidence that as a religion, Judaism has flourished exactly under these conditions. Finally, the logical extension of this statement is, that Zionists would not have succeeded if it were not for the Holocaust.
The instrumentalization of suffering for the sake of the idealist constitution of nationhood is of course nothing specifically Zionist, it permeates all struggles for autonomy of nations that are threatened or oppressed by others. What is specific, however, is that the suffering itself is not confronted, or stopped, but instead, mobilized to motivate a settler-colonial project that can only succeed if it imposes the same suffering on others, who had nothing to do with it. The idea of “salvation through flight” which is at the core of Zionism, is not an act of self-defence, it is not an act of bravery, but of cowardice. That is why Zionism is inherently kakistocratic.
Israel can afford to glorify its war crimes because it is protected not just by its nuclear bombs, its iron dome, its technologically advanced and extremely well-funded war apparatus, its extended networks of Hasbara, but also because it has enslaved the United States and Europe into justifying and facilitating its war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. Israel has been violating international law with impunity since its inception in 1948. It remains a mystery how this has been accomplished. The influence of AIPAC on the political landscape of the United States of America is well documented as is the complete unwillingness of both main political parties in the USA to stop it. It is clear that a weak and stupid coward like Donald Trump is easily manipulated but let us not fool ourselves: Biden, Obama and the Clintons were equally highly submissive and compliant in doing Israel’s bidding.
This, however, does not explain why political representatives of most, not all, member states of the EU prostrate themselves before the State of Israel and bend over backwards to justify its war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide (we are not even speaking about the other violations of international law anymore here). This is even more remarkable, when we consider the overwhelming popular rejection of the ongoing genocide in Gaza (except perhaps in Germany as criticizing Israel can easily be turned into antisemitism and by extension an attack on German Staatsräson).- How can it be that a deeply unpopular support for Israel, which drains political capital from politicians justifying it, does not seem to affect the political system?
It is questions such as this one that may lead to embracing conspiracy theories that suggest that the real power at work here is not Israel but something else, something invisible, something global, something sinister, something evil. And we are back to medieval anti-Semitism. The loop is now completed and we are going full circle.
As I reject this resort to deep-state conspiracies, I prefer to stay more superficial. There may be simple interests at play here. Let us demand that politicians and decision makers show us their private businesses, their investment portfolios, their relationships to specific lobbies, their off-shore financial transactions. Politicians do not become rich by means of their official functions, but through the less public aspects of their positions. Politicians can be bribed, extorted and blackmailed and it makes perfect logical sense to assume that when a politician seems to act irrationally, hidden interests are at play.
The irrational support for Israel does not need to be orchestrated by Israel. It could simply be colluding interests between finance capital, the military industrial complex and the activities of legislators and political decision makers. After all, a decision to support a country at war means a transfer of public funds to private bank accounts mediated by the shares of investors in arms industries. Arms industries do not operate on free markets; their income streams are solely determined by political decisions. One should not wonder that if politicians have their private wealth managed by, say, Black Rock, they are also more likely to support governmental decisions to supply arms to a nation at war , as they personally benefit from such a decision.
It is either this or we have to start looking for more Jeffrey Epsteins to answer the question why the farcical imitation of Adolf Hitler, who goes by the name of Trump, has decided to use more US-taxpayers money, against the will of the majority of Americans, to attack Iran at the behest of Zionism.
Disaffected Sociology 
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