By Alon Mizrahi on Twitter.
After seeing another Gazan father holding his dead little daughter in his hands, and crying his soul out yesterday, a thought occurred to me: what are the long-term effects of exposure to high daily doses of extreme brutality, disfiguration, dismemberment, and extensive infanticide?
The individual level needs to be addressed separately. What I’m referring to is the cultural, psychopolitical level, one often referred to as collective consciousness, which social media, commonly shared across political, cultural, and lingual barriers may be understood to be creating, for the first time in human history.
What does it do to our humanity to undergo such a long period of being collectively subjected to A Clockwork Orange-like treatment, involving direct injection of the most obscene forms of violence into our shared nervous system, memory, and capacity for moral judgment?
Do we value life as dearly today as we did nine months ago? Do we see bodily integrity the same way? Moreover, do we think humanity and humans have an innate sense of morality at all? Or have we been stripped of this belief, which is vital to any sense of protectedness in human society?
Far from being purely philosophical, this thought experiment may assume critical societal importance in the way this prolonged exposure to gruesome violence is perceived by people given the role of committing legal violence by society, namely police officers and soldiers.
Seeing Israeli police getting gradually more violent in the way it demonstrations, and watching clips from those events, I could not but feel a sense of ‘if we’re allowed to dismember, run over, and destroy Palestinians, why can’t we do this to you?’
Most barbaric forms of violence
If carrying out the most barbaric forms of violence against one group of human beings is forcefully legitimized, as evident both by the length of time it is allowed to take place and the zealous backing it receives from Western countries, why must it be limited to just that group? Isn’t this the right way to deal with people who challenge your supremacy and authority?
And while no one is going to explicitly say to German or Canadian police officers ‘Do unto demonstrators as Israel does unto Palestinians’, the deeper layer of reality itself says just that. By sanctioning this behavior and protecting it vehemently and through policy and censorship of dissent, a soldier or police officer the world over is made to feel unjustly disadvantaged by being allowed to do less than an Israeli soldier to people who don’t obey the rules.
It is not that we haven’t seen severe police and military brutality before. but we’ve never before seen the serial disfiguration of innocent people, children, and babies presented as just, moral, and righteous. But we are seeing it now.
It is exceedingly vital for mental health experts and political scientists (who must be anti-Zionists to be able to perform this job) to start talking about the damage Israel’s streamlined and Western-protected genocide is doing to humanity’s psychology and to its political culture. This discussion should have started long ago, and it must start as soon as possible. So if you’re reading this and you’re fit to talk about this, please do.
No passive voice here
It would be disingenuous of me to conclude this text without calling by name the reason for both the conversation about our damaged collective consciousness not happening, which is the same formal reason given for the support Israel gets in weapons and policy, i.e. internal censorship and the enforcement of pro-genocide discourse in Western societies.
Antisemitism is used as a bludgeon to silence dissent and stifle the conversation. And it is not just any conversation, but one about the most pressing moral issue on the international agenda at the moment, and, even more fundamentally, if not urgently, it is a conversation about the very basic elements of the human experience: life and death, childhood and innocence, fairness and justice, privilege, and violence.
If Israel’s identity wasn’t clear enough, the use of antisemitism to force an almost nonexistent and lopsided conversation about what it’s doing is done by Jewish and Zionist lobbies in the West while displaying a staggering level of influence (not to say control) over policy and discourse. I am not revealing any secret – AIPAC and ADL brag about this openly.
Why and how was this allowed to happen will remain a top question on the people of this world’s agenda for a long, long time. This whole thing may prove a reputational blow to the Jewish people from which it may not be able to recover. And I wouldn’t count on Western powers being able to stifle the conversation forever. Zionism, culminating in this genocide and the way it has been served in the West may be the most fatal error in all of Jewish history.
Alon Mizrahi, is an Israeli and a former professional footballer, who played for clubs including Nice, Maccabi Tel Aviv and Hapoel Tel Aviv. His post, republished here, is from his ‘X’ feed and the original can be found here.
