Jonathan Cook

The same malign intent by Israel towards the Palestinians is stamped through its history like the lettering in a children’s stick of seaside rock. But despite the consistent aim of Israeli policy, generation after generation of Western politicians, diplomats and journalists has shown a repeated inability to grasp what is happening before its very eyes. The Palestinian historian Rashid Khalidi once noted that the first goal of Israel’s founders as they prepared to establish their Jewish state on a large swath of the Palestinian homeland in 1948 was to empty Palestine’s urban heartlands of their educated elites.

The Alice Through the Looking Glass quality of Israeli disinformation over the combined siege and invasion of Gaza — and its widespread and credulous repetition by the Western media — is successfully distracting attention from Israel’s real goals in this one-sided war of attrition. The current destruction of Gaza’s civilian and administrative infrastructure is reminiscent of the Israeli army’s cruel rampages through the streets of West Bank cities in the repeated invasions of 2002 and 2003, and the Jewish settlers’ malicious attacks on Palestinian farmers trying to collect their olive harvests. Three long-standing motives are discernible in Israel’s current menacing of Gaza. Jonathan Cook reports.

Until the advent of Zionism at the turn of the twentieth century, Jews for whom their Jewishness mattered believed either that their identity was of a strictly religious nature or, if they were secular, that it was a meaningful marker of their ethnicity. In other words, Jews who wanted to identify themselves as Jews were either Jews in that they practised a religion called Judaism or they were Jews in that they believed they belonged to a distinct ethnic group. But Zionism added a third possible category of Jewish identity. The new kind of Jewish identity was a strange hybrid from the outset.

The killing by Palestinian militants of two Israeli soldiers and the capture of a third from an army post close to the Gaza Strip set the scene for Israeli “reprisals” and “retaliation”, according to the reports of BBC correspondents in Israel and Gaza at the weekend. We can ignore the weeks of shelling by the Israeli army of Gaza, the firing of hundreds of missiles into the crowded Strip that have destroyed Palestinian lives and property, while spreading terror among the civilian population.

If you keep lying long enough and with enough conviction, people start to believe you — or at least doubt the evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli army’s account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed, and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach in Gaza. The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing. The army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western “thought” about Arabs and Muslims.

Imagine the following scenario. A Palestinian gunman boards a bus inside Israel and rides it to the city of Netanya. Close to the end of the line, he walks over to the driver, levels his automatic rifle against the man’s head and pumps him with bullets. He turns and empties the rest of the magazine — one of 14 in his backpack — into the passenger behind the driver and two young women sitting across the gangway. As bystanders in the street outside look on in horror, our gunman then reloads his weapon and sprays the bus with yet more fire, injuring 20 people.

Israelis have a word for it: “hasbara”. It is often misleadingly translated as “advocacy for Israel”. But what the word signifies more deeply for Israel’s supporters is the duty, when the truth would be damaging, to dissemble or to disseminate misinformation to protect the interests of Israel as a Jewish state — that is, a state with an unassailable Jewish majority. If hasbara is expected of the lowliest members of Israel’s international fan club, it is a duty of the first order for the country’s prime minister.

The Shin Bet is possibly best known for its interrogation methods when extracting confessions from detainees. As Kimmerling notes, the most likely result will be a “professional studies” programme relating to the Shin Bet’s work. Such arrangements are nothing new in Israeli academia, Kimmerling points out. There are strong ties between the universities and the defence industry because “some university staff join academia after [military] service and careers in the defense establishment, and not all of them manage to ‘go civilian’.”

In approving an effective ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians this week, Israel’s Supreme Court has shut tighter the gates of the Jewish fortress the state of Israel is rapidly becoming. The judges’ decision, in the words of the country’s normally restrained Haaretz daily, was “shameful”. By a wafer-thin majority, the highest court in the land ruled that an amendment passed in 2003 to the Nationality Law barring Palestinians from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel — what in legal parlance is termed “family unification” — did not violate rights enshrined in the country’s Basic Laws.

With his coalition partners on board, Israel’s prime minister Ehud Olmert is plotting his next move: a partial withdrawal from the West Bank over the next few years which he and his government will declare as the end of the occupation and therefore also any legitimate grounds for Palestinian grievance. From here on in, Israel will portray itself as the benevolent provider of a Palestinian state — on whatever is left after most of Israel’s West Bank colonies have been saved and the Palestinian land on which they stand annexed to Israel.