Gaza Selfie: Representing the Chosen People

“Encouraging and integrating aliyah is a strategic event for the State of Israel. Aliyah in the coming years will serve as an enormous growth engine for the Israeli economy and an engine of values — a renewal and refreshment of Zionism.”
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel Finance Minister, February 2024

There is a difference between the photographs published in the Western media during Israel’s 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip — which at the time was the most deadly in decades, killing over 2,300 Palestinians — and the far larger number of images, both photographs and digital footage, that have been coming out of Gaza since 7 October 2023. That’s partly because of the ubiquity of smartphones and social media today; but the images also serve a different geopolitical function.

What I’ve described previously as the ‘Bibilical’ representation of Palestinians in 2014 undoubtedly prepared the frame through which the peoples of the West initially viewed Israel’s attack on Gaza after the insurgency of 7 October; but the images and footage of the current crimes, which constitute a second Nakba, are very different. As I’ve also written previously, I don’t think we’ve ever seen what a military genocide looks like at such close quarters. In contrast, during Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2021, the social media accounts of Palestinian activists documenting the deaths and destruction were shut down, and I’d guess that the same media blackout could be imposed now. The US military exerted complete control over the media’s reporting during its invasion of Iraq in 2003, and I’d imagine so could the Israel Defence Forces if they wanted to, particularly given the openly Zionist stance of the owners of social media (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, etc.).

It might appear odd, therefore, that Israel is not allowing food, water and medical supplies into Gaza — thereby creating a man-made famine on top of the crime of killing 41,500 Palestinians, injuring over 77,000 and displacing 2 million from a quarter of a million destroyed homes — but is allowing the murderous and destructive effects of their actions to be published on social media. This is worthy of consideration and some attempt at an explanation of why, which I will try to offer here.

It’s clear that Israel is expanding its limits ‘from the river to the sea’, as the ruling party, Likud, defined it in its 1977 election manifesto, within which Palestinians will live as something close to slave workers within an apartheid state. And the West has shown, conclusively by now, that it is happy with that arrangement — happier, even, than it was with the similar situation in South Africa between 1948 and 1994, which it occasionally felt obliged to sanction. That means greatly increasing the Jewish population too. As of 2023, nearly 30 per cent of Jews living in Israel were immigrants born in a different country, and that figure will need to rise considerably to combat the higher birth rates of Palestinians, which even the Israel Defence Forces can’t kill in sufficiently large numbers.

It’s particularly striking that so many photographs and so much footage has come out showing just how dehumanised the Jews of Israel have become under generations of Zionist indoctrination, and which has prepared them to perpetrate the crimes they are with an apparently clear conscience — indeed more than that: to commit those crimes as a demonstration of virtue. I’m thinking of the documentation of female Israeli soldiers posing in front of bound and blindfolded male Palestinian prisoners in the manner of the US marines at Abu Ghraib; of laughing male Israeli soldiers standing over bound female Palestinians forced to their knees, possibly prior to being raped; of laughing Israeli male soldiers posing with the under-clothing of the Palestinian women they’ve killed in the ruins of the homes they’ve destroyed; of Israeli soldiers recording themselves beating wounded Palestinian prisoners; of Israeli soldiers dedicating the mining and explosion of buildings in which Palestinians may still be living to their own children; of Israeli soldiers standing on the heads of bound Palestinian prisoners; of Israeli soliders smiling and posing before desecrated mosques covered with obscene graffiti; of female soldiers posing for a group ‘selfie’ in front of scenes of genocide; of the televised footage of Jewish children singing about wiping out Gaza and killing Palestinians; of Israeli Jews dancing ecstatically in celebration of the genocide in Gaza at music concerts; of Jewish settlers with US accents stealing the homes of Palestinian families in the occupied territories; of Israeli Jews forming a blockade of aid into Gaza; and even of US and UK Jews talking about collectively moving into developments on the ‘sea-front’ real-estate of Gaza even as the bodies of those who once lived there wait to be bulldozed by Israeli contractors.

Just as we’ve never seen what a military genocide looks like in such detail, we’ve also never seen how the perpetrators of genocide behave at such close quarters, or heard what they think. The photographs and footage coming out of the liquidation of the Gaza concentration camp are evidence of what is more than the cruelty of this self-elected ‘Chosen People’. They demonstrate, in addition, a psychopathic national psychology indifferent to the rest of humanity and what we think of the crimes being committed by the Israel Defence Forces. The fact these images have been made or recorded not by photojournalists looking to expose the brutality of warfare but by the soldiers themselves, who have no qualms in uploading them onto their personal social media accounts, corroborates their psychopathology.

This may be because Israeli Jews have become so dehumanised by the ideology of Zionism and the brutality of 75 years of occupation that they really aren’t aware of how this looks to the rest of us, or, at least, to those of us horrified by their evident joy in the suffering, humiliation and murder of Palestinians. But it’s also a product of the indoctrination of Jews since birth into the horrors of the Shoah, and the repeated admonition by Zionists that no-one but the State of Israel will stand up for Jews. In their eyes, this grants Israeli Jews the sacred right, which they have exercised with increasing fidelity for 76 years, to treat the Palestinians as they themselves were treated by the Germans — which is to say, as subhuman Untermenschen, stripped naked, blindfolded, beaten, herded like cattle into refugee camps in the desert or shipped abroad, their men carted off to prison, where they are tortured with impunity and killed at the slightest sign of resistance.

I also think that, as the West slides deeper into fascism at every level of society, from our governments, military, judiciary and police forces to financial institutions, the media and cultural and education industries, we’re seeing, in far greater focus, the boot that George Orwell predicted, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, would be stamping on the human face forever in the future that is now our present. He just never guessed it would bear the flag of Israel on its moulded rubber sole.

But I also think that the war crimes of Israel, which have been overwhelmingly condemned by the peoples of the world in weekly protests while being supported militarily, financially and politically by Western governments, has turned more people than ever before not only against the State of Israel but also against the Jewish diaspora. I fully expect the Prime Minister of Israel and leader of Likud, Benjamin Netanyahu, to use the war crimes of his government and military — most probably with a false-flag attack on a synagogue in New York — to draw more of that diaspora to Israel on the grounds that Jews are ‘no longer safe in the West’, as we’re constantly being told by the almost unanimously Zionist Western media interviewing Jewish celebrities in London and New York.

This doesn’t mean, as some commentators have speculated, that the continued existence of the State of Israel is threatened by the consequences of its current war crimes. As Mao Tzedong said to a delegation of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in 1965, Israel is the base for Western imperialism in the Middle East, and until the US Empire falls it will remain there. The recording of the crimes of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, and their dissemination in such graphic detail across Western media otherwise dedicated to censoring information — with no comparable photographs and footage coming out of the Ukraine, for example — serves the goals of Zionism. This, as we are seeing incontrovertibly demonstrated for all the world to see, is to turn Palestine into an Israeli concentration camp in which the Jews are the guards.

As in an increasing number of wars waged in the age of the internet, including that in the Ukraine, the atrocities committed by the grinning ghouls of the Israel Defence Forces are an immigration advertisement for Jews worldwide. ‘Come to Eretz Yisrael: The safest place to be Jewish!’ Zionists call this aliyah, or ‘ascent’, which is an indication of what they think of Gentiles.

Perhaps most worryingly for the rest of us, as happened with the Spanish Civil War, which history reduced to the opening act of World War Two, the genocide in the Gaza Strip is a crime of such enormity that only a Third World War can erase it from the memories of the politically amnesiac populations of the West, and in doing so protect those responsible for committing, collaborating with and calling for it — both Jews and Gentiles — from facing justice under international law.

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Simon Elmer is the founder of Architests for Social Housing, and author of The Great Reset: Biopolitics for Stakeholder Capitalism. His recent books include The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State (2022), as well as two volumes of articles on the UK biosecurity state, Virtue and Terror and The New Normal, both published in 2023.

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