Regarding, “but Hamas.”

Republished from Friends of Phil: The Writings of Phil Rockstroh

Image: 1963, The Civil Rights Era “Children's Campaign” assaulted with police water cannons on the Jim Crow-ruled streets of Birmingham, Alabama. Photograph by Frank H. Rockstroh

(When Palestinian Civil Rights campaigners (e.g., during The Gazan Great Walk Of Return) have emulated the tactic, IDF snipers have shot them down outright.) 

Regarding, “but Hamas.”

 

My late father, orphaned as an infant, adopted by a Jewish mother from The Lower Eastside, New York and a gentile father, a New Orleans denizen via Staten Island, snapped the iconic photograph below on the streets of Birmingham, Alabama. 

He sold the photograph, for the purpose of keeping a roof over our family’s head, to his photo-journalism syndicate and the image was subsequently published on the front page of the New York Times and the pages of Life Magazine. 

When people demand why, as a Jewish person, I am repelled by Zionism, I offered in reply variations of: 1) My mother is a survivor of the Holocaust 2) Growing up, as I did in Jm Crow-ruled Birmingham, Alabama, upon my first visit to Israel, I detected a pronounced and ruling, bigotry-rancid mindset of the Zionist citizenry that was an analog to the mindset of Third Reich Germans and Jim Crow era US Southerners, complete with all the noxious casuistry and soul-defying psychological projections to which individuals in possession of majority status privilege in ethno-supremacist societies are prone. My family was scorned as “n-word lovers” by Jim Crow-clinging Alabamians as I am slandered as a “Kapo” by Zionist true believers. 

When, as a child, walking the streets of Birmingham with my mother, according to Jim Crow law, Black men were obliged, under threat of arrest, to cross the street when in the path of an approaching White woman. As is the case with present day Zionists, the mindset evinces a pathological fear within the head of the oppressor in regard to the oppressed. As is the case with its fear-based and brutal analog in the Zionist state, the mindset is a progenitor of all manner of societal pathology, from casual cruelty to genocidal impulses. 

Thus when Zionists accuse me and other anti-Zionist Jews of tribe-betraying treachery thus enabling Israel’s savage, blood-crazed mortal enemies, the following truism comes to mind in regard to Zionist apologists and other authoritarian, bigoted brutes, “every accusation is a confession.” 

To wit, every accusation regarding the crimes against humanity committed by Hamas, the Israeli thugocracy has exceeded ten thousand fold. Moreover, opinion polls of the Israeli citizenry reveal they are in full support of the worst of the uniformed thugs of the IDF’s war crimes, including the wholesale and planned starvation of Gaza’s children. 

When Jews such as myself regard with mortification and condemn in the strongest terms the conflation of Judaism and Zionism — the abominations perpetrated by the latter group are the type of unforgivable actions that we dread will be associated, in a broad, indiscriminate manner, with us the primary group. 

All war crimes should not only be regarded as reprehensible but there is a minefield of false equivalence stretching between Palestinian resistance and Zionist war criminality, between Palestinians’ struggle for survival and Israel's attempt to erase not only their presence from the land of their ancestors but their history as a viable people from collective memory. Hence, an inadvertent confession of genocidal intent. 

Then there is this: before you gibber “but Hamas too…” allow this to sink in: place yourself in the position of the people of Gaza (a location human rights organizations termed an “open air prison” well before the Oct 7 prison break out. Considering the evils that have been perpetrated on Gazans by the Zionist regime those kinds of condemnations should be regarded as facile and feckless declarations and utterances of casuistry.

Then there is this to consider: The history of the West reveals: Acts of suppression inflicted on powerless people abroad will engender a “chickens coming home to roost” effect (i.e., The Principle Of Perpetual Poultry Returns (POPPR). State perpetrated repression and violence in foreign policy traveled homeward. 

In the US, to greater and greater degrees, speech is censored, ICE thuggery reigns, religious zealotry acts in the service of mercenary agendas, and there seethes on the highest seat of power a within-the-threshold-of Alzheimer’s president, surrounded by lickspittle tools and manic fools, who is an ambulatory caricature of a preening dictator. The dismal and deranged criteria dovetails and cross-pollinates with Western acceptance and enabling of Israel’s brutal and endless oppression of the Palestinian people. 

As noted above, every accusation aimed at the resistors of tyranny is in fact an admission of intent. 

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