Indeed, if the American government "defended" its own actual international border in this way, liberal Zionists would be on the highest of moral saddles excoriating the Trump administration for its crime against humanity. And--forgetting, as is obligatory, the thousands of heavily-armed Jewish Zionists who regularly force their way across actual international borders with impunity--if some Arab country's snipers killed hundreds and wounded tens of thousands of similarly unarmed Jewish Zionist men, women, children, and paraplegics who were demonstrating at an actual international border for the right to return to their biblical homeland, we all know the howling and gnashing of morally outraged teeth that would ensue from every corner of the Western political and media universe. No "Guarding the border was more important than avoiding killing" would be published in the NYT, or tolerated in polite company, for that scenario.
Nathan J. Robinson got to the bottom line in his wonderful shredding of Rosner's argument, it comes down to: "Any amount of Palestinian death, however large, was justified to prevent any amount of risk to Israelis, however small." Western governments and media have fashioned, and are doing their utmost to sustain, an ethico-political universe where Israel can "lay siege to a million people, 'bomb them occasionally,' and then kill them when they show up at the wall to throw rocks."
Is there a way anymore of not seeing the racism of Zionism? Can we just say, once and for all, that the interests of Palestinians--not as pitiable creatures but as active, fully, enfranchised human beings--are not anywhere on the list of Soffer's or Dichter's or Rosner's (or the Western media's or governments') priorities, and refuse any of their pitifully disingenuous expressions of concern for the Palestinians' benefit? Nobody gets to put "For your own benefit," in front of "Surrender or I'll put a bullet in your head." The only concern any of these commentators have for the people of Gaza is that they submissively accept their forced displacement and imprisonment in "the largest concentration camp ever to exist."
Does the vulgarity of it shock you?
The "human shields, human sacrifice" trope, which all these apologias hang on, is particularly mendacious and hypocritical as used by Zionists. It's also a classic example of projection.
This is a "human shield":
It is Israel that has repeatedly used the specific, prohibited tactic of using children as "human shields" to protect its military forces. According to the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, Israel is guilty of the "continuous use of Palestinian children as human shields and informants." Besides this namby-pamby UN Committee that no red-blooded American/Zionist would pay any attention to, the High Court of Justice in Israel identified and denounced the "human shield" procedures the IDF acknowledged and defended using 1,200 times. These include "the 'neighbor procedure,' whereby neighbors of wanted Palestinians are forced to go into the wanted man's house ahead of troops, in case it is booby-trapped," and Israeli "soldiers forcibly position[ing] members of [a] family, including the children, at the windows of [a] home and proceed[ing] to fire from behind them."
So, when Zionists use a "human shields" argument as a moral cudgel against unarmed civilian protestors, and a moral justification for a powerful army, which brazenly uses children to shield its own soldiers, killing scores of those protestors by the day--well, it's not a stretch to see this charge is a projection of Zionists' own pattern of thought and behavior.
Besides being an ongoing tactic of today's Israeli army, "human shields" and the "human sacrifice" they imply were an integral element of the Zionist narrative--expressly articulated and embraced, with no apology, as a necessity for the establishment of a Jewish State.
Take a look at what Edward Said in 2001 called: "the main narrative model that [still] dominates American thinking" about Israel, and David Ben-Gurion called "as a piece of propaganda, the best thing ever written about Israel." It's the "'Zionist epic'"identified by many commentators as having been enormously influential in stimulating Zionism and support for Israel in the United States." In this piece of iconic American culture, an American cultural icon--more sympathetically liberal than whom there is not--explains why he, as a Zionist, is not bluffing in his threat to blow up his ship and its 600 Jewish refugees if they are not allowed to enter the territory they want:
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