In the latest statistics of the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the toll of the occupation army’s aggression against the Gaza Strip since October 7 has risen to approximately forty-four thousand martyrs, while the number of wounded and injured exceeded one hundred thousand Gazans.
It is true that the Palestinian people have experienced the Zionist killing machine throughout the history of their struggle with the occupier, but those massacres did not occur in a single sentence. Rather, they varied in their size, history, and geography.
The Haifa massacre took place in 1937, Bab al-Amoud in 1947, Tantura in 1948, Kafr Qasem in 1956, the Tal al-Zaatar camp in 1976, Sabra and Shatila in 1982, the Al-Aqsa massacre in 1990, the Ibrahimi Mosque in 1994… and the list goes on.
Although these massacres occurred sporadically over time, the Zionist massacres since the flood of Al-Aqsa came in bulk and not in detail. In a single day, Zionist forces can commit more than one massacre throughout besieged Gaza. Killings and bombings are often accompanied by sadistic celebrations.
This article examines the backgrounds of that aggressive spirit that prevailed over its owners, and we have hardly found anything similar to it in history. We cannot realize the gluttony in killing except by leaving the superficial level of analysis to the deeper levels. These are the levels that are related to the “underlying cognitive models,” as Dr. Abdul Wahab Al-Mesiri calls them. In order to trace this cognitive map, we must consider how religious texts are invested in conflict management.
Religious claim in Palestine
The Zionist entity is a settlement bloc that employs “Jewish preambles.” Zionist propaganda to justify the usurpation of Palestine often focuses on the “divine promise.” Palestine, which “flows with milk and honey,” as the Bible says, is the land that the God “Jehovah” promised the Prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, to give to him and his descendants after him. He said to him, “To your offspring I give this land from the River Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River.”
Then the relationship with the land will adapt through transfer or “liquidation of diaspora” by facilitating Jewish migrations towards Palestine. The Zionist project was based on the necessity of building a national homeland for the Jews, extending along the historical borders as defined by the BibleA“From the Euphrates to the Nile.”
These are the borders that David Ben-Gurion announced before the Knesset in 1956. All Jews in the world must immigrate to them in order to establish the pure Jewish state.
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, after the 1967 setback, expressed this relationship between the Torah and the land. He said, “If we own the Torah, and consider ourselves the people of the Torah, then it is our duty to own all the lands stipulated in the Torah.” Exclusive sovereignty over the land of Palestine is justified by the provisions of Jewish law and the theory of “salvation.”
Rabin was punished with death for accepting “peace” with the Palestinians, in which he committed to giving up part of the land that had long been considered at the core of their historic state. Murder is “the Lord’s command,” as the killers promoted it. As for the indigenous population, based on this ideology, they become a project for killing, expulsion, and displacement.
Ideological killing
Theodor Herzl described Zionism as a “colonial idea” formed in the context of imperial expansion. It inherited from it colonial violence, national isolation, and the desire to accumulate profit. Hence, the Zionist state “cannot exist in a state of peace,” which made the management of war one of the essential elements in the cohesion of Zionist society.
Thus, the state was militarized, just as society was militarized. This zero-sum option was not a futile process, as much as it was a faithful representation of the “cognitive map of the Zionist mind” in its view of the conflict. Behind Zionist practices lies a layer of accumulated justifications, a mixture of religious narratives and myths. When myth is summoned from distant histories, it becomes a tool for mobilization and mobilization, as “the ghost of a fighter” always resides in it, as Hassanein Heikal says.
The world has become divided into the Zionist doctrine into good people and good people. This doctrine granted the good people the right to liquidate the Gentiles, whether they were individuals, symbols, or cities. “Canaan becomes cursed,” cities become subject to bulldozing and destruction, and residents become the subject of killing and displacement. The “nationalist” god issued a fatwa to his followers to “destroy the city and annihilate with the sword all those in it: men, women, children, and the elderly, even cows, sheep, and donkeys.”
The biblical text immortalized the massacre of Jericho three thousand years ago, when they gathered after their wanderings, and “they destroyed everything in the city, man, woman, and infant, even oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword, and they burned the city and everything in it with fire, except the gold and silver and vessels of brass, for they put them in a treasury.” “Lord.”
This massacre, as mentioned in the Torah, has been repeated steadily throughout the history of the conflict with the entity. This explains the Zionist massacres in Palestine since the 1930s.
The assassination of Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam was not the first sin, nor was the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, Hassan Nasrallah, or Yahya Sinwar the last crime on the list of Zionist crimes. There is a history of permissible blood from Fouad Hijazi and his companions to the symbols of the national and Islamic struggle with all their orientations. In the course of religious interpretation, every resistance becomes legitimate for killing, and all hostile cities become subjects of enslavement and colonization.
Based on this religious conviction, Gaza – the difficult city – in evoking those experiences and those representations becomes an permissible city.
The vocabulary of murder in current sadism
Zionist history was built on the relentless activity of Zionist gangs that spared no effort in shedding blood. With the Nakba, the gangs turned into an army that specialized in killing, displacement, and destruction. From the theory of the iron wall to the generals’ plan, through to the Dahiya plan, the military plans were masters of extermination.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky has been the main feeder of the right-wing movement throughout Zionist history. Netanyahu is nothing but an extension of that school. His speech was filled with the language of iron and fire, which is fueled by the conviction that the Palestinian is not a “human being with recognized value.” Therefore, it was not surprising that the Zionist discourse after October 7 went deeper into the dehumanization of the Palestinians.
The ousted Minister of Defense was the first to initiate. He described the Palestinians as “human animals.” The Palestinians, in Netanyahu’s speeches, are “bloodthirsty monsters,” “sons of darkness,” “savages and barbarians,” and “monsters who kill children.”
He finds justifications for his speech in his faith, so he sees in his battles those battles that were or those battles that could be (Armageddon). He cites the biblical story of the complete destruction of the “Amalekites” at the hands of the Israelites. With him, history repeats itself, and he finds himself drowning in Gazan blood, fighting the “gentiles” from the perspective of faith. In the same doctrine, the Zionists are only those good people who identify with goodness, light, and civilization.
The bank of goals of Itamar Ben Gvir, who was raised on the extremism of Meir Kahane, went beyond the men of the resistance to “those who celebrate, those who support, and those who distribute candy. They are all terrorists who must be destroyed.”
Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu relishes the scenes of destruction in Gaza. To him, it is a “pleasure for the eyes.” He has no qualms in calling for a nuclear attack on Gaza. A sadism that finds its explanation only in Talmudic biblical texts that consider killing a “legal duty.”
All massacres are similar to the Jericho massacre. And all the Gentiles are like the Amalekites. In all of them, episodes of genocide are repeated, the destruction of crops and offspring, the burning of everything that is accomplished, and the destruction of everything that moves. In all of this, they are loyal to their travels.
There is no doubt that the intensification of this religious lexicon in Zionist discourse reflects the depth of the shift that Israeli society has witnessed towards religious Zionism with the extreme religious right.
Thus, death is distributed throughout the sector in the name of the deadly doctrine. When military targets are absent from the Zionist soldier, every mover becomes a target. You don’t have to be resistant to be vulnerable. In the Zionist theater of operations, identities have no value. The war machine spares no one. Everyone in the Goals Bank is the same.
Indeed, this gluttony in killing went beyond human beings to killing the elements of life in Gaza: water, food, and air, and even “killing the place.” It struck water tanks, prevented the entry of food supplies, and paralyzed the activity of hospitals, targeting medical and paramedical staff, and preventing medicine, and if it were possible, it would prevent air. About the people of Gaza.
We will not find at the conclusion of this discussion about the ideological backgrounds of the Zionist Holocaust in Gaza anything better than what Hannah Arendt said about Zionist fascism as it became involved in Palestine: It has become “exchanging business with Hitler.”
The opinions expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune Network.