"Israel appears to many outside observers to be a society held together by a collectively chosen scapegoat. This often crosses over into sadism. The sadist, however, does not wish for the object of their sadism to disappear, because if it does, their desires are no longer fulfilled. They wish it to instead remain in a state of degradation, as testimony to the effectiveness of their desires in the world. Israelis may begin by dehumanizing the Palestinians to be able to oppress and eradicate them, but find themselves enjoying the process of dehumanization itself.
Aristotle has a completely instrumental attitude towards slaves, describing them as ‘living tools’, required to undertake mindless drudgery without the master having to soil his hands. Nietzsche saw this as a shallow way to approach the subject: the master needs the slave not merely to get tedious work done but to reaffirm his own sense of self. The existence of the slave is a continual reaffirmation of the master’s superiority. To put it another way, if the Palestinians did not exist, or if they stopped existing, what would be the point of being an Israeli?
The impunity of a slave-owner who maltreated his slaves in a slaveholding society was rooted in the social institutions of his world and the basic norms which his society professed to respect. Israeli impunity in the twenty-first century, by contrast, is an anomaly: radically contrary to all the values which we claim to hold and in conflict with the large-scale institutional structures we have created purportedly to enforce them. This impunity can be maintained only through political, economic and social coercion directed by Israel and its allies against both international institutions and Western populations. That means, however, that it is not an immutable feature of our world, but a construct that could shatter under pressure."
https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/politics-of-impunity
#Israel #Palestine #Genocide #Impunity #HumanRights
