For Israel, the Palestinians are tools that can be disposed of at will and abandoned (2023)

Yin Zhiguang is Professor at the Department of International Politics of the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. Originally published in Guancha.

Yin Zhiguang 2023-10-27, Original publication: guancha.cn Translation: Roderic Day

No one can remain calm in the face of imperialist bombs and lies.

Tuesday evening, October 17. After nine days of fierce air strikes by the militaristic Israeli government dominated by the Likud Party, the blockaded city of Gaza has almost been razed to the ground. Palestinians, trapped in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli government, cut off from water and electricity, take refuge in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in northern Gaza. The injured, the sick, their family members, the medical staff, and a large number of displaced people are doing their best to try to stay alive, supported by the hospital’s only power generator. A missile strikes.

Many of them die that night.

Many of them had only just been born.

Shortly afterward, desperate people try to dig their bodies out of the rubble. They’re hit by another precision missile strike, and die there as well.

Four days earlier, on October 13, the Israeli military had ordered all 1.1 million Palestinians north of Wadi Gaza, ^[1] including Gaza City, to evacuate south within 24 hours. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven away from their homes, driven into the desert, driven into further confinement. They were hated, abandoned, and abused by the imperialist colonizers — like despised artifacts, like used-up tools, like drained livestock.
Meanwhile, imperialist elites, “humanitarians” in imperialism’s payroll, obedient imperial citizens, and imperial troops all set out to spread lies. They rule in the style of colonizers: on the one hand they magnanimously announce “We don’t target civilians” while on the other they genocide Palestinians in the name of protecting Israelis. These are no longer the surviving descendants of Nazi concentration camps, they are the armed guards of the open-air concentration camp in Gaza. They are ruthless — they do not hesitate to cut off water and electricity, or to open fire against the Palestinians, whom they describe as “human animals.” ^[2] They are systematically turning Gaza into a terra nullius, attempting to build a pure “Jewish State” on “barren” land. <sup>[3]

Netanyahu’s right-wing Israel today is not fundamentally different from Cecil Rhodes’s 19th century Britain, practicing imperialist policies with impunity. They stake the survival of their country — or, rather, their clique — on the total oppression of another group of people. Following Israel’s neoliberal reforms in 1985, in the 1990s, the Israeli government resumed the peace process with the Palestinians. One of the key outcomes of this “peace” was the full opening of the Palestinian market to Israeli firms, and the complete absorption of the Palestinian economy into Israel as an appendage.</sup>

^{Rest of the text can be accessed here: https://redsails.org/yin-zhiguang-on-palestine/}