Racial hatred against Palestinians

Alexander Stephens (1812-1883), a politician from Georgia who became the vice president of the Confederate State of America during the Civil War, defined the Confederacy in these terms: “Our new government is founded upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that superior race is his natural condition.”
Though a lot of water has passed under the bridge since that time, it now appears, in the wake of the monstrous hate crime in the historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina last week — where the perpetrator gunned down 9 worshipers in cold blood, all the while hollering “you’re taking our country” — that American society is far from having closed the book on its racial divisions.
The overwhelming majority of Americans find it chilling that there are still, after all the healing and all those years of civil rights legislation, people like Dylan Roof (the alleged murderer who often wore flags of apartheid South Africa and white minority-ruled Rhodesia on his sweat shirt to advertise his supremacist sentiments) running loose in their midst. The governor of the state, Nikki Haley, grieved: “The heart and soul of South Carolina is broken.” And last Monday, President Obama, demonstratively agitated while being interviewed, was driven to use the N-word. “Racism — we’re not cured of it yet,” he said. “And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite not to say nigger in public.” The nation was shocked by the massacre and revolted by the discovery that someone like the 21-year-old Dylan Roof is one of their own.
Now here’s a question posed for you by a Palestinian, any Palestinian, living in the West Bank: How would you like to live, as we live today, surrounded by 350,000 Dylan Roofs, Jewish supremacists who have ensconced themselves in colonies on our ancestral land, people who, equally motivated by racial hatred, have committed many a slaughter against us that make the one in Charleston seem, by comparison, insignificant?
In that regard, consider the massacre at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994. Baruch Goldstein, a settler from the nearby colony of Kiryat Arba and an American Jew from New York, like a great many pieds noirs from the West Bank, was a charter member of the fanatic, far-right Jewish Defense League, a group deemed terrorist by the FBI and a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Goldstein was not a psychopath, nor was he, as a trained doctor, someone who belonged to a socially marginalized group.
He was, however, like American white supremacists imbued with hatred for blacks, a Jewish supremacist imbued with an unfathomable hatred for Arabs. (As a physician, he reportedly refused to treat Arab patients, even those, like the Druze, who served in the Israeli Army.) In the early morning of Feb. 25 that year, well into the second week of Ramadan, this monster — and what else would you call him? — entered the mosque, armed with an assault rifle, waited a while until the 800 worshippers were kneeling down in prostration (Sujud), making them an easy target and opened fire, killing 29 and wounding 125 others. The survivors, enraged, wasted no time lunging at Goldstein and beating him to death. The slaughter of the worshippers set off mass protests in the West Bank, where another nine Palestinians were killed by occupation troops.
In the weeks following the massacre, thousands of Israelis from the colonies in the West Bank, traveled to Goldtein’s grave to celebrate his actions and venerate his name. Hasidim danced and sang around his grave. Rabbis openly praised his rampage as an act that conforms with the “Halachic principle,” allegedly found in Talmudic and Rabbinic Law.
Trust me on this one: If Americans had 350,000 of these dangerous supremacists buzzing around in their midst, they would do something about it. But in Israel, the industrialization of murder has become common, whether it is practiced as a war in Gaza, or as a “military operation” in the village of Qibya in 1953, when Israeli troops, commanded by Ariel Sharon went from house to house tossing hand grenades through windows, killing 69 civilians, two thirds of them women and children. But the fact of the matter is that Israeli society is already beyond redemption. It is already saturated by an “eliminationist drive” directed at Palestinians. Perhaps what Zionism has done all these years is to unleash a latent and long dormant, need to project onto others the sick logic of Jewish history. Centuries of conditioning by a simple idea — that the Gentile is an enemy, that everyone is out there to kill Jews — has wreaked havoc on the inward preoccupations of Israelis. When that happens to a community, its members become severed from social and moral constraints.
They act out. They act out because it is permitted, because it is encouraged and because they could. They act out, above all, because they know they can get away with it. Their supremacist American counterparts do not have, well, that luxury. They know that the weight of the American justice system, coupled with the revulsion of the community, will come down on them like a ton of bricks.