A couple of weeks ago a silent procession walked through Eureka, California, streets, dressed in mourning black. They carried a rope, from which dangled and twirled a thousand paper children, representing the many thousands of children put to death in Gaza and Lebanon. The procession stopped at the door of Congressman Huffman, who marches in lockstep with US complicity in the obliteration of Gaza.
The spectacle there has become so unbelievably Satanic that it is trite, a caricature. Gaza is the medieval paintings of Hieronymous Bosch come to life: throngs of terrified humans being driven pitilessly from place to place, severed limbs, targeted assassinations, naked people chained in unnatural positions, sodomy, infernal fires. Israeli soldiers prancing, like mocking goblins, in women’s underwear snatched from the ruins, daring the entire world to stop them. We are watching the unspeakable crime,“ nefandum vitium”.
As Israeli military icon Moshe Dayan remarked, ”Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
The narrative so closely resembles the Biblical apocalypse that one wonders whether our US government officials, participating with Israel in the occupation, do not have the Book of Revelations open on their desks instead of Clausewitz or modern strategy manuals. Indeed, 39% of Americans and large number of US Congress-people, believe we are in the End Times. They too are eager for a temple to be built on top of Al Aqsa. For them, the inferno presently taking place in the Middle east must be part of the expected sequence of events described in Revelations. Israel is possessed, moving with a terrible and unearthly speed.
As Israeli military icon Moshe Dayan remarked, “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother”.
I spent 1947-8 in Nuremberg, because my father, Gen. Telford Taylor, was chief prosecutor for the American trials. It was therefore natural for me to become interested in international law. My mother collected evidence for the trials. She studied the documentation of Hitler’s Final Solution, and the details of the Ostplan, an outline for exterminating the Slavs, another group of “untermenschen”. The experience filled her with bitter loathing for the German people. She could not forgive them for their failure to control their own government.
The failure of the American people to end the mass murder in Gaza and Lebanon is exponentially more loathsome than the failure of the Germans. This inability, of a people who have a livestream, ringside seat on the slaughter, to act, is a catastrophe. It is as if we have lost our gravitational field, and that all morality, wisdom and culture, which humanity has achieved in 4000 years, are bits of plastic, paper and bone, blown and blasted through the streets of Gaza and Lebanon.
The creation of Israel in Palestine in 1948 supplied an ironic conclusion to WWII. In fact it was more of a curse than an absolution. The foundational concept, that God promised the land of Palestine to the Jews, is as ugly as Manifest Destiny, unipolarity, or Deutschland Uber Alles. Indeed, the Israelis were grimly realistic about a Jewish nation state here. Israeli leaders repeatedly stated that it would have to live forever by the sword:
“I don’t mind if after the job is done you put me in front of a Nuremberg trial and then jail me for life. Hang me, if you like, as a war criminal. What you don’t understand is the dirty work of Zionism is not yet finished, far from it.”
-Ariel Sharon, Israeli General, prime minister and statesman
“The Jewish people have a map… which our youth and adults should try to fulfill: from the Nile to the Euphrates…one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.”
-David Ben Gurion, called the Father of Modern Israel
The Jewish settlers, whose history and culture were European, and hostile to Arab and Bedouin ways of life, began instantly to commit crimes against humanity in the driving of 700,000 people from their homes with torture and mass murder. Supported faithfully by the United States and Great Britain, their crimes have continued for 75 years.
Israel may have a right to exist but has lost any right to be the occupier of what was once called the Holy Land. This time, Israel, not Palestine, must go. If it wants an apartheid nation state, it must be located somewhere else. Palestine has been an evil lodestone for Judaism. Israel’s example has inflamed chaos around the world. International law is scarred, weakened, defaced, and desecrated, as Israel continues to defy and abuse the United Nations. Tolerance for cruelty worldwide has increased, and risks imprinting the character of future generations. Soon, demonstrations such as the Eureka procession above described, may be suppressed.
Israel must be made an offer it cannot refuse, which means it must go willingly. The area of Israel is 8,000 acres which is tiny in comparison with for example Wyoming (97,000 acres). Europe of course would be the ideal location, since the roots of Israeli culture are European. It is common knowledge that Europe is experienced in population resettlements. The United States is of course Israel’s best friend, with a history of being a Promised Land itself. Everyone must be satisfyingly remunerated. But it is worth it and will cost less than the madness of the current holocaust.
It will help to redeem our souls.
The United States of course has murdered 25 million people since WWII, and is guilty of all the war crimes for which the Nazis were convicted. But that is another story. Perhaps Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe, though long, will one day bend toward justice even for us.
Ellen Taylor is a writer. Among many other pieces, she has written the brilliant, War Crimes, From Nuremberg to Ukraine. Her father was General Telford Taylor, a chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.
