By Khalid Amayreh Recent Israeli behavior toward a host of issues and events portrays a state in the throes of an existential anxiety. For example, the clearly hysterical response by the Israeli government to the mobilization of a few ships carrying humanitarian aid to blockaded Gazans caricatured a state that reacts in a phobic manner to dangers and threats that don’t really exist. After all, the volunteers on board the ships, who include people from different cultures and religions, made it abundantly clear that their mission was to deliver badly-needed humanitarian materials to the people of Gaza Strip, hermetically besieged by Israel for the fifth consecutive year for no convincing reasons. Another message these courageous men and women, who really represent the real conscience of humanity, is to highlight the utter illegitimacy, illegality and immorality of the criminal siege that is meant to starve and strangulate 1.8 million human beings whose only “crime” is their enduring determination to seek liberty from the grandchildren and great grandchildren of the holocaust. There is no doubt that Israeli leaders and officials know this fact too well. However, this apparently didn’t prevent the inherently dishonest Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu from claiming that the free Gaza flotilla was carrying arms to Hamas, a claim that obviously didn’t contain an iota of truth. The less professional liars among the Israeli government clique claimed that the flotilla amounted to armed armada which was planning to invade Israel, attack the Israeli navy and harm Israeli soldiers. But one would have to send his or her own mind on an extended holiday to believe that a few hundred peace activists, many of them elderly men and women above the age of 70 are planning a blitz against the mighty Israeli army. Nonetheless, Israel is not a classical neurotic and psychotic case. Israel is perfectly aware of the fact that it is lying to the world and for the world. Several months ago, Israel claimed it was imposing the Nazi-like siege on Gaza because Gazans were “showering” Israeli towns with rockets. (we are actually talking about nearly innocuous projectiles that do very little damage) Now, the lie is being replaced with another lie, namely that Gaza was endangering Israel’s security and even existence. But, again, one would have to be extremely gullible to buy such pornographic lies. Indeed, one is always prompted to ask how could a thoroughly tormented, thoroughly starved and thoroughly bombed people, many of them can hardly put food on the table for their kids, pose a real threat to a country with one of the strongest armies in the world, a nuclear power with 200-300 nuclear bombs and warheads in its arsenal, which also has the United States president, media and congress, at her beck and call? In the past few days, the Israeli authorities declared a state of emergency at the Ben Gurion airport in order to arrest peaceful international activists intent on expressing solidarity with the Palestinian people. Israeli officials stopped short of calling these activists terrorists, although many of them hail from states that maintain close relations with Israel. Indeed, the tone used by the bulk of the Israeli media in reference to these peaceful activists was clearly convulsive and hysterical, as if the arrival of a few dozen peace activists in Occupied Palestine constituted a mortal threat to the apartheid state. One doesn’t have to be a great psychological analyst to realize the pattern of behavior is symptomatic of a country that is not sure of its moral credibility. This utter lack of moral credibility was brazenly displayed a few weeks ago when the Israeli army was ordered to shoot to kill Palestinian refugees demonstrating along Occupied Palestine’s northern borders. And the result was the death of several innocent people who never really posed a real danger or threat to Israel. But Israel does have a mortal fear for losing its so-called legitimacy. And it constantly tries to maintain this “legitimacy” by way of killing and lying. As an observer of the conflict in Palestine for so many years, I really don’t see that Israel (I am speaking about Israel, not the Jewish people) has any authentic legitimacy besides the legitimacy of the fait accompli. In the final analysis, Israel is based on ethnic cleansing, land theft and organized terror. As such, Israel can’t have any atom of moral legitimacy, neither now, or after a hundred years. The fact that powerful states recognize this hateful, racist entity doesn’t mean much in moral terms. Needless to say, when a country lacks moral credentials, as Israel obviously does, that country puts itself on a sure course to self-destruction sooner or later. Military and economic strength might prolong the life-span of oppression and “illegitimacy,” but ultimate demise will be the ineluctable fate of illegitimate states. Numerous Israelis know deep in their hearts that they are living on land that belongs to another people, that they are residing in homes whose real owners were expelled by Israel’s terrorist army to the four corners of the globe. Yet they prefer to keep up themselves in perpetual moral hibernation and detest any thought or anyone that might remind them of the immense oppression they have meted out to their victims, the Palestinian people. In a few decades, our world is likely to undergo deep, historical changes that would be very bad for Israel and Zionism. Some of the harbingers of these changes are already looming, while others are yet to emerge. Then Zionism will most certainly face its agonizing moment of death and extinction. As to the Palestinians, the victims of dispossession, ethnic cleansing and systematic persecution, they must have an enduring vigor that goes beyond day-to-day assessment of events. And their ultimate goal must be nothing less than having the entire slate thoroughly clean.

