South Africa – About Things That Matter

Following Zionist Logic, Hamas Has the Moral Right to Commit Genocide against Israel

This past week, the world held its breath as South Africa’s top legal team pressed its case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The lawyers argued that the state of Israel is guilty of genocide by prosecuting its war against the people of Gaza.

On Thursday, the South Africans made their case in exquisite detail. It cited chapter and verse proving, the lawyers said, that Israel not only committed acts of genocide, but that according to its leaders’ own admissions, Israel did so with full genocidal intent.

On Friday the Israeli defense team gave their reply. It basically held that all of Israel’s actions including the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians (at least half of them children and women) are justified by the Hamas attacks of October 7^th, 2023.

Final resolution of the case may take months or even years. Now however, we await the court’s preliminary directives.

Whatever those judgments and injunctions might be, the very fact that the world was forced to listen to the South African case against Israel represented a victory for the Palestinians and an education for the world at large – especially for the United States. That’s because the U.S. mainstream media (MSM) has largely excluded the Palestinian viewpoint from public awareness. In fact, to give sympathetic voice to the Palestinian perspective has been all but criminalized here.

Accordingly, since October 7^th, Americans have been subjected to nonstop Israeli propaganda that presents the conflict in Gaza as though it began on October 7^th — as though it was initiated without provocation by blood thirsty terrorists driven by irrational anti-Semitism.

So understood, that scenario gives to Israel the right to overlook international law and to follow a “morality” of revenge, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. It is a “morality” completely supported by the United States.

The argument here is that such morality can have only highly disastrous effects.

To show what I mean, allow me to (1) summarize the case so eloquently argued by the South African legal team, (2) lay out Israel’s exceptionalist morality, (3) put the entire case in historical perspective, (4) apply Israel’s logic to that case, and (5) conclude with specific recommendations about legal responses to Israel’s policies.

South Africa’s Case

The case of the South African legal team was argued convincingly. It was founded on international law. The argument implied and/or specifically held that:

Illegal occupiers enjoy no right to self-defense.
Neither does any regime practicing apartheid. Apartheid is a war crime.
On the contrary, it is the illegally occupied who have the right of self-defense against their occupiers and any system of apartheid. That right includes taking up arms against the perpetrators in question.
No provocation, no matter how egregious justifies direct attacks on civilians.
In all cases, any response to terroristic attacks must observe the principle of proportionality. That is, Article 51 Section 6 of the UN Charter states that revenge attacks against civilian populations are strictly forbidden.
So are forced relocations of entire populations, deprivation of food and water to civilian populations, attacks on hospitals, medical personnel, schools, refugee camps, places of worship, and members of the press.

By ignoring such legal restrictions, the South African lawyers argued, Israel is guilty of genocide defined in law as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” The lawyers bolstered their case with statements from Zionists all the way from soldiers in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) to the country’s prime minister declaring their genocidal intentions.

Israel’s Syllogism of Genocide

In reply to the accusations just cited, Israeli lawyers laid out their case arguing that Israel’s right to self-defense justified all the actions listed by the South African barristers. The Israeli case and exceptionalist “morality” implies the quasi-syllogism immediately below:

Following unprovoked violent attacks on civilians by an enemy, the right to retaliate in self-defense overrides all moral principles and international law.

a) More specifically, it exempts the offended from all legal strictures against killing civilians including babies, infants, children, women, and the elderly in any way connected with attacks by the enemy in question.

b) In such cases, ethnic cleansing and genocide become morally justifiable.

2. But on October 7^th, 2023, the Palestinian terrorist organization called Hamas violently attacked Israeli civilians near the Gaza border resulting in the deaths of more than 1000 Israelis (including many civilians) with over 2500 wounded.

3. Hence, according to the above-stated moral principle, Israel’s right to retaliate in self-defense overrides all other moral principles and international law. It exempts Israel from any legal strictures against killing civilians including babies, infants, children, women, and the elderly in any way connected with attacks by the enemy in question.

Such moral reasoning apparently makes sense to the political leaders of Israel and to most Israeli citizens. It also has been embraced by the political class of the United States, by its mainstream media (MSM), and by many U.S. citizens. For them, Israel’s right to self-defense reduces any talk of genocide (and of ceasefire) to anti-Semitism.

Arguably, this is because the relevant reasoning processes of those just mentioned begin on October 7^th, 2023. Hamas struck first, they argue. It is therefore responsible for the violence now directed against it. Hamas has only itself to blame.

Historical Perspective

However, following Israeli logic, the situation changes, if the one’s thinking begins not on October 7^th, 2023, but more than 100 years ago. That’s when European Jews supported by Great Britain committed what Pakistan’s UN envoy Munir Akram called the “original sin” in Palestine.

It was in 1917 that Great Britain exercising illegal imperial power issued its infamous Balfour Declaration. Without moral right and absent consultation of the indigenous of Palestine, the decree created a national home for Jewish Europeans from Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and other countries where they had a long history subjected to anti-Semitic pogroms and persecutions.

Of course, the indigenous of Palestine experienced the arrival of European settler colonists with the same sort of resentment and sporadic resistance that Native Americans experienced when white conquerors from Europe arrived on the shores of Abya Yala. The latter came with their religious prejudices too, every bit as strong as those of Zionist fundamentalists. Like the latter (as recalled by Enrique Dussel in his Invention of the Americas) the settler colonialists from Europe considered the indigenous “human animals.” As sub-humans, they automatically forfeited their resources to the civilized new arrivals with their “holy Catholic faith.” It granted them rights to the “new world” ratified by the pope himself, the very representative of God on earth.

Palestinian resentment and resistance were compounded in 1948, when following the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust, European Jews flooded Palestine. The settler colonists destroyed 531 Palestinian towns and villages, stole the homes of their inhabitants, committed more than 70 massacres, and killed more than 15,000 Palestinians in the process.

It’s no wonder that the Palestinians remember the sequence of events as The Nakba (the Catastrophe). It’s also no wonder that Palestinians aided by key elements of the Arab world fought two wars of resistance in 1967 and 1973 as well as implementing two major campaigns of largely peaceful resistance (Intifadas) against the settler colonists from 1987-1993 and from 2000-2005.

To all this, Israel responded with overwhelming violence taking thousands of Palestinian lives. The most recent non-violent campaign, the Palestinian’s “Great March of Return” in 2018 saw 214 protestors (including 46 children) killed by Israeli sniper fire. More than 36,100 (including almost 9000 children) were also wounded. Virtually none of this received due attention in the U.S. MSM.

Noam Chomsky summarizes the atrocities just described using the Israeli phrase “mowing the lawn.” That refers to the Israeli practice (at least since 2005) of periodically invading, bombing, and imprisoning (often without charge) thousands of Palestinian civilians. Chomsky enumerates the steps as follows:

A truce accord between Israel and Hamas is established.
Hamas lives up to it.
Israel violates it.
Israel escalates the violation.
This elicits a Hamas response.
The reaction provides a pretext for what Israel calls “mowing the lawn” – i.e. one of its major periodic attacks on Palestinians.
Then comes the western propaganda: “Poor Israel is attacked by rockets. What can it do? They must defend themselves.”

If Hamas Followed Israel’s Moral Logic

Keeping in mind the history just recounted as well as Israel’s “moral” logic about self-defense and dispensation from observing international law and prohibitions against revenge, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing and even genocide, Hamas was perfectly within its rights to perpetrate its acts of violence on October 7^th. In fact, those acts compared to Israel’s can be characterized as restrained and moderate.

In any case, following Israel’s logic, here’s how Hamas’ quasi-syllogism might run:

Following violent attacks on civilians by an enemy, the right to retaliate in self-defense overrides all moral principles and international law.

b) In such cases, ethnic cleansing and genocide become morally justifiable.

2. But for the past 100 years and more, Israel has violently attacked Palestinians resulting in the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians with many other thousands wounded and maimed.

a) Hence, according to Israeli “moral principles,” Hamas’ right to retaliate in self-defense overrides all moral principles and international law.

b) More specifically, it exempts Hamas from any legal strictures against killing civilians including babies, infants, children, women, and the elderly in any way connected with attacks by the enemy in question.

3. And so, Hamas can claim the moral right to ethnically cleanse Israel of its entire population and to commit acts of genocide against it.

Conclusion

Of course, the point here is not to argue for the genocide of anyone. It is only to underline the absurdity and danger of Israel’s (and the United States’) blatant disregard of international law and common-sense morality.

It is also to make the point that Israel’s logic cuts both ways. If its attacks on Gazans are justified by Palestinian atrocities, Palestinian attacks on Israel are even more justifiable. That is, it might be argued that the Palestinians as victims of Israel’s “original sin” and repeated atrocities over the last 100 years have much more right to revenge than their colonial occupiers.

In any case, if Israel and its U.S. enablers are found guilty of genocide by the ICJ, the country’s leadership, and its weapons suppliers (including the U.S. President and Secretary of State) should be placed under arrest.

So should those identified as responsible for the planning and execution of Israel’s particularly egregious war crimes. All should be tried following the example of the post-World War II trials of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Those convicted should be executed or given lengthy prison sentences as were the German war criminals found guilty during the Tribunal held from 1945-1948.

Cosmic-Centrism: South Africa’s a Good Place to Start (15th in a series on critical thinking)

Easwaran

In this series, I’ve been tracing my own growth in terms of Ken Wilber’s stages of egocentrism, ethnocentrism, world-centrism, and cosmic-centrism. I’ve been arguing that each stage has its own “alternative facts.” What I believed to be factual as a child, I no longer accept — in any field, faith included. The highest stages of critical thinking are achieved, I believe, by those who accept the alternative facts of mystics and sages across the globe. Their facts receive virtually no recognition from the world at large. Yet, they are truest of all.

The studies and travel I’ve recalled so far in this series had taken me from Chicago and various places in the United States to Europe where I spent five years traveling widely. Then I moved to Appalachia, and from there journeyed to Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Cuba, and Zimbabwe. Each step of the way, my awareness expanded. By my 50s, I had pretty much gone beyond ethnocentrism.

Then by 1997 (at the age of 57), I gingerly entered the next phase of Wilber’s growth hierarchy, cosmic-centrism. The door opened that Christmas, when my wife, Peggy, gave me the gift of three books by an Indian teacher of meditation, Eknath Easwaran.

The most important of the three was simply entitled Meditation. The book explained how to meditate and outlined Easwaran’s “Eight Point Program” for spiritual transformation. The points included (1) meditation, (2) spiritual reading, (3) repetition of a mantram, (4) slowing down, (5) one-pointed attention, (6) training of the senses, (7) putting the needs of others first, and (8) association with others on the same path.

As a former priest, I was familiar with such spirituality. After being introduced to meditation during my “spiritual year” in 1960, I meditated every day for the next dozen years or so. Then I stopped. I thought I would never go back.

But after reading Meditation, I decided to perform the experiment Easwaran recommends there. He challenged his readers to try the eight-point program for a month. He said, if no important changes occur in your life as a result, drop the practice. But if significant personal transformation happens, that’s another story.

Suffice it to say that I tried for a month, and now nearly 20 years later, I’m able to report that I’ve never missed a day of meditation. Soon I was meditating twice a day. In short, I had been re-introduced into spiritual practice, but this time under the guidance of a Hindu. However, Easwaran insisted that his recommended practices had nothing to do with switching one’s religion or even with adopting any religion at all.

In other words, meditation had introduced me into the realm of mysticism common to Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslim Sufis, and subscribers to other faiths.

Easwaran described mysticism, wherever it appears, as founded on the following convictions: (1) there is a divine spark resident in the heart of every human being, (2) that spark can be realized, i.e. made real in one’s life, (3) in fact it is the purpose of life to do so, (4) those who recognize the divine spark within them inevitably see it in every other human being and in all of creation, and (5) they act accordingly.

Those are the principles of cosmic-centrism.

South Africa

In 2012, during my wife’s sabbatical in Cape Town, South Africa, my eyes started opening to the divine in nature – especially in the ancient rock formations in the southern Cape. As Dean Perini points out in his Pathways of the Sun, many of them have been “enhanced” by the Koi-Koi and San people indigenous to this area. The enhancements (for instance, sharpening features in rocks which resemble human faces) serve the same purpose as the completely human fabrications in places like Tikal, Stonehenge, and (perhaps) Easter Island. They position the movement of the sun, moon, stars, and planets to keep track of equinoxes and solstices. All of those heavenly bodies and seasons influence our own bodies (70% water) as surely as they do the ocean tides and the seasons. So it was important to the Koi-Koi and San to mark the precise moments of the annual celestial events for purposes of celebrations, rituals, and feasts.

Near Cape Town, we lived in Llandudno near the location’s great “Mother Rock.” Like so many other mountains, rocks, sacred wells and springs in that area, it exuded extraordinary cleansing energy. My wife and I often made our evening meditation before that Rock, and on occasion in a nearby sacred cave.

They say that the human story began in South Africa 300,000 to 500,000 years ago. So in the presence of ocean, sacred caves, and holy rocks, we attempted to reconnect with the roots of it all and with the animals and ancient peoples who in their harmony with nature’s processes seem much wiser than we post-moderns are proving to be.

We were entering cosmic space, where the principle of the unity of all creation shapes critical thinking.

(Next week: Learning from spiritual masters in India)

Cape Town Notes

I’m here in Cape Town, South Africa, and have been for the last three and a half months, accompanying my wife, Peggy, who’s completing her sabbatical in this one of the most beautiful cities in the world. We’re living in Llandudno, just outside of Cape Town in a flat we’re renting from friends we met sixteen years ago during a sabbatical year in Zimbabwe. We’re a five-minute walk from the beach which is just spectacular.

For the past month, we’ve been traveling this “cradle of human civilization” along the gorgeous “Garden Route” and beautiful “Wine Route” that attract so many visitors each year. With our daughter Maggie, her husband (Kerry), their two delightful children [Eva (3) and Oscar (1)], and the family’s au pair (Carla) we’ve explored Cape Town, its museums, gardens, and encircling mountains. We’ve also been on safari encountering in the process lions, elephants, wart hogs, hartebeests, impalas, ostriches, black rhinos, giraffes, water buffalo, and zebra.

Carla (au pair), Eva (grandaughter), Kerry (son-in-law), Oscar (grandson), Maggie (daughter), Peggy (my bride), and I. Off searching for lions. — Setting out to search for lions.

Our son, Brendan, also visited us for a week with his girlfriend, Erin.

Brendan and I played a couple of South Africa’s picturesque golf courses surrounded as they are by endless vineyards and looming mountains.

Brendan teeing off. Mike watching and wishing he could hit the ball like that.

Some of the rock formations here in the southern Cape are remarkable. As Dean Perini points out in his Pathways of the Sun, many of them have been “enhanced” by the Koi-Koi and San people indigenous to this area. The enhancements (for instance, sharpening features in rocks which resemble human faces) serve the same purpose as the completely human fabrications in places like Tikal, Stone Henge, and (perhaps) Easter Island. They position the movement of the sun, moon, stars, and planets to keep track of equinoxes and solstices. All of those heavenly bodies and seasons influence our bodies (70% water) as surely as they do the ocean tides and the seasons. So it was important to the Koi-Koi and San to mark the precise moments of the annual celestial events for purposes of celebrations, rituals, and feasts.

We’re privileged here in Llandudno to bask in the presence of the great “Mother Rock,” which like so many other mountains, rocks, sacred wells and springs in this area exudes extraordinary cleansing energy. Peggy and I often make our evening meditation before this Rock, and on occasion in a nearby sacred cave.

Yes, the human story began here 300,000 to 500,000 years ago. In the presence of ocean, sacred caves, and holy rocks, we’re attempting to reconnect with the roots of it all and with the animals and ancient peoples who in their harmony with nature’s processes seem much wiser than we post-moderns are proving to be. What a privilege it is to be in Africa.