Israel's "education" plan for the children it could not kill in Gaza

Hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at which the legal consequences of Israel's practices in the Palestinian territories it occupies are to be addressed, took place over the past two days. The hearings do not address the genocidal crimes that Israel has committed since 7 October alone, about which no one any longer has any doubt. On the occasion of this case, all the ugliness of the racist Apartheid regime that Israel has applied in the lands it has occupied since 1948 is being laid out. In addition, the racist, aggressive ideological face of Zionism, which has until now been presented to the world as innocent, as a condition of hating Judaism, and which is a source of hatred and hostility toward other people, is being laid out with concrete examples that cannot be ignored.

In an environment in which criticizing Zionism immediately triggers accusations of anti-Semitism, the hate-filled approach of Zionist Israel toward Arabs should itself be regarded as anti-Semitism proper. Because the Arabs, too, are a no less Semitic race than the Children of Israel. With one difference: since the Arabs did not confine the matter of race to blood and genes but based it on culture and language in order to be more inclusive, it may be said that they have not remained a pure Semitic race. But it is very clear that, for Israel too, the matter is not left exclusively within the boundaries of race.

The Zionist ideology that the Children of Israel worked out in order to feel a privilege within the Semitic race and to make the world accept it can become the source of every kind of violence, as an ideology of no benefit to people, that never thinks any good for other people, utterly discriminatory, privileged and supremacist. It is so violent that it can think of gouging out the eye of anyone who looks at it askance. You cannot make Zionism, in these dimensions, the subject of any academic, intellectual or ordinary investigation. When you do, the reality of Zionism's racism and aggression comes out stark naked.

That the matter has come to this point so openly in the ICJ hearings exhausts all the capital of innocence and victimhood that Zionist ideology has accumulated in the name of anti-Semitism. It also calls on Israel to stop the barbarity it has pursued since 7 October, but in spite of all this Israel continues its aggression without slowing down at all. The Gazans, whom it has pushed as far as the Rafah border crossing, it does not leave alone here either; at this point it continues to massacre them, again without distinction among children, civilians, women, the sick, the elderly and journalists.

Meanwhile, the Israeli genocidal government is still very far from both of its goals regarding Gaza. It has neither been able to finish off Hamas nor to rescue its captives held by Hamas. In negotiations conducted under Israeli public pressure over the captives, it keeps repeating the goal of completely eradicating Hamas from Gaza. But to reach this goal no way is visible other than raising the level of its massacres even further and deepening the genocide even more.

In fact, even publications and think tanks in the West that support Israel unconditionally underline that this goal is impossible. For example, the New York Times wrote that one of the weakest points of the strategy Israel has pursued so far is eliminating Hamas. Because Hamas represents a political and religious idea that cannot be broken up, and it is an organization that has grown thanks to its prestige among Palestinians for embracing armed struggle against Israel.

Similar analyses are made in abundance. It can be said that Hamas is not an organization but an idea that the occupying Israeli entity inevitably brings forth. Of course, this is a sociological assessment, but the idea of Islamic belief and action assesses the theological-political side of the matter differently and gives it endless energy. Far from finishing Hamas, every success Israel imagines it has achieved against Hamas feeds Hamas further, and ultimately carries the risk of sooner or later awakening a world community of 2 billion facing it and turning it into Hamas.

But like all pharaohs, Israel thinks in the short term. However much strategic Zionist intelligence is attributed to it. It cannot escape the fact that with its own aggression it is also preparing its own end. Its targeting of children is because of this stupidity. The child massacres that rouse everyone's conscience and unite them, alongside Hamas, in the ranks of support for Gaza are in fact the only remedy for Israel's bird-brain. Because these children will grow up and turn into so many Qassam Brigades that will take revenge on it. Driven mad with this fear, it kills or maims children and the young, but in the meantime it does not take into account that its end may not be postponed until the revenge of the children it could not kill.

In fact, in the meantime it also exposes an ignorance of its own on this subject. The plan for the so-called post-Hamas Gaza that its officials let slip is to govern a Hamas-free Gaza through occupation and, of course, to ensure that the children who grow up here, who survive its genocide, are educated away from the influence of Hamas ideology.

Well, why could it not do this in the West Bank, which it has held under occupation for 60 years? How will it be able to prevent the children in the occupied areas from having a consciousness of resistance?

This very plan, which Israeli officials do not hold back from voicing, is itself evidence of genocidal intent. The practices envisaged in this plan are essentially the routine reflexes of colonialism as well. Otherwise, how can Palestinian children be given an education that will ignore the Israeli occupation and its genocidal barbarity? Who can give it? How can it be anything other than a colonial approach of a barbarity world history has not seen?

We ask these questions, but let us nevertheless underline again that Israel's plan for the children who have managed to survive its massacres is nonetheless "education." This is like a confession of how the ideology that makes racist-genocidal Israel look pleasant in the world can be secured at the global level. It is a revelation of how education in the modern world, despite all its splendor, its charm and its make-up, works as brainwashing. If you wish, you can look from here at today's current education systems and curricula as well.