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Photo: “To hate Arabs isn’t racism, it’s having values. #IsraelDemandsRevenge.” Posted to an Israeli Facebook page in the last 24 hours.

Since the beginning of colonialism, it has been a cruel, cynical practice to push the native into a desperate position in which he creates brutal acts of despair. Israel didn’t invent this pattern; it only upgraded it. This practice historically enabled the Christian sovereign to portray the native as a barbarian beast that needed to be either domesticated or slaughtered.

At the same time, the sovereign painted a self-portrait of himself as a martyr on the cross. The sovereign always performed an ethical-cultural “superiority” in a white-Western framework. He always admitted to some ethical glitches as exceptions about which he made sensitive art (or films) to perform repentance and soul-cleansing. Yesterday, in Israel, the sham revealed itself.

Like two mirrors facing each other in infinite regress, tens of thousands of young Jewish colonialists stood in front of the camera and created a self-portrait of potential murderers. This portrait reveals that Israeli terror is not only performed by the army, but also by tens of thousands of citizens. It took only a day for the potential murderers to become actual murderers. The mask of innocence fell from their faces. And now it appears as if all of us are murderers, Jews and Palestinians alike.

Therefore, without undermining the personal responsibility of the individual murderers, it’s crucial for us to understand that the true murderer of all the youngsters, Palestinians and Jews, is the occupation, the apartheid, and the ideological meta-structure of Israeli sovereignty. “Who murdered first?” and “Who murdered how many?” are side questions, and sometimes even misleading questions, within the oppressive machinery of the Israeli government throughout its history.

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