Renowned physician and author Dr. Gabor Mate joins The Grayzone to offer his reflections on Israel’s gruesome military operation in the besieged Gaza Strip.
It’s one of those situations where somebody who deals with trauma in my work and who and speaks so much, and words really are my metier, the words fail me at this point. It’s difficult to explain how I perceive the situation but in a certain deep sense, I feel that it’s the worst thing I’ve seen in my whole life. It’s impossible to compare atrocities – I mean nothing compares with the mechanized murder of five, six million Jews by the Nazis. What can compare to the slaughter of three million Vietnamese civilians by the Americans; the many murders and mass killings that are not even reported in the Western press such as the Indian-Asian Genocide in East Timor, such as the killing of 100,000 Guatemalan indigenous people in the 1990s by the American and Israeli-trained brutal military in that country? One could go on.
But what is different about this is that I have never seen anything so publicly committed, such atrocities perpetrated on television and the victims are presented as the perpetrators. And, either this spectacle, this obscene, vicious spectacle, that we’re subjected to is either supported or condoned by the major media and all of the politicians.
Now, it’s obligatory and I think it’s even necessary to say, this is my point of view, is that what happened on October 7th wasn’t justifiable, that the killing of civilians, whatever details may yet emerge about intentions or what actually happened, that’s not something that should have happened. That was something horrible and it was an atrocity. But even the need to say that comes out of a culture in which the atrocities of the other side are never called out. No Israeli spokesman, when they talk about their policies, never asked, “Do you condemn the pogrom at Hawara in the West Bank earlier this year? Do you condemn the killing of Palestinian children by settlers? Do you condemn the regular attacks by the settlers? Do you understand that the former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Army said that the situation of the Palestinians in the West Bank reminds him of the situation of Jews in Germany?”
Is this even reported in the Western press? And what he meant is that the settlers, like the Nazi hooligans, are free to attack the Palestinians as the Nazi thugs, the Brown Shirts, were free to attack Jews and the army and police not only stood by, they aided them. Is the Western public made aware of the thousands of Jewish Israeli Rabbis and historians and intellectuals who recently signed a document calling the present situation clearly apartheid? Are you aware that the former head of Mossad has said that the situation of the Palestinians under occupation is apartheid? So when anybody is asked to speak about perpetrations on the Palestinian side, are they immediately asked to condemn and to denounce and to reject?
And yet, the daily suffering, crucifixion of the Palestinian people, and including and especially the people in Gaza, nobody’s ever called to task. Nobody’s ever questioned. And so these smooth-faced liars in the Israeli Army, who could give lessons to Joseph Goebbels, who are masters of propaganda like Goebbels, they’re allowed to get away with it.
I’m speaking emotionally now. It’s not helpful sometimes to speak emotionally because people get repelled by the anger or the outrage that one generates. I understand the grief on both sides. I understand the sorrow. I’ve had communication from Israeli friends who are actually sympathetic to the Palestinian side who are just in fear, who are full of thoughts of revenge. I get that. I understand it. But surely in this situation, whoever you are, whichever side you are on, you have to get past your feelings. You can understand your feelings. You can accept them. But if you want truth, and you want peace, and you want justice, you can’t just go by feelings that are conditioned by decades of propaganda, decades of weaponizing the suffering of Jews as a baton with which to beat the Palestinians. You’ve got to get past that. And you’ve got to actually ask yourself: “Do I really know what’s going on? Have I stood one second, even in my mind, in the shoes of the other? Have I tried to understand what is happening to those people if they committed acts that are hateful? What drove them to that hate? Did the Palestinians come to Europe to attack Jews? Or did something happen in their land that made them so desperate?”
And finally, I would only say that what happened is not a secret. It’s been documented. It’s been written up by Israeli historians. I could name five of them right off the bat: Tom Segev, Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappe, and many others. Israeli journalists. None of this is even vaguely controversial from the historical point of view. And the fact that we live in such a bubble, and this bubble is created by the same Western press that brought us the Iraq War and the weapons of mass destruction and the Kuwaiti incubator children, leading to the death of 500,000 Iraqi civilians. The same Western press that brought us the Vietnam War. When Martin Luther King spoke out against the Vietnam War, do you remember what the New York Times said? The New York Times said, “This time he crossed over the line.”
That same press, you might ask yourself, why are they so either passive or enthusiastic cheerleaders for this genocide? Are you really going to trust them? Are you going to try to find out for yourself? So yes, I’m speaking with a lot of emotion now. I did give it to you in an extensive one, a longer one not so emotionally ladened as these words have been now. But in light of the latest news from Gaza with the apparently cell phones, internet being cut off and the bombing is being escalated, you know what, I’m upset. I’m really upset. I have a lot of feelings of pain. I know what happened to my own people. Nothing that happened to us in any way justifies what’s going on right now. I’ll stop there.