If Hamas set out to draw the world’s attention to the plight
of the Palestinians, they succeeded beyond their fondest dreams. Contrary to
what Israel would have you believe, October 17, 2023 did not come out of nowhere.
Hamas may have in their charter a resolution to kill all Jews but there is no
record of them saying such that I have found. On the other hand there is a long
history of Israeli Zionists desire to kill all Palestinians including
statements by Netanyahu.
“The Palestinians have never been at war with Jews; they
have been resisting a unilateral settler colonial project whose declared aim is
the take-over of their homeland, the transformation of Palestine into Israel
and the erasure of the Palestinian people, its culture and heritage. Calls to
“end the violence” are not enough. On the contrary, they create a false dichotomy
between military conquest, occupation, displacement, repression and the war
crimes of a settler state on the one hand and the resistance of a colonized
people with no state of their own, no army and no support from the major
political powers on the other. Under the guise of “security” and
“self-defense,” the United States and Europe have supported Israel’s killing
and displacement of Palestinians – routinely described as “terrorists” – while
ignoring and even justifying Israeli state terrorism.” Israeli Committee Against HouseDemolitions
The subject of on-going Israeli genocide
of Palestinians is something I said I would not blog about. I changed my mind.
Robert Reich’s substack column Howto understand the politics of Israel and Palestine?
was interesting reading though he danced around too many things for my liking.
It was the comments section that really got to me. One commenter repeated every
Zionist lie I ever heard.
This map shows how Israel has over time taken over
Palestinian lands. Brought up to today would show even less green area. An
article purporting to prove the map false begins by stating that Palestine never
existed. How stupid do they think we are?
Many of us grew up in a culture that believed the Jews were
God’s chosen people, that they were entitled to reclaim their ancient homeland
after the Holocaust of WWII. We believed no one lived there except a few
wandering Bedouins and that the Israelis made the desert blossom like a rose. We believed that the surrounding Arab states first
attacked Israel on May 15th, 1948, and that the Palestinians were
asked to leave by their leaders so they could more easily destroy Israel.
We believed that Israel was under existential threat in 1967
and that the preemptive 6 day saved the country. We believed that the
Palestinians and other Arabs constantly attacked Israelis because they were
Jews. We believed Israel was a democracy and that Arabs living in Israel had
the same rights as Jews. We believed that the Palestinians were offered a
two-state solution and rejected it every time. Most importantly we believed
that opposing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or opposing Zionism was opposing
Judaism and was antisemitic.
These are lies promoted by Zionists to justify Israel’s occupation
of Palestinian Land and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. These
lies are propagated by the well-oiled and sophisticated Hasbara, Israel’s PR
machine. It is reinforced by pro-Israeli organizations such as ADL and AIPAC. However,
in the past 20 years, Israeli historians have begun validating Palestinian
claims so they can no longer be ignored.
The truth is that Israel is a European settler colony and
like all settler colonies was established by killing the indigenous people or driving
them out or forcing them into small fully controlled enclaves. Promised by God
or Manifest Destiny.
Judaism and Zionism
are very different. One is religious, the other political. Judaism is a
monotheistic religious belief practiced by Jews, an ethnoreligious group and nation by continuation through descent or
conversion of the ancient Jewish people. Zionism is a nationalist
political movement based on Jewish Supremacy and the inferiority of
Palestinians based on the biblical concept of the "Return to Zion",
a way of proving the occupation is legitimate. By conflating
anti-Zionism with Anti-Judaism and calling it antisemitism, the Zionists have
legitimized antisemitism, as decent people everywhere oppose Israeli Zionist
treatment of Palestinians. This is very dangerous to Jews everywhere who may be
lumped in with Zionists.
In 1938, Ben Gurion described the conflict with the Arabs as
"in its essence a political one... politically we are the aggressors and
they [the Arabs] defend themselves." From the beginning, Zionist ideology,
the goal of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine necessitated ethnically
cleansing the land of Palestine, displacing and dispossessing the Arab
population.
Israel is touted as the only
democracy in the Middle East. It is a democracy for Jews only. Palestinian citizens of Israel have
over 30 laws narrowly defining what they can do and where they can go. They can
vote and have their own political party. Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza
live in a police state and are subject to the whims of the IDF.
When Israel declared itself a nation May 14, 1948, most of
the Jews had arrived only in the last few decades. From 1882 onwards, thousands of Eastern
European and Russian Jews began settling in Palestine; pushed by the
anti-Semitic persecution and pogroms they were facing in the Russian Empire,
and the appeal of Zionism promising a Jewish Homeland. In 1882 there were 24,000
Jews in Palestine, increasing to 50,000 by 1900. There were about 88,000 in
1922 when the total population was officially 750,00, roughly 12%. By 1939, the Jewish population had
increased to 445,000 out of a total population of about 1.5 million, roughly
30%.
The Zionist Organization also acquired land to settle the
Jewish immigrants, buying from
absentee landlords and displacing tens of thousands of Palestinian tenants. In
1920, Jewish holdings in Palestine were about 2 1/2 per cent of the total land
area. By 1939, they had increased their holdings to over 5.7 per
cent of the total land area.
The Ottoman Empire fought on the side of Germany in WW I.
The British and French seized and divided up the Middle East according to a
series of Mandates from the newly formed League of Nations. The Palestinian
Mandate, lasting from 1920 to 1947, included a strongly worded version of the Balfour
Declaration. The Balfour Declaration was a letter written in 1917 by
British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild, in which
he expressed the British government's support for a Jewish homeland in
Palestine. It marked the true beginning of an Israeli state.
Palestinians openly warned against the motives of the
Zionist movement in the press as early as 1908. They regarded the Zionist
Organization’s activities to increase Jewish immigration to and land holdings
in Palestine as colonization of their ancestral land by
foreigners. Not yet politically organized, the Palestinians vented
their anger through violence. Anti-Zionist riots erupted in 1920,
1921, 1929, eventually culminating into a full-scale rebellion from 1936 to
1939. The British authorities violently crushed
the revolt, destroyed at least 2,000 Palestinian homes, put 9,000 Palestinians
in concentration camps and subjected them to violent interrogation, including
torture, and deported 200 Palestinian nationalist leaders.
Britain tried to control the situation by halting all Jewish
immigration to Palestine from 1939 onwards and announcing
that instead of partition, Palestine would in 1949 become a unified independent
State with both Jews and Arabs sharing in government administration and
rule. This was rejected by both sides.
In 1944, several Zionist armed groups (Irgun headed by
Menachim Begin, Lehi (aka Stern) and Haganah) declared war on Britain for
trying to put limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine at a time when Jews
were fleeing the Holocaust. The Zionist paramilitary organizations
launched a number of attacks against the British – the most notable of which
was the King David Hotel bombing in 1946 where the British administrative
headquarters were housed; 91 people were killed in the attack.
In 1947, the British turned the disaster they
had created over to the United Nations.
To be continued
