Let’s just get something out of the way right up front, before I go any further. Zionism is not Judaism; being Jewish does not make anyone Zionist; and anti-Zionism is not equivalent to anti-Semitism.

It is now well past time for the United States to withdraw all rogue state, Israel; though that is unlikely to happen without a movement to make it happen, because the US is now effectively the biggest and most dangerous rogue state on the planet.

Democrats won’t touch this issue for the same reason they avoid that other P-Word, Prison. They are as complict in the incarceration of 2 million people here — mostly of color — as they are in the continuing support of the terror state of Israel.

So let’s just talk briefly about what Zionism actually is, and get away from the mythology promoted by and AIPAC.

In 1923, Vladimir Jabotinsky (a founder of Zionism) wrote “The Iron Wall,” an essay that laid out a direct comparison of expropriation of the Arabs with the genocide of the indigenous people of North America:

“There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of the native population. Such an event has never occurred.

“The natives will always struggle obstinately against the colonists - and it is all the same whether they are cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco] Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is inadmissible to any native people.

“Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.

“They have the precise psychology that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie. Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.

“It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.

“Even an agreement with non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.

“We cannot give any compensation for Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.”

THAT is Zionism! Among other things, white supremacist… the reason the Bushites are so ardently incapable of being the least bit critical. White supremacy is the organzing principle underpinning the Republican Party.

Now an actual wall is being built that captures yet more Palestinian land. Despite the objection of the United States, the wall has just been condemned by a ruling of the International Court of Justice at The Hague on July 9th, 2004. But for the foreseeable future, enforcement of this ruling will remain… elusive. Like a unicorn.

The more recent analogy can be found in Apartheid South Africa, of which Israel made a key ally, where Black South Africans were pushed onto squalid reservations called Bantustans and subjected to “pass laws,” much as Palestinians are now. It should not surprise anyone that Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization that cajoled the British Mandate into awarding them Palestine was a good friend of the vicious South African Apartheid architect, General Jan Smuts.

But we seldom hear of this theft, or of the massive theft of Palestinian water. The US press has been so thoroughly intimidated by Zionist publicist/attack dogs, who bait every critic of Israel as an anti-Semite, that they have developed journalistic norms with regard to Palestine-Israel that completely support the Zionist position.

Robin C. Miller’s book “The Media’s Middle East Rules of Engagement” is a good primer on how this works, listing ten “rules” that are scrupulously followed and giving examples of each.

Rule 1: See the Middle East through Israeli eyes.

Rule 2: Treat American and Israeli governmental statements as hard news.

Rule 3: Ignore the historical context.

Rule 4: Avoid the fundamental legal and moral issues posed by the Israeli occupation.

Rule 5: Suppress or minimize news unfavorable to the Israelis.

Rule 6: Muddy the waters when necessary.

Rule 7: Credit all Israeli claims, even if wholly unfounded.

Rule 8: Doubt all Palestinian assertions, no matter how self-evident.

Rule 9: Condemn only Palestinian violence.

Rule 10: Disparage the international consensus supporting Palestinian rights.

There is an eleventh rule that hovers over all the other rules. Equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. This shuts everyone up. That’s why it is so critically important that this Eleventh Rule be challenged loudly and clearly and frequently. Anti-Zionism is NOT anti-Semitism. Zionism is not Judaism. Not all Jews are Zionists, and not all Zionists are Jews. The point is that Zionism raises many questions about what constitutes Jewishness. Israeli Jews are largely secular, so it cannot be called a strictly religious category. Race is not even a scientifically operational term. The Jewish communities around the world are distinctly developed from one another. If Zionism is to define Jewishness for itself, it can only do so - loosely - as the Diaspora, the political utility of which, for example with the African Diaspora, is one where that ’scattered’ status still results in a common historically conditioned oppression. For Israeli Jews, the contrary is true. They have become not an oppressed nationality, but an oppressing European settler state.

After the 1st Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in 1897, Herzl penned his manifesto, Der Judenstaadt (The Jewish State), in which he used overtly racial-colonial language to describe the process of seizing Palestine from its inhabitants, saying that this new state would be…

“…a rampart of Europe against Asia, of civilization against barbarism [a white supremacist remark]… We shall endeavor to encourage the poverty-stricken population [Herzl knew next to nothing about Palestinians] to cross the border by securing work for it in the countries it passes through, while denying it work in our own country. The process of expropriation and displacement must be carried out prudently and discreetly. Let the landowners sell us their land at exorbitant prices. We shall sell nothing back to them.”

The British supported this position unequivocally after World War I with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Balfour himself would say in 1919, “In Palestine, we do not even propose to consult the inhabitants of the country and (Zionism’s) immediate needs and hopes for the future are much more important than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who presently inhabit Palestine.”

One of the most despicable ideological practices of Zionism has been its pimping of the Holocaust to justify Israel’s fascist-like treatment of Palestinians. In fact, prominent Zionists consorted with Mussolini, and saw the Holocaust as a great boost for Zionism.

Jabotinsky was an admirer of Mussolini and stated his racism openly and proudly:

“It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than [sic] his own. In order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.”

This founding father of Zionism could have been quoting Adolph Hitler. Now his political offspring want to capitalize on Hitler’s monumental crime to legitimate their own crimes.

The irony was that with the blood-and-soil, anti-Semitic fascism that swept up Europe and began the horrifyingly systematic, industrially-rationalized slaughter of European Jewry, and with the closure of western borders (including those of the US) to those desperately escaping genocide, Zionist settlements in Palestine filled up. Zionists themselves actively lobbied western nations to refuse those trying to escape from Hitler’s crematoria.

In 1938, Ben Gurion had already stated, “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.”

As late as 1943, while the Jews of Europe were being exterminated in the millions, the U.S. Congress proposed to set up a commission to “study” the problem. Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the principal American spokesperson for Zionism, came to Washington to testify against the rescue bill because it would divert attention from the colonization of Palestine. (Sheonman, Ralph, “The Hidden History of Zionism“)

Zionists actively collaborated with Nazis. This is a verifiable historical fact. Not only did the Zionist Federation of Germany send a resolution of support to the Nazi Party in 1933, “the World Zionist Organization Congress in 1933 defeated a resolution calling for action against Hitler by a vote of 240 to 43.” (ibid.)

The history of Zionist collaboration with fascism is barely touched upon here, because my intent is not to paraphrase the history but simply to make my point about the obscenity of Zionists now laying claim to the Nazi Holocaust as justification for the Palestinian Holocaust they are perpetrating to this very day, all the while claiming that the Palestinians and other Arabs are bent on reproducing Nazi Germany’s crimes against them.

This post was excerpted from a longer piece I did two years ago, and it is still available, if anyone is interested.

Meanwhile, the slaughter in Iraq continues; and people say, “Why do they hate us?” as American-made missles rain down from American-made helicopters on the men, women, and children of Gaza and Lebanon.

The United States cannot attack Iran, nor can Israel mount a proxy attack on Tehran, without risking a generalized and well-armed Shia rebellion in the South of Iraq against American forces. In the North of Iraq - Iraqi Kurdistan - Turkish forces cross the border to raid Kurdish positions while Iran lobs artillery fire into Kurdish mountain bases. Even as Turkey retains its commitment never to allow an independent Kurdistan on its Southern border, the Turkish government has grown increasingly Islamist and so more receptive to overtures from Iran.

The principle constraint remaining on the Turkish government is its powerful desire to become part of the European Union - a desire that is steadily losing traction with the Turkish masses whose backs are being broken with the very neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies supported by the EU.

The US attempt to use the Kurds as a counterbalance against the Shias - even resorting to election fraud to diminish the UIA vote count - has backfired spectacularly. Not only has it set the stage for a Shia-Kurd armed conflict within the newly constituted Iraqi armed forces, it has created the conditions for a tactical rapprochement between the Kurds and Sunni Arab guerrillas… an American nightmare.

Instead of knocking off Iraq then moving promptly to the next target - Iran - the Bush administration has now played the foil for Iran, and put within Iran’s reach what it has sought for decades: the position of key political actor in the region and the world.

The only place in the region where the Bush administration enjoys a shred of support from any significant segment of actual national populations is among the right wing in Israel - a strategic alliance that has cost the US dearly over the years and promises to cost it more.

(More on these developments)

So Israel takes it on itself to tear Lebanon to pieces over one prisoner of war (who WAS across the border when he was ambushed) and make a mockery of the US-Israeli profession of fealty to democratic ideals (Hamas, was elected in Palestine!). By hitting Hezbollah (which looks like they are simply destroying another nation), perhaps they can send the message — a message of structural weakness — that they will disregard Arab and Muslim life with the same impunity as the US — a macho demonstration sure to elicit not surrender, but more heated resistance. For this demosntration of Israeli military masculinity they will risk regional war, tell Condi Rice to shit in her hat for even questioning them, while her brain-dead boss galavants across Europe proclaiming this aggression is “self-defense.”

This is just the last in a long line of Zionist crimes (which we NEVER hear about here) with names like the King David Hotel, Baldat al-Shaikh, Yehiday, Khisas, Kazaza, the Semiramis Hotel, Dair Yassin, Naser al-Din, Abu Shusa, Tantura, Beit Daras, the Dahmash Mosque, Dawayma, Houla, Sharafat, Qibya, Kafr Qasem, Khan Yunis, Gaza City, Al Sammou, Sabra and Shatila, Oyon Qara, the Al Aqsa Mosque, the Ibrahimi Mosque, Jabalia, the Eretz Checkpoint, Mansuriah, Nabatyaih, Qana, Trqumiah… this list is very long.

When we sign the checks for these atrocities without taking the trouble to see whose lives have been cashed to redeem them, we become complicit. We’ve all heard the Israeli side of this for years. Research it for yourself, and avoid US-Israeli sources for a change. Enough is enough of bloody aggression from both.

The United States can no longer afford Israel; and those who continue to do what they cannot afford soon find themselves bankrupted. Morally, the US is already there.

Divest! Free Palestine!

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