Entered into the database on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 @ 18:04:33 MST
And the discussion of Zionism
for what it is — exactly as we are witnessing right now — a secular,
racist political movement, characterized by expansionism and militarism , is
going to have to happen online, because neither the mainstream press nor mainstream
politicians will touch it with a ten-foot pole… even when it is piling
up more bodies as it leads the world into a regional disaster. 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. 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. __________________________ Read from Looking Glass News Racism,
Not Ignorance Plagues the Media Corporate
Media Faithfully Spins Lebanese Mass Murder Escalation",
"retaliation" and BBC double standards in Gaza A
Glossary of Dispossession: Hiding Behind Words Israel:
Rogue Nation Committing Genocide While
the Palestinians Face Genocide...7,400 millionaires living in Israel Israel
using chemical delivery weapons in Lebanon Israel
is now using poison gas and depleted uranium shells on towns in the south of
Lebanon Tel-Aviv
and Beirut compared - July 20, 2006 IDF:
Mossad "has significantly infiltrated Hizbullah" The
racist subtext of the evacuation story At
least now we know who authorised this Shocking
images of "Gifts from Israeli Children" What
If Israel Had Never Been Created? 
The P-Word is Palestine