I Love Israel and I Apologize

Palestinian refugees leaving a village near Haifa, June 1948. Photo by Corbis

... at a meeting convened by Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi), the most successful politician in Israel at present explained: 

“This election is between those who apologize and those who are proud ... those who are objective and those who are in favor of the State of Israel.”

Well, [Habayit Hayehudi chairman] Naftali Bennett, I apologize and I love Israel (of course not your Israel and not the present Israel); I’m objective and I’m in favor of (a just) State of Israel; I apologize and I’m proud.

You’re going to stop apologizing? Israel never even started doing so. 

If only it had apologized a long time ago. If only it would acknowledge its sins, if only it would accept moral responsibility for them.

It’s no shame to apologize – it’s far more embarrassing not to do so. Apologizing is a strength, not a weakness, and on the way to reconciliation (with the Palestinians) we have to stop at the first station – an apology. 

It’s true that in the elite unit of Bennett and Yinon Magal they don’t apologize for anything, not even for acts of murder, assassinations and abductions (the murder of Abu Jihad, for example, or the abduction of Sheikh Obeid). In the settlements they don’t apologize for anything either – not for the exploitation, not for the disinheritance and not for the theft.

As a rule, in Israel people don’t apologize for anything, not in the occupation nor on the road. Guilt feelings are an embarrassment, and apologizing is for those with no backbone. 

That’s why Bennett’s election slogan: “Stop Apologizing. Be Proud” will become so catchy and popular: the “apologizers” vs. “the proud,” the “objective ones” vs. “lovers of the country.” I’m proud to belong to the former group.

I would like to apologize, if that would be of any significance, to the entire Palestinian people, throughout the generations. For 1948, for 1967 and for everything that happened in their wake. An apology for 1948 would not have made the state that was established less just – it would have become more just. For the mass expulsion and for preventing the return, for the ethnic cleansing in several districts and for several acts of slaughter, which may be part of every war – we can and should apologize.

We can and should apologize for the fact that what happened in 1948 has never ended. That the spirit of 1948 has not passed, and continues to this very day in the State of Israel’s basic attitude toward the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, in its sense of ownership and superiority, in its aggressiveness and violence, in its ultranationalism and racism.

Nor has anything changed in the policy of dispossession: Take what you can – then as now, when the State of Israel is already a regional power. We should apologize for that. We should apologize for the innumerable dead killed for no reason, for the endless lies and deception. For tyranny in the territories and for apartheid. For trampling a nation’s dignity, for suffocating its freedom and for separating it and breaking it up into tiny nations. For erasing its heritage and disdaining its culture. For short-changing Israeli Arabs and for demonstrations of racism against them. For the “price tag” crimes and the Operation Protective Edge crimes. For all of them we should apologize.

Apologizing would not solve anything or atone for anything, but it could signal a genuine intention to turn a new leaf.

Apologizing would broadcast moral strength and self-confidence, which the country so badly lacks, convinced as it is that it can live forever on its sword, even if there is not a single historical precedent for that. For all these things (and more) Israel will have to apologize some day.

Anyone who believes that even if the reconciliation is delayed, it will eventually come, understands that it must include an apology. That’s how it was in South Africa and that’s how it will be in Israel, if it’s not too late.

Gideon Levy

Palestine Is Still The Issue

'Palestine Is Still The Issue' tells how almost a million Palestinians had been forced off their land in 1948, and again in 1967. 

John Pilger asks why the Palestinians, whose right of return was affirmed by the United Nations more than half a century ago, are still caught in a terrible limbo - refugees in their own land, controlled by Israel in the longest military occupation in modern times.

"If we are to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed. What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have risen up against Israel's huge military regime, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But, for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison. This film is about the Palestinians and a group of courageous Israelis united in the oldest human struggle, to be free."

Pilger distills the history of Palestine during the twentieth century into an easily comprehensible struggle for land - the loss of seventy-eight per cent of that belonging to Palestinians when the state of Israel was founded in 1948 and their claim to only the remaining twenty-two per cent, which had for thirty-five years been occupied by Israel.

In a series of extraordinary interviews with both Israelis and Palestinians, he speaks to the families of suicide bombers and their victims. He witnesses the humiliation of Palestinians at myriad checkpoints with a permit system not dissimilar to apartheid South Africa's infamous pass laws. 

One Palestinian woman tells of how she was stopped from passing through a checkpoint when she went into labour and had to return home to give birth with her mother-in-law using a razor to cut the umbilical cord. The baby later died. 

He goes into the refugee camps and meets children who, he says, "no longer dream like other children, or if they do, it is about death." 

He is shown round the Palestinian Ministry of Culture in Ramallah after a recent Israeli attack where he discovers faeces smeared on walls and floors and a room of children's paintings vandalised.

Archive footage shows pledges by successive American presidents in support of Israel. Pilger describes the Israeli administration as "America's deputy sheriff" in the oil-rich Middle East, receiving billions of dollars and the latest weapons: F16 aircraft, bombs, missiles and Apache helicopters. 

He reveals that Britain also fuels the conflict even though it condemns Israel for its illegal occupation. 

"During the first fourteen months of the Palestinian uprising, the Blair government approved 230 export licences for weapons and military equipment to Israel... Tony Blair has said, and I quote him, "We are doing everything we can to bring peace and stability to the Middle East.'" As a result, Israel is now the fourth-largest military power in the world.

Pilger concludes: 

"The truth is that Israelis will never have peace until they recognise that Palestinians have the same right to the same peace and the same independence that they enjoy. 

Recently, that great voice of freedom, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, asked this: "Have the Jewish people of Israel forgotten their collective punishment, their home demolitions, their humiliations so soon?" 

Israel's own dissenting voices have not forgotten and those who speak out in this film honour the best traditions of Jewish humanity... The occupation of Palestine should end now. Then, the solution is clear: two countries, Israel and Palestine, neither dominating nor menacing the other. Is that impossible or is history to witness the consequences of yet another silence?'"

The State Of Israel Is A Dictatorship

Prof. Leibowitz discusses the existence of Judeo-Nazis and of a Nazi-like mentality which is dominant in the Israel.

"Since the 6 day war, Israel is no longer a democracy. Israel deprives 2 million people of civil and political rights. 

Depriving 2 million people of their civil and political rights is not an opinion, but a reality.

That is what the state wants!

It is willfully that the state deprives these 2 million people of the civil and political rights.

The state of Israel is the only dictatorship that exists today in the enlightened world.

So it is not a coincidence that Israel is the only state n the world, in the enlightened world, in which the president of the supreme court was capable of saying that torture may be used in order to make Arab prisoners talk. 

Everyone knows full well that everywhere in the world those in power use torture, but it is illegal. All the states in the Western World, abolished it in the 18th century, even before the French Revolution, 200 years ago, they abolished the use of torture during police interrogations. All the Western countries, even Tsarist Russia. 

But the state of Israel represents the backwardness of a state body in which there is a monster who exercises the functions of the president of the Supreme Court, only to say that the use of torture is permitted when it is necessary in the interest of the state.

That shows that a Nazi-like mentality, because it is a Nazi mentality, also exist sin our country. That is a fact. 

But the fact is that in the Israeli legal system, neither the judges, nor the lawyers, challenged this man. 

That says a great deal about the Nazi mentality that is dominant here. 

In other words, there are Judeo-Nazi's. Judeo-Nazis exist!"

"We Invented The Car Bomb"

Car bombing has become synonymous with the Middle East in recent years, so few people would be surprised to realise that this most destructive and indiscriminate form of terror became established in this part of the world.

However, less well known is the fact that this was originally a Jewish weapon used against the Arabs.

The method of killing and destruction was actually pioneered in 1920 in New York, and in a cart rather than a car. An Italian anarchist called Mario Buda packed a horse-drawn wagon with explosives and killed dozens of innocent bystanders on Wall Street in a protest against capitalism.

However, the first bomb to be transported to a target in a motorised vehicle was created by two fighters of the Lehi movement in pre-state Palestine.

These pioneers of a uniquely horrible form of warfare are still alive and were interviewed by the presenter, former CIA agent Bob Baer. 

Yaakov Heruti and Eliezer Ben-Ami explained how they chose their target, the Soraya building in Jaffa, used as the headquarters of the armed Arab resistance. They parked their truck bomb outside the building and set it off, killing 28 people including innocent bystanders, and injuring hundreds more.

The two 83-years-old were unrepentant about the operation but regretted the non-combatant casualties. Said Heruti: 

"We never wanted to kill innocent civilians and children, it happened by bad luck." 

Perhaps, but it must have crossed their minds that by exploding a truck packed with explosives in a crowded street without any warning, civilians and children were likely to be blown away along with enemy fighters.

This was not a film that set out to make any moral points - indeed most of those interviewed showed little remorse for their actions - but it did demonstrate that in every single case, the reverberations of the explosions had a negative impact on those who planted the bomb as much as on those who were attacked.

After the Lehi bomb, an Arab called Fawzi El Kuttub set about wreaking vengeance on the Jews. Trained by the Nazis in bomb-making, he aped the Jewish fighters by setting off car bombs which killed Jewish civilians in Jerusalem, and came close to assassinating future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. When the smoke eventually cleared, eight car bombs had been set off - four Arab, four Jewish - claiming 120 lives.

Source: The Jewish Chronicle

The Irgun Were Terrorists Not Freedom Fighters

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated that there is a difference between Palestinian freedom fighters who act against soldiers and terrorists, who act against civilians. 

The Livni test is interesting, of course, both because the foreign minister was basically talking about her father, Eitan Livni, who was the chief operations officer in the Irgun and later a Knesset member. 

Naturally, Livni does not view the Irgun people as terrorists, but as freedom fighters. And so says the Irgun's official history, too: It operated against military and government facilities, not against civilians.



Livni most likely was raised on this myth, on the lofty self-image nurtured by Menachem Begin even before his organization fell apart. 

The Truth Was Different:

On July 6, 1938, Irgun people snuck a bomb into the produce market on Hamelachim Street in Haifa. Two Irgun veterans reported later, in a book that was printed with the aid of the Defense Ministry, that 18 Arabs were killed and 38 wounded in the operation. 

Two days later, Irgun people carried out an attack in Jerusalem; four Arabs were killed. Ten days after that, the Irgun returned to the Haifa market: 27 Arabs were killed and 47 wounded.

In their book, "Divrei hayamim le'milhemet hashihrur" ("Chronicles of the War of Independence"), editors Yaakov Amrami and Arie Melitz described how the attacks were carried out: 

Twice, the bombs were brought in inside baskets of vegetables. One bomb was placed inside a crate of shoe polish. Over the years, the organization also struck at buses, coffee shops and movie houses. People from the Haganah and Palmach also carried out actions against Arab civilians. Both were terrorists, also according to the criteria presented by Livni on "Nightline."

Livni focused on the targets of the attacks, for a moment it seemed that she ruled out in principle any harming of civilians. This also makes for a nice historic lesson: Indeed, there is no justification for harming civilians. Never: Not in Dresden or Hiroshima or Hanoi or Beirut or Ramat Gan or Gaza. 

But Livni also justified the artillery fire on Gaza, and then the definition game requires other participants: state-sponsored terror, harming civilians during wartime.

Neither Israelis nor Palestinians have ever forsworn terror. Both have used it and found on occasion that it advances their goals. Arab terror in the 1930s almost led to the expulsion of the British from Palestine, on the eve of World War II; Jewish terror gave a push to their expulsion in the late 1940s. There is a generation of Israelis that grew up not only admiring the terror used by the underground organizations prior to the state's founding, but also on a whole ethos of wars against colonialist regimes everywhere.

Yitzhak Shamir called himself "Michael" after Michael Collins, the famed leader of the Irish underground.

Naturally, Israelis also grew up admiring the partisans who fought against the Nazis.

In the 1950s and '60s, they identified with the liberation movements in Africa and South America. Along with their admiration for Che Guevara and Steve Biko - a leader of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

Israelis also nurtured friendships with leaders who had sat in jail up to then as terrorists: Israel gave them weapons and money, invited them to Israel and showered them with great honor. Their books were translated into Hebrew and published by national publishing houses. Nothing offended Israelis more than the pejorative "imperialists."

Moshe Dayan compared the Fatah to the Irgun; in this comparison, Israel took the role of the despised British.

Many years later, Ehud Barak said that if he were a Palestinian, he would have joined the terror organizations. 

Fatah hijacked planes and thereby put the Palestinian problem on the world map - Who knows if anyone would have heard about their distress if it weren't for their terror?

It's doubtful if Ariel Sharon would have initiated the dismantling of the settlements in the Gaza Strip if not for Palestinian terror.

This is the same Ariel Sharon who in the 1950s stood at the head of a renowned paratroop unit that committed acts of terror in Palestinian villages across the border.

By Tom Segev
Apr. 20, 2006
12:00 AM

Gaza: Essentialism and Jewish History

Alimuddin Usmani:  As I write to you, the ceasefire has, once again, collapsed between Israel and Palestinian fighters in Gaza. In its attempt to kill Hamas armed wing leader, Mohammed Deif, the IDF failed, and instead killed his wife and infant son.

It is increasingly clear that Israel is stuck in this conflict and doesn't know how to end it. You were the first to say that Israel was "desperate for a break in the violence."

How were you able to predict this outcome when most analysts failed?

Gilad Atzmon:  Unlike the Jewish ‘progressive’ commentators who have dominated the Palestinian solidarity discourse for about two decades, I am a reactionary essentialist. I believe that events in history and politics become meaningful only when analyzed within an rigorous essentialist context. 

Righteous progressive Jews suffocate the discourse with tons of anecdotal details in order to conceal the Jewish ideology at the core of the crimes committed by the Jewish State and the Lobby. I firmly believe that every Israeli and Jewish collective political activity from AIPAC to Mondoweiss can be understood within the framework of Jewish culture, ideology  and heritage.

By now I am not a lone voice anymore. Many scholars and commentators detect the obvious spin at the heart of the Jewish progressive discourse. The Jewish State openly proclaims its commitment to Jewishness, Jewish values and heritage, making the Jewish progressive attempt to prevent an understanding of Israeli crime and Jewish lobbying within the context of Jewish culture, ideology and heritage almost amusing.

As an essentialist it is clear that Israeli barbarism, the Nakba, the Holodomor, the Zio-driven neocon movement and even the crimes committed by the Yiddish speaking International Brigade at the time of the Spanish Civil war must be examined in the light of Jewish goy hatred, Jewish supremacy and the unique sense of Jewish righteousness inextricably intertwined with Jewish self-love.

Once Israeli politics are viewed within the framework of Jewishness, every Israeli war crime and cabinet decision is predictable.

Moreover, if self-destruction and the Shoah are embedded within Jewish cultural DNA, it is impossible to avoid the devastating conclusion that what Israel is doing in publicly targeting a helpless civilian population is a repetition of the way in which Jews have managed to bring total disasters upon themselves.

Two months ago, Jewish Theologian Marc Ellis published a book on Jewish prophecy. Ellis wrote, “like the ancient prophets Atzmon exposes Jews. At the same time, Atzmon believes that the Bible, from which the prophets spring, is bogus….Atzmon provides no hiding place for Jews anywhere.”  (Future of the Prophetic, Marc H. Ellis p 332).  I was obviously flattered by Ellis equating me with Moses and Ezekiel and casting me as the contemporary Jewish prophet. But I felt the need to correct Ellis- it is my essentialism and philosophical approach that helps me to grasp and predict Israeli behaviour and political conduct. Sadly, I have no supernatural prophetic abilities.

The take home message is clear. If Israel defines itself as the Jewish State, we should accept its own definition.  Once we do that, the entire machinery of Jewish collective action reveals itself. Israel and its Jewish lobby are transparent, predictable and consistent with the Book of Esther. Less obviously, but just as consistently, the Jewish Left, including George Soros and his ilk, are revealed as a deliberately deceptive but transparent form of controlled opposition. 

Alimuddin Usmani:  Recently the US halted the transfer of Hellfire missiles to Israel. Is the US rethinking its relationship with Israel and understanding that the Jewish State is not a strategic asset anymore?

Gilad Atzmon:  

America realized a while ago that Israel is not a strategic asset. Dependence on Middle East oil is decreasing and the Pentagon knows by now that the chances that America will ever use Israel as a runway for its Air Force are nonexistent. 

And yet, the Jewish Lobby is still the most significant political power in Washington, and to a certain extent, still dominates US foreign policy. In the last four decades, Israel and the Jewish lobby have invested an enormous effort aimed at dominating American politics. By now, they have pretty much achieved domination, only to discover that once again they ‘won the battle but lost the war.’ By the time Washington became an Israeli colony, America lost its prime position as a peace broker. And again, an essentialist perspective sheds light on the role of the Jewish elite in this endeavor.

America is not the first or second super power to be brought down by Jewish power. It is just the latest in a long line. America would love to emancipate itself, but in order to do so, it must first seal the hole in its system that allows a foreign lobby to dominate its policy. 

Alimuddin Usmani: During the demonstrations in Paris against the Israeli war we saw the emergence of a group called "Gaza firm." Some analysts believe that they are a kind of ‘Goyim defense league.’ What is your analysis of this new phenomenon? 

Gilad Atzmon:  I think that a ‘goyim defense league’ is a necessary development. I have come to believe that resistance to Jewish politics and power is the only thing that can save world peace as well as the Jews.

The suppression of anti-Jewish feelings by means of ‘political correctness’ has led, on the one hand, to Jewish impunity, and, on the other, to explosive and violent resentment toward Jews. The natural opposition toward Jewish politics and supremacist attitudes should never have been suppressed. Opposition must be openly addressed if only so that Jews and their state grasp that their liberties are not limitless.

Gaza The Broken Hearted

The Language Of Death

World Can't Wait helped produce a town meeting last night, sponsored by Revolution Books in New York City.

Chris Hedges gave the main address.

The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating, squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building a series of ringed Palestinian enclaves where the Israeli military will have the ability to instantly shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate the misery.   

Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who try to use it to become gods. Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is murder.

Images of dead Palestinian children, lined up as if asleep on the floor of the main hospital in Gaza, are a metaphor for the future. Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. 

Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. Families who carry the broken bodies of their children to hospitals do not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of those they love do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a “martyr”?

The refusal by our political leaders, from Barack Obama to all but five members of Congress, to the major media to speak out in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and our hypocrisy. 

The public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity is being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians is a betrayal of the memory of those killed in other genocides from the Holocaust to Cambodia to Rwanda to Bosnia. 

The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the Holocaust is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide, and you do not -- no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against -- you are culpable.   And we are very culpable. 

The F-16 jet fighters, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250-pound “smart” GBU-39 bombs are all part of the annual $2.4 billion in military aid we give to Israel. Palestinians are being slaughtered with American-made weapons. They are being slaughtered by an Israeli military we lavishly bankroll. But perhaps our callousness indifference to human suffering is to be expected. We, after all, kill women and children on an even vaster scale in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

[End of Speech]

The bloody hands of Israel mirror our own.

“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe recently, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as desperate events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system... Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – has allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanize the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them. The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern [of genocide].”

Israel operates under the illusion that it can crush Hamas and install a quisling Palestinian government in Gaza and the West Bank. This puppet government will be led, Israel believes, by the discredited Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abass, now cowering in the West Bank after being driven out of Gaza. Abbas, like most of the corrupt Fatah leadership, is a detested figure. He is dismissed as the Marshall Pétain of the Palestinian people, or perhaps the Hamid Karzai or the Nouri al-Maliki. He is as loathed as he is powerless. 

Israel’s destruction of Hamas and reoccupation of Gaza will not bring peace or security to Israel. It will merely obliterate the only internal organization with enough stature and authority in Gaza, an organization elected to power in free and fair elections, to maintain order. The Israeli attack empowers the Islamic movements across the regime who one day may well ring Israel like a vice. It reduces all communication to the language of force. The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel. 

Forty plus years after W.H. Auden described the dumb ogre loose in the streets of Prague, he lopes, still dumb, again through the alleyways of Gaza City:

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,

Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

The Partition Of Palestine; Providence, Miracle or What Really Happened

Sixty-six years ago, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 181, which partitioned the land of Palestine into two States: the “birth certificate” for Israel, and the “death certificate” for Palestine.

The Return (not the end of the Diaspora) of the Jews to their “rightful” historical homeland in 1947, and the creation of the Modern State of Israel in 1948, was the stated purpose of Zionism, a secular Jewish political movement that arose in Europe in the late 19th century.

Zionism is not to be confused with Judaism or Rothschild Zionism:

• Zionism: an organization of Jews who believed the Jewish people needed a nation of their own to escape persecution.
• Judaism: A religion based on the Torah and the Talmud practiced collectively by Jews.
• Rothism or Rothschild Zionism: abbreviation for The Zionist movement corrupted and co-opted by The House of Rothschild and their agents to make sure the Jewish people had their own state in 1948 to advance a New World Order agenda. The New World Order is one of the 33 conspiracies proven to be true. [1]

The creation of the State of Israel, as it turns out, was not the silver lining around the dark cloud of desolation of two World Wars and the Holocaust. The creation of the State of Israel was a meticulous New World Order plan dating back to 1897, when a few wealthy Europeans led by the Rothschilds — not the Jewish people — wanted to create an understanding for the founding of a Jewish State. The few wealthy Europeans claimed that the “increase” in the anti-Semitism present in the World at the end of the 19^thCentury would end if a people collectively known as “Jews” returned to their “rightful” historical homeland in Palestine. [Appendix A]

Prior to 1933, most Jewish people in the World pursued a strategy of assimilation and had no interest in moving to Palestine and saw the Zionism movement as contributing to, not eliminating, anti-Semitism.

Page 16 of Herzl’s diary confirms the Rothschild Zionist movement will contribute to anti-Semitism.

“Anti-Semitism will become our friends,” and “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews . . . become worse. This will assist in realization of our plans. I have an excellent idea . . . I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth. The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews. The anti-Semites shall be our best friends.” (From Herzl’s diary, 1895-1904, Part I, pp. 16, q4)

The popular notion that anti-Semitism caused the Zionist movement makes the mistake of post hoc ergo propter hoc - "after the fact, therefore because of the fact."

In other words, a distinction must be made between an irrational movement in 1897 by a few wealthy Europeans, and a rational movement after 1933 by thousands of people who believed they needed their own state to escape persecution.

Click here to visit a website devoted to documenting how the ideology of the Rothschild family exploited anti-Semitism for the last 50 years.

Following World War II, the Jews, finally liberated from the Nazi concentration camps run by the Germans, suddenly find themselves in containment camps run by the British.

The world is in shock at what was done to the Jews in Nazi Germany. But while the world feels guilty for not having stopped Hitler, a former gay prostitute and street cleaner, from taking over the world with H.W. Bush’s father’s money, they aren’t ready to give Palestine to the Jews. [2]

Things don’t just happen they are made to happen.

The Ship That Launched A Nation

The Saga of how an old pleasure lakes steamer ship influenced the final vote at the United Nations officially began in July 11, 1947.

The ship, the SS President Warfield, later renamed the Exodus 1947, became known as the “Mayflower of the Middle East” and “the ship that launched a nation.”

July 11, 1947, 4,554 Holocaust survivors board the Warfield in Marseille, France, and sail toward what they hoped would be a new home in Palestine. The ship arrived in the port of Haifa on July 19, 1947.

Matt Schudel of the Washington Post provides the following account of the Exodus:

Shortly before it was to enter the port of Haifa, British Navy vessels rammed the Exodus at sea. During the resulting shipboard riot, in which passengers and crew defended themselves with cans of soup and potatoes, British sailors killed two passengers and an American crew member. When the Exodus finally docked in Haifa, the Jewish refugees were denied entry by British authorities.

The lone American journalist to board the Exodus, Ruth Gruber, described it as, “a black, shabby, broken steamer . . . The ship looked like a matchbox that had been splintered by a nutcracker. In the torn square hole . . . we could see a muddle of bedding, possessions, plumbing, broken pipes, overflowing toilets, half-naked men, women looking for children.” (February 25, 2005, Businessman Louis 'Shorty' Levin; Sold Ship That Became 'Exodus,’ Washington Post, Page B06)

The refugees were placed on three squalid British transport vessels, HMS Ocean Vigour, HMT Runnymede Park, and HMS Empire Rival, to be taken back to France, not to Cyprus. 

After three weeks, because the Jews refused to disembark in France, they were sent to detention camps in Germany — an act of such symbolic cruelty that it provoked international outrage. [3]

Britain's Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s act of such symbolic cruelty provoked international outrage. The subsequent global condemnation of Britain’s heartlessness, according to historians, was a crucial factor in the final vote at the United Nations to partition Palestine. The Exodus became known as the "Mayflower of the Middle East" and "the ship that launched a nation." Secret CIA Documents On Truman & Zionist Terrorism xww.tbrnews.org

Few decisions by Britain's foreign secretary could have been more certain of retaining the attention of the world press.

Nota Bene: The Rothschilds operate out of the sovereign state known as “The City” located in the one square-mile in … you guessed it … the heart of London. http://www.oocities.org/rothschildrg/

The small clique who rule the City dictate to the British Parliament. As the former British Prime Minister of England during the late 1800s Benjamin D'israeli wrote: "So you see... the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes" (Coningsby, The Century Co., N.Y., 1907, p. 233).

November 1946

The incredible story of Exodus 1947 by Tzvi Ben-tzur, using Google maps technology raises a number of questions about the ship, the passengers and the journey.

• A ship named President Warfield - an old pleasure lakes steamer - is purchased in the USA on behalf of the Mossad Le'Aliya Bet in November 1946. The crew comprises mostly of Jewish volunteers from North America. John Grauel - a Methodist minister/reporter from the pro-Zionist American Christian Palestine Committee - joins as an observer. At the end of March 47, after refitting and one failed attempt to sail, the ship heads to the Mediterranean under a Hondurian flag. The press in the USA "discovers" the story, the purpose of the ship is exposed, and the British intelligence starts to follow the ship closely. The Mossad's administrative name for the ship is "Ha'na'si" (meaning "the president").

[The press in the USA "discovers" the story, the purpose of the ship is exposed. Really?]

• It is the 17th of July, and the ship name is changed to Exodus 1947. The gid’oni Azrial Enav (in the picture) organizes an historic broadcast – a 1st of its kind – directly from the ship to the Jewish community in Eretz Israel. The broadcast lasts about 20 minutes and is heard all over the country. The minister John Grauel adds a call in English to the members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) – who are visiting Palestine at that time - to come to the ship and talk directly with the refugees.

[A radio broadcast, the day before the ship is rammed? Are you kidding?]

• On July 18, 02:00am, the British Navy suddenly opens an attack on the ship in an attempt to intercept her. A bitter fight that lasts about four hours ensues, in which three Jewish people find their death. In light of mortal danger to some of the injured, the commander of the Exodus,Yossi Harel, orders to cease resistance. The British bring medical help, and the ship, now off the coast of K’far Vitkin, continues under British control towards the port of Haifa.

• It is July 18th, and the ship enters the port in the early hours of the afternoon. Members of UNSCOP who are present there are quite moved by the sight of the shattered & wounded immigrants, the battered ship, and the immediate transfer of the immigrants to three deportation ships. The next day the deportation ships leave the port, but instead of heading to Cyprus as expected they are heading back to France, following a new British policy termed ‘Refoulment’ - deportation back to the country of departure.

[This one needs no commentary]

• Humburg area, Germany On Sep. 9 the ships arrives at the area, the immigrants are forcefully taken off the ships, and are sent to the detention camps Papendorf and Amstau. The British suffers yet another blow in the battle over world opinion which is now furious at the news of Holocaust survivors being forced back into Germany.

[The British suffers yet another blow]

Was the Saga of the Exodus a sloppy plan to move 4,554 Jews out of Europe on the "underground railroad, to Palestine” or, was the Saga a meticulous plan to influence the vote in the United Nations? Consider:

• A plan that just happens to get discovered by the media in the United States
• A plan that just happens to get exposed to British intelligence, who then instruct their Navy to ram the rickety ferry boat, now renamed the Exodus, just “shortly before it was to enter the port of Haifa.”
• A radio broadcast, the day before the ship is rammed and is directed to the members of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) — who just happen to be visiting Palestine at that time.

Not convinced it was a meticulous plan to influence the United Nations vote? Then consider the story behind the story behind the story of how the SS Warfield, a rickety former Chesapeake Bay ferryboat built in 1928 to sail forever the inland waters of Chesapeake Bay, became The Ship that Launched a Nation.

The Saga Really Began In The Summer Of 1945


The Saga of how an old pleasure lakes steamer ship influenced the final vote at the United Nations really began in the summer of 1945.

The SS President Warfield, an old ferryboat, was purchased by the New York Jewish millionaire, Rudolf G. Sonneborn in the summer of 1945. (Hochstein J.M. & Greenfield M.S., 2010, The Jews' Secret Fleet: The Untold Story of North American Volunteers who Smashed the British Blockade, Gefen Publishing House, New York).

The Pledge by Leonard Slater (iUniverse; June 26, 2000) is the only place you will ever read about the meticulous plan implemented by Rudolf G. Sonneborn, one of the most important, yet most private of men, in Jewish history. The Pledge is also the only documentation of the Meticulously Planned Exodus Saga, whose objective allegedly was smuggling arms into Israel. The secret American underground that after World War II helped arm the new state of Israel. According to Slater, it was thought that the plan would have a greater chance of success (“The balance would shift even more dramatically”) if 4,554 displaced European Jews were allowed entry to Palestine.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,810661,00.html

The plan to help arm the new state of Israel would have a greater chance of success if 4,554 displaced European Jews were allowed entry to Palestine. Unlikely!

The plan to influence the United Nations Vote would have a greater chance of success if 4,554 displaced European Jews were refused entry to Palestine and returned Concentration (Displaced persons) camps in Germany. Very Likely!

Think about it. You are Rudolf G. Sonneborn, a Jewish millionaire in 1947; the minimum wage was 75 cents an hour and World War II freighters were a dime a dozen. Why would you purchase a rickety former Chesapeake Bay ferryboat that might not even make the journey across the Atlantic let alone from France to Haifa? And even more curious, why make sure that no one knows that you are the man “who launched a nation?”

Answer: You buy a rickety ferryboat because you know it is going to be rammed by the British eight months later when it arrives in Haifa.

The ‘S.S. New York’ below was another inland waters steamer that like the ‘President Warfield’ was sailed as part of Convoy ‘maniac’ dressed up to look like a large liner.


You didn’t get to be a millionaire in 1947 by being stupid.

Entfernung

The social cataclysmic events of two World Wars, the Holocaust and 70 million deaths, were never about a fanatical dictator who wanted to exterminate the Jews.

Doctor Kubovy, from the Tel Aviv "Documentation Center," admitted in 1960 "there is no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich which speaks of exterminating the Jews”... and in 1981, Walter Laqueur, author of The Terrible Secret, admitted: "Until now, we have never found Hitler's order to destroy the European Jewish community, and in all probability the order was never given."

There is no order because Hitler used the term “Entfernung” – which translates to removal of the Jews -- in this case entfernung of the Jews to Palestine.

The social cataclysmic events of two World Wars, the Holocaust and 70 million deaths, were about a fanatical dictator who wanted to help his grandfather entfernung 
the Jews to Palestine. [4]

Katherine Smith PhD is a regular contributor to the home of Thought Provoking Articles and can be reached at mandrell2010@gmail.com

Endnotes

[1] The Jews return to the “Holy Land” portends Armageddon.

Armageddon, the final battle, will come when someone blows up the Dome of the Rock. That magnificent golden domed mosque built on the site of Solomon’s Temple (the abomination of desolation) is preventing the return of the messiah. Radical Christians and Jews believe Christ will not come back to earth until the Jews rebuild the Temple.

Should the Dome be demolished, then for the first time in history, thanks to Saddam Hussein when he destroyed 90 percent of Iraq’s Wetlands, 200 million people could cross the Euphrates for a holy war in Jerusalem. [1.1]

A war that will rid the planet of millions of useless eaters.

The Rothschild New World Order only needs 500 million of us for slaves.

[1.1] In 1994, 60 percent of the wetlands were destroyed by Saddam Hussein's regime. 
They were drained to permit military access and greater political control of the native Marsh Arabs.

[2] Prescott Bush, patriarch of two Presidents and connected to the House of Rothschild, was funding Hitler from America, while German soldiers were killing Americans. Bush’s company was seized under the, “Trading With The Enemy,” Act but the Anti-Defamation League has never criticized the Bush family.

[3] September 10, 1947, Washington D.C. Secretary of State George C. Marshall disclosed that the US. had urged Britain to reconsider sending the “Exodus” group to Germany, but Britain replied that there were no facilities for housing them elsewhere because the French did not want them and there were a number of vacant detention camps in Germany.

[4] Adolph Hitler: War Hero, Street Cleaner, Prostitute or Secret Agent: A Psychohistory AnalysisHansjurgen Koehler in his book, "Inside The Gestapo,"

Maria Anna Schicklgruber, Adolf Hitler's grandmother, "A little servant girl…….came to Vienna and became a domestic servant…….at the Rothschild mansion…….and Hitler’s unknown grandfather must be probably looked for in this magnificent house.

 By Katherine Smith, PhD

Anti-Zionism Is NOT Anti-Semitism

In 2005, Palestinian human rights groups and civil rights organisations launched a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel. This campaign has multiple aims, one of them being to pressure the Israeli government to comply with United Nations resolutions and ensure that its policies conform with international law and the Universal principles of human rights.

Specifically, the BDS campaign intends to achieve the full recognition of Palestinians as equal citizens within the state of Israel, to achieve the right of return of Palestinian refugees displaced by Israel since 1948, as demanded by Article 11 of the United Nations general assembly resolution 194, to end Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Arab land, cease the building of settlements and dismantle the ongoing Israeli West Bank barrier (also known as the Apartheid Wall).

This campaign has attracted its supporters around the world, including Palestine solidarity activists in Australia. Various socialist and left groups have strongly supported the BDS campaign. But the campaign has received strident criticism from Zionist organisations, political parties supportive of Israel and the ever-hostile Murdoch media establishment. Professor Irwin Cotler, former justice minister in the Canadian government, warned of what he called the "de-legitimisation" of Israel, being promoted by campaigns like BDS. This de-legitimisation is nothing new, he argued, being based in anti-Semitism. Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, long known for his support of Israel, went further and attacked the BDS campaign for "abetting terrorism" and for being an obstacle to peace. The BDS campaign has faced charges of anti-Semitism by Australian politicians and trade union leaders as well. Indeed, criticism of the state of Israel, its policies and founding ideology of Zionism is routinely met with the charge of anti-Semitism.

This charge usually serves to silence any debate about Israel’s policies, slander the critic with a tag that is dripping with historic vitriol and delegitimise any measures by Palestinian and Palestine solidarity activists to achieve full human rights for the Palestinians and the associated Palestinian refugees. If a critic of Israel is motivated by good old ethnic-racial hatred, then their claims for equal rights and statehood recognition are discredited. The supporters of the Palestinian cause can then be ignored and their claims of Palestinian statehood rejected as the outpourings of the irrationally obsessed, mindlessly hateful partisans of anti-Semitism, motivated by revulsion of the Jewish people and their culture.

Let us examine more closely the issue of anti-Semitism, the claims of Zionism and its realisation in the state of Israel and the tactic of boycott, divestment and sanctions. Anti-Semitism is an irrational, xenophobic hatred of Jews as a people; regarding the Jewish people around the world as constituting one indivisible, biologically unchanging entity that comprise one nation.

Christian Hostility

Anti-Semitism is nothing new, being based in the traditional religious, namely Christian hostility to the Jewish culture and people. After the lifetime of Jesus, early Christian attitudes towards the Jews began to harden. Anti-Jewish attitudes and doctrines were part of Christian teaching and popular art from the earliest times of the established Christian church.

The gospel of John, written much later than the three other gospel books, contains the most decisive comments indicating a break with Judaism, though this book is less historical than the others. This kind of religious anti-Semitism was partly based on theological differences, competition for followers and misapprehension of Talmudic beliefs and practices.

The religious-based anti-Semitism of centuries past has been largely superseded by the more modern-sounding, pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish prejudice, which singles out Jews as incapable of assimilating into their host nation and motivated by a tribalist-racial hostility to non-Jews and unwilling to adapt to the secular, "modern" values of the West. Modern day, nationalistic anti-Semitism adopted a particular political dimension – to exclude the Jews as a people from the political and economic life of their resident countries. Forcing Jews out of employment, business, suppressing their language and schools; these became part of the political program of anti-Semitic parties across Europe.

Capitalism

In the 19th century, with the rise of secularism and nationalism, the religious ideologies were pushed aside and the traditional prejudice of anti-Semitism was adapted to the changing political and economic conditions of capitalism. Oppressed nations, particularly those in the Ottoman Turkish, Austro-Hungarian and tsarist Russian empires, were demanding their independence and fighting for it. The Jewish populations of Europe, hitherto assimilated into their respective nations, were now articulating their religiously based teachings of a return to Zion in a more nationalistic form. The Jewish people had been taught that a divinely inspired Messiah would restore them to the allegedly historical homeland of the Jews in Palestine. Never matter that Palestine was home to Arab Muslims and Christians. This yearning was always a vague aspiration; in the context of 19th century nationalism and secularisation, aspirations for a homeland were to take a different turn.

Throughout Europe, nationalist groups were agitating for independence; the Greeks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians and other nationalities long suppressed were rising. The authorities in tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey and other European states needed a convenient scapegoat to blame the rising nationalistic tensions. The growth of industrial capitalism broke the bonds of feudalism and undermined the position that many Jewish communities held in the feudal order. The capitalist system created its own inequalities and imposed suffering on the working class. Workers in various countries, among them the Jewish workers, made common cause to fight against the social and economic oppression of capitalism.

Anti-semitism was the usual outlet to divert growing anger at the economic and political injustices of the time. Immiseration could be blamed on the "Jewish usurer", the stereotype of the shifty, scheming Shylock, extorting the "average" (meaning non-Jewish) worker, gained traction in times of economic distress. Pogroms against Jewish communities were a frequent occurrence in Europe, particularly in imperial Russia under the tsar. In this charged context, the Jewish people of Europe began to join revolutionary, nationalist and socialist groups, joining the fight for social and economic justice.

Zionism

But a new response began to be articulated by a number of Jewish commentators and intellectuals in Europe. They regarded anti-Semitism as the inevitable and immutable consequences of living among non-Jewish nations and that assimilation was impossible. They began to elaborate a new nationalistically motivated yearning for a homeland – Zionism. Lance Selfa, in the International Socialist Review article "Zionism: False Messiah", explains that political Zionism defined itself the project of establishing an exclusively Jewish state, as a nationalist, colonialist project. Zionism maintains that Jews around the world are a single nation and thus need to establish a separate homeland. Zionism holds that anti-Semitism is an inevitable consequence of the Jewish presence in their host societies.

Moses Hess, a German Jewish contemporary of Karl Marx, was the earliest exponent of this abnormal nationalism. He wrote a book, Rome and Jerusalem: The last national question (1862), in which he expounded that German anti-Semitism was a fact of life and could not be changed. The Jews of Europe would always be regarded as the outsiders and that assimilation had failed. He argued that Jewish emancipation by joining the revolutionary struggles of the time was impossible and that there was only one solution – a separate homeland for the Jewish people.

However, it is with Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jewish journalist and author of the book The Jewish State (1896) and modern that political Zionism finds its most articulate exponent. Herzl argued that anti-Semitism was not only an inevitable product of Jews living as minorities amid a non-Jewish population, but was also a necessary political ally, compelling Jewish communities in Europe and elsewhere to be driven out and thus further the goal of building a separatist homeland. Zionism is a particular form of Jewish communalism, very similar in goals to the Hindu supremacist and communist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that seeks to establish a Hindu-exclusive state in India by expelling Muslims and other minority communities.

Zionism shares with anti-Semitism the basic foundational premise that Jews around the world are a fixed entity and must be separated from non-Jewish populations in order to be emancipated. This kind of abnormal nationalism not only required that Jews dissociate themselves from the struggle for equality and economic justice in their home countries, but also find a place to call their homeland. Palestine was not the first destination chosen by the nascent Zionist movement; Herzl and the leaders of the World Zionist Organisation (WZO) appealed to the major imperial states of the day for a territory to call their own. At various stages, Uganda, Argentina, Madagascar were all seriously considered as possible homelands for a new Jewish state.

They approached the Ottoman Turkish sultan, the German kaiser and the Russian tsar, whose regime was responsible for anti-Jewish pogroms, in the vain hope of acquiring recognition for their cause, helping to divert Jewish workers from the revolutionary struggle and demobilise Jews in the fight against the poison of anti-Semitism. Herzl even shook hands with the Russian minister von Plehve, in 1903. Plehve was the minister of interior and director of the police who oversaw the massive pogroms against the Jews of Kiev and other cities in the early 1900s. The Zionist leaders approached all the imperial powers for favours, no matter how criminal and murderous they were in relation to the Jewish populations in Europe.

Zionism, from its very inception, was always an ally of imperialism.

It is interesting to note that Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann and other Zionist politicians wrote about the Jews of Europe in the most disparaging, obscene terms, reflecting their acceptance of the basic ideas of anti-Semitism. Anne Zirin, in her article documenting the "Hidden history of Zionism", notes that the writings of Herzl, Nordau, Weizmann and other leading Zionists are replete with descriptions of Jews as aliens, parasites, bacteria, poisonous elements that cause harm to their hosts.

These views stem from the basic premise of Zionism – and anti-Semitism – that humans can be most logically and fundamentally divided into races and it is useless to struggle against such genetically based racial differences. Herzl himself regarded the anti-Semite as a necessary and dependable ally; he wrote in his diaries that the anti-Semitic countries would be the most interested in expelling the Jews from Europe and assisting their emigration to a Jewish homeland. Herzl surmised:

the anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies.

Not only were Jews considered a separate race, but also had to be defined as one of the "superior" races, able to build their own state.

With the end of World War I, the imperial patrons that Herzl approached had all been defeated – Ottoman Turkey collapsed and its territories divided among Britain and France; the Austro-Hungarian and tsarist Russian regimes had been toppled and newly independent states had taken their place. The one empire that Zionist leaders had approached during the war and that had committed to building a Jewish national home was Britain. The 1917 Balfour Declaration committed the British government to the Zionist project of building the Jewish population in Palestine. The British ruling class and Balfour, the then foreign secretary, were anti-Semitic; they had their own reasons for encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine. The British military governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, bluntly declared that the Zionist movement was a useful ally of Britain, dedicated to building a "little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism".

British Anti-Semitism

Balfour’s anti-Semitism was not out of place in the English aristocracy and ruling class. Winston Churchill, a rising star of British politics and the secretary of state for air and war, wrote an article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald in 1920 entitled "Zionism versus Bolshevism". Churchill argued that Bolshevism was a devious product of the Jewish mentality, a perverted aspiration for equality that can never be fulfilled. Jewish people in Europe were gravitating towards this subversive philosophy. After all, were not leading Bolshevik figures in the Russian revolution of Jewish origin? So that is conclusive evidence; the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy is afoot to overturn the existing social order. But there is a solution; winning Jews over to Zionism. The best antidote to the virus of Bolshevism and its misguided ideas of racial and economic equality is the doctrine of Zionism; the British government has the responsibility to build a Zionist home for the Jews in Palestine.

The goal of the Zionist project was spelled out quite clearly by its leaders – Palestine must be colonised. The migration of Jewish settlers into Palestine was conducted from the turn of the 19th-20th centuries not just for creating a new market and acquiring natural resources, important as those goals were. The Zionist movement wanted to create a new type of society, one that demolished the indigenous people – namely the Palestinians – and created a settler-colonial society that was exclusively Jewish. The Palestinian economy had to be undermined and replaced by a new, settler project. This effort undermines the myth, peddled by Zionist groups, that Palestine was a "land without a people" and the Jews being "a people without a land".

Vladimir Jabotinsky, a leading figure of early Zionism and the political father of the hardline right-wing ideological tradition within the Jewish state, explained quite clearly that the Zionist movement had come to Palestine to colonise it and defeat the local population. In a 1923 article entitled "We and the Arabs", Jabotinsky elaborated exactly what the Zionist movement intended to achieve in Palestine: colonisation. He explained that the indigenous population would fiercely resist any attempts at colonisation and so it was necessary to construct an "iron wall" of separation, until the Palestinians submitted, were expelled or were simply liquidated. Jabotinsky expressed the racially biased colonial view of the Palestinians that settler advocates have had of indigenous populations.

Any native people – it's all the same whether they are civilized or savage – views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains.

I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.

He went on to expound on how exactly he wished the Zionist movement to treat the indigenous people of Palestine:

Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Jabotinsky founded a school of thought within Zionism that was sympathetic to the fascist powers of the time. He admired Mussolini’s Italy and his organisation had cordial relations with leading fascist political leaders in Rome. In 1935, when Mussolini authorised a division of Zionist activists to take on military training in Italy, he described Jabotinsky to the Zionist emissaries of the time as "your fascist, Jabotinsky".

Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and precursor of the Likud party in Israel, was not the only Zionist activist that sought the collaboration of the imperial powers. The mainstream of the Zionist movement, Labour Zionism, led by figures like David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, were also applying to the various imperialist powers for their patronage. The Zionist leaders offered to make Palestine an outpost of "civilisation" amidst the ocean of native "savages", the Arabic-speaking peoples.

Annie Zirin, in her article about the history of Zionism for the International Socialist Review, quotes the writings of Theodor Herzl, who explained that the new Jewish state in Palestine would form an outpost of European cultivated civilisation against a tide of pan-Arab barbarism. This point is important and we will return to it later.

Britain remained the imperial patron of the Zionist project, assisting the passage of Jewish emigrants to Palestine throughout the 1920s and 1930s. With the revolt of the Palestinians in 1936, Britain changed its tactics and recommended partitioning the country along ethnic lines, allocating portions of Palestine to Arabs and Jews. What is important to note is that during all this time, the Zionist movements in Europe regarded the imperial states as allies and made decisive efforts to place themselves at their disposal.

Lenni Brenner documented the efforts of the Zionist leaders to ingratiate themselves with the fascist powers of the 1930s in his book Zionism in the Age of the Dictators. Brenner examines the attempts by the German Zionist federation to undermine the campaign against anti-Semitism in Germany, find ways to cooperate with the Nazi regime and appease anti-Semitic sentiments in Germany in order to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine. The visit of a top Nazi SS official to Palestine for six months, as a guest of the Zionist federation, was commemorated with the issuance of a gold medal: on one side, the Nazi swastika with the words "A Nazi travels to Palestine"; on the other, the Star of David. The Nazi official in question wrote several articles about his sojourn in Palestine and was enthusiastic about the Zionist project, describing how Jewish soil under a Jew’s feet “reformed him and his kind in a decade. This new Jew will be a new people.”

Brenner’s book is available online and makes for a fascinating expose on the willingness of the Zionist leaders to approach any imperialist regime, no matter how murderously anti-Semitic, in order to achieve their goals of colonising all of Palestine.

Israel and Apartheid

It is not the purpose of this article to go into a detailed examination of the 1947-48 ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israeli forces, establishing the Jewish state. The reader can refer to the excellent book by Israeli historian Illan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, which documents the plans of the Zionist movement to attain ethnic supremacy in Palestine by expelling the indigenous population.

What is important to note is that after its official foundation in 1948, the Zionist state was not only dependent on imperial patronage for its survival, but also became a bulwark of reaction, establishing working alliances with other repressive regimes around the world. Zionism is an essential prop within the larger imperialist system. Nowhere is this aspect of the Zionist state more in evidence than in its extensive military, political, economic and ideological cooperation with the former apartheid state of South Africa.

In 2010, a book detailing this unspoken yet solid alliance was published, called The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret relationship with South Africa. The ultra-racist regime of apartheid South Africa was subject to sanctions and international condemnation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. United Nations resolutions called on states to terminate relations with the white supremacist state. But one state continued and even increased is economic and military cooperation with the white racist regime – Israel.

The Afrikaner outpost in South Africa was not just anti-black, but also had a history of anti-Semitism. The National Party, the South African party that implemented and extended apartheid, had sympathetic ties to anti-Semitic groups and even supported the fascist regimes in the 1930s. Many of its leaders were themselves members of pro-Nazi groups in South Africa. Yet this was no obstacle for ties between Pretoria and Tel Aviv to flourish.

The Israel-South Africa connection was driven by pragmatic considerations – sharing nuclear technology, military training of their respective armed forces, the development of business ties and the growth of cultural exchanges. But what is significant to note is that this axis was not just opportunistic; there was a deep ideological affinity between Zionism and white supremacist apartheid. The South African prime minister in the 1970s, John Vorster, described the common goals that both Israel and his regime had in confronting the enemies of "Western civilisation". Just as Israel was an outpost of white European civilisation up against an ocean of Arab-Muslim barbarism, white South Africa was engaged in a struggle against the onslaught of black African communism. Tel Aviv and Pretoria were "brothers in arms", forming a mutually beneficial and ideologically driven axis that reinforced repressive practices with regard to their respective indigenous populations.

Hendrik Verwoerd, the South African politician primarily responsible for the extension of apartheid and the creation of black African bantustans, commented in 1961 that:

The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.

John Dugard, a South African professor of law and former UN special rapporteur to the Human Rights Council on the human rights situation in the occupied territories, wrote an introduction to a book published in 2009 called Israeli Apartheid: A beginner’s guide, in which he examines the similarities and differences between the two societies. In 2009, Dugard wrote an article published in the Huffington Post that it is high time to treat the Israeli regime with the same exclusion as was applied to apartheid South Africa. In its treatment of the Palestinians, Israel is implementing its own version of apartheid, he noted.

Understanding the history of Zionism, its regard for anti-Semitism as a cement with which to build a new state and its role as an ally of racist and oppressive regimes, helps us to understand the importance of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, the starting point of this article.

So is boycotting Israel motivated by anti-Semitism?

Absolutely not says Sherry Wolf, an activist with the US Socialist Worker magazine and an advocate of BDS. Zionism’s supporters use the charge of anti-Semitism to deflect debate, shut down meaningful dialogue and downgrade the struggle by Palestinians for their rights. The BDS movement has condemned anti-Semitism and racism in all its forms. As Sherry Wolf explains it, the BDS movement is about achieving economic, political and social equality for the Palestinians.

Wolf herself is of Jewish background and she recognises the historic injustice perpetrated by the Zionist regime against the Palestinians. Brian Klug, senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford University and a founder of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights, explains that anti-Zionism has nothing in common with anti-Semitism. Do not poison the debate on Palestine with false accusations. This does not mean that charges of anti-Semitism can be dismissed lightly – far from it. As Tony Greenstein, anti-Zionist activist in Britain elaborates;

Like the boy who cried wolf, the charge of “anti-semitism” has been made so often against critics of Zionism and the Israeli state that people now have difficulty recognising the genuine article... One of the consequences of this abuse of the term “anti-semitism” is to devalue the currency. It renders it almost meaningless because people assume that allegations of anti-semitism are merely the last-ditch resort of those who are incapable of defending the Apartheid Wall that separates the people of the West Bank from their land, the bulldozing of civilian houses, the wanton destruction of olive groves and crops, to say nothing of the theft of their land.

Let us leave the last word to Omar Barghouti, one of the leaders of the BDS movement, who elaborated on why we should support the BDS movement:

A Jewish state in Palestine (“a state of the Jewish nation”), no matter what shape it takes, is by definition exclusionary; it cannot but contravene the basic rights of the land’s indigenous Palestinian population and perpetuate a system of racial discrimination that ought to be opposed categorically. Any other exclusionary regime in Palestine that denies citizens some of their rights based on their identity — ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, etc. — must be rejected just as strongly.

Accepting modern-day Jewish Israelis as equal citizens and full partners in building and developing a new shared society, free from all colonial subjugation and discrimination, as called for in the democratic state model, is the most magnanimous — rational — offer any oppressed indigenous population can present to its oppressors. Only by shedding their colonial privileges, dismantling their structures of oppression, and accepting the restoration of the rights of the indigenous people of the land, especially the right of Palestinian refugees to return and to reparations and the right of all Palestinians to unmitigated equality, can settlers be indigenized and integrated into the emerging nation and therefore become entitled to participating in determining the future of the common state.

It is time to advocate a secular, unitary and democratic state in Palestine, because this is the equitable, humane solution for all its people.

(Rupen Savoulian)