In the Lost Worlds/Lost Causes Year 2009

Risks that Israel runs

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Breaking the Israeli Mediterranean naval blockade?

From Times Online, 7 June, 2010
Propaganda war latest: Tehran 3 Israel 0
Iran’s tactic of portraying its enemy as facing inevitable destruction is proving successful

By Amir Taheri

As Iran’s leadership prepares to dispatch a Red Crescent flotilla to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, its propaganda organs are spreading one message throughout the Muslim world: the Jewish state, branded by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “the Zionist stain of shame”, is heading for its inevitable destruction.
An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said of these aid ships that “if this symbolic campaign continues, it will result in the surrender of the Zionist regime, which will certainly be one of its biggest defeats”.
Over the past three years, Iran’s Khomeinist regime has succeeded in changing the traditional perception of Israel. Instead of Israel being the almost invincible enemy that crushed the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War and the Six Day War, it is now portrayed as a waning power, a small and vulnerable enclave that, having lost the support of its powerful protector, the United States, is facing the might of a resurgent Muslim world under Tehran’s leadership.
This message is pumped out through Iranian satellite television stations, such as the Arab language al-Alam News Network. Tehran also publishes scores of magazines and books that are freely distributed throughout the Muslim world. Muslim opinion-formers are regularly invited to Iran for seminars on the pan- Islamic campaign to accelerate “the inevitable end of Israel”, a phrase repeatedly used by Iran’s official media. Mr Ahmadinejad has visited more than two dozen Muslim countries to propagate this new anti-Israel strategy.
To underline this new image of Israel, the Tehran propaganda machine has replaced footage of poor Palestinians crushed by “Zionists” with that of the growing arsenal of rockets that Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have built up for what President Ahmadinejad calls “the final assault on the Zionist state”. The Jew, previously depicted as aggressive and domineering, is presented as cowardly. The mullahs in Friday sermons in Iran now claim such things as “the Jew runs away at the first sight of blood”.
The Tehran regime’s mouthpieces in the media and universities emphasise the cooling of US-Israel relations under Barack Obama and insist that Washington has realised that its support for Israel has become too costly. Perhaps the most recent significant diplomatic success scored by Tehran came last month when a UN conference called by President Obama to set the world on the road to nuclear disarmament failed to call on Iran to stop its nuclear programme. Instead, it called for a nuclear-free Middle East, thus linking Israel’s reported nucear weapons to Iran’s controversial programme.
Tehran has succeeded in dragging non-Arab states, notably Turkey, a former ally of Israel, and Malaysia into conflict with Israel, and is working on others, especially Pakistan and Indonesia, in the hope of creating a pan-Islamic front. The Turkish Prime Minister visited Iran last month to seal a nuclear deal.
Tehran has other reasons to be happy with its strategy of confrontation. It has ended the Israeli-Syrian peace talks by threatening to withdraw its substantial economic support for President Assad’s increasingly fragile regime. Tehran’s bullying has also forced Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates to stop normalising relations with Israel.
Egypt’s decision last week to lift its blockade of Gaza is presented by Tehran as another example of how Muslim public opinion could achieve “victories against the Zionist enemy”. Tehran’s immediate goal is to appear as leading the international campaign to lift the Israeli blockade which, if it happens, will be presented as another sign that the tide of history is turning against the Jewish state. Assuming a high profile in the conflict with Israel has three key advantages. First, it helps divert attention from the Khomeinist regime’s domestic problems. Next week, opposition parties plan mass demonstrations calling for an end to what they describe as “despotic rule”. The regime hopes that images of its flotilla of jihad defying the “Zionist enemy” would present the opposition as “enemies of the resurgent Islam”.
Next, the “end of Israel” campaign would help the majority of Muslims, who are Sunni, to forget that Iran is a mainly Shia and thus heretic nation that is not qualified to claim the leadership of the umma.
Finally, Tehran’s strategy will enable it to present any military clash with the US, over Iraq for example, as a consequence of the Islamic Republic’s campaign against Israel rather than because of its deliberately provocative and adventurist foreign policy.
Believing that its potential adversaries are weak and indecisive, the Khomeinist regime appears determined to push the region to the edge of war and, perhaps, beyond.

(Ends)

Amir Taheri is the author of The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.

How many divisions?

NEARLY SEVENTY YEARS ago, in the course of World War II, a heinous crime was committed in the city of Leningrad. For more than a thousand days, a gang of extremists called "the Red Army" held the millions of the town's inhabitants hostage and provoked retaliation from the German Wehrmacht from inside the population centers. The Germans had no alternative but to bomb and shell the population and to impose a total blockade, which caused the death of hundreds of thousands.

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Some time before that, a similar crime was committed in England. The Churchill gang hid among the population of London, misusing the millions of citizens as a human shield. The Germans were compelled to send their Luftwaffe and reluctantly reduce the city to ruins. They called it The Blitz.

This is the description that would now appear in the history books - if the Germans had won the war.

Absurd? No more than the daily descriptions in our media, which are being repeated ad nauseum: the Hamas terrorists use the inhabitants of Gaza as "hostages" and exploit the women and children as "human shields", they leave us no alternative but to carry out massive bombardments, in which, to our deep sorrow, thousands of women, children and unarmed men are killed and injured.

IN THIS WAR, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite.

Almost all the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line. They almost entirely ignored the Palestinian side of the story, not to mention the daily demonstrations of the Israeli peace camp. The rationale of the Israeli government ("The state must defend its citizens against the Qassam rockets") has been accepted as the whole truth. The view from the other side, that the Qassams are a retaliation for the siege that starves the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all.

Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western ; TV screens, did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

True, Western and Israeli TV channels showed only a tiny fraction of the dreadful events that appear 24 hours every day on Al-Jazeera's Arabic channel, but one picture of a dead baby in the arms of its terrified father is more powerful than a thousand elegantly constructed sentences from the Israeli army spokesman. And that is what is decisive, in the end.

War - every war - is the realm of lies. Whether called propaganda or psychological warfare, everybody accepts that it is right to lie for one's country. Anyone who speaks the truth runs the risk of being branded a traitor.

The trouble is that propaganda is most convincing for the propagandist himself. And after you convince yourself that a lie is the truth and falsification reality, you can no longer make rational decisions.

An example of this process surrounds the most shocking atrocity of this war so far: the shelling of the UN Fakhura school in Jabaliya refugee camp.

Immediately after the incident became known throughout the world, the army "revealed" that Hamas fighters had been firing mortars from near the school entrance. As proof they released an aerial photo which indeed showed the school and the mortar. But within a short time the official army liar had to admit that the photo was more than a year old. In brief: a falsification.

Later the official liar claimed that "our soldiers were shot at from inside the school". Barely a day passed before the army had to admit to UN personnel that that was a lie, too. Nobody had shot from inside the school, no Hamas fighters were inside the school, which was full of terrified refugees.

But the admission made hardly any difference anymore. By that time, the Israeli public was completely convinced that "they shot from inside the school", and TV announcers stated this as a simple fact.

So it went with the other atrocities. Every baby metamorphosed, in the act of dying, into a Hamas terrorist. Every bombed mosque instantly became a Hamas base, every apartment building an arms cache, every school a terror command post, every civilian government building a "symbol of Hamas rule". Thus the Israeli army retained its purity as the "most moral army in the world".

THE TRUTH is that the atrocities are a direct result of the war plan. This reflects the personality of Ehud Barak - a man whose way of thinking and actions are clear evidence of what is called "moral insanity", a sociopathic disorder.

The real aim (apart from gaining seats in the coming elections) is to terminate the rule of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In the imagination of the planners, Hamas is an invader which has gained control of a foreign country. The reality is, of course, entirely different.

The Hamas movement won the majority of the votes in the eminently democratic elections that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah's peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state. Hamas is deeply rooted in the population - not only as a resistance movement fighting the foreign occupier, like the Irgun and the Stern Group in the past - but also as a political and religious body that provides social, educational and medical services.

From the point of view of the population, the Hamas fighters are not a foreign body, but the sons of every family in the Strip and the other Palestinian regions. They do not "hide behind the population", the population views them as their only defenders.

Therefore, the whole operation is based on erroneous assumptions. Turning life into living hell does not cause the population to rise up against Hamas, but on the contrary, it unites behind Hamas and reinforces its determination not to surrender. The population of Leningrad did not rise up against Stalin, any more than the Londoners rose up against Churchill.

He who gives the order for such a war with such methods in a densely populated area knows that it will cause dreadful slaughter of civilians. Apparently that did not touch him. Or he believed that "they will change their ways" and "it will sear their consciousness", so that in future they will not dare to resist Israel.

A top priority for the planners was the need to minimize casualties among the soldiers, knowing that the mood of a large part of the pro- war public would change if reports of such casualties came in. That is what happened in Lebanon Wars I and II.

> This consideration played an especially important role because the entire war is a part of the election campaign. Ehud Barak, who gained in the polls in the first days of the war, knew that his ratings would collapse if pictures of dead soldiers filled the TV screens.

Therefore, a new doctrine was applied: to avoid losses among our soldiers by the total destruction of everything in their path. The planners were not only ready to kill 80 Palestinians to save one Israeli soldier, as has happened, but also 800. The avoidance of casualties on our side is the overriding commandment, which is causing record numbers of civilian casualties on the other side.

That means the conscious choice of an especially cruel kind of warfare - and that has been its Achilles heel.

A person without imagination, like Barak (his election slogan: "Not a Nice Guy, but a Leader") cannot imagine how decent people around the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the rows of boys and girls in white shrouds ready for burial, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food. The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world. No argument has any force next to an image of a wounded little girl lying on the floor, twisting with pain and crying out: "Mama! Mama!"

The planners thought that they could stop the world from seeing these images by forcibly preventing press coverage. The Israeli journalists, to their shame, agreed to be satisfied with the reports and photos provided by the Army Spokesman, as if they were authentic news, while they themselves remained miles away from the events. Foreign journalists were not allowed in either, until they protested and were taken for quick tours in selected and supervised groups. But in a modern war, such a sterile manufactured view cannot completely exclude all others - the cameras are inside the strip, in the middle of the hell, and cannot be controlled. Aljazeera broadcasts the pictures around the clock and reaches every home.

THE BATTLE for the TV screen is one of the decisive battles of the war.

Hundreds of millions of Arabs from Mauritania to Iraq, more than a billion Muslims from Nigeria to Indonesia see the pictures and are horrified. This has a strong impact on the war. Many of the viewers see the rulers of Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority as collaborators with Israel in carrying out these atrocities against their Palestinian brothers.

The security services of the Arab regimes are registering a dangerous ferment among the peoples. Hosny Mubarak, the most exposed Arab leader because of his closing of the Rafah crossing in the face of terrified refugees, started to pressure the decision-makers in Washington, who until that time had blocked all calls for a cease- fire. These began to understand the menace to vital American interests in the Arab world and suddenly changed their attitude - causing consternation among the complacent Israeli diplomats.

People with moral insanity cannot really understand the motives of normal people and must guess their reactions. "How many divisions has the Pope?" Stalin sneered. "How many divisions have people of conscience?" Ehud Barak may well be asking.

As it turns out, they do have some. Not numerous. Not very quick to react. Not very strong and organized. But at a certain moment, when the atrocities overflow and masses of protesters come together, that can decide a war.

THE FAILURE to grasp the nature of Hamas has caused a failure to grasp the predictable results. Not only is Israel unable to win the war, Hamas cannot lose it.

Even if the Israeli army were to succeed in killing every Hamas fighter to the last man, even then Hamas would win. The Hamas fighters would be seen as the paragons of the Arab nation, the heroes of the Palestinian people, models for emulation by every youngster in the Arab world. The West Bank would fall into the hands of Hamas like a ripe fruit, Fatah would drown in a sea of contempt, the Arab regimes would be threatened with collapse.

If the war ends with Hamas still standing, bloodied but unvanquished, in face of the mighty Israeli military machine, it will look like a fantastic victory, a victory of mind over matter.

What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet.

In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.

(Ends article by Uri Avnery)

Shlomo Sand's revisionist Israeli history reviewed in France

The Zionist myth exposed ...

(It seems to the webmaster that this review of Shlomo Sand's views are more crisply and clearly expressed in the below review, originally from France, than as his views have been as reviewed in English, for the simple reason that with French no longer being an internationally-used language (no longer a lingua franca, is that ironic?). Simply, a French reviewer may well care not at all about the oppressive weight of international views shared on the issues by the English-speaking world (especially by fundamentalist Christians speaking English and not influenced by Catholicism). In this context, Canada, USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the EU, and anywhere else that literate English is spoken. We approve of the review enough to reproduce it below. The writer is Wayne R. Dynes of New York, (professor, retired), from his blog "dyneslines" at: http://dyneslines.blogspot.com/ All this is about how the racialist delusions of Germany's Nazis have somehow and quite weirdly been imported into the consciousness of world Jewry with unfortunate consequences for world civilization today. And posing great risks for the future of the state of Israel. No one today wants to see fresh holocausts from people-on-people while climate change (nature itself?) poses other and even more long-term risks. -Ed)

Thursday, 19 March, 2009. - The Zionist myth exposed

A new monograph by Shlomo Sand provides a massive challenge to the Zionist myth of the “return” of the Jewish people to Eretz Israel. This book has appeared almost simultaneously in Hebrew (it was a bestseller in Israel) and In French. My comments stem from reading the French version Comment le peuple juif fut inventé (Paris: Fayard, 2008). Author Sand is a professor of history at Tel Aviv University.

Sand begins with a review of the literature on the formation of nations. Broadly speaking, those who have addressed this problem fall into two schools: the primordialists and the constructionists. The former view -- widely, though incorrectly assumed to be simply common sense -- assumes that ethnic essences have existed “since the mists of antiquity.” To shape this primordial heritage into a modern nation two things are necessary: an awakening of ethnic consciousness among the people, and removal of foreign domination -- the latter being perceived as the key obstacle to the “organic” realization of nationhood.

This view has long attracted skeptics, who point out that reconstructions of primordial national histories are all too often laced with myth and wishful thinking.

The best-known exponent of the constructionist view (or “modernist,” as it is sometimes termed) is the British historian Benedict Anderson, who holds that a nation is a community that is socially constructed, that is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Anderson's book, Imagined Communities,” in which he expounds explains the concept, was published in 1983. According to this view, most modern nations are not simply the concretization of long-occulted realities, but deliberate fabrications. An imagined community differs from an actual community because it is not based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity. Nowadays, the media play a major role in creating and sustaining imagined communities, through targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as the public. These communities are understood as both limited (through the maintenance of national boundaries) and sovereign (in the perspective of populism).

Shlomo Sand’s book challenges the Zionist version of the primordialist view of the history of the Jewish people -- and its presumed culmination cum restoration in the state of Israel. Conversely, he advances powerful reasons for adopting the constructionist approach.

According to Sand, the description of the Jews as a migratory and self-isolating nation of exiles, "who wandered across seas and continents, reached the ends of the earth and finally, with the advent of Zionism, reversed course, and returned en masse to their orphaned homeland," is nothing but "national mythology." Like other national movements in Europe, which sought out a splendid Golden Age as the embodiment of a heroic past -- for example, ancient Rome for the Italian risorgimento or the Teutonic tribes for Germany -- to prove they have existed since the beginnings of history, "so, too, the first buds of Jewish nationalism blossomed in the direction of the strong light that has its source in the mythical Kingdom of David."

More particularly, Sand shows that the idea of a “history of the Jewish people” is a relatively recent product encapsulating a series of acts of imagination. Medieval and early modern Christianity created numerous world histories coming down to the time of the writers. Islam offers something similar. Yet, as far as we know, no medieval or early modern rabbi ever attempted such a thing. For the rabbis the Bible, always glimpsed through the lenses of Mishna and Talmud, was mainly a repository of do’s and don’t. As such it was the foundation of Halakha, loosely translated as “Jewish law.”

In fact the first writer to attempt a full-scale history was a French protestant, Jacques Basnage, whose Histoire de la religion des juifs appeared at The Hague in 1706-07. On, and in 1820-28 a German Jewish scholar, Isaak Markus Jost, followed suit. According to Sand, Jost was a German patriot who portrayed the Jews as simply loyal citizens of the countries in which they reside(d). With the massive work of Heinrich Graetz (1853-76) this historiographic enterprise takes a proto-Zionist turn, in that Graetz thinks of the Jewish people as a perennial and supranational entity. With the addition of the territorial component -- return to Eretz Israel -- this view became the foundation of the official histories that emerged in Mandate Palestine and its successor, the state of Israel. With the formation of the state of Israel many of its intellectual defenders sought to root its existence in the biblical record. Ostensibly they were supported by archaeology, though this supposed foundation has turned out to be chimerical.

After exploring the background, Sand turns to his major thesis, that the Jewish people is a composite and not an organic entity. The author holds that the Jews now living in Israel and other places in the world are not simply descendants of the ancient people who inhabited the Kingdom of Judea during the First and Second Temple period. In Sand’s view, their origins lie in the varied peoples that converted to Judaism during the course of history, in different corners of the Mediterranean Basin and the adjacent regions. Not only are the North African Jews for the most part descendants of pagans who converted to Judaism, but so are the Jews of Yemen (remnants of the Himyar Kingdom in the Arab Peninsula, who converted to Judaism in the fourth century) and the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe (many of them refugees from the Central Asian kingdom of the Khazars, who converted in the eighth century).

Many readers of Sand’s book have taken a fancy to Dahia al-Kahina, a leader of the Berbers in the Aurės Mountains. Although she was a proud Jewish woman, few Israelis had ever heard the name of this warrior-queen who, in the seventh century CE, united a number of Berber tribes and pushed back the Muslim army that invaded North Africa. Kahina, a kind of Jewish Boadicea, belonged to a Berber tribe that had converted to Judaism, apparently several generations before she was born, sometime around the sixth century CE. Sand believes that the Jews of al-Andalus (Islamic Spain) stemmed mainly from these Berber converts.

If the Kahina discovery has proved enchanting, not so the renewed emphasis on the Khazars. The information concerning their kingdom has long been known, in part through a popular book by Arthur Koestler, but this news has been slow to penetrate in the state of Israel. This is so, notwithstanding the recent arrival of some 500,000 Jews and wannabes from the nations of the former Soviet Union, who may well represent this Khazar heritage.

In fact, Sand holds that the most crucial demographic addition to the Jewish population of the world came in the wake of the conversion of the kingdom of Khazaria, a huge empire that arose in the Middle Ages on the steppes along the Volga River, which at its height ruled over an area that stretched from the Republic of Georgia of today, to Kiev. In the eighth century, the Khazars rulers adopted the Jewish religion and made Hebrew the written language of the kingdom. Beginning in the tenth century the kingdom weakened; in the thirteenth century is was utterly defeated by Mongol invaders, and its Jewish inhabitants were dispersed.

Sand subscribes to the hypothesis, which was already proposed by historians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, according to which the Judaized Khazars constituted the main demographic source of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe.

"At the beginning of the twentieth century there is a tremendous concentration of Jews in Eastern Europe, three million Jews in Poland alone," he says. "The Zionist historiography claims that their origins are in the earlier Jewish community in Germany, but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."

If this is so, one may ask: if the Jews of Eastern Europe did not come from Germany, why did they speak Yiddish, a Germanic language?

"The [middle-European] Jews were a class of people dependent on the German bourgeoisie in the East, and thus they adopted German words. Here I base myself on the research of linguist Paul Wechsler of Tel Aviv University, who has demonstrated that there is no etymological connection between the German Jewish language of the Middle Ages and Yiddish. As far back as 1828, the Ribal (Rabbi Isaac Ber Levinson) said that the ancient language of the Jews was not Yiddish. Even Ben Zion Dinur, the father of Israeli historiography, was not hesitant about describing the Khazars as the origin of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and describes Khazaria as 'the mother of the diasporas' in Eastern Europe. But more or less since 1967, anyone who talks about the Khazars as the ancestors of the Jews of Eastern Europe is considered naive and moonstruck."

A journalist asked Sand why the idea of the Khazar origins is so threatening?

"It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: 'We came, we won and now we are here' the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our [statist] right to exist."

It is appropriate to ask: is there no justification for this fear?

"No. I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens."

The implication, it seems, is that there is no such thing as a Jewish people.

"I don't recognize an international people. I recognize 'the Yiddish people' that existed in Eastern Europe, which though it is not a nation can be seen as a Yiddishist civilization with a modern popular culture. I think that Jewish nationalism grew up in the context of this 'Yiddish people.' I also recognize the existence of an Israeli people, and do not deny its right to sovereignty. But Zionism and also Arab nationalism over the years are not prepared to recognize it.”

With further regard to Jewish diversity, Shlomo Sand points out that in antiquity, culminating in the Hasmonean kingdom, there were a number of major incorporations of surrounding peoples into the Judaic nucleus. Moreover, there were no major expulsions as a result of the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the repression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135. Before and after, of course, there had been considerable voluntary emigration to various parts of the Roman Empire, accompanied by conversions from the surrounding gentile population. Accordingly, the myth of exile at this time is just that: myth.

"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains. Agreeing with other historians who have treated the same issue, ...

but they do not succeed in explaining how a small number of Jews who came from Mainz and Worms could have founded the Yiddish people of Eastern Europe. The Jews of Eastern Europe are a mixture of Khazars and Slavs who were pushed eastward."

"It is clear that the fear is of an undermining of the historic right to the land. The revelation that the Jews are not from Judea would ostensibly knock the legitimacy for our being here out from under us. Since the beginning of the period of decolonization, settlers have no longer been able to say simply: 'We came, we won and now we are here' the way the Americans, the whites in South Africa and the Australians said. There is a very deep fear that doubt will be cast on our right to exist."

Sand answers: "No. I don't think that the historical myth of the exile and the wanderings is the source of the legitimization for me being here, and therefore I don't mind believing that I am Khazar in my origins. I am not afraid of the undermining of our existence, because I think that the character of the State of Israel undermines it in a much more serious way. What would constitute the basis for our existence here is not mythological historical right, but rather would be for us to start to establish an open society here of all Israeli citizens."

With further regard to Jewish diversity, Shlomo Sand points out that in antiquity, culminating in the Hasmonean kingdom, there were a number of major incorporations of surrounding peoples into the Judaic nucleus. Moreover, there were no major expulsions as a result of the sack of Jerusalem in 70 CE and the repression of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135. Before and after, of course, there had been considerable voluntary immigration to various parts of the Roman Empire, accompanied by conversions from the surrounding gentile population. Accordingly, the myth of exile at this time is just that: myth.

"The supreme paradigm of exile was needed in order to construct a long-range memory in which an imagined and exiled nation-race was posited as the direct continuation of 'the people of the Bible' that preceded it," Sand explains. Agreeing with other historians who have treated the same issue in recent years, he argues that the exile of the Jewish people began as a Christian myth that depicted that event as divine punishment imposed on the Jews for having rejected the Christian gospel.

From all that we can learn from the historical record, most of the Jews residing in Roman Judaea remained there. What then became of them? After 324AD many converted to Christianity; their descendants, most at least, in turn became Muslim. Genetically speaking, today’s Palestinians are Jews. Curiously, this view was maintained by no less a figure that David Ben Gurion in the 1920s. After the Arab uprising in 1929, however, Ben Gurion and his colleague Yitzhak Ben-Zvi abandoned the idea for political reasons.

Does Sand think that in fact the real descendants of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah are the Palestinians?

"No population remains pure over a period of thousands of years. But the chances that the Palestinians are descendants of the ancient Judaic people are much greater than the chances that you or I [his Israeli interviewer] are its descendants. The first Zionists, up until the Arab Revolt [1936-9], knew that there had been no exiling, and that the Palestinians were descended from the inhabitants of the land. They knew that farmers don't leave until they are expelled. Even Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, the second president of the state of Israel, wrote in 1929 that, 'the vast majority of the peasant farmers do not have their origins in the Arab conquerors, but rather, before then, in the Jewish farmers who were numerous and a majority in the building of the land'."

One might think that Shlomo Sand would welcome the information stemming from DNA evidence as reinforcement for his views regarding the composite nature of the Jewish people. Yet he does not, pointing to the often-contradictory and ideological nature of the findings as they are reported in the press. It is true that some unlikely claims have been made, including the hailing of the so-called “Aaronic gene.” a component that has been found not only among the Palestinians, but also among Greeks and Kurds! One finding, though, is of interest to his thesis. While the genes of the Kohanim (the Cohens) prove to be largely derived from the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, the genes of Ashkenazic Levites, the other major priestly group, have a strong Central Asian component. This finding would tend to reinforce the Khazar thesis.

As Sand points out, the Y chromosome, which is usually the focus of these studies, serves only to follow the male line, since only males have this chromosome. Historical evidence suggests that at various stages of Jewish history -- for example the formative years of the Ashkenazim -- foreign women were involved in small numbers. The absence of evidence from the female line is embarrassing, since one’s Jewish status is determined, according to the rabbis, by whether one has a Jewish mother or not.

Sand does admit the value of genetic research in helping to detect and combat inherited disorders, such as Tay-Sachs Disease. In all likelihood, the quality of genetic research will improve. As it does, the results are likely to reinforce Shlomo Sand’s persuasive conclusions deriving from his attentive study of the historical record.

Sand’s vision stretches forwards as well as backwards. “If Israel does not develop and become an open, multicultural society we will have a Kosovo in the Galilee. The consciousness concerning the right to this place must be more flexible and varied, and if I have contributed with my book to the likelihood that I and my children will be able to live with the others here in this country in a more egalitarian situation, I will have done my bit." he said.

"We must begin to work hard to transform our place into an Israeli republic where ethnic origin, as well as faith, will not be relevant in the eyes of the law. Anyone who is acquainted with the young elites of the Israeli Arab community can see that they will not agree to live in a country that declares it is not theirs. If I were a Palestinian I would rebel against a state like that, but even as an Israeli I am rebelling against it."

(Ends the review of Sand's book)

The Case Against Israel's "Right To Exist"

By Roger Tucker, 14 March, 2009, Countercurrents.org

An Open Letter to Representative David Price (D) 4th District, NC, USA

As you know, Mr. Price, I was invited to join a group of activists who met with you Monday morning to urge you to take action regarding the siege of Gaza, the Occupation and American support for Israel. I declined to attend because my particular focus is on One State advocacy, and you have made it crystal clear that this is not your view, nor is it ever likely to be (unless and until, in the due course of time, it becomes politically expedient). You represent the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill), fondly known as the pat of butter in a sea of grits, a highly educated, liberal, metropolitan area that votes heavily Democratic. You received 63% of the vote in the recent election, and fly under the "progressive" flag. Yet you voted for House Resolution 34, supporting Israel's massacre in Gaza.

Dr. Sarah Shields of UNC took you to task for that in her excellent article, but biting and accurate as that was, she only went halfway. All of the actions you were urged to take are mere palliatives .They would serve no other purpose than to apply a little band-aid to a wound so deep and life threatening that the patient belongs in the Intensive Care Unit (too bad the hospital was bombed out of existence).

That sort of thing makes progressives feel good about themselves but doesn't even begin to address the real problem, which is the continued existence of the State of Israel. To say such a thing is the most blasphemous conceivable heresy from the Zionist perspective, which they have managed to convince most Americans is a sane and reasonable point of view. But, like the "official" version of the Holocaust, that other jury-rigged pillar supporting the edifice of the Rube Goldberg contraption called Israel, it is actually sane and reasonable to call such dogmas into question. From the point of view of science and history, of reason and the pursuit of truth, there can be no forbidden subjects, or we take the risk of returning to the Dark Ages.

So let us examine this curious notion that Israel has some sort of inherent "right to exist," a claim that no other nation-state has ever felt it necessary to make. We would all agree that human beings have a right to exist, although there are many who would make an exception for those who commit murder. Some even go further and say that all sentient beings have a right to exist, but only in this one peculiar case is there this insistence that a particular nation-state has such an inalienable right. Why is that? Is it, perhaps, because in this particular case the contention is on particularly shaky ground? Sorry, but methinks the lady protesteth too much. We can't, particularly as Americans, question Israel's right to exist on the basis that they commit mass murder - so many nations, including our own, have routinely done so. Nor can we merely point to the fact that Israel is an ethnocentric colonial-settler state - patterned on the now universally abhorred orgy of 19th century European colonialism - which has established itself through a long, ongoing process of genocide against the indigenous population.

Would pointing out that Israel is a xenophobic, racist state that has been practicing ethnic cleansing since its inception do the trick? How about making the case that Israel practices a form of apartheid that observers like Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu say is worse than what existed in South Africa - would that suffice? What about the numerous crimes against humanity, serial violations of the fundamental principles of the UN enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Then, of course, one might say that Israel's flagrant flouting of International Law would be sufficient, or the fact that Israel has refused to even acknowledge numerous UN resolutions, let alone abide by them, or the commission of numerous war crimes, as perpetrated during the recent holocaust in Gaza,. Wasn't the not forgotten false flag attack on the USS Liberty in itself sufficient cause to change course? Still not enough? How about the clandestine development of nuclear weapons irrespective of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel refused to sign? These facts are beginning to add up - perhaps the combination of the above would be sufficient to make the case.

The Zionists chose to locate their Jewish State in Palestine, of all places. Actually, the idea was first cooked up by the British Home Office in the early 19th Century, one of many strategies contemplated to establish and secure the Empire. That came to nought, but the notion was popular in some circles and gained renewed momentum when Theodor Herzl popularized a paranoid scheme to create an impregnable ghetto somewhere, anywhere, where the Jewish People would at long last be insulated from the consequences of their actions. After shopping around, Palestine was chosen. This was the result of various coincidences; the sentimental attachment to their supposed origin in the Holy Land, as expressed in the venerable saying "Next year in Jerusalem," that it also happened to promise proxy control over the resources and markets of the Middle East, as well as offering a simple and convenient means for the Europeans to rid themselves, once again, of the accursed Jews (as they were nearly universally perceived).

The land, however, was already populated, and thus began the organized hasbara (Heb: propaganda) campaign that has reached a crescendo in our time, to the point that Zionism now has effective control of the entire Western world, with even the Vatican paying obeisance to their Zionist Inquisitors. They said, "A land without a people, for a people without a land" (coined by Lord Shaftesbury, 1853). The brazen self-deception and lying had begun, and has only gathered steam over time. And how were they going to reconcile a dream based firmly within the tradition of the Western Enlightenment, replete with democratic ideals and socialist idealism, with the stark reality of colonizing someone else's land against their will? The idealists at that time were in the firm majority, so, in the spirit of Cecil Rhodes and their own version of Manifest Destiny, they conjured up a vision of enlightened Westerners (never mind that the new settlers were the widely detested Eastern European ashkenazim , the scattered turko-finnic remnants of the Khazarian Empire, established by tribes allied with Attila the Hun) uplifting the primitive peoples of the Orient (never mind that the Palestinians were a highly cosmopolitan and civilized people consisting of Muslims, Christians and Jews - largely secular - who all got along rather swimmingly).

They would buy the land fair and square and build a veritable City of Light in Jerusalem, or so the story went. It would be a bi-national state shared between the natives and the newcomers. This was cultural Zionism, primarily a product of the idealistic Viennese and other Western European Jews, which predominated until the early days of the Third Reich, at which time a much darker form of Zionism (a near mirror image of Nazism) began to gain ascendancy among the immigrant Jews in Palestine. This was the political Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky, and with it came the original outrages of Middle Eastern terrorism at the hands of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, directed at both their Arab neighbors and the representatives of the British Mandate. The leaders of these terror organizations became the future Prime Ministers of Israel, Menachem Begin among them (Albert Einstein's warning was and is applicable to all of them), and this tradition has continued into another generation in the person of Tzipi Livni, the current Foreign Minister and daughter of Eitan Livni and Sara Rosenberg, both prominent former Irgun members. Israel is a terrorist organization masquerading as a nation.

Israel has been more or less continuously at war with its neighbors as well as the indigenous population since its inception. It has made no serious attempt to resolve the conflict other than through force, stonewalling and subversion (Oslo, Annapolis and Camp David were all charades), only a steady, seemingly inexorable process of bringing to fruition the Zionist dream of Greater Israel - either the more grandiose version that would encompass all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, or the relatively modest one, from the Jordan River to the sea. Through financial and political arm-twisting, relentless hasbara that has established the fanciful Zionist narrative as "history" in the popular mind, and using the Holocaust to guilt-trip the craven and gullible Western world, the secular fascist ideology of Zionism and its quasi-religious sibling, the Holocult, have, in a very real sense, also conquered the West. An extraordinarily successful campaign one might say, the ultimate real estate scam, but one that is doomed, as it is based only on lies and greed, violence, bribery and extortion.

Merely pointing out that the State of Israel is an abomination on moral, ethical and legal grounds (and religious ones) is perhaps insufficient, but we can do better than that. We Americans are known for being a pragmatic people, so let's look at it from that perspective. I'll use a few analogies from the field of medicine to illustrate what I mean.

Zionism has been compared to a virus, even to a viral meme complex. The latter usage is apropos, but I'm referring to its biological meaning. It is an adaptation by a primitive organism that allows it to invade a host body and then multiply many fold, often inflicting serious injury on the host and sometimes even death. The original host was Palestine, but viruses are often contagious and may even cause epidemics, and there is no shred of a doubt that Zionism has become a major pandemic. It has already done enormous damage to the interests of the United States, and it threatens the well-being of the entire human race - in the worst case scenario, which is not all that far fetched, it threatens to plunge the world into a major nuclear conflagration.

Sometimes a useful plant is improved by grafting on a part from a closely related species, resulting in a beneficial hybrid. Grafting is also used in medicine, as in skin grafts. It is elementary to observe that the practitioners of these specialties must take great care to avoid rejection of the graft, or organ in the case of human transplants - otherwise the graft does harm to the host or patient, and often leads to death. Therefore, one would suppose that a group of people, with little in the way of military might and intending to colonize a foreign land would take sensible precautions to avoid such an outcome. In the case of the early 19th century Zionist "pioneers" in Palestine there was a healthy awareness of such dangers and therefore a tendency to act like civilized human beings. But as time went on and the settlers became much stronger vis-a-vis the locals such precautions were cast to the winds, and were replaced by the hoary adage that might makes right.

The logical result of such a malignant grafting technique is the death of the host, as we have been witnessing over the last agonizing 60 years. And what, then, happens to the graft - can it survive by replacing the host? Perhaps, if the host had merely been Palestine, but the difficulty here is that Palestine was in many ways the hub of the Middle East and remains at the heart of the Islamic world, the larger host in this case. Can the graft survive in the midst of 1.2 billion people that have been outraged to the point of vowing that sooner or later, whatever it takes, the graft will get the shaft? As they say in medicine, the adverse side affects far outweigh any benefit and therefore the procedure is contra-indicated.

Last but not least, Israel resembles most closely a malignant tumor. It exists in a state of war with its host, sucking the life blood out of it. There are various modalities for dealing with such a tumor. One is to cut off its supply of blood, but we do just the opposite. Another is to improve the health and bolster the immune system of the affected patient. We do just the opposite. In the end it will have to be killed. There are various ways of doing this, from poisoning it with radiation and/or chemicals to having it surgically removed. It would be good if such drastic and dangerous methods could be avoided, but they are inevitable if in the meantime the tumor is not only allowed, but encouraged, to grow. The benign method, not available to modern medicine but easily achieved through political intervention, is to transform the whole of Palestine into a healthy, thriving. multiethnic democracy. Isn't that what we preach to the world (except in this one instance)? All it would take is a worldwide movement, similar to that which brought down apartheid South Africa. It is very doable, but decent, compassionate, aware people - people who pay more than mere lip service to such notions as peace and justice - need to stop pussyfooting around and get on the same page.

Israel cannot exist except in a state of war with an external enemy. Those who have lived there, like myself, know full well that absent a unifying enemy, Israelis would go at one another like cats and dogs and the so-called State would quickly dissolve into chaos. After all, Israel is comprised of a melting pot population that is only nominally "Jewish" and has no commonality other than the mostly fictitious Zionist narrative, a resurrected dead language, and the dubious opportunity to lord it over the untermenschen. It is only the Zionist elite who benefit by this ongoing tragedy - ordinary Israelis and Jews worldwide are as much victims of this scheme as are the Palestinians. They haven't suffered to anywhere near the same extent yet, but give it time. History has a way of repeating itself, and we all know that what goes around comes around. I can tell you that Jews like myself, who are aware of what has been going on and can see the handwriting on the wall, have no great desire to be up against the wall when the shit hits the fan.

As in South Africa, when the bloom began to fade from the rose - ah, the romantic and inspiring tale of the Afrikaaners as the 13th tribe of Israel! - the Israeli government has been desperately trying to combat the demographic problem by importing many thousands of pseudo-Jews, as well as trying to bribe the Persian Jews (at $10K/head). That was the rationale for importing the Ethiopians, hundreds of thousands of Russians who merely have to declare that they are Jews no matter how far-fetched (or purely fictitious) the connection, and now they have gone so far as to ship in Peruvian Incas no less. They'll take anybody, as long as they aren't Palestinians (the rightful owners of the land) or Muslims from anywhere. In spite of all that, there has been a net loss of population in the last two years as the rats begin to leave the ship.

Congressman Price, isn't it high time something were done about this, that Americans finally stand up and stop acting like pitiful sheep with wool covering their eyes? And don't even think about mentioning the so called "two state solution," that fraudulent scam, that ridiculous fig-leaf for further ethnic cleansing, or any of the other lame excuses for procrastinating (I've heard them all), like waiting for the Palestinians to take the lead. Don't you think they would jump at the chance (70% support a one-state solution in historic Palestine where Muslims, Christians and Jews would live together with equal rights and responsibilities), or do you think they're stupid?

Little talked about are the obvious benefits to the Israelis (even the Zionists). At long last they could have the peace and security that they, like any other people, long for. They would have the option of living anywhere they choose in Palestine, without having to act like ravening beasts. In cooperation with the Palestinians and the neighboring peoples, they could develop a healthy, prosperous and respected country and region. And if this all happens voluntarily, while the demographics are still on their side, they could negotiate an advantageous deal that would leave them with much of what they now have, and without the enormous expense of an incredibly out-sized military or the threat of eventual destruction. That would truly be a real victory for the Israelis, for all Jews, for the Palestinians and for everyone else - what they call a win-win situation. But the clock is ticking.

The choice is, theoretically, among four possible solutions. Which among them would you choose, based on the best available information? It is, as they say, a no-brainer.

Roger Tucker is a writer and activist living in the Triangle, NC. He is a committed advocate for the One State Solution re Israel. He is thinking of moving out of the country, perhaps to Mexico, conceivably to Tierra del Fuego, maybe even off planet, although he worries that he might be getting too old to learn a new language. This essay was first published on his website: http://onestate.info on13 March, 2009 and copying the article if attributed is acceptable usage -Ed.

Weird report cannot be vouched for

(The below item is posted simply because it arrived to the webmaster on 6-3-2009. It seems to have come from an Australian via a German website via a source in Iran. It cannot be vouched for, but it raises a variety of issues, including curiosity about a decided sense of mischief/malice, on the part of ... who? - Ed.

INTERPOL issues denial of reported Iranian request seeking arrest of 15 senior Israeli officials

Statement by INTERPOL General Secretariat headquarters, Lyon, France

02 March 2009

While INTERPOL does not ordinarily comment on false stories reported in the media, in light of the nature of recent erroneous articles reporting that INTERPOL is being used by Iranian authorities to seek the arrest of 15 senior Israeli officials on alleged charges of war crimes in Gaza, the Organization is taking the unusual step of making the following public statement:

"INTERPOL has neither been requested to issue by Iran, nor has it issued on behalf of Iran or any of its 187 member countries any Red Notices for persons wanted internationally or other requests seeking the arrest of senior Israeli officials for alleged war crimes in relation to the Gaza offensive in December [2008] and January."

INTERPOL's Constitution strictly prohibits the Organization from making 'any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character'

. All further enquiries should be directed to the source reported in the media. Since INTERPOL has received no information in relation to the alleged false claim, INTERPOL is unable to comment further on this matter.

Israel versus Hamas?

Or is it really that simple by January 2009?

Early January 2009: Something needs to be said. Many things need to be said ... In January 2009, Israel risks exhausting the world's remaining compassion and empathy following the Holocaust of World War Two. Compassion and empathy fatigue have set in.

Between "9.11", 11 September 2001 and 2008, the USA totally squandered the worth of any sympathy the world might have wished to give it after that disastrous event in New York. Much the same - empathy fatigue due to perceptions of the sympathy-recipient demonstrating bad faith - now applies to Israel.

(The question is: how and why do States suffer a problem, worth empathising with, but then develop bad faith and waste any sympathy given to them? The question is unanswerable in human nature, actually. One may as well ask Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe such a question. His answer will not be useful, since he is quite insane.)

Over the Christmas/New Year break, this website received e-mail from members of Socialist Alliance Australia, with tired-old, pilgeristic views on the current conflict, the usual "this is dreadful and outrageous" stuff. The webmaster hardly felt, while witnessing a renewed outbreak of Middle Eastern Madness, that the predictable views of age-ing Australian lefties will be relevant. But what will be relevant?

By 3 January 2009, the Israel versus Hamas scenario is reminiscent of the insane USA versus USSR formula of the Cold War, MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). Or is it, just possibly, worse than that? It's worse. What is at stake are today's views of the human versus the theological legitimacy of the State of Israel. (In the opinion of this website, theology loses, as it should do, ok.)

It seems to this website that it's a very old and very Talmudic/Rabbinical proposition - that he who hurts people hurts God - and vice versa. This website, while agnostic in religion, thinks that this is very true, and a very good way to look at things, in its way ... it seems to pan out. And that to the extent that it is true in human affairs, the State of Israel has sheer hell to come!

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Delving into the preposterous

A friend of this website during 2008 regularly cruised the Net and found huge resources of comment on contemporary perceptions of the modern state of Israel and ideologies girding it, surrounding it, threatening it. Some of the comment was pro-Israel, some of it anti. There is a LOT of propaganda around, and much of it can be regarded as unreliable. The single-most memorable word used came from a pro-Palestinian writer, regarding the "preposterous" claims of the Israelis regarding a right to possession of territory in Palestine, based on Biblical findings. (As explored from many angles in opinions given below.)

Not that the cynically civilian-wasting Hamas is perfect either, or non-guilty of crimes against humanity, not least against its own people. Hamas is hiding behind the human shield of its own people while with random-but-vehement passion it fires its unsophisticated rockets into Israel, hoping for the worst effects, and then complaining in non-random and rather more sophisticated fashion to the world's media about the somewhat predictable response. There is a cynicism here that is far more pathological than mere world-weariness.

For the situation here is complex. Hamas hides behind its civilians and fires randomly but often unsuccessfully into Israel. Achieves a low kill rate. Annoyed Israel finally mounts a campaign of military retaliation against Hamas' rocket-firing agents, hardly surprising, but we see that since the notables of Hamas hide in odd places near or behind civilians, in effect, Israel, with superior fire power, is landing rockets with near randomness into a cooped-up civilian population. With a high kill rate. That is, two populations here are landing rockets on each other at random: in fact, on the basis of two different kinds of "randomness". As warfare, it's asymmetric. As maths of randomness, it's asymmetric. The political and ideological arguments are asymmetric. Why would anyone expect the outcomes to be rational, or symmetric? Or useful? Or future-orientated?

This is a war of the lethality of exploding asymmetric randomness. If the Frenchman who observed the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean war can be paraphrased here, we might say, "This is NOT magnificent, and it is NOT war." So, what is it?

This is a modern-day David-versus-Goliath contest. But what odds? Hamas would be extremely well-advised to cease shooting rockets into Israel. Israel would be well-advised to negotiate more effectively with Hamas, read, with disgruntled Muslims (?). With displaced Palestinians?

Plainly, the once-displaced Palestinians need their own State, which in terms of respectability ought to be a modern, democratic, non-theocratic, multicultural society. And the same for Israel - modern, democratic, non-theocratic (dropping Biblical preposterousness), and multicultural. Modern Israel only has one option - the more theologically humble, non-chutzpah option. Both sides need to drop the God-thing and start the Human-Co-operation thing. If they don't, the rest of humanity can only leave them to their use of their lethal, random, asymmetric devices as best they see fit.

There is no good reason, from 2009, why the "Holy City" of Jerusalem should not be welcoming to many/all cultures, on an if-not, why-not basis (if it doesn't or can't do this, these days, it is obviously not holy! Enough said!)

It could be simple, but anyone well-read might easily predict that Tradition, that's right, all the Respectables of Tradition these past 1500 years or so, will conspire to ensure that it fails to become simple. Which brings us back to the lethality of exploding asymmetric randomness. (The pro-Zionist Einstein once said that God does not play dice with the Universe. But he never said that God does not play dice with Death.)

David and Goliath - long ago

	Image lifted from the Net Israel versus Hamas In early 2009, who is David and who is Goliath? And who is the most wise? And who the most dead in spirit? And who will win?

A David and Goliath contest, except for one very important and very modern point - Israel has nuclear capability but dare not use it close to its own territory. Sensible. But this means that Israel's closest neighbours, if they wish, can move in closer and closer with no fear of nuclear retaliation. More conventional tactics can be used. Which brings us to the present discussion. About the effects of random bombings. Which are probably far worse than the effects of random suicide bombers, since "random bombings" come out of the sky.

This webpage has a very peculiar attitude here, a little personal. The webmaster was born in 1948, the year that Israel was created as a state. At age 60, the webmaster finds that Israel is being bombed by a neighbour, and is bombing a neighbour. The webmaster finds himself not being bombed by his neighbours and not bombing them. Life is peaceful. What then could be wrong with the State of Israel? Zionist ideology, perhaps? (See below.)

The Israeli government now claims that the rocket attacks from Hamas on the Gaza Strip are unacceptable, which they are. But it appears that the comparative death rates re Israel versus Gaza Strip are about 100 to one with the Gazans (the Davids of the conflict here) the losers. Who is David vs Goliath here? What about Biblical allusions drawn from much the same territory? What changes occur in history re disputes re control of territory? Does it come down to apartheid? To genocide?

At this point, this webpage takes a point of departure that today's mainstream media would never countenance ... an observation from Thomas Pynchon's amazing novel, Gravity's Rainbow (well, the webmaster reads widely).

The literary problem of random rocket attacks

	Image lifted from the Net: The cover of the amazing Pynchon novel read, and re-read, and re-read, by the webmaster.

As novel, Gravity's Rainbow begins with the time when Nazi Germany was buzz-bombing London, randomly. Novelist Pynchon makes much of the effect of the simple randomness of the threat on London's people. We know from history, anyway, that Germany's random buzz-bombing of London, and England, where-ever it happened, encouraged the British response - massive incendiary bombings of German cities including Dresden. So this webpage in early 2009 wonders why Hamas would bother with an old tactic like random bombings? Are Hamas not too bright? Are Hamas over-imaginative with it? Don't they realise that random bombings (which might seem quite fun from the bomber's side?) simply encourage ultra-fierce and not entirely rational response from the army of the people being randomly bombed (?).

It's a European outlook, apparently: "Never declare a war you don't think you can win". But someone said to us in reply here: Maybe that's just a European formula, not recognised in the Middle East? Which took us aback quite a bit, and quite suddenly! Not unlike a random bombing drop, really.

What did this person have in mind? The older and particularly poisonous Middle Eastern formula, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"? Was he imagining that Hamas in early 2009 is hoping for military support against Israel from Moslem friends around the region? (And the Ayatollah of Iran reportedly has given this kind of support in principle.) And if Israel even suspects this, what will Israel then think, militarily?

To the propaganda wars, then ...

It's no secret on the Net, a great many allegations are being made that before 1939, and the outbreak of WWII, that named Jewish Zionist officials besotted with crypto-Nazi notions of "racial Purity" and "blood and soil" ideology made "accommodations" with Nazi officialdom about a resettlement of Jews in "the Holy Land" ... The worst direction this line of propaganda takes is that the said Zionists consigned European Jews who did not wish to emigrate and resettle, to the fatality of the non-mercies of the Nazis. That is, non-Zionist Jews at the hands of the Nazis became a blood sacrifice for not heeding the wishes of the Zionists. Few worse things could be alleged, but this strain of opinion is being assiduously propagandised on the net - though we don't yet know by whom - and indications of 2008 are that these allegations take even professional Holocaust deniers by surprise, even they are quite unprepared for it. See below for one example-

Sent: Monday, November 10, 2008 10:50 AM Subject: Zionist Collaboration with Nazis

Book Review

51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis, By Lenni Brenner, (Ed.), Barricade Books, 2002, 342 pp. List: $22; AET: $15.

Reviewed by Sara Powell

It's no secret that Zionism embraced political expediency to advance the cause of carving Eretz-Israel from the land of its native inhabitants. In his 1983 book, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Lenni Brenner shows that 20th century Zionists observed shockingly few limits to that expediency. Not surprisingly, the book received little coverage in the American media. Now, in 51 Documents, Brenner has compiled a wide variety of letters, statements, articles, and judgements-some of which appeared in his earlier book - by a broad array of activists and authors, that documents Zionist cooperation with the Nazis. On the face of it, the notion seems absurd. However, Brenner presents the case-made in many Zionists' own words - that the Nazi agenda of expelling the Jews from Germany fit nicely with the Zionist plan for enticing those Jews into settling in Palestine and creating a new Jewish nation.

In addition to introductory and concluding chapters, the book is organized into five sections which lead the reader through early, pre-Zionist documents; pre-Holocaust ideological factions; the Holocaust era itself; and a chapter on the Stern Gang and the Nazis. Readers should note that a few documents are not indicative of collaboration in and of themselves, but provide the background to others written in response. These latter do indicate levels of collaboration between Zionists and fascists, both the Nazis in Germany, and those in Mussolini's Italy. Brenner's brief explanatory notes at the beginning of each document are helpful, as are the glossary and index.

51 Documents assumes a certain knowledge of Zionist history, and requires a close reading and some deconstructive efforts on the part of the reader. Those willing to commit the time and effort, however, are rewarded with some stunning revelations. The reason some Zionists eschewed the boycott against Hitler's Germany, for instance, is that they had a financial deal-Ha'avara-with Germany allowing Jews to exchange their wealth for goods to be exported to Palestine at less of a loss, as an incentive to emigrate. Those wondering why Zionists today are so organized and experienced in their public relations efforts discover that these battles have been fought before. Moreover, the section on Nazi and Zionist understandings of "nationality" versus citizenship reveals how German and Israeli practices are based on the same concept.

51 Documents also sheds a whole new light on the term "Holocaust guilt," frequently understood to mean Western, non-Jewish guilt for not acting against the Holocaust earlier. However, these documents make it clear that Holocaust guilt began with those Zionists who made the undoubtedly difficult, but politically expedient choice to place Eretz-Israel at the top of their priorities, above the lives of their threatened European brethren.

From a Zionist Executive Meeting speech by Yitzhak Gruenbaum on 18 February, 1943:

And when some asked me: "Can't you give money from Keren Ha Yesod (Palestine Foundation Fund) to save Jews in the Diaspora?" I said: "No!" And again I say no....And, because of these things, people called me an anti-Semite, and concluded that I'm guilty, for the fact that we don't give ourselves completely to rescue actions. (p. 211)

However difficult it may be, the reader must confront some rather disturbing conclusions. The most unsettling realization for this reviewer is that pre-Holocaust Zionists were able to politically align themselves with the Nazis because both groups fundamentally saw race as an important dividing line - and, moreover, were determined to keep it that way. From Vladimir Jabotinsky to Albert Einstein, "assimilation" of Jews into the societies in which they lived was not an acceptable option. Rather, Jewish nationalism required equality on a national level, not a personal one. As Jabotinsky explained, "It is impossible for a man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different from his own" (p. 10); in Einstein's words, "Palestine is first and foremost not a refuge for East European Jews, but the incarnation of a reawakening sense of national solidarity" (p. 29). Finally, David Yisraeli, a member of the Stern Gang, wrote the following in late 1940, as part of a proposal to Hitler. It was delivered in 1941 to two German diplomats in Lebanon.

3. The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East (p. 301).

Such beliefs, of course, were not limited to Nazis and Zionists. Scientific and philosophical constructs of the day considered such differentiation legitimate, and ideas of racial difference-and, therefore, racial supremacy-were practiced around the world.

Another disturbing conclusion a reader must inevitably face is that Zionists learned both tactical and political lessons from the Nazis and that, even today, these lessons are applied to further the Zionist cause. Although most likely known to potential readers of this book, another disturbing element is the cover-up of the less than savory roles of current Israeli leaders, including former prime ministers, in the terrorist Irgun and Stern Gang just before, during, and after the Holocaust. Likewise, the succumbing of various US officials to Zionist pressure is a familiar, but distressing, story.

51 Documents seems to represent a renewed attempt by Brenner to bring information regarding Zionist collaboration with the Nazis to U.S. supporters of Israel, as well as to Jews and Muslims, in order to expand dialogue with knowledge, and save lives-both Palestinian and Israeli-in the process. Readers of 51 Documents will find it difficult not to remove the rose-coloured glasses that so many seem to wear when examining Zionism.

Sara Powell is AET's administrative and public relations director.

Home > Archives > Sept_2004 > 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With the Nazis --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The below material re DNA testing of Israelis was received by this website on 16 September 2008 from an e-mailer friend who tracks interesting issues. We have taken it from another webpage of this website and re-posted it here, as it's important in the interests of rationality - Ed

A Clinical Resolution of the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict

For the past few years, a number of peace activists have proposed a novel way to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The beauty of their proposal is in its simplicity. Exploiting recent advances in science, they suggest that a little clinical analysis would straighten out the warped minds of many a delusional Zionist and create a psychologically positive environment for a rational resolution to the conflict between the natives of the Holy Land and their European tormentors.

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DNA studies can conclusively prove that the Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine and that the Israelis are mostly of Eastern European Yiddish ancestry or descendants of assorted non-Palestinian Middle Eastern and North African Jews. In fact, a comprehensive DNA study would retire the entire body of Zionist mythology to the scrap heap of history. The conclusions of such a probe would certainly be a great stride in the direction of a permanent peace and a just resolution of this conflict.

Such a scientific endeavor would immediately provide a few simple answers to some very basic questions. Are Israelis just Palestinian wannabes? Do they covet Palestinian ancestry as well as Palestinian real estate? How intellectually warped do you have to be to even consider the preposterous theology of the Zionist cult? The answers provided by a comprehensive DNA study will certainly focus the minds of delirious Israelis who strut about proclaiming themselves of Holy Land pedigree.

Zionism is an ideological relic of the late nineteenth century that has been resurrected by the loonies who subscribe to the Evangelical Judaeo-Christian Identity movement. At its core, this European political movement was all about Manifest Destiny, chosen white people, and by extension, disposable Middle Eastern natives. It is the white supremacy movement of old - adorned in a new garb laced with a veneer of values and heritage.

One can only imagine what the Holy Land would be like had its fate not fallen into the hands of Lord Balfour and the other racist social engineers of the British Empire who thought nothing of eradicating a whole non-European nation. Had it not been for the advent of the Zionist movement, the Palestinians would probably be the most honored people on the planet - if only for passing on their monotheistic traditions and Abrahamic values to their brothers and sisters around the globe.

Being a Palestinian must be a mind-warping experience. Consider a very short version of their tragic story: Their ancestors - the ancient wise men of the Holy Land - inspired by the most credible creation mythology, took the risk of exporting their illuminating spiritual experience to the rest of the world. For going to the trouble of sharing their creed, their descendants now pay the stiff price of losing their ancestral lands. Out of the blue, thousands of years later, a deranged messianic fool like Tom Delay emerges from some back alley in Texas with an eviction notice and George Bush shows up with a posse to help Sharon enforce it. The Palestinians ask the messianic nuts why they do what they do and they respond that they were inspired by something one of your ancestors might have said a few thousand years ago.

Folks like Tom Delay believe that decimating the Palestinians paves the road to Armageddon. I am certain [that] if the scriptures said the road to Armageddon went through Crawford, Delay would show up at Dubya's ranch riding a Caterpillar bulldozer.

Every Zionist - whether Jewish or Evangelical - believes that Palestinians Christians and Muslims deserve to be evicted from their native lands because they consistently fail a medieval test of faith in the Jewish creed. No matter, that the Palestinians are the only verifiable progeny of the very same ancients who wrote both the Old and the New Testament. In the warped mind of Tom Delay, the legacy of inspirational Palestinian liturgy - a gift to the world from their Holy Land ancestors - is reason enough for the collective punishment of modern-day Palestinians and the wholesale confiscation of their patrimony. The Palestinians are not burdened with the sins of their fathers - but with the spiritual gifts of their ancestors.

Today, ten million people live in the land of Palestine (Israel and the occupied territories). About 55% of them are Israeli Jews and the rest are descendents of the indigenous native people who are aptly called Palestinians. It should be noted that another six million Palestinians continue to live in exile as refugees, making up the single largest refugee population in the world. So, about eleven million Palestinians all over the planet can claim descent from the ancient people of the Holy Land.

All told, we have a conflict that involves about sixteen million people - eleven million native Palestinians and five million uninvited invaders of the Jewish faith. One might also consider adding in the nine million or so Jews who live outside Israel - although I suspect a vast majority of them might not be aware they have a conflict with the Palestinians.

A comprehensive DNA study would not just benefit the collective mental health of delusional Israelis who fancy themselves of Semitic origin. Many Palestinians are also in denial as to their Jewish heritage and their blood relations to the ancient Hebrew tribes. Before they became Christians, they were Jewish or Hellenic. Before many of them converted to Islam, they were Christian. When people speak of Masada, it is the Palestinians who should gloat with pride at the heroism of their ancient warriors. When the conversation turns to the legacy of Jesus of Nazareth, it is the Palestinians who should claim him as the greatest son of Palestine.

The Palestinians were the first nation to profess Judaism and the first to rally around Jesus - forming the nucleus of what eventually became a universal religion. They were also the first people, outside of Arabia, to convert to Islam. Their imprint on the three major branches of the Abrahamic traditions is unmistakable.

What we have here is mass confusion about collective identity. The European Zionists believe themselves of ancient Palestinian pedigree and the natives of the Holy Land have some kind of collective mental block that prevents them from taking pride in the scriptural feats of their Hebrew ancestors.

Unlike the Palestinians, the Arabic-speaking natives of Lebanon embrace their Phoenician heritage. Egyptian Copts and Muslims no longer worship Pharonic deities. But the native people of the Nile Valley continue to cherish their inheritance from the glorious ancient civilization built by their ancestors. Jordanians lay claim to the legacy of the Nabateans and the natives of Damascus boast that their city is the oldest continuously-inhabited metropolis on the planet. The fact that their tongues now communicate in Arabic has not diminished their zeal in honoring the pre-Arab cultures of their ancestors.

The Palestinians should follow the example of their neighbors and make exclusive claim to the heritage of the ancient people of the Holy Land. Let the Yiddish intruders carry the burden of discovering their authentic roots and redesigning their family tree.

This is not to suggest that the Yiddish folk who now lord over Palestine should be ashamed of their central European past. Most people of European heritage eventually manage to adjust to their ancestors' legacy. If the Zionists need therapy to cross the identity bridge to [recognition of] their true heritage, the Palestinians should be gracious enough to pay for the couch. Give the Israelis a little space to reacquaint themselves with their real parents before obliging them to abandon the mythological lineage they have adopted.

At its core, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict comes down to extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Those who are committed to resolving this murderous genocidal conflict should work to infuse a little rational DNA tonic into the volatile mix.

Israelis are always boasting about how modern and advanced they are. Maybe a sampling of the wonders of DNA science will help them discover that they shouldn't confiscate other people's land and try to cover up their crimes with collective identity theft?

From their own mouths

See: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2008/12/31/israel-s-history-in-quotes?tempskin=basic
On Apartheid Israel go to: www.exposingisraeliapartheid.com/

The Peoples Voice @ thepeoplesvoice.org Israel's History in Quotes 12/31/08 06:15:52 am Window into Palestine

What their own mouths said ...

Hebrew essayist Achad Ha-Am, after paying a visit to Palestine in 1891: "Abroad we are accustomed to believe that Israel is almost empty; nothing is grown here and that whoever wishes to buy land could come here and buy what his heart desires. In reality, the situation is not like this. Throughout the country it is difficult to find cultivable land which is not already cultivated."

Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine, Complete Diaries, 12 June, 1895 entry: "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

The Balfour Declaration to Baron Rothchild, on the 2nd of November, 1917: "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."

Lord Sydenham, Hansard, House of Lords, 21 June 1922: "If we are going to admit claims on conquest thousands of years ago, the whole world will have to be turned upside down."

Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, 1923: "Zionist colonization must either be terminated or carried out against the wishes of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, be continued and make progress only under the protection of a power independent of the native population - an iron wall, which will be in a position to resist the pressure to the native population. This is our policy towards the Arabs ..."

Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of Revisionist Zionism (precursor of Likud), The Iron Wall, 1923: "A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!... Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important... to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot - or else I am through with playing at colonizing."

David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985: "We must expel Arabs and take their places."

Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department in 1940. From "A Solution to the Refugee Problem": "Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries - all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left."

Israeli official Arthur Lourie in a letter to Walter Eytan, director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry (ISA FM 2564/22). From Benny Morris, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-49", p. 297: "...if people become accustomed to the large figure and we are actually obliged to accept the return of the refugees, we may find it difficult, when faced with hordes of claimants, to convince the world that not all of these formerly lived in Israeli territory. It would, in any event, seem desirable to minimize the numbers...than otherwise."

David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben- Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978: "We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai."

David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar's Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157: "We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians will never come back to their homes. "The old will die and the young will forget."

David Ben-Gurion, one of the father founders of Israel, described Zionist aims in 1948: "A Christian state should be established [in Lebanon], with its southern border on the Litani river. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab Legion's strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo... And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers' account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram."

[Begin, and Yitzhak Shamir who were members of the party became Prime Ministers.] Albert Einstein, Hanna Arendt and other prominent Jewish Americans, writing in The New York Times, protest the visit to America of Menachem Begin, December 1948: "Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly-created State of Israel of the Freedom Party (Herut), a political party closely akin in its organization, method, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties."

Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher, addressed Prime Minister Ben Gurion on the moral character of the state of Israel with reference to the Arab refugees in March 1949: "We will have to face the reality that Israel is neither innocent, nor redemptive. And that in its creation, and expansion; we as Jews, have caused what we historically have suffered; a refugee population in Diaspora."

Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense and Foreign Minister), on 12 February, 1952. Radio "Israel.": "It lies upon the people's shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire."

Martin Buber, to a New York audience, Jewish Newsletter, 2 June, 1958: "When we [followers of the prophetic Judaism] returned to Palestine...the majority of Jewish people preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us."

Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion's special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From "The Arabs in Israel" by Sabri Jiryas: Rabin's description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. "We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters ... "

Aba Eban (the Israeli Foreign Minister) stated arrogantly. New York Times, 19 June, 1967: "If the General Assembly were to vote by 121 votes to 1 in favor of "Israel" returning to the armistice lines-- (pre-June 1967 borders)

Dr. Israel Shahak, Chairperson of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, and a survivor of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, Commenting on the Israeli military's Emergency Regulations following the 1967 War. Palestine, Vol. 12, December 1983: "Hitler's legal power was based upon the 'Enabling Act', which was passed quite legally by the Reichstag and which allowed the Fuehrer and his representatives, in plain language, to be what they wanted, or in legal language, to issue regulations having the force of law. Exactly the same type of act was passed by the Knesset [Israeli's Parliament] immediately after the 1967 conquest granting the Israeli governor and his representatives the power of Hitler, which they use in Hitlerian manner."

Golda Meir, 8 March, 1969: "How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to."

Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, 4 April, 1969: "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al- Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

Golda Maier Israeli Prime Minister 15 June, 1969: "There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed."

Israeli General Matityahu Peled, Ha'aretz, 19 March 1972: "The thesis that the danger of genocide was hanging over us in June 1967 and that Israel was fighting for its physical existence is only bluff, which was born and developed after the war."

Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972: "It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."

Joseph Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist agency charged with acquiring Palestinian land, Circa 194. Machover Israca, 5 January, 1973, p. 2: "The only solution is Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], or at least Western Eretz Israel [all the land west of Jordan River], without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point ... We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe."

Yitzhak Rabin, leaked a censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in New York Times, 23 October 1979: "We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said, 'Drive them out'"

Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, "Begin and the Beasts". New Statesman, 25 June 1982: "[The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs."

Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983: "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle."

Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces - Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times, 14 April 1983: "We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours."

Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983: "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves."

Isreali Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, in a speech to Jewish settlers, New York Times, 1 April, 1988: "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls."

Israeli Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, Inferring that killing isn't murder if the victim is Gentile. Jerusalem Post, 19 June,1989: "Jewish blood and a goy's [gentile's] blood are not the same."

Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, tells students at Bar Ilan University, From the Israeli journal Hotam, 24 November, 1989: "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories."

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service: "The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the Jordan River for future generations, for the mass aliya [immigration], and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country."

Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, 15 November,1998: "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours ... Everything we don't grab will go to them."

Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - 28 August, 2000. Reported in Jerusalem Post 30 August, 2000: "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more" ...

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, 16 November, 2000: "If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force ..."

Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, 10 May, 2001: "There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies? Not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy."

Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, 3 October, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio: "Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that ... I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."

"Israel Koenig, "The Koenig Memorandum": "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population."

Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency's Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5: "There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. I tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:...the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish ... with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary."

Ben Gurion: In 1899, Davis Triestsch wrote to Herzl: "I would suggest to you to come round in time to the "Greater Palestine" program before it is too late ... the Basle program must contain the words "Great Palestine" or "Palestine and its neighboring lands" otherwise it's nonsense. You do not get ten million Jews into a land of 25,000 Km2"." The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill -- From the Nile to the Euphrates."

Vladimir Jabotinsky (the founder and advocate of the Zionist terrorist organizations), Quoted by Maxime Rodinson in Peuple Juif ou Problem Juif. (Jewish People or Jewish Problem): "Has any People ever been seen to give up their territory of their own free will? In the same way, the Arabs of Palestine will not renounce their sovereignty without violence."

David Ben Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister) quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp. 121: "If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti - Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?"

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ Source: http://windowintopalestine.blogspot.com/2008/12/israel-history-in-quotes.html multi-blog platform

Israel's policy of Zionism risking erosion

View from this webpage as at 3 March 2009: It is clearer by now to this website, at least, that there are two dilemmas now on the agenda for Israelis particularly re the Gaza Strip situation. Both options presumably have their risks, and the policy of Zionism risks erosion on either front. Should the solution be what is called a one-state solution? Or, a two-state solution? Who around the world is backing which option?

The two-state solution would entail the preservation of Israel largely as-is, plus the creation of a new state for formerly-dispossessed Palestinians. This solution, for example, would make it clear to reluctant Israelis that Palestinians do indeed exist and do not wish to, and will not, tolerate harsh treatment from Israelis. The one-state solution would propose that, probably, Israel would adjust its borders somewhat, without warfare, freely and voluntarily absorb formerly-displaced and resentful Palestians into the Israeli population, and everyone would get on with their lives, presumably settling any outstanding disputes in the courts. Either solution would tend to suggest that Palestinians would be better off. But both solutions tend to suggest that Israeli citizens and politicians would need to make some adjustments to their attitudes.

With the two-state solution, both the Israelis and the Palestinians would be better off undertaking not to harrass each other. With the one-state solution, Israeli Zionism (or, Jewish Exceptionalism), would need to be dropped as Israel went the way of a modern, humane, secular and multicultural state with no officially-supported state religion.

Culturally, for both sides, the one-state solution seems the more dramatic. Israelis would drop Zionism, or any pointed notions suggesting their Middle Eastern specialness, while the more orthodox Israelis would lose Judaism as a specially-favoured state religion. Muslims (the Palestinians?) living in Israel would have to agree to live peacably in a secular state. In which cases, the one-state solution seems the more challenging to the religiose and the devout. Ironically, the one-state solution might mean that Israel wins the military war, but might mean that Israel loses the ideological meta-weapon - Zionism - that assisted its birth.

On the other hand, economically, if the two-state solution were adopted, what could help guarantee that a new Palestinian state could continue to be economically viable? Friendship with big-brother neighbour Israel?

The cost of human lives aside for a moment (as should not even cross the mind, anyway), it would appear that with both these dilemmas, Hamas has caught Israel's Zionist ideology in a highly muscular pincer movement (that is, the horns of the dilemmas will finally meet, and piece, but pierce and gore what?) - and wishes to crush it to death. Given the small, David-vs-Goliath size of Hamas, all this is far worse than a real-and-literal re-reading of a familiar Old Testament story first encountered during all our Western World childhoods. Hamas' tactics seem to mean that Zionism is being given nowhere to go, at all. Why might this be?

The one-state solution would erode Zionism somewhat, the two-state solution would possibly erode Zionism even more by way of dividing opinion perpetually yet unreslvedly in Israel itself. And there are serious problems here for whatever has remained as Western World support for Israel. More so concerning the USA, where the pro-Israel-Christian Right of the USA, and the Jewish people of the USA, both, who seem equally enthusiastic about the issues as they are brainwashed. The issues in some ways are political, as to the present, and theological, into the past, as deep in the (Abrahaminic) past as one wishes to go.

From what this website has seen of pro-Palestinian propaganda the past few years, in modern-day terms, the Biblically-based claims of Zionism-Judaism by 2009 are plainly preposterous, and are certainly not relevant to current Israeli claims, or to Middle-Eastern issues generally. Ironically for Orthodox Israel, the more effective are the works of Hamas, the less real will Jerusalem be to Orthdox Jews in Israel.

Hamas is not just firing rockets somewhat aimlessly and ineffectively into rural Israel (bent and mad as that does seem to an Australian observer), it is firing rockets of religious meaning and history into the meaning of a holy city named Jerusalem. Hamas - or pro-Palestinian propagandists - have been studying the history and development of Zionism in totally unforgiving ways for specific, post-1948-type reasons.

One conclusion easily to be reached is that Israel's Zionists are crypto-Nazis, a conclusion this website agrees with about Zionism. Which in a sense might mean, that not till Israel gives up Zionism in the Middle East, can it be said, that Adolf Hitler has given up the ghost, died, and finally gone away. (While we all know, that weird and hard-to-explain strains of "neo-Nazism" survive in Germany, UK, Russia, Australia and USA to date.)

In a sense, while officially, Israel and her patriots eloquently and unrelentingly lament the lamentable death-rates of The Holocaust, and continually emotionally blackmail the rest of the world about all the related post-Hitlerian issues, privately, Zionism continues to project a crypto-Nazi ideology; thereby, and confusingly, and paradoxically, keeping Hitler's legacy alive, with Palestinians now the victims, not Jews.

But then, who, really, are "The Semitic Peoples"? Hamas' view, at the cost of great sacrifice of the lives of its own people, seems to be that Israel shall not continue to get away with this kind of ideological con-trick on the world stage, and that pressure will be kept up till Zionism trembles.

The proposal from Hamas in these kinds of terms seems to be this: When Israel drops Zionism, and drops hefty claims about non-and-anti-Zionism amounting to "anti-Semitism", which is anti-Jewish, then the other kind of Semitic peoples from the Middle East, known as Palestinians of the post-1948 variety, might even be inclined to begin to forgive or to forget the anti-Semitism of the Zionists of Israel towards the Palestinians. Which would mean that Judaism would become merely another religion of the world that people can join or leave as they see fit, which is how a great many Jews, who are non-Zionists, already see Judaism.

In which case, for Israel to become a secular state might finally be its only best long-term protection against various continued action from militant Islam in the Holy-City-heart of the Middle East, somewhat after Israel gives up the crypto-Nazi elements of its Zionist-inspired birthing - an ideology which also had hijacked the original - and allegedly Biblical reasons - for modern Israel to be what is has become.

But perhaps, and this is what fundamentalist Christians will wonder about, one also has to wonder if God is a democrat? This Australian website is quite certain that God isn't a democrat, and isn't interested in the issues of democracy. Which is a great part of the problem, for both Israel, and Hamas, Moslems in general, and the entire set of Christian-influenced population of the so-called Western World. It's a propaganda war on the scale of any story ever told, for any reasons, about any battle between the angels of the Lord and the angels of any other agency.

And what do we notice today? No one anywhere at all in the world enjoys seeing news reports of the battles and skirmishes on their TV sets about the time they wish to enjoy their evening meal. Something the Editors of the Old Testament, of course, never anticipated, that the whole world would be watching evidence of the confused aggressions of their most fervently addled and brainwashed readers. It is a lesson, of course, that Moslems today have to learn as well. Thus shall The Children of Abraham teach the other Children of Abraham - better not to kill each other, the sin of Cain against Abel. Better to get on with the rest of your life in peace, free of religion itself if that is how you finally need to be, to be able to conduct the peace. - Ed

Meantime, it seems by 3 March 2009 quite premature for a sympathetic world to be pouring billions of aid money into Gaza while the resolution of conflicts is still highly uncertain. If the Gazans wish to continue suffering because Israel retaliates when Hamas continues to shoot rockets into Israel, this website concludes that such madness disenfranchises them from being given enthusiastically-gathered bundles of aid, because the enthusiasm has been misplaced. The world does need more compassion, but what it doesn't need is misplaced compassion. Nor does it need misplaced sympathy for Israel. -Ed

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