CANADIAN GOVERNMENT PARTNERS WITH ISRAEL LOBBY TO DELETE PRO-PALESTINIAN ACCOUNTS

FEBRUARY 17TH, 2023

Source

By David Miller

he Israel lobby is working directly with the Canadian government and with Silicon Valley corporations to quash the voices of those critical of its expansionist policies and systematic oppression of its indigenous population.

One clear example of this came last September when an international parliamentary committee met in Congress in Washington, DC, to demand that Twitter remove the account of Palestinian-Canadian Laith Marouf. Marouf is a multimedia producer who currently serves as a senior consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Centre and the coordinator of ICTV, a project to secure a national multi-ethnic news television station in Canada. He also has a long record of active support for Palestinian rights.

As such, Marouf – whose Community Media Advocacy Centre is funded by the Canadian government – faced official consequences for comments he made critiquing Israel. But the Trudeau administration went further to secure his erasure from social media, which should concern all those who believe in free speech.

Marouf’s case is just one in an endless stream of such acts happening all over social media and beyond. Marouf, in other words, was not the first and certainly will not be the last. Furthermore, his case opens the floodgates for the stream of suspensions to become a torrent.

As a major human rights abuser engaged in apartheid and military occupation of Palestinian land, Israel’s working relationship with big tech and the Canadian government is showcasing how antisemitism is being weaponized to target, flag and now vanish accounts critical of the apartheid state.

Marouf’s case also highlights the existence of a nearly fifty-year alliance between a Canadian national and a former Soviet dissident – a relationship that began as part of an Israeli intelligence operation. This history directly ties what happened to Marouf to Israel’s foreign policy strategies developed between 2000 and 2016.

A BIASED GROUP

The Interparliamentary Task Force To Combat Online Antisemitism is, as the name suggests, an international grouping of parliamentarians. Launched in September 2020, the task force is focused on increasing awareness of and developing responses and solutions to allegedly growing online antisemitism. Its first hearing was held on September 16, and the committee called executives from Twitter, YouTube, Meta, and TikTok to testify and explain how and why accounts like those of Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, were still in existence. Khamenei’s English Twitter account has nearly a million followers. At the time of writing, it and its Russian, Spanish, Arabic and Farsi alternative accounts remain live.

Former Canadian member of parliament (MP) Michael Levitt went over his five allotted minutes in his enthusiasm to denounce Marouf’s tweets. Another member of the task force devoted some of her time to arguing that “Zionism as an identity” should be included as a “protected characteristic.” She elaborated, “Zionist is an integral part of the identity of the majority of Jews and many non-Jews who self-define as Zionists.”

But who is on this committee, and why would they make such an argument? Answering this question accurately involves peeling back several layers of the onion and tracing back the origin story of this latest assault on online Palestinian speech.

An exhausted Laith Marouf and his CUTV crew report live from the ground in Montreal, May 20, 2012. Alexis Gravel | Flickr

It is claimed that the committee consists of “bipartisan legislators” and parliamentarians from Israel, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Yet this claim of “bipartisanship” is quickly scotched. The task force’s four South African members identify as Zionists and are part of the controversial Democratic Alliance, the party for whom most White South Africans vote. No African National Congress (ANC) members are involved in the group. At the hearing, one MP denounced the ANC, reportedly claiming, “The greatest proponents of antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment comes from our government.”

Members of the Task Force from the US include Democratic Congresspersons Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has visited Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored tour, and Ted Deutch, the newly-appointed CEO of the Zionist lobby group, the American Jewish Committee.

Among the British representatives is Andrew Percy, the Conservative MP who converted to Judaism in 2017 partly because of “a wholehearted commitment to support of Israel.” The other British representative is Alex Sobel, a longtime supporter of the Zionist affiliate of the Labor Party, the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM). The Canadian representatives included the former MP Michael Levitt, who is now President-CEO of the Zionist Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Also from Canada was Anthony Housefather, who in 2019 wrote, “I have always been and will continue to be a huge supporter of Israel.”

Along with two Members of the Israeli Knesset (MK) was the former MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh. Widely respected journalist Gideon Levy has described Cotler-Wunsh as both “an expert on human rights, an enlightened intellectual” and “nationalist, racist, cruel.”

At the hearing itself, three more Zionists were present. The first was the Israeli special representative for antisemitism, Noa Tishby. Recently Tishby denounced Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bella Hadid – all Muslim women – as anti-Semites for condemning the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli soldiers. Tishby reportedly “singled out only criticism of Israel from Muslim Americans,” showing an apparent “effort to cast their anger as the product of ethnic or religious bigotry.” Another Zionist at the hearing was Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the State Department’s Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, appointed in March 2022. According to Ismail Allison of CAIR, Lipstadt has a “history of using bigoted rhetoric, including Islamophobic … talking points.”

Well-known Canadian politician and jurist Irwin Cotler was also in attendance. He is Canada’s Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism, a position receiving CA$ 5.6 million over five years beginning in 2022. He is also the stepfather of Michal Cotler-Wunsh MK, mentioned above. As it turns out, Cotler is the most significant actor in this story, being deeply embedded in Zionist lobby networks.

Unsurprisingly, no representative of Arab or Palestinian origin is involved in the task force.

20 YEARS OF CLASHES

Marouf claims that “in 2021, I began to be stalked and harassed online by Zionists in the Broadcasting sector in Canada.” These efforts led to his Twitter account being shut down for “hateful conduct” and promoting “violence against or directly attacking” people with protected characteristics like race, ethnicity or national origin.

In fact, Marouf has spent much of the past two decades years combatting Zionist efforts to censor him. The first such instance happened at Concordia University in 2001 when he was the first Arab candidate to be elected to a student union executive in Canada. Within months of his appointment, he was “expelled summarily … for writing that ‘Zionism is Jewish Supremacy’”. He won an ensuing six-month court battle with the university. After that, however, the attacks continued; the next was from the Chair of the Department of History, who, as Marouf noted, was also the chair of a Zionist lobby group.

Among the interlocutors back in 2002 was then-MP Irwin Cotler. Cotler’s reputation was at that stage not nearly as great as it is now. Perhaps this is why Marouf’s comrades were able to occupy his office, following which the police were called. Marouf has confirmed to Mintpress that he was “part of the organizing of the occupation” but was not present in the office.

At the time of Marouf’s clashes with Cotler, Cotler’s wife, Ariela, was also involved in the events. She was President of the board of Montreal Hillel in 2001 during the most heated period at Concordia. Hillel is the Zionist student organization on campus in Canada and the US. She “played a major role in the pro-Israeli activity” at that time, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, an Israeli think tank.

Before that, Ariela had been parliamentary secretary for Menachem Begin. As can be imagined from this, Ariela is a hardline Zionist and claims to have been involved “at the cradle” with the creation of the so-called Birthright program, which takes young Jews to “Israel” despite there being no “birthright” for Jews in Canada or elsewhere to colonize Palestine.

Ariela Cotler has also been involved in a wide range of other Zionist lobby groups, including the Canada Israel Committee and the Federation Combined Jewish Appeal, the largest Zionist fundraiser in Canada. The Federation CJA, as it is known, has promoted Canadians joining the Israeli army.

IRWIN COTLER – ZIONIST REGIME ASSET

Cotler’s public persona is that he has some sympathy for the underdog. At the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, he notes he has been described as “Counsel for the Oppressed” and as “Freedom’s Counsel.” His 600-word profile does not use the words “Israel,” “Zionism,” “Jewish,” or “antisemitism”; his decades-long advocacy for the crimes of the State of Israel are not even hinted at.

Born in 1940, he took degrees at McGill University and then secured a Law postgraduate degree at Yale in 1966. In 1968 he was hired as a speechwriter for the then Justice Minister for four years. In 1970 he was appointed as an associate professor at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto before being appointed Professor at McGill in 1973. That same year he helped found and became President of the pro-Israel Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East, and he then “spent his summers travelling the Middle East.”

By the late 1970s, he was already heavily involved in Zionist advocacy, being the lawyer for Anatoli Shcharansky. A Ukrainian Zionist activist, Shcharansky was active in agitation as part of an operation run by a secret Israeli intelligence organization, Nativ, to access new settlers from the Soviet Union. Was Cotler aware that he was involved in an intelligence operation?

Cotler is welcomed by Benjamin Netanyahu during a 2014 visit to Israel. Photo | Israeli GPO

In 1978 while working with Shcharansky, he was living in the Jewish quarter of Damascus and, not surprisingly – given his Zionist contacts –  drew the attention of Syrian officials. He also spent time in Egypt in 1975, 1976 and 1977, making contact with the political elite, including the foreign minister, and was introduced to President Anwar Sadat. Knowing that Cotler would later visit Israel, Sadat “asked him to deliver a message to … prime minister Menachem Begin.”

Cotler claims he said “he didn’t know” Begin “particularly well.” But when he arrived in Israel, he was “invited to lunch with members of the Knesset.” There he met a Begin staffer named Ariela Zeevi, who took him to meet her boss. The message was, “Egypt was prepared to enter into peace negotiations with Israel.” Cotler later married the staffer in 1979 and became a “close personal friend” of Begin.

ZIONIST LOBBY STALWART

In 1980, Irwin Cotler was appointed President of the Canadian Jewish Congress. Four years later, he participated in a Jerusalem conference entitled “Hasbara: Israel’s Public Image.” (Hasbara is a Hebrew word meaning “explanation,” which is used as a synonym for “propaganda” in English). The American Jewish Congress ran the event, a group with a history of working directly with the Israeli intelligence agency Nativ, a campaign to recruit new settlers from the Soviet Union. Though referred to only as a professor of law at McGill, Cotler made it clear that he was a committed partisan of Israeli hasbara, complaining that “hasbara efforts are discriminated against” and that “Israel itself has become some kind of illegitimate entity.”

Since this public declaration of commitment to the cause of Zionism, he has taken up a dizzying number of appointments in Zionist organizations. He is or has been affiliated with a wide range of Zionist groups on three continents, including,

• United Against Nuclear Iran;
• Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies;
• Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs;
• MEMRI;
• UN Watch;
• Jewish People Policy Institute;
• International Institute for Counter-Terrorism;
• The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy 

All of these groups are closely related to the State of Israel, some with intelligence connections, some in receipt of funds, or created by Tel Aviv. None of these roles are listed in his biography at the Wallenberg Center, to which he is currently attached. Nor are Cotler’s interesting links with the far right in Ukraine; he is reportedly on the advisory board of “Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter,” which honored Ukrainian Nazis who collaborated with Nazi Germany and massacred Jews in the 1940s.

ENTER THE MOSSAD

But it is in the policy planning process of the state of Israel that Cotler seems to have made the most significant impact. Cotler has been, as British writer Antony Lerman puts it, “probably the most significant and influential international figure in the propagation of the concept of the ‘new antisemitism.’” As codified and finally published in its current form in 2016 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, the “working definition” of antisemitism is the weapon of choice of the Zionist movement to intimidate and bully supporters of the Palestinians.

While the idea of the new antisemitism has roots back to the 1940s and was a subject of renewed interest from the early 1970s, the administrative infrastructure to redefine antisemitism flourished from the late 1980s when Mossad was given the lead in the coordination of the strategy. As Lerman has noted, the Monitoring Forum on Antisemitism, established in 1988, “aimed at establishing Israeli hegemony over the monitoring and combating of antisemitism by Jewish groups worldwide.” It “was coordinated and mostly implemented by Mossad representatives” working in Israeli embassies.

A key step in the process was the first Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in  January 2000. The resulting Stockholm Declaration “became the founding document” of the International Holocaust Remembrance Association. Cotler headed the Canadian delegation to that event. He was also a key figure in responding to the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, which concluded that Zionism is racism. In a hyperbolic reply for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, he denounced “what was supposed to be a conference against racism” [emphasis in original], saying it “turned into a conference of racism against Israel and the Jewish people.” He also decried what he called a new “genocidal antisemitism – the public call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.

Cotler was engaged directly with the state of Israel’s response to Durban in co-founding the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA) in 2002 “in collaboration with Israel’s Deputy Foreign Minister Rabbi Michael Melchior.” This venture, however, collapsed, its main problem being that it was obviously an instrument of Israeli foreign policy. Even an arch-Zionist like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League observed: “If a lot of its strategy and implementation is coming from Israel, I won’t be supportive of it.”

In 2003 a new body, the Global Forum for Combatting Antisemitism, was created by Melchior and Cotler’s friend and former “client” Natan Sharansky (formerly known as Anatoli Shcharansky, he changed his name to Zionise it, as do many incoming settlers). Sharansky was also – as an Israeli government minister in charge of antisemitism —chair of the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism, which had been set up in the 1990s. “The State of Israel has decided to take the gloves off and implement a coordinated counteroffensive against antisemitism,” Sharansky said.

Sharansky right, holds the Congressional Gold Medal presented to him by President Reagan, center, as President-elect Bush looks on, Jan. 11, 1989. Barry Thumma | AP

In his “3D test of antisemitism,” Sharansky took up the idea of discrimination against a nation-state, trialed by Cotler. It focused only on the occasions where it was claimed that criticism of Israel became antisemitism:

• “demonization” is “when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion”;
• “double standards,” when criticism of Israel is “applied selectively”;
• “delegitimization” when Israel’s “fundamental right to exist” is denied.

These are tendentious arguments. Who is to judge what is “sensible” or “selective”? No regime or even state has a “fundamental” right to exist.

Cotler and Sharansky would frequently connect again over the course of the ensuing decade. For example, they both attended the February 2008 Global Forum for Combating Antisemitism. It was here that the plan to extend the event around the globe was announced. Though it has been claimed that the subsequent London event was independent, the 2008 event it was seen as simply another GFCA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) event. Minister Tzipi Livni personally thanked British MOP John Mann for ‘volunteering to host the Global Forum next year.’

Tellingly, the new body used the identical name to the previous 2002 effort: the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Sharansky was an advisor.

In 2009, Cotler was on the steering committee of the ICCA. Also, there was Fiamma Nirenstein, an Italian writer and politician who has lived in an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem since 1998. Cotler led a delegation of 11 Canadian MPs to the event. Together, they decided to form a Canadian coalition. Thus was the Israeli network extended to Canada: the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism. It met in November 2010 and produced a final report the following year. Canadian groups which were critical of the redefinition of antisemitism to equate it with anti-Zionism responded to the consultation, but their submissions were “excluded from the hearings.”

The ICCA would host conferences in London in February 2009, Ottawa in November 2010, Brussels in June 2012 and Berlin in March 2016. A “task force” report on “internet hate” was published in 2013. In addition, an Italian parliamentary report was published in 2011, having reportedly taken “inspiration” from the ICCA. Similar German parliamentary reports came out in 2011 and 2017. These reports, commissions and groupings laid the groundwork for the American hearing late last year that removed Marouf from social media.

ZIONIST INFLUENCES EMBEDDED IN TWITTER

As the State of Israel developed its strategy to redefine antisemitism as opposition to Israeli government policy, it embedded a number of Zionist lobby groups in the process. For example, advisors on the Coordination Forum for Countering Antisemitism included the following: The U.S.-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B’nai B’rith International (BBI), the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and the U.K.-based Community Security Trust (CST). Some of these advisors to the state of Israel were carried over as advisors to the European Union Monitoring Center, which first introduced the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2005. Both the ADL and BBI were there, as was the EU branch of the WJC, the European Jewish Congress and the UK-based CST.

When Twitter started to appoint advisors on content, these same groups were again in the frame, with no indication that they were essentially assets of the Israeli government. In 2015, Twitter launched a safety center and listed a number of ‘trusted partners’ in the US, Australia, and Europe.

In the area of offensive speech, it listed both the ADL and CST as concerned with antisemitism. Twitter executives have referred to the CST as “empowering” Twitter to “take action.” The big tech platform takes advice from precisely zero Palestinian organizations or grassroots Muslim groups on how to regulate its content.

From 2018, the list of groups working with Twitter evolved. In addition to the ADL, two new European groups were added: the Board of Deputies of British Jews in the UK and the Centre Européen Juif d’Information [European Jewish Information Center] (CEJI) in Brussels. Both these groups are strongly pro-Israel. The Board of Deputies unblushingly admits in its 2020 Trustees report that it enjoys a “[C]lose working relationship with the Embassy of Israel in the UK, including with the Ambassador, diplomats, and professional staff, and strengthened links to the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the IDF Spokesperson Department.”

The CEJI is a Zionist organization that advertises working closely with a range of other Zionist groups as “partners,” including B’nai B’rith Europe and the CST. Scandalously, amongst its funders are a host of social media firms, including Twitter itself. So Twitter funds a Zionist lobby group to lobby Twitter on issues relating to the question of Palestine. It is not surprising, therefore, that when pressure is brought to bear from apparently bipartisan lawmakers, and Twitter turns to its trusted advisors, pro-Israel decisions are routinely made. The whole process of both pressure and response is entirely corrupted by Zionist influence.

Israel’s government is also heavily involved in censoring pro-Palestinian content online. According to 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, the Israeli Ministry of Justice Cyber Unit sends requests to remove Palestinian content to tech giants. Through Israel’s access to information law, the government said requests to social media companies led to the deletion of 27,000 posts from Facebook, Twitter, and Google from 2017-2018.

CONCLUSIONS

After all these years, Cotler continues to spearhead illegitimate attempts to subvert solidarity with Palestine under the guise of fighting antisemitism. Shored up by a constantly evolving Zionist movement with its front groups, lobby initiatives and covert operatives (many of whom are embedded in Twitter’s own editorial structures), it is not a surprise that Twitter censored Laith Marouf’s account.

The Israel lobby’s cancel culture depends on the decades of work done by Cotler as an Israeli asset and by his close co-conspirator, the former Soviet prisoner and Israeli government minister Sharansky. Both have been central to forging the “criticism of Israel is antisemitism” weapon which is put to daily use by the lobby through their operatives on the ground, via inter-parliamentary front groups or via the editorial structures of Twitter itself, to do the bidding of a foreign state.

The bloody sore on humanity’s conscience

February 14, 2023

Thou shalt not be a victim.
Thou shalt not be a perpetrator.
And above all,
Thou shalt not be a bystander.
Yehuda Bauer

Globalize the Intifada!
Lowkey

Intro – were do we really live?

Each society, each country has at least two foundational bases: an official ideology and a number of foundational myths (and these myths can be very close to the historical truth or not).  In the case of the West (roughly Zone A), the official ideology is “western liberal democracy” (itself based on a lionization of capitalism and “free market values”).  However, once we look “under the hood”, so to speak, we see that since its birth in the Middle-Ages the foundational myth of the West has been exceptionalism and its inevitable by-product, imperialism.  And it does not matter one bit what verbiage this myth has been wrapped it.  It can be the demented claims of universal authority the Papacy, or the so-called “universal values” (aka human rights) of Freemasonry, the racial superiority of the Nazis or globalist agenda of the transnational financiers.  The past two decades or so have, however, seen a very interesting phenomenon: the wholesale abandonment of any “pious” ideology other than the minimal lip-service needed to show a (totally non-existing) loyalty to any values.  That is, however, not to say that no ideology currently exists.  It does, very much so, but it is one *openly* based on hatred of the “other”.  I am talking, of course, of the Woke ideology which is so powerfully expressed by the actions of the “Biden” Administration.

The Woke ideology is not different from its predecessors by its underlying hatred of the “other” (all the previous western ideologies were also based on that hatred of the “other”), but by its unapologetic proclamation of this hatred.  You could say that the Woke ideology is following Dubya’s “you are either with us or with the terrorists“, but on steroids.  And like all western ideologies, the Woke ideology demands that you not only accept a lie (many lies, in fact), but that you also loudly proclaim it.  And, of course, the bigger the lie, the more vociferously it is proclaimed urbi et orbi.

Again, this is hardly anything new but, as Hegelian dialectics affirms, quantity can have a quality of its own.  We clearly see this today in the post-Christian society all of Zone A lives in: not only are falsehoods proclaimed as “secular dogma”, but the very notion of “truth” has lost any meaning.  To repeat, while in the past the rulers of the West did proclaim and even impose ideologies based on lies, today these same rulers have basically retired the very *concept* of “truth” in any other meaning than “in agreement with the official party line/narrative”.

Furthermore, while in the past violence had to be justified in various ways (be it the White Man’s burden, or Trotsky’s apology of Red Terror, or Roosevelt‘s “day of infamy” or Dubya’s GWOT), now violence has become accepted simply under the heading “because we can” and “what are you going to do about it?”.  The genocidal wars in Iraq or the terrorist attack on North Stream 2 are good examples of the “kuz we can” ideology.

In other words, we are now living in a society openly based on:

• Lies or even the repudiation of the concept of “truth” and
• Violence/terrorism

The first corollary of this is that facts simply don’t matter anymore.  Neither does logical analysis.

Second, in a way very reminiscent of Trotsky’s apology for Red Terror (if you have not, read his absolutely brilliant, if profoundly demonic, defense of Red Terror in this article!), the current ideology openly proclaims that “it’s okay if we do it, and it is not okay if you do it“.  That, of course, implies a qualitative superiority of the “we” over the “you”.  This type of “situational ethics” has some rather interesting characteristics and implications including:

• It is profoundly narcissistic in its mindset (hence why the “we” has “rights” that the “other” does not).
• It measures loyalty by how big a lie a person is willing to loudly proclaim and affirm

You could say that the bigger the lie you affirm and proclaim (virtue signaling) the “better” a person you are, at least by modern standards.  And if the lie is truly self-evidently ridiculous and counter-factual (Srebrenica, 9/11, MH-17, Skripals, etc. etc. etc.) then you are a loyal and enlightened member of society.  Conversely, if you reject a lie because it is simply obviously counter-factual, then you are not “just” wrong, you are the enemy.

This western infatuation with lies, ideology and violence has its roots in the heresies of the Papacy, but it has since long metastasized into every and all facets of our society and now it has openly become the main ideological pillar upon which everything else is built.

[Sidebar: in my personal observation, the northern European countries are, in that sense, far worse than the southern European ones.  That is also where, predictably, where you will find the most rabid russophobes.  The southern European countries, having more complex and stronger historical roots, seem to be less gullible and hateful than their northern counterparts.  The UK, of course, stands alone and above all others in terms of racist hatred for the “other”;  as for the rest of the Anglosphere, it is run by Neocons and Globalists whose hatred for the other is based on centuries of racist mythologizing, to the degree that this type of racism (externally; internally they proclaim to be categorically opposed to any racist notions which is, of course, yet another lie, except that in this case their – internal and external – racism is directed at any group upholding traditional values) has become a core pillar of their worldview, even if most brainwashed subjects are utterly unaware of it (or don’t even care anymore)].

The above is crucial to the understanding of the world we now all live in.  But before we continue, we need to address another issue: what is Zionism?

What is Zionism? A quick reminder

In my 2014 article “AngloZionism: Short primer for the newcomers” I wrote the following:

Let’s take the (hyper politically correct) Wikipedia definition of what the word “Zionism” means: it is “a nationalist movement of Jews and Jewish culture that supports the creation of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the Land of Israel“.  Apparently, no link to the US, the Ukraine or Timbuktu, right?  But think again.  Why would Jews – whether defined as a religion or an ethnicity – need a homeland anyway?  Why can’t they just live wherever they are born, just like Buddhist (a religion) or the African Bushmen (ethnicity) who live in many different countries?  The canonical answer is that Jews have been persecuted everywhere and that therefore they need their own homeland to serve as a safe haven in case of persecutions.  Without going into the issue of why Jews were persecuted everywhere and, apparently, in all times, this rationale clearly implies if not the inevitability of more persecutions or, at the very least, a high risk thereof.  Let’s accept that for demonstration sake and see what this, in turn, implies.  First, that implies that Jews are inherently threatened by non-Jews who are all at least potential anti-Semites. The threat is so severe that a separate Gentile-free homeland must be created as the only, best and last way to protect Jews worldwide.  This, in turn, implies that the continued existence of this homeland should become an vital and irreplaceable priority of all Jews worldwide lest a persecution suddenly breaks out and they have nowhere to go.  Furthermore, until all Jews finally “move up” to Israel, they better be very, very careful as all the goyim around them could literally come down with a sudden case of genocidal anti-Semitism at any moment.  Hence all the anti-anti-Semitic organizations a la ADL or UEJF, the Betar clubs, the network of sayanim, etc.  In other words, far from being a local “dealing with Israel only” phenomenon, Zionism is a worldwide movement whose aim is to protect Jews from the apparently incurable anti-Semitism of the rest of the planet.  As Israel Shahak correctly identified it, Zionism postulates that Jews should “think locally and act globally” and when given a choice of policies always ask THE crucial question: “But is it good for Jews?“.  So far from being only focused on Israel, Zionism is really a global, planetary, ideology which unequivocally split up all of mankind into two groups (Jews and Gentiles), which assumes that the latter are all potential genocidal maniacs (which is racist) and believes that saving Jewish lives is qualitatively different and more important than saving Gentile lives (which is racist again).  Anyone doubting the ferocity of this determination should either ask a Palestinian or study the holiday of Purim, or both.  Even better, read Gilad Atzmon and look up his definition of what is brilliantly called “pre-traumatic stress disorder”

Now let’s be clear: while Zionism itself is based or the ideology and worldview of rabbinical (Pharisaic) “Judaism”, it is not an ethnicity, but an ideology.  This is why I wrote the following in that same article:

By the way, there are non-Jewish Zionists (Biden, in his own words) and there are (plenty of) anti-Zionist Jews.  Likewise, there are non-Anglo imperialists and there are (plenty of) anti-imperialists Anglos.  To speak of “Nazi Germany” or “Soviet Russia” does in now way imply that all Germans were Nazis or all Russian s Communists.  All this means it that the predominant ideology of these nations at that specific moment in time was National-Socialism and Marxism, that’s all.

[Sidebar: I want to add one more thing here, especially for those who hate Jews: every time a Jew is unfairly denounced as the perpetrator of some evil deed, it is not only one innocent person which is unfairly condemned, but there is some non-Jewish SOB who is happily slipping away.  Is that something which you really want?  Just think about this, carefully, and understand the consequences of such a worldview!  I suggest that you don’t have to like Jews, or approve of what some of them do, to not want an outcome where any real investigation into the fact of the matter becomes impossible.  Finally, please realize that blaming “the Jews” for something require no knowledge, no expertise of any kind and no brains.  This is therefore something which the dumbest members of our society will be very strongly drawn towards.  Again, just think about it carefully. ]

By the way, while (Pharisaic) “Judaism” is clearly religious and while most original Zionist were not religious, over time Zionism adopted all the man-hating assumptions of (Pharisaic) “Judaism” while, at the same time, secularizing them.  You could say that (Pharisaic) “Judaism” is “God ordained racism” while Zionism is “secular racism”.  More fundamentally, both (Pharisaic) “Judaism” and secular Zionism are virulently anti-Christian and want to eradicate even the tiny remnants of a completely defeated Christianity in the West.  Finally, in the modern state of “Israel”, we now see a new phenomenon becoming very important: religious Zionism, that is a bland of Haredi (Pharisaic) “Judaism” with the type of secular Fascism cum Apetheid modern “Israel” embodies.

If you want to see the kind of freaks which this ideology produces, just see my articles “A crash course on the true causes of “antisemitism”” and “A Crash Course on the True Causes of “Anti-Semitism”, part II: the hunt for anti-Semites“.  If you read those (please do!) you will discover what I can only call “God ordained racism” which is quite unique as most religions are, by their very nature, universalist, including, of course, both Christianity and Islam (after returning from his trip to Mecca, Malcolm X totally dropped his “blue eyed white devils” nonsense; Islam cured him from Elijah Muhammad’s crude racism!).

What happened after WWII?

Simply put, the end of WWII saw an ideological alliance between Anglos and Zionists.  Why? Mainly for two very different reasons:

• Their common hatred and fear of Stalin (who is always and *wrongly* accused of hostility towards Jews)
• A recognition of very similar worldviews (exceptionalism, supremacism)

Basically, the racist worldview of (Pharisaic) “Judaism” blended with the historical racist worldview of the leaders of the Anglosphere to create the modern Anglo-Zionism.

Do I even need to mention that both worldviews are not only based on lies, they use lies as their primary, go-to, “weapon” against anybody dares who oppose them. You could say that the following verse by Saint John the Apostle, Evangelist and Theologian are the best description of the ideological cornerstone of both wordviews: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:44).  Notice how closely Saint John connects lies and homicidal violence – these always go hand in hand!

During the Cold War, most of that hatred was directed at Communism, at least officially (after 1991 it became pretty clear that even without Communism the leaders of the West hated the Russian people).  After the 9/11 false flag, that hatred was directed at any state which would defy the West and Israel, and at any form of real, traditional, Islam.

I often smile when I hear the endless discussion about whether the dog is wagging its tail or the tail wag the dog.  In reality, this does not matter because the dog and the tail are one and the same organism, fully united in their purposes and goals.  And the point is, therefore, not who wags whom, but what the entire animal wants to achieve.

Originally, of course, the Anglos had mostly disdain for their up and coming Jewish counterparts, but money is much more powerful than any other consideration (at least in the West) and soon the part of the Anglo elites which was willing to adopt Zionism’s core values/reflexes easily out-competed the Anglo “old guard” which did not want to yield any real power to what they saw as their Jewish competitors.  And that is how AngloZionism was born.

What about “Israel” in all this?

The USA is probably the first and only country on the planet created by members of a demonic secret cult, that is Freemasonry (the fact that this Freemasonry had some external features of pseudo-Christianity does not change this).  “Israel” might well be the only country in history built purely on lies, also a sure sign of the “father of all lies”.  From the infamous “country without people for a people without country” to a complete ban on honest investigation into WWII or into the other founding myths of the state of Israel, to the endless “right” of this country to exist – “Israel’s” entire existence is predicated on the usual demonic pair: lies and violence.  In fact, while there were, and still are, plenty of states out there ruled by racists, Israeli is the only OPENLY racist state on the planet.  And this is why, for example, any Jew on the planet has the “right” to “return” to the state of “Israel” while a refugee born in Palestine has no right to return to his own home.  In “Israel” some are simply more equal than others!  Officially.

Is “Israel” unique in its systematic use of lies and violence?  No, not at all.  But it is unique in its unapologetic use of lies and violence to not only to achieve some specific geopolitical goals, but also to feed its cult of self-worship and sense of racial superiority above the “goyim” who, as we all know, “only understand violence”.

Yes, “Israel” is an abomination which no civilized person or society can accept, nevermind endorse.  But “Israel” is far more than that – it is also the litmus test of obedience to ruling classes of the West.  You can think of it as an Asch Conformity Experiment, but on a planetary scale, and one which you are asked not to only reject what your senses tell you, but one which shows how much you are willing to suppress you own conscience and embrace pure evil.

Those who embrace this lie become bound not only by a common worldview, but they become accomplices in something unspeakably evil and false.  Such people are much more than just bystanders to a slow-motion genocide, but they are also experts at Orwell’s doublethink:  when told to, they will gladly proclaim that right is wrong, white is black and reality whatever the ruling elites decree it to be.

For these people, neither “truth” nor “reality” make any difference.  None!

Such people are authoritarians not only because they love to give orders and impose their lies upon others, they are also authoritarians because they love to get orders and execute them (see here for an interesting discussion of this type of person).

Having said all that, we can we observe today?

Simply put, what we observe is a shameful and disgraceful attitude by almost every country out there.  And I will begin my denunciation of this state of affairs with Russia.

No, Russia is not “in cahoots” with “Israel” or Netanyahu!  This kind of crap is spread by infantiles who don’t understand how true complexity of the competition between states and by people who are paid (in money or recognition) to spread FUD (fear uncertainty and doubt) about Putin and Russia.

However, Russian leaders are showing an ice-cold indifference to the plight of the Palestinian people.  Oh sure, Russia officially supports all the relevant UNSC Resolutions about “Israel” and the Palestinians, but other than paying them lip-service, Russia does absolutely nothing against the “Israelis” as long as Russian interests are not directly affected or threatened.  I guess you can call it “Realpolitik” but I call it immoral and criminal indifference and I find is shameful.  Russia will never be come a truly Orthodox country again until it renounces such ugly forms of “pragmatism” and until moral/ethics return to the center state of the core values of Russian society and Russian policies.

In sharp contrast, and in spite of being much weaker than Russia while living its entire existence under the threat of attack by the AngloZionist, the Iranians have steadfastly placed morals over so-called “pragmatism” when dealing with the issue of “Israel” and the Palestinian people.  Of sure, of course, not all Iranians are that pure and noble, enough to see how Rafsanjani’s “Gucci Revolution” was backed to the hilt by Zionists to see that not everything is perfect in Iran.  But humans are the same everywhere.  What makes Iran so dramatically different is not that Iranians are “better” people, but that Iran officially places moral, ethical and even religious values at the cornerstone of its worldview and policies!  That is quite remarkable, and unique, and puts the shame the rest of the planet.

What about the current war in the Ukraine?

Today we are all fixated on the war between NATO and Russia in the Ukraine, and this is quite logical.  After all there is a fair chance that the freaks who run the Empire will prefer the destruction of the entire northern hemisphere to a (now quite inevitable) Russian victory.  However, we should not kid ourselves, this war is not, repeat, NOT about the Ukraine or even the future of the EU.  This is a war which will decide whether the AngloZionist will take full control of our planet or whether the last empire in history will be replaced by a multi-polar, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural, multi-political international order regulated by the rule of law.  Thus “Israel” has a HUGE stake in it, and no, *not* because the “(((Khazarians)))” wand to create a new state in the Ukraine or Crimea, but because if the AngloZionist Empire falls, the Zionist regime in “Israel” will have to either renounce its worldview of “God given racism” or, indeed, face its demise as predicted by Imam Khomeini when he said: “this regime that is occupying Qods [Jerusalem] must be eliminated from the pages of history“.

In the case of the Nazi run Banderastan, we saw the Ukrainian Nazis and the Israeli Nazis work hand in hand, while at the same time the Israelis pretended to maintain equidistance between the two belligerents.   Yes, the Ukronazis and the Israelis do hate each other too, but much less than they hate Russia and everything Russian.  What better example of the Zionist moral flexibility then to see “Israelis” sending weapons and “volunteer” instructors to the Bandera-worshipping Nazis in Kiev and against the people who liberated Jew from the Nazi camps!  Ditto for the so-called (and much misrepresented, see here, here or here) “pogroms” which were all located in what is today’s Ukraine and not in Russia.  As for the infamous (and also much misrepresented, see here, here or here) Pale of Settlement, how is is different from the wall the “Israelis” built to prevent Palestinians from freely loving across their own land?  In fact, any serious comparison of the two would immediately show that the latter is infinitely worse than the former.

And yet.

The truth is that the rabbinical/Pharisaic hatred of Russia is not based on history or any past wrongs, but on purely religious reasons: rabbinical/Pharisaic “Judaism” is an anti-Christianity just in the same was as the Latin Papacy is an anti-Orthodoxy!  Why?  Because Christians claim to the the “real Jews” (in spiritual terms) and Orthodox Christians claim to be the “true Church”.  In other words, Orthodox Christianity challenges and debunks both the Judaic claim to the Old Testament and the Latin claim to the New Testament.

Does it really surprise anyone to see the Latins working hand in hand with their “elder brothers in the faith” who “await the same messiah”?

There is also the fact that the Russian society today, while not truly Christian by a long stretch, is yet unwilling to give up the moral/ethical values of true Christianity.  Even “worse” is the real possibility that Russia might return to her true Christian roots, especially after the conclusion of the NATO war against Russia (assuming it does not end in a nuclear apocalypse, which it well might).

And no, it is no coincidence at all that the key actors (Nuland, Kagan, Blinken, etc.) are all Zionist Jews.  There are objective reasons for that.  Yet, we must always remember the words of Saint Paul who wrote “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph 6:12).  We must remember these words not only because innocent people have no nationality, including innocent victims, or because there is no such thing as “collective guilt”, but because we – unlike the Latins – cannot defend true Christianity while ignoring its key teachings!  It is as wrong to deny the nature of this warfare as it is wrong to deny its spiritual, and not ethnic, nature.  At the very core, we are dealing with a stark choice:

• Do we accept the common humanity of all people or
• Do we reject it

If the latter, than your place with with the Nazis, be them German or Israelis.  If accept that common humanity – then act on it and never allow yourself to be brought down by the fact that our enemies do not share this key value.  It is really that simple!

Conclusion

Ever since the 2014 coup in Kiev I have been almost exclusively focused on the Ukrainian civil war and, after 2022, on the US/NATO war against Russia.  Only rarely did I mention Zionism or Israel.  Primarily because I simply did not have the time.  And this is why today, in what shall be my last posted analysis on the Saker blog I wanted to revisit that topic again.  At over 4000 words, the above is not indented as an exhaustive discussion of the topic.  My hope is that what I wrote above my seen enticing enough for you, the reader, to pursue your own research into this immense and complex topic.  I think you could do worse than reading the various texts I have mentioned above. But the choice is yours.

I want to conclude this post with the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his famous text “Live not by the lie“.  I hope that they will inspire you.

Andrei

***

Excerpt from “Live not by the lie“:

When violence bursts onto the peaceful human condition, its face is flush with self-assurance, it displays on its banner and proclaims: “I am Violence! Make way, step aside, I will crush you!” But violence ages swiftly, a few years pass—and it is no longer sure of itself. To prop itself up, to appear decent, it will without fail call forth its ally—Lies. For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence. And it is not every day and not on every shoulder that violence brings down its heavy hand: It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.
And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold through me!
We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!
This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.
Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.
And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?

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‘No Monopoly on Grief’: How Antisemitism is Used to Normalize Israeli Racism

February 7, 2023

Protest against the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of Antisemitism in London. (Photo: Video Grab)

– Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle

By Jamal Kanj

Imagine in post-apartheid South Africa if blacks practiced racism against whites, and then African American rights groups defended those policies under the pretext of slavery and past oppression of Africans.

There’s no need to imagine, that is exactly what major Jewish rights organizations, such as the Anti -Defamation League (ADL) had done to normalize Israel’s depopulation of Palestine since 1948, and continue to defend Israel’s apartheid practices against Palestinians, today. Not because of Jewish historical grievances against Palestinians, Arabs, or Muslims, but rather for the maltreatment of Jews in Europe.

To ensure the hegemony of the Zionist narratives, ADL, American Jewish Committee, Jewish Congress, AIPAC, etc., used the antisemitism label as an intellectual terror tool to silence critics of Israel equating them with Jewish haters. To the point where Jewish rights organizations’ adherence to the political Zionist project, Israel, is evident in their willingness to whitewash anti-Jewish tropes so long as the Jewish hater is inexplicably a friend of Israel. Conversely, they’d eagerly defile proven anti-racist civil rights pundits, including Jews, and international rights organizations if they dare to challenge Israeli policies.

The term, anti-Jewish hatred, is applied here instead of the sweeping antisemite political label so as not to clump Jewish haters with well-established Israeli and international rights groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem, …etc. This is particularly important when supposed Jewish rights organizations purposefully convolute Jewish hate with fact-based political criticism of Israel.

Furthermore, the term Semite is often misused when ascribed to Jews with no proven genetic connections to the original Semites of Mesopotamia, and with an implicit racist intent to exclude non-Jewish Semitic people.

I’m cognizant of the sensitivity when comparing political Zionism to supremacist groups like the Nazis. However, as a Palestinian victim of the Zionist political project, who grew up in a refugee camp, and the son of parents who were refused the right of return to their own homes, simply because they were not Jewish, I understand the ills of dehumanization just like European Jews who suffered under the Nazi program.

To contextualize my proposition, I watched with disgust the appointment of the Jewish racist, Bezalel Smotrich, as a minister in the current Israeli government. The Ukrainian Jewish descendant once addressed a native Palestinian (Israeli) lawmaker stating: “You’re here by accident because (David) Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job.”

The “job” the most likely Khazar Jewish convert refers to is Ben-Gurion’s order to forcefully evict my parents, along with 780,000 other Palestinians from their homes in 1948, and razing more than 500 villages to the ground. The Palestinian (Israeli) lawmaker was an offspring of the 150,000 natives who managed to stay under the newly imposed state.

In juxtaposing the quintessential racist nature of the maligned oppressors, I am in no way comparing historical Jewish suffering to Palestinians’ pain. Just as I wouldn’t draw any comparison between the slavery of Africans and the ordeal of Aboriginals in the new world. Rather than competing on the scale of grief and victimhood, it would be more productive for all of us to acknowledge that pain is distinctive, individualistic, and real.

Equally, and in order to draw the appropriate conclusions, those experiences should be introduced within a contemporary context. For example, within roughly 15 years, WWII crimes against Jews were recognized, the new Germany acknowledged the harrowing atrocities of the Nazis, compensated victims or their progeny, and restituted their right to go back to their homes.

In contrast, 75 years later, the people of Palestine continue to endure Israeli apartheid occupation, and the expelled population or their descendants are refused the right of return to their original homes.

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), when I demand justice for my expelled parents or when I contrast the sins of the Nazi attempts to depopulate Europe of Jews, and the Zionist depopulation of Palestine, IHRA characterizes this as “Anti-Semite.”

ADL, IHRA and others use the “antisemitic” political label as a blanket defense to censor public discourse, more so when they fail to argue facts and deeds regarding indefensible Israeli malevolent policies. For them, Israel is a sacred cow, and unlike other political entities they’d give themselves the right to criticize, Israel is untouchable, and above all, is immune from reproach by a Jew or gentile.

Additionally, they fail to provide empirical evidence that criticizing Israeli policies leads to Jewish hatred, nor is there any validation that revering Israel―the Anglicans and Trump’s veneration are just examples―curbs the rise of hate. To the contrary, there are reasons to believe that observed spikes of anti-Jewish incidents are linked to Jewish rights groups’ efforts to conflate Jewish values with Israel’s immoral policies more than anything else.

ADL, IHRA et al. have no monopoly on grief. Having been a victim of past injustice does not exonerate any group from inflecting future injustice. To quote the prominent Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, in his book Culture and Resistance, “there is a great difference between acknowledging Jewish oppression and using that as a cover for the oppression of another people.”

Exploiting the “antisemite” political label to blackmail critics of Israel is a cover for oppression, and it does not advance the fight against Jewish hatred. Instead, it exposes the hypocrisy of the tribal organizations, such as the ADL, and normalizes Israeli (Jewish) apartheid practices against Palestinians.

From Tennessee to Palestine: What Happened to Cause and Effect?

January 30, 2023

Israeli forces raided Jenin and killed nine people. (Photo: via ActiveStills.org)

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

By Benay Blend

In the past few days, Palestine has witnessed heightened aggression by the Zionist government, while in the United States, five Memphis policemen brutally beat a young man to death after a routine traffic stop.

On the surface, these events are not related. A closer look at mainstream news coverage as well as systemic problems embedded in each society reveals how much they have in common.

On January 26, 2023, an article by Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network led with the headline “Massacre in Jenin: Resistance Continues Amid Occupation Killing of at Least 9 Palestinians,”  followed by a photo of grieving women. The caption reads “Jenin bleeds but resists,” which is why Israel chose to murder 9 Palestinians that day, including a 61-year-old woman.

When CNN covered the same event it quoted no Palestinians, except for the Palestinian Authority (PA), but merely repeated justifications for the massacre from Israeli security forces, specifically that they were after a “terror squad [operating in Jenin] belonging to the Islamic Jihad terror organization.”

In this way, mainstream news turns resistance fighters into “terrorists” by quoting the perpetrators of the violence. “The Islamic Jihad terror operatives were heavily involved in executing and planning multiple major terror attacks, including shooting attacks on IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians,” the joint statement from the Israel Defense Forces, Israel Security Agency and Border Police said, thereby defending a preemptive massacre based on what might or might not happen.

On January 7, 2023, five Memphis police stopped Tyre Nichols, a young black man, for alleged “reckless driving.” In early reporting, CNN said that “a confrontation occurred” between the driver and police, after which he “fled on foot.” When the police apprehended him “another confrontation occurred” followed by his arrest.

After the release of bodycam footage and a surveillance camera mounted to a pole, the media changed its story. What the recordings showed was not a “confrontation,” but five black policemen viciously using their fists and a baton to beat a young, handcuffed man to death. The initial reaction is important, though, because it illustrated the ways that mainstream media listened only to the police in much the same way that they accepted as truth what Zionist officials held as their version of the massacre in Jenin.

In both cases, there is no effort to analyze cause and effect. Events are portrayed as singular in form, as if the occupation had not been abusing the occupied since 1948 as if there had never been a black person murdered by the police before Tyre Nichols.

In the foreword to Ramzy Baroud’s The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (2018), Ilan Pappé describes Al-Nakba al-Mustamera, the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe), which he writes is “a common Palestinian reference to the age and time they have been living in during the last seventy years” (p. xi). In other words, the Nakba of 1948 is not merely a historical event but rather it comprises all of the oppression that they have been living under to this day.

“And indeed,” continues Pappé, “examining the history of the Zionist movement in Palestine, it transpires clearly that the settler colonial project that commenced in the late nineteenth century is not over yet; as is the struggle against it” (p. xi).

Yet Western media seldom looks back at the Zionist entity’s actions that resulted in a response, so consequently, resistance fighters are portrayed as terrorists whose deaths are justified in this light. Since the massacre at Jenin, there have been several reprisals on the part of the resistance, the first, the shooting of several Israelis in a Jerusalem synagogue, portrayed by police chief Yaakov Shabtai as “one of the worst terror attacks in the past few years.”

There is very little mention of what promoted the shooting, not only the massacre in Jenin but also the 75 years that came before it. In her recent book Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity (2023), Tahrir Hamdi explains that “the violence of the colonizer is aimed at dehumanization and repression, but the violence of the colonized is meant to end that repression and to rehumanize the oppressed” (p. 146.) In this way, she continues, the colonized undergoes a transformation of the colonized into an “empowered being who is able to create the kind of fear in the colonizer that the colonizer created in the colonized” (p. 147).

This lack of context carries over to the United States each time a person of color, but also the poor of any race, are murdered by the police. “This is not just a professional failing,” Police Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis said. “This is a failing of basic humanity toward another individual. This incident was heinous, reckless and inhumane. And in the vein of transparency, when the video is released in the coming days, you will see this for yourselves.”

In this way, the murder of Tyre Nichols by the police is treated as a lone event committed by a couple of individuals who lacked humanity. Nevertheless, as activist/journalist Jon Jeter notes, the goal of the news and entertainment industry is to “decontextualize violence such as that visited upon this young brotha in Memphis and depict it as an isolated, aberrant occurrence.”

The reality is more “grotesque,” he adds, than the horrible scenes witnessed on the tapes. “America is an apartheid state,” he concludes (and here Jeter might include “Israel” as it is much the same). “It is organized around the principle of white supremacy.” So when it “terrorizes 42 million black people on the streets, in the schools, and courtrooms and workplaces,” the goal is to convince their targets that they are a “defeated people, and that any effort to resist is futile.”

As grass-roots organizer Bree Newsome Bass stated on Twitter: “How can it be racist if the police are Black? Because the institution of policing itself is racist.” Dating back to the days when Black people worked on the slave patrols, there as always been racism embedded in the system, so no amount of promoting diversity on the force will help. What is important is that people of color and the poor are most often victims of the system.

There are other similarities between the Zionist state and this culture of violence in the United States. When asked if the five police, in this case, will likely be indicted for their crimes, Ajama Baraka replied:

“They are scheduled to be sacrificed for the system – so yeah. Even if it is on lesser charges. That is why the Feds are around also. They will prosecute also if the state charges don’t stick. This is way beyond Memphis now. It is an ideological issue for the settler state globally so they are toast.”

Indeed, policing in the United States is a global issue. Palestine is Here, a website that tracks various exchanges with the Zionist state has documented that the Memphis police department has long sent its officers to Israel for training. In 2002, shortly after 911, the first training expedition took place under the guise of learning about “counter-terrorism,” which translated to mean how to deal with the unruly populations in your country. “Rather than promoting security for all, these programs facilitate an exchange of methods of state violence and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling, and suppression of protest and dissent.”

Considering that policing began as a method to catch enslaved people who had run away from their masters, the force would still be racist even without the benefit of learning from their Israeli counterparts. Still, it links both settler colonial states in a common purpose: to control the oppressed in both countries.

“Jenin is bleeding and resisting,” concludes Samidoun, yet it is “refusing security coordination with the occupation and continuing to struggle, despite massacre after massacre, with the entire Palestinian people for the liberation of Palestine.” Despite all efforts to erase, intimidate, and invoke fear in the beleaguered population in Palestine and the US as well, the struggle for liberation goes on invoking all of us to support the occupied in their struggle for liberation and justice around the world.

The American Jewish war over Zionism can begin

 NOVEMBER 8, 2022 

Source

Zionism destroys everything in its path. It has corrupted every major American Jewish organization. And Netanyahu’s return allows American Jews to acknowledge this.

NETANYAHU BANNER IN JERUSALEM, OCTOBER 2022. PHOTO BY PHIL WEISS.

BY PHILIP WEISS

I last visited Israel in 2018 just before it passed the constitutional law declaring the country the nation state of the Jews, and in those four years it has become a narrower place. The signs of religious nationalism are everywhere today, even near Tel Aviv. The settlers have now taken over the army (Yossi Gurvitz tells me), and when activists visit hotspots in the South Hebron Hills settlers smash their car windows with rocks as soldiers do nothing. The young bartender at the King David Hotel tells me there is no occupation, those are Jewish places not the West Bank.

When I was young, my girlfriend came back from Israel and said, “It’s hard there, they are tougher than we are,” as a form of praise. American Jews admired those Jews for being tough. Now it’s different. The ugliness of Israel is inescapable. The guns everywhere. The hatred of Palestinians. The complete acceptance of apartheid.

The importance of Tom Friedman’s article saying the Israel we knew is gone is not about Palestinians. No, the Israel Palestinians know is the same. It is about American Jews. They are finally catching a clue. That is the importance of last week’s election, the Itamar Ben-Gvir election, in which his fascistic Religious Zionism party took 14 seats, and hard right wing parties took 74 (per Dahlia Scheindlin). The new ugly Israel will alienate American Jews, as Israel lobbyists Dennis Ross and David Makovsky openly fretted in an Op-Ed.

Tom Friedman is following in the footsteps of Peter Beinart and Jeffrey Goldberg: Zionist journalists who stood up for Israel again and again in the public square then had enough. Beinart is the bravest, he has come out for one state. Goldberg completely disappeared when he saw that the occupation was devouring Israel five years ago. Now Friedman is pivoting, and liberal Zionists are in complete meltdown; J Street wants to change the subject to AIPAC and the U.S. elections.

Zionism—the ideology Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land– is at last becoming problematic for American Jews.

The disarray is a good thing. Zionism—the ideology Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu embody, one of Jewish supremacy in the Jewish land– is at last becoming problematic for American Jews. They are up to their chins in a discriminatory ideology, and so we begin a war over Zionism that will bring down the Israel lobby in the next ten years. Because Zionism destroys everything in its path.

It took decades for Zionism to win in America. Herzl was an embarrassment to Jewish leadership till Brandeis converted to Zionism in 1916. It took the rise of Nazism in the 30s to swing the Jewish establishment over to Zionism as a program in 1942; and by 1967 of course, the ravishment was complete. Tom Friedman was giving chalktalks on the Israeli military movements to his high school classmates, and later saw his job at the New York Times as making Israel’s case in America. “Israel had me at hello,” he confessed at the 92d Street Y a couple of years ago.

Maybe the biggest lie the Israel lobby purveyed was that the United States had to hug Israel in order for it to make progress with the Palestinians. America hugging Israel and granting it impunity in international forums is what gave us the Jewish Nation State law in 2018, the shutdown of leading Palestinian human rights organizations in 2021, the murder of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May, and the rise of Ben-Gvir. Hugging Israel has encouraged its mass psychosis: the belief that militant apartheid is the only response to the political problem of millions of Palestinians without any rights.

Hugging Israel is what kept Israel from responding in good faith to the one true miracle of its history—the fact that Palestinian leadership accepted its existence on the ’67 lines back in 1988.

No doubt Ben-Gvir, a convicted terrorist, is in the DNA of religious Zionism. Zionism’s first step toward sovereignty in 1948 was the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians so that there would be a “strong Jewish majority” on far more land than the U.N. had granted the Jewish state. The Nakba has never ended; it was lately affirmed by the Nation State law that gives Jews the “exclusive right of self determination” in the land– apartheid under law.

Palestinian resistance to this regime is what gave Ben-Gvir his 14 seats. He ran on the claim that Defense Minister Benny Gantz – who bragged of bombing Gaza into the Stone Age in 2014 – was too soft on Palestinians. So killing nearly 200 Palestinians so far this year is soft. Oh yes, those Israelis are tough. Tough like Nazis were tough.

Zionism has caused nightmares and heartache and misery for Palestinians for decades, but as the media consultant, and Mondoweiss contributor, Ghousoon Bisharat said to me in Haifa, Ben-Gvir is not our problem, he is the Jews’ problem.

Finally American Jews will see what Zionism has done to us, corrupted almost every Jewish institution with racism, turned Jewish leaders into apologists for persecution and massacres.

And now he is the American Jews’ problem. Finally American Jews will see what Zionism has done to us, corrupted almost every Jewish institution with racism, turned Jewish leaders into apologists for persecution and massacres. “You must explain to me how the most accomplished most highly educated most liberal group in America has embraced apartheid,” John Mearsheimer said to me years ago.

That accounting is finally upon us. It won’t be easy. Those Jewish groups are still committed to apartheid. The AJC and ADL have lately  doubled down with new hack CEOs to carry out the Zionist project in the U.S. David Makovsky rationalizes apartheid by praising Zionism’s “institutions” on a Democratic Majority for Israel briefing. I guess he meant Qalandiya checkpoint. Where Palestinians have their faces rubbed in humiliation.

Makovsky and Ross and DMFI and ADL and the liberal Zionists too are terrified of anti-Zionists. They are terrified of how Ben-Gvir will put the wind in our sails, terrified that groups they consider marginal, Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow, will spring to the leadership of the young. They are right to be terrified. The war over Zionism inside American Jewish life has begun.

QALANDIYA CHECKPOINT. OCTOBER 2022. (PHOTO: PHILIP WEISS)

JUDAIC FANATICISM IS THE MOTIVATION BEHIND THE LATEST ‘ISRAELI’ ATTACK ON KATA’IB IMAM ALI

JANUARY 10, 2020

by Jonathan Azaziah

We told you the Jews are attempting to wipe out the Men of God who laid waste to ISIS. And now they’re at it again, bombing the border area between Syria and Iraq in yet another flagrant act of aggression targeting the Iraqi Islamic Resistance. At least 8 fighters have been martyred by the usurping Zionist entity’s criminal attack. It’s Kata’ib Imam Ali that is still on the Jews’ minds and in their crosshairs and while this may solely seem like part of the ongoing American-‘Israeli’ escalation against the Resistance Axis — an analytical observation that is rather elementary to make — there is something more sinister to this onslaught. Indeed, the motivations for these atrocities are rooted 100% in Judaism, both from the “spiritual” perspective and the historical one. The number 3 is of the utmost importance for the Jews, with abyssal Kabbalistic, Talmudic and Halakhic aspects to it. And Shaytan’s Chosen Warmongers haven’t completed their triple murder yet. They got Qassem Suleimani (R.A.) They got Abou Mahdi al-Mohandes (R.A.) But they missed Shibl al-Zaydi, Commander of the Kata’ib Imam Ali.

As elucidated by Rabbi Yossi Marcus, the Kabbalist who runs the ultra-Zionist Chabad of the North Peninsula and spent time as a colonizer in Palestine’s Safad (one of the major capitals of illicit Kabbalistic activity going back several hundred years), when something is done 3 times in Judaism, it becomes permanent. In Hebrew, it is called “chazakah”. Kabbalistically, the number 3 means “peace” and “integration”. And we know that there is no peace from the vantage point of Judaism, nor is there integration within “the tribe”, unless the sanctification of “Yahweh’s” name is being pursued through revenge, war and the eradication of the seed of Amalek.

Indeed, when applied geopolitically and militarily vis-a-vis Zion’s war on the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Mouqawamah Bloc partners, the “chazakah” sought by the Jews in this instance is the elimination of the Dauntless and Defiant trifecta of Suleimani (R.A.), Al-Mohandes (R.A.) and al-Zaydi, which will bring “peace” to the “house” of World Jewry because the most effective personalities in countering its intrigue, these “Viceroys of Amalek”, will be no more. And because the afterlife is barely an afterthought at best in Judaism, with Jewish scholars noting that “Judaism is focused on life and how to live it”, and with the “Torah” having ZERO – repeat, ZERO – mention of it at all, Jews can’t comprehend the Culture of Martyrdom present in Iran as well as Ansarullahi Yemen and elsewhere that keeps its adherents resisting no matter what calamities they face down. Keeping this in mind, al-Zaydi lives, alhamdulillah, and Jewish plots against him and Kata’ib Imam Ali persist as a result.

That was the “spiritual” angle. Now, the historical facets of the ramped up Zionist onslaught against Iraq and Syria are staring everyone right in the face via the name of Shibl al-Zaydi’s group of Righteous Renegades: Kata’ib IMAM ALI (A.S.) The brother, successor and son-in-law of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.W.) was a tour-de-force against the Jewish Power Configuration of his era and on the battlefield, he mopped the floor with the Yahoudlings. Because the Jews were impotent when confronting Haydar al-Karrar (A.S.) eye-to-eye, they collapsed into the shadows, their home, hatching a scheme of subterfuge to dispatch the Imam (A.S.) It was a Jew, Ibn Muljim (L.A.), who assassinated him in the most cowardly manner of cowardly manners, driving a poison sword into his head as he was in prayer in the masjid. Exactly like the cowardly fashion the US and ‘Israel’ murdered Suleimani (R.A.) and Al-Mohandes (R.A.), slaughtering them with a flying robot while they were unarmed on a peace mission. Verily, the similarities between Amir al-Mou2mineen (A.S.) and his modern-day acolytes, the Knight of Kerman (R.A.) and the Brightness of Basra (R.A.), are vast. Most especially in the identical enemy opposing them.

Understanding this struggle as an ideological one will give us better insights into how Dajjal and its lieutenants operate. It is Judaism driving the latest flare-up against Iran currently, along with the war on Islam historically. Not just Zionism, which is merely the political outgrowth of Judaism. The Jewish obsession with the number 3 and the Halakhic-Talmudic-Kabbalistic need to “make permanent” all things in line with the “mitzvot” of the “Torah” is demented. Simply demented. This Judaic fanaticism is dangerous to the umpteenth degree. For the Iraqi Islamic Resistance and the Mouqawamah Bloc of course, yes, but also the whole of the globe. We pray for ALLAH (SWT) to encase in armor all pure-souled opponents of Shlomo as the battle against Jewish supremacist evil rages.

And we sincerely pray for the Jews to hearken to the teachings of Rasoulallah (S.A.W.W.) and Christ (A.S.) before they take us and themselves into oblivion. To say they’re too far out in front of their skis and have been for quite some time is the understatement of… Well… the 40 some odd centuries they’ve been around, wandering about and tormenting Gentiledom along the way.

SHOCKING DETAILS OF ZIONIST BIOLOGICAL WARFARE AGAINST PALESTINIANS EXPOSED

OCTOBER 28TH, 2022

By Kit Klarenberg

Source

Academics Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University and Benjamin Z. Kedar of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem have produced an extraordinary paper based on a welter of archival material, exposing in disturbing detail the hitherto obfuscated dimensions of an operation by Zionist forces to use chemical and biological weapons against both invading Arab armies and local civilians during the 1948 war.

That brutal conflict created the state of Israel, and led to permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, known as the “Nakba” – Arabic for disaster, catastrophe, or cataclysm.

Morris and Kedar offer a highly granular timeline of events, starting in the initial months of that year, as Britain prepared to evacuate Mandatory Palestine on May 15. In the lead up to that date, Zionist settlers were very much on the defensive, with militias “continuously” attacking their enclaves and convoys, with the support of neighboring armies, due to their joint rejection of UN Resolution 181, passed in November 1947, which proposed partitioning Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states.

With Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Transjordan all having expressed an intention to invade Palestine when Britain left – and having been actively encouraged in this regard by British intelligence – Zionist guerrillas began mounting an offensive, not merely to neutralize Arab fighters, but capture territory, destroying houses and civilian infrastructure along the way, to prevent displaced residents from returning.

In order to augment the latter component of this effort, ensure Zionist seizure of Arab villages and towns was permanent, facilitate easier conquest of further areas, and hinder the progress of advancing Arab armies, these militias began poisoning wells with bacteria to create local epidemics of typhoid, dysentery, malaria and other diseases, in direct violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which strictly prohibits “the use of bacteriological methods of warfare.”

As we shall see, the Zionists were suitably emboldened by the clandestine operation’s success that they eventually attempted to expand their poisoning campaign to invading Arab armies’ home soil.

“STATE OF EXTREME DISTRESS”

The code name of the biological warfare operation, “Cast Thy Bread” was a reference to Ecclesiastes 11:1, which directs Jews to “cast thy bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again.”

The prospect of using biological weapons against the “enemy” had been percolating among the Zionist movement for some time, come the 1948 war. Three years earlier, immediately after the end of the war in Europe, Crimea-born Jewish partisan leader and poet Abba Kovner had, after reaching Palestine, hatched a plot to mass-poison Nazis, to avenge the Holocaust.

Kovner intended to either infect waterworks in German cities, or poison thousands of SS officers detained in Allied prisoner of war camps with a fatal disease. Having procured poison from two academics at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, he travelled to Europe to enact the plans, but was arrested by British security officials en-route, right after dumping his deadly cargo in the sea, and aborting his mission.

Abba Kovner, center, poses in Lithuania in July 1944, before he made is way to the Ein Ha-Horesh settlement in Palestine. Source | Yad Vashem

The former strategy resurfaced in Zionist consciousness as the prospect of a war of independence loomed, and became formalized with the creation of HEMED by Haganah, the primary Jewish paramilitary organization in Mandatory Palestine 1920 – 1948. HEMED’s three components – titled A to C – dealt with chemical and biological defense and warfare, and nuclear research.

On April 1, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, a leading figure in the Zionist movement who is regarded as the primary founder of the state of Israel, and served as its first Prime Minister, met with a senior representative of Haganah to “discuss the development of science and speeding up its application in warfare.”

Two weeks later, bacteria that would induce typhoid and dysentery among those who consumed it was distributed to Haganah operatives across Palestine. Before war even broke out on May 15, it had been used to poison water sources in Arab-held areas, the West Bank city of Jericho being the first documented instance. This was done in order to “undermine Palestinian staying power in still inhabited sites and to sow hindrances along the prospective routes of advance of invading Arab armies.”

That Zionist militants did not expect areas earmarked for Palestinians under the UN’s partition plan to remain Arab-inhabited in the event of victory in the looming war is strongly underlined by their targeting of many of these villages and towns in advance.

A vital aqueduct in Kabri that was the primary if not sole source of water for many nearby Palestinian settlements was poisoned on May 15. The paper’s authors call it “the most serious and potent use” of biological weapons during the entire 1948 War.

The historic northern city of Acre, designated part of a future Arab state by the UN, was one of the areas dependent on the aqueduct for water. The morale of its inhabitants is said by Morris and Kedar to have been “already shaky” at this juncture, due to Haganah’s recent conquest of the Arab parts of nearby Haifa, the region’s capital, and resultant flight of most of its population, many of whom took up residence in Acre.

Haifa’s capture by Zionists – achieved despite protection from British forces – cut off Acre not only from Haifa but neighboring Lebanon, and the prospect of Britain’s departure contributed to “plummeting” spirits among the population. The outbreak of a typhus epidemic, courtesy of Operation Cast Thy Bread, left Acre “in a state of extreme distress,” the city’s mayor reported on May 3. No one had the slightest clue that it had been deliberately created, for precisely this reason.

‘WHAT WAS THE POINT?’

Morris and Kedar assert that despite the widespread campaign of biological warfare engaged in by Zionist militias across Palestine, there were comparatively few reported casualties as a result – although dozens of Palestinians, and some British soldiers, are confirmed to have been killed – and the progress of invading Arab armies was barely halted due to disease outbreaks among soldiers.

“The apparent ineffectiveness…and problems in producing and transporting the weaponised bacteria may well have curbed enthusiasm for the campaign among Israeli defence executives. What was the point?” the pair speculates.

Such conjecture is somewhat bizarre, given so many of their findings, and private communications between Haganah operatives cited elsewhere in the paper, make abundantly clear the strategy was highly valued, and proved pivotal in the permanent capture of many Arab villages, towns, and cities.

Take for instance the aforementioned Acre. One day into the war, Zionist forces attacked the city, and delivered an ultimatum: unless inhabitants capitulated, “we will destroy you to the last man and utterly.” The next night, local notables duly signed an instrument of surrender, and three-quarters of the Arab population – 13,510 out of 17,395 – were displaced in a proverbial pen stroke.

The Arab village of As Sumeiriya, on the outskirts of Acre, lay in ruins after being leveled by a demolition team in May 1948. Frank Noel | AP

Accordingly, the academics refer to a previously unpublished June 1948 report from Hanagah intelligence unit Shai, which attributed the speed and ease with which Acre fell into Zionist hands in part to the epidemic they had earlier unleashed. The city was far from unique in this regard – outbreaks of typhus, and “panic induced by rumours of the spread of the disease” was determined to be “an exacerbating factor in the evacuation” of several areas.

Hindsight can on occasion mislead, but it was not retrospective pattern recognition that led Zionist militants to eagerly expand the poisoning campaign as the war unfolded. Between June and August 1948, two pseudonymous Hanagah operatives exchanged a series of cables while the bitter battle for Jerusalem raged. One became increasingly angry at the lack of progress, imploring the other, “immediately stop your neglect of Jerusalem and take care to send Bread here [emphasis added].”

Then, on September 26, “an important Zionist executive” proposed to Ben-Gurion a wide-ranging blitz of “harassment by all means,” not only in target areas of Palestine, but also belligerent Arab countries. This counter-offensive was intended to reverse the Egyptian Army’s capture of UN-mandated Jewish territory, seize some or even all the West Bank for settlement, and prevent the return of displaced Palestinian to areas partially or wholly in Zionist control.

The utility of biological warfare in achieving those objectives was obvious, and cables initiating the literally toxic process were fired off from the highest levels of Hanagah to its assorted militias the same day. Cairo’s water supplies were a major stated destination. Plans to that effect were evidently being explored in advance elsewhere as well.

On September 21, a Hanagah operative hiding in Beirut reported to headquarters on possible targets for sabotage operations in Lebanon, including “bridges, railway tracks, water and electricity sources.”

Lebanon remained in the crosshairs for some time, even as the war neared its completion, and Zionist victory was all but assured. In January 1949, two months before the country and Israel signed an armistice agreement ending the war between them, Hanagah again tasked operatives with investigating “water sources [and] central reservoirs,” in Beirut, and “supplying maps of water pipelines” in major Lebanese and Syrian towns.

“IT’S A TRICK…”

Clearly, then, there was very obviously a “point” to the poisoning program from the perspective of Ben-Gurion et al.

The connivance allowed the Zionists to efficaciously seize Palestinian territory, evicting Arabs from lands they had inhabited for centuries and deterring them from coming back, without firing a shot. Neither their victims – nor the international community – had no idea that the community-threatening epidemics seizing much of the region were man-made, rather than naturally occurring, either.

While it is clear from the paper certain individual militants were horrified by Cast Thy Bread and sought to curtail its operation, the relative lack of casualties cannot be chalked down to humanitarian concerns. Senior Zionists knew well the dire effects those infected by the bacteria suffered, not least because several of their own operatives contracted typhus themselves after accidentally drinking bottles containing it, believing the contents to be “gazoz”, a popular carbonated drink in the Middle East then and now.

Instead, Cast Thy Bread helped conceal the settlers’ long-term objectives of annexing land far in excess of that which had been proposed under the UN partition plan, including Palestinian territory and portions of neighboring Arab countries. Clandestine use of low death rate biological weapons meant a mass purge of civilians from these areas would appear to be voluntary and self-initiated, and could be secured without the need for large-scale massacres, or local residents being evicted at gunpoint en masse.

Ben-Gurion spelled out the Zionists’ true territorial ambitions in October 1937, following publication of Britain’s Peel Commission findings, which first advocated partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews. He supported the proposal, “because this increase in possession is of consequence not only in itself, but because through it we increase our strength, and every increase in strength helps in the possession of the land as a whole.”

Such honesty is vanishingly rare. Obscuring at all times the genocidal character of Zionism, which underpins and is absolutely fundamental to the colonial ideology, has been of the utmost importance to all its adherents ever since its inception. It is an ever-increasingly difficult facade to maintain, as the days of employing covert techniques to purge Israel and the territories it illegally occupies of Arabs are largely over. Instead, the slow-burn annihilation of Palestinians is conducted overwhelmingly in broad daylight.

As former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters found out to their immense personal, professional and political cost, the primary means by which Israel shields its systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from public scrutiny and condemnation today is via bogus accusations of anti-Semitism against detractors. Shulamit Aloni, former Israeli Education Minister and winner of the Israel Prize, explained to Democracy Now! in 2002:

It’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in [the U.S.] people are criticizing Israel, then they are anti-Semitic…It’s very easy to blame people who criticize certain acts of the Israeli government as anti-Semitic, and to bring up the Holocaust, and the suffering of the Jewish people, and that is to justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”

The material collated by Morris and Kedar suggests this is a long-established “trick”. On May 27, 1948, Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs sent a cable to the UN Secretary General, revealing that the previous day his country’s soldiers had captured two “Zionist agents” who were attempting to contaminate springs “from which the Egyptian troops at Gaza draw their water supply,” and had “dropped typhoid and dysentery germs into the wells lying to the east of that town.”

Acre Aqueduct was poisoned by typhoid injected by Zionists in May 1948. Source | Palestine Land Society

The cable, intercepted by Hanagan, was read out at a UN Security Council meeting later that day by Syria’s representative. In response, Major Aubrey Eban, designated representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (Israel had not yet been internationally recognized and was not a member state at that time), offered a vicious riposte.

He charged that the Egyptian and Syrian governments had “chosen to associate themselves with the most depraved tradition of medieval anti-Semitic incitement – the charge that Jews had poisoned Christian wells.”

“The Security Council, we are convinced, will not wish to become a tribunal for recitations from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion offered from the words of Dr. Goebbels. We hope that the Security Council will be interested not in this contemptible incitement, but in the reality of [Arab] bombs and shells falling on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv at this moment,” he added furiously.

Such an intervention may account for why, after initial press interest in the two diplomats’ caustic war of words, Cast Thy Bread remained successfully buried for almost seven-and-a-half decades subsequently, despite opaque references to the monstrous machination appearing in several autobiographies of Zionist leaders and militants from the time, and a 2003 academic article.

Indeed, the operation was so secret that even Israeli government censors were apparently unaware of its existence, so allowed numerous highly incriminating papers referencing the operation’s codename to pass by them unexpurgated, straight into the publicly accessible archives of the Israeli Occupation Forces.

Reinforcing the significance of Operation Cast Thy Bread, and the eager Zionist embrace of its grisly constituent techniques, HEMED’s biological warfare division became the formally civilian Institute for Biological Research in Nes Ziona, a town in central Israel, after the 1948 War ended. Its first director was former Haganah officer Alexander Keynan, who was intimately involved in the planning and execution of “Bread”.

Little is known about the extent or nature of Israeli biological weapons research or development today. The Institute for Biological Research has remained largely hidden from public view ever since launch, not least due to extensive security measures blocking outsider access. British investigative journalist Gordon Thomas has described a site over which no aircraft are allowed to fly, and scientists toil in laboratories deep underground creating “bottled agents of death.”

Nonetheless, it may be significant that modern Israel is one of very, very few countries in the world that is neither a signatory to the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention nor the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention. Could another “Cast Thy Bread” be in the literal and proverbial pipeline? At the very least, we have no reason to think it won’t be. If such a campaign was to be waged now, it would likely escape public detection even more effectively than last time.

A striking aspect of Palestinian writing about the 1948 War, identified by Morris and Kedar, is an almost total lack of reference to epidemic outbreaks at the time at all. Surviving victims of the Nakba today who contracted typhoid at the time, or had friends and relatives who did, now face the renewed indignity of learning, 74 years after the fact, they were deliberately poisoned.

Who killed Jeremy Corbyn’s social justice project?

Tuesday, 25 October 2022 3:25 PM  [ Last Update: Tuesday, 25 October 2022 3:25 PM ]

Jeremy Corbyn

By David Miller

The hidden truth about The Labour Files, the largest leak in Britain’s political history, is the opposite of the right-wing critics of the Labour Party. 

They say that Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the UK’s Labour Party, interfered to slow down the progress of antisemitism cases.

The truth was that he speeded them up massively. In doing so, he intensified the witch-hunt against ordinary party members, despite the lack of evidence of a specific problem in the Labour Party of so-called “antisemitism”.

In fact, the evidence shows that levels of antisemitism in the Labour Party were lower than in society in general.

The number of notices of investigation, suspensions and expulsions connected to antisemitism all surged exponentially once Jennie Formby took over as General Secretary in the spring of 2018.

In 2019, there were 45 expulsions; in 2017 there had only been one. Was this because there was a real and increasing problem of antisemitism? No. However, the Corbyn-led party took over and extended the witch hunt by internalizing Zionist talking points on what antisemitism was.

These sang from the hymn sheet produced by the Zionist regime in blurring together anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Zionist talking points

By acting as if the Zionist talking points were evidence-based, key elements of the office of the Leader of the Opposition (known as LOTO), and those around it, came to believe that they were genuine. 

As a result, they appointed staff who also believed in the false Zionist talking points. At the head of the unit appointed to deal with complaints were three people, each of whom had drunk the antisemitism Kool-Aid:

• Harry Hayball, who had previously been in Momentum and studied the history of antisemitism on the left” by reading That‘s Funny You Don‘t Look Antisemitic and The Lefts Jewish Problem. The latter was written by an employee of the Community Security Trust which runs point for the Zionist regime in the UK. The former was by Steve Cohen published in 1984 and republished in 2005 by Engage the Zionist lobby group formed to oppose Boycott Divestment and Sanctions. Momentum in 2019 tweeted to recommend the book. As the leader of the Zionist-leaning Trotskyist sect, the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) Sean Matgamna wrote in an obituary in March 2009 that towards the end of his life Cohen considered himself a supporter of AWL”. In other words, Hayball learned about the notion of “left antisemitism” from committed Zionist propaganda tracts. Hayball also states that he was lobbied by a wide range of stakeholders from JLM, Jewish communal organisations and the wider Jewish community. Prior to working in the antisemitism unit, Hayball had been the head of Digital with Momentum, the allegedly hard left support group for Corbyn.  While there he had proactively progressed the witch-hunt claiming of himself that from August 2018 onwards, Hayball submitted dozens of complaints to Labour about cases of antisemitism he had documented from social media posts by suspected Labour members”.  In the Labour files it was revealed that at a meeting after an elderly woman suffered a stroke and died soon after learning of her expulsion from the party, a senior officer had laughed and said “Look we’re anti-Semite killers now!”.  According to the Al Jazeera whistleblower: The whole room broke out in laughter. I can reveal that the official who made the “joke” was Harry Hayball.

• Patrick Smith, a former member of the AWL, who resigned from the party in 2013 complaining about its Islamophobia. He then joined the Communist Party of Great Britain which, like the AWL, bandies about the Islamophobic term “Islamist”. Smith had previously complained about anti-Zionist views being problematic in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and denounced its members as being essentially mad”.

• Laura Murray is claimed in the leaked Labour Antisemitism Report, mainly written by Hayball –  to have developed her understanding of antisemitism through her work with the JLM and with Jewish communal organisations” in her role as Stakeholder Manager in the Leader’s Office. Murray also appears to have taken on the role of advocating the views of the Zionist groups to the leadership. She wrote to GLU about the concerns expressed by the JLM and Jewish communal organisations about the handling of antisemitism cases. Note that even the use of the phrase Jewish communal organisations is a Zionist talking point. The main Jewish communal groups are all Zionists. Murray was also said to have, “developed a comprehensive understanding of antisemitism on the left” through her work with “Jewish stakeholders” and “by undertaking further education and training, including” acourse on ancient and pernicious antisemitic tropes” at the Israeli government sponsored Yad Vashem.

The report goes on to say that the employment of Hayball was an indication of the internal desire of Murray and others to “build a team which understood the processes from the perspective of the complainant, which was self-critical.

The assumption was, of course, that the complainants were mainly acting in good faith, which was a recipe for a dramatic escalation of antisemitism suspensions, warnings and expulsions, with no basis on any rational or factual assessment of racism against Jews.

Corbyn’s Zionist advisers

In addition, Corbyn had surrounded himself with close advisors who were either soft on Zionism or were actually true believers. Momentum the so-called hard left support group for Corbyn – was set up by a variety of such people, including obviously Jon Lansman, who in an earlier period had been critical of Zionism.

But during the Corbyn period, he moved to a soft Zionist position, supporting the Zionist-produced IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism and repeatedly saying that the party had to regain the trust of the Jewish community. In May 2016, he wrote that what had been happening in Labour was a frenzied witch hunt in part fuelled by the fundamentalist wing of pro-Israeli organizations. But in the same piece, he argued that the left should drop the term Zionism altogether.

His argument is that Zionists in occupied Palestine are more hardline than those in the UK.  Maybe so, but they are unwilling to countenance the end of the Jewish state. So far, no Zionist group has accepted the end of the “Jewish State”. We are left, then, with the fact that Zionism inherently means support for a settler colony in occupied Palestine.

By 2019 Lansman had moved to the position  – the Party now had “a major problem with antisemitism and had “a much larger number of people with hardcore antisemitic opinions.

Lansman also invited into a key role in Momentum, a left Zionist activist from Scotland, Rhea Wolfson. She was a member of the Zionist affiliate to the Labour Party, the Jewish Labour Movement and was one of the editors (until April 2018) of the Clarion, the paper of the Zionist Trotskyist sect the AWL. According to her: One of the funniest things about Momentum is it’s just so Jewish.

James Schneider

Among other founders of Momentum was James Schneider. At Oxford University, he met his long-time friend Ben Judah, in whose play Schneider acted. It involved the inevitable Arab terrorist who subsequently turns out to be anti-Semitic. The pair were housemates in the period when Schneider founded Momentum in 2015 and they remain friends today.

Judah did his bit for the witch hunt between 2015 and 2019.  Prior to it, though, he had already claimed in May 2015 that he was pinned to the wall, throttled, punched in the head and told to Get out you f***ing Jew, by George Galloway supporters in Bradford, a charge emphatically denied by Galloway and his Respect Party.

Judah now works for the NATO lobby group the Atlantic Council, having previously worked at the “regime-change friendly” European Council on Foreign Relations and then the neoconservative US think tank the Hudson Institute, which champions aggressive, Israel-centric US foreign policies.

Schneider went on to become Corbyn’s strategic communications adviser. Press TV’s Palestine Declassified’ understands that he was among the key people pushing the idea that apologies needed to be made, and that the IHRA should be adopted.

He is on record as saying that the ridiculous judgement of the EHRC “should and must be implemented. He even highlighted what he thought were really good passages in a book by Dave Rich of the Zionist extremist Community Security Trust, The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti-Semitism. These suggestions, it is reported, include ditching conspiracy theories, not using Holocaust analogies or hysterical language when talking about Israel. These of course all relate at least in part to discussions of the Zionist entity as opposed to Jews.

As the leaked Labour Antisemitism report, the Forde report and the Labour Files show, the bullets used to assassinate Corbyn were produced and shaped by the Zionist regime. They were then carried to the scene of the crime by Zionist lobby groups, assets and fronts. 

But the key proximate actors that delivered the coup de grace to Corbyn were his own supporters and those in his own office.

David Miller is a writer, broadcaster and investigative researcher. He is the producer and expert commentator on Palestine Declassified, a weekly PressTV show. He was unjustly sacked by the University of Bristol in 2021 at the behest of the Zionist movement.

(The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

Israel Bombs Aleppo Airport for the Second time in One Week

SEPTEMBER 6, 2022

 ARABI SOURI 

Israel (read: the USA, rest of NATO, and the Gulfies) bombed Aleppo International Airport taking the airport out of service for the second time in one week.

A Syrian military source said in a statement conveyed by the Syrian news agency Sana:

“At approximately 8:16 p.m. this evening, the Israeli enemy carried out an air aggression with a number of missiles from the direction of the Mediterranean, west of Latakia, targeting Aleppo International Airport.”

The military sources added that the aggression led to material damage to the airport runway rendering it out of service.

Official and local sources have not reported any casualties from this Israeli war crime at the time of this report.

Reminder: bombing civilian facilities is a war crime defined by all conventions and international treaties, bombing an international airport during its operation is an Israeli level of war crime sanctioned by its sponsors in the so-called collective west and will not go unpunished.

Israel, the US’s advanced criminal tool in the region, is proving to those still hesitant that its very existence is an existential threat to the people of the region, a threat to the world’s peace order, and a threat to humanity as a whole.

Syrian Civil Aviation has suspended all arriving and departing flights to the airport, diverting them to Damascus International Airport as it assesses the damage to the airport’s infrastructure, mainly the runways, rendering it unsafe for commercial flights and the passengers on board such flights.

The Syrian Ministry of Transportation urged all passengers scheduled for departure from the airport to contact their air travel and booking agencies to reschedule their flights.

It took the Syrian civil aviation two days to repair the damages from the previous Israeli bombing of the Aleppo International Airport on the 31st of August, the technicians are still assessing the damages from this aggression at the time of this report.

Israel only exists with the massive funding it receives from US and EU taxpayers, the massive funding from most of the Gulfies, and the ‘ironclad‘ protection it receives from the collective west, their claims that they are protecting its ‘democracy’ is a farce in the face of their own citizens who they suck their blood dry to finance their antichrist project in Israel; if someone thinks otherwise, just watch Biden’s latest Satanic speech again.

Zionism is an anti-Jewish ideology built on the myth of creating a homeland for the Jewish in diaspora in contradiction to the teachings of the Torah that literally prevent the Jews from creating a country of their own as they are, as per their own books, punished by God to be dispersed amongst the nations for the mischief they have collectively committed when the Jews of the Levant had a Jewish state of their own.

Another myth is that the homeland of all the Jews in the diaspora is in Palestine, Judaism is a religion and not a race or ethnicity, Zionism is not a religion, it’s a political movement, and the early Zionists even considered Argentina and Crimea as potential places to build their state before they settled on Palestine with the help of the British. To put it into perspective think of what relates Christians in the Philippines or Africa, or Europe to Palestine. Or what relates a newly converted European Muslim to Mecca in Arabia?

The history of the creation of Israel, the current day state not Israel the nickname of Prophet Jacob son of Isaac son of Ibrahim (Abram), and all the massacres, crimes against humanity, and war crimes it committed and is committing against the real Semite people of the Levant is evidence that this Zionist movement is an antichrist movement sponsored by very influential western bankers and mega-churches like the Evangelical Church in the USA, in order to ‘unleash the beast’, the signs are all on the walls and only fools will not see them, the same fools who will worship the antichrist instead of God.

Syria, the last secular country in the region, is engaged in a war of terror and war of attrition waged against its people by the world’s super-rich and superpower countries for the past 11.5 years, this came after decades of isolation and sanctions imposed on the country not to force export western ‘values’ to its conservative people, it’s because of its refusal to recognize the so-called ‘state of Israel’, the Syrians know much better than everybody else that the return of Jesus Christ will be in Damascus, in particular, he will descend from Heavens onto the white eastern minaret of the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus and will lead the believers in the final battle of Armageddon. If you consider all of these biblical details as myths, you better read the Talmud and the Tanakh, the Zionists’ books they wrote to misinterpret the Ten Commandments, and the Torah, the two books that base the constitution of the so-called state of Israel.

Syria might or not respond in kind in a tit for tat for these repeatitive Israeli war crime bombing of Aleppo International Airport, Syria has a priority duty now to enhance its defenses and help the world rid of the kingdom foothold of the antichrist, and it’s advancing rapidly in this process despite the US-sponsored and protected war crimes committed against it and against its people by Israel, ISIS, Al Qaeda variants, and NATO armies, the US army and the Turkish army, and the host of ‘intelligence’ agencies of the west and Gulfies.

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Betar: The Fascist Group that Produced Three Israeli Prime Ministers

AUGUST 18, 2022

Members of the Betar Zionist youth movement demonstrate against British policy in Palestine at the tomb of Theodor Herzl in the Jewish cemetery in Vienna.

Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° 

Hussam AbdelKareem

Former Israeli PM and renowned war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu once stated that Betar founder Vladimir “Jabotinsky’s doctrine will continue to feed the flame of Zionism and guide our path”.

By the beginning of the 20th century, Poland was home to the biggest Jewish population in the world, with 3.3 million Jews living in that country. In the period between the two world wars, Poland was an incubator for the development of extreme right-wing Zionism. Its leading proponent, the Russian-born Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, a poet, journalist and political activist, was the founder of Betar, one of the popular Zionist youth movements in Europe.

Betar was built on a militaristic spirit, characterized by its staunch opposition to socialism, steeped in the exaltation of violence and loyal to Jabotinsky’s charismatic and authoritarian leadership. Although its core base was in Poland, Betar began to reach Jewish communities in other countries. By 1920s, its worldwide membership was about 60,000, of whom three-quarters lived in Poland.

To left-wing and Labour Zionists, who would take command of the newly established “Israel” in 1948, Betarists were regarded “Jewish fascists”, as described by “Israel’s” first prime minister David Ben-Gurion. Two of its members, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, would serve as “Israel’s” prime ministers, while a third, Benzion Netanyahu, would be the father of “Israel’s” longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 1915, Vladimir Jabotinsky immigrated to Palestine in order to fulfill his Zionist dream of a “Jewish state” in the “Promised Land”. But the then-Ottoman ruler of Palestine, Jamal Pasha, quickly discovered the Zionist plots and activities and suspected their loyalty to “the enemy” during wartime, so he decided to deport thousands of them, including Jabotinsky, to British-controlled Egypt. In Alexandria, Jabotinsky began organizing the Jews in a sort of para-military police force, and he soon offered his services to Great Britain proposing to the British commander in Egypt, General Maxwell, to establish a Jewish brigade to join the war effort under British command. But the British General wasn’t impressed and offered the Zionists a logistics role only. The Jews of Alexandria accepted General Maxwell’s offer and thus the “Zion Mule Corps” was formed. Jabotinsky felt humiliated and headed back to Europe.

From the moment Jabotinsky set foot on Polish soil in 1927, he began working hard to transform Betar into a mass movement among the Jews. He founded the Union of Revisionist Zionists, challenging the mainstream Zionism that was already playing a significant role in the lives of Polish Jews in independent Poland which re-emerged after World War I. Jabotinsky also used Betar to enhance his own political status. He broke with mainstream Zionism, advocating a more aggressive, even violent, approach to dealing with the British colonial administration in mandate Palestine and with Palestinian Arabs, and calling for a “Jewish state” stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian Peninsula and the Euphrates River in Iraq. Poland was a fertile recruiting ground and its Jewish youth were Jabotinsky’s most important disciples. Between 1919 and 1937, almost 250,000 Jews immigrated to Palestine, half of them from Poland, giving Jabotinsky’s organization significant influence there.

In Poland, an environment of anti-semitism prevailed in the late 1930s. There was a feeling among the Poles that Jews were naturally predisposed to communism and were overrepresented in key sectors of the economy. Jews were being targeted by economic boycott, and anti-Jewish legislations were passed. These developments were advantageous to Jabotinsky’s cause. Poland extended diplomatic and military aid to Betar, lending public support to Revisionist positions at the League of Nations and providing military training and weapons to the Revisionists’ armed militia in Palestine, the “Irgun Tsvai Leumi”. Jabotinsky, in turn, presented the Polish government with a plan to send 1.5 million Jews to Palestine over a 10-year period. Polish officials responded warmly to it, regarding it as a practical solution to significantly reduce Poland’s Jewish population. Jabotinsky’s scheme was endorsed by senior Polish politicians, including the foreign minister, the Polish ambassador to Britain, and Poland’s consul general in occupied Al-Quds.

However, Betar’s policies so alarmed Labour Zionists that they warned of exporting “Jewish fascism” to Palestine. Chaim Weizmann, the president of the mainstream World Zionist Organization, was particularly concerned. He even compared Jabotinsky’s Revisionism to Italian fascism. Weizmann’s criticism of Betar was natural, considering the widespread belief that the 1933 assassination of Haim Arlosoroff, the powerful Labour Zionist leader in Palestine, had been the work of Betar activists.

With the eruption of World War II, Betarists, like Menachem Begin, fled the country. Having been imprisoned by the Soviets, he joined the British-controlled army of General Wladyslaw Anders and arrived in Palestine in 1942 where he defected and started his new life between his revisionist-Zionist fellows. During World War II, Avraham Stern, a Betar member, broke ranks with the Irgun and formed his own underground organization, Lehi. Scores of Polish Jewish immigrants flocked to Lehi, which attacked British assets in Palestine and reached out (unsuccessfully) to Italy and Nazi Germany. Yitzhak Shamir was a Lehi leader who personally supervised the brutal killing of the British State Minister, Lord Moyne, in Cairo. The British authorities in Palestine identified Shamir as the person who issued the order for the two assassins who shot Lord Moyne. His name was put on the “Most Wanted” list.

After “Israel” was declared, the Lehi and Irgun members, along with the whole revisionist Zionists were forced to lay down their arms and join the Israeli occupation forces, together with the Haganah of the mainstream Zionism under Ben-Gurion and Weizmann. They formed a political party, Hirut, advocating their extreme-right and expansionist ideology. They remained in opposition for 29 years until 1977, when they won the general elections under the “Likud” coalition and seized power. The old Betarists, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir successively served as prime ministers for a total of 14 years before handing over the leadership to the new generation of revisionist Zionism represented by Benjamin Netanyahu, the son of their old pal Benzion Netanyahu, who served as prime minister for 15 years.

Under Benjamin Netanyahu, whose ideas hail from Jabotinsky’s Revisionism, Betar’s philosophy of living by the sword has become the mainstream in “Israel”, while the old Labour Zionism faded away. In his book “A Place Among the Nations” Netanyahu wrote that “Israel” must display the maximum power towards the Arabs and that Palestinians can only live as “foreigners” under Israeli rule. On July 15, 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu stood at the memorial place of Vladimir Jabotinsky in occupied Al-Quds and very passionately said about his fascist idol: “Jabotinsky was the one who forged the foundations for the combat tradition of our youth over the last hundred years. It was one of his significant innovations. He was a pillar of fire lighting the way for our people”. Netanyahu went on and quoted Jabotinsky’s slogan “It is time to show the world a Jewish rifle with a Jewish bayonet”. He concluded his speech by saying “Jabotinsky’s doctrine will continue to feed the flame of Zionism and guide our path”.

https://syria360.wordpress.com/2022/07/22/contemporary-zionism-pursues-its-assigned-role-as-an-advanced-military-and-intelligence-base-of-anglo-american-european-imperialism/

J-STREET, ANDY LEVIN, AND LIBERAL ZIONISM

AUGUST 15TH, 2022

By Miko Peled

Source

JERUSALEM, PALESTINE – The liberal Zionist voice, which many people mistake for actual support for justice in Palestine, is toxic and dangerous and probably serves Israel and its brutal, racist agenda more than any other ideology.

The most glaring example for this is of course J-Street and its followers. The following two statements are from the advocacy’s group’s website, and in light of Israel’s latest murderous assault on Gaza, they are particularly reprehensible:“We support Israel’s right to defend itself militarily and believe that maintaining Israel’s qualitative military advantage in the region is one essential element of a strategy to keep Israel secure for the long term.”

“We believe that Israel’s military actions in Gaza have been both understandable and justifiable. No country can be expected to absorb thousands of rockets without the right to respond militarily.”

J-Street claims Israel’s attacks on Gaza are “Understandable and justifiable!!” I think they should tell that to the parents of the children who Israel killed and maimed so effectively. Regarding Israel’s bloody assault on Gaza this month, and the criminal targeting of residential areas that caused death and severe injuries to children and other civilians, the best J-street could come up with was,

Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is a terrorist organization responsible for horrific attacks against Israeli civilians. Israel has the same right as any other country to defend itself from the threats posed by such an entity.”

Barely mentioning the death of Palestinian children, they could not find the courage to condemn Israel for its reckless, bloody and unprovoked attack and all they could say is that Israel,

[T]argeted top PIJ commanders in Gaza in order to preempt retaliation by PIJ against Israel. PIJ responded to the Israeli airstrikes comprising the operation with rocket fire into Israel, including into civilian areas.”

J-Street added that:

Israel’s airstrikes reportedly resulted in the death of both PIJ fighters and Palestinian civilians, including children. There are also reports that malfunctioning PIJ rockets resulted in Palestinian civilian deaths. We grieve for the civilian lives lost in this latest round of violence and call for the circumstances of their deaths to be credibly and independently investigated.”

The bodies of  two children, killed alongside their family by Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, are laid to rest in the central Gaza Strip. Sipa via AP Images

Why are they not condemning Israeli aggression in the strongest possible terms? It is interesting what the organization says about the political candidates they decide to endorse:

J Street supports political candidates who support Israeli security and peace in the Middle East. To be eligible for JStreetPAC endorsement, a political candidate must demonstrate that they support a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, active U.S. leadership to help end the conflict, the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel, continued aid to the Palestinian Authority and opposition to the Boycott/Divestment/Sanction movement.”

It was well reported that J-Street and AIPAC clashed over which candidate will represent the Democratic Party for Michigan’s 11th district. As things turned out, Rep. Haley Stevens defeated Rep. Andy Levine, who portrayed himself as the most progressive voice on Palestine in the United States Congress.

However, looking at it from Palestine, representative Andy Levine’s claims to be “pro-Palestinian” are even more absurd than they are when seeing them from the U.S. Here are a few examples of Levin’s “pro-Palestinian” stance.

After President Biden’s visit to Israel, Levin released a statement saying:

I commend President Biden’s reaffirmation of [the] United States’ bedrock support for a two-state solution as the only way to ensure both Israel’s long-term security as a Jewish and democratic state and the political and human rights of the Palestinian people. After years of rightward shift under Trump that denied Palestinians’ right to self-determination, President Biden has restored our commitment to two states for two peoples to the heart of U.S. policy.”

Biden had, in fact, not reversed the Trump administration’s anti-Palestinian policies and, as was well reported, stood by Israeli leaders and declared himself to be a Zionist. In other words, supporting racism, apartheid and unchecked violence against the Palestinian people.

Furthermore, Levin stated:

As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a proud Jewish American and the author of the Two-State Solution Act, I will continue to work with the President and his team and my colleagues in Congress toward advancing peace, justice and security for Israelis and Palestinians.”

And in a tweet from 2021, he said, “I believe U.S. policy must support real human rights for Palestinians and real security for Israelis, who have a right to live without fear of deadly rocket fire.”

I believe U.S. policy must support real human rights for Palestinians and real security for Israelis, who have a right to live without fear of deadly rocket fire. We must admit the status quo protects neither and examine the policies that brought us here. https://t.co/lS79B2PMLz pic.twitter.com/ity3pQquLl

— Rep. Andy Levin (@RepAndyLevin) May 14, 2021

MORE TOXIC THAN AIPAC

The so-called liberal Zionist approach was the bedrock of Zionist public relations. Even though it was Zionist Labor and other “left leaning” political parties that conducted some of the most bloody attacks against Palestinians, somehow the lie of liberal Zionism survived. Over the years, the political parties in Israel dropped the facade of being “left leaning” or even “liberal” with regards to the Palestinian issue. They continued to pursue the violent racist policies of Zionism, and it became the work of Zionists in the West to continue the lie.

J-Street came in at a time when it was clear that Zionist public relations required help. Zionist Jews needed an organization that would help them to continue their support for apartheid in Palestine, and so they needed a home, so to speak, that would continue to perpetuate the lie of a nicer, friendlier form of Zionism.

Even as Israel showed less regard for its image, J-Street took on the role of fig leaf covering the true face of Israel and helping Zionist American Jews to talk about the possibility – which exists only in their minds – of this friendlier, pie in the sky, peace-loving Israel. It would seem an impossible task as the Israeli brutality towards Palestinians continued unabashed. And yet they succeeded. J-Street is a player among players, raising funds and promoting the lies of a democratic yet strong Israel that can one day live in peace with its neighbors.

DECODING THE PROPAGANDA

There are many areas in which it would seem unthinkable that the lie could survive, the most glaring of which is the Gaza Strip, an area with over two million people, more than half of whom are children. Israel imprisons Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and imposes a policy of calorie counting on them, meaning that they never starve to death but will just live on the brink of starvation.

If J-Street and its supporters were concerned with the rights, life or safety of Palestinians they would see – as people of conscience around the world do – that it is incompatible with support for Israel. “Israeli security” is code for giving Israel license to kill indiscriminately. “A Strong Israel” is code for permitting the reckless arming of an apartheid regime that uses its massive military force to target a nation who never had a military force.

“The Two-State Solution” is code for allowing the Israeli apartheid state to continue its crimes against Palestinians indefinitely. A “democratic Israel” is code for disregarding the fact that Israel was established as an apartheid state and that it is not even remotely interested in the rights of Palestinians, but rather promoting a Jewish supremacist agenda throughout all of Palestine.

Opposing the Palestinian call for boycott and sanctions against Israel and referring to Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” is unconscionable. Yet it continues to be the foundation of Zionists, whether they are liberal or otherwise.

ISRAEL’S WAR ON CHILDREN

One would think that the safety and rights of children would be something we can all agree on. Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children is not only a violation of international law, but a violation of all the boundaries of humanity. Children are a real test of where one’s humanity stands, regardless of whether one calls oneself Jewish or not.

Andy Levin constantly repeats that he is “proudly Jewish.” He even said he was “very Jewish” – whatever that means. When I asked Andy Levin to sign on to a bill presented in Congress by a colleague of his, Congresswoman Betty McCollum, which speaks to the need to protect Palestinian children, he said he would not do so. He then added that none of the Jewish members of Congress would ever support it because, “it is anti-Israel.” So what if it is? If justice, peace, freedom are all anti-Israel, it means there is a problem with Israel and those who support it.

The liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world

10 Jul 2020

Source: Al Mayadeen English

Politologist and Researcher; Columnist and Activist; Founder of the Canaán Association.

Susana Khalil 

We have a date with history and it is the liberation of Palestine today in the XXI century against the colonial yoke and anachronism called “Israel”.

Perhaps the end of hunger is the liberation of the world. Freedom is dignity and justice, there is no liberation with the injustice of hunger, hunger is savagery and slavery…The end of hunger is not in the universal human imaginary…It is a corpse theme and even laughable. There is an atheistic confession regarding the end of hunger in the world, anointed with alms, charity and philanthropy.     

The liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world

Zionism is a Eurocentric fascist movement and today it is the engine of imperial inhumanity and is the very normalization of fascism. Zionism is an enemy of humanity that with its despotic supra-power allows it to mock and subjugate the world as the untouchable bearer of Peace.

Zionism operates among rivals, i.e. there is American Zionism and there is Russian Zionism, and there is Chinese Zionism. There is Zionism in its fascist nature and there is also Zionism operating on the left wing. There is Nazi Christian Zionism as well as Islamo-fascist Zionism and at the same time, it operates in the illustrious temple of art, academia and intellectuality: in multiple cases in the scientific and technological plunder, always in the financial, commercial and media mafia. Its hyperrealistic power seems surrealistic.  

For decades Zionism has been one of the great articulators of the West in the macabre spilling of the blood of the peoples of Africa and Latin America for the plundering of their natural resources.

In 1948, the Euro-Zionist movement succeeded in imposing a colonial regime in Palestine called “Israel”. It was imposed on the basis of ethnic cleansing against the native Semitic Palestinian people. The wounded Arab world protested and the international Zionist power managed to conceal its barbarism, stating that they were Arab savages, anti-Semitic Muslims… Zionism is the perfect crime, the victim is guilty. Western egocentric gluttony ejaculates in its creative and illustrative ignorance: They found the land of love, sang Edith Piaf in tribute to the colonial regime of “Israel” that massacred the native Semitic Palestinian people. 

Note

“Israel” that was imposed in 1948 in Palestine is a classic colonialism, a colonial anachronism and its parallelism with the classic colonialism is that it does not come from a country but from a European movement (Zionism), which seeks to create a nation-state. In this case, they use the Jewish religious doctrine (Semitic heritage), they falsify history, they allege that it is about the ”return” to the ancestral land (Indo-Europeans, non-Semitic Jews). And this is why we are facing a colonialism in which it does not only colonize the land of the people but steals, appropriates the history of the native people, and this is because it is a colonialism that does not come from a country but from a movement that seeks to be a country. Therefore it takes the history of the native people. “Israelis” are not “Israelites”. This colonial particularity of usurping the native Palestinian history, culinary and cultural expression, is part of the equation of extermination of the Palestinian people. The native Palestinians are not only expelled from their homeland but the enemy  seeks to expel them from history.

End of the note

It is worrying to see today, how the tyrannies, neo-colonial Arab monarchies, in order to perpetuate themselves in power, are investing colossal sums of money in the falsification of Islam, in school education, in large international Islamic forums, to present this colonialism as an Islamic principle. Be careful with this.

The liberation of Palestine, that is to say the end of the colonial regime of “Israel”, is the collapse of the Arab dictatorships, whether they are pro-imperialist Arab dictatorships or anti-imperialist Arab dictatorships.

Behind the cruel US imperial invasion of Iraq was the colonial regime of “Israel”, through the Zionist Lobby, as part of the colonial expansionist project: “Greater Israel”, from the Nile to the Euphrates.

Today, the colonial regime of “Israel” is in possession of at least 400 atomic bombs.

The humiliating Oslo Accords in which a Palestinian elite groveled and were forced to abandon the armed struggle. By abandoning the armed struggle, much of the Palestinian imaginary was lost, we no longer speak of the Fida’i. It used to be said: To be against “Israel” is not to be against the Jews. Now it is said: To criticize “Israel” does not mean to be against “Israel”. Without realizing it, we are becoming Zionists. It is criminally naïve to believe in the existence of this colonialism.

Former Palestinian leaders gave up the armed struggle for the peaceful struggle that already existed, but a peaceful struggle has not been achieved either, since Western repression does not allow us to express freely or to express the essence of the Palestinian Cause. We have not positioned our own lexicon, under the pretext that we must be intelligent, strategic, objective, subtle, tactical. Although the Palestinians have become more visible in the world, this has not stopped Zionism from advancing its ethnic cleansing in order to make the Palestinian people disappear.

Yes, war is perverse, but pacifism, in some cases of a petty bourgeois humanism, demagogic and in other honest cases, has proved not to be enough to fight the most powerful fascism of today; on the contrary, it has facilitated its advance. Zionism scoffs at all the great denunciations made by great institutions of the world including the UN. We are contemplating history instead of provoking history.

No one has the right to impose which is the way to resist, the peaceful or the armed struggle, both are valid. Another element is to impose on us to recognize Israeli colonialism as an alternative for Peace. That is a trap.  As a native Palestinian of the Diaspora, I do not recognize colonial despotism. The solution is Palestinian independence. Never expel any so-called Israeli, they were born there, that is their land, that is Palestine.

Israeli colonialism is not limited to Palestine but to the rest of the Arab-Persian and Kurdish countries.

The end of the Palestinian people would be the victory of fascist obscurantism, an attack against the rest of the peoples of the world. The peoples of the world will be weaker.  

We have a date with history and it is the liberation of Palestine today in the XXI century against the colonial yoke and anachronism called “Israel”. We have a debt to Humanity and that is to extirpate colonialism from our contemporary history and to extirpate the most powerful fascism of our time. It sounds lovely to say this, the challenge is immense, we must stop self-censorship, under the pretext that we must be strategic. We must kick the table, educating the world about the just Palestinian cause and the danger that Zionism poses to humanity. That embarks deep determination and steadfastness, therein lies the beauty of being Palestinian. From our Diaspora they will come for us to ruin our lives, but to liberate Palestine is the liberation of the world. A more dignified and noble world is mandatory.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

• Let’s denazify the world, end the colonial regime of “Israel”

The unholy alliance: Hindutva and Zionism

June 29 2022

Source

By Amrit Wilson

lthough faced with a backlash from Muslim countries at the offensive comments about the Prophet Mohammad by official spokespersons of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) – and the serious economic crisis this may precipitate for India – Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been unable to deliver a credible response.

Modi faces an impossible task: how to reconcile his chosen international image of a man of peace who loves hugging world leaders, with the murderous Islamophobic agenda he implements back home.

His mask has dropped. Modi and his BJP party, stand exposed for what they are – violent Hindu-supremacists driven by Hindutva, an ideology very similar to Zionism which seeks to transform India into a fascistic Hindu state.

Following Israel’s example

India, is, of course, a very different country from Israel. It has a history of anti-colonial struggle, it is currently in dire economic straits (worse off in the global hunger index than countries like Rwanda and Sudan), and most significantly, it boasts massive people’s movements of farmers, students and indigenous people which are challenging the government and facing intense repression.

But this does not stop the BJP government from seeking to emulate Israel and its policies. Just as the Israeli state was built on ethnic cleansing, the Modi apparatus is involved in the ethnic cleansing of the 14 percent of its population who are Muslims.

India has enacted laws comparable to the Nazi Nuremberg legislations which can potentially strip Muslims of citizenship and expel them from the country; prevent them from marrying Hindus; ban them from offering prayers in public places, and so forth.

There is also a violent economic boycott of Muslim-owned businesses, while lynchings by vigilante mobs sponsored by the state are frequent.  Outspoken Muslim women are facing vile attacks online including being ‘sold’ in mock auctions, while Muslim women and girls in hijab are being barred from entering colleges and hounded on the streets by Hindu-supremacists.

In many areas, Muslims are being labelled encroachers or illegal immigrants and incarcerated in massive immigration detention centers. Recently, in a striking comparison with what commonly takes place Palestine, bulldozers have been brought into action to crush Muslim homes and property. 

Silence is violence

Modi endorses all this with his silence. Before he became prime minister, he was the chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, where, in 2002, he had presided over a massacre of Muslims in which 2000 were killed and 200,000 displaced.

Revealing the true nature of Hindutva, these genocidal attacks had been precisely planned months in advance, with mobs arriving in trucks, armed to the teeth, chanting slogans of incitement to kill, and guided by computer printouts of addresses of Muslim families and their properties, obtained from the local government.

The police joined in killing and mutilating Muslims, specifically targeting women, killing their children, born and unborn, before their eyes, before they themselves were raped, mutilated, and murdered.

The Hindutva project had another face too which was clearly revealed in Gujarat when Modi sold prime coastal land to corporations for a pittance. They reciprocated by supporting him and the Hindutva agenda. Modi soon became synonymous with development, despite soaring inequalities.

As a result of the Gujarat massacres, Modi was banned from entering the US and Britain, but was welcomed back when he became prime minister in 2014. Meanwhile, the killings engineered by the BJP continued with a series of pogroms against Christians in 2008, against Muslims in 2013 and again in 2020 – this time in the capital city of New Delhi.

The role of the British

Like Israel, which was given Palestinian land by Britain, Hindutva owes its origins to the British. Following India’s first war of independence in 1857, in which Hindus and Muslims united to fight the colonizers, the British implemented trusted divide and rule policies.

They nurtured enmity between Hindus and Muslims and encouraged the growth of right-wing Hindu and Muslim parties which became ultimately responsible for the partition of what was once India, into two countries, India and Pakistan.

Chief among these far-right Hindu parties was the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) established in 1925. Today, nearly one hundred years later, it is of crucial importance as the controlling parent of scores of Hindu supremacist groups, which include not only the BJP, but militant women’s organisations, violent student groups, and killer gangs.

Modelled on Mussolini’s Black Shirts and inspired by the Nazis, the RSS views Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as a model of ‘race pride’ which should be replicated in India against Muslims.

Just as the militant Stern Gang and Irgun shaped the Israeli state, the RSS has today penetrated much of the Indian state, from the judiciary and the police, to the media and education system – including many universities, though here the resistance has been very strong.

The creation of myths

Central to Hindutva is the rewriting of history, and like Israel, Hindutva groups are always discovering ‘evidence’ which suggests that ancient Islamic shrines are of Hindu origin, or as in the case of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, claimed to be built on the Second Temple. These ‘discoveries’ are followed by mass demolition campaigns.

Even the famed and iconic Taj Mahal, arguably India’s most famous landmark and a symbol of love, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, is now being dubbed Tejo Mahalaya, a Hindu temple.

Hindutva claims that all true Indians are Aryans who lived in India from time immemorial in an area called Akhand Bharat or Undivided India, which it aims to re-establish. According to proponents, Akhand Bharat included today’s Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Myanmar but its borders (like Israel’s) are constantly shifting, with Malaysia and Thailand recently added.

The BJP and neoliberalism

Despite its espousing of these medieval beliefs, however, the BJP is a modern party, which rose to power in the early 1990s by reshaping itself to fit in with India’s neoliberal policies.

The neoliberal era also brought a profound change to India’s relationship with Israel. In the early years after independence, India was committed to freedom for Palestine and its citizens were banned from visiting Israel (as well as apartheid South Africa). Indeed as a gesture of solidarity, Prime Minister Nehru famously visited Gaza in 1960.

Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in Gaza, 1960

However, by In 1992, full diplomatic relations were established between India and Israel, and when the BJP rose to power in a coalition government between 1998 and 2004, the relationship strengthened, with Israel supplying arms, including laser-guided missiles, during the 1999 Indo-Pakistan war. In 2017, Modi visited Israel – the first Indian PM to do so – and signed numerous weapons deals.

Hasbara and Bollywood

Today, India is Israel’s largest purchaser of weapons, accounting for nearly 50 percent of Israel’s arms sales. Joint ventures include the notorious Adani group and Elbit partnership. Additionally, New Delhi imports agricultural technology from Israel, and many resorts in India, are effectively places for rest and recreation for Israeli soldiers.

More recently, the Bollywood film industry is being used to cement the India-Israel relationship and fight the cultural boycott of Israel’s entertainment business. Co-productions are in the making and there have been numerous visits to Israel by Bollywood stars

On Israel’s so-called Independence Day there were celebratory parties across India marking the occasion. Israeli actor-musician Tsahi Halevi, famous for his role in Fauda, a TV show which demonises Palestinians, visited India and performed a cover of the Indian hit song “Tere jaisa yaar kahaan.”

Global Hindutva emulates global Zionism

Like their Zionist counterparts, Hindutva groups are active in the diaspora across the world. Their aim is to project India as a peaceful and highly successful democracy. To this end they have penetrated political parties in the west as well as the corporate world.

Adopting the model of silencing criticism perfected by Zionists, (who claim that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic), Hindutva groups claim that all criticism of the Modi regime by progressives in the diaspora is Hinduphobic – though Hinduphobia, unlike anti-Semitism has no material or historical basis.

Back in India, a very intense struggle is being waged, with people’s movements, the Left, and other progressives pitted against the ruling party.

They are students fighting the attempts to impose a neoliberal Hindu-supremacist model of education; farmers who have won the first round of a battle against the corporatization of agriculture; human rights activists and lawyers fighting to defend the thousands of political prisoners in Modi’s jails – imprisoned for campaigning peacefully against fascism.

Many, though not all, of these people are Hindus, but they are not organized as Hindus. In addition, there are indigenous people or Adivasis who have their own religion and are fighting displacement from their ancestral land by mining companies. These struggles bring hope in an otherwise bleak environment, and serve as a reminder that fascism will always be defeated.

FORGET LIBERATING UKRAINE – WE FIRST NEED TO LIBERATE OUR MINDS

JUNE 10TH, 2022

By Jonathan Cook

Source

Nothing should better qualify me to write about world affairs at the moment – and Western meddling in Ukraine – than the fact that I have intimately followed the twists and turns of Israeli politics for two decades.

We will turn to the wider picture in a moment. But before that, let us consider developments in Israel, as its “historic,” year-old government – which included for the very first time a party representing a section of Israel’s minority of Palestinian citizens – teeters on the brink of collapse.

Crisis struck, as everyone knew it would sooner or later, because the Israeli parliament had to vote on a major issue relating to the occupation: renewing a temporary law that for decades has regularly extended Israel’s legal system outside its territory, applying it to Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank.

That law lies at the heart of an Israeli political system that the world’s leading human rights groups, both in Israel and abroad, now belatedly admit has always constituted apartheid. The law ensures that Jewish settlers living in the West Bank in violation of international law receive rights different from, and far superior to, those of the Palestinians that are ruled over by Israel’s occupying military authorities.

My latest: A new report by human rights group B'Tselem calling Israel an apartheid state will make it harder to smear Israel's critics as antisemites for arguing that the Jewish state is a racist endeavour https://t.co/ubVRYd3nhj

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) January 14, 2021

The law enshrines the principle of Jim Crow-style inequality, creating two different systems of law in the West Bank: one for Jewish settlers and another for Palestinians. But it does more. Those superior rights, and their enforcement by Israel’s army, have for decades allowed Jewish settlers to rampage against Palestinian rural communities with absolute impunity and steal their land – to the point that Palestinians are now confined to tiny, choked slivers of their own homeland.

In international law, that process is called “forcible transfer,” or what we would think of as ethnic cleansing. It’s a major reason that the settlements are a war crime – a fact that the International Criminal Court in the Hague is finding it very hard to ignore. Israel’s leading politicians and generals would all be tried for war crimes if we lived in a fair, and sane, world.

So what happened when this law came before the parliament for a vote on its renewal? The “historic” government, supposedly a rainbow coalition of leftwing and rightwing Jewish parties joined by a religiously conservative Palestinian party, split on entirely predictable ethnic lines.

Members of the Palestinian party either voted against the law or absented themselves from the vote. All the Jewish parties in the government voted for it. The law failed – and the government is now in trouble – because the rightwing Likud Party of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined the Palestinian parties in voting against the law, in the hope of bringing the government down, even though his legislators are completely committed to the apartheid system it upholds.

UPHOLDING APARTHEID

What is most significant about the vote is that it has revealed something far uglier about Israel’s Jewish tribalism than most Westerners appreciate. It shows that all of Israel’s Jewish parties – even the “nice ones” that are termed leftwing or liberal – are in essence racist.

Most Westerners understand Zionism to be split into two broad camps: the right, including the far-right, and the liberal-left camp.

Liberals Are Adopting an Old Soviet Tactic: Painting Opponents as Mentally Ill

Today this so-called liberal-left camp is tiny and represented by the Israeli Labour and Meretz parties. Israel’s Labour Party is considered so respectable that Britain’s Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, publicly celebrated the recent restoration of ties after the Israeli party severed connections during the term of Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

But note this. Not only have the Labour and Meretz parties been sitting for a year in a government led by Naftali Bennett, whose party represents the illegal settlements, they have just voted for the very apartheid law that ensures the settlers get superior rights over Palestinians, including the right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.

In the case of the Israeli Labour Party, that is hardly surprising. Labour founded the first settlements and, apart from a brief period in the late 1990s when it paid lip service to a peace process, always backed to the hilt the apartheid system that enabled the settlements to expand. None of that ever troubled Britain’s Labour Party, apart from when it was led by Corbyn, a genuinely dedicated anti-racist.

But by contrast to Labour, Meretz is an avowedly anti-occupation party. That was the very reason it was founded in the early 1990s. Opposition to the occupation and the settlements is supposedly hardwired into its DNA. So how did it vote for the very apartheid law underpinning the settlements?

UTTER HYPOCRISY

The naïve, or mischievous, will tell you Meretz had no choice because the alternative was Bennett’s government losing the vote – which in fact happened anyway – and reviving the chances of Netanyahu returning to power. Meretz’s hands were supposedly tied.

This argument – of pragmatic necessity – is one we often hear when groups professing to believe one thing act in ways that damage the very thing they say they hold dear.

But Israeli commentator Gideon Levy makes a very telling point that applies far beyond this particular Israeli case.

He notes that Meretz would never have been seen to vote for the apartheid law – whatever the consequences – if the issue had been about transgressing the rights of Israel’s LGBTQ community rather than transgressing Palestinian rights. Meretz, whose leader is gay, has LGBTQ rights at the top of its agenda.

Levy writes: “Two justice systems in the same territory, one for straight people and another for gay people? Is there any circumstance in which this would happen? A single political constellation that could bring it about?”

The same could be said of Labour, even if we believe, as Starmer apparently does, that it is a leftwing party. Its leader, Merav Michaeli, is an ardent feminist.

Would Labour, Levy writes, “ever raise its hand for apartheid laws against [Israeli] women in the West Bank? Two separate legal systems, one for men and another for women? Never. Absolutely not.”

Levy’s point is that even for the so-called Zionist left, Palestinians are inherently inferior by virtue of the fact that they are Palestinian. The Palestinian gay community and Palestinian women are just as affected by the Israel’s apartheid law favoring Jewish settlers as Palestinian men are. So in voting for it, Meretz and Labour showed that they do not care about the rights of Palestinian women or members of the Palestinian LGBTQ community. Their support for women and the gay community is dependent on the ethnicity of those belonging to these groups.

It should not need highlighting how close such a distinction on racial grounds is to the views espoused by the traditional supporters of Jim Crow in the U.S. or apartheid’s supporters in South Africa.

So what makes Meretz and Labour legislators capable of not just utter hypocrisy but such flagrant racism? The answer is Zionism.

Zionism is a form of ideological tribalism that prioritizes Jewish privilege in the legal, military and political realms. However leftwing you consider yourself, if you subscribe to Zionism you regard your ethnic tribalism as supremely important – and for that reason alone, you are racist.

You may not be conscious of your racism, you may not wish to be racist, but by default you are. Ultimately, when push comes to shove, when you perceive your own Jewish tribalism to be under threat from another tribalism, you will revert to type. Your racism will come to fore, just as surely as Meretz’s just did.

DECEPTIVE SOLIDARITY

But of course, there is nothing exceptional about most Israeli Jews or Israel’s Zionist supporters abroad, whether Jewish or not. Tribalism is endemic to the way most of us view the world, and rapidly comes to the surface whenever we perceive our tribe to be in danger.

Most of us can quickly become extreme tribalists. When tribalism relates to more trivial matters, such as supporting a sports team, it mostly manifests in less dangerous forms, such as boorish or aggressive behavior. But if it relates to an ethnic or national group, it encourages a host of more dangerous behaviors: jingoism, racism, discrimination, segregation and warmongering.

As sensitive as Meretz is to its own tribal identities, whether the Jewish one or a solidarity with the LGBTQ community, its sensitivity to the tribal concerns of others can quickly dissolve when that other identity is presented as threatening. Which is why Meretz, in prioritizing its Jewish identity, lacks any meaningful solidarity with Palestinians or even the Palestinian LGBTQ community.

Instead, Meretz’s opposition to the occupation and the settlements often appears more rooted in the sentiment that they are bad for Israel and its relations with the West than that they are a crime against Palestinians.

This inconsistency means we can easily be fooled about who our real allies are. Just because we share a commitment to one thing, such as ending the occupation, it doesn’t necessarily mean we do so for the same reasons – or we attach the same importance to our commitment.

It is easy, for example, for less experienced Palestinian solidarity activists to assume when they hear Meretz politicians that the party will help advance the Palestinian cause. But failing to understand Meretz’s tribal priorities is a recipe for constant disappointment – and futile activism on behalf of Palestinians.

The Oslo “peace” process remained credible in the West for so long only because Westerners misunderstood how it fitted with the tribal priorities of Israelis. Most were ready to back peace in the abstract so long as it did not entail any practical loss of their tribal privileges.

Yitzhak Rabin, the West’s Israeli partner in the Oslo process, showed what such tribalism entailed in the wake of a gun rampage by a settler, Baruch Goldstein, in 1994 that killed and wounded more than 100 Palestinians at worship in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

Rather than using the murder spree as the justification to implement his commitment to remove the small colonies of extreme settlers from Hebron, Rabin put Hebron’s Palestinians under curfew for many months. Those restrictions have never been fully lifted for many of Hebron’s Palestinians and have allowed Jewish settlers to expand their colonies ever since.

My latest: Israel's expulsion of international observers from the city of Hebron removes the last restraint on Jewish settlers who are already subjecting Palestinians there to a reign of terror https://t.co/L0khRKHU56

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 10, 2019

HIERARCHY OF TRIBALISMS

There is a further point that needs underscoring, and that the Israel-Palestine case illustrates well. Not all tribalisms are equal, or equally dangerous. Palestinians are quite capable of being tribal too. Just look at the self-righteous posturing of some Hamas leaders, for example.

But whatever delusions Zionists subscribe to, Palestinian tribalism is clearly far less dangerous to Israel than Jewish tribalism is to Palestinians.

Israel, the state representing Jewish tribalists, has the support of all Western governments and major media outlets, as well as most Arab governments, and at the very least the complicity of global institutions. Israel has an army, navy and air force, all of which can rely on the latest, most powerful weaponry, itself heavily subsidized by the U.S. Israel also enjoys special trading status with the West, which has made its economy one of the strongest on the planet.

The idea that Israeli Jews have a greater reason to fear the Palestinians (or in a further delusion, the Arab world) than Palestinians have to fear Israel is easily refuted. Simply consider how many Israeli Jews would wish to exchange places with a Palestinian – whether in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem or from the minority living inside Israel.

The lesson is that there is a hierarchy of tribalisms, and that a tribalism is more dangerous if it enjoys more power. Empowered tribalisms have the ability to cause much greater harm than disempowered tribalisms. Not all tribalisms are equally destructive.

But there is a more significant point. An empowered tribalism necessarily provokes, accentuates and deepens a disempowered tribalism. Zionists often claim that Palestinians are a made-up or imaginary people because they did not identify as Palestinians until after the state of Israel was created. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir famously suggested the Palestinians were an invented people.

This was, of course, self-serving nonsense. But it has a kernel of truth that makes it sound plausible. Palestinian identity clarified and intensified as a result of the threat posed by Jewish immigrants arriving from Europe, claiming the Palestinian homeland as their own.

As the saying goes, you don’t always fully appreciate what you have until you face losing it. Palestinians had to sharpen their national identity, and their national ambitions, faced with the threat that someone else was claiming what they had always assumed belonged to them.

SUPERIOR VALUES

So how does all this help us understand our own tribalism in the West?

Not least, whatever the anxieties being encouraged in the West over the supposed threat posed by Russia and China, the reality is that the West’s tribalism – sometimes termed “Western civilization,” or “the rules-based order,” or “the democratic world,” or, even more ludicrously, “the international community” – is by far the most powerful of all tribalisms on the planet. And so also the most dangerous.

Israel’s tribal power, for example, derives almost exclusively from the West’s tribal power. It is an adjunct, an extension, of Western tribal power.

But we need to be a little more specific in our thinking. You and I subscribe to Western tribalism – either consciously or less so, depending on whether we see ourselves as on the right or the left of the political spectrum – because it has been cultivated in us over a lifetime through parenting, schools and the corporate media.

Here is the full list of countries' "perceived democratic deficit", in other words the difference between how important people say democracy is and how democratic they think their country is.

The top 5 countries are: China, Switzerland, Vietnam, India and Norway. pic.twitter.com/uhv9Cxc5PG

— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) June 2, 2022

We think West is best. None of us would want to be Russian or Chinese, any more than Israeli Jews would choose to be Palestinian. We implicitly understand that we have privileges over other tribes. And because we are tribal, we assume those privileges are justified in some way. They either derive from our own inherent superiority (a view often associated with the far right) or from a superior culture or traditions (a view usually embracing the moderate right, liberals and parts of the left).

Again, this echoes Zionist views. Israeli Jews on the right tend to believe that they have inherently superior qualities to Palestinians and Arabs, who are seen as primitive, backward or barbarian-terrorists. Overlapping with these assumptions, religious-Zionist Jews tend to imagine that they are superior because they have the one true God on their side.

By contrast, most secular Jews on the left, like the liberals of Meretz, believe that their superiority derives from some vague conception of Western “culture” or civilization that has fostered in them a greater ability to show tolerance and compassion, and act rationally, than do most Palestinians.

Meretz would like to extend that culture to Palestinians to help them benefit from the same civilizing influences. But until that can happen, they, like the Zionist right, view Palestinians primarily as a threat.

Seen in simple terms, Meretz believes they cannot easily empower the Palestinian LGBTQ community, much as they would like to, without also empowering Hamas. And they do not wish to do that because an empowered Hamas, they fear, would not only threaten the Palestinian LGBTQ community but the Israeli one too.

So liberating Palestinians from decades of Israeli military occupation and ethnic cleansing will just have to wait for a more opportune moment – however long that may take, and however many Palestinians must suffer in the meantime.

NEW HITLERS

The parallels with our own, Western worldview should not be hard to perceive.

We understand that our tribalism, our prioritizing of our own privileges in the West, entails suffering for others. But either we assume we are more deserving than other tribes, or we assume others – to become deserving – must first be brought up to our level through education and other civilizing influences. They will just have to suffer in the meantime.

When we read about the “white man’s burden” worldview in history books, we understand – with the benefit of distance from those times – how ugly Western colonialism was. When it is suggested that we might still harbor this kind of tribalism, we get irritated or, more likely, indignant. “Racist – me? Ridiculous!”

Further, our blindness to our own super-empowered Western tribalism makes us oblivious too to the effect our tribalism has on less empowered tribalisms. We imagine ourselves under constant threat from any other tribal group that asserts its own tribalism in the face of our more empowered tribalism.

Some of those threats can be more ideological and amorphous, particularly in recent years: like the supposed “clash of civilisations” against the Islamist extremism of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

The West’s Hands in Ukraine Are as Bloody as Putin’s

But our preferred enemies have a face, and all too readily can be presented as an improbable stand-in for our template of the bogeyman: Adolf Hitler.

Those new Hitlers pop up one after another, like a whack-a-mole game we can never quite win.

Iraq’s Saddam Hussein – supposedly ready to fire the WMD he didn’t actually have in our direction in less than 45 minutes.

The mad ayatollahs of Iran and their politician-puppets – seeking to build a nuclear bomb to destroy our forward outpost of Israel before presumably turning their warheads on Europe and the U.S.

And then there is the biggest, baddest monster of them all: Vladimir Putin. The mastermind threatening our way of life, our values, or civilization with his mind games, disinformation and control of social media through an army of bots.

My latest: Simple-minded media propaganda – like the claim that Russia’s Putin is deranged – is precisely what brought us to the current crisis over Ukraine https://t.co/QW0pbEq44G

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 28, 2022

EXISTENTIAL THREATS

Because we are as blind to our own tribalism as Meretz is to its racism towards Palestinians, we cannot understand why anyone else might fear us more than we fear them. Our “superior” civilization has cultivated in us a solipsism, a narcissism, that refuses to acknowledge our threatening presence in the world.

The Russians could never be responding to a threat – real or imagined – that we might pose by expanding our military presence right up to Russia’s borders.

The Russians could never see our NATO military alliance as primarily aggressive rather than defensive, as we claim, even though somewhere in a small, dark mental recess where things that make us uncomfortable are shoved we know that Western armies have launched a series of direct wars of aggression against countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and via proxies in Syria, Yemen, Iran and Venezuela.

It's disturbing how many people are peddling the idea that Nato is a 'defensive alliance'. It *claims* to be defensive. Actually, Nato is a central pillar of the highly lucrative war industries. This may help clarify: https://t.co/SL2MA1ASMh

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 26, 2022

The Russians could never genuinely fear neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine – groups that until recently Western media worried were growing in power – even after those neo-Nazis were integrated into the Ukrainian military and led what amounts to a civil war against ethnic Russian communities in the country’s east.

In our view, when Putin spoke of the need to de-Nazify Ukraine, he was not amplifying Russians’ justifiable fears of Nazism on their doorstep, given their history, or the threat those groups genuinely pose to ethnic Russian communities nearby. No, he was simply proving that he and the likely majority of Russians who think like he does are insane.

More than that, his hyperbole gave us permission to bring our covert arming of these neo-Nazis groups out into the light. Now we embrace these neo-Nazis, as we do the rest of Ukraine, and send them advanced weaponry – many billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry.

US intelligence chiefs: Putin is a madman bent on world domination. If he scents defeat, he'll blow us all up with his nukes.

US Congress: Let's send Ukraine $40bn in weapons to defeat Russia over there rather than here.

Who will save us from Washington's warmongering insanity? pic.twitter.com/oKZuaT5sJ5

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) May 11, 2022

And while we do this, we self-righteously berate Putin for being a madman and for his disinformation. He is demented or a liar for viewing us as a existential threat to Russia, while we are entirely justified in viewing him as an existential threat to Western civilization.

And so we keep feeding the chimerical devil we fear. And however often our fears are exposed as self-rationalizing, we never learn.

Saddam Hussein posed an earlier existential threat. His non-existent WMDs were going to be placed in his non-existent long-range missiles to destroy us. So we had every right to destroy Iraq first, preemptively. But when those WMDs turned out not to exist, whose fault was it? Not ours, of course. It was Saddam Hussein’s. He didn’t tell us he did not have WMDs. How could we have known? In our view, Iraq ended up being destroyed because Saddam was a strongman who believed his own propaganda, a primitive Arab hoisted by his own petard.

If we paused for a moment and stood outside our own tribalism, we might realize how dangerously narcissistic – quite how mad – we sound. Saddam Hussein did not tell us he had no WMDs, that he had secretly destroyed them many years earlier, because he feared us and our uncontrollable urge to dominate the globe. He feared that, if we knew he lacked those weapons, we might have more of an incentive to attack him and Iraq, either directly or through proxies. It was we who trapped him in his own lie.

Hypocrisy piled on hypocrisy. The UK is working hand in glove with the ICC to help it prosecute Russian forces for war crimes.

That's the same UK that Amnesty found had 'obstructed' the ICC's efforts to prosecute UK forces for their war crimes in Iraq: https://t.co/Xt3KGMfEdU pic.twitter.com/1LknEWgfSi

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 6, 2022

And then there is Iran. Our endless fury with the mad ayatollahs – our economic sanctions, our and Israel’s executions of Iran’s scientists, our constant chatter of invasion – are intended to stop Tehran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon that might finally level the Middle East’s playing field with Israel, whom we helped to develop a large nuclear arsenal decades ago.

Iran must be stopped so it cannot destroy Israel and then us. Our fears of the Iranian nuclear threat are paramount. We must strike, directly or through proxies, against its allies in Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Gaza. Our entire Middle East policy must be fashioned around the effort to prevent Iran from ever gaining the bomb.

In our madness, we cannot imagine the fears of Iranians, their realistic sense that we pose a much graver threat to them than they could ever pose to us. In the circumstances, to Iranians, a nuclear weapon might surely look like a very wise insurance policy – a deterrence – against our boundless self-righteousness.

VICIOUS CYCLE

Because we are the strongest tribe on the planet, we are also the most deluded, the most propagandized, as well as the most dangerous. We create the reality we think we oppose. We spawn the devils we fear. We force our rivals into the role of bogeyman that makes us feel good about ourselves.

In Israel, Meretz imagines it opposes the occupation. And yet it keeps conspiring in actions – supposedly to aid Israel’s security, like the apartheid law – that justifiably make Palestinians fear for their existence and believe they have no Jewish allies in Israel. Backed into a corner, Palestinians resist, either in an organized fashion, as during their intifada uprisings, or through ineffectual “lone-wolf” attacks by individuals.

But the Zionist tribalism of Meretz – as liberal, humane and caring as they are – means they can perceive only their own existential anxieties; they cannot see themselves as a threat to others or grasp the fears that they and other Zionists provoke in Palestinians. So the Palestinians must be dismissed as religious maniacs, or primitive, or barbarian-terrorists.

This kind of tribalism produces a vicious cycle – for us, as for Israel. Our behaviors based on the assumption of superiority – our greed and aggression – mean we inevitably deepen the tribalisms of others and provoke their resistance. Which in turn rationalizes our assumption that we must act even more tribally, even more greedily, even more aggressively.

The US war lobby is so massively bloated that it would be simply astonishing if it didn't have a (usually covert) finger prised into every major conflict zone on the planet – and a strong vested interest in perpetuating those conflicts too pic.twitter.com/XOVCkqx78x

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 4, 2022

CHEERLEADING WAR

We each have more than one tribal identity, of course. We are not only British, French, American, Brazilian. We are Black, Asian, Hispanic, white. We are straight, gay, trans, or something even more complex. We are conservative, liberal, left. We may support a team, or have a faith.

These tribal identities can conflict and interact in complex ways. As Meretz shows, one identity may come to the fore, and recede into the background, depending on circumstances and the perception of threat.

But perhaps most important of all, some tribalisms can be harnessed and manipulated by other, narrower, more covert tribal identities. Remember, not all tribalisms are equal.

Western elites – our politicians, corporate leaders, billionaires – have their own narrow tribalism. They prioritize their own tribe and its interests: making money and retaining power on the world stage. But given how ugly, selfish and destructive this tribe would look were it to stand before us nakedly pursuing power for its own benefit, it promotes its tribal interests in the name of the wider tribe and its “cultural” values.

EU to exempt private and corporate jets from green aviation fuel tax.

We are not all in this together. https://t.co/1LI6w88rMs

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) June 6, 2022

This elite tribe wages its endless wars for resource control, it oppresses others, it imposes austerity, it wrecks the planet, all in the name of Western civilization.

When we cheerlead the West’s wars; when we reluctantly concede that other societies must be smashed; when we accept that poverty and food banks are an unfortunate byproduct of supposed economic realities, as is the toxifying of the planet, we conspire in advancing not our own tribal interests but someone else’s.

When we send tens of billions of dollars of weapons to Ukraine, we imagine we are being selfless, helping those in trouble, stopping an evil madman, upholding international law, listening to Ukrainians. But our understanding of why events are unfolding as they are in Ukraine, more so than how they are unfolding, has been imposed on us, just as it has on ordinary Ukrainians and ordinary Russians.

Another carefully calibrated step in Nato's intensifying proxy war against Russia. The US and UK prepare to send offensive rocket artillery to Ukraine with a long enough range to hit Russia.

At what point does Nato drop the pretence and own this war – and its consequences? pic.twitter.com/KtF8GMMyrl

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 6, 2022

We believe we can end the war through more muscle. We assume we can terrorize Russia into withdrawal. Or even more dangerously, we fantasize that we can defeat a nuclear-armed Russia and remove its “madman” president. We cannot imagine that we are only stoking the very fears that drove Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place, the very fears that brought a strongman like Putin to power and sustain him there. We make the situation worse in assuming we are making it better.

So why do we do it?

Because our thoughts are not our own. We are dancing to a tune composed by others whose motives and interests we barely comprehend.

An endless war is not in our interests, nor in those of Ukrainians or Russians. But it might just be in the interests of Western elites that need to “weaken the enemy” to expand their dominance; that need pretexts to hoover up our money for wars that profit them alone; that need to create enemies to shore up the tribalism of Western publics so that we do not start to see things from the point of view of others or wonder whether our own tribalism really serves our interests or those of an elite.

Greenwald on the interests of the west's military-industrial complex: 'Right at the moment when the market for these weapons disappeared, when the US finally got out of Iraq and Afghanistan, lo and behold there's this new market in Ukraine' https://t.co/s3wVNbkOJN

— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 6, 2022

The truth is we are being constantly manipulated, duped, propagandized to advance “values” that are not inherent in our “superior” culture but manufactured for us by the elites’ public-relations arm, the corporate media. We are made into willing co-conspirators in behavior that actually harms us, others, and the planet.

In Ukraine, our very compassion to help is being weaponized in ways that will kill Ukrainians and destroy their communities, just as Meretz’s caring liberalism has spent decades rationalizing the oppression of Palestinians in the name of ending it.

We cannot liberate Ukraine or Russia. But what we can do may, in the long term, prove far more significant: We can start liberating our minds.

From Nakba 74 and Beyond: Solidarity is Ongoing

May 19, 2022

Thousands of Palestinians throughout the besieged Gaza Strip commemorate the 74th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba. (Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

By Benay Blend

On Nakba Day 2022, thousands of people around the world marked the 74^th anniversary of the “catastrophe” of 1948 that saw nearly 800,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes as Zionists established the illegal state of Israel. Demonstrators also demanded justice for the slain Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who was assassinated by Israeli forces in Jenin within the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Appropriately, on May 15, poet and activist Remi Kanazi tweeted: “Why solidarity matters. It’s Nakba Day. Other communities are in pain and dealing with supremacist forces. If we don’t fight against all systems of domination and build with each other,” he warned, “the oppression we face will never truly end, even if we think it does.”

 As if in answer, an Azov-insignia wearing teen carried out a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Because 11 out of the 13 victims were black, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the police have labeled the murders a “hate crime.”

The problem with this label is that it implies that the crime was an act of a lone individual acting on racist impulses. The solution, many believe, is gun control. Both assumptions are mere band-aids on the problem. Whether a member of an organized group or not, this man was not a lone shooter, but rather part of a larger Nazi movement.

As Benjamin Norton noted, the shooter was wearing the same “black sun” Nazi symbol used by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov militia, which NATO is arming and training. According to an Al Jazeera report, Ukraine has emerged as an international center for the far right around the world. There Azov has been active in training men who want combat experience and share a fascist ideology.

The soldier who murdered Abu Akleh also acted as a member of a particular society, writes  scholar/activist Steven Salaita, doing “exactly what Israeli soldiers do.” Indeed, over the past two decades the Zionist state has murdered approximately fifty journalists, making Abu Akleh’s death not an aberration, a mistake, but rather a matter of policy.

The colonizer, concludes Salaita, perpetuates violence “because of colonization.” In the end, it is “the only way he knows how to be a good citizen” while maintaining a “meaningful existence” for himself.

Just as few shooters act alone, but rather as products of their worldview, so do those who successfully work for social justice do so in community. Mourning the assassination of her compatriot, Gaza-based Palestinian journalist Wafa Aludaini writes that Abu Akleh was a household name in local homes because she documented Israeli crimes.

In her own words, Abu Akleh attests to her close connection to community: “I chose journalism,” she explained, because she wanted to be “close to the people. It might not be easy to change reality,” she continued, “but at least I could bring their voice to the world.”

Writing is a solitary endeavor, but the formation of ideas is not. In the introduction of These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons (2020), Ramzy Baroud, activist/journalist/writer and editor of this collection, declares that “because Palestinian resistance is a collective experience, the writing of this book has also been a collective effort. It is our attempt to reclaim the narrative of our people,” he continues, “to liberate it from the suffocating confines of political, media and academic discourse and take it into the heart of resistance.”

Palestine solidarity by its very definition is also a communal effort, the work of many groups of individuals whose histories are likely different but whose goals for the future intersect with those of all colonized peoples around the world.

My own involvement began around 1980 with a Muslim/Jewish dialogue group organized by fellow grad students at the University of New Mexico. Since then, my activism has evolved away from conversations that by their very nature involve a power gap to direct involvement/writing that attempts to place Palestinians at the center. At the present time my activist work involves membership in the recently organized Albuquerque chapter of Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network. As a writer, I’ve also learned that very little happens in a vacuum; formulation of ideas requires a give and take between people of similar, and sometimes different, persuasion. From all those years I’ve learned the importance of being part of an organization.

Solidarity means maintaining unanimity no matter where the media directs our attention. “Empathy’s endurance,” writes Onyesonwu Chatoyer, organizer for the All African People’s Revolutionary Party—Southwest, makes possible “a better and more just way of living” that is “within our capacity” to rebuild. At the present time, however, our inner lives are being “weaponized and manipulated,” especially among the “disorganized and unconscious” elements of our society.

In his preface to Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out (2022), Ramzy Baroud defines the parameters of the struggle. “Solidarity that is not guided by authentic Palestinian voices is simply futile,” Baroud declares, “it cannot effectively mobilize what is essential: their purpose” (p. xviii).

The collection’s chapters are a testament to the ability of Palestinians—and by extension all people who are engaged in freedom struggles—to liberate themselves. Reflecting on “The International Struggle on Behalf of Palestine,” co-editor Ilan Pappé shares three major truths that he has learned during his decades-long involvement in the solidarity campaign. First, solidarity for an Israeli Jew means moving away from Zionism and its “comfort zone”; second, winning the trust of the Palestinian people remains crucial; and finally, trying to influence others to follow the same path is hard (p. 411).

In an interview with Asantewaa Nkrumah-Turé, organizer with Black Alliance for Peace Philadelphia, Margaret Kimberly led the conversation in a way that resonates well with Baroud’s and Pappe’s interpretation of solidarity. Nkrumah-Turé began by speaking of her experience on a panel at the recent Al-Awda Conference in New York. There she tied her anti-imperialist work to Palestine solidarity, commitments that she traced back to the long history of Black support for the Palestinian struggle,

For example, Nkrumah-Turé mentioned her late brother Kwame Turé who came out against Zionism during his involvement with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In this way her trajectory is different than Pappé in that she did not have to leave Zionism in order to oppose it.

Like Baroud and Pappé, Nkrumah-Turé acknowledges other groups who have come to share her position. For example, she salutes Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for what she believes must have been a “difficult move” when they came out with a public statement denouncing Zionism.

Finally, she addresses what Pappé calls the “tension between effort and tangible results” (pp. 411,412), losing hope due to the lack of significant changes on the ground. In answer, both highlight the importance of looking to the future. For Pappé, the solution is asking if we “have done enough for the cause,” and for Nkrumah-Turé, a similar response: developing the kind of courage to stay in the fight for the long haul.

For me, it is helpful to consider all of the activists mentioned in this article, along with the contributors to Our Vision for Liberation, as the energy who provide sumud (steadfastness) and inspiration for the future struggle.

– Benay Blend earned her doctorate in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Her scholarly works include Douglas Vakoch and Sam Mickey, Eds. (2017), “’Neither Homeland Nor Exile are Words’: ‘Situated Knowledge’ in the Works of Palestinian and Native American Writers”. She contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

The deeply buried roots of resistance

16 May 2022

Source: Al Mayadeen

Jeremy Salt 

Would they have attacked them had they been of a different ethno-religious background but were still occupiers?  Most certainly yes. These young men had no other motive to do what they did but they were Palestinian and that one word decided their fate.

Had Palestine been partitioned peacefully, even the ‘Jewish state’ would have had a population that was almost 50 percent non-Jewish against an ‘Arab state’ that was 100 per cent Palestinian

The  Palestinian village of Al Muzayri’a was located about 15 kilometers from Ramla.  The attraction was probably rich agricultural land close to a large market town with access to most of the facilities the villagers might need.  Roman and Byzantine ruins were the evidence of the site’s settled history before the long Muslim period of rule began in the 7th century.  Muslim rule was characterised by leaving things as they were as long as the  caliph’s or sultan’s subjects, Muslim, Christian or Jewish,  paid taxes and obeyed the law.  The comparison with the genocide and cultural destruction that followed European conquests is striking. Generally,  Christians and Jews flourished under Muslim rule with not even a remote parallel, in the case of the latter, with the murderous anti-semitism that has characterised European history since the adoption of Christianity.  Needless to say, as Europeans,  the zionist settler-colonists of Palestine used the same murderous tactics  against the indigenous people.  

In the 18th century, the Al Rumayh family from the Ramallah district moved to Al Muzayri’a. At the time it was a small village. Even by 1870 it only had 68 houses and a recorded population of 234 males,  although with women and children the entire population must have been considerably larger.  The census of 1922 showed a wholly Muslim population of 578, the census of 1931, 780, living in 186 houses.  In 1919 a school for boys had been opened, with a school for girls following some time later. 

In 1945, British records indicate,  Al Muzayri’a had a population of 1160,  most of whose food needs were met by the produce of its 10,822 dunums of land, including bananas,  citrus fruit, and cereal crops.  By 1948 the village had a population of 1346 living in 320 houses. Post-1945,  Zionist land acquisition, and settlement had resulted in the loss of 1450 dunums of land but the other 9042 remained the individual or collective property of Al Muzayri’a. The village was included in the territory allotted to the ‘Arab state’ in the UN’s 1947 partition plan. It violated the principle of self-determination and would never have passed but for White House threats to vulnerable African, Latin American, and even European governments.

In any case, partition was never more than a propaganda tool for the zionists. They had no intention of abiding by it. Had Palestine been partitioned peacefully, even the ‘Jewish state’ would have had a population that was almost 50 percent non-Jewish against an ‘Arab state’ that was 100 per cent Palestinian. The ‘Jewish state’ would have been a contradiction in terms and could only have been sustained by apartheid. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 did not solve this fundamental zionist dilemma, as there are now at least as many Palestinians between the river and the sea as there are zionist colonists. The zionists are back to where they were in 1948,  except that the apartheid state has come into being and is recognised around the world for what it is.

The zionist “declaration of independence” of May 14, 1948,  was followed by a series of military operations aimed at seizing as much territory as possible irrespective of whether it had been allocated to the ‘Arab’ or the ‘Jewish’ state. Operation Dani, launched on July 9,  was largely directed against Ramla and Lydd,   but first surrounding villages had to be ‘cleared.’ On July 12,  Al Muzayri’a was stormed by zionist forces and its entire population was driven out. In The Edge of the Sword,  zionist ‘historian’ Netanel Lorch writes that mortar fire and aerial bombardment were alone sufficient on the first day of the operation to cause the ‘’flight’’ from many villages but those who did not flee were driven out anyway.  Throughout 1948  hundreds of towns, villages and hamlets were to share Al Musayri’a’s fate. The peak of Operation Dani was the ethnic cleansing of Lydd and Ramla, affected through terror, intimidation, and war crimes, including the massacre of 80-100 people taking shelter in the central Dahmash mosque. 

In 1949 two zionist settlements,  Nahalim and Mazor,  were built on Al Muzayri’a’s land.  Even by that time, only stone ruins were left of the village. In the 1990s the town of ‘Elad’ (‘’forever God’’) was built on the site and on May 5, 2022, as the zionists celebrated their ‘independence,’ two young Palestinians killed three people in a park.  

Since March 22, 19 people have been killed in this latest Palestinian ‘’wave of terror’’ as it was inevitably described in the zionist media. Israel has responded with threats to resume the murder of senior Hamas figures, along with hundreds of arrests and raids on the West Bank during which many  Palestinians have been killed. By May 9, 50 Palestinians had been killed so far in 2022, 49 on the West Bank or in the eastern part of occupied al-Quds and one in Gaza.  The dead included two men in their 80s,  two women aged 24 and 47, four boys aged 13,14, 16, and  17, four young men of 18, and two aged 19.  

On May 11, Palestinian-American Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, born in Al Quds,  was murdered while covering Palestinian resistance in Jenin. The zionist army chief’s claim that she could have been killed by Palestinian gunmen was described by other journalists on the scene as a complete lie. There were no militants anywhere near them.  Shireen’s producer, Ali Samoudi, who was wounded, said zionist soldiers close to the journalists had fired three shots at them.  The first missed,  the second wounded him in the back and the third hit Shireen in the head. Another journalist reaching out to help her said the soldiers did not stop firing even though she was on the ground and mortally wounded.  

In the hunt for the ‘Elad’ assailants, zionist forces also rounded up many West Bank Palestinians described as being in “Israel” ‘’illegally.’’ Such a concept is derisory where the zionist settler state is concerned. It has lived outside any laws except its own for more than 70 years. Its justice system is actually an injustice system, insofar as the Palestinians are concerned. Real justice stands on the side of all Palestinians,  pre-1967, and post-1967 as well as Palestinians living far from their homeland.   

The other issue here is resistance. The right of resistance to occupation is upheld under international law: there is no ‘right’ of occupation, only responsibility as a temporary consequence of war, with the occupier prohibited from settling civilians in occupied territory. It is not just the West and Gaza Strip that are ‘’occupied territories”. This is a fiction that suits the governments that gave Palestine to the zionists in the first place. The tactics used by the zionists in 1948 and 1967 were the same and have been used ever since. ‘Israel’ lives off rights it never had and could never have been bestowed upon it by a third party. Morally, ethically and legally, no right to live can be based on the destruction of another right to live.  In such cases, brute force always dictates the outcome.  

Peace with justice is the preferred option of any reasonable person. but zionism is not a reasonable doctrine. Despite their suffering at the hands of the zionists, the majority of  Palestinians went along with the 1990 Oslo agreements in good faith, only to realise within a few years that the negotiations were being deliberately stretched out by the zionists to consolidate their occupation: in other words, the continuation of war by other means. The duplicity of the previous four decades was simply being dressed up in new clothing.  It was at this point that the Palestinians returned to armed resistance in the form of the second intifada (in fact arguably the third, if the 1936 uprising is to be regarded as the first).

Throughout history how the Palestinians have reacted since 1918 is normal in the lives of an occupied people. Occupation is followed by resistance as naturally as night follows day. The occupier is not just the soldier or the military administrator but the occupier’s civilian population. The occupation turns them into targets as well and who is ultimately responsible if not the government that settled them on someone else’s land? Armed struggle is included in the internationally acknowledged right to resist occupation. The position was summed up on December 3, 1982, when the UN General Assembly passed resolution 37/43 reaffirming ‘’the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means including armed struggle.’’  

Why did the two young Palestinians end the lives of three other human beings in ‘Elad,’ and why in the past few months have other Palestinians launched attacks on the settler population in Bir Saba, Al Quds, and other places? One mind cannot work out the tangled emotions in another mind but did Palestinians attack these settlers just because they were Jews, as the zionist media always claims,  or because they were seen as the occupiers of Palestinian land who happen to be Jewish?   

Would they have attacked them had they been of a different ethno-religious background but were still occupiers?  Most certainly yes. These young men had no other motive to do what they did but they were Palestinian and that one word decided their fate. They would have had the same normal interests, hopes, and aspirations of other young people around the world but the normality of their lives was occupation. Their capacity to do what they did was fuelled by the decades of  death and pain suffered  by every Palestinian family at the hands of the occupier. Al Muzayria and hundreds of other ethnically cleansed villages in 1948;  ‘Elad’, Bir Saba, and other places where settlers who have replaced the original inhabitants have been struck down in 2022;  cause and effect. 

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

في ذكرى النكبة… الأسطورة التي أغفلها غارودي

السبت 15 أيار 2022

المصدر

موفق محادين 

هذه هي الأسطورة الغائبة التي أغفلها غارودي والعالم، ولم ينتبها إلى دورها وأهميتها البالغة في تضليل الرأي العام الغربي.

ربما كان مهدي عامل أوّل من أضفى بُعداً معرفياً على الطائفية، بوصفها أيديولوجيا ما قبل الرأسمالية، في خدمة الرأسمالية، مميّزاً بينها وبين الدين، كمرجعية إيمانية خالصة.

في ذكرى النكبة… الأسطورة التي أغفلها غارودي

ولم تجد مقولة عامل هذه صداها، كما وجدته في الأيديولوجيا الصهيونية.

فبالرغم من كل ما قيل عن الصهيونية كتعبير عن البورجوازية اليهودية الكبيرة (اليسار العربي الكلاسيكي) أو عن البورجوازية الصغيرة (أبراهام ليون)، فإنّ الوقائع والمعطيات وبنية الخطاب الصهيوني لا تغادر هذه المقولة، وتجعلها ملائمة وقابلة للاستنتاج أن الصهيونية هي أيديولوجيا ما قبل رأسمالية، سواء في مفاهيمها النظرية الأولى، كما كرّستها كتابات الصهاينة الأوائل ومؤتمر بال، أم في مشروعها السياسي، الذي رافق الإعلام الصهيوني عن قيام الدولة العبرية على الأرض العربية في فلسطين.

هذه هي الأسطورة الغائبة التي أغفلها غارودي والعالم، ولم ينتبهوا إلى دورها وأهميتها البالغة في تضليل الرأي العام الغربي، وإعادة إنتاجه في كل مرة، وفق المقاييس السرية لتقارير وملفات وزارة المستعمرات البريطانية، وهي تصمّم محميّة رأسمالية شرق المتوسط، بأيديولوجيا ما قبل رأسمالية.

لقد قدّمت الصهيونية نفسها كأفضل ممثل للغرب في الشرق، وكخطوة أولى في رحلة الألف ميل، من أجل شرق ديمقراطي معاصر! وتمكّنت أيضاً من اختراق العديد من الأوساط الثقافية العربية، المثقلة بالتخلّف، والتي لم تدرك بعد أن هذا التخلف يعود في واحد من أهم أسبابه إلى دور الصهيونية في احتجاز مشروع الاندماج القومي، وإعاقة هذا المشروع بالهويات الجهوية القطرية البدائية، التي يجري تسويقها كهويات وطنية مستقلة جداً.

فهل تعبّر الصهيونية عن الأيديولوجيا الرأسمالية حقاً، أم هي صورة كاريكاتورية لهذه الأيديولوجيا في مضامينها ودلالاتها ما قبل الرأسمالية؟ وماذا عن القراءات والملاحظات التالية:

أولاً: لم تتأسّس “إسرائيل” كدولة قومية بورجوازية خارج الدين الذي كان فصله عن الدولة شرطاً أساسياً من شروط النمط الأوروبي لهذه الدولة. بل تأسّست كداعشية توراتية لليهود، الذين ينتسبون إلى عشرات القوميات والأعراق والأجناس.

والدين اليهودي كما سجّله عزرا في السبي البابلي، ليس مثل أي دين آخر. ففي التلمود تتساوى النفس اليهودية مع العزة الإلهية، ويصبح اليهود شعباً مقدّساً مكتفياً بذاته. ولذلك لم يحاول اليهود التبشير بدينهم، لأنهم لا يقبلون خفض مستوى واجبهم نحو تجسيد النموذج الأرقى بجعله واجباً لكل البشر.

ولا تزال بنية الخطاب الصهيوني، الذي ينتج العقل اليهودي الجمعي كل صباح، بنية محكومة أو مسكونة بهذه الحالة، التي لا تعتبر دم اليهود ودم الأغيار من القوميات والأديان الأخرى دماً متساوياً، والتي لا تسمح لغير اليهودي بتسلّم أيّ منصب مهم في الدولة، ولا تسمح ببيع الأرض والبيوت والحقول للأغيار، ولا تسمح بإنقاذ غير اليهودي يوم السبت.

وهناك عشرات الأمثلة التي يعرضها إسرائيل شاحاك في أعماله المنشورة، التي تكذّب كل ما يقال عن الطابع العلماني للدولة العبرية.

ثانياً: لم تتأسّس “إسرائيل”، بصورة طبيعية، كما كل البلدان الأخرى، ولم تعبّر عن مصلحة بورجوازية معينة في بناء دولة سوق خاص بها.

وإضافة إلى التأكيدات المعروفة في التاريخ الصهيوني بشأن الدور العام الذي يمكن لليهود أن يلعبوه بين السويس وطريق الهند الشرقية، وأن يمنعوا عودة روح محمد علي إلى مصر ثانية (وفق تحذيرات البارون روتشيلد، وناحوم سوكولوف، وجابوتنسكي…).

إضافة إلى كل ذلك، وبالاشتقاق من الوظيفة غير الطبيعية للصهيونية السياسية المذكورة، اشتقت الصهيونية من هذه الوظيفة أيديولوجيا غير طبيعية في ملامحها ما قبل الرأسمالية، من جهة، ومن قدرتها على الاستمرار كذلك، كواحدة من مظاهر الرأسمالية نفسها. ومن ذلك:

· فكرة التطويب المقدّس للأرض، بوصفها حالة خلق جديدة، مماثلة للخلق الأول، وصورة عن الفعل النموذجي، الذي قامت به السماء وجسّدته في هبوط نوح على البرية وبناء مملكة الله الأرضية وسط عالم من الخطايا، فتكون “إسرائيل” معادلاً لنوح، وتكون الكوارث التي سبقت قيام “إسرائيل” معادلاً للعماء الكوني الأول، والوحش المائي الذي يرمز إلى ذلك. ويكون مصرع هتلر، والإخفاق العربي في حرب 1948، معادلين لهزيمة الوحش المائي، وما تستدعيه من قرابين بشرية ضرورية للتطويب المقدس الجديد.

· فكرة الألفية أو العود الدوري، والتي لا يمكن تصور الأيديولوجيا الصهيونية من دونها. فهي الفكرة التي تضفي على الهزائم والكوارث طابعاً مقدساً، بوصفها المسوّغ التاريخي للانبعاث مرة أخرى. وهي الفكرة التي توفّر جسراً أو صلة ما بين أيديولوجيا ما قبل رأسمالية كالأيديولوجيا الصهيونية، وبين الأيديولوجيا الرأسمالية في حقبتها الإمبريالية، كما عبّر عنها “فوكوياما” في نهاية التاريخ.

·       فكرة الأمة المزعومة أو الشعب المقدّس، التي تتعالى على التاريخ والسيرورة، وتلغيها بإحالة المعرفة البشرية كلها إلى حدوس صوفية، وما عداها ضرباً من الخطيئة.

ومن المفهوم أن الحدوس المقصودة في البنية التوراتية للخطاب الصهيوني، هي حدوس محسومة بصورة ربانية للشعب المختار: (روح الله عند أبراهام كوك، والقدرة العليا عند آحاد هعام، والأسطورة الحية عند هرتزل).

ثالثاً: لم تتأسّس “إسرائيل” على أسس ديمقراطية بورجوازية، بل وفق ديمقراطية أخرى، هي الديمقراطية الجرمانية، وما تستدعيه من عرقية خالصة (مفبركة) لتسوّغ علاقة السيد اليهودي (الأنا) بالعبد العربي (الآخر).

فالدولة هنا ليست مؤسّسة قائمة على الحق، بل مؤسّسة قائمة على تصوّر أيديولوجي مرتكز على العرقية.

والحرية والديمقراطية شرط داخلي لإنتاج فاشية خارجية،  وليستا نموذجاً إسرائيلياً لديمقراطية فريدة في الشرق الأوسط.

رابعاً: لم تؤسّس الصهيونية دولة مدنية حديثة، بل أسّست نموذجاً لدولة قديمة ما قبل رأسمالية، هي الدولة-القلعة. وكانت في كل ذلك تعبيراً عن نموذج الدولة الحامية والجغرافيا السياسية التقليدية القديمة، القائمة على التخادم السياسي.

وبالارتباط بذلك، لم تؤسّس الصهيونية لمجتمع حديث مؤهّل لإنتاج دولة معاصرة، بل إنّ الدولة هي التي أنتجت المجتمع، وكان بالضرورة وجهها الآخر.

فكما ولدت وعاشت الدولة العبرية على الريع الخارجي والعائدات الإقليمية للوظيفة التاريخية، ولد المجتمع اليهودي على شاكلة دولته. واتّسم بطابع ريعي مماثل، وظلّ يعيد إنتاج بنيته وآلياته الداخلية على إيقاع الوظيفة السياسية الخارجية، واستعاد صورة المجتمع الذي شهدته إسبارطة وروما، وكان ينقسم، كما هو معروف، إلى سادة ونبلاء وبيروقراط من جهة، وعبيد منتجين، من جهة ثانية.

فمقابل النبلاء والسادة في أثينا، يتولى الأشكينازيم في الكيان الصهيوني المناصب الرفيعة في الجيش والاقتصاد والمجتمع. ومقابل العبيد، يقوم الأغيار من العرب والعمال الآسيويين بالأعمال اليدوية.

خامساً: وبالارتباط بالدولة الحامية ومجتمع الدولة الريعي، ظل الاقتصاد الإسرائيلي، بالرغم من عمليات الضخ الخارجي الكبيرة، اقتصاداً شديد الارتباط بالموقع الإقليمي لـ”إسرائيل” داخل لعبة الأمم بين أحواض النفط والطرق والممرات الكبرى، وخطوط التصدّع العالمية.

وأعاد إلى الأذهان اقتصادات الدول-القلاع القديمة، التي كانت تعيش وتتغذّى على طرق التجارة وحماية القوافل والغارات المأجورة.

فبخلاف الطابع المستقل للعسكرة عن البنية الاقتصادية – الاجتماعية في بلدان الديمقراطية الرأسمالية، تمثّل العسكرة في “إسرائيل” جزءاً لا يتجزأ من بنية الدولة والاقتصاد والمجتمع.

وبخلاف الاقتصاد المفتوح في بلدان الرأسمالية الكبرى، التي ترعى الدولة العبرية، تحتفظ هذه الدولة باقتصاد مركزي، ليس له ما يبرّره سوى اعتبارات الوظيفة الخارجية، وما تستدعيه هذه الاعتبارات من شروط اجتماعية داخلية لتعزيزها والتقاطع معها باستمرار.

سادساً: لم تؤسّس “إسرائيل” تقاليد أو مناخات وحدة وصراع طبيعية مع أحد، لا مع الأصدقاء وخاصة الولايات المتحدة، ولا مع العرب.

فعلاقاتها الخاصة مع واشنطن ليست علاقة قائمة على قانون الوحدة والصراع في إطار الوحدة، كما هي حال العلاقات التي تميّز الدول والقوى الصديقة أو المتحالفة، بل علاقة قائمة على اعتبارات أخرى، تحيل “إسرائيل” برمّتها إلى حالة أميركية داخلية، تجعل أيديولوجيا الأنظمة اليهودية، ما قبل الرأسمالية، مجرد تنويعة خاصة على أيديولوجيا نهاية التاريخ الإمبريالية.

وعلاقاتها مع العرب لم تقم، في المقابل، على قانون الوحدة والصراع في إطار الصراع، بل أخذت، وبالضرورة، شكلاً صراعياً من نوع مختلف، لا يستهدف الإخضاع وتقاسم النفوذ الإقليمي، داخل منطقة عربية أصلاً، بل يستهدف الإقصاء والنفي في مستويين مترابطين: نفي الشعب الفلسطيني لا إخضاعه، وتفتيت البنى العربية، وتحويلها إلى كانتونات وجزر معزولة، على غرار دولة البانتوستانات القبلية التي صنعتها جنوب أفريقيا في ما مضى، كأحزمة وأشرطة حدودية حولها.

ولدينا هنا أكثر من مفارقة: الأولى أن “إسرائيل” لا تسعى من وراء الاتفاقيات التي وقّعتها مع غير طرف عربي إلى تكريس أيّ من هؤلاء الأطراف والتعايش معهم، بل إلى تحويل التسوية معهم إلى مناخات موضوعية لتفكيك هؤلاء الأطراف أنفسِهم وتحويلهم إلى مكعبات متناثرة وظواهر إسرائيلية داخلية يتحمّلون في الوقت نفسه الأعباء الأمنية والاجتماعية المباشرة في دوائرهم الخاصة، ويعيدون إنتاج هذه الظواهر في المدار الإسرائيلي بأقل التكاليف الممكنة.

والمفارقة الثانية أن السياسات الإسرائيلية المذكورة لا تتّسم بالطابع الرأسمالي التقليدي المعروف لدى المتروبولات الدولية والإقليمية، بل بطابع أقرب إلى النمط الإقطاعي، وذلك بفضل الموقع الحاسم للأيديولوجيا الصهيونية التوراتية، داخل الوظيفة السياسية الخاصة للدولة-القلعة، والشعب-الطبقة.

صحيح أن مشروع التفتيت الصهيوني للمحيط العربي يقوم على فلسفة السوق وإملاءات البنك الدولي، مقابل مشروع المركزة الإسرائيلية، الذي يقوم على رأسمالية الدولة وقانون الكتل الانتخابية، إلا أن هذه الآليات الرأسمالية تتحرك عملياً ضمن تصورات وبنى اجتماعية ما قبل رأسمالية أو متماهية معها.

فالمعادلة السابقة هي التي تجعل دولة اليهود هذه أقلية طائفية كبرى، وسط أقليات عربية صغيرة، متطاحنة.

أخيراً…

كان متّى يقول: كل ما يؤخذ بالسيف، بالسيف يهلك.

وكان البيتار ينشدون: بالدم قامت يهوذا، وبالدم سقطت، وبالدم ستبعث من جديد.

فكان السؤال: لماذا لا تزول ثانية، فكل ما ينبعث، بحسب غوته، جدير بالزوال.

إلى ذلك، وإضافة إلى مصالح بريطانيا الاستعمارية في إقامة قاعدة عسكرية شرق المتوسط لحماية طريقين مهمّين وتأمينهما، طريق شركة الهند الشرقية، وطريق السويس، فإن الذي نفّذ المشروع الصهيوني فريق بريطاني كامل مرتبط بالصهيوني وايزمان، ويتألف هذا الفريق من كل من:

1. كامبل بنرمان

2. ونستون تشرشل

3. اللورد سايكس

4. الجنرال اللنبي

5. اللورد بلفور

6. شبكة سارة التجسّسية

7. لورنس العرب وشبكة الجواسيس المرتبطة به

8. هربرت صموئيل

9. إيلياهو ساسون.

وقد لعب بنرمان دوراً مهماً في التنبيه إلى أهميّة عزل مصر عن مشرق الوطن العربي عبر إقامة كيان يهودي في فلسطين، وكانت تجربة محمد علي الذي وحّد مصر وبلاد الشام ماثلة في ذهنه.

وأخذ سايكس على عاتقه تمزيق سوريا الطبيعية إلى أربعة أقاليم، سوريا الحالية، ولبنان، وشرق الأردن وفلسطين، مقدمة لوضع فلسطين بتصرّف الحركة الصهيونية. وجاء بلفور بوعده المعروف تتويجاً لاتفاقية سايكس-بيكو، واستكمل ذلك كل من تشرشل والجنرال اللنبي، الأول بتأسيسه للفيلق اليهودي في القوات البريطانية، والثاني باحتلال فلسطين وطرد الأتراك منها وتسليمها للبريطاني الصهيوني هربرت صموئيل، الذي كان ابنه ضابطاً في الفيلق اليهودي.

كما عهد إلى شبكتين للتجسّس وتجنيد المرتزقة توفير الظروف المواتية لإطلاق المشروع الصهيوني كما أداره الصهيوني وايزمان بالتنسيق مع هرتزل وروتشيلد (الصندوق المالي). فإضافة إلى شبكة لورنس المعروفة، لعبت اليهودية سارة وشبكة التجسّس والدعارة التي تديرها دوراً كبيراً في اختراق أوساط عربية عديدة واستمالتها، أما إيلياهو ساسون أو إيلياهو إيلات، فقد عهد إليه بتقديم نفسه كمستشرق بريطاني مهمته دراسة الأحوال العربية المحيطة بفلسطين، حيث أمضى، فعلاً، سنوات عديدة بين الأهالي في مصر وسوريا وشرق الأردن ولبنان، تمكن خلالها من إقامة علاقات واسعة مع زعامات وشيوخ في هذه المناطق، وفّرت له الاطلاع عن كثب على أحوالهم وطرق تفكيرهم ومصالحهم من جهة، كما لعب دوراً في إشاعة ثقافات كيانية تدعو إلى الاستقلال عن سوريا والتخلص من نفوذ أكبر حزب كان يدعو إلى استقلال ووحدة سوريا الطبيعية آنذاك، وهو حزب الاستقلال السوري. وبحسب مذكّراته (إسرائيل وجاراتها) التي تقع في ألف صفحة تقريباً، فقد قدّمت الحركة الصهيونية دعماً مالياً للعديد من الزعامات والقوى (الجديدة) المعادية لوحدة سوريا الطبيعية، وكان يرى أن سيطرة اليهود على فلسطين لا يمكن أن تحدث وتستمر بوجود سوريا الواحدة الموحّدة.

إن الآراء المذكورة في هذه المقالة لا تعبّر بالضرورة عن رأي الميادين وإنما تعبّر عن رأي صاحبها حصراً

Zionism in Ukraine Allied with Nazism

MAY 5, 2022

Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360°

In this deep dive with historian and author Matt Ehret we examine the history of Zionism in Ukraine and the origin of many of the Zionist ultra nationalist groups now occupying Palestinian territory since the Nakba (ethnic cleansing of Palestine) in 1948.

We look at the emergence of the Chabad Lubavitch sect that was established before Zionism came into existence and has its origins in Ukraine – now with 10,000 emissaries in 100 countries at the cutting edge of Zionist expansionism. This group is believed to be responsible for the majority of the price tag attacks in occupied Palestine, denies the right to return for all Palestinians and leads the ideological war against non adherents of Judaism.

We make the link between this secular ultra nationalist ideology and consider how it is mutually inclusive of the Ukrainian far right and Nazi elements that now dominate Ukrainian politics, military and police. Matt analyses the Oligarchical power base behind these cults and how it ties into the Great Reset/WEF agenda that is threatening Humanity.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/03/regarding-antisemitism/

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/foreign-minister-sergey-lavrovs-interview-with-mediaset-moscow-may-1-2022/

https://syria360.wordpress.com/2022/05/04/israelis-fighting-shoulder-to-shoulder-with-ukrainian-neo-nazis-russian-foreign-ministry/

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2022/03/16/israels-links-to-ukraines-thriving-neo-nazi-movement/

Palestine in the face of Palestinicide

15 Jan 2022

Source: Al Mayadeen

Susana Khalil

Today, some Arab tyrannies, in order to perpetuate themselves in power, seek to submit to this colonial-imperial force, putting the Arab-Persian world at risk.

Palestine in the face of “Palestinicide”

Zionism is a European colonial movement. The English historian Keith Whitelam conceptualizes it as the continuation of Colonial Europe. In 1948, Zionism succeeded in imposing a colonial regime in Palestine called “Israel”. It is classic colonialism, but it differs from historical colonialism in that it does not come from a people, but from a movement that aromatically falsifies history and disguises itself as a people, i.e. the “Jewish people”. Jews, Muslims, and Christians are not peoples, they are religions, and it is sad to have to explain this, at this point in human history and to a supposedly enlightened, educated, and secular world.

The West supposedly has to its credit a worthy history of fighting for secular values, which cost them blood. Secularism is today part of its identity and culture and is a sentiment, but it is inept and structurally ignorant to believe and feel that Jews are a people. To address this issue is to be discriminated against, even by pro-Palestinians. Beyond being a rotten Western taboo, it has its reckless consequences due to sophisticated totalitarian censorship, clear Western obscurantism.

The ideologues of Zionism foresaw that in their colonial enterprise, the day the native achieves his independence, they, as colonizers who do not come from a people but from a movement that seeks to become a people, do not have a point of return as happened in classical colonialism, that they as Jews would return to their respective original homelands. That is why Zionist colonialism has as its nature the very end of that native people in order to settle and ensure the foundations of a “nation-state” called “Israel”. This principle not only remains in force but also advances. Today, some Arab tyrannies, in order to perpetuate themselves in power, seek to submit to this colonial-imperial force, putting the Arab-Persian world at risk.

The colonial and expansionist regime of “Israel” withdrew from the Sinai territories in Egypt, conditioning and subjugating the Egyptian dictatorship. There is a false withdrawal from the Palestinian territories, conditioning and subjugating a caste of Palestinian traitors of the so-called Palestinian Authority. They maintain a military invasion in the Golan Heights in Syria. They unilaterally withdrew from South Lebanon, without conditioning and subjugating the Lebanese government or any Lebanese caste, and this exception is because they were overthrown by the Lebanese armed resistance of Hezbollah. The international Zionist lobby is the mastermind of the barbaric US imperial military invasion of Iraq, for the alleged establishment of democracy, and for the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There will be no justice in the Arab-Persian world, except through the abolition of “Israel’s” colonial expansionist anachronism.

The worst thing about the Oslo Accords is not Zionist colonialism that managed to infiltrate through the Palestinian Authority, but the “memoricide” exercised by that Palestinian Authority, erasing the essence or the raison d’être of what the cause of liberation of the native Palestinian people against the Israeli colonial yoke is. And this “memoricide” takes place when the armed struggle is abandoned, so people are encouraged to follow the “peaceful” approach of struggle, which already existed, that is to say, the cultural, legal, academic, political, financial, economic, media, intellectual, humanitarian, religious, artistic, culinary, and historical struggle, which already existed and must exist; it is vital and magical. But the point is that on the stage, in the peaceful universe, the raison d’être of the Palestinian Cause is censored, evaded. In fact, almost nobody talks about the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, anymore.

I do not remember the author of the phrase: “If you want peace, prepare for justice.” The Palestinian people are facing the most powerful fascist movement of our historical time. Zionism is neoliberal and non-neoliberal imperialism itself.

Armed struggle is not easy and neither is it a guarantee for the liberation of historic Palestine. The peaceful struggle is not easy; it focuses on human rights, and in many cases, it does not address the essence of the Palestinian Cause. Both fronts are important, all fronts of struggle are important.

From the peaceful stage, as a native Palestinian from the Diaspora, the daughter of peasant survivors of Al-Nakba, I fight against the colonial yoke of Israel, I fight for the National Liberation of my Palestinian people against a colonial force.

From the peaceful scenario, does the colonial regime of “Israel” have the right to exist? From the noblest of my soul, I say no. The so-called Israeli population would become Palestinian. Just to raise this is outrageous. I do understand and comprehend the reaction of not understanding; comprehending and accepting the right of native people to decide for themselves. I understand the atheists of freedom and justice.

Some might defend the existence of that colonial, imperial regime and anachronism and believe they have the right to do so, but what is not morally acceptable and constitutes an outrage to human dignity is censoring defending the others’ right to voice their rejection in the universe of debate. That is contrary to the free-thinking world.

There are those who lovingly state, I support “Israel”, and to those I say, support it in your country. why don’t you give it your homeland? There must be a debate, and this is part of the human condition.

I believe that we Palestinians must reposition ourselves, renaissance the root of our cause, be reiterative, not fall into distractions, and not submit to the reality of a contour or conjuncture. This implies intellectual courage and deep human fortitude in the face of so much censorship, fear, demonization, and threat. We must make our intellectual peaceful revolution. We must kick the table and be a rebellion of lucid intellectual light. Therein lies not only the beauty of the Palestinian Cause, but the beauty of being Palestinian.

… More than an intellectual challenge, it is to liberate intellectual fear, for Zionism itself is an intellectual, academic, media, legal, historical, moral, aesthetic, religious, archeological, sociological and philosophical fraud.

The Palestinian Liberation Cause is a direct cause for the protection of the Arab, Persian, and Kurdish world from Israeli expansionist colonialism. As I heard, it was said in the neighborhood of El Guarataro, in Venezuela, the liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world.

Let us free ourselves from the self-censorship that sets the trap for us. We must be strategic, intelligent, and subtle. We will not receive any subsidy, if we do so, we will be rejected, demonized.

They operate an extermination plan against the Palestinian people; they not only colonized the homeland, but also its history, its cuisine, and its most popular artistic expression. And it is logical to say that, for example, they colonized the falafel and the embroidery. That is proof and sample that it is colonialism that does not come from a people, it needs to disguise itself as a people and take it from the native people. They are extermination modalities; they must expel Palestine from history.

It is all about being honest, the world, yes, the world is at risk in the face of Zionism. The Palestinians have an appointment with history and it is to liberate today, in the 21st century, their people from the anachronistic and expansionist colonial regime of “Israel”. Likewise, the Palestinians have a debt with humanity itself and it is to extirpate Zionism, the most powerful fascism of our time, for this we need everybody in, which is the struggle of our time.

Let me be riddled and demonized with the filthy and bastard accusation of the Zionist supremacy of anti-Semitism. Anyway, as Ernesto Guevara used to say, “How can my life matter if what is in danger is humanity.”

Yes, the liberation of Palestine is the liberation of the world, that is to say, taking steps against imperial, colonial atrophy and barbarism synchronized by Zionism.

The gloomy thing is that if we let the Palestinian people disappear, they will sadly exist in the echo of humanity as the cursed people, that by not liberating its noble cause, humanity remains in darkness. In this case, the outcome would be a cursed Palestinian, a traitor Arab.

The opinions mentioned in this article do not necessarily reflect the opinion of Al mayadeen, but rather express the opinion of its writer exclusively.

• The Palestinian Cause is Neither a Religious nor a Human Rights Cause

Let’s be honest, Zionist Israel is built on a tissue of lies

December 23, 2021

82-year-old, Diana Neslen [Youtube]

British journalist and author Yvonne Ridley provides political analysis on affairs related to the Middle East, Asia and the Global War on Terror. Her work has appeared in numerous publications around the world from East to West from titles as diverse as The Washington Post to the Tehran Times and the Tripoli Post earning recognition and awards in the USA and UK. Ten years working for major titles on Fleet Street she expanded her brief into the electronic and broadcast media producing a number of documentary films on Palestinian and other international issues from Guantanamo to Libya and the Arab Spring.

Yvonne Ridley 

Not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews, but say anything negative about the political ideology of Zionism or speak in favour of Palestine and the chances are, regardless of your religious beliefs or lack of them, you will end up being accused of anti-Semitism. In today’s world, posting negative tweets about Zionism or expressing the slightest criticism of Israel can land you in trouble. One 82-year-old woman in Britain, for example, could be expelled from the Labour Party having been accused of posting “anti-Semitic” views on social networks. Diana Neslen, though, is Jewish.

After three investigations by the party, Neslen has had enough and is fighting back. Her legal team has sent a warning letter to let Labour officials know that her anti-Zionist viewpoint is a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. Furthermore, the lawyers at Bindmans say that she has been “subjected by the party to discrimination and harassment related to her protected philosophical belief.”

This has the potential to be a hugely significant case that will put the political ideology of Zionism under the spotlight. Its supporters, especially millions of Christian evangelicals around the world, especially in the US, would have us believe that political Zionism is older than Methuselah himself who, according to the Bible, reached the grand old age of 969. However, compared with the ancient patriarch, the nationalist movement is still in its infancy, having originated in eastern and central Europe towards the back end of the 19th century.

READ: UK media and politicians ‘misled public’ with support for far-right Israeli ambassador

Not only is Zionism a relatively new kid on the ideological block, therefore, but it’s also only relatively recently that the movement has been supported by mainstream Jewry and non-Jews of every political hue. It has taken root among Jews following decades of propaganda and millions of dollars spent lobbying the US and other western governments for legislation to criminalise those who would dare to criticise it.

It wasn’t always like this. Back in December 1938, election results in Poland saw the Zionist political project struggling to take hold within one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities. Only one of the 20 seats allocated to Jews was won by a Zionist candidate; 17 went to the anti-Zionist socialist party, Bund. The evidence suggests that pre-World War Two, orthodox Jews were not generally attracted to Zionism or the concept of a Jewish state. Mike Marqusee made this point in his book If I am Not For Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Verso Books, 2008): “As long as there has been Zionism, there have been anti-Zionist Jews. Indeed, decades before it even came to the notice of non-Jews, anti-Zionism was a well-established Jewish ideology and until World War II commanded wide support in the diaspora.”

The Nazi Holocaust did indeed change things when it murdered millions of Jews and other minority groups, including the disabled, trade unionists, gypsies and homosexuals. “I remember thinking at the end of the war, ‘Why didn’t the Germans do anything?'” said Neslen. “When there’s injustice done in your name you cannot close your eyes to it. That’s why I feel very strongly.” Israel, remember, claims to act on behalf of all Jews, no matter where they live.

The truth remains, though, that Zionism is based on lies. There, I’ve said it, and will no doubt be refused a platform by universities for incurring the wrath of the more rabid elements of Israel’s extreme supporters in the Zionist lobby groups. Like Neslen, however, I too have reached breaking point, although I am not a Jew. So it is time for me to stand my ground, and also fight back.

One of the most enduring of Zionism’s lies was promoted by British author Israel Zangwill 120 years ago when he repeated the well-worn slogan that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without a land”. After realising that this was simply not true, Zangwill parted company with the founders of Zionism and in 1904 started talking about the 600,000 Palestinians who occupied the so-called “land without a people” at the time. He continued to speak out about the Palestinian elephant in the Zionist living room. Today, no doubt, he would be slandered as anti-Semitic; in 1913 Zionists simply called him a traitor.

Like Zangwill, Diana Neslen was also a “committed Zionist” until she visited Israel and saw the self-styled Jewish State at close quarters. And, just like Zangwill, she has been punished, insulted and persecuted since turning her back on the racist ideology. She is not the only person who appears to have been persecuted for her anti-Zionist beliefs, and the fact that she is Jewish appears to cut no ice with her detractors. They continue to insist that the Labour Party must investigate her “anti-Semitism”. What did she say or do to deserve what her lawyers describe as a totally “unjustified and disproportionate” response? In one tweet in 2017 she wrote, “The existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour and I am an antiracist Jew.”

Inside Israel itself, in response to accusations from Jews like Neslen that Zionism is colonialism, the goalposts are being moved yet again with new lie claiming that Jews are genetically “indigenous” to the land. It’s an argument that “swims in fascist waters” according to one Jewish writer who said that the blatant appropriation of anticolonial language changes the definition of Zionism. Far from being a Jewish nationalist movement founded in the 19th century, explained Abe Silberstein, these new zealots are trying to portray Zionism as “an indigenous rights movement, the implication being that virtually all Jews are indigenous to the land of Israel.”

OPINION: Overthrowing Israel’s bogus definition of anti-Semitism

As support for Israel among US Jews starts to fall, especially among the young, it seems as if Zionism is losing its mythical status as a benign ideology, even as the peaceful grassroots Boycott, Sanction and Divestment movement, BDS, rises in popularity. In 2015, a Yachad-Ipsos Mori survey conducted in British Jewish communities found that, while 90 per cent of Jews in the UK believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, just 59 per cent identified themselves as Zionists, down from 72 per cent in 2010. It is no longer clear if “Zionist” means someone who supports Israel’s government, or simply the state’s right to exist.

In 2018, the Labour Party in Britain adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism. “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavour,” says the IHRA, is an example of anti-Semitism. Opponents of its use in this way argue that legitimate criticism of a government is certainly not the same as illegal anti-Jewish racism. Indeed, even the person responsible for drafting the definition — and it remains a draft document; it’s not set in stone — has said that “pro-Israel lobby groups have weaponised the definition in an attempt to silence critics of Zionism.”

Jewish Voice for Labour, of which Neslen is a member, says there are at least 42 Jews in the Labour Party who have faced or are facing disciplinary charges relating to allegations of anti-Semitism. Ironically, under self-proclaimed Zionist and leader of the Labour Party Sir Keir Starmer, Jewish members are five times more likely to have faced complaints about anti-Semitism than non-Jewish members. It remains to be seen if Labour does apologise to Neslen and undertake not to pursue further investigations against her in respect of her beliefs, but it is clear that her lawyers will not drop the legal action.

According to Neslen in the Guardian, “The Labour Party has no idea, in my opinion, of what anti-Semitism is. My son was attacked by a luminary of the [British National Party] who was jailed for three years. I remember picking up the phone and being subjected to death threats from the BNP. People who have never experienced anti-Semitism have no idea what it means, what it means for a Jew to be found guilty of anti-Semitism.”

Like the Labour Party, most other the other main political parties in Britain have adopted the controversial, “seriously flawed” IHRA definition of anti-Semitism apart from in Scotland. There, the Scottish Greens hold two ministerial positions in Nicola Sturgeon’s government. Both co-leaders, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, still refuse to endorse the definition. The Greens have voted previously in favour of a motion that described Israel as a “racist state” based on “Jewish supremacy” and calls Zionism a racist endeavour. This is entirely consistent with the findings of Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem earlier this year.

READ: Jewish woman threatens to sue UK Labour over ‘anti-Semitism’ warnings

The far-right Israeli government is said to be increasingly concerned about the decline of support for Zionism. I wouldn’t be surprised if it has already instructed its embassies and lobby groups around the world to shore up support for the ideology in 2022. Indeed, as reported recently by MEMO, it seems that the pro-Israel lobbyists are going on the attack already; Sturgeon is facing mounting criticism over the Scottish National Party’s partnership with Scottish Greens. The First Minister has also been accused of Jew-hatred for discouraging “trade between Scotland and illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories”.

Such tactics make it no surprise, therefore, to hear that British MP Robert Jenrick has pledged to get the British government to outlaw BDS. Speaking at the Leadership Dialogue Institute (LDI), a think tank fostering closer cultural ties between Australia, the UK and Israel, he addressed BDS in a meeting under the inflammatory heading “Why Do So Many People Hate Jews?” Again, the attempt is to conflate legitimate criticism of a political ideology with totally illegitimate, abhorrent racism against Jews. As one leading pro-Palestine campaigner has said, “Anti-Zionism is a duty; anti-Semitism is a crime.”

When Zionists move the goalposts they unwittingly expose the tissue of lies on which the state of Israel has been built. The Jews in Europe pre-Holocaust saw Zionism for what it was and voted accordingly. It is time for the truth about the ideology to be told before any more Jews like Diana Neslen are persecuted for their wholly acceptable beliefs. Their right to freedom of thought and speech must not be curtailed as they seek justice for the people of occupied Palestine.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.