The Myth of Liberal Zionism: In Conversation with Miko Peled (PODCAST)

November 2, 2022

In this episode, Paul Salvatori talks with pro-Palestinian Israeli activist, journalist and author Miko Peled. (Thumbnail: The Palestine Chronicle)

By Paul Salvatori

In this episode of “Palestine In Perspective”, host and Toronto-based writer for The Palestine Chronicle, Paul Salvatori, talks with pro-Palestinian Israeli activist, journalist, and author Miko Peled.

Peled shares why, despite it presenting itself as progressive, “liberal Zionism” is a myth and how all forms of Zionism amount, in practice, to the denial of fundamental rights and freedoms for the Palestinian people.

Unique about this episode is that Peled, having grown up in Israel society and in a Zionist community (before rejecting it and becoming a pro-Palestinian activist), provides a firsthand look into what that society actually looks like, the troublesome (and racist) attitudes of its members and just how to cut off they are from the Palestinians they claim to well understand as a “threatening” or “menacing” presence.

This quasi-ethnographic perspective offers listeners a revealing look into how a great deal of Israeli society still, and unfortunately, falsely views Palestinians today, as well as the warped sense of pride they take in their subjugation.

“Palestine In Perspective” is a newly featured podcast on The Palestine Chronicle and sub-series of the social justice and human rights-focused podcast, The Dark Room.

Through candid interviews and discussions with pro-Palestinian voices—from scholars and activists to artists and intellectuals—“Palestine In Perspective” illuminates key issues of Palestinian justice, resistance and the international struggle against Israeli apartheid. The show is hosted by Toronto-based writer, activist and musician Paul Salvatori. 

(Thank you to Peter Restivo for the sound mixing of this episode.)

– Paul Salvatori is a Toronto-based journalist, community worker and artist. Much of his work on Palestine involves public education, such as through his recently created interview series, “Palestine in Perspective” (The Dark Room Podcast), where he speaks with writers, scholars and activists. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.

Betar: The Fascist Group that Produced Three Israeli Prime Ministers

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”.

On the Politics of Victory and Defeat: How Gaza Dethroned the King of Israel

June 09th, 2021

King Bibi Feature photo

By Ramzy Baroud

Source

For Netanyahu, the biblical version of Israel was far more convincing than the secular Zionist ideology of yesteryears and by changing the narrative, he managed to redefine the support for Israel around the world.

How did Benjamin Netanyahu manage to serve as Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister? With a total of 15 years in office, Netanyahu surpassed the 12-year mandate of Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion. The answer to this question will become particularly critical for future Israeli leaders who hope to emulate Netanyahu’s legacy, now that his historic leadership is likely to end.

Netanyahu’s ‘achievements’ for Israel cannot be judged according to the same criteria as that of Ben Gurion. Both were staunch Zionist ideologues and savvy politicians. Unlike Ben Gurion, though, Netanyahu did not lead a so-called ‘war of independence,’ merging militias into an army and carefully constructing a ‘national narrative’ that helped Israel justify its numerous crimes against the indigenous Palestinians, at least in the eyes of Israel and its supporters.

The cliched explanation of Netanyahu’s success in politics is that he is a ‘survivor’, a hustler, a fox or, at best, a political genius. However, there is more to Netanyahu than mere soundbites. Unlike other right-wing politicians around the world, Netanyahu did not simply exploit or ride the wave of an existing populist movement. Instead, he was the main architect of the current version of Israel’s right-wing politics. If Ben Gurion was the founding father of Israel in 1948, Netanyahu is the founding father of the new Israel in 1996. While Ben Gurion and his disciples used ethnic cleansing, colonization and illegal settlement construction for strategic and military reasons, Netanyahu, while carrying on with the same practices, changed the narrative altogether.

For Netanyahu, the biblical version of Israel was far more convincing than the secular Zionist ideology of yesteryears. By changing the narrative, Netanyahu managed to redefine the support for Israel around the world, bringing together right-wing religious zealots, chauvinistic, Islamophobic, far-right and ultra-nationalist parties in the US and elsewhere.

Netanyahu’s success in rebranding the centrality of the idea of Israel in the minds of its traditional supporters was not a mere political strategy. He also shifted the balance of power in Israel by making Jewish extremists and illegal settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories his core constituency. Subsequently, he reinvented Israeli conservative politics altogether.

He also trained an entire generation of Israeli right-wing, far-right and ultra-nationalist politicians, giving rise to such unruly characters such as former Defense Minister and the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Lieberman, former Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, and former Defense Minister, and Netanyahu’s likely replacement, Naftali Bennett.

Indeed, a whole new generation of Israelis grew up watching Netanyahu take the right-wing camp from one success to another. For them, he is the savior. His hate-filled rallies and anti-peace rhetoric in the mid-1990s galvanized Jewish extremists, one of whom killed Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s former Prime Minister who engaged the Palestinian leadership through the ‘peace process’ and, ultimately, signed the Oslo Accords.

On Rabin’s death in November 1995, Israel’s political ‘left’ was devastated by right-wing populism championed by its new charismatic leader, Netanyahu, who, merely a few months later, became Israel’s youngest Prime Minister.

Despite the fact that, historically, Israeli politics is defined by its ever-changing dynamics, Netanyahu has helped the right prolong its dominance, completely eclipsing the once-hegemonic Labor Party. This is why the right loves Netanyahu. Under his reign, illegal Jewish colonies expanded unprecedentedly, and any possibility, however meager, of a two-state solution has been forever buried.

Additionally, Netanyahu changed the relationship between the US and Israel, where the latter was no longer a ‘client regime’ – not that it ever was in the strict definition of the term – but one that holds much sway over the US Congress and the White House.

Every attempt by Israel’s political elites to dislodge Netanyahu from power has failed. No coalition was powerful enough; no election outcome was decisive enough and no one was successful enough in convincing Israeli society that he could do more for them than Netanyahu has. Even when Gideon Sa’ar from Netanyahu’s own Likud party tried to stage his own coup against Netanyahu, he lost the vote and the support of the Likudists, later to be ostracized altogether.

Sa’ar later founded his own party, New Hope, continuing with the desperate attempt to oust the seemingly unconquerable Netanyahu. Four general elections within only two years still failed to push Netanyahu out. Every possible mathematical equation to unify various coalitions, all united by the single aim of defeating Netanyahu, has also failed. Each time, Netanyahu came back, with greater resolve to hang on to his seat, challenging contenders within his own party as well as his enemies from without. Even Israel’s court system, which is currently trying Netanyahu for corruption, was not powerful enough to compel disgraced Netanyahu to resign.

Until May of this year, Palestinians seemed to be marginal, if at all relevant to this conversation. Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation looked as if they were mollified, thanks to Israeli violence and Palestinian Authority acquiescence. Palestinians in Gaza, despite occasional displays of defiance, were battling a 15-year-long Israeli siege. Palestinian communities inside Israel seemed alien to any political conversation pertaining to the struggle and aspirations of the Palestinian people.

All of these illusions were dispelled when Gaza rose in solidarity with a small Palestinian community in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem. Their resistance ignited a torrent of events that, within days, unified all Palestinians, everywhere. Consequently, the popular Palestinian revolt has shifted the discourse in favor of Palestinians and against the Israeli occupation.

Perfectly depicting the significance of that moment, the Financial Times newspaper wrote, “The ferocity of the Palestinian anger caught Israel by surprise.” Netanyahu, whose extremist goons were unleashed against Palestinians everywhere, similar to his army being unleashed against besieged Gaza, found himself at an unprecedented disadvantage. It took only 11 days of war to shatter Israel’s sense of ‘security’, expose its sham democracy and spoil its image around the world.

The once untouchable Netanyahu became the mockery of Israeli politics. His conduct in Gaza was described by leading Israeli politicians as “embarrassing”, a defeat and a “surrender”.

Netanyahu struggled to redeem his image. It was too late. As strange as this may sound, it was not Bennett or Lieberman who finally dethroned the “King of Israel’, but the Palestinians themselves.

If not for the Arab collusion, the annexation plan would not have been passed: Palestinian expert

Source

By Mohammad Mazhari

July 19, 2020 – 20:4

TEHRAN – A Palestinian analyst believes that the Arab collusion provided an opportunity for Israel to take advantage of some influential Arab countries to take steps toward the annexation of the occupied West Bank.

“The Arab reality is catastrophic, and this provided a window and opportunity for Israel to take advantage of some influential Arab countries to pass the annexation plan,” Zakarya Al-Ahmad tells the Tehran Times. 

He argues that if it was not for the Arab collusion, Israel would not have embarked on annexing the West Bank.

Following is the text of the interview:

Question: What are the reasons that some Israeli parties oppose the annexation of the occupied West Bank?

Answer: Here are three types of opposition to the annexation plan inside Israel. The first one is supported by the left-wing parties that talk about a peaceful solution for Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  Labor Party adopts this approach, but they are in the minority. 

The other critic of the annexation plan is the religious Zionists, especially the leaders of settlements. They believe that the West Bank is part of Israel, and therefore merely annexing parts of this area is not enough, and here lies the dispute over the scope of annexation.

The third group comprises of moderate parties, such as Blue and White and its allies. This party opposes annexation based on its leftist background and believes that it can lead to strategic problems in their relations with the Palestinian Authority and the U.S.

They call for harmony with the U.S. and the international community, emphasizing that the annexation without American approval, may result in problems at international level.

Q: Benjamin Netanyahu recently warned Benny Gantz that he would either have to accept the annexation plan or hold early elections. Do you think that annexation would lead to the collapse of the Israeli government?

A: As for Netanyahu’s warning to Benny Gantz, I rule out that it will lead to the collapse of the government for two reasons: The first reason is that Netanyahu actually works within the U.S. framework, and this is the reason for a delay in annexation, and therefore when he wants to take a step or take a final decision concerning annexation, he will consider into account Washington’s agreement, and Benny Gantz has no problem in this regard. The second reason is that Benny Gantz will be a loser in case of dissolving the coalition government for an important cause. 

If new elections are held, Netanyahu will win with a greater difference, given that the coalition or the powerful bloc (the Blue-White bloc) that had re-run the elections three times disintegrated after Benny Gantz joined the government and defected from his alliance with Yair Lapid.

Benny Gantz has no chance to win if he enters the election race, and so far he has no achievement on the ground. His coalition disintegrated, and he will lose if he competes Netanyahu, according to opinion polls.  Benjamin Netanyahu is able to win more than 40 seats in the Knesset, and he can form a government with right-wing parties.

Q: How do you see the positions of Western countries and international institutions toward the annexation plan? Will it affect relations between the European Union and the Zionist regime?
A: With regard to the positions of the European Union and international institutions, the important point is that European countries often limit themselves to condemning and objecting, but nothing will translate into action. Three cases proved this approach during the last period: The first case is the annexation of the Golan and recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan. The second case is moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the third point is the “Deal of the Century.”
“If the Palestinian Authority decided to confront Israel and let the people resist on their own, I think we can expect a new Intifada.”There was indeed opposition from some Western countries and international institutions, but it was not translated into real policy. 
Consequently, he does not believe that these international institutions can change the annexation decision or prevent Israel from implementing the plan, or imposing sanctions on Israel. 
In addition, even if these institutions could change something, Israel possibly would be affected minimally. Still, soon Israeli diplomacy will restore balance to relations, and relations with these institutions will recover. Since Israeli diplomacy is rooted in these institutions, it cannot be affected in the long run.
During the past years, the European Union was against settlement and imposed sanctions on the settlements and their products, but Israel continued to build many Jewish settlements and did not stop, on the contrary accelerated it.
Q: What will be the reaction of the Palestinian factions if the West Bank is annexed? Do you expect a new uprising?
A: The Palestinian factions threatened that the annexation plan would be considered declaring a war. It may be an escalation, but it will not lead to a comprehensive war. 
I believe that the Palestinian factions are not interested in entering an all-out war because any war will be disastrous, and post-war is more complicated than before, and will not prevent Israel from taking the annexation step.
In the event the Palestinian factions respond, the responses may be limited, but to enter into a comprehensive confrontation, in my estimation, is not in their interest.
 The Intifada (vast uprising) is linked to an issue; the decision of the Fatah movement and the Palestinian Authority. One of the most significant obstacles that undermine the Intifada in the West Bank is the security coordination between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. This obstacle has long prevented the Palestinian resistance from achieving any progress and execution of any operations against Israel in the West Bank.
“The Arab countries are an essential part of ‘deal of the century’.”The second point is intelligence penetration or Israeli intelligence control of the West Bank.
 If the Palestinian Authority decided to confront Israel and let the people resist on their own, I think we can expect a new Intifada.
Indeed, we can bet on the continuation of individual operations with an individual weapon. This can give a result, but it needs continuity and media support against Israel and help and sponsor the families of the people who resist Israel, especially since most of these families are subject to the demolition of their houses and harassment.
The resistance is facing a difficult situation in the West Bank because of the policies exercised by the Palestinian Authority. Still, if Fatah decides to push and invite people to uprising and give them a weapon in order to carry out operations, at my discretion, that could lead to problems for Israel and will bring a long-term achievement, or at least they will send a message to the world that there are resistance groups who stand in the face of this occupier racist regime.
Q:  How do you evaluate the attitudes of Arab countries towards the annexation plan?
A: If it was not for certain Arab states’ consistency with the Israeli vision, the Zionist regime would not have actually dared to take such a step. 
The Arab countries are an essential part of the “deal of the century,” and the annexation comes in this context, and it is not separate from this deal. There are some distinct stances, but they are fragile. One of these positions which may affect the American administration is Jordan’s position, but can Jordan continue to oppose the annexation plan? 
In my opinion, it will not be able to continue. The question is that can Jordan cancel the peace agreement or at least overlook some provisions of the peace process? I think it is not easy because of its relationship with the international community and U.S. influence and its miserable internal economic situation. In the best condition Jordan can allow a flow of arms to Palestinian factions in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, the annexation plan will eliminate the possibility of forming a Palestinian state, and Jordan will bear the burden of displaced Palestinians from the West Bank in the future. 
Although it has been said that the annexation is partial in this phase, on the strategic level, Israel will not give up a single inch in the West Bank due to (the so-called) religious and strategic considerations. In fact, it will not allow the establishment of a Palestinian state.
 The alternative is displacing the Palestinians and forcing them to go to Jordan. In this case, Jordan will face a big problem.
So Jordan’s opposition comes from this point of view. But can it stand alone? In my opinion, it will not be able to stand alone.


The Arab reality is catastrophic, and this provided a window and opportunity for Israel to take advantage of some influential Arab countries to pass the annexation plan. If not for the Arab collusion, it would not have passed this plan.

جنرالات تل أبيب يتصدّرون المشهد و«أزعر الحارة» ‏يخرج من السباق

محمد صادق الحسيني

‏تفيد أخبار فلسطين المحتلة بأن قائمة أزرق أبيض بزعامة بني غانتس أي جنرالات تل أبيب قد تمكنوا من تجميع 61 صوتاً من اعضاء الكنيست الصهيوني لمصلحتهم ما سيمكنهم عملياً من نيل جائزة التكليف بتشكيل الحكومة الإسرائيلي.

‏وهذا يعني أن «أزعر الحارة» نتن ياهو فقد حظوظه في حكومة الوحدة الوطنية التي كان ينادي ويتشدّق بها بحجة مكافحة كورونا…!

‏من جهة أخرى صحيح أن محاكمته قد تأجلت لأيار المقبل إلا أن ذهابه الى السجن صار أقرب مع هذا المسار الجديد الذي أخذته لعبة شد الحبل بين تياري الشاباك الذي يكاد يمثله بني غانتس ويعلون واشكينازي، والموساد الذي ظل يشكل على مدى العقدين الماضيين بمثابة عصا أزعر الحارة نتن ياهو…!

المعلوم أن غانتس سيحصل على التكليف الرئاسي لتشكيل الحكومة بتوصية 61 نائباً، وهم 15 القائمة (العربية) المشتركة + 7 قائمة ليبرمان + 6 تحالف حزب العمل وميرتس = 61 نائبًا

فهل سينجح غانتس في تشكيل الحكومة؟

ثمّة من يقول بأن أمام مشهد عصابة تل أبيب 3 خيارات:

إقامة حكومة ضيقة. وهذا خيار شبه مستحيل لأن هناك اعضاء داخل تحالفه يعارضون اقامة حكومة بدعم خارجي (الأصوات العربية).

تشكيل حكومة وحدة مع الليكود يتناوب على زعامتها مع نتن ياهو. وهو أمر سقط من خلال اقتراح غانتس على نتن ياهو بمنح العرب في مثل هذه الحكومة 3 حقائب هي الصحة والسياحة والمعارف، المعارف التي لن يقبل الصهاينة المتطرفون «المتدينون» الا ان تكون من حصة حلفاء نتن ياهو أي حاخامات الكيان الصهيوني كما كانت دوماً. وهو الأمر الذي يعرفه غانتس تماماً كما يفترض إنما طرحه على نتن ياهو ليحرجه فيخرجه …!

انشقاقات في أحزاب اليمين والمتدينين قد تنضم لتحالف غانتس .

القانون سيمنح غانتس لتشكيل الحكومة مهلة 4 أسابيع في المرحلة الأولى ثم أسبوعين، وإن لم يفلح يتم تكليف نتن ياهو وهو أمر بات مستبعد مع قرار ليبرمان العلمانيّ التاريخيّ للانضمار الى تكتل غانتس – اليسار، وهو ما يبدو عليه بأنه جاء بضوء أخضر روسي وربما أميركي أيضاً، بهدف تجاوز مرحلة نتن ياهو البهلوانية الهوليودية الفاشلة …

أياً تكن احتمالات مسار الحكومة الإسرائيلية المقبلة إلا أن القدر المتيقن أنها أخرجت أزعر الحارة من السباق، وقربت احتمالات دخوله السجن بعد محاكمة أيار المقبلة، ما لم يطرأ تحوّل كبير في مسارات المعادلة الإقليمية الدولية التي تبدو أنها مرآة عاكسة لتشقق وانقسام الدويلة والمجتمع الإسرائيلي عمودياً وأفقياً بعد عقود من الادعاءات الزائفة بأنهم رمز الدولة النموذج للديمقراطية في عالمنا العربي والإسلامي، الرمز الذي يتمّ تهشيمه وتهميشه مع كل انتصار تسجله قوى التحرر والمقاومة العربية والإسلامية من غزة الى بيروت الى دمشق الى طهران فبغداد وصنعاء والقادم من الأيام يحمل الكثير من المفاجآت ..!

والله بالغ أمره، ولكن أكثر الناس لا يعلمون,

بعدنا طيبين، قولوا الله.

By Way of DecEpstein

by way of decepstein.jpg

by Gilad Atzmon

Yesterday, prosecutors revealed that Jeffrey Epstein kept a fake Saudi passport in his home’s safe along with diamonds and piles of cash. It also emerged last week that Epstein invested millions in a deal with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.  Barak acknowledged to the Daily Beast that he, like other world leaders, visited Epstein’s Island and that he was first introduced to Epstein by Shimon Peres, former Israeli prime minister and president.

Barak’s high-tech company financed by the arch sex trafficker is called Carbyne. The Israeli enterprise develops “call-handling and identification capabilities for emergency response services,” essentially it seeks total access to your phone, its GPS system and its camera. This shouldn’t take us by surprise. By now we know that Epstein was very excited by cameras.

In a world with functioning media, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post and every other Mainstream Media (MSM) outlet would compete mercilessly to dig out the dirt all the way from Epstein’s Island to Tel Aviv but, it seems our MSM is doing the opposite. It conceals the shame. It invests its energy into diverting attention from that which has become obvious to the wider public: Epstein wasn’t just a disgusting paedophile. It is likely that he was serving an intelligence agency and perhaps more than just one.

Four days ago one of the most courageous writers around, former CIA analyst Philip Giraldi, produced a detailed article dealing with the  obvious question: was Epstein an Israeli spy? Giraldi ends his piece:

“it will be very interesting to see just how far and how deep the investigation into Epstein and his activities goes. One can expect that efforts will be made to protect top politicians like Clinton and Trump and to avoid any examination of a possible Israeli role. That is the normal practice, witness the 9/11 Report and the Mueller investigation, both of which eschewed any inquiry into what Israel might have been up to. But this time, if it was indeed an Israeli operation, it might prove difficult to cover up the story since the pedophile aspect of it has unleashed considerable public anger from all across the political spectrum.”

I admire Giraldi and would like to think that he is correct here.  In Britain, however, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, pretty much collapsed when Lord Janner, became a centre of its focus. Lord Janner was a former chairman of the BOD, a Body that claims to represent British Jews. He was also the founder of the Holocaust Memorial Trust. Some people, so it seems, are either above the law or beyond scrutiny.      

We may have to admit that in a world where the Labour Party is terrorised, in the open, by a foreign lobby, in a world where Penguin press stops publishing  a book because it referred to the Rothschilds a as an ‘influential Jewish family,’ in a world where the British national broadcaster is reduced into a Zionist propaganda unit, no one in proximity to power dares to look into the possibility that the intelligence agency of a close ally might have invested millions if not billions of dollars in the formation of a spectacular blackmail apparatus that abused underage children through sex trafficking.

If Epstein wasn’t a lone operator, it is time to ask what his senders had in mind when they formed such a sex trafficking operation. Did they think of the possible consequences if the network were exposed? Did Ehud Barak or Shimon Peres consider the possible implications of their association with a convicted sex offender? Did they care about the possible ramifications to world Jewry, or Israel’s reputation, or Israel’s political affairs and its relationships with the USA? Did they have a plan B? Or maybe you don’t need a plan B in a world where the political class is deeply compromised and the mainstream media as a whole does little but veil the truth.


My battle for truth and freedom involves some expensive legal and security services. I hope that you will consider committing to a monthly donation in whatever amount you can give. Regular contributions will enable me to avoid being pushed against a wall and to stay on top of the endless harassment by Zionist operators attempting to silence me and others.

Donate

From Bibi to Herzl

September 20, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Zionism vowed to make the Jews people like all other people. Israel promised to be the fulfilment of the Zionist aspiration. But the reality on the ground proved otherwise. It didn’t take long before Israel became ‘The Jewish State’ – a state like no other. In this talk, I present a new outlook of the Zionist project and its collapse. I can now throw new light on the most peculiar anomalies in Zionist history, such as labour Zionist brutality towards indigenous Palestinians in ’48, the rise in the prominence of the holocaust in Israel after ’67 and the current manufactured antisemitism hysteria.

I do apologise for the quality of the sound, we work hard to improve it.

Conflating Anti-Zionism with Anti-Semitism a Dangerous and Useful Ploy for Zionists

JERUSALEM — (Analysis) According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, anti-Semitism is defined as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” This is also how anti-Semitism is understood by people in general. However, the state of Israel and Zionist organizations around the world do not want the term to be defined as only racism against Jewish people but also to include criticism and rejection of Zionism.

Jewish rejection of Zionism

The Zionist movement had no concern for God or Jewish law because the Zionist leaders were secular and their vision was to create a secular state. They claimed that Jews were a nation just like any other, even though clearly that is not the case. Jews in Yemen, in Iraq, in Poland or in the Holy Land itself had and continue to have their own distinct customs, clothing, culture and language. The only common thing that Jewish people around the world possess is their religion. This is true even today, when many Jewish people see themselves as secular. Jews in America have a distinct culture that is different from that of Jews in France or Iran or in occupied Palestine.

The Zionists secularized the Old Testament, treating it as though it was a historical document, which it very clearly is not; and, finally, the Zionists claimed that Palestine is the Land of Israel and that it is the land of the Jewish people and therefore they have a right to take it, even by force. They invented and spread the motto, “A Land without a People for a People without a Land,” even though clearly there were people on the land, the Palestinian Arabs. These people, in the eyes of Western colonizers, being non-European and not white, were just insignificant and invisible.

Jewish opposition to Zionism was swift and fierce and is well documented. The leading Rabbis of the Ultra-Orthodox community were very clear in their opposition and the points they made were as relevant in the early 20th century as they are today. According to Jewish law, the Jewish people are forbidden from claiming sovereignty in the Land of Israel. They were expelled by Divine decree as a result of their own rejection of God’s laws and are not permitted to return until such time as God sends His messenger to grant them permission to return. To claim, as many Zionist do, that God gave The Land of Israel to the Jewish people and therefore they are permitted to live there, and force another nation into exile in the process, contravenes the commands of the very God that they claim gave them the land.

AP_120304053909.jpg

God’s promise of the land to the Jewish people was conditioned upon their obedience to His laws. Having failed to so obey, they cannot simply claim it back. Furthermore, there is a prohibition on taking the land by force, dying for the land, or taking a life of another human being. Jewish law commands its followers to be loyal citizens in whatever country they happen to live.

Furthermore, in a book named Or Layesharim or Light for the Truthful, published in the year 1900, the rabbis of the early twentieth century warned of four major inevitable consequences should the Zionist movement be allowed to accomplish its goal of a so-called “Jewish state” in Palestine.

  1. Unprecedented violence to the Holy Land;
  2. Unprecedented tensions between Jews and the Palestinian Arabs;
  3. Jeopardizing the relations between Jews and Muslims;
  4. Casting doubt as to the loyalty of Jewish people in the countries in which they reside around the world.

Sadly, no one listened to the rabbis and, as things turned out, every one of their warnings became true.

Conflating anti-Semitism with rejection of Zionism

From early on, the Zionist movement and then the State of Israel have had a tense relationship with the Ultra-Orthodox community because of its clear anti-Zionist stance. Having grown up in Jerusalem I can recall how each year on particular days, including the Israeli Day of Independence, there would be processions at the Ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods where the Israeli flag would be burned.

The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, which claims to be a civil-rights organization but is in reality a Zionist watchdog, maintains that “Anti-Zionism is a prejudice against the Jewish movement for self-determination and the right of the Jewish people to a homeland in the State of Israel.” This is an interesting twist on Zionism and what it means to oppose it.

To begin with it is not prejudice to oppose Zionism. The Zionist movement has been around for over a century and has a clear track record of racism and extreme violence. Nor is it prejudice against the right of Jewish people to live in Palestine. The creation of the state of Israel came at an enormous cost and included genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the establishment of an apartheid regime. That is enough reason to oppose any movement.

The ADL also claim that BDS — the Palestinian call for a boycott, divestment, sanctions campaign against Israel — is anti-Semitic. On its website, it says that “ADL believes that the founding goals of the BDS movement and many of the strategies used by BDS campaigns are anti-Semitic.” It goes on to say that “the [BDS] campaign is founded on a rejection of Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state. It denies the Jewish people the right to self-determination.”

BDS-001

However, the proclaimed demands of the BDS call, as stated on their website, could not be more clear nor could they be farther from what the ADL claims they are. Namely:

  1. Ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.
  2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality.
  3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.

These demands are all remedial and one can summarize them with three words: Freedom, Justice and Equality — three values that are perfectly congruent with Judaism and Jewish values and with which millions of Jewish people fully agree. Not one of these demands poses even the slightest danger to Jews anywhere. However, they are demands that the State of Israel opposes; and Zionist watchdogs like the ADL, which work in the service of Israel, falsely claim that such opposition to Israel constitutes anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, many if not most people around the world are unaware that historically the Zionist movement and Zionist ideology have been at odds with world Jewry.

As it was then, so it is today: there are entire communities of Jewish people who reject Zionism. The anti-Zionist religious Jews are one such community and there are others, who are not religious and have rejected Zionism and live and thrive in countries around the world, as Jewish people have done throughout the vast majority of Jewish history.

Zionist concerns

It is safe to say that the Zionist establishment, concerned about its own legitimacy, decided to embark on this campaign to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Historically the secular, European Zionist establishment did succeed in convincing and applying pressure on governments and non-governmental organizations around the world to ignore the calls and opinions of traditional rabbis, and accept the Zionist state and consequently accept the claim that opposing Zionism is equivalent to anti-Semitism.

As a result of the growing support for the Palestinian cause and realization that Zionism as a movement is responsible for the inexcusable crimes committed by Israel towards the Palestinian people, consecutive Israeli governments felt the need to stop the growth of anti-Zionist sentiments around the world and began a campaign to conflate criticism and rejection of Zionism with racism and anti-Semitism.

This has reached ridiculous proportions, as when the self-appointed International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, or IHRA, took it upon itself to define anti-Semitism and began a campaign to have its definition accepted by governments and non-governmental organizations around the world. This is how we reach absurd situations like the one in the U.K., where the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, who has fought racism his entire life, is accused of anti-Semitism.

If one wants to eradicate anti-Semitism, one should fight to end all forms of racism; supporting Israel is supporting racism. Claiming that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitic is a false, shameless claim.

By Miko Peled
Source

Correctly Defining Modern Zionism

Correctly Defining Modern Zionism

The Ugly History of the Christian Zionist Movement, Starting in 1909

Source

Mike King

It seems highly likely that the founder of the movement was backed by wealthy Jewish interests intent on building popular support for Zionism.

Though Sugar and I, er, “The Editorial Board” of The Anti-New York Times take great delight in bitch-slapping libtards and pointy-headed intellectuals, it is important to emphasize that not all of America’s insane people are found on the political “Left.”

Though “Christian Zionists” are much closer to our views on social, political and economic matters, their dangerous lunacy when it comes to blindly supporting “the chosen people” and Greater Israel as “end times” requirements calls for an equal-opportunity beat down of these irrational maniacs.

The size and power of the Christian Zionist hordes (aka Evangelicals and Baptists) are no secret to anyone who understands anything about American politics. What is not commonly understood, even among these crazies, is how exactly they got to be so ziotarded in the first place.

Sugar, fire up the Time Machine and set the dial to 1909, please.

   
Some estimates put the numbers of Evangelical Christian Zionists as high as 40 million. These misguided fanatics are even more zealous in their love of Israel that the Jewish Israel Lobby!Cyrus Scofield was a small time politician and career criminal. In 1873, he was forced to resign his position as a District Attorney because of crooked financial transactions which included accepting bribes, stealing political contributions, and securing bank notes by forging signatures. He served jail time for forgery charges.

A heavy drinker, Scofield later abandoned his wife and two daughters. His wife finally divorced the drunken crook in 1883. As so many con-men do, Scofield.soon claimedto have “found Jesus. He later claimed to have obtained a Doctor of Divinity degree, but “Minister” Scofield’s degree has never been verified.

In 1909, after several mysterious trips to Europe and New York, Scofield published the notated reference Bible that still bears his name. The added side notes in “the Scofield Bible” inject a very weird “End Times” prophecy into Christianity. Because of Scofield’s altered Bible, today’s Christian Ziotards believe that Jesus will return to save his followers (The Rapture), but only after Israel is established and that “God will bless those who bless Israel.”

This biblical alteration, at the hands of a known criminal, marks the beginning of this powerful force in American politics that has mentally infected many millions of otherwise decent people with Scofield’s poison. Yes indeed — the Scofield Bible was very good for Zionism!.The question remains: who did the con-man Scofield meet with while in New York and Europe?

 
Jew agent / ex-con Cyrus Scofield and his “study bible” led many millions of Christians to turn a blind eye to Palestinian suffering and actually worship the people who hate Christianity.These Old Testament fanatics who call themselves “Baptists” really need to read what the original “baptist,” John the Baptist, and Jesus Christ are actually quoted as saying, in the New Testament, about the chosenites that they love so much:

Matthew 3:7 — John the Baptist calls out Jewish high priests (Pharisees and Sadducees) as “vipers”

But when John saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his place of baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?

Matthew 3:9 — John the Baptist to Jewish priests, refuting the “chosen people” concept:

Don’t just say to each other, ‘We’re safe, for we are descendants of Abraham.’ That means nothing, for I tell you, God can create children of Abraham from these very stones.

Matthew 23:15 — Jesus to Jewish priests, on converting gentiles to Judaism:

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You traverse land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hellas you are.

John 8:44 — — Jesus to the Jewish priests on their ungodliness

You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

And there are plenty more gems like those in the New Testament, as well as the famous incident in which Jesus made a whip and chased the money lenders out of the temple. Yes, it’s true, Christo-Ziotards. According to the contemporary definition of the term, your lord and savior, Jesus Christ, was quite the “anti-Semite” TM — which is why those very same Pharisees “lobbied” the Roman Governor of Judea to torture and crucify him.

How’s that for irony?!

   
THE CHRISTIAN ZIONISTS NEED A BIBLE LESSON! 1. Jesus Christ was always ripping on and contradicting the Jewish bosses. 2&3. The Pharisees then pressured the Romans to kill him.


Boobus Americanus 1: I read in the New York Times today that the alliance between Evangelicals and Israel is growing stronger.

Boobus Americanus 2: These Christian Zionists are really crazy. They want end times to come and need Israel to be blessed so they can be zapped into the rapture.


Edward Gibbon said it best: History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.”


Source: TomatoBubble

Palestine, Syria, ID Politics and the West

July 30, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

Interview by Dina Y. Sulaeman – Indonesia Center for Middle East Studies

http://ic-mes.org/politics/interview-with-gilad-atzmon/

Dina: In your book, “The Wandering Who”, you wrote extensively  about Jewish identity politics. Is ‘identity politics’ special for Jews?

Gilad: No, not at all. In my new book, ‘Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto,’ I present a universal approach to identity politics.

Jewish identity politics is a model for identity politics in general. In the west, we have witnessed the evolution of gay ID politics, black ID politics and so on. ID politics operates to teach people to speak and think ‘as a’;  ‘as a black’, ‘as a lesbian’, ‘as a feminist’, ‘as a Muslim’, etc. It is an attempt to break apart all the established and traditional social structures. Why? Because, the Jewish elite is fearful of the old structures, they tend to believe that anti-Semitism is rooted in the established edifice and in working people being united. The Frankfurt School and thinkers like Wilhelm Reich managed to revolutionise society– in the name of ‘progress,’ we are now divided and detached from our ‘reactionary’ roots.  But it is devastating that the left has been united against working people forging a cohesive identity… this is very strange because the left is supposed to look after the working people and unite and inspire them to action. The left in the west is disturbed by the fact that the working people always vote for the flag, for the right, for the nationalist, for Trump, for Hitler and so on. Accordingly, modern ID politics is a project that developed out of this unique intellectual and political bond between the left and Jewish intelligencia. The Jews are better at ID politics than any other group for an obvious reason. For the  gay, the black, the Muslim, the feminist or the lesbian, ID politicsis a new thing.  Jews have been doing itfor 3000 years — Jewish culture is identity politics.

It would be reasonable to argue that ID politics is an attempt to Jewify (as opposed to Judify)  the entire social order. It has been a project that has caused some devastating cultural, social and political impacts.

Dina: So, there are differences between the  ‘Jew’ and ‘Judaic’ thing.  In your book, you said that the problem, in Palestine for instance,  isJewishness rather than  Zionism. Can you explain it?

Gilad: It is confusing. Jewishness is the belief that the Jews are somehow special, chosen, privileged and should enjoy and celebrate their privilege. Not all Jews subscribe to this idea, but many of them do. Even the Jewish anti-Zionist will say, ‘listen to us, we can say something that you (goyim, gentiles) can’t, we as the Jews in the movement,  give you a ‘kosher stamp.’ They are  basically claiming that ‘we are privileged’.  Even Jewish anti-Zionists subscribe to hard corechoseness. Norman Finkelstein, whom I admire intellectually, used  to say, I can say it because my mother was in a concentration camp.  What about you Dina? Your mother wasn’t in Auschwitz, can you still think or express your thoughts ? Or support Palestine? Or do you have to send your mother to Auschwitz before you make a judgment on Israel or other aspects of Jewish power? Choseness is, unfortunately, embedded in Jewish thinking.

Zionism is just one symptom of Jewish choseness. Interestingly enough, and this is my first time I have said this in an interview, some people, including some of my best friends, say that ‘Judaism was hijacked by Zionism.’  I say NO.  It is the other way around — Zionism was hijacked by Jewishness and eventually Judaism.

Zionism was initially an anti-Jewish movement. Zionism started in  the late 19th century. It proclaimed that Diaspora Jews were an ugly parasitic identity; they didn’twork, they didn’tfarm, they were traders and bankers, capitalists, usurers, exploiters and so on, ..but this wasn’t entirely their fault. It had happened because Jews  didn’t  have a land of their own. “Once we settle in Palestine, all of that will change.”  And, indeed, they went to Palestine and for two weeks they worked on the land and built factories.  But then they found out that the Palestinians were cheaper [labour] and they all became Jews again.   It is amazing that Zionism was a secular movement that promised to ‘civilise’ the Jew. But then ideological Zionism was hijacked by Jewish exceptionalism and later by Judaic choseness. While early Zionism operated to defeat choseness, Israel and Zionism have little to offer but chosenism.

There is a problem with certain interpretations of Judaism. I do accept that some  orthodox  interpretations of Judaism may defy supremacy. But I’ve yet to come across any Judaic perception that I can accept as ethicalor universal. Judaism is not a universal precept:

  1. It’s tribal. It does not refer to  “us” as humanity, it is, instead, all about  “us” the Jews.
  2. There are no ethics in Judaism. In Islam or Christianity, you are expected to  take action based upon belief such as’ jihad,’ you purify yourself. In Judaism‘ethics’ is replaced by ‘commandments’ and ‘mitzvoth’, you follow rules to do this and that, and rules not to do that and this. You are not supposed to make an independent judgement. They tell you, “don’t kill, don’t steal.” Human beings do not need to to be told not to kill, theyknow it’s ethically wrong. In Jerusalem, regulations replace ethics!

Dina: but then when we say that the root of the Palestinian problem is Jewishness (not Zionism), they will call us anti-Jew or anti Semites.

Gilad: It is not nice, but this is a tactic that has been used to silence the discussion. However, we are not talking here about individual  people, we are referring to ideology and we are supposed to be able to criticize ideology. But, as we can see, some Jews don’t want us to do that, and for an obvious reason!

Do you have identity politics here in Indonesia?

Dina: well..yes… We have some Muslim groups that keep saying that the muslims are oppressed by the Chinese and the Christians; they accused the government of being pro-Chinese/Christian.

Gilad: I’m not familiar with Indonesian society and politics, but you just confirmedwhat I have been saying –identity politics is always used as an attempt to weaken the hegemonical structure.

As a nation, we enjoy  the ability to mobilise  as one people. It doesn’t matter if you are Muslim, Christian, or Hindu, we are together, caring for each other, because we share the same land, and our most important values as a country are health, education, and work (production, manufacturing). If I speak instead ‘as a Muslim,’  ‘as a Christian,’  ‘as a woman,’  ‘as a lesbian,’ I contribute to the breaking of society into sectors. The most interesting thing about the sectorial break is that each sector is a cosmopolitan one. If I define myself as a Muslim identitarian then the border of my identity is not the physical border of Indonesia, it extends to Malaysia, the Middle East, the Balkans and even Europe and the United States. If I define myself as a gay, the border also transcends  beyond my country. This is exactly how Jewish identity operates. Jews, as we know,  are not attached to any piece of geography, it is a cosmopolitan  identity.  Zionism initially attempted to defy Jewish cosmopolitanism.

In America, for instance, I speak about the patriots vs. the identitarians, the patriots who see themselves primarily as Americans. So you can be black, you can be gay, you can be a Jew, but you say: I’m an American who happens to be black, I’m an American who happens to be a Jew, I’m an American who happens to be gay. But the identitarians  see themselves primarily as sectarians:   I’m a gay who lives in America, I’m a Muslim who lives in America.  And it’s a very big difference. Because if you are primarily gay, your primary interest is in promoting gay rights and gay interests, for example, to have a dedicated hospital for AIDS. If you are black, you want to see special budget allocations for black people and their needs. But for patriots, whoever they are, the most important thing is a new factory so that we, as a collective (gays, black, Jews, women etc) , have a good reason to wake up in the morning and go to work.

Dina: So in your view, nationalism is very important, right?

Gilad: If global capitalism is a problem, and I thinkit is, then, national socialism may be the answer. What I mean by national socialism is localism combined with equality. I don’t mean racism, I’m anti racist. I am also opposed to tyranny. I would say that my vision of national socialism is similar to that of George Orwell. It is patriotic yet humanitarian: anti racist and anti tyrannical.

Dina: Now I want to talk about Syria with you. Do you think the Syrian conflict distracted public opinion towards Palestine?

Gilad: It did, this is a very clear observation. The crisis in Syria is a hideousdisaster and it has definitely distracted attention from Palestine, and who benefits from that? Israel, of course. This is why it shouldn’t surprise us that the major players in the creation of this crisis were Israel and its supportive Jewish Lobbies. And it shouldn’t surprise us that Israel and the Jewish Lobby are now changing sides. In the beginning they supported Al Nusra, now they seem to be with the Russians. Turkey has switched sides too, they still don’t like Assad but they prefer Assad to having a Kurdish State on their eastern border . So we are dealing with a level of deadly global opportunism. Many within the the pro-Palestinian activist network  are also changing sides, they were anti Assad initially and are now pro Assad.

The Palestinian leaderswere not very politic here. The Assad regime was very supportive of Palestine. Hafez, Bashar’s father, fully supported Hamas. It was devastating  to see how quickly Hamas decided to oppose Assad. I understand why it happened… Qatar, the Saudis, the Sunni alliance, the Muslim Brotherhood. I don’t like to criticize Palestinians and their politics  but they were not very clever here.

Dina: ok last question, what is the future of Palestine?

Gilad: I don’t think that we are moving toward a peace negotiation, a peace plan or an orchestrated reconciliation. When people talk about two states, what they really mean is two Jewish states. But I believe that within the next 20-30 years we will see a Palestinian majority on the land. It’s a just a matter of time. Here I agree with Abbas. Everybody likes to hate Abbas. But Abbas understands that time is on the side of the Palestinians. For Abbas demography is the one and only Palestinian bomb.

Dina: So you don’t agree with jihad?

Gilad: I didn’t say I am against jihad. If Palestinians resist, they will always get my support. They live in hell and I will always support them. This is my role. But I’m not in position to advocate a solution or push a political or military mantra. I see myself as a (Hebrew speaking) Palestinian,  but I don’t live there. I cannot urge people to get themselves killed while I live comfortably in London. I cannot tell them to sit and wait either. It is not my role. My job as an intellectual is to try to explain what is happening. Abbas says that if we engage in active war, they [the Israelis] will throw us all out, they will kill us, they have no mercy, and he is absolutely right. So, we just have to sit and wait;  this land will be Palestine from river to the sea.

Dina: do you refer to  demography?

Gilad:  Absolutely!

Isaac Herzog: Netanyahu and I Visited Arab Leaders

Local Editor

03-07-2017 | 15:29

‘Israeli’ opposition leader Isaac Herzog confirmed that he, along with Zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited leaders in the Arab world, saying: “I met with leaders that have never been seen by ‘Israeli’ eyes. The political process I was in charge of was huge, and it gives hope of building a Palestinian state,” ‘Israel’ Hayom reported.

Isaac Herzog: Netanyahu and I Visited Arab Leaders


Herzog, however, said he was “not ready for any one-sided step,” the newspaper added. “There is an alternative coalition in our hands. Proper work might defragment Netanyahu’s coalition,” he added.

Herzog’s remarks were made on the eve of the preliminary elections of the Zionist “Labor” Party which will take place on Tuesday to elect a new president.

Estimations, however, show that none of the candidates will win 40% of the votes, the required percentage for someone to win, expecting to hold another round next Monday.

Source: Zionist Media, Edited by website team

“Zionism has anti-Semitic strains, witness its collaboration with Nazis”

Hell just froze over: the New York Times runs an article saying Zionism is racist

Trump’s election is having fascinating consequences. Today the New York Times ran a long piece titled, “Liberal Zionism in the Age of Trump,” by Omri Boehm of the New School saying that liberal Zionism is a contradiction: liberal American Jews have “identified themselves with Zionism, a political agenda rooted in the denial of liberal politics.”

Boehm’s most startling point is that Zionism has anti-Semitic strains, witness its collaboration with Nazis. Hannah Arendt is happy today.

The piece will greatly increase the pressure on liberal Zionists to choose one idea or the other, and to stop denying the existence of apartheid.

Boehm says white nationalist Richard Spencer helped to blow up the liberal Zionist hypocrisy in his famous encounter with a Texas rabbi when he said he admires Israel for its ethnic purity and the rabbi had nothing to say. Some of Boehm’s hammer blows:

by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right…

insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion…

Boehm never comes out and uses the term “racist,” but he might as well.

Trump has changed the map.

As long as liberalism was secure back in America and the rejection of liberalism confined to the Israeli scene, this tension could be mitigated. But as it spills out into the open in the rapidly changing landscape of American politics, the double standard is becoming difficult to defend…

[T]he following years promise to present American Jewry with a decision that they have much preferred to avoid. Hold fast to their liberal tradition, as the only way to secure human, citizen and Jewish rights; or embrace the principles driving Zionism.

By the way, the denial of the right of return is racist:

Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. That’s the reason for which Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer.

And then this verboten history: Zionists collaborated with “anti-Semitic politics.” With Nazis:

The “original sin” of such alliances may be traced back to 1941, in a letter to high Nazi officials, drafted in 1941 by Avraham Stern, known as Yair, a leading early Zionist fighter and member in the 1930s of the paramilitary group Irgun, and later, the founder of another such group, Lehi. In the letter, Stern proposes to collaborate with “Herr Hitler” on “solving the Jewish question” by achieving a “Jewish free Europe.” The solution can be achieved, Stern continues, only through the “settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine.” To that end, he suggests collaborate with the German’s “war efforts,” and establish a Jewish state on a “national and totalitarian basis,” which will be “bound by treaty with the German Reich.”

It has been convenient to ignore the existence of this letter, just as it has been convenient to mitigate the conceptual conditions making it possible.

This is an opinion piece by an outsider, not a New York Times article. Hell and everything else would freeze if the NYT started writing news pieces which presupposed Zionism as actually practiced is racist. They won’t do that yet. They might conceivably start writing articles where people with that view are treated respectfully as they express it, rather than hiding the view from readers or treating people who express it as moral lepers.

Many of Boehm’s arguments have been made on the left for years, of course. The liberal Zionists chose to ignore them and talk about the two-state solution. They are losing that luxury. Though, expect some pushback from the Zionist forces inside the New York Times.

The Times would never have run this piece if Boehm were not Israeli. Just as the newspaper insisted, according to the late Tony Judt, that he identify himself as Jewish when he defended Walt and Mearsheimer in 2006. There are double standards in the press too.

 

Theresa May trying to stifle criticism of apartheid israel

Letter, The Guardian

Fears new definition of antisemitism will stifle criticism of Israel

December 16, 2016

You report that the government is going to adopt a “new definition” of antisemitism in order to prevent an “over-sweeping condemnation of Israel” (Britain to pioneer new antisemitism definition, 12 December). The new definition has nothing to do with opposing antisemitism, it is merely designed to silence public debate on Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians. Antisemitic incidents comprise about 2% of all hate crime. Why then the concentration on antisemitism and not on Islamophobia, which is far more widespread? The suspicion must be that the real concern is not with antisemitism but with Britain’s support for Israel.

Israel claims to be “the only democracy in the Middle East.” Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation are governed by a wholly different set of laws than Jewish settlers. This makes Israel the world’s only apartheid state and thus deserving of strong condemnation and the target of boycott, divestment and sanctions. We agree that it is antisemitic to associate Jews with the actions of the Israeli state. Unfortunately this is precisely what the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition will achieve through perpetuating the stereotype that all Jews support the Israeli state. The IHRA will strengthen not weaken antisemitism. There is a very simple definition of antisemitism from Oxford University’s Brian Klug. Antisemitism is “a form of hostility towards Jews as ‘Jews’.” The IHRA definition smuggles in anti-Zionism, in the guise of antisemitism, as a means of protecting the Israeli state and thus western foreign policy.

Tony Greenstein
Jacqueline Walker *
Miriam Margolyes *
Professor Haim Bresheeth *
Professor Nira Yuval-Davis *
Michael Sackin *
Dr Derek Summerfield King’s College
Professor Roger Iredale
Averil Parkinson Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Campaign
Dr Vacy Vlazna Coordinator, Justice for Palestine Matters
Vicky Moller Child survivor of the Holocaust
Dr Cathy Rozel Farnworth
Rica Bird *
Chantal Cameron
Robert Cohen *
Brian Chinnery
Mike Cushman *
Deborah Darnes
Patrick Darnes
Helen Dickson
Tony Dickinson
Greg Dropkin
Mark Elf
Deborah Fink *
Kenny Fryde
Terry Gallogly
Judy Granville
James Hall
William Hanna
Jenny Hardacre
Abe Hayeem *
Alain Hertzmann
Doug Holton
Grahame Humphreys
John Leigh-Brown
Penny Leigh-Brown
Leah Levane *
Les Levidow
Richard Lightbown
Beverley Lloyd
Kathy McCubbing
Elizabeth Morley *
Diana Neslen *
Caroline O’Reilly
Edmond O’Reilly
Juergen Peter
Nicola Pratt University of Warwick
Roland Rance
Janine Reed
Bronwen Roberts
Donald Saunders
Ian Saville *
Miriam Scharf
Richard Seaford
Roddy Slorach
Charles Stuart
Jean Sullivan
Bernice Walker
Adam Waterhouse
Eric Willoughby
Dorothy Wilson
Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi *
* JfJfP signatory

SHIMON PERES IS DEAD, BUT HIS LEGACY OF GENOCIDE AND DECEPTION IS ALIVE AND WELL

peres-demon

by Jonathan Azaziah

I understand the visceral need to rejoice over certified demon Shimon Peres finally kicking the bucket, especially our Lebanese and Palestinian brethren whose families have suffered the most unspeakable things at his hands of ruination. I truly do. And admittedly, I smiled ear-to-ear when I read the breaking news. Rejoicing in delirium however is not only counterproductive and out of place but completely out of touch with reality. Peres, or, as he should be called, Szymon Perski (his Ashkenazi birth name), may indeed be dead but his legacy of genocide and deception is alive and well, just as the case was (and remains) with Ariel Sharon’s (real name: Scheinermann) legacy of genocide and barbarism. There can be no rest even for a second because there are still 6-7 million usurping, occupying Jews roaming around illegally in Palestine, which means there are still 6-7 million potential Syzmon Perskis roaming around illegally in Palestine too. And make no mistake, while Sharon was a warmongering maniac who didn’t give a damn if the “Goyim” saw him drink blood in public, it is the cunning of Peres that makes him infinitely more dangerous and destructive.

Perski was indeed a paragon, if not THE paragon, of Liberal Zionism. And while many commentators would correctly argue that there is no “liberal” version of ethnic cleansing, land theft, resource pillaging and mass murder in the name of Halakhic-Talmudic law, Liberal Zionists are markedly different from their Revisionist (right-wing) Zionist counterparts in their chameleonic ability to claim they come in peace with a stone-cold straight face while simultaneously engaging in even larger, even bloodier acts of violence than their rightist coreligionists. Talk “peace”, walk war; this was Peres to the letter. As he built up ‘Israeli’ diplomatic relations all over the Global South, Africa particularly, tricking newly decolonized peoples into believing that ‘Israel’ was some kind of socialist oasis in a desert of “reactionaries”, as he preached “peace” and “tolerance” in Western capitals, as he claimed “dovishness”, as he collected the utterly fraudulent trinket known as the Nobel Peace Prize, he was also the single-greatest mover and shaker behind the usurping Zionist entity’s “defense” industry which now exports 5-7 billion dollars worth of death machines, tech and arms per year. It can be said without challenge that he was in fact the godfather of ‘Israeli’ weapons manufacturing and he was the godfather of the criminal Zionist nuclear weapons program at Dimona in occupied Al-Naqab too.

Perski schmoozed and bamboozled the colonialist French regime into helping his savage little tumor build its nukes while he signed off on operations involving theft of nuclear materials from the United States, like Project Pinto, the NUMEC debacle and the activities of LAKAM-agent-turned-Hollywood-mogul Arnon Milchan, who Perski personally recruited. And let us not forget for a moment that above and beyond all this shadowy intrigue and clandestine intelligence work, which also included creating Al-Qaeda and helping the South African apartheid regime with its own nuclear program, Perski had no issue whatsoever in spilling the blood of the innocent when it suited him. The slaughter of 106 civilians, mostly children, in Lebanon’s Qana in April ’96 comes to mind, as does the Nakba itself, in which the founding Zionist was intimately involved in running guns to Haganah as well as the Irgun. Perski was actually ideologically committed to inflicting terrorism wherever it was “necessary”, all to preserve the existence of the artificial Jewish supremacist regime. As former ‘Israeli’ Prime Minister Moshe Sharett (real name: Shertok) revealed in 1955 when writing about Pinkas Lavon who would go on to carry out the false flag known as Operation Susannah, “Peres shares the same ideology [as Lavon]: He wants to frighten the West into supporting ‘Israel’s’ aims.” Arms-dealer, nuke-builder, child-killer, terrorism-enthusiast. Perski really was “peace” personified, wasn’t he?

Sarcasm aside though, our aim here extends far beyond exposing Perski’s true colors and documenting his six decades of spreading chaos and devastation on the planet as the children of Satan tend to do. What we’re really out to achieve is a true understanding of the problem on our plates and the subsequent prevention of another Perski–or Perskis–coming into being and unleashing more immeasurable calamities like the ‘Israeli’ defense industry and nuclear program. Such a scheme is already afoot in the Palestine Solidarity Movement today. Remember that no matter what, the ultimate goal of Shimon Peres was to advance the interests of International Zionism and preserve ‘Israel’ in our midst. Despite the flowery language of solidarity and liberation that the overwhelming majority of Jewish “pro-Palestine” activists happen to use, their goal, like Perski, is to keep the ‘Israeli’ cancer alive in Palestine and stop the criminal usurper population from returning to their countries of origin.

These CHAZA, the Hebrew word for “pig”–which in this instance is being used as an acronym for “controlled, halfway-‘Anti’-Zionist agents”; clever, ain’t it? 😀 –have removed “Death To ‘Israel’” from the Palestine Solidarity lexicon, declared that support for Syrian President Dr. Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Arab Republic is not acceptable, blacklisted Hizbullah, refused to discuss Oded Yinon, gone AWOL on discussing the ‘Israeli’ role in spreading Takfirism and noted that any talk about alternative WW2 history, 9/11 truth or Jewish influence, wealth and power on a global scale is “anti-Semitism” and grounds for termination from the ranks of the “movement”. Intellectually speaking, what makes the mindset of the CHAZA any different from Peres? They can call it “Post-Zionism” or even “Anti”-Zionism, but they are still channeling Liberal Zionism stalwart Perski’s legerdemain in totality: Talk liberation, walk the status quo. And just as so many foolish Arabs and Muslims lined up behind Peres and Rabin to back the Oslo Accords over 20 years ago, they’re falling for the okey-doke again today with the Jews of the Palestine Solidarity Movement, allowing them to dictate discourse and attempt to demolish belief in an ‘Israeli’-free Palestine like IOF demolishes Palestinian homes with bulldozers in Al-Quds. This cannot continue if Palestine and yes, the entirety of ALLAH’s (SWT) Green Earth, are to be liberated from the clutches of these deceivers.

Szymon Perski is dead, but his legacy of genocide and deception is alive and well in the form of a new, more advanced, more underhanded type of Zionist: The CHAZA. And this is exactly what cancers do, don’t they? If left untreated, they mutate into something exceedingly more difficult to deal with and ultimately defeat. But just as most of the world today looks at Perski as the sanguinary, felonious, children-butchering hypocrite he was, his ideological offspring too will meet the swords of truth and exposé, for ‘Anti’-Zionist pretenders, like their Liberal Zionist predecessors, aren’t welcome among us. Rest in torment and rot in Jahannam Peres, you foul, ghastly, heinous parasite. In the name of Qana, every inch of Palestine and all of humanity that stands on the brink of annihilation because of the usurping Jewish entity’s nuclear program that you helped birth, we declare that soon, the abomination of ‘Israel’ will die like you and all the crimes that you committed will have been for nothing. How I do know that? ‘Cause in the final analysis, vultures posing as doves do not even stand a ghost of a chance against the majestic eagles desperately hungry to fly over a liberated Al-Aqsa.

#DeathToIsrael #RestInTormentPeres

Choseness from Bernard Lazare to Michael Foster

August 17, 2016  /  Gilad Atzmon

Those who want to learn how Jews bring disasters on themselves should follow the activities of Michael Foster,  a man who identifies himself as a  “Labour Jewish donor” and labels Corbyn supporters "Sturm Abteilung" (Nazi stormtroopers). 

Those who want to learn how Jews bring disasters on themselves should follow the activities of Michael Foster,  a man who identifies himself as a  “Labour Jewish donor” and labels Corbyn supporters “Sturm Abteilung” (Nazi stormtroopers).

By Gilad Atzmon

In 1894 the French Zionist intellectual Bernard Lazare published his monumental book‘Anti-Semitism, its Causes and History.’ 

Like most of his contemporary early Zionists, Lazare realised that anti-Semitism had its roots in the bad behaviour of Jews.

Four and a half decades before the Shoah, Lazare discerned what it was about the Jews that made them hated in so many disparate places and time periods. Lazare and most of his fellow early Zionists understood that the Jews were often complicit, if unwittingly, in their own victimisation. They were actually pretty effective in bringing disasters on themselves.

Those who want to learn how Jews bring disasters on themselves should follow the activities of Michael Foster, a man who identifies himself as a prominent “Labour Jewish donor.”

The Jewish Labour donor Foster suffers from the belief that the Labour party is a private matter for Jews. He “despises” Corbyn as well as his supporters. He presumes that the £400, 000 he has spent on the Labour party entitles him to dismiss what seems to be the democratic choice of the vast majority of Labour party members. Foster’s recent Daily Mail commentary,  ‘Why I despise Jeremy Corbyn and his Nazi stormtroopers’ provides us with a spectacular illustration of Jewish bad behaviour.

Consistent with the most distasteful supremacist tribal conduct, Foster dismisses Corbyn followers as a ‘circus’ and as ‘Corbynistas,’ he calls them “disciples” to imply that Corbyn followers are a religious cult rather than a rational political movement. The Jewish donor goes so far as to label Corbyn supporters as Sturm Abteilung (Nazi stormtroopers).

In fact, the only contemporary collectives that resemble Sturm Abteilung are West BankJewish settlers and the Beitar Jerusalem football fans who chant en masse “Here we are, we’re the most racist football team in the country!”

In a bizarre twist, Foster who is an active and prominent operator for a foreign lobby (LFI), dares to call Corbyn’s politics “alien to this country.” Foster imagines that the man who is supported by a huge majority within the Labour party membership is “divisive and aggressive.”

What makes the Corbynistas divisive and aggressive? Foster answers, “if you are like me, a Jewish donor to Labour, you are smeared as a Blairite conspirator, plotting to falsely use the accusation of anti-Semitism to damage the Left.” But Foster has been behaving exactly as he describes openly and intensively for over a year. Maybe Lazare’s compendium of Jewish bad behaviour needs an updated revision. It is sadly symptomatic of a Jewish political merchant to be oblivious to the effects of his own actions. Michael Foster self-identifies as a Jewish Labour donor and overtly operates against Corbyn, the democratic choice of the Labour party. Foster proclaims his £400, 000 investment in the Labour Party and then protests that he is deeply offended when he is singled out by some of Corbyn’s supporters for his behaviour.

At least Michael Foster has added a precious contribution to our understanding of Jewish politics and power. For obvious reasons not many Jewish mammonites are stupid enough to acknowledge their conspiratorial agenda. Foster is doing so for free.

Bernard Lazare published Anti-Semitism, its Causes and History four decades before Hitler came to power. Instead of reading Lazare and attempting to remedy their position,Jewish institutions labeled Lazare as a self-hater and ignored his invaluable study.  Lazare didn’t know Michael Foster but he identified the Jewish supremacist symptoms that are, unfortunately, attached to Jewish culture, politics, collectivism and lobbying. Lazare identified the self-aggrandising belief in his own superiority that fuels Michael Foster.  But there is one symptom Lazare failed to identify; the choseness that is an unfortunate and severe form of blindness.  Choseness, like supremacy, disables any form of mirroring or self-reflection.

Galloway: Antisemitism and Islamophobia

Antisemitism And Zionism are Two Faces of the Same Coin

Anti-Zionism is NOT Antisemitism

 

Identity Politics, Racism and Confusion

April 17, 2016  /  Gilad Atzmon

 

Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: Ian Donovan seems to be the last thinking man in the Left. I occasionally disagree with some of his ideas. However, unlike most of the people who associate themselves with that political decaying club, Donovan seems to engage in a consistent and rigorous analysis. The following is a good review of the Jews/Left current state of affairs.

 

 

Source: https://socialistfight.com/2016/04/17/identity-politics-racism-and-confusion/

By Ian Donovan

The idea that Tony Greenstein, the Jewish leftist in Brighton recently suspended from the Labour Party apparently for ‘anti-semitism’, has to prove that he is not ‘anti-semitic’ should be just absurd. It is a sign of the irrationality and demented character of the political atmosphere in and around the Labour Party, with the party leadership under extreme pressure from Zionist witchhunters, that a long time Jewish left-wing activist like Greenstein should feel obliged to ‘prove’ he is not an anti-Jewish racist.

One wonders how many black members of the Labour Party face suspension expulsion for anti-black racism, or how many of Chinese heritage face suspension for anti-Chinese bigotry? If there were such, it would make the Labour Party into the butt of stand-up comedy, not of serious political controversy. The fact that this can even be conceived in Labour is only due to the irrational nonsense peddled by Zionist racists within and without the Labour Party, that those who fail to support the Zionist project are motivated by anti-semitism (anti-Jewish racism), and that those Jews who do this are ‘self-hating Jews’. But in the absence of oppression, allegations of ‘self-hatred’ (which if it existed would simply stem from internalised oppression) are themselves a racist slur, denying the right of people of Jewish origin to choose a non-Zionist form of Jewish identity, or even to reject Jewish identity altogether, as ways to oppose the virulently racist form of ‘Jewishness’ embodied in political Zionism.

The latter accusation shows the far right, racist character of Zionism even in the Labourite context, as the ‘self-hater’ epithet, also sometimes rendered as ‘Jewish anti-semite’, is identical to the epithet ‘race traitor’ used by the white far right in the main imperialist countries. It really shows that Zionists constitute a far-right fifth column in the Labour Party, as an agency of a racist state whose followers would be quite prepared to act as instigators of the same kind of fascist-like repression against workers organisations that Israel does against Palestinians in the Middle East if they felt it necessary.

We in Socialist Fight are ourselves facing blood libels from Zionists; our Marxist analysis of the Jewish question and Zionism today has been portrayed as akin to Nazism by bourgeois commentators and some on the so-called ‘far left’ have either joined in with this rubbish, or vacillated wildly in the face of the pressure from the bourgeoisie and the Zionists. We continue to demand all the socialist and Marxist left in and around the Labour Party engage in a principled United Front to defend each other from the right-wing and the Zionists, in which all tendencies stand together on the principle that ‘an injury to one is an injury to all’, while retaining full freedom of debate.

A Jewish supporter of Socialist Fight provided us with a pretty sharp commentary on the nonsense being thrown at SF and others by all kinds of Zionists and capitulators to it. She wrote

“It seems to me although you are not Anti-Semitic (not all Jews are Semitic although I am) most of your critics are whether in a blatant or covert way. Do they actually know that Israel is an artificial concept? I have been called a self-hating Jew many times on what evidence I do not know. However once again I would like to say you are defined a Jew if:

“1. You have a Jewish mother. This does not make you a Semite as a considerable amount of East Europeans converted to the Jewish religion.
2. If you convert this of course does not make you a Semite.

“As many Muslims are Semitic surely that makes the Zionists anti-Semitic. So using Zionist logic I, a Semite who supports my Palestinian cousins who are also Semite, am anti-Semitic. However Zionists of all stripes who may and often are not Semites but support the state of Israel in whatever they do legal or illegal cannot be anti-Semitic. THIS DOES NOT MAKE SENSE.”

 

If it is absurd for Tony Greenstein to have to prove he is not anti-semitic, it is just as absurd for the Israeli-Jewish-born Jazz Saxophonist Gilad Atzmon to have to prove such either. Neither of them would have to prove any such thing in a rational world, since both of them have similar ethnic origins – they are both Jewish by birth. Its only in the world of the Zionist-dominated body politic that we live under that people of Jewish origin have to prove that they are not anti-semitic, i.e. that they do not hate their own people purely for the ethnic origins that they share. In fact, by sleight of hand, the Zionists have expanded the definition of ‘anti-semitism’ so that you do not have to hate people of Jewish origin in general to be so accused. It’s enough to express disgust at Zionist crimes, or attempt to analyse the way Zionists organise politically to stamp on opposition to those crimes, to be accused of ‘anti-semitism’ today. This does have the effect of devaluing the meaning of the term.

Tony Greenstein, in trying to prove that he is not anti-semitic, i.e. that he is not a witch to the Labour Zionist witchhunters, has flip-flopped (not for the first time) over the long contentious issue of Gilad Atzmon, Previously, in the course of some uncharacteristically fraternal debates with Socialist Fight, where he repeated his usual nonsense about ‘anti-semitism’, he had in a sly but somewhat ‘soft’ tweet intimated that he did not consider either ourselves or Atzmon to be Jew-haters in a personal sense. At the time he was trying to reconcile the obvious fact that Socialist Fight comrades are active and militant anti-racists with the elements of genuine anti-Zionism that we share with Atzmon – the willingness to analyse, criticise and expose the international dimension of Zionism. He believes that to believe that Zionism is a Jewish bourgeois international movement is to be ‘anti-semitic’, yet we are obviously not racists at all; anyone who knows us or is not blinded by class or race prejudices can see that. So he looked for a way to resolve this contradiction in his own ideology and came up with this in the course of a Twitter exchange with me:

 

He was obviously getting carried away by the objective need in this situation for a United Front of those anti-Zionist socialists under the gun of the Zionists, feeling the pressure enough to deviate somewhat from his previously virulent hostility to Socialist Fight, and Gerry Downing and myself in particular. Which is why he tweeted this at me as part of a reasonably political exchange.

Unfortunately, this tangled him up in some pretty acute contradictions given his decade-long campaign to ostracise Atzmon from the left, but also to vilify anyone else in the left who did not join in his anathema. The sophistry involved with Enoch Powell in the above tweet is pretty transparent. Blacks and Asians who have suffered from racial abuse and violence from Powell supporters would probably regard the idea that Powell was not personally racist as absurd and somewhat offensive. Tony is not stupid, he knows that this is a fig-leaf that no-one honest will take seriously (see my deconstruction of this in my recent article Zionism’s International Dimension: Revolutionary Strategy).

But Greenstein does not have a settled position on Atzmon, just a gut antipathy that does not have a coherent theory behind it. This is why his writings are so full of bluster and contradiction when this comes up. He has now received help from the Zionist blogger BobFromBrockley, who helpfully provided him with a tweet Atzmon sent in 2014, in response to some Zionist twitter warrior.

 

According to Bob from Brockley, this tweet is suppposed to prove that Atzmon is a racial anti-semite, that he hates all Jews for racist reasons, which is really the implied meaning of any allegation of anti-semitism.

But though it looks bad at first sight, and is certainly a foolish and self-defamatory thing to tweet, something does not add up about the allegation that it represents ‘racist’ anti-semitism. The obvious point is the phrase ‘I am not a Jew anymore’. No ‘racial’ anti-semite could ever say that or believe that. It would as absurd as to say ‘I am not a black person’ any more. That is not the way the world works. You cannot change your ethnic origin any more than you can change your skin colour. Nor is there any suggestion that this is about the Jewish religion, Atzmon is not markedly either religious or anti-religious and is not hostile to anti-Zionist religious Jews. In fact, he has more regard for them than he does for many anti-Zionist secular Jews.

Twitter is a notoriously difficult medium to communicate nuance. It does appear that this tweet was simply a response in a heated exchange to a noxious Zionist troll who was subsequently suspended from Twitter for threatening violence against George Galloway. Who of course had been beaten badly by an ultra-Zionist thug only a few months earlier. I doubt that would bother Bob From Brockley much. But I am sure it would bother Tony Greenstein.

 

The tweets of OnePoundOne are no longer available, as his account was suspended as a result of these threats. But it seems obvious that if such a odious person as this had malevolently purported to appeal to Atzmon as a “fellow Jew”, he would likely have received a pungent response like this. All this really means is that Twitter is extraordinarily easy to quote out of context.

I commented on what is behind this kind of verbiage from Atzmon a while ago on the Socialist Unity blog, when I wrote:

“He divides Jews into three categories: religious Jews, people simply of Jewish origin, and people who regard their Jewishness as a political identity. These are not mutually exclusive, but they are separate and separable strands. He says his materials are actually only criticisms of the third strand or category.”

“He does tend to use ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’ and ‘Jewishness’ too freely as shorthand for the third strand, which causes confusion and makes it easy to misunderstand him and/or quote him out of context. He seems to enjoy the heated arguments that result from such things, which is a flaw in my opinion, and sometimes generates more heat than light.”
(http://socialistunity.com/campaign-demonisation-george-galloway-constitutes-incitement/#comment-700318)

This was another example of the left’s inability to deal with Atzmon and people like him, and to get their heads around the fact that thanks to the sheer barbarism of Israel’s crimes, there are now people of Jewish origin who are so disgusted by being involuntarily associated with them that they express extreme disgust at being born and brought up Jewish. This thread was supposedly defending George Galloway from his Zionist tormentors on Question Time. I was excluded from SU by Socialist Unity’s erratic honcho Andy Newman for agreeing with Galloway’s defence of and sympathetic interview with Atzmon on Sputnik. The irony of this is incredible. If Galloway had posted comments defending his defence of Atzmon in a thread supposedly defending Galloway, he would logically have been excluded too!

One might wish Gilad Atzmon would be more careful in his use of language. But from his standpoint, since he is of Jewish origin anyway, he does not see the need.

Atzmon shares much with Shlomo Sand on the substance of this, though not in style. Sand wrote last year:

“How, in these conditions, can individuals who are not religious believers but simply humanists, democrats and liberals, and endowed with a minimum of honesty, continue to define themselves as Jews? In these conditions, can the descendants of the persecuted let themselves be embraced in the tribe of new secular Jews who see Israel as their exclusive property? Is not the very act of defining yourself as a Jew an act of affiliation to a privileged caste which creates intolerable injustices around itself?” (How I Stopped Being a Jew, 2015 p87)”

 

Atzmon’s version of this is somewhat similar, as revealed recently in an article criticising the politics of Michael Rosen, another leftist of Jewish origin who insists on ‘self-identifying’ as Jewish in a political, not merely an ethnic sense. Rosen produced a short posting on ‘anti-semitism’ in the Labour Party, demanding a ‘strong united left’ to ‘protect’ Jews from anti-semitism:

“Anti-semites would identify me as Jewish. (I self-identify that way too, but let’s leave that to one side for the moment).

“Given that’s what anti-semites do, on occasions I have to ask myself, who I would turn to for assistance in the case of unwarranted attacks, persecution, harassment or pogroms?” (cited athttp://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/4/9/michael-rosen-and-the-kosher-san)

Atzmon’s response is pungent, but it does clarify exactly what he rejects about “Jewishness” on the one hand, and what he does not and cannot reject:

“According to Rosen, anti Semites will identify him as Jewish, then in the same line, he writes that he “self-identif[ies] that way too.”  So according to Rosen, the anti Semites are actually correct in identifying Rosen as what he is, that is, a Jew

“But Rosen then claims that those who identify him as what he declares himself to be are anti Semites. I wonder, since Rosen identifies himself as a Jew, how does he know that he isn’t himself an anti Semite? Are there some criteria?

“Rosen’s Jewishness is an odd entitlement. He is entitled to identify as a Jew while the rest of us are advised that identifying him as such turns us into ‘hate mongers.’

“In my writing I delve into Jewish Pre TSD. Jews are often tormented by a phantasmic traumatic event set in the future. No one exemplifies this  mental condition better than the Jewish poet. ‘I have to ask myself, who would I turn to for assistance in the case of unwarranted attacks, persecution, harassment or pogroms?’ What persecution, what pogroms, Mr. Rosen? You are one of Britain most beloved children’s poets. You are not a Syrian refugee, no one calls to kick you out of the country.  You are not the oppressed. Why do you feel the need to prepare for a pogrom? Is it guilt on your part? Are you hiding something?

“Let me tell you, Mr. Rosen, none of my Jewish friends are afraid of pogroms or ‘unwarranted attacks.’ In the eyes of the so called ‘anti Semites’ I should be seen as a Jew, my kids are also ethnically Jewish and yet, the fear that you describe in your statement is totally foreign to us. We are free of fear. We enjoy our lives, we listen to music, we love each other and pray for peace. What we don’t do is imagine the next pogrom. Is it because we do not identify politically as Jews?” (http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/2016/4/9/michael-rosen-and-the-kosher-san)

 

rosen.jpg

This is very clarificatory about the substance of the debate between Atzmon and his left-wing, non-Zionist Jewish critics is about. It is not about ‘race’ or anything like it. It is rather about whether a progressive, non-Zionist non-religious Jewish identity is possible or even desirable. The heated conflict between Atzmon and his critics is mainly because he answers”No” to that question. It is a heresy hunt, in other words.

It is perfectly natural for those concerned with humanism and the like to find detestable something that ‘creates intolerable injustices around itself” in Sand’s words. Whether this is the correct political response is a subject for debate according to the norms of democracy that are part of the best traditions of the workers movement. What people like BobFromBrockley, who support the kind of ‘intolerable injustices’ Sand is talking about, have to say about this is less clear. Such people are hostile to workers democracy for opponents of Zionism. Greenstein, and people like him, who want to keep one foot in each camp over such democratic questions, are sooner or later going to have to make a choice.

We as Marxists do not take a definitive position on this. In our view, there is nothing inherently either good or bad about Jewish identity. Just as there is nothing inherently good or bad about being gay or lesbian, or identifying with any national or ethnic group. What we are for is freedom to choose, and opposing all discrimination and oppression not only against those who embody or embrace a particular identity, but also against those who reject such, provided they do not seek to violate the rights of others. This is separate from the question of Zionism, which is a racist project that oppresses the Palestinians and must be opposed down the line. The heresy hunt against Atzmon and the attempt to bully the left into ostracising him and those who are influenced by him is something we oppose tooth and nail because of our commitment to workers democracy and the right to free inquiry into questions of identity and related matters.

Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan thinks jews are “superior” to mere non-jews. Superior in what exactly?

Israeli Minister latest in long line of prominent Jews asserting the inferiority of non-Jews

At TOO we have felt something of a duty to document instances where prominent, mainstream Jewish figures have publicly expressed the traditional Jewish view of a qualitative superiority of Jews to non-Jews. Previous examples include the late Lubavitcher leader, Menachem Schneerson of New York who was honored by President Reagan in 1983 (“The Gentile does not want anything. He waits to be told what the Jew wants!”; we have a case of . . . a totally different species. . . . The body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world).

Another well-known example is Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s statement that “Goyim were born only to serve us.” As the previous link shows, such statements are pervasive on the ethno-religious right in Israel, often by very prominent mainstream figures.

Mondoweiss provides another example, this time from Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan. Dahan, who has nine children and has lived in a West Bank settlement, recently stated that “Palestinians have to understand they won’t have a state & Israel will rule over them.”

So much for the farce of peace negotiations. But not too long ago, Dahan showed he is entirely on board with Schneerson, Yosef, et al.:

Ben-Dahan referred to Palestinians as animals in 2013, according to the Times of Israel:

“To me, they are like animals, they aren’t human.”

Ben Dahan told Maariv that homosexual Jews were superior [to]gentiles — gay or straight.

“A Jew always has a much higher soul than a gentile, even if he is a homosexual,” he said.

For Jews, ethnic interests are the ultimate value, trumping trivial issues like sexual orientation. Homosexual Jews still have ethnic interests as Jews, and the ethnonationalist right seems to appreciate that fact — while sensibly not advocating a public culture of homosexuality.

It goes without saying at a US government official stating the superiority of his group would be out of a job the next day. But Dahan’s statement will not be covered in the US media, so it will not affect support for Israel among the less than human non-Jewish American public.

Mazal Tov To Ludwig Watzal and The ‘Call For BDS’

May 20, 2015  /  Gilad Atzmon

 By Gilad Atzmon

It is encouraging to read that Ludwig Watzal, my prime detractor in Germany, has now fully embraced my criticism of Jewish liberals and the Jewish Left. Watzal now admits that the BDS Movement has been hijacked by Liberal Zionists.

Just a few years ago, Watzal labelled me a racist and an ‘anti-Semite’ for suggesting in “The Wandering Who” that the Jewish Left operates as a controlled opposition apparatus.

Watzal’s review of The Wandering Whocomplained that: “The book is very well written, which make its harmful and racist theses more dangerous.” His review also said, Atzmon’s “hatred is directed not only against the Zionists, but above all against Jewish Left, left anti-Zionists and those who oppose the Israeli government policy as Jews.”

But Watzal’s views appear to have evolved.

In an article published yesterday by MWCNEWS, one of my favourite dissident outlets, Watzal succumbs to my reasoning.  Watzal quotes me verbatim in his new article “Is The BDS Movement Hijacked By Liberal Zionists?”, but for some reason Watzal forgot to attribute my words to me. Sadly, integrity still hasn’t made it into Left culture, but we should not give hope, we shall give our allies on the left as much time as they need to catch up.

The following is a segment from my talk last week at the LA Levantine Cultural Centre:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J87Y139jlV0&t=27m43s

Since 2012 I’ve been voicing criticism of the change that was introduced into the BDS goal statement by Omar Barghouti in a clandestine manner and behind the backs of the Palestinian people.

And here is Ludwig Watzal from yesterday’s article:

“The BDS movement was launched in 2005 with sound goals. The first was “ending the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.” The phrase “all Arab lands” included also the territory of the State of Israel. This was interpreted by Zionist forces as delegitimizing the State of Israel. In 2010, that goal was secretly changed to the following: “Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall.” This change took place only in the English, but not in the Arabic version.

BDS and its main protagonists are financially supported by Georges Soros. He supports so-called progressive liberal causes and is considered a philanthropist and a liberal Zionist.”

It is crucial to understand that both BDS leader Omar Barghouti and BDS advocate Electronic Abunimah have been confronted numerous times and asked to explain publicly the treacherous change inserted into the BDS goal statement. Both Barghouti and Abunimah have repeatedly avoided the question and have refused to address the matter.

I would like to use this opportunity to congratulate Ludwig Watzal for his courageous step in favour of the truth. Truth and Justice are the road to peace.

http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/51690-bds-movement-hijacked.html#sthash.yLhIpCWY.dpuf

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!