By Mahmoud El-Yousseph
June 2, 2011

How funny it is that people will support our Constitution and the right to free speech only when it applies to them, but when it comes to Israel, the rules never applied. You can question the existence of God Almighty, insult Jesus (peace be upon him), or even call our Commander-In-Chief by any name in the book and no one will give a rat. But if you dare to challenge  Israel, you are committing America’s number one sin.

That is what happened to 28 year-old Jewish-American Rae Abileah during the address of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a joint session of Congress in May. Miss Abileah,  a peace activist and member of pro-Palestinian group, CodePink, yelled, “No More Occupation! Stop Israeli War crimes! Equal Rights for Palestinians!”

She was quickly tackled to the ground by members of of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], beaten, then arrested at George Washington University Hospital following her medical treatment. She was released a few hours later. Miss Abileah is facing charges of disrupting Congress this month.

Flashback: In September 2009, President Obama became the first president to be called ‘liar’ in front of a joint session of Congress by a Republican senator.  South Carolina’s Joe Wilson, pointing angrily at the President, blurted at the top of his voice: “You lie!” when Obama was addressing the Congress on health care. A few minutes later, Sen. Wilson again interrupted the President by shouting, “Not true!”

Do you wonder what happened to Sen. Wilson? No, he was not thrown out of the Capitol, was neither assaulted nor sanctioned. Absolutely no charges disrupting Congress were ever filed against him. So why was Rae Abileah treated differently? Why does America bend its knees and bow its head to Israel?

Unlike the powerful Jewish lobby or US lawmakers, who acted like cheerleaders to a foreign leader, Miss Abileah delivered a message of peace to people who could not hear it in the same way from someone who had not been where she was, who had not done what she did. Miss Abileah visited Palestine and lived among Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. She was an eyewitness who spoke with an authority.

She was an eyewitness to the Israeli war crimes committed daily against Palestinians, including the uprooting of olive trees, home demolitions, land confiscation, midnight raids and arrests, targeted assassinations, and of course, the illegal and inhumane siege of Gaza. All these crimes are committed by Israel with full financial support and diplomatic cover, courtesy of the USA.

Sadly, Abileah’s story was barely covered by lame stream news media  in the US., whereas it was a front page story in the Israeli press. Her message to Israel and our nation is: You will not commit such crimes with my name, with my religion and with my money and get away with it.

Abileah is also an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace. On June 3, 2009: Code Pink flew a banner that said “End the siege of Gaza” at President Obama’s Muslim-outreach speech at Cairo University.
This fearless truth-telling Jewish woman should be praised for her courage and unwavering support for peace, justice and freedom in  Palestine. For that, I say God bless, speedy recovery, and  thank you Rae Abileah!
Mahmoud El-Yousseph
Retired USAF Veteran

Feedback: elyousseph6@yahoo.com

At the end of one of my first journeys to the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 2004, I endured a shocking experience at Ben-Gurion Airport. I never imagined that Israeli security forces would abuse a 79-year-old Holocaust survivor, but they held me for five hours, and strip-searched and cavity-searched every part of my naked body. The only shame these security officials expressed was to turn their badges around so that their names were invisible.

The only conceivable purpose for this gross violation of my bodily integrity was to humiliate and terrify me. But it had just the opposite effect. It made me more determined to speak out against abuses by the Israeli government and military.

Yet my own experience, unpleasant as it was, is nothing compared to the indignities and abuses heaped on Palestinians year after year. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is based not on equal rights and fair play, but on what Human Rights Watch has termed a “two-tier” legal system – in other words, apartheid, with one set of laws for Jews and a harsh, oppressive set of laws for Palestinians.

This, however, is the legal system and security state AIPAC (The American Israel Public Affairs Committee) will defend from May 22-24 at its annual conference. And, despite this grim reality, members of Congress will converge to hail AIPAC and Israel. The Palestinians’ lack of freedom is bound to be obscured at the AIPAC conference with its obsessive focus on security and shunting aside of anything to do with upholding fundamental Palestinian rights.

Several years ago near Der Beilut in the West Bank, I saw the Israeli police turn a water cannon on our nonviolent protest. As it happened, I recalled Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 and wondered why an ostensibly democratic society responded to peaceable assembly by trying, literally, to drown out the voice of our protest.

In Mas’ha, also in the occupied West Bank, I joined a demonstration against the wall Israel has built, usually inside the West Bank and occasionally towering to 25 feet in height. I saw a red sign warning ominously of “mortal danger” to any who dared to cross in an area where it ran as a fence. I saw Israeli soldiers aiming at unarmed Israelis, Palestinians and international protesters.

I also saw blood pouring out of Gil Na’amati, a young Israeli whose first public act after completing his mandatory military service was to protest against the wall. I saw shrapnel lodged in the leg of Anne Farina, one of my traveling companions from St. Louis. And I thought of Kent State and Jackson State, where National Guardsmen opened fire in 1970 on protesters against the Vietnam War.

So as AIPAC meets and members of Congress cheer, I hold these images of Israel in my mind and fear AIPAC’s ability to move US policy in dangerous directions. AIPAC does a disservice to the Palestinians, the Israelis and the American people. It helps to keep the Middle East in a perpetual state of war and this year will be no different from last year as it keeps up a steady drumbeat calling for war against Iran.

AIPAC pretends to speak for all Jews, but it certainly does not speak for me or other members of the Jewish community in this country who are committed to equal rights for all and are aware that American interventionism is likely to bring further disaster and chaos to the Middle East.

Israel, of course, would not be able to carry out its war crimes against civilians in Lebanon and Gaza without the United States – and our $3 billion in military aid – permitting it to do so. At 86 years old, I use every ounce of my energy to educate the American public about the need to stop supporting the abuses committed by the Israeli government and military against the Palestinian people.

Sometimes there are people who try to shout me down and scream that I am a self-hating Jew, but most of the time the audience is receptive to hear from someone who survived the Holocaust and now works to free the Palestinians from Israeli oppression.

The vicious discrimination brought to bear against Palestinians in the occupied territories deserves no applause this week from members of Congress attending the AIPAC conference. Instead, they should raise basic questions with Israeli officials about decades of inferior rights endured by Palestinians both inside Israel and the occupied territories.

Hedy Epstein is a Holocaust survivor, who writes and travels extensively to speak about social justice causes and Middle Eastern affairs.

Take action by attending Move Over AIPAC, a gathering in Washington DC from May 21-24, 2011, to expose AIPAC and build the vision for a new US foreign policy in the Middle East! More information can be found at www.MoveOverAIPAC.org.

This particular case has been quite interesting, because of the fact that all Palestinian factions publicly distanced themselves from it and denied responsibility for carrying it out. Despite the Israeli government immediately blaming it on Palestinian ‘terror’ without any proof and using the death of the Fogels as an excuse to further expand the illegal colonization of the West Bank, a gag order was placed on the investigation as rumors and theories grew about who the actual culprit may have been.

Itamar is a heavily fortified settlement overlooking the surrounding Palestinian villages on whose land it is illegally built. The colony is notoriously well fortified to ensure intruders do not enter; it is completely surrounded by 8 foot high electrified wire fence with 2 feet of razor wire on top, sensors to determine if the fence has been cut, automatic cameras that cover the entire perimeter, 24 hour security guard presence and protection provided by the Israeli military. All of its inhabitants are heavily armed, and like almost all Israeli settlements it is surrounded by hundreds of meters of empty buffer land that Palestinians cannot step foot in.

The fact that Itamar probably has more security than the White House led many to conclude that whoever killed the Fogels could not have simply snuck in and snuck back out again.

But now the Israeli security authorities, that bastion of transparency and human rights, say they’ve extracted confessions from Amjad Awad, 19, and Hakim Awad, 18, both from Awarta. According to Haaretz, the teens decided on a whim to go to Itamar armed with nothing but wire cutters and a prayer. They walked across the buffer zone without being noticed by the cameras, security guards, soldiers or residents of the colony. They reached the electrified fence, where they spent ten minutes cutting the wire. The automatic cameras and sensors seemed, by a stroke of anti-semitic fortune, to be asleep that day.

Once they’d cut the fence, the two teenagers walked into the colony, where again nobody noticed them. They found a house which by sheer luck was 1) unlocked, 2) empty and 3) had an M16 rifle and ammunition lying about. Amjad and Hakim picked up the gun and the bullets, and stepped out of the empty house. There, they moved to the Fogels’ residence. They walked in, and killed four family members-one with the gun, the others with a knife.

Having defied all odds, the teenagers now left the house and went back outside. They still hadn’t been noticed. Neither the gun shot nor the screams had been heard (the security services here explain that the weather wasn’t conducive to carrying sound waves that evening). While realizing they STILL hadn’t been noticed by any of the residents, soldiers, security guards or cameras, Amjad and Hakim spotted the Fogels’ 3 month old baby through the window. So they decided to go back inside and kill the baby.

Insatiable Arab thirst for blood and all that.

Now the teens, armed with a big stolen M16 rifle, ammunition, and a knife simply walked back out of the colony, again unnoticed by the cameras, soldiers, guards, colonists, sensors and maybe even God himself. They walked across the buffer zone, back to their village, and thought they had gotten away with their dastardly crime. Of course, they had forgotten to factor in the tireless efforts of the Israeli army and intelligence apparatus, who laid siege to their village for days, barring the entry of food and medicine, rounding up villagers en masse, savagely beating others and destroying extensive property in Awarta.

The story presented by the Israeli security forces has more holes in it than a hunk of Swiss cheese treated with birdshot. As Ali Abunimah points out, they can’t even get their claim right about whether or not Amjad and Hakim acted alone or on behalf of the PFLP. And Israel’s penchant for using torture and threats to coerce confessions doesn’t really do much for its credibility here. If 6 year old girls are beaten and 60 year old women are violently detained in Awarta, your brain doesn’t have to go far to guess what the Shin Bet did to extract confessions from the young men.

And before the seething masses of indignant Zionists could finish wringing their hands, out comes the family of Hakim Awad with the inconvenient revelation that their son had recently undergone testicular surgery that made it impossible for him to walk long distances and needing the toilet every hour, and was at home recovering the night the Fogels were killed. Oops.

Zionism really is losing its lustre: They decided to frame a guy who can barely walk for trekking across a buffer zone, through an electrified fence, breaking into two houses, killing an entire family then jogging merrily home.

The massacre was publicized by propagandists looking to convince other Palestinians in the vicinity to flee. Along with other terror campaigns, such as burning crops and bullying villagers, the Zionist militias used the bloodshed there to scare other Palestinians. Deir Yassin was re-settled by Israeli colonists, something that even liberal Zionists like Martin Buber found outrageous.

Though there were other massacres, Deir Yassin stands out as especially gruesome and instrumental to the capture of Jerusalem.

These are resources sent out by the Institute for Palestine Studies.

ARTICLES

-Historian Joel Beinin called Deir Yassin “the most infamous massacre of Palestinian Arabs.”

He wrote, “The efforts of the Zionist armed forces to retain Jerusalem, including the massacre at Dayr Yassin, were an important factor prompting the Arab population of western Jerusalem and its surrounding villages (Malha, Lifta, ‘Ayn Karim, etc.) to leave.” (p. 11)

Beinin recounted a debate in the Knesset in 1949 in which one member said “If you don’t know [about Dayr Yassin] you can ask” David Ben-Gurion. The Knesset member also said, “thanks to Dayr Yassin we won the war, sir.”

The exchange was published in this article (p. 23) by Amnon Kapeliouk.

-Nathan Krystall wrote that a Red Cross official said the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre had no “military reason or provocation of any kind” in his article on the de-population of western Jerusalem (p. 10)

-A 1991 Norman Finkelstein article on myths about Al-Nakba, in response to Benny Morris, mentioned the Deir Yassin massacre, but places it in a campaign to empty much of Palestine of Palestinians.

-Palestinian attorney Raja Shehadeh “grew up hearing about the massacre in Deir Yassin but didn’t know that it was one of scores” that took place.

BOOKS

-There is some important testimony on Deir Yassin in the classic book, ‘From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948.’ Ed. Walid Khalidi, pp. 761-766. It is for sale online.

-An important book — published in Arabic — is ‘Dayr Yasin: 9 April 1948,’ by Walid Khalidi. It is based on the personal testimonies of thirty survivors of the Dayr Yasin massacre of 1948. It also draws on the accounts of individuals from the groups that perpetrated the massacre: the Irgun, Stern Gang, and the Palmach.

Woven together to form a composite picture of the events leading up to the massacre, this narrative is distinguished from other accounts by its comprehensiveness and its placement of the massacre in its wider geopolitical context. The book contains six maps and six appendices that list the victims and classify them by family, gender, and age.

By Rania Elhilou, Communications Officer

ANERA – Gaza City

December, 2010:  Randa Al-Jarousha has seven children. Her husband is jobless. He used to work in construction but he got sick and lost his job.  Even if he gets better, his chances of finding another construction job are slim since building materials are in short supply.

Most days, Randa sends her son to school without breakfast and relies on the fortified snacks offered in the Milk for Preschoolers program run by ANERA, “At least I know my son Mohammed can get milk and biscuits every day. Milk is too expensive for me now and I can’t afford to give him protein-rich food like eggs or meat.”  A neighbor recently donated three little chickens, which Randa is raising and eventually will cook for her children.

Randa is not alone.  The jobless rate now is estimated at 50 percent, one of the world’s highest.  That means one out of two Palestinian workers in Gaza cannot find a job.

Somehow they still need to put food on the table.  But the price of food is soaring.

A bag of small pita breads costs about $2.  A family of seven would need a bag of bread every day but that would cost $14 and without an income, mothers like Randa must do without. She just shakes her head, “Shopping in the market now is a nightmare.”

With no or very little resources, how often can a mother buy a kilo of potatoes at $1.50? Or, a kilo of tomatoes, at $1.50, triple what it cost last summer.  A kilo of rice now runs about $2.50. It was only $2 six months ago. A kilo of meat would cost at least $15 – a rare luxury that some families might be able to enjoy every four months or so.

A can of powdered milk runs about $4 and will feed one child for a week.  So, most mothers buy larger packages of powdered milk, which can feed more for less.  But a kilo of powdered milk will cost more than $13, depending on the quality.  So, mothers resort to diluting the milk with a lot of water, which might satisfy their youngster’s thirst but not his nutritional intake.  Fresh milk at $2.70 a liter is beyond most budgets.

I now see children scavenging in the garbage to collect plastic bottles and other bits and pieces that they can sell in the market to help their parents buy food.

It’s true that we are less dependent on products smuggled through the tunnels from Egypt now that more products are coming in legally from Israel.  But that doesn’t mean we can afford them.

Little has changed for families here.  And for most, life is just getting harder.

- end -

ABOUT ANERA:  For more than 40 years, ANERA has been a leading provider of development, health, education and employment programs to Palestinian communities and impoverished families throughout the Middle East.  In FY 2009, the relief and development agency delivered more than $50 million of programs to the people of the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon and Jordan. For more information, go to www.anera.org

The Zionist Adventure (part 4/4)

What the Zionists would really like to do is get the green light from the US (the main corporate host) to drop a couple of daisy cutters on Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, just like Uncle Sam does when he goes to war. The Israeli nuclear warheads are not a real deterrent to Lebanon or Syria due to proximity. Thus, the nuclear deterrence is an illusion. Israel is too small (distance between Tel Aviv and the West Bank is less than 10 miles), and to physically conquer or destroy Tel Aviv is not difficult. So, as long as Israel’s enemies do not have the fire power to do so, and as long as the Saracen populations are under control through various means, Tel Aviv can continue its fragile existence, with Israelis living in daily fear (most of it imagined) of the day that the Arab monsters would flush them out into the sea. That’s why when Israel invades and bombs Lebanon or Gaza, it is supported by almost every Israeli because they see in those actions an expansion of their security (they can sleep better at night).

As aforementioned, the conglomerates can only profit as long as the status quo remains: Israel doesn’t annihilate all its enemies once and for all, and Israel’s enemies remain strong enough to cause minor nuisances every now and then, like a Hezbollah kidnapping across the border, or a Hamas/Jihad bombing. And in order to maintain the status quo, Israel’s leash is released only far enough to barely re-stabilize the region. If, say, Hamas gets too strong, Israel is allowed to cause more havoc and destruction. If Hamas is weakened, the US pulls Israel’s leash, shouting “down boy! down!” and gives it a treat (maybe another nuclear submarine).

But the wind of destabilization has been blowing a bit too hard lately on Israel and its conceivers. Unlike Israel, Hezbollah and many other religious and secularist resistance groups don’t seem to respond positively to monetary and material incentives. In other words, they can’t be leashed. To subdue them back into the profit-generating low-intensity conflict, they have to be bombed into submission, which requires Israel (the leashed) to remain stronger than all its unleashed enemies. But in July of 2006, the conglomerates and the world woke up to a very different equation. For thirty-three consecutive days, Israel had been unable to subdue Hezbollah one single iota. In fact, Israel’s creators have intervened through so-called non-aligned channels to ask Hezbollah to stop, which it did for strategic reasons. Even the Mossad and CIA were shocked at Hezbollah’s display of advanced firepower, and so they went back to their dark rooms to recalculate the stability equation.

Hezbollah could not have done it without Iranian backing. Hence, to eliminate the Hezbollah threat (which is becoming exponentially serious), the math work in the dark rooms keeps pointing to the same target: Iran. But Iran is backed by Russia and China, who also, like the American conglomerates, wish to own oil wells and profit off the Middle East low-intensity conflict. Just like Israel, the Russo-Chinese think, Iran must build a nuclear arsenal in order to deter Israel, not annihilate it. And just like Israel, when Iran gets a little out of hand, the Russo-Chinese smack Iran on its hand to behave itself.

The US (and its conglomerate backers) have shifted strategy. Notice how the media focuses on Iran without alluding much to its weapons suppliers. The Iranian nuclear program could not have been possible without Russo-Chinese support. For America to bomb Iran is like for Russia to bomb Israel. It’s not going to happen. A nuclear Iran is the price the US has to pay for resuming its low-intensity conflict profiteering stability.

The Zionists, however, are interested in their iron-grip security, and that requires the destruction of the Iranian nuclear build-up as a starting point, followed by the destruction of all resistance groups once and for all. The American government and its employers do not share this sense of urgency because, first of all, its not their ass on the line, and second, allowing Iran to develop its military capability is acceptable as long as it serves the overall goal: maintaining low-intensity conflict in the region for high profits.

On the other side, Hezbollah and other resistance groups seek to undo the Zionist project, even if it could only be done by force. Israel, as usual, is crying wolf to Uncle Sam (that their country is on the verge of annihilation). Since the inception of their state, Israelis have been living in that horror, and most of them hold onto their other citizenships/passports from Europe or its offshoots, as a life boat in case their project hits an ice berg. It is this horror that drives the Zionist thirst for war, and justifies every assassination, every bombardment, and every bullet that leaves the barrels of their rifles to kill Arabs. While the Arab resistance fighters of all sects are driven by justice: to get back what is rightfully theirs.

As rational actors, the United States, Russia, and China will allow a nuclear Iran to emerge because the alternative would be a large-scale war with unpredicted devastation to the region and the whole world. Israel, however, doesn’t seem to be rational at this stage. In its incessant fear of annihilation, the Zionist regime might go nuts and attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. And if Iran chooses to retaliate, and most likely they will, all hell will break loose.

There is a way for Arabs and Jews to stop being pawns in the hands of super powers and their low-intensity-conflict profiteering game: racism must be eliminated, and in its place justice must be upheld; the right of return to all Palestinians, and thus Israel becomes the homeland of all its inhabitants as equal citizens. This would mean the end of the Zionist adventure. It is, by far, the most humane, peaceful, and just solution to the conflict. And if it’s true that the nineteenth century European racism is so entrenched in the minds and hearts of Israeli Jews that they cannot imagine living as a minority in an Arab-majority country, then they should be more than welcome to pack their bags and blow the dust off those European passports they have locked away for so long, and buy a one-way ticket back home.

The alternative is to wait for the Middle East to run out of oil, or when the world abandons fossil fuels, whichever comes first. At that time, no one will come to Israel’s rescue. The Zionist stock will drop to bankruptcy, and politicians will sell their Zionist ties faster than you can say hava nagila. It’s ironic how the racist element in Zionism which successfully blocks assimilation, builds roads and settlements for Jews only; security fences and high walls of separation, would become the key to the Zionist project’s demise. Whether through war or peace, now or later, the Zionist adventure will come to an end.

The Zionist Adventure (Part 3/4)

“[this resolution is] another manifestation of the bitter anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish hatred which animates Arab society. Who would have believed that in this year, 1975, the malicious falsehoods of the ‘Elders of Zion’ would be distributed officially by Arab governments? Who would have believed that we would today contemplate an Arab society which teaches the vilest anti-Jewish hate in the kindergartens?… We are being attacked by a society which is motivated by the most extreme form of racism known in the world today… For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value.” ~ Chaim Herzog, Israeli ambassador to UN.

That is how Israel responded in 1975, when the world voted on United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 3379, which “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The majority; including all Arab nations, Cuba, Brazil, China, Soviet Union, Mexico, Portugal, Turkey, India, and others totalling seventy-two, voted “yes,” and thirty-two abstained. But given the strong condemnation used in that resolution, abstaining is just a passive “yes.” Those thirty-five who voted “no” were the same nations that conceived, irrigated, armed, and covered for Israel all these years, minus eastern Europe, plus a few weightless states (coalition of the bought).

Interestingly, the resolution was based on other world denouncements of Zionism, such as the 1973 UNGA resolution 3151 (condemning Zionist alliance with Apartheid South Africa), the 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year in Mexico City, the 1975 Organization of African Unity resolution 77, and the 1975 Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs of Non-Aligned Countries, all of them condemning Zionism, the last one accusing it of being a “threat to World Peace.” This should give a clear image of how the world thought and felt in the 1970s towards Zionism.

Despite the absence of any anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic language in those resolutions, the Zionists themselves were the ones who insisted on mixing the terms because it served them best. Regardless, the racism in Zionism is in its very definition: A state for Jews only, on a land that belongs to another people. To a Zionist, to be against this project is to be anti-Jewish, and nothing has been more hurtful to world Jewry since the Holocaust than for Zionists to base the entire Jewish being as an ethnic group and religion on a racist ideology.

If Israel were to eliminate racism from its project, i.e. treat the ten million non-Jewish indigenous population of Israel (1.5 million 48 Arabs, 3.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and West Bank, and five million Palestinian refugees in diaspora) as equal citizens to the five million Jewish-Israelis, Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. Thus, for the Zionist project to survive, these ten million Palestinians must, at all costs, be excluded from the Jewish state through expulsion, citizenship revocation and denial, genocide, or all three. They have been getting away with these by accusing their victims (the rightful owners of the land) and their supporters of anti-Semitism and hatred towards Jews (instead of hatred towards Zionism).

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Palestinians are anti-Semitic. How is that grounds for demolishing their homes, razing their orchards, and expelling them out of their land? Under what legal or ethical code in all history can this be justified? Are the Zionists truly incapable of seeing the wrong in this? Of course not. They know exactly what they’re doing, and it’s all justified when their entire framework is based on racism: “I am more worthy than him,” and that view has been consistent with their behavior since the inception of their state.

Zionism, as an ideology, has become bankrupt since global movements came about to uproot racism, sexism, and ethno-centrism in the world, and to uphold human rights and the 4th Geneva Convention above all. This is precisely why Israel has received more condemnation from international organizations (including UN, ICC, and ICJ) than any other nation on earth. And the Zionist response: the world is infested with anti-Semitism. Even non-Jewish politicians in democratic governments justify their support for the Zionist project by expressing fear of being labeled anti-Semitic, as if saying: “look, if I don’t support Israel, they will accuse me of anti-Semitism and that would make me a Nazi, and people don’t vote Nazis into office.”

There lies the roots of the symbiotic relationship between Israel and all corrupt government officials and businessmen around the world: Zionists need anti-Semitism to justify and cover for their project, and politicians and media outlets need more money. Together, they continue the propagation of the Holocaust as though it was the only genocide that took place in history, and as though no one else suffered in the world. Forget the millions of Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Russians, Vietnamese, Bosnians, Rwandans, Armenians, and Native Americans (all who suffered genocide in recent times) but we must focus on the Jewish Holocaust because it reminds everyone why anti-Semitism (and by default, anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli sentiment) can never be tolerated. And that is the Pavlovian conditioning that the Zionists have been so successful at dispensing through global media: Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims are anti-Semitic (read anti-Zionist), and we have all seen what happens when anti-Semitism is tolerated — Holocaust. On this the Jewish people have spoken: never again!

“Britain’s high commissioner for Palestine, John Chancellor, recommended total suspension of Jewish immigration and land purchase to protect Arab agriculture. He said ‘all cultivable land was occupied; that no cultivable land now in possession of the indigenous population could be sold to Jews without creating a class of landless Arab cultivators’…The Colonial Office rejected the recommendation.” ~ Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice by John Quigley

Of course they never cared to explain to their kids the contradiction of why they didn’t return home until Zionism was born after two thousand years of Ashkenazi exile. What the hell have Ashkenazi Jews been doing for the last two millennia living in Europe and identifying themselves as Europeans?

The Israeli national mythology extended its tentacles into religion as well, citing the concluding words of Jewish daily prayers “שנה הבאה בירושלים (next year in Jerusalem)” as evidence that the yearning for Aliyah (return to eretz y’israel) had preceded Zionism and had been inseparable from their culture for all these years of Diaspora. Of course, they conveniently leave out the part where this religious return must be led by the Jewish Messiah, and that any other Aliyah attempt is considered an abomination. It is based on this very prayer that Orthodox Jews have strongly rejected the Zionist project in its earlier days.

The national myth continues: they returned home with the best of intentions to live side by side with the Arab occupiers. But just like European anti-Semitic bastards, these Arabs could not bear the idea of living with Jews (mind you, indigenous Jews comprised 10% of the population and called themselves Palestinian). And thus, the Arabs organized and terrorized the Jews, even tried to drive Jews into the sea. And so, the Jews had no choice but to defend themselves, and they fought till victory, while the Arabs fled their homes.

“In general international law, the principle holds true that no citizen loses his property or his rights of citizenship; and the citizenship right is de facto a right to which the Arabs in Israel have much more legitimacy than the Jews. Just because the Arabs fled? Since when is that punishable by confiscation of property, and by being barred from returning to the land on which a people’s forefathers have lived for generations?” – Erich Fromm

Of course, the “fleeing” took place after the Israelis massacred Palestinian men, women, and children in cold blood, such as the most cited massacre of Deir Yassin. The Palestinians fled because they believed that their fate would be identical to Deir Yassin’s. But massacre or no massacre, ask a Zionist if Palestinian refugees should be allowed to return to any part of historic Palestine, and they will not deny the reason behind their absolute rejection: the open return of Palestinian refugees would shift the population ratios such that Israel could no longer maintain its Jewish identity, and would thus nullify the entire Zionist project. From this, we learn two important facts:

1. It is completely understandable, then, for the same reasons given above, why the Palestinians rejected the huge influx of Jewish immigrants into Palestine. It had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
2. The Zionist project couldn’t have been realized without massive and coercive expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians. The expulsions were planned, as official documents show (read on the Hashemite-Zionist agreements as early as 1919) and a whole country was created in 1921 to absorb and repatriate the refugees, before Palestinians attempted any assault on Jewish immigrants.

From the King-Crane Commission (1919) report:

“The commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor…The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conferences with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase… If [the] principle [of self-determination] is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist program.. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted…No British officers, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms.The officers generally thought that a force of not less than fifty thousand soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program…The initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a ‘right’ to Palestine based on occupation of two thousand years ago, can barely be seriously considered.” ~ The Israel-Arab Reader by Laqueur and Rubin.

Once the Zionist project had been unveiled to the Arab streets of Jerusalem, Beirut, Damascus, and Baghdad, the second Arab Revolt began in the late 1930s, aimed at the British, French, and Zionist forces in Palestine and elsewhere.

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French…What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct…If they [the Jews] must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs… As it is, they are co-sharers with the British in despoiling a people who have done no wrong to them. I am not defending the Arab excesses. I wish they had chosen the way of non-violence in resisting what they rightly regard as an unacceptable encroachment upon their country. But according to the accepted canons of right and wrong, nothing can be said against the Arab resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi (1938)

Unfortunately for Zionism, the age of racism it was born and nurtured in had long passed. Thus, Zionist leaders have resorted to their dirtiest (and probably last) card in their deck: to turn the Zionist, Jewish, and Israeli identities into synonyms. By insisting to refer to themselves as Jews, they turned every criticism against Israel or Zionism into criticism against world Jewry, and thus anti-Zionism became synonymous with anti-Semitism. This propaganda campaign was also aimed at Jews themselves, to make them equate the identities, and for many, the campaign has been successful. Thus, an Arab, or a Hindu, speaking out against Israel is by default anti-Semitic. And, ironically, a Jew speaking out against Israel is a self-hating Jew, for how can you explain them being simultaneously Jewish and against Israel?

“Only an internal revolution can have the power to heal our people of their murderous sickness of causeless hatred…It is bound to bring complete ruin upon us. Only then will the old and young in our land realize how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed we put up houses of education, charity, and prayer, while we babble and rave about being the “People of the Book” and the “light of the nations.” ~ Martin Bubber

International Zionism could not have been born at any other time than during the era of European colonial ambitions. It was the late 1800s, when racism was science, and being racist was still fashionable. Slavery had only been recently abolished in many parts of Europe, America, and the British Empire. It was the age of Friedrich Nietzsche’s revision of morality (from which Adolf Hitler built his ideology). It was the century when phrenology (scientifically detecting criminal tendencies in a man based on the shape and size of his skull) was considered real science.

If Herzl, the Austro-Hungarian journalist who turned Zionism from a Carrot Top fan club into a sophisticated organization with real potential, had stuck with his first idea of uniting Germanic people (of whom he considered himself to be part of) into a greater Germany, there would have been no Israel today.

This whole business of the European Jews “finally returning“ to their “homeland,” or “promised land,” is complete bogus, developed only in recent times. The European Jew could have moved into the Levant if he truly wished for the last thousand years. If millions of unorganized Mexicans can infiltrate the high-tech security fences into the US, the Jews could have certainly entered a much less border-controlled, third-world country like Palestine. But there was no such wish among the great majority of European Jews, as is the case today (about 75% of world Jewry choose not to live in Israel). This myth that the European Jew has been yearning day and night to return to eretz y’israel did not surpass empty slogans rehearsed during prayers awaiting the coming of the Messiah; something which Herzl ridiculed.

The Zionists have also downplayed and tossed into memory-holes the massive popular rejection among Jews to create a Jewish state. The most rigorous opposition was the religiously devout Orthodox Jews (some still are) and Jewish Palestinians at the time. Zionism, a secular entity, has been labeled as blasphemous in its early years of development by many Jews of all backgrounds.

Albert Einstein: “I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish State. Apart from practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish State, with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power, no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain.” (He was offered Israeli citizenship and the presidency of Israel; and rejected both.)

Another common misconception today is that the Zionist organization was seen as the rescue team for Jewish survivors of the most ruthless anti-Semitism ever spread throughout Europe since the Grand Inquisition. In fact, the Zionists saw in anti-Semitism the very fuel needed to accomplish their project. As for European monarchs, without their funding and political support, Herzl and company would not have even made it into the footnotes of history. The Gentile-European support for their project was tremendous, and preached in the name of realizing the Jewish dream of finally having a land they can call home (Does Liberia come to mind?). Palestine was only one of the several suggested locations to build that state. Other locations included Alaska, Argentina, and Madagascar. Palestine was finally chosen precisely because the Zionists knew they could play the religious card on the dimwitted among the Jews. Zionist leaders appeared in every major city, giving lectures and advertising the Zionist project as the only true hope for world Jewry. As statistics show, the majority of Jews, however, chose to immigrate to the realistic and pragmatic Promised Land — the Americas.

The more Zionists received imperial backing, the stronger became their belief in the dream. But to rule a country, you need people, lots of people. Despite Palestine having had a vibrant Jewish community ever since the Arabs conquered it in AD 638, who have reversed the Greco-Roman edict to banish all Jews from Jerusalem; it wasn’t enough. The Zionists required that the majority they ruled over were Jewish, preferably European ones (Ashkenazim). To solve this problem, they struck a deal with those in charge of Palestine at the time: the British and their puppet Arab Kings. And the deal was to begin exporting European Jews on a massive scale into Palestine, concentrating them in a specific region (Tel Aviv area), until they have become a majority (like what the Mormons did in Utah). Once that majority of European Jews had become a reality, the time to declare independence of eretz y’israel became a matter of a stroke of a pen, and the expulsion of unwanted Goyim would commence as planned.

The declaration of independence was recognized immediately by the countries that hated (and wanted to get rid of) the Jews most, and within less than a year, Israel was accepted as a member of the UN. The Zionists could not have pulled this off on their own. And thus, rehashed conspiracy theories, such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had been circulated in Europe to fuel anti-Semitism (in the same way that, say, FOX  and CNN fuel anti-Muslim sentiments) were then gaining traction among many simple-minded and educated Arabs. It was the only logical explanation to the backing of Israel by all major superpowers, including the Soviet reds! The average Arab began to relate Zionist actions with European rejection and anti-Semitism. As Zionists stole more land, forged property deeds and documents, signed secret treaties with Europeans and puppet regimes, the Arab people began (with the assistance of puppet regime propaganda) to draw the false link, thinking to themselves: “no wonder the Europeans hated them and couldn’t stand them! They must have been acting this way in Europe too!” — ending up with an image of an invicible organization that is so secretive that even gods and devils have a hard time in keeping up with their evil plot for world domination.

The simple-minded Arab, however, missed the more obvious and correct explanation; that Zionism was just another European colonial entity that just happens to be of Semitic roots (completely irrelevant), naturally in cahoots with other, like-minded European colonial regimes. The Zionists are not, and never were, in control of superpowers. They were allies in colonialism, and both sides found mutual interests in furthering the Zionist project.  It was the European racist mentality of the time that led Zionist leaders to pray for a stronger wind to blow on the flames of the Holocaust, to hasten the export of Jewish victims into their projected chess board: Palestine.

Ben Gurion (1938): “If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative.“