War On Terror Within: The End of Jewish History
By Gilad Atzmon
Mar 18th, 2009 at 9:59
The issue I am going to discuss today is probably the most important
thing I’ve ever had to say about Israeli brutality and contemporary
Jewish identity. I assume that I could have shaped my thought into a
wide-ranging book or an analytical academic text but instead, I will do
the very opposite, I will make it as short and as simple as possible.
In the weeks that have just passed we had been witness to an Israeli
genocidal campaign against the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza.
We had been witnessing one of the strongest armies in the world
squashing women, elderly people and children. We saw blizzards of
unconventional weapons bursting over schools, hospitals and refugee
camps. We had seen and heard about war crimes committed before, but this
time, the Israeli transgression was categorically different. It was
supported by the total absolute majority of the Israeli Jewish
population. The IDF military campaign in Gaza enjoyed the support of
94% of the Israeli population. 94% of the Israelis apparently approved
of the air raids against civilians. The Israeli people saw the carnage
on their TV screens, they heard the voices, they saw hospitals and
refugee camps in flames and yet, they weren’t really moved by it all.
They didn’t do much to stop their “democratically elected” ruthless
leaders. Instead, some of them grabbed a seat and settled on the hills
overlooking the Gaza Strip to watch their army turning Gaza into modern
Hebraic coliseum of blood. Even now when the campaign seems to be over
and the scale of the carnage in Gaza has been revealed, the Israelis
fail to show any signs of remorse. As if this is not enough, all
throughout the war, Jews around the world rallied in support of their
“Jews-only state”. Such a popular support of outright war crimes is
unheard of. Terrorist states do kill, yet they are slightly shy about it
all. Stalin’s USSR did it in some remote Gulags, Nazi Germany executed
its victims in deep forests and behind barbed wire. In the Jewish state,
the Israelis slaughter defenceless women, children and the old in broad
daylight, using unconventional weapons targeting schools, hospitals and
refugee camps.
This level of group barbarism cries for an explanation. The task ahead
can be easily defined as the quest for a realisation of Israeli
collective brutality. How is it that a society has managed to lose its
grip of any sense of compassion and mercy?
The Terror Within
More than anything else, the Israelis and their supportive Jewish
communities are terrorised by the brutality they find in themselves. The
more ruthless the Israelis are, the more frightened they become. The
logic is simple. The more suffering one inflicts on the other, the more
anxious one becomes of the possible potential deadly capacity around. In
broad terms, the Israeli projects on the Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and
Iranian the aggression which he finds in himself. Considering the fact
that Israeli brutality is now proved to be with no limit and with no
comparison, their anxiety is as at least as great.
Seemingly, the Israelis are fearful of themselves being the henchmen.
They are engaged in a deadly battle with the terror within. But the
Israeli is not alone. The Diaspora Jew who rallies in support of a state
that pours white phosphorous on civilians is caught in the exact same
devastating trap. Being an enthusiastic backer of an overwhelming crime,
he is horrified by the thought that the cruelty he happens to find in
himself may manifest itself in others. The Diaspora Jew who supports
Israel is devastated by the imaginary possibility that a brutal intent,
similar to his own, may one day turn against him. This very concern is
what the fear of anti-Semitism is all about. It is basically the
projection of the collective Zio-centric tribal ruthlessness onto others.
There is no Israeli - Palestinian Conflict
What we see here is a clear formation of a vicious cycle in which the
Israeli and his supporters are becoming an insular fireball of vengeance
that is fuelled by some explosive internal aggression. The meaning of it
all is pretty revealing. Since Palestinians cannot militarily confront
Israeli aggression and destructive capacity, we are entitled to argue
that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All there is, is Israeli
psychosis in which the Israeli is being shattered with anxiety by the
reflection of his own ruthlessness. Being regarded as the Nazis of our
time, the Israeli is thus doomed to seeing a Nazi in everyone.
Similarly, there is no rise in anti-Semitism either. The Diaspora
Zionist Jew is simply devastated by the possibility that someone out
there is as ethically corrupted and merciless as he himself proved to
be. In short, Israeli politics and Zionist lobbying should be seen as no
less than a lethal Zio-centric collective paranoia on the verge of total
psychosis.
Is there a way to redeem the Zionist of his bloody expedition? Is there
a way to change the course of history, to save the Israelis and their
supporters from total depravity? Probably the best way to pose this
question is to ask whether there is a way to save the Israeli and the
Zionist from themselves. As one may gather, I am not exactly interested
in saving Israelis or Zionists, however, I do grasp that redeeming
Zionists of their transgression may bring a prospect of peace to
Palestine, Iraq and probably the rest of us. For those who fail to see
it, Israel is just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the day,
America, Britain and the West are now subject to some similar forms of
"politics of fear" that are the direct outcome of Neocon deadly
interventionist ideology and practices.
The Shrink from Nazareth
Many years ago, so we are told, there was an Israelite who lived amongst
his brethren in the land of Canaan. Like the contemporary Israelis, he
was surrounded by hate, vengeance and fear. At a certain stage he had
decided to intervene and to bring a change about, he realised that there
was no other way to fight ruthlessness than to search for grace. “Turn
your other cheek” was his simple suggestion. Identifying the Israelite’s
psychosis as “a war against terror within”, Jesus grasped that the only
way to counter violence is to look in the mirror while searching for
Goodness within.
It is rather apparent that Jesus’ lesson paved the way to the formation
of western universal ethics. Modern political ideologies drew their
lesson from the Christian prospect. Marx’s normative search for equality
can be seen as a secular rewriting of Jesus’ notion of brotherhood. And
yet, not a single political ideology has managed to integrate the
deepest notion of Jesus’ grace. To seek peace is primarily to search for
one within. While Israelis and their Neocon twins would aim at achieving
peace by means of deterrence, true peace is achieved by the search for
harmony within. As a Lacanian scholar may suggest, to love your
neighbour is actually to love yourself loving your neighbour. The case
of the Israeli is the complete opposite. As they manage to prove time
after time, they are really loving themselves hating their neighbours or
in short, they simply love themselves hating in general. They hate
almost everything: the neighbour, the Arab, Chavez, the German, Islam,
the Goy, Pork, the Pope, the Palestinian, the Church, Jesus, Hamas,
calamari and Iran. You name it, they hate it. One may have to admit
that hating so much must be a very consuming project unless it gives
pleasure. And indeed the Israeli “pleasure principle” could be
articulated as follows: it continuously drives the Israeli to seek
pleasure in hate while inflicting pain upon others.
It must be mentioned at this point that the ˜War Against Terror within”
is not exactly a Jewish invention. Everyone, whether it is nations,
peoples or individuals, are a potential subject to it. The consequences
of American nuclear murderous slaughter in Hiroshima and Nagasaki made
the American people into a terrorised collective. This collective
anxiety is known as the “cold war”. America is yet to redeem itself of
the fear that there maybe someone out there as merciless as America
proved to be. To a certain extent, operation Shock and Awe had a very
similar effect on Britain and America. It led to the creation of
horrified masses easily manipulated by highly motivated elite. This
exact type of politics is called “politics of fear”.
And yet, within the western discourse a correction mechanism is in
place. Unlike the Jewish state that is getting radicalised by its own
self feeding paranoia, in the West, evil is somehow confronted and
contained eventually. The murderer is denounced and hope for peace is
somehow reinstated till further notice. Not that I hold my breath for
President Obama bringing any change, one thing is rather clear, Obama
was voted in to bring a change. Obama is a symbol of our genuine attempt
to curtail evil. In the Jewish state, not only it doesn’t happen, it can
never happen. The difference between Israel and the West is rather
obvious. In the West, Christian heritage is providing us with a
possibility of a wish grounded on belief in universal goodness. Though,
we are under the constant danger of exposure to evil, we tend to believe
that goodness will eventually prevail. On the other hand, in Hebraic
tribal discourse, Goodness is the property of the chosen. The Israelis
do not see goodness or kindness in their neighbors, they see them as
savage and as a life-threatening entity. For the Israelis, kindness is
their very own property, accidentally they are also innocent and
victims. Within the western universal discourse, goodness doesn’t
belong to one people or a single nation, it belongs to all and to none
at the same time. Within the western universal heritage, Goodness is
found in each of us. It doesn’t belong to a political party or an
ideology. The elevating notion of grace and a Good God is there in each
of us, it is always very close to home.
What Kind Of Father Is That?
“Then when the Lord your God brings you to the land he promised your
ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to give you –“ a land with large,
fine cities you did not build, houses filled with choice things you did
not accumulate, hewn out cisterns you did not dig, and vineyards and
olive groves you did not plant – and you eat your fill.” (Deuteronomy:
6: 10 -11).
"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to
possess and drives out before you many nations…then you must destroy
them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.”
(Deuteronomy 7:1-2)
At this point we may try to attempt and to grasp the root cause behind
the severe lack of compassion within the Israeli discourse and its
supportive lobbies. I believe that an elaboration on the troubled
relationships between the Jews and their different Gods may throw some
light on the topic. It is rather obvious that the ever growing list of
Jewish “Gods”, “Idols” and “Father-figures” is slightly problematic at
least as far as ethics and kindness are concerned. The very relationship
between “the son” and the “non-ethical father” must be explored. The
philosopher Ariella Atzmon (who happens to be my mother) defines the
complexity of the false beginning as the “Fagin Syndrome”. Charles
Dickens’ Fagin is a “kidsman”, an adult who recruits children and trains
them as pickpockets and thieves, exchanging food and shelter for goods
the children steal. Though the kids must be grateful towards their
master, they must also despise him for turning them into thieves and
pickpockets. The kids realise that Fagin’s goods are all stolen and his
kindness is far from being genuinely honest or pure. Sooner or later
the kids will turn against their master Fagin in an attempt to liberate
themselves of the immoral catch.
From a father-son perspective, the Biblical Jewish God Jehovah is no
different from what we might see in the Fagin syndrome. The father of
Israel leads his chosen people through the desert to the promised land
so they can rob and plunder its indigenous habitants. This is not
exactly what one may expect of an ethical father or a “kind God”.
Consequently, as much as the sons of Israel love Jehovah, they must also
be slightly suspicious of him for turning them into robbers and
murderers. They might even be apprehensive regarding his kindness. Thus,
it shouldn’t take us by a surprise that throughout Jewish history more
than just a few Jews had turned against their heavenly father.
However, bearing in mind the common secularist perception that Gods are
actually invented by people, one may wonder, what leads to the invention
of such an “unethical God”? What makes people follow the rules of such a
God? It would be also interesting to find out what kind of alternative
Gods Jews happened to pick or invent once Jehovah has been shunned.
Since emancipation, more than just a few Jews had been disassociating
themselves from the traditional tribal setting and rabbinical Judaism.
Many intermingled with their surrounding realities, dropped their chosen
entitlement and turned into ordinary human beings. Many other Jews
insisted upon dropping God yet maintaining their racially orientated
tribal affiliation. They decided to base their tribal belonging on
ethnic, racial, political, cultural and ideological grounds rather than
the Judaic precept. Though they noticeably dropped Jehovah they insisted
upon adopting a secularist view that was soon shaped into a monolithic
religious-like precept. All throughout the 20th century, the two
religious-like political ideologies that had been found to be most
appealing by the Jewish masses were Marxism and Zionism.
Marxism can be easily portrayed as a secular universal ethical ideology.
However, within the process of transformation into a Jewish tribal
precept, Marxism has managed to lose any traces of humanism or
universalism. As we know, early Zionist ideology and practice was
largely dominated by Jewish leftists who regarded themselves as true
followers of Marx. They genuinely believed that celebrating their Jewish
national revival at the expense of Palestinians was a legitimate
socialist endeavour.
Interestingly enough, their opponents, the anti-Zionist Bund of the East
European Jewish Labour, didn’t really believe in the institutional
robbery of the Palestinians, instead, they believed that taking from
rich European is a great universal mitzvah on the path towards social
justice.
The following are a few lines from The Bund’s anthem
We swear our stalwart hate persists,
Of those who rob and kill the poor:
The Tsar, the masters, capitalists.
Our vengeance will be swift and sure.
So swear together to live or die!
Without engaging in questions having to do with ethics or political
affiliation, it is rather obvious that the Jewish Marxist anthem is
overwhelmingly saturated with “hate” and “vengeance”. As much as Jews
were enthusiastic about Marx, Marxism, Bolshevism and equality, the end
of the story is known. Jews en masse dropped Marx a long time ago. They
somehow left the revolution to some enlightened Goyim such as Hugo
Chavez and Evo Morales. Leaders who truly internalised in the real
meaning of universal equality and ethics.
Though in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, Marxism
found many followers amongst European Jews, following the Holocaust,
Zionism has gradually become the voice of world Jewry. Like Fagin, the
Zionist Gods and Idols: Herzl, Ben Gurion, Nordau, Weizmann, promised
their followers a new unethical beginning. Robbing the Palestinians
was their path towards a long overdue historical justice. Zionism
transformed the Old Testament from a spiritual text into a land
registry. But again as in the case of Jehovah, the Zio God transformed
the Jew into a thief, it promised him someone else’s property. This in
itself may explain the Israeli resentment towards Zionism and Zionist
ideology. Israelis prefer to see themselves as the natural dwellers of
the land rather than pioneers in a non-ethical Jewish Diaspora colonial
project. The Israeli Jew furnishes his political stand by means of
severe ethical escapism. This may explain the fact that as much as the
Israelis love their wars, they really hate to fight them. They are not
willing to die for a big abstract remote ideology such as the “Jewish
nation” or “Zionism”. They overwhelmingly prefer to drop white
phosphorous and cluster bombs from afar.
However, along the relatively short history of modern Jewish nationalism
the Zio God made friends with some other Gods and kosher idols. Back in
1917 Lord Balfour promised the Jews that they would erect their national
home in Palestine. Needless to say, as in the case of Jehovah, Lord
Balfour made the Jews into plunderers and robbers, he came up with an
outright non-ethical promise. He promised the Jews someone else’s land.
This was basically a false beginning. Evidently, it didn’t take long
before the Jews turned against the British Empire. In 1947 the UN made
exactly the same foolish mistake, it gave birth to the “Jews-only State”
again at the expense of the Palestinians. It legitimised the robbery of
Palestine in the name of the nations. Like in the case of shunned
Jehovah, it didn’t take long before the Jews turned against the UN. “It
doesn’t matter what the Goyim say, all that matters is what the Jews
do”, said Israeli PM David Ben Gurion. Recently Israelis had managed to
even shun their best subservient friends in the White House. On the eve
of the last American presidential election Israeli Generals had been
filmed denouncing President Bush for “damaging Israeli interests for
being overwhelmingly supportive” (Ret. Brig General Shlomo Brom). The
Israeli Generals basically blamed Bush for not stopping Israel from
destroying its neighbours. The moral is rather clear, the Zionists and
the Israelis will inevitably turn against their Gods, Idols, fathers and
others who try to help them. This is the real meaning of the Fagin
syndrome within the Israeli political context. They will always have to
turn against their fathers.
I believe that the most interesting Jewish belief system of them all is
the Holocaust Religion, which the Israeli Philosopher Yeshayahu
Leibowitz rightly defined as the “new Jewish religion”. The most
interesting aspect of the Holocaust religion is its God-figure, namely
“the Jew”. The Jewish follower of that newly formed dogmatic precept
believes in “the Jew”, the one who redeemed oneself. The one who
“survived” the “ultimate genocidal” event. The followers believe in “the
Jew”, the “innocent” victim sufferer who returned to his “promised land”
and now celebrates his successful revival narrative. To a certain
extent, within the Holocaust religious discourse, the Jew believes in
“the Jew”, expressed as his/her powers and his/her eternal qualities.
Within the newly formed religious framework, Mecca is Tel Aviv and the
Holy Shrine is the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum. The newly formed
religion has many shrines (Museums) scattered around the world and it
has many priests who spread the message around and punish its opposing
elements. From a Jewish perspective, the Holocaust religion is a fully
transparent expression of self love. It is where past and future merge
into a meaningful present, it is when history is translated into praxis.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, every person who identifies
politically and ideologically (rather than religiously) as a Jew is,
practically speaking, succumbing to the Holocaust religion and a
follower of its father-figure “the Jew”. And yet, one may wonder, what
about Kindness, is there any goodness in this newly formed
‘father-figure’? Is there any grace in this narrative of innocent
victimhood that is celebrated daily at the expense of the Palestinian
people?
If there is an end to history, the Holocaust religion embodies the very
end of Jewish history. In the light of the Holocaust religion the
“Father” and the “Son” unite at last. At least in the case of Israel
and Zionism they bond into an amalgam of genocidal ideology and reality.
In the light of the Holocaust religion and its epic survival ethos the
Jewish State considers itself legitimated in dropping white phosphorus
on women and children who they have caged in an inescapable open-air
prison. Sadly enough, the crimes committed by the Jewish State are done
on behalf of the Jewish people and in the name of their troubled history
of persecution. The Holocaust religion brings to life what seems to be
the ultimate possible form of insular brutal incarnation.
Historically Jews have shunned many Gods, they dropped Jehovah, they
dumped Marx, some have never followed Zionism. But in the light of the
Holocaust religion, while bearing in mind the scenes from Gaza, Jenin
and Lebanon, the Jew may have to continue in the tradition and drop
“the Jew”. He will have to accept that his newly formed father-figure
was formed in his own shape. More concerning is the devastating fact
that the new father is proved to be a call to kill. Seemingly, the new
father is the ultimate evil God of them all.
I wonder how many Jews will be courageous enough to shun their esoteric
newly formed father-figure. Will they be courageous enough to join the
rest of humanity adopting a universal ethical discourse? Whether the
Jew drops “The Jew”, only time will tell. Just to remove any doubt, I
did drop my “Jew” a long time ago and I am doing fine...
http://zionismexplained.org/"It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to
Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews."
Albert Einstein
by
Donald Dinelli, M.A.
In the Beginning
Zionism is a movement started, partly in response to Russion pogroms, by
a number of European Jews in the 1890's. At the first Zionist conference
which was convened in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, and lead by Theodor
Herzl, a tenacious, Austrian Jew, the 197 Jewish delegates passed the
following resolution: "Zionism seeks to secure a publically recognized,
legally secured home in Palestine for the Jewish people."1 These Jews
formed an organization called the World Zionist Organization, later just
called the Jewish Agency or Jewish Committee. By 1914 the Zionists had
127,000 dues paying members world-wide.2 Today, you can find a chapter
of the Jewish Agency in every Jewish community throughout the world.
Without delay the Zionists set out to implement their mission of
removing Palestinians from the land. They set up "the Fund" or "the
Jewish National Fund" to buy land from under the Palestinians' noses and
deposited it in a trust which allowed only Jews to use or rent it. Most
Palestinians at this time were peasants working the land of rich,
absentee, Arab landlords. Theodor Herzl avowed: "We shall try to spirit
the penniless (Palestinian) population across the border by procuring
employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any
employment in Palestine ... Both the process of expropriation and the
removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly," 3
From the beginning of Zionism this was the essence of Zionist policy:
use Jewish money, collected from throughout the world, to run the
Palestinians out of Palestine by buying their land and/or their jobs. If
that didn't work the Zionists would use the money to terrorize the
Palestinians into fleeing or kill them.
Out of a population of 1,000,000 people in 1897 Palestine, only 5% -
50,000 - were Jewish. Those few Jews reacted negatively to Zionism. They
neither saw the need for a Jewish state in Palestine, not did they want
to exacerbate relations with the Palestinian Arabs. At this time in the
Holy Land, religions lived together in relative harmony - a harmony only
disrupted when the Zionists began to claim that Palestine was the
'rightful' possession of the 'Jewish people' to the exclusion of its
Muslim and Christian inhabitants.
Zionism and the Media
In 1919 Ben-Gurion, who later would become the first prime minister of
Israel, saw that the Zionists were creating a problem with no just
solution. "No solution! There is a gulf, and nothing can fill this guilt
... I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to
the Jews. ..We, as a nation, want this country to be ours; the Arabs, as
a nation, want this country to be theirs." Later, during the Arab revolt
of 1936-39 against this takeover, Ben-Gurion continued: "This is an
active resistance by the Palestinians to what they regard as a
usurpation of their homeland by the Jews ... But the fighting is only
one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And
politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves." 4 He
proceeded to strengthen the Jewish terrorists organizations like the
Irgun with more guns and explosives so that they could, with bullets
when necessary, force the Arabs into relinquishing their ownership of
Palestine.
In 1938, he was most explicit on what land the Zionist intended to take
and make part of "Greater Israel." "The boundaries of Zionist
aspiration," he told the World Council of Poale Zion is Tel aviv,
"include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today's Jordan, all of
Cis-Jordan (West Bank) and the Sinai."5
Later he continued, "After we become a strong force as the result of the
creation of the state, we shall abolish partition (the UN's partition
which created Israel and left some of Palestine) and expand (Israel) to
the whole of Palestine. The state will only be a stage in the
realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our
expansion. The state will have to preserve order - not by preaching but
with machine guns."6 As to the Palestine inhabitants who are in the way
of all this expansion, his answer was always, "Drive them out."7
Zionists are terrorists. Their movement is a terrorist movement
continuing today. Israel practices state terrorism as it implements
these Zionist plans.
Israeli Zionism Now
No one can understand the Palestinian vs Israeli conflict today, if they
do not understand Zionism - it's history, policy, and methods. Zionism
is essentially Jewish nationalism rooted in 19th century racist,
colonialist thinking gilded over with a "religious" patina. The policy
which the state of Israel is executing today is nothing more than a
continuation of that Zionist policy begun in 1897. Listen:
* "We cannot make peace with the Palestinians until we reduce the
Population of the West Bank by 50 percent." says Labor's Dr. Ephraim
Sneh, a minister in Sharon's Cabinet. (August 2002).
* Approximately 80,000 Palestinians have left the West bank and
Gaza Strip since the beginning of the year (August 2002), a rise of 50%
compared to last year, says a senior Palestinian authority official.
Today, there are over 4,000,000 Palestinian refugees - Palestinians
Israeli Zionists drove out of Palestine one way or another during the
past one hundred years.
* According to a U.S. government report in 2002, 70% of
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are now living below the poverty
line; unemployment has risen to 50% while there are a minimum of 300,000
non-Palestinian foreign workers in Israel. (Unemployment rose to 80% in
2003.) Israel will not let Palestinians leave the occupied territory and
go to work in Egypt, where many of them have jobs, or Israel where they
had jobs.
* In a 21 month period in 2002 Israel has murdered over 1,450
Palestinians, 240 of them children. Over 23,000 Palestinians have been
injured.
* By now 90% of the land in Israel proper is held under:
"restrictive land covenants" barring non-Jews, even those with Israeli
citizenship from owning the land or from earning a living on it. Yet,
according to Israeli law, a Jew from anywhere in the world can come to
Israel and automatically be a citizen with the right to own land.
* Israeli Prime Ministers, repeatedly acting against international
law, have encouraged more and more Jews to establish illegal settlements
in Palestine. Today, while these settlers take up 1.7% of the West Bank,
they control 41.9% of the land in the West Bank through a system of
Jewish local and regional councils Zionist Israel has set up in Palestine.
* Israel's Labor Party platform in 1984 had the "Four No's" in it:
1) No to a Palestinian state, 2) No negotiation with the P.L.O., 3) No
return to the 1967 borders, and 4) No removal of any settlements.
* And now the Israeli Zionists are building an apartheid wall over
451 miles long, 20 feet high, topped with barbed wire, with guard towers
every so often to keep the Arab left in Palestine locked in. In America
we would call these prison like reservations; in South Africa,
Bantustans. Furthermore, throughout the West Bank, Israel has set up
over 700 military checkpoints that Palestinians must stop and get
permission to cross - even to get to the other side of their village, or
their farmland, or to get to their hospital, or to go to school.
The objective of present day Zionist Israeli policy is an intensified
version of Jewish Zionist policy used by Theodor Herzl and Ben-Gurion:
get rid of the Palestinians from Palestine; their methods are also the
same: persecute the Palestinians so they flee, take their land, starve
them through unemployment, tear up the territorial integrity of
Palestine with Jewish settlements, murder them, and keep the other
Middle Eastern nations dysfunctional. This is a state policy of ethnic
cleansing - of slow genocide - which ends up establishing Israel as an
apartheid state. Zionists have been slowly, patiently, and successfully
working at this for over 100 years. Sometimes they have had to take a
step back to take two forward but they have never lost their focus. Most
want to establish "Greater Israel". By that they mean all of Palestine -
PLUS. Many times you will hear Israeli settlers, the Likud party, or
other Zionists talk about "Greater Israel". Zionists speak of the
occupation of Greater Israel as a right, given to them by God. Below is
a map of what the Zionist plan to be "Greater Israel."
Ben-Gurion from the beginning knew that the Jewish Zionists were the
aggressors and did not care. He cared only to take the land at any cost
- he used diplomacy when it succeeded, deception and lies when needed,
and the Haganan (a Zionist terrorist group) when the others failed.
Justice was not then and is not now a concern. Sharon is no different
today. He is known as the "butcher of Sabra and Shatila" for a reason.
Ohmert is no different either.8
The UN's Mistake: the Creation of Israel
In 1947 the Zionists got Washington to affirm their creeping takeover of
Palestine. They won over President Truman, and then with his help the
United Nations.
The British who were in charge of Palestine for fifty years thought it
impossible to peacefully create two separate nations out of this little
piece of land. They recommended to Washington and the world: one federal
nation with two states. 9 But Truman, a sort of biblical Zionist
himself, running for re-election in a close race that needed the Jewish
vote, took the Zionist position and said in 1946 that he wanted two
separate nations: Israel and Palestine. 10 In 1946, after WWII, the U.S.
was more powerful than Britain.
Jewish lobbying in this country had focused on Truman and succeeded. The
Jewish Agency in 1946 raised $100 million annually - money they used to
pressure the President and the U.S. Congress. By then American Jews had
created a mammoth lobbying machine in Washington that when activated
could within days flood Congress with letters, petitions, and campaign
finance donations.11
In 1947 there were 1,300,000 Arabs in Palestine along with 560,000 Jews.
Over the years Zionists encouraged and financed Jewish immigration to
Palestine as they continue to do today. The Nazi's brutal policies of
the 1940's, (World War II) also encouraged it.
The 1947 vote in the UN to create Israel out of Palestinian land was 33
countries for, 13 against, and 10 abstentions.12 Not one Arab or
predominately Muslim country voted yes. War was inevitable. And the
nations of the UN knew it. The United Nations had made a terrible mistake.
This Palestinian, Arab-Jewish war, in one form or another, has gone on
from 1897 until today. The Palestinian intifada and suicide bombers,
Hamas and Hezbollah, along with Zionist Israel's tanks and Apache
helicopters are just a continuation of it.
Today, American, Zionist Jews continue their lobbying effort by bribing
Congress and the President with "campaign donations" and with a strong
influence and presence in the American media to force American support
for Zionist Israel and its policy of Palestinian annihilation. These
American Zionists have hung Israel like an albatross around America's
neck. And because they have put Israel first over American interests are
bordering on being traitors to America.
Without America's support, financial and diplomatic, Zionism could not
succeed. The rest of the world, especially the Arabs, know this and are
today holding America and Americans accountable. The many attacks on
American interests, including that of
September 11th, are manifestations
of it....and of the Siamese twins CIA2/MOSSAD/MI6....
Israel’s Occupation
A book by Neve Gordon
Review by Yehudit Keshet
20 March 2009
Yehudit Keshet reviews Neve Gordon’s book, Israel’s Occupation, “a
valuable text for anyone trying to understand Israel’s apparatuses of
oppression”, one that “shows clearly how Israeli policy over time has
always been to hold on to the territory conquered in June 1967,
detaching the land from its existing population: the Palestinians”.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has generated a plethora of literature
ranging from personal accounts to precise recordings of abuses and
misuses of power, policies and human rights, and from historical surveys
to a host of solutions and counter-solutions for ending the occupation
and/or achieving “peace”. In this library of anguish relatively few
works provide a theoretical framework for understanding the overall
processes of Israeli domination over Palestinians and their land. The
focus tends to be experiential, on what was or is or should be done, on
what is endured rather than on the underlying structure, the deeper
meanings of oppression.
Neve Gordon’s Israel’s Occupation is therefore a welcome contribution to
the field. First of all, it is immensely readable, providing a clear,
comprehensible theoretical framework as well as tracing the development
of the occupation from its beginnings as an ostensibly temporary “benign
and enlightened” military-administrative system whose “arrangements,
legal orders and policies were constantly modified to conceal the
permanent nature of Israel’s control” (p.16) to the current phase which
Gordon identifies as a move away from a policy of colonization to a
policy of separation. That is, from the management of the colonized
population in order to maximize the exploitation of resources such as
land and water, to a policy summed up by the statement “we are here,
they are there” (p. 119), an abdication of responsibility for the
well-being of the occupied population while continuing to exploit those
same resources of land and water.
Gordon’s cardinal argument is that the underlying logic of the
occupation is, and always has been, the separation of the Palestinian
people from their land, and not simply by means of land expropriation
for colonizing purposes: in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Six Days
War the then military advocate-general, Meir Shamgar, formulated a
manipulative legal policy that “rejected the applicability of the 1949
Fourth Geneva Convention ... to the OT [occupied territories]” (p.26).
Shamgar maintained that, since neither the West Bank nor Gaza had been
sovereign areas prior to June 1967, they should be considered disputed
rather than occupied territories. This position not only continues to
find its place in Israeli policy, but it is frequently voiced in public
discourse; it denies the rights of Palestinians to their land and to
political self-determination in that land. It cannot be stressed enough
that this removal of the people from their land, legally and,
increasingly physically, lies at the heart of the occupation. It is a
truth that is overlooked, hidden beneath the mass of plans and roads
maps for a supposed peace.
Drawing on Foucauldian theory, Gordon goes on to identify three modes of
control operative in the occupation and based on the above logic:
1. biopower – control of the population rather than the individual
via institutions that regulate aspects of societal life such as medical
care or welfare;
2. “while configuring and circumscribing the political sphere and
normalizing knowledge” (p.12), exercising disciplinary control that
“aims to engender normalization through the regulation of daily life”
(p.16); and
3. sovereign power – “the imposition of a legal system and the
employment of the state’s military to either enforce the rule of law or
to suspend it” (p.13).
These modes of control operate concurrently and frequently overlap, as
effected by Israel over the last 42 years. Gordon makes clear that this
theory is not an essentialist claim presaging a given outcome, but that
the occupation has a dynamic of its own: “Even though the Israeli state
appears to be a free actor from which a series of policies originates, a
closer investigation reveals that its policies, and more particularly
the modification of its policies over the years, have been shaped by the
different mechanisms of control operating in the OT. The same is true of
the policy choices of resistance groups ... and other non-state
actors...” (p.3).
Gordon pursues the development of the apparatuses of oppression over
five stages of occupation: military government during 1967-80; civil
administration during 1981-87; first intifada during 1988-93; the Oslo
period 1994-2000 and the second intifada from 2000 to the present. Since
1967 Israel has sought ways to manage the population by a variety of
modalities of control, initially through making the occupation invisible
– for instance, Moshe Dayan’s much vaunted Open Bridges policy in the
1960s and 1970s, bringing economic and other benefits that created an
illusion of increased prosperity and well-being. Israel also allowed the
opening of several universities as part of a normalization of the
occupation. But, as Gordon says, “...due to a series of restrictions and
constraints imposed on the Palestinian economy, the industry and service
sector could not be developed and the employment opportunities open to
professionals ... with the OT were very limited”. (p.16) The resulting
frustration of unemployed – or underemployed – graduates drew them
inevitably into political activity. This is but one, obvious, aspect of
Gordon’s thesis of excesses and contradictions that generated resistance
to the occupation and the consequent Israeli intensification of modes of
control. Excess in this context refers to a result which is not the
objective of a given means of control. For instance, Israel employed
several practices designed to suppress Palestinian nationalism and
encourage other forms of identification such as local rather than
national loyalties by retaining in the early stages of the occupation
the existing institutions inherited from the Jordanians – civil
servants, mayors and village mukhtars. At the same time, restrictions
were put in place regarding political organizing, and press and other
censorships were imposed. The resulting social friction and
dissatisfaction led to the emergence of a new, younger leadership, the
rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization among others and increased
national identification in the face of the shared hardships and limitations.
The bonding sense of shared predicament led in time to the first
intifada (1987-93), the watershed marking a transition from Israel’s bio
and disciplinary modes of control to an emphasis on sovereign power, the
imposition or suspension of law expressed in arrests, beatings, torture,
curfews – all methods that had existed previously but were now used
extensively and more intensively, as they have been ever since. The
emphasis in fact shifted from control to suppression, generating in turn
intensified resistance with its inevitable consequences.
The book traces the rise, and fall, of the Oslo process, the outsourcing
of the occupation’ (p.169) or control by other means, with Yasser Arafat
and the Palestinian Authority as subcontractors for Israeli security.
Oslo was allegedly a hiatus in the conflict, a truce towards a final
settlement that would enable Israeli control of the OT by means other
than military. The period was much marked by contradictions and
excesses: the expansion of settlements, continued land expropriation and
proliferation of checkpoints, to name but a few. The resulting
Palestinian frustrations that culminated in the second intifada again
marked the transition to Israel’s current policy of separation, that is
the suspension of law, the restructuring of Palestinian space to confine
the population in ever more restricted areas, disconnected from one
another through the cantonments of the West Bank and the enclaves
created by the “Separation Barrier”. In this phase methods of control
have become more lethal and more remote. Apart from military incursions
and night raids, the army’s presence is reduced, or at least is made
less visible. Checkpoints have become hi-tech terminals where the human
interface is all but eliminated; human movement on the ground, fraught
with uncertainty and danger, is reduced and even air-space has been
harnessed in the service of control as aerial surveillance is
intensified; death by bombing or shooting from the air is the
commonplace, as in the targeted assassinations of alleged terrorists
with their inevitable “collateral damage”. This is remote control in
every sense: not only has the Israeli army become faceless and unseen,
the Palestinians too have been positioned as faceless objects, targeted
if not for death then for reduction to the barest of bare lives, in the
most literal sense. There is no longer even the pretence of
normalization but increasingly a move from a politics of life to a
politics of death.
Despite its theoretical basis, the book avoids the pitfalls of academic
jargon, making it accessible also to the interested layman. Drawing
extensively on government and military documents as well as reports and
personal testimonies, it is a valuable text for anyone trying to
understand Israel’s apparatuses of oppression – how the occupation has
worked in the past, how it continues to work in the present and how it
is likely to continue to work in the future. It shows clearly how
Israeli policy over time has always been to hold on to the territory
conquered in June 1967, detaching the land from its existing population:
the Palestinians. The consequent contradiction of having to
manage/control an existing non-Jewish population perceived as a
demographic as well as a military threat, a population with no civil and
even few human rights has inevitably led to excess, both by the Israeli
side and in the form of Palestinian resistance, violent and non-violent.
While the facts recorded in the book will be familiar to many, Gordon’s
cogent analysis gives a fresh insight and perspective as well as
exposing the dangerous trajectory on which Israel’s current separation
policy is embarked. Those who speak of “peace” and “solutions to the
conflict” would do well to heed Gordon’s closing words: “The only
tenable way to solve the conflict is by addressing the occupation’s
structural contradictions. Any attempt to reach or impose a solution ...
without reuniting the Palestinian people and their land and offering
them full sovereignty over the land, including a monopoly over
legitimate violence and the means of movement, will ultimately lead to
more contradictions, and the cycle of violence will surely resume”. (p.
225).
Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, Berkley, 2008). 225pp
Yehudit Keshet is Israeli co-founder of Machsom Watch, a human rights
organization that monitors Israeli checkpoints and their effect on the
Palestinians’ daily lives.....
