Rock art by Tim Christensen
One of the assertions Zionists make is if the Arab states care so much about the Palestinians, why don't they invite them to move to Egypt or Qatar or Jordan? As if Palestinians were not a distinct nationality but just Arabs, a "people" in the sense that Jews are a people or Christians are a people (Christendom) or Muslims are a people (the Ummah).
It's a similar proposal made by Abolitionists, including Abraham Lincoln, when they were working for the freedom of the slaves in the US. Few of them wanted former African slaves to remain in this country. Lincoln himself said he was in favor of deporting freedmen and -women and was strongly against allowing them to integrate and intermarry with Whites. Let them go back to Africa, he and other Abolitionists said, even though of the four million slaves in the South in 1860, only a minority had ever seen an inch of the continent of Africa and most had ancestors in America for more generations than most Europeans did (in 1750 African Americans vastly outnumbered Whites in the colonies).
The Abolitionists' solution to the matter of what to do with four million freed slaves was a new, American-made place called Liberia ("freedom land"). I don't know that anyone was using the phrase "A land without a people for a people without a land" at the time. But just as there was already an indigenous population living in Palestine in the late 19th century, the land we now know as Liberia was very much occupied in 1860, though without modern cities and a modern culture to rival anything in Europe as Palestine had. The indigenous Africans, like the people of Palestine a few decades later, were politically invisible both to abolitionists and to the small number of African Americans they could persuade to take advantage of the offer to have their own nation, so long as it wasn't on the North American continent.
How did the African American migrants treat the Africans already living on the land carved out for them by white people? They treated them in much the same way Zionists have treated Palestinians. The native Africans were marginalized and their rights to the land ignored. Native Africans weren't even given citizenship in the Liberia until 1905.
Sound familiar? A people (though only defined as that by their White countrymen, just as Europeans got to define who was or was not a Jew in 15th-century Spain and 1930s Germany), a people who had endured centuries of oppression and dehumanization, when the tables were turned, became the oppressors by virtue of their moral dispensation to do so because of their having been victims themselves.
Theodore Herzl, the Founding Father of modern Israel, was a secular, German-speakng, well-educated man of Jewish heritage. He kept a Christmas tree during the holidays and did not circumcise his son. His intention in lobbying for a homeland for Jews was to give Eastern European Jews a safe haven from the pogroms and other discrimination they were subject to (Jews in Britain, France, Germany were relatively well-integrated into those societies, where one was a Britain, a Frenchman, or a German by dint of citizenship, not, as in the East, by blood).
Herzl was preaching to the choir in the UK, where members of the establishment, including prime ministers, had long been advocating for a Jewish state in order to facilitate the Second Coming of Christ in fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. The Zionists at first had no preference for where such a state should be established—Uganda, Alaska, anyplace would do. The main thing was to move the Eastern Jews out of Europe, especially out of Western Europe, to which they were immigrating in large numbers. Herzl felt no kinship with those "ignorant," Orthodox, "ugly" and "dirty" people, as he called them. They were giving respectable Jews like himself a bad name by association. (Jewish Britains had largely come from Spain and Portugal and were well-educated and prosperous.)
It was when the British decided "a little Jewish Ulster," as the first governor of Palestine put it, would give the UK a base in the Near East to keep the Arab nations at bay that the Zionist enterprise was secured. As a bonus, Britain would be Jew-free.
Jews themselves were less enthusiastic for the project. They were Europeans and wanted to remain Europeans, or if they did want to leave Europe, it wasn't to a piece of land in Asia populated by Arabs. What's more, virtually all the rabbis opposed mass immigration to "the Land of Israel," citing scripture that forbade such a return before the coming of their Messiah.
During the early years of the 20th century, East European Jews had been emigrating to the US by the millions (at a time when they also had a choice to go to Palestine). But the 1924 Immigration Act of Congress limited new immigration from eastern and southern Europe to a trickle of what it had been for the past 30 years. Who is not familiar with the plight of the St. Louis, the ship carrying Jewish refugees in 1939, denied permission to offload in the US and forced to return to Europe, where its human cargo became prey for the Nazis? After the second world war, Jews who had not been killed in the concentration camps were shuttled off to Palestine, even when they professed a preference to go to the US or South America.
Europe, which now moves in lockstep with the Zionist genocide project in Gaza and the West Bank, provided arms and money for the nascent state of Israel to drive out or kill Palestinians who, despite 60 years of Zionist recruitment efforts, were still a large majority of the population. Today those same European nations brag about how they provided weapons to the Zionist militias. It is as if the Abolitionists had sent off all of the freed slaves to Africa to keep them from polluting White blood, gave them arms to dominate the indigenous people there, and then bragged about what a good deed they had done.
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe tells how after he gave a talk in Prague, he was invited by the mayor to visit the Jewish museum, where much was made of the large number of guns Czechoslovakia had provided to the Zionists to suppress the Palestinians. Pappe's response: if Czechs really cared about the Jews they had oppressed, why didn't they invite them back to Czechoslovakia?
Europe and the US through the United Nations assuaged their collective guilt for the Holocaust by dumping the Jews of Europe on the Palestinians, while at the same time avoiding any responsibility themselves for them. They also gave the Zionists carte blanche to deal with the Palestinians as they saw fit, in effect absolving them from any obligation to observe the international laws that had just been codified largely because of what had been done to Jews and millions of others by the Nazis.
The moral of this story may be that human beings will behave in similar ways in similar circumstances even if their recent histories should be cautionary tales against acting like their own oppressors. I don't know if anyone in America ever cared about the way freed Americans were treating their African "brethren" in Liberia. In any case, almost all Americans of African descent in 1865 recognized the US as their country and had no desire to "go back" to an imaginary "homeland" on another continent.
Had Jews been invited to stay in Europe after the second world war, most might have chosen to do so. They really were Europeans, after all, eager to free themselves of the ghettos and the rabbis and escape not just the pogroms but to take advantage of the civic and social freedoms Napoleon's army had made possible. Unlike the romantic version of their history, most were happy to escape the heel of the religious establishment that had an interest in keeping them cooped up in shtetls where that same establishment could impose a strict control on them. The Enlightenment may have come later for Jews than it did for Christians, but thanks to philosophes like Moses Mendelssohn and, later, Napoleon, it did eventually arrive, and it did so in force. If it hadn't occurred, all Jews today would still be what the Israelis call "Ultra-Orthodox" like the Hassidim who live in their own closed-off communities, uneducated, under an oppressive rabbinate, in the midst of a modern city where they speak their own language and never properly learn English or anything much but Jewish lore.
The movie Delancey Street (an otherwise exceptional film) portrays immigrant Jews "going native" in the New World, abandoning their religious and social traditions, as traitors to their Jewish heritage. The Orthodox Talmudic scholar is the lone heroic figure holding on to the old ways that defined who a Jew was. (To be fair, the secularizing characters are also portrayed sympathetically, but the message is there nonetheless.) The historical truth was somewhere in between. Jews did indeed populate neighborhoods like Manhattan's Lower East Side for more than a century. Many of them continued to attend synagogues and observe Passover and other holy days. But they did so by choice. Despite gentile prejudice, they slowly became absorbed (the pejorative term among Jews would be "assimilated") into American culture. Jews in the US today are more thoroughly members of the nation they live in than they have ever been since the brief independence of Judea in pre-Christian times. They are also, despite the occasional attacks all minority groups are subject to in America, safer than they have ever been anywhere, including modern Israel.
Again, not an experience unique to Jews. Irish-Catholic immigrants were also happy to be free of the priest-ridden land they had left primarily for economic reasons. Just as the rabbis went sniffing around to see who was violating the sabbath by smoking a pipe, Irish priests peered though cottage windows at night to see if anything sinful (dancing) was taking place. Irish immigrants to America did not give up their religion any more than immigrant Jews did theirs. Only, here they kept it by choice as well as, again like Jews, out of a sense of loyalty to the faith they liked to believe had stood with them against the English oppressor. There's a certain comfort and pride in distinguishing oneself from the majority, especially when one has the option to embrace or not embrace that distinction. The same members of groups that would in the past have demanded that they be seen as no different from anyone else, now demand recognition as distinct entities while at the same time refusing to be discriminated against.
Jefferson laid out the mentality of the oppressor claiming victim status as well as anyone. In the Declaration of Independence, after listing a long—very long—list of administrative and political grievances against the King, he concludes with the following:
He has incited domestic insurrections [i.e., slave revolts] amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished [sic] destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Notice, first, the oblique reference to the human beings being held in forced labor camps, to give a proper name to what we still refer to as "plantations." Better not to call that atrocity by its proper name. Jefferson, like many others of his time, found slavery to be a moral embarrassment, but not embarrassing enough to do away with it.
Then there's the "merciless Indian Savages" and their indiscriminate killing of whites. As if those so-called savages were acting differently from the way whites had treated them, driving the indigenous peoples off the land on the excuse that they were not really owners of said land because they did not farm it properly like a civilized people would.
Or as if they, the colonists, did not exterminate the Indians wholesale when the natives failed to abandon those lands fast enough for real estate speculators like George Washington to make a nice profit by reselling them. Or as if they, the settlers, did not use germ warfare to kill Indians "of all ages, sexes and conditions," sending them blankets infected with smallpox and doing so as an ordinary way of waging war (you can find orders to do so by commanding generals in their correspondence).
It's a typical story of settler colonialism. The newcomers must find a way to make themselves the sole owner of land inhabited by others. First they marginalize and dehumanize them. Then they eliminate them, either by driving them off the land or by penning them up in Bantustans, or both. Resistance is answered with slaughter. Eighteenth-century Americans used muskets and swords. The British drove the Irish into the forests and made sure they stayed there until they had starved to death. The Zionists use the most advanced weaponry available (most of it given them by the US) and all the usual horrific tactics a conquering nation uses on a conquered people who refuse to leave their homes, fields, and cities.
There is nothing special or unusual about Zionism. It just resists the movement of history. It was okay in the 1890s to kill 10 million Congolese or all the indigenous inhabitants of Tasmania. But Hitler gave genocide a bad name. Unfortunately for the Palestinians, the Israelis did not get the memo, and the West has pretended the genocide (aka "ethnic cleansing) that began in 1947 and has continued since is not happening or is justified by past atrocities against Jews for which we, the West, are in fact guilty.
It would help if we recognized the context of the present situation instead of making what-about claims based on the day's headlines.
Israel is a legitimate nation. It was legitimized by writ of the United Nations in 1948. It is also a Zionist state. Zionism is a nationalist movement founded by a Jewish German named Theodore Herzl in the late 19th century when nationalism, and racism, were seen as good things even when they meant the elimination (read "slaughter") of native populations. In America we called it Manifest Destiny. In other places it was just seen as the obvious superiority of the White Race and the privileges superiority entailed.
In 1948 Israel ethnically cleansed (read "expelled and/or killed") half the indigenous population of Palestine, a former province of the Ottoman empire. In doing so, they took much of the land intended as a Palestinian homeland from the majority-Arab population assigned it by the United Nations. From 1948 to 1967 Israel controlled all the land from the Sinai peninsula to the west bank of the Jordan river, which was under the jurisdiction of Jordan. The Palestinians still remaining in the new state of Israel lived under a form of martial law.
In 1967 Israel went to war with its Arab neighbors, conquered the West Bank, and took control of the Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had lived in what had become Israel used to live and work. Israel now held all of former Palestine from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea.
Under International Law, a conquering nation, even one that has been the victim of a war, can only occupy a conquered territory for a limited amount of time (which is why the US could not remain in Germany or Japan for more than a few years). Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip since 1967, refusing to leave even after several resolutions passed by the UN ordered them to do so. It has also allowed Israeli "settlers" to colonize the West Bank, also in clear violation of International Law most recently affirmed by the International Court of Justice to which Israel is a signatory.
The Zionist project, now well over 100 years old, has always been to occupy all of what it sees as the historical Land of Israel, which in modern times means all the land from the Jordan river to the sea. Though secular in its original conception (the rabbis of Europe insisted Jewish law expressly forbids Jews returning to the Land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah), Israel nevertheless claims the right to all the land based on Biblical promises made to the ancient Hebrews by their God, Yahweh. A large and growing section of the Orthodox Jewish Israeli population hold fast to this belief, though all Jewish members of Israeli society, including atheists, invoke it.
The acknowledged aim of Zionism from the very beginning was to rid the "Land of Israel" (on some maps stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile) of Arabs. And because that mandate, at least for political purposes, comes from God himself, human laws do not apply.
Under International Law a people who are under illegal occupation have a right to resist their oppressors with violence as long as they take care to avoid killing or injuring civilians (think the French Resistance during World War II). As of this writing, the latest evidence, most of it from Israeli sources, indicates more than half the killed and wounded civilians during Hamas's raid on southern Israel were the victims of Israeli weapons. Those who were not were victims of war crimes by Hamas.
Under International Law, the indiscriminate killing of civilians is a war crime, even if the armed enemy is "embedded" in a civilian population.
Israel, along with most of the Western democracies, alleges it has "a right to defend themselves." But self-defense is not a legitimate argument for a nation that is oppressing a people whose land they have no right to be occupying (or, in the case of Gaza, confining to a ghetto over which they determine everything and everyone that goes in or out) and whose stated goal is to make the land of original Palestine Arab-free.
The argument of self-defense on the part of aggressors is an old one. The American colonies and then US used it to remove and exterminate the native population of North America. The Nazis used it to defend their invasions of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Southerners in the US used it to defend their treatment of slaves and, later, keep former slaves bottled up in ghettos where they enjoyed even fewer rights than the limited ones Palestinians who live in the state of Israel can claim.
Israel, like our segregated South or our removal and treatment of the indigenous peoples who inhabited this land for millennia, is an embarrassment at best to humanity and should be a deep shame for any nation or individual who supports it. Some scholars of International Law assert that under that law the United States of America, because it supports, funds, and otherwise assists Israel's violence, is a co-belligerent of the Israel carnage in Gaza. That means we are legitimate military targets for Palestinian resistance as much as the state of Israel itself is.
Is that what we want to be—a legal ally and principal armorer of a nation that behaves like the worst international aggressors of the 20th century?
We have yet to face up to the crimes we have ourselves committed against the American Indian and our slaves and former slaves. We gladly memorialize the mass atrocities of other nations, but in some states we are currently removing from our school history books any significant account of our genocide of indigenous peoples and our centuries-long enslavement of millions of Africans and their progeny. However we may want to see ourselves, our behavior trumps any political rhetoric we may voice. Taking down some statues, renaming military bases, and changing the name of a national holiday are symbolic gestures that may ease our consciences, but our reasons for supporting racist, totalitarian states like Israel, and dictatorships like Saudi Arabia does not contain enough propagandist fabric to cover the shame of our collusion with mass murder.
