Showing posts with label zionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label zionism. Show all posts

09 April 2019

THE ANTI-SEMITIC CON


The Anti-Semitic Con



With the Putin/Russia Collusion Fairytale debunked, the undeniable cancer of real foreign interference in our government demands an honest airing.

Since American politics is mortally corrupt, one might wonder why bother to expose one prime cause of its ethical degeneracy.  If the beast is dead, what use is determining what killed it?  Well, it isn’t quite dead and we have to live with it.  If the public knew one country has done more to subvert our government than all others combined it might raise enough hell to stop it.

In terms of influence, there can be no serious denial that Israel exerts by far the most powerful suasion of any foreign power on America.  Influence exerted by a foreign power’s registered lobby is legitimate per our toothless  protocol.  Israel’s is not so registered, but… details, details.  So, when Republicans invite Bibi to smarmily insult a sitting President in a joint session of Congress, that’s influence, not interference.  When, besides financing most Senators and Representatives elections, Israel takes them on cushy, free PR junkets to Tel Aviv, that’s influence, not interference.

Conversely, when Clintonista subversion of the Sanders campaign appears on Wikileaks and is instantly imputed to Russia and Putin–without proof and against expert technical evidence–that’s not influence, it’s Russki interference.  More absurdly, when–again, without proof–the same Dem CFOs howl that Putin Trolls bought chump change worth of dingy ads on Facebook that swung the election to Trump that’s… but you get the picture.

What is obvious and has long been so–and has been emphasized by two years of fraud and insanity regarding imagined Russian collusion–is that influence is what your friends have; interference is what your enemies do.

Why, when it is so blatantly obvious as to be a source of outspoken pride for them, is the fact that Israel’s right-wing ruling clique brazenly and continually interferes in American government in the most aggressive and offensive way, universally denied?  You want flagrant foreign collusion with high officials in U.S. government?  Open your eyes.  And your mind…

The reason it’s officially denied is that Israel’s Congressional whores know that not to do so violates their deal.  Not to back Israel unquestioningly  terminates it, and the loss of that money means loss of office… to say nothing of the beating they’d take in the press and on their reputations.

The great mass of Americans won’t admit what many can’t help but know because they, too, fear being attacked for such bold honesty.  They are equally vulnerable to rough handling from the same source: the massively powerful Israel Lobby, a unified phalanx of militant American Zionists.
To be clear: Zionism has always insisted that Israel exists for Jews only.

The Israel Lobby–financed by vast American Zionist wealth–potent as it is, could not leverage our politics if its tactics were exposed, and it knows it.   History gives it the key that makes rational assessment of Israel’s policies impossible: the Holocaust and the true anti-Semitism that was its cause.

Evocation of that horror allows any critique of Israeli government to be sleazily labelled Anti-Semitism, and so to effectively nullify argument.  The dishonest and cynical Israel Lobby uses this tactic shamelessly to blunt and derail sound criticism or even plain examination of Israeli state behavior.

What then is Anti-Semitism?  By definition it is antipathy or hatred of the Jewish people as a whole.  An Anti-Semite espouses that categorical prejudice, and Anti-Semitism in word or deed pertains to Jews in toto.  In contrast, behavior that is ugly, hateful, or injurious but not directed at Jews as a whole, though execrable, is not Anti-Semitic, just as it’s possible to hate a Catholic or Muslim without hating their religion or their people.

It follows then, that criticism, even vicious, hateful criticism of the Israeli State, is not inherently Anti-Semitic, and the claim is false on its face.  To attack the Israeli State is not to attack Jews as a people since Israel is not home to most of Jewry and its polity by no means defines or represents Jews in all their broad, complex range of beliefs, practices, and principles.

To say that criticizing the brutal, repressive apartheid Israeli government’s actions is Anti-Semitic is no more legitimate than to say that condemnation of the American State’s vicious imperialist wars makes one anti-American.

This disingenuous con needs to named and refuted around the world.

Is there criticism of Israel that is clearly Anti-Semitic?  Of course, there is!  Plenty of it.  Anti-Semitism is no less real and evil because it does not apply to all critiques of Israel or all insults to Jews or Jewish entities.  Precisely because Anti-Semitism is so vile and toxic a disease, and because it will continue to live in its odious carriers, it is critically important not to vitiate the ubiquitous contempt it arouses by cynically muddling its meaning.

The dishonest and defensive crying of wolf that the government of Israel and the Israel Lobby deploy against any criticism of their history and policy is, in addition to being morally contemptible, deeply counterproductive in terms of Israel’s standing in world opinion.  Mounting a transparently false, blanket, all-purpose lament as a cover for their most obvious and glaring crimes and cruelties cannot prevent the world from seeing them for the corrupt and unjust power they are and fiercely, adamantly opposing them.

Beyond the damage Israel’s cowardly dishonesty does to itself, a more critical concern for Americans concerns what it has done and is doing to exacerbate the rolling debacle of our misruled and floundering country.  The Israel Lobby, Zionism’s American voice, wielding the bogus trope of  Anti-Semitism as a club, infects and pollutes through its agents and activists every niche of our government from the Presidency and Congress, to Federal Departments and Bureaus, to State and local offices.

Without Zionist acceptance Trump would not have been President, but neither would Obama.  Through the Lobby’s diligence we have made our country hated by carrying Israel’s dirty water in the Middle East, crippled and hamstrung enlightened policy at home, and been afflicted with such creatures of nightmare as the Harpy, Nikki Haley, bughouse pseudo-Christian loon, Mike Pompeo, and murderous psychopath, John Bolton.

Nothing suggests the death grip Israel and its Lobby have on our fate can be broken.  So long as the Anti-Semitic Con is viable, even our security is in jeopardy with its blind, sick, demented chosen monsters in charge.

The fable of the eagle and scorpion comes painfully to mind.  When the bird, stung and bearing them both down to death, asks how the scorpion could sting it after swearing not to do so, it replies, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.”  It was all too clear what Israel was in 1947.
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Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net

23 May 2018

THE DEATH OF THE 2 STATE ILLUSION THOSE WHO SUPPORT TWO STATES SUPPORT A TWO STATE SOLUTION

This article comes from Tony Greenstein's blog. It is one of the best analyses I have yet read, and it is all the better because it makes mincemeat of the mainstream media with their pathetic bleatings about what is going on in Palestine and the ongoing disaster for the Palestinian people in their native land and the stealing thereof of an occupying settler nation which has really got no claim to the land whatever.

When is the world going to sit up and do something about it - if ever? And at the moment the world means the US of A.

As a South African, I have seen the worst aspects of an apartheid state, but Israel has managed to amplify it a thousand times over.

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Tuesday, 22 May 2018


Israel/Palestine is already one state –the only people who talk of 2 States are Zionists

The Death of the 2 State Illusion

Those Who Support 2 States

Support an Apartheid Solution

Another brilliant article from Israel’s premier journalist, Gideon Levy.  It can only be a matter of time, perhaps when Netanyahu has finally silenced the few remaining NGO’s and human rights organisations that attention will be turned to Levy and Amira Hass and the other journalists who aren’t prepared to play ball with Zionism.
There are some gullible fools and political cowards unfortunately in the Palestine solidarity movement, who still call for a 2 State solution  These naive souls, amongst which one must count the Executive of the Palestine Solidarity  Campaign, who sincerely believe that the Israeli government is going to agree to a separate Palestinian state.
It is difficult to know whether these people actually believe this, because it is always hard to get inside someone’s head.  The fact that Netanyahu stated at the last election that there would be no  2 state solution, the fact that there is no member of his ruling coalition who calls for a Palestinian state is irrelevant.  When Tzipi Hotoveli, Israel’s religious nut of a Deputy Foreign Minister and a member of Likud states that “We need to return to the basic truth of our rights to this country,” she said. “This land is ours. All of it is ours. We did not come here to apologise for that.” what part of that I wonder do these people not understand?
The Israeli Labour Party also doesn’t believe in a 2 state solution.  Sure they pay lip service to it but the position as outlined by their leader Avi Gabbay is opposition to the dismantlement of the settlements.  The settlements have been so constructed as to prevent a 2 state solution and without their being dismantled any Palestinian state would have more holes in it than a Swiss cheese.
The Times of Israel of 2nd November 2017 summed up the situation perfectly: After pro-settlement comments, Gabbay reiterates support for two-state solution
Of course I would be less than honest if I didn’t confess to opposing 2 states on principle.  The root cause of the problem in Palestine is not two peoples fighting over one piece of land as liberal Zionists pretend but a settler colonial movement which displaced an indigenous population and erected a racial supremacists state as in South Africa.  A 2 state solution, even were it feasible, would be a monstrosity.  Israel would be even more racist and aggressive.  The Palestinian state, which would be a Bantustan in practice, would be a horrific police state whose main job was to police its own subjects in order to keep Israel satisfied, because there would be a massive power imbalance between them.  Indeed the Palestinian ‘state’ would be something like the quisling entity that the Palestinian Authority operates at the moment.
That is why I opposed, in 1993, the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO.  At the time I resigned from PSC over the issue when, at an emergency conference, two-thirds of the meeting agreed to support them. My views on them are best represented in a debate with Julia Bard of the Jewish Socialists Group in the pages of National Labour Briefing, A Mess of Potage in October 1993.
In the article I said that:
The Accord divides the Palestinian nation in two. It excludes not only _ those Palestinians living inside pre-1967 Israel, but the two million Palestinians who were exiled in 1948 and 1967. It explicitly rules out the right of return. Israel continues to control the Allenby bridge to Jordan.

Under the Accord Israel will retain control over land, water and resources. The Palestinians will collect their own garbage, control education and health and police themselves. In effect, the prison guards will be removed from inside to outside the prison walls.
Zionism was not founded in order to establish a state in half the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).  It claims the whole land.  Indeed the biblical Land of Israel extends up to the Litani river in Lebanon and down to the Nile in Egypt and across to the Euphrates in Iraq, so there is quite a way to go.  The idea of stopping half way and handing over 22% of the territory of Mandate Palestine is absurd.
Of course there are some people who talk about 2 states who know full well that it will never be achieved.  Firstly Zionist organisations in this country, in particular Labour Friends of Israel and the Jewish Labour Movement but also the Board of Deputies of British Jews support 2 states.  However these same organisations support all Israel’s repressive actions in the Territories.  They all support the Occupation wholeheartedly.  Yet unless there is sufficient opposition to the military occupation, there is no chance that Israel will unilaterally hand over part of the West Bank for a state. 
We saw that last week when the Board of Deputies and Labour Friends of Israel rushed to support the Israeli army's gunning down of 60 unarmed Palestinian demonstrators whilst blaming the violence, not on those who did the shooting but on the victims (for which Hamas is the all-purpose address).
It should therefore clear that these organisations are hypocritical liars.  They know that there will never be a 2 state solution as does the pro-Zionist Alliance for Workers Liberty, an allegedly Trotskyist organisation.  So why do they support 2 states?  Because that is the best way to undermine calls for the only possible solution to Israeli Apartheid, a democratic, secular state in the whole of Palestine.  Support for 2 States is also a way of opposing the call for equal rights for all those under Israeli rule, i.e. an end to the present Apartheid situation.
There are of course a second group, such as Jeremy Corbyn, who have no analysis worthy of the name and simply oppose Israeli repression and call for a 2 State Solution because they fondly imagine that the ‘international community’ will put pressure on Israel to conform.  However it should be obvious even to these people that the United States, which is in essence the ‘international community’ has no intention whatsoever of pressurising Israel to agree to a 2 state solution.

Emily Thornberry, Labour’s Shadow Foreign Secretary also calls for 2 States.  I have no doubt whatsoever that she does not believe it is possible.  She is an ardent Zionist and a member of Labour Friends of Israel.  As such her posturing on the issue is entirely cynical.  She is above all a supporter of the Atlantic Alliance and the special relationship with the USA.  Israel is integral to that.
The reality today is that there is already one state.  As Gideon Levy says, there is no border between pre-1967 Israel and today’s Greater Israel.  The only question therefore is whether or not all those living under Israeli rule should be granted equal rights.  Those who oppose this are supporters of the present Apartheid situation.  Of course this will mean that there will no longer be a Jewish State.   That is not such a loss.  What is a Jewish state?  Does a state pray to god or put on tefillin (phylacteries)?  A Jewish state simply means a state where Jews have more rights than non-Jews.  It is a Jewish supremacist state and no one who calls themselves a socialist should have anything to do with such a concept.
Tony Greenstein 
A debate on the Oslo Accords in Labour Briefing in October 1993 with the Jewish Socialist's Julia Bard
Calling Israel a democracy when less than half its subjects live in freedom is a propaganda trick that has worked better than one would have thought
Gideon Levy   Apr 15, 2018 
FILE PHOTO: Arrests at the Gaza border, 2007AP
With the approach this week of celebrations marking Israel’s 70th birthday, 12 million people live in the country. Some of them are citizens, some are residents, some are detainees, and all are subjects. Everyone’s fate has been determined by the country’s governing institutions.

On this Independence Day, we have to acknowledge that the country’s genuine borders are the Mediterranean Sea to the west and the Jordan River to the east, including not only the West Bank but also the Gaza Strip. Israel controls all this territory and everyone who lives there through various and sundry means, even if from a legal standpoint there’s no mention of this.

Forget the law. Israel long ago abandoned it. In practice it rules Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the case of Gaza, it suffices with control from the outside, which is more convenient. On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come to recognize that the occupation of the territories in 1967 is not temporary. It was never meant to be and never will be. The 1967 border has been erased. The distinction between 1948 and 1967 doesn’t exist.
It was only in the state’s first 19 years, a blink of an eye from a historical perspective, that the country existed without the territories. For the balance of its history, the occupation has been an inseparable part of it, its character, its government, its essence, its DNA. What existed here for a brief time and is gone will not be coming back.

It’s critical that we rip the cover off the alleged transience of the occupation, which for some Israelis has been a sweet delusion and for others a dangerous threat. There is an abyss dividing a temporary occupation and a permanent one.

In its early years, Israel was small in area and population, but its youth, like everyone’s youth, quickly passed. For most of its existence, Israel hasn’t resembled the girl we remember. Its days as a small country with a Jewish majority have passed and the clock can’t be turned back. It’s no longer the small woman of our dreams. It’s the big woman of our nightmares.

On Israel’s 70th birthday, the time has come to recognize that Israel is a binational state under whose control two peoples live, equal in size. It maintains separate governing systems for them: a democratic one for Jews, discrimination for Israeli Arabs, and dictatorship for Palestinians. It’s not an equal democracy for all its subjects, meaning, of course, that it’s not a democracy.

There’s no such democracy where what’s allowed for one people isn’t for another. Therefore, on its 70th anniversary, Israel being called a democracy when fewer than half its subjects live in freedom is nothing but a propaganda trick that has worked to a greater extent than one would have thought.

It’s not only Israelis who deny and repress this reality. It’s more convenient for the Western world, too, to look at Israel’s more enlightened side, to ignore its dark side and continue to call it a democracy. After all, in the West, what country hasn’t also had such a colonialist back yard? And who could really confront Israel, a country that rose from the ashes?

Israel is therefore the darling of the West, despite the hollow lip service to the Palestinians, and so the West too has embraced the excuse of the occupation’s temporary nature: “Just wait, wait a little longer for the ‘peace process’ and the Israelis will be pulling out of the territories.” So it’s important that the lie of the transience of the occupation be exposed.

If the occupation isn’t temporary, it would be clear that Israel isn’t a democracy but rather an apartheid state par excellence. Two peoples and two systems of rights. That’s was apartheid looks like, even if it hides behind excuses ranging from temporariness to security grounds, from the right to the land to the concept of the chosen people, including the divine promise and messianic redemption.

These excuses don’t change the picture. In South Africa, no doubt an apartheid state, the regime invoked similar excuses to justify its existence. No one bought them. But with Israel there actually are buyers. One difference between South Africa and Israel is that Israel is stronger, more sophisticated and better connected to the world. And it has done a better job obscuring its apartheid.

It’s big, strong and nondemocratic. Israel oppresses the Palestinians through various means with one result: There isn’t a single free Palestinian in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. Their fate is determined by the Israeli government in Jerusalem and the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, and they have no rights at either one. Is this not apartheid? Is it democracy?

And now on to the showy and proud Independence Day ceremonies planned by Culture Minister Miri Regev. Let’s not rain on her parade.                

18 March 2017

ISRAEL AND THE A-WORD (APARTHEID)


Israel and the A-Word

Photo by Alan Ireland | CC BY 2.0
The word resonated loud and clear from South Africa. Hendrik Verwoerd, widely described as a key architect of apartheid, was the far-right National Party’s propagandist, political strategist and, ultimately, party leader. In 1961, as South African Prime Minister, he noted that Israel was built on land taken ‘from the Arabs after the Arabs lived there for a thousand years.’ The point was to express his approval and to highlight Zionism’s common cause with the Afrikaner pioneers: ‘In that, I agree with them. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.’

Verwoerd was able to make this diagnosis without needing to live to see the brutality of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza after 1967. Israel’s apartheid foundations were laid in its dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948. They were reinforced by the immediate erection of colonial constitutional structures that cemented the exclusion of the colonised.

Since then, Israeli law and policy has only deepened the state apparatus of separation and segregation, discrimination and domination. Over the years, countless activists, authors and artists, as well as leading anti-apartheid figures from South Africa, have referred to Israel’s particular brand of structural discrimination as akin to apartheid. In the last decade, international lawyers have also begun to do likewise, but with reference to the definition of apartheid under international law rather than by analogy to southern Africa.

This week, a report commissioned and published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) has concluded that ‘Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole’. According to the report, the Israeli regime governing Palestinians is a racial regime of institutionalised domination – the essence of the international legal definition of apartheid. The maintenance of Israel’s exclusionary constitutional character as the state of the Jewish people has entailed a “strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people”. It has involved expulsion of Palestinian refugees into exile, discrimination against Palestinians inside Israel as second-class citizens, oppression of Palestinians under occupation; all through a concerted array of law, policy and practice that forges ‘a comprehensive policy of apartheid’.

This finding breaks new ground in the context of UN analysis on Israel/Palestine. Specialised UN bodies – such as the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine – have in recent years categorised Israeli law and policy in terms of racial segregation and apartheid. This framing has been geographically limited to the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, however – as distinct from inside Israel itself, or Israel’s relationship with the Palestinian people writ large.

This was a somewhat necessary distinction, given the UN practice of analysing the occupied Palestinian territory and Israel as two separate territories under international law. But it was also in certain respects an artificial distinction. Much of what renders the situation in the occupied territory as apartheid is the separate and preferential legal system applied to Israeli settlers – a hierarchical legalism which is central to the constitution of Israel itself. Laws on citizenship, residency and family unification, as well as land, planning and housing rights, apply inside Israel to benefit Jewish-Israeli citizens over Palestinians. Those laws are then channeled into the West Bank to further stratify the population there. Colonisers living in the settlements are endowed with legal status and privilege that is denied to the Palestinian population of the same territory.

There are of course differences in the modalities of Israel’s discrimination against Palestinians – depending on whether they are inside Israel, in occupied territory, or in exile. The crucial point that the UN report highlights, however, is that this is nonetheless best viewed as a single overarching institutional regime which discriminates against the Palestinian people as a whole.

For a UN Commission report to state this so clearly, and to theorise Israel as a “racial state”, is significant. A people’s tribunal, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, did arrive at similar conclusions back in 2011. The momentum that this analysis has gathered in official UN settings since then shows the possibilities of an international law from below – one which is not afraid to confront the realities of a state in which increasingly discriminatory legislation has spewed thick and fast from an ascendant far-right.

While the report’s findings do hinge on the legal definition of apartheid, the Commission itself does not have the authority of an international tribunal. The International Court of Justice and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are among the relevant actors when it comes to determining Israel’s state responsibility for an unlawful apartheid regime. The International Criminal Court enters the fray for determining the criminal responsibility of individual Israeli officials for the perpetration of acts of apartheid, as crimes against humanity. Any adjudications from these and other legal institutions can feed into the UN political organs vested with the capacity to impose sanctions and arms embargoes, as was (eventually) done with apartheid South Africa. In this context, the report offers a potential platform for further developments in the political arena of the UN.

A UN spokesperson has said that ‘the report as it stands does not reflect the view of the Secretary-General’. The report made no claim to represent the views of the UN as a whole. It does, however, reflect the views of a regional UN commission, made up of eighteen member states of North Africa and West Asia. And here it is important to remember that the genesis of the UN sanctions and arms embargo against South Africa flowed up from below and inwards from the periphery, not down from on high or out from the core. The Third World states led the charge against apartheid for many years in the face of Western resistance and support for South Africa. It was 1952 when a group of thirteen Arab and Asian states first succeeded in adding ‘The Question of Race Conflict resulting from the policies of apartheid’ to the UN General Assembly’s agenda. It took another 25 years – after multiple abstentions and vetoes by Britain, France and the US, and a rising global social movement against apartheid – before the Security Council eventually imposed a mandatory arms embargo on South Africa.

In the current conjuncture, the significance of this week’s report extends beyond Israel/Palestine. Verwoerd’s National Party is not the only white supremacist political movement to have seen the attraction of Israel’s constitutional structures. The “alt-right” movement in the US is premised on a white nationalism that incorporates very real antisemitic discourse and intimidation among its multiplicity of racisms. At the same time, it admires Israel’s exclusionary policies. Richard Spencer describes the alt-right project as ‘a sort of white Zionism’ and argues, as Omri Boehm has noted, that Israel’s ethnic-based politics is the basis of a strong, cohesive identity which the alt-right is seeking to emulate in the US.

With the alt-right now maintaining a foothold in the White House, it is imperative to think seriously about the apartheid nature of Israel’s constitutional order and about how to deepen anti-racist alliances and solidarities across borders. The Trump/Bannon travel ban agenda of course finds some parallel in Israel’s own long-standing border policies, and comes at a time when Israel has adopted new legislation purporting to ban boycott adherents. In that context, the ESCWA report’s call for member states and civil society to support and ‘broaden support for boycott, divestment and sanctions initiatives’ is another significant political move.

John Reynolds teaches international law at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.

21 February 2017

ZIONISM AND ANTISEMITISM: RACIST POLITICAL TWINS

Zionism and Antisemitism: racist political twins, by J-BIG

A briefing by Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods, written by and for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions activists, explaining how the charge of antisemitism applies to Zionism itself.
Read the briefing in full here.

The movement for freedom, justice and equality for Palestinians opposes Israel’s occupation, colonisation of Arab lands and its apartheid system. The campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) targets the Israeli state, institutions and companies complicit in Israel’s crimes. 1
BDS has become an effective means for people of diverse backgrounds to express their humanitarian, anti-racist impulses in solidarity with Palestine. Recognising the power of BDS, Israel’s defenders have regularly accused the movement of antisemitism. They use this favourite weapon to intimidate and silence critics of Israel, including Jewish anti-Zionists, who are dismissed as ‘self-hating Jews’.

This briefing has been written by and for BDS activists to explain how the charge of antisemitism applies to Zionism itself. Indeed, they are racist political twins. Understanding their mutual dependence will help strengthen the BDS movement and inform our strategy. Antisemitism portrayed as eternal Zionism historically argued that antisemitism was inherent in non-Jews and thus would always persist. According to Leo Pinsker, founder of the 19th century Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion), ‘Judeophobia is a mental disease. As a mental disease it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.’ 2

On this basis, antisemitism couldn’t be eliminated, so opposing it was futile. Founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, wrote in his 1895 diary: ‘In Paris… I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to “combat” anti-Semitism.’ 3 He also wrote that ‘the antiSemites will be our most dependable friends, anti-Semitic countries our allies’4 , i.e. by stimulating Jewish immigration to Palestine.

 According to Jacob Klatzkin, editor during 1909-1911 of Die Welt, the official Zionist newspaper: ‘We are… naturally foreigners. We are an alien nation in your midst and we want to remain one.’ 5

Early Zionists accepted stereotypes commonplace at the time: that Jews, especially Eastern European Jews, were backward. They were seen as having become degenerate because they lacked a homeland, so settling Palestine would uplift and cleanse them. For example Pinhas Rosenbluth, later Israel’s Justice Minister, wrote that Palestine was ‘an institute for the fumigation of Jewish vermin’.6 Seeing Jews as ‘human dust’, Zionists sought to redeem them through aliyah – i.e. ‘ascent’ to the ancient Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael).7 Zionists agreed with European antisemites that Jews didn’t belong and should be assisted or even pressurised to leave Europe.

But most Jews rejected this notion. In 1897 the first Zionist Congress had to be moved to Basel in Switzerland from Munich, because Jews there regarded Zionism as antisemitic and feared it would undermine their civil rights in Germany. 8

Antisemitic support for a Jewish State Zionism has always depended on support from antisemitic elites. Even before Jewish Zionist organisations developed, political Zionism was promoted by 19th -century European imperialists such as Lords Palmerston and Shaftesbury, Benjamin Disraeli and Napoleon III’s Secretary Ernest Laharanne. Many Christians believed Jewish immigration to Palestine would bring about the Second Coming of Christ, as in Biblical prophecy.

More pragmatically, they saw a future Jewish homeland as a British imperial outpost – ‘a “little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’, according to the first military governor of Jerusalem. 9 Such political motives explain the famous ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, when UK Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour (a Christian Zionist) favoured ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Everyone else was classified as belonging to ‘non-Jewish communities’. The only opposition in Cabinet came from its sole Jewish member, Edwin Montagu, who warned that the plan would lead to discrimination against non-Jews in Palestine and against Jews elsewhere. 10

As Prime Minister a decade earlier, Balfour had promoted the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to block immigration of Jewish refugees from Czarist pogroms in Russia. He wanted them to go to Palestine instead. He warned against ‘the undoubted evils that had fallen upon the country [Britain] from an immigration that was largely Jewish’.11 Undermining an anti-Nazi boycott Zionists have often argued that only their own state can protect Jews from antisemitic attack. During the early stages of the Third Reich, moreover, the Nazis and Zionist organisations shared an outlook on Jewish separation.12 By attempting to separate Jews from the rest of humanity, the Zionists made destructive choices.

When Nazi Germany introduced antisemitic laws and promoted physical attacks on Jews, the Jewish diaspora in other countries organised an effective campaign for an international boycott. Mass rallies were held in many cities all over the world. In the USA and several European countries, large shops cancelled orders for German goods and found alternative sources. The Nazi regime’s accomplice to beat the boycott was the World Zionist Organisation (WZO). Under the Transfer (Haavara) Agreement of March 1933, the WZO actively opposed the boycott in exchange for the Nazis permitting some well-off Jews and their wealth to be transported to Palestine.

This transfer amounted to at least $30m worth of German goods, thus making Hitler a significant economic sponsor of the Zionist project. The Agreement would ‘pierce a stake through the heart of the Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott’, according to historian Edwin Black.13 Members of the World Jewish Congress sought to continue the boycott, but the WJC leadership soon joined the WZO in undermining it. Zionism gains from antisemitism in Poland In the mid-1930s Poland’s government also moved against the country’s Jews by enacting laws modelled on the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. For example, new laws restricted the kosher slaughtering of cattle and excluded Jews from specific professions. The Polish regime also negotiated with France to establish a ‘Jewish colony’ in Madagascar where Polish Jews could be sent.14

These developments and the antisemitism of the Catholic Church strengthened the Polish Zionist movement. Betar, a right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement opposed to trade unions, worked with antisemites in the Polish military from 1930 onwards. High-ranking army officers secretly trained Betar recruits, most of whom immigrated to Palestine by the end of the decade to join Zionist military forces there.

Nevertheless Zionism in Poland faced strong opposition from the Bund, a Jewish-secular socialist party, which had a stronger following than any other Jewish party in Poland. From the Holocaust to the ‘New Jew’ Zionism was a minority political force among European Jews until six million were killed by the Nazis.

The Holocaust strengthened Zionist efforts to gain international support for a Jewish state in Palestine. Most Jewish refugees sought escape to Western Europe or the USA but were blocked by immigration controls – supported by Zionist organisations – and so migrated instead to Palestine. Zionist colonisation depended on racist institutions which still operate today. The Jewish Agency promotes Jewish immigration to Israel. The Jewish National Fund (JNF) still allocates Israeli land only to Jews.15 The Histadrut – often mistakenly called a ‘trade union’ – has been in reality a business promoting ‘Hebrew-only labour’.16

The Israeli ‘Law of Return’ offered citizenship to all Jews, wherever they live in the world. Zionist militias attacked Palestinian civilians during the 1940s until the 1948 declaration of independence for Israel. In 1947-48 this terror campaign led to the expulsion of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes. Several massacres panicked Palestinians to flee their homeland. An official ‘state of emergency’ prevented refugees from exercising their right of return, thus violating international law to this day. Zionist settlement did not stop at taking over indigenous people’s land. Rather than exploit their labour, Zionism sought to expel or eliminate them, as earlier European settlers had done in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.

Zionism sought to replace the indigenous population with colonial-settlers as the ‘New Jew’. This doubly racist project maligned the Bund’s working-class solidarity as backward and sought to replace immigrants’ Yiddish culture with a literally fabricated one. Israeli author Amos Oz explains: ‘Even new lullabies and new “ancient legends” were synthesised by eager writers’, e.g. glorifying the settlers’ land appropriation through agricultural labour (compare the two posters).17 Jewish futures: class solidarity versus colonial settlement Socialist Jew of the Bund youth organisation: ‘Join the Tsukunft’ (Future)18 New Jew of settler-colonialism: ‘Towards a new life in the Promised Land’

As the ideology underpinning Jewish settlement in Palestine, Zionism was embraced by many Jews as a route to a socialist Utopia based on collective labour and idealistic kibbutz communities. In practice they faced a choice: either break with Zionism or accept its racist, colonial nature. 19 Racist Right-wing politics As in the 1930s, Zionism and racist Right-wing politics have continued to converge. The US political scene features an alliance between Jewish Zionists and the far more numerous fundamentalist Christian Zionists. Today many of the 40 million Christian Evangelists there believe that a Jewish ‘return’ to Palestine will bring the Second Coming, Armageddon and then the Rapture, when the Righteous will be saved. Everyone who does not accept this prophecy, including Jews, will be sent to hell. Since 9/11 Christian Zionists have also seen Israel as a front-line defence against the so-called ‘Islamic threat’.

Jewish Zionists have exploited this support, even when combined with blatant antisemitism. According to Pastor John Hagee, President of the Southern Baptist Convention, ‘Adolph Hitler was a “hunter”, sent by God, who was tasked with expediting God’s will of having the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.’20

Nevertheless Hagee’s support for Israel has been welcomed by the Anti-Defamation League, which is meant to oppose antisemitism.21 Likewise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, ‘The good news is that Israel is not alone – it has your support’, when addressing a rally of Hagee’s one million-strong Christians United for Israel. 22 As in the USA, European racist groups combine antisemitism with support for Zionism.23

Throughout Europe most major racist parties are antisemitic, Islamophobic and pro-Zionist. English Defence League members express antisemitic views, while also flying the Israeli flag. Support for Israel also comes from Robert Zines, MEP of Latvia’s Freedom & Fatherland Party, who joins the annual march in memory of SS veterans who guarded extermination camps.24 Similarly in Poland, the Law and Justice Party is a home for proIsrael antisemites. 25 Michal Kaminski MEP strongly supports Israel while also defending ‘the good name of Jedwabne’ – a town where hundreds of Jews were burned alive in a synagogue in 1941.26 Racist equation: Zionist = Jewish Western support for Israel is based on much more than collusion with antisemitism. Israel has demonstrated its utility in suppressing Arab nationalist aspirations for democratic control of the Middle East and its natural resources, especially since the 1967 war.

Israeli counter-insurgency methods have been used widely by Western military forces, e.g. in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Israeli military has turned the Middle East into a laboratory for surveillance, control and armament systems to be extended globally. 27 Imperialist domination closely links the Western powers to the Israeli colonial-settler state. Palestinians regularly face Western demands ‘to recognise Israel as a Jewish state’, thus conflating a people with a state.

This conflation has been encouraged by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose supporters have described it as ‘the Jewish lobby’.28 A similar conflation was also promoted by the now-defunct EU Monitoring Centre (EUMC) on Racism and Xenophobia.29 According to its so-called ‘working definition of antisemitism’, it could be antisemitic to deny ‘the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour’. 30 Since this definition was rejected by the UK’s Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), Zionists have campaigned for universities to de-recognise the union.

This demonstrates once again that it is Zionists, not their critics, who continue to equate their colonial-settler project with all Jews. By claiming to be ‘the State of the Jews’, Israel implicates all Jews in Israel’s wars, occupation, land thefts, expulsions and other crimes. Mirroring that equation, some misguided supporters of the Palestinians have attributed their oppression to an international Jewish conspiracy, to ‘Jewish power’, to ‘a Jewish spirit’, etc. The extreme-Right journalist Israel Shamir promotes those elements of traditional European antisemitism, ostensibly to support the Palestinians. These explanations obscure the source of Palestinian oppression. They perversely accept Zionist claims to represent all Jews and ‘Jewish values’.

Leading Palestinian commentators and activists reject such “support” as damaging the Palestinian cause. Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Omar Barghouti and Rafeef Ziadeh were among dozens who denounced those who blame ‘Jewish’ characteristics for the oppression of Palestinians. 31 As the Palestinian BDS National Committee has argued, ‘equating Israel and world Jewry… is itself antisemitic’. 32

The equation stereotypes Jews, threatens their civil rights and undermines their national identity in countries where they live. It originated from antisemites who saw Jews as an alien people not belonging in Europe and needing their own homeland. This equation is contradicted by the many people of Jewish origin who actively support Palestinian national rights and play central roles in the BDS campaign.

BDS – against Zionism and antisemitism Understanding Zionism and antisemitism as racist political twins – sometimes even partners in crime – underpins the Palestinian call for BDS. Its anti-racist aims – freedom from occupation, justice for refugees denied their right of return, and equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel – are best served by targeting Israel as a racist state aligned with the political-economic interests of the Western powers.

Published January 2013 (with expanded notes March 2013) by Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG) http://jews4big.wordpress.com, jews4big@gmail.com We are UK-resident Jews who support the Palestinian call for a boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign to hold Israel to account for decades of breaching international law.

J-BIG is part of the Boycott Israel Network,

www.boycottisraelnetwork.net


Further reading on Zionism and antisemitism

Gilbert Achcar, Arabs and the Holocaust, Saqi, 2010.
Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine, Macmillan, 1984.
Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, Croom Helm, 1983
Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, 2003.
David Landy, Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights, Zed, 2011.
Antony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist, Pluto, 2011.
Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, I.B. Taurus, 1985.
Akiva Orr, The unJewish State: The Politics of Jewish Identity in Israel. Ithaca Press, 1983, http://www.akiorrbooks.com/files/The_Un_Jewish_State.pdf
Akiva Orr, Israel: Politics, Myths and Identity Crises, Pluto, 1994, http://www.akiorrbooks.com/files/israel_myths.pdf
Yakov Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A History of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
John Rose, The Myths of Zionism, Pluto, 2005.
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, Verso, 2010.
Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland, Verso, 2013.
Nathan Weinstock, Zionism: The False Messiah, Inklinks, 1979.
Ben White, Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide, 2012.

Notes

1 http://www.bdsmovement.net/call#.TqsNhnPajNM
2 Leo Pinsker, Autoemanzipation: ein Mahnrufan seine Stammesgenossen, von einem russischen Juden, Berlin, 1882, pp.4-5; http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html; for bringing together many sources cited here, thanks to Tony Greenstein’s blog, azvsas.blogspot.com
3 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl; the Zionist spelling of ‘anti-Semitism’ has an essentialist meaning, so it is used here only for direct quotes (otherwise ‘antisemitism’).
4 The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, translated by Harry Zohn, New York, 1960, page 19.
5 Jacob Klatzkin, Krisis und Entscheidung im Judentum: Probleme des modernen Judentums, 2d edition, Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1921, p.118; cited in Klaus Herrmann, ‘Historical perspectives on political Zionism and antisemitism’, in Zionism & Racism, 1977, p.204 http://www.eaford.org/publications/1/ZIONISM%20&%20RACISM.pdf
6 Joachim Doron, ‘Classic Zionism and modern anti-semitism: parallels and influences’ (1883-1914), Studies in Zionism 8, Autumn 1983.
7 Aki Orr, The unJewish State. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Land of Israel. Les Levidow, ‘Zionist antisemitism’, http://www.iahushua.com/Zion/zionrac12.html
8 Nathan Weinstock, Zionism – A False Messiah, Inklinks.
9 Memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs, 1937, p.364
10 http://www.zionism-israel.com/hdoc/Montagu_balfour.htm
11 Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p.201; Michael Joseph Cohen, Churchill and the Jews, 1900-1948, Frank Cass, 2003, p.19.
12 Francis Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestinian Question, Taurus, 1985.
13 Edwin Black, The Transfer Agreement. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.
14http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Total/Polish%20Antisemitism.htm
15 http://www.jnews.org.uk/commentary/background-paper-the-controversial-laknd-policies-of-the-jewishnational-fund
16 http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2009/03/histadrut-israels-racist-trade-union.html
17 Haim Bresheeth, Self and Other in Zionism: Palestine and Israel in recent Hebrew literature, in Khamsin, 14/15. Palestine: Profile of an Occupation, London, Zed Books, 1989, pp.120-52.
18 http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Tsukunft
19 Antony Lerman, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist.
20 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/21/mccain-backer-hagee-said_n_102892.html
21 http://www.adl.org/PresRele/HolNa_52/5299_52.htm, June 2008
22 http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/waiting-for-the-messiah-netanyahu-addresses-evangelicalchristian-gathering-in-jerusalem-1.419432
23 http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/europe%E2%80%99s-islamophobes-and-israel-right-alliance
24 http://azvsas.blogspot.com/2009/10/conservatives-anti-semitic-fascist.html, http://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-anti-semitic-friends/8516
25 http://electronicintifada.net/content/bad-romance-poland-and-israels-love-story/9266
26 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/29/conservatives-europe-miliband-hague-kaminski
27 Steve Graham, ‘Settler colonial securitism: Israeli surveillance and control regimes at airports and megaevents’, http://campacc.org.uk/uploads/images/Steve%20Graham.pdf Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression, https://israelglobalrepression.wordpress.com/download/ NeoConOpticon: The EU Security-Industrial Complex, TNI, http://www.statewatch.org/analyses/neoconopticon-report.pdf
28 Chuck Hagel and the Ghost of AIPAC Past, http://www.lobelog.com/chuck-hagel-and-the-ghost-of-aipac-past/
29 UCU resolution on EUMC working definition of anti-semitism, http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=5540#70; Richard Kuper, Any critic of six-year-old definition of antisemitism attacked as antisemitic, http://jfjfp.com/?p=23479; Antony Lerman, http://antonylerman.com/2011/06/02/the-farcical-attack-on-the-ucu-for-voting-against-use-ofthe-eumc-working-definition-of-antisemitism/
30 http://www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/working-definition-of-antisemitism/english/
31 http://uspcn.org/2012/03/13/granting-no-quarter-a-call-for-the-disavowal-of-the-racism-and-antisemitism-ofgilad-atzmon/
32 http://www.bdsmovement.net/2011/die-linke-protecting-7427#.TqsUsnajNM

10 April 2015

JAKE LYNCH, NICK RIEMER, UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY, ZIONISM

The order in which the names appear at the head of this item is random, but not totally so.

However, in the world scheme of things as they stand in Australia and around the world is that zionism is the name of the cause of most of the world's tragedies as they manifest in this day and age, April 2015.

Zionism and its origins seem to be a product of mid-nineteenth century British anti-semitism when it seem that Christians in Britain reasoned that Jerusalem was a good place to develop for all Jews to be able to go and live in, and Britain would be able to address it's problem of having Jews living and working in Britain. Anti-semitism has been so widespread for so long that many around the world would support getting rid of Jews and getting them centred in one area well away from where "civilised" Christians lived.

However zionism turned into the hydra - cut off one head and more will appear to replace just the one removed.

The 21st century zionist development is now one where one might well say that zionism is a world conspiracy and many countries are complicit in its propagation.

This is just the beginning of a very long saga.

Before going any further I must make the point that any viewpoint I put together in this item is on the understanding that I am an atheist and do not accept any of the issues from the bible unless they have been accurately historically authenticated. Other items included in this blog may well be from people with different views, but the stories are widespread and from varied sources, so I hope it all ends up with some sort of historical background to zionism, judaism, anti-semitism and related issues  including Palestine and apartheid Israel - as a South African born and bred who lived in apartheid South Africa for 50 years before coming to live in apartheid Australia where I have now lived for 33 years, I know apartheid when I see it!

The item from the Washington Institute is dated 2007 and therefore does not include the war crimes and genocides being perpetrated on the Palestinians in the intervening years up to and including 2015 - these are of course ongoing and still supported by much of the world!

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NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN
 
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A Basic History of Zionism and its Relation to Judaism

By Hanna Braun, London
First Published: September 2001: In order to understand the circumstances that led to the birth of Zionism I shall sketch an outline of the history of Judaism and the Jews.

Since biblical times Jewish communities lived in Arab lands, in Persia, India, East and North Africa and indeed in Palestine. With the destruction of the Temple and the final fall of their state in 70 AD many Jews were taken out of Judea and hence to Rome and the Diaspora. Many poorer Judeans, however (such as subsistence farmers), were able to stay in Palestine. (Some of them had converted to Christianity and were one of the earliest Christian groups.) Modern research suggests that when Islam arrived in the area in 633 AD many of these Jews converted and that they form a considerable part of today's Palestinians. These various communities were on the whole well integrated into their respective societies and did not experience the persecutions that later became so prevalent in Europe. In Palestine, for instance, Muslims repeatedly protected their Jewish neighbours from marauding crusaders; in one instance at least, Jews fought alongside Muslims to try and prevent crusaders from landing at Haifa's port, and Salah al-Dinl-din, after re-conquering Jerusalem from the crusaders, invited the Jews back into the city.

The Jews in Spain under Moorish rule flourished and experienced a renaissance mirroring that of the great Islamic civilisation and culture at the time. As Christianity spread from the north of Spain, Jews were again protected by Muslim rulers until the fall of Granada - the last Moorish kingdom to pass into Christian hands - when both Jews and Muslims were expelled at the end of the 15th century (Jews in 1492 and Muslims 10 years later).

 Most of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula settled in North Africa and the lands under Ottoman rule, including Palestine, and continued their peaceful co-existence with Muslims in those countries. The bulk of Portuguese "converted" Jews (these were forced conversions and such Jews were called Marranos, i.e. pigs, by Jews who had fled or who preferred to die for their faith) settled in Amsterdam, presumably because they had long established trading connections in that city. In 1655 they were invited to Britain by Oliver Cromwell. Most of them were glad to resettle since at the time the Netherlands had just freed itself from the Spanish yoke and the shadow of the dreaded inquisition was still uncomfortably close.

The fate of Jewry in European countries was very different: persecutions, killings and burnings were widespread and Jews were forced to live in closed ghettos, particularly in the Russian Empire, where they were confined to the "Pale of Jewish" (?) settlement, an area which consisted of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Byelarus or White Russia. Anyone who wished to move outside these borders needed special permission. However, by the mid-19th century some of the more progressive Jewish communities had established themselves in the big cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Kiev.

In central and western Europe religious tolerance, followed by the granting of full citizen rights and emancipation, came relatively early, in the wake of general liberalization. However, Russian rulers remained opposed to any liberalization, including religious tolerance and emancipation, and as late as 1881 Tsar Alexander the third initiated a series of particularly vicious pogroms to divert unrest amongst the population, at a time when Britain, for instance, boasted of a Jewish prime minister.

Total segregation was not always imposed from outside, however; frequently it was enforced from within by highly authoritarian rabbis who exercised absolute power over their congregations, often including the right to life and the imposition of the death penalty. Thus it was a major decision for anyone to leave these congregations and to look for a broader education (known as "enlightenment"). In eastern Europe enlightenment was a relatively late phenomenon and it found expression initially in the mid-19th century, in a revival of Hebrew language and literature and in the modern idea of Jews seeing themselves as a people.

This distinction between a people and a religion was of course disapproved of by the Orthodox Jews, who still today regard Hebrew as a sacred language to be used solely for prayers and religious studies and the Jewish people and religion as indivisible. The concept of the Jews as people closely mirrored the relatively new European idea of a homogeneous nation state. An exception to this was the socialist "Bund" organisation whose members rejected nationalism and later Zionism.

Some of these early proto-Zionists, calling themselves "Hovevei Zion" (Lovers of Zion), started the first settlements in Palestine in the 1870's, and a larger number of immigrants followed after the Russian pogroms of 1881-82. These settlers distinguished themselves by their deliberate segregation from the indigenous population and their contempt for local customs and traditions. This naturally aroused suspicion and hostility in the locals. This exclusivity was largely based on a sense of superiority common to Europeans of the time, who believed they were the only advanced and truly civilised society and in true colonial fashion looked down on "natives" or ignored them altogether. However, beyond that there was also a particular sense of superiority of Jews towards all non-Jews. This belief in innate Jewish superiority had a long tradition in religious Jewish thinking, central to which was the notion of the Jews as God's chosen people. Moshe Ben Maimon (Maimonides) had been an exponent of this theory and quite often thinkers with a more humane outlook, e.g. Spinoza, were excommunicated. The accepted thinking in the religious communities was that Jews must on no account mix with gentiles for fear of being contaminated and corrupted by them. This notion was so deeply ingrained that it quite possibly still affected, albeit subconsciously, those Jews who had left the townships and had become educated and enlightened. Thus the early settlers from eastern Europe transferred the "Stettl" (townlet) mentality of segregation to Palestine, with the added belief in the nobility of manual labour and in particular soil cultivation. In this they had been influenced by Tolstoy and his writings.

The "father" of political Zionism, Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), came from a totally different perspective. Dr. Herzl was a Viennese, emancipated, secular journalist who was sent by his editor to Paris in 1894 to cover the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus had been a captain in the French Army who was falsely accused and convicted of treason (although he was acquitted and completely cleared some years later). The case brought to light the strength of a strong streak of anti-Semitism prevalent in the upper echelons of the French Army and in the French press, with profound repercussions in emancipated Jewish circles. Herzl himself despaired of the whole idea of emancipation and integration and felt that the only solution to anti-Semitism lay in a Jewish Homeland. To that end he approached various diplomats and notables, including the Ottoman Sultan, but mainly European rulers, the great colonial powers of the time, and was rewarded for his efforts by being offered Argentina or Uganda by the British as possible Jewish Homelands.

Herzl would have been quite happy with either of these countries, but when the first Zionist Congress was convened in Basle in 1897, he came up against Eastern European Jewry, by far the greatest majority of participants, who, although broadly emancipated and enlightened, would not accept any homeland other than the land of Zion. Not only had some of them already settled in Palestine, there were strong remnants of the religious/sentimental notion of a pilgrimage and possibly burial in the Holy Land. The last toast in the Passover ceremony is "Next year in Jerusalem"; although this was a religious rather than a national aspiration, it was common amongst the Orthodox communities to purchase a handful of soil purporting to come from the Holy Land to be placed under the deceased's head. (Orthodox Jews at that time completely rejected any Jewish political movement and did not attend the congress.)

Herzl was quick to realise that unless he accepted the "Land of Zion", i.e. Palestinian option, he would have hardly any adherents. Thus the Zionist movement started with a small section of Jewish society who saw the solution to anti-Semitism in a return to its "roots" and in a renewal of a Jewish people in the land of their ancestors. In his famous book "Der Judenstaat" (The State of the Jews) Herzl wrote that the Jews and their state will constitute "a rampart of Europe against Asia, of civilisation against barbarism," and again regarding the local population, "We shall endeavour to encourage the poverty-stricken population to cross the border by securing work for it in the countries it passes through, while denying it work in our own country. The process of expropriation and displacement must be carried out prudently and discreetly--Let (the landowners) sell us their land at exorbitant prices. We shall sell nothing back to them."

Max Nordau, an early Zionist, visited Palestine and was so horrified that the country was already populated that he burst out in front of Herzl: "But we are committing a grave injustice!" Some years later, in 1913, a prominent Zionist thinker and writer, Ahad Ha'am (one of the people), wrote: "What are our brothers doing? They were slaves in the land of their exile. Suddenly they found themselves faced with boundless freedom ... and they behave in a hostile and cruel manner towards the Arabs, trampling on their rights without the least justification ... even bragging about this behaviour." But the dismay of Nordau and others at the injustices to, and total lack of recognition of, the indigenous population was silenced and indeed edited out of Jewish history and other books, as was some of Herzl's writing. The Zionist slogan of "a land without people for a people without land" prevailed and within a matter of a few years the immigrants became "sons of the land" (Bnei Ha'aretz), whereas the inhabitants became the aliens and foreigners.

Following renewed efforts and lobbying after Herzl's death, the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which granted Zionists a Jewish Homeland in Palestine, set the official seal of approval on their aspirations. Protests and representations by local Arab leaders were brushed aside. Lord Balfour wrote in 1919: "In Palestine, we do not even propose to consult the inhabitants of the country. (Zionism's) immediate needs and hopes for the future are much more important than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who presently inhabit Palestine."

Settlements grew slowly for a long time, but the systematic buying up of land, frequently from absentee landlords, which left tenant farmers homeless, contributed to the first Palestinian uprising in 1921-22 and other outbursts of hostilities. The worst was a massacre of some 65 Jews in Hebron in 1929, after orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe had founded a "Yeshiva" (a religious study centre) in the town and had aroused the suspicions and hostility of the indigenous population, who prior to this had lived in peace and harmony for hundreds of years with their non-European Jewish neighbours. Another contributing factor to growing Arab hostility was the Zionists' policy of not employing Arabs or buying their produce.

For many years Zionism remained a minority movement of mainly Eastern European Jews, excluding the whole religious establishment, most central and western European Jews and, last but not least, all non-European Jews who, unbeknown to Herzl and his co-founders, form the majority of us. These communities were ignored by early Zionists, who had little interest in their aspirations until the establishment of the state of Israel after the "independence" war of 1948-9. After this the new state unleashed a massive propaganda campaign to induce the Sephardi and Oriental Jews to "ascend" to the land of their ancestors, mainly for demographic reasons--in 1948 only about one third of the population and about 6% of the land were Jews or in Jewish hands--but also as cannon fodder. This also happened in the 1980's with the Jews of Ethiopia. However, upon arrival these non-European newcomers were treated very much as inferior second-class citizens. This European dominance is still prevalent in modern Israel where, for example, the national anthem speaks about Jewish longing for the East towards Zion, whereas for many of the non-European communities Palestine lies to the West. Sadly, this has led to some groups of Sephardi (non-European) or Oriental Jews becoming extreme right-wing chauvinists, so as to "prove" their credentials.

Immigration ("Aliyah"--ascent in Zionist parlance) took off in seriously large numbers with the rise of Hitler, who initially declared himself quite sympathetic to Zionism, as had other right-wing anti-Semites before him. New Jewish settlements mushroomed, leading to a bitter and prolonged Palestinian uprising from 1936 till 1939, when it was crushed by the British mandatory powers. But it was not until the end of the 2nd World War and the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 that Zionism started to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Jewish society. Since that time we have witnessed an increasing and deliberate confluence of Judaism and Zionism, to the extent that today it is widely regarded as treason and self-hate for a Jew to criticise the state, let alone Zionism.

In my view, this development was almost inevitable given the preconception of an exclusive Jewish state. Could we realistically conceive of a France purely for the French? England only for the English? (Unless, of course we belong to the National Front or similar groups.) In a post-colonial world the notion is completely unacceptable and ridiculous. How then, can Israel and the majority of its citizens justify their claim and yet remain convinced that theirs is a modern, democratic society? The last resort, when all logical justifications fail, is that God has promised the land to his people, namely us. (This rather begs the question of where this leaves a non-believing Jew.) I have found over the years, and particularly in the last 30 or so years, that the numbers of young people wearing the skullcap and generally observing at least some of the religious laws has increased dramatically, and I believe this is no coincidence.

The religious establishment has gone along with the general flow and has, indeed, profited from it. Since the late 50's there has also been a notable and frightening change in the Orthodox community, which led to the establishment in 1974 of the "Gush Emunim" (the block of the faithful), initiated by Rabbi Tsvi Yehuda Kook the younger. This is the fundamentalist movement which believes in accepting the state of Israel and striving to make it entirely and exclusively Jewish. Prior to this time Orthodox Jewry played no important role in politics except in pressuring successive governments to introduce more Jewish religious regulations into state law. The ultra-orthodox group "Neturei Karta" (the landless) has never recognised the state of Israel, and its members are exempt from army service.

Although Gush Emunim is small in numbers, it wields disproportionate influence since successive Israeli governments covertly (and sometimes almost overtly) have endorsed its aspirations. Gush Emunim's followers have been allocated to special army units so as to enable them to observe Jewish religious laws and rituals in every detail (although even in the regular army only Kosher food is served and the Sabbath is observed as far as possible). These units have a reputation as dedicated, crack troops. What is less well known but silently condoned is their refusal to give medical aid or even drive wounded persons to the hospital on the Sabbath unless they are Jews.

In my view this is an extremely short-sighted and dangerous road, leading in the end to a fundamentalist theocracy much like that of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The fundamentalists' belief is that the Messianic age is already upon us and that any obstacles to a total elimination of any non-Jews in the promised land, i.e. the whole of what was Palestine including the Holy Mount, is God's punishment for sinful Jews, namely all those who are westernised and secular. This fully exonerates, and indeed sanctifies, a man like Baruch Goldstein who murdered 29 Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi mosque, as well as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Like the Hamas movement, which was initially encouraged by Israel's secret services, this is another genie which, having been let out of the bottle, can no longer be controlled.

It seems a bitter irony that a movement that initially saw itself as progressive, liberal and secular should find itself in an alliance with, and held to ransom by, the most illiberal reactionary forces. In my view this was inevitable from its inception although the founders, and most of us (including even people like myself, growing up in Palestine in the thirties), did not foresee this and certainly would not have wished it.

Nowadays the deliberate blurring of the distinction between Zionism and Judaism, which includes a rewriting of ancient as well as modern history, is exploited to stifle any criticism of Israel's policies and actions, however extreme and inhuman they may be. This, incidentally, also plays directly into anti-Semitic prejudices by equating Israeli arrogance, brutality and complete denial of basic human rights to non-Jews with general Jewish characteristics.

Zionism has now assumed the all-embracing mantle of righteousness. It claims to represent and to speak for all Jews and has adopted the slogan of "my country right or wrong." The West tolerates Israel's continuous breaches of human rights--violations that it would not tolerate if perpetrated by any other country. Few Western states and not many Jews dare take a stand against Israel, particularly as many of the former still feel a sense of unease and guilt about the holocaust which Zionist Jews inside and outside Israel have exploited in what to me seems an almost obscene manner. In the USA, the Jewish Zionist lobby is still strong enough to keep successive governments on board. Moreover, the USA regards Israel as an important strategic ally in its fight against Middle Eastern "rogue" states which have supplanted the Soviet Union as the great satanic enemy of the free world.

I fear that unless and until Israel is judged by the same criteria as other modern states, this is unlikely to change. It is the duty of all Jews with a sense of justice and a conscience to speak out against the falsifications of history by the Zionist lobby, and the dangerous misconceptions it has led the West to accept.

Hanna Braun, London, September 2001

Hanna Braun is a retired lecturer, living in London. She is a former Israeli, having emigrated to Palestine as a child in 1937 to escape Nazi Germany -- her grandmother later died in the Terezin ghetto. She was in the Haganah in 1948 but left Israel in 1958 for Britain, after having become disillusioned with the Israeli government. She is a signatory of The RETURN Statement Against the Israeli Law of Return - For the Palestinian Right to Return .


Bibliography:

Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion

Israel Shahak, Fundamental Judaism in Israel

Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews, Ancient and Modern

Michael Prior (ed.), Western Scholarship and the History of Palestine

New Comment section added February 26, 2013
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+2
John Cook's avatar
John Cook · 110 weeks ago
This artical is absolutely FULL of omissions and distortions. Basicly it's the Zionist viewpoint. It's the "politically correct" standard bullshit. Read "History of the US-Israel Relationship, Part 1" for a dose of reality re Zionism.
Note that the author was an Israeli terrorist (from 1948 to 1958) till the blood got too much for her.
Disgusting indeed.
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1 reply · active 34 weeks ago
+3
Human Right's avatar
Human Right · 110 weeks ago
About 90% of today's "Judaists" on this planet originated in Russia around 750AD and have no indiginous relationship to Palestine whatsoever.
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0
GMB's avatar
GMB · 110 weeks ago
The Jewish Chronicle of London.

"So, what did the Muslims do for the Jews?''

By David J Wasserstein, May 24, 2012

''Islam saved Jewry. This is an unpopular, discomforting claim in the modern world. But it is a historical truth. The argument for it is double. First, in 570 CE, when the Prophet Mohammad was born, the Jews and Judaism were on the way to oblivion. And second, the coming of Islam saved them, providing a new context in which they not only survived, but flourished, laying foundations for subsequent Jewish cultural prosperity - also in Christendom - through the medieval period into the modern world.''
http://www.thejc.com/comment-and-debate/comment/6...
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2 replies · active 110 weeks ago
0
GMB's avatar
GMB · 110 weeks ago
@Human Right -- agreed. For a long time, the Khazar narrative was smeared as 'crackpot', 'conspiracy', 'anti Semitic' theory, but now Shlomo Sand's books have validated it.

See Shlomo's recent interviews -- from the 14 minute mark --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR-dDwwXx2E
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2 replies · active 17 weeks ago
-2
C Moore's avatar
C Moore · 110 weeks ago
As the American wife of a Palestinian refugee (1948), I disagree with John Cook. This is a brave, historically accurate account of the birth and consequences of the Zionist movement-up to the time she wrote this. NOW, the consequences of Zionism have led to horrible genocidal wars, and possibly a nuclear holocaust this summer if the U.S. destroys Iran as the Zionists who control our government intend. Google ODED YINON to read the Zionist master plan to destroy the Islamic nations (published in 1982) -they turned that project over to the U.S.-google The Project for the New American Century (written by Zionists in the U.S. to fulfill Yinon's plan.)
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1 reply · active 90 weeks ago
-2
marcus's avatar
marcus · 110 weeks ago
Yes, this is a brave & true article & should be reprinted more often as an answer to the AIPAC, ADL Zionist thugs & their anti-semitic enablers & agent provocateurs.
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1 reply · active 90 weeks ago
-2
marcus's avatar
marcus · 110 weeks ago
Also see: "The Hidden History of Zionism" & "Zionism in the Age of the Dictator" by Jews exposing Zionism's quisling alliances WITH the Nazis AGAINST the ANTI-Nazi left & communist-led resistance as well as with colonialism & imperialism throughout Zionism's history
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1 reply · active 90 weeks ago
-3
Amerikagulag's avatar
Amerikagulag · 110 weeks ago
The torah and the talmud are weapons of mass destruction and their adherents are enemies of humanity. They are both based on a false 'invented' god/religion.
The torah and talmud are the core of a religion which teaches intolerance, racism, hatred of all others and supremacy. It is a religion which fosters division. It should be banned world wide.

The old testament is a collection of fiction, falacy, forgery and outright lie. Archaeology doe NOT support the claims of the bible. In a word it NEVER HAPPENED. The exodus, the wandering, the parting the red sea....all just fables and lies.

Yet the world continues in their blind submission to this falacy. And the current inhabitants of the land formerly known as Palestine have no historical connection with that land whatsoever. They practice genocide of the native population on a daily basis - exactly what the europeans did to the Native Americans of North and South America. Supplant is the word. Israel has supplanted PALESTINE illegally and bases its existence on a book of lies.
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2 replies · active 4 weeks ago
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Banat German 's avatar
Banat German · 109 weeks ago
There needs to be some clarification regarding Balfour Declaration. In 1916, Germany offered a peace agreement to England where there would be a ceasefire, and all army return to their borders. Germany indicated that no country would have to give up any territory or pay reparation to Germany. England was giving serious consideration to this German proposal because France and England were losing the war. The Zionists step in and told the British government that if Palestine could be given to the Jews, they guarantee to get America involved in the war. England turn down the proposal and sure enough, next year America under Jewish influence enter the war. Where as Germany offered a ceasefire, no reparation, and no loss of territory, which would have stop war in 1916. The Jewish influence during the Wilson adninistration was so great that at the end of the war, the Jews were calling the shots and Germany and the people suffered the consequences in excessive reparation and loss of German territory and their colonies.
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1 reply · active 90 weeks ago
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greg's avatar
greg · 51 weeks ago
the only reason israel exists is the jews of america coercing the american govt. into world war 2 to protect britain as long as britain agreed to give palestine to the jews
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Kevin's avatar
Kevin · 51 weeks ago
>>> 24.03.1933 - DAILY EXPRESS : Judea declares War on Germany [ ??? ]
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Helene's avatar
Helene · 25 weeks ago
broken link in the above article:The RETURN Statement Against the Israeli Law of Return - For the Palestinian Right to Return .
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blackwidow's avatar
blackwidow · 21 weeks ago
0
GJM's avatar
GJM · 17 weeks ago
MORALITY AND MENTALITY OF RULERS

1. the rulers' morality and minds appear to be marked by greater mental and moral schizophrenia than the morality and mentality of the members of the ruled population.

2. The ruling ,groups contain a larger proportion of the extreme mental types of the gifted and the mentally sick than the rank and file of the ruled populations...the ruling groups are more talented intellectually and more deranged mentally than the ruled population... the ruling strata have a larger proportion of dominating, aggressive, highly selfish, bold and adventurous persons, men harsh and insensitive to other human beings, hypocrites and liars, and cynical manipulators of human relationships, than the strata of the ruled populations.

3. The moral behaviour of ruling groups tends to be more criminal and sub-moral than that of the ruled strata of the same society.

4. The greater, more absolute, and coercive the power of rulers, political leaders, and big executives of business, labour and other organizations, and the less freely this power is approved by the ruled population, the more corrupt and criminal such ruling groups and executives tend to be.

MORAL DUALISM OF RULING ACTIVITIES

1. A considerable part of the criminalizing functions of rulers is represented by their violent, destructive and murderous activities - activities which characterize much of the total' behaviour of governments. War activity can serve as an example of this kind of occupational function; the planning, preparing for, and carrying on of war has always been practically the main preoccupation of rulers. Stripped of its propaganda, war activity is the most terrible form of organized mass-murder supplemented with other acts of human bestiality, lust, and sadistic-masochistic destructiveness. No war activity can be carried on without throwing to the wind, at least temporarily, all the moral imperatives. No man preoccupied with war activities for years and years, can escape the demoralizing and criminalizing effects of this murderous business.

Other murderous activities of rulers deaden their moral sensitivity, and harden their souls and hearts towards the lives and values of human beings. Directly and retroactively these activities contribute to demoralization and criminalization of rulers.
http://www.panarchy.org/sorokin/power.html




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The Washington Institute: Improving the Quality of U.S. Middle East Policy















Policy Analysis









PolicyWatch 1303

Britain and Zionism: Then and Now

Policy #1303
November 13, 2007

On November 2, 2007 -- the ninetieth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration -- Michael Makovsky, Gerard Baker, and Simon Henderson addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Dr. Makovsky is foreign policy director of the new Bipartisan Policy Center and author of Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (2007). Mr. Baker is U.S. editor for the Times of London. Mr. Henderson, a former journalist with the Financial Times, is a Baker fellow and director of the Gulf and Energy Policy Program at The Washington Institute. The following is a rapporteur's summary of their remarks.

MICHAEL MAKOVSKY

On November 2, 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, a classified statement of support for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Britain was an unlikely sponsor of the Zionist initiative, considering that it was the first European country to expel its Jewish population in 1290, and that it did not grant full political emancipation to Jews until 1871. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, British evangelicals began supporting the idea of a Jewish homeland because the "second coming" could occur only after the Jews had returned to the Holy Land. The idea came under serious government consideration during World War I because of exaggerated ideas about Jewish influence in Western societies (including the United States) and the availability of captured Ottoman territory (the British seizure of Jerusalem on December 9, 1917, greatly bolstered this support).

Winston Churchill's policies with regard to the Balfour Declaration provide a good starting point from which to understand British policy in the Middle East. Before World War I, he was drawn to the romantic notion of a Jewish restoration to the Holy Land. As the war came to an end, however, he opposed partitioning the Ottoman Empire into European mandates, viewing it as a means of countering the rising power of Soviet Russia even in defeat. And in 1921, using his authority as secretary of state for the colonies, he designated three-fourths of Palestine as a kingdom for Abdullah, the Hashemite prince who had fought alongside T. E. Lawrence -- who Churchill greatly admired.

 When Churchill traveled to Cairo that year to formalize an agreement, however, he changed his favorable opinion of the Arabs and came to regard the Jewish people as collaborators in the mission to civilize the world. At that time, he became an avid Zionist and remained one for the rest of his life.

For much of the 1930s, subsequent British administrations discouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine, and Churchill himself was preoccupied with the Nazis, Italy's political alignment, and the deterioration of the British Empire. Nevertheless, he supported Zionism and equated appeasing the Arabs in Palestine with the appeasement of Hitler. In 1940, as prime minister, he encouraged Jewish emigration to Palestine and armed Jewish groups to defend themselves against Arab fighters. He worked diligently on a postwar settlement that would create a Jewish state by force, if necessary, but failed because of the opposition of the Saudi king and President Franklin Roosevelt. Once Churchill left office in 1945, the British government reverted to a strongly anti-Zionist, pro-Arab stance, despite its shared socialist orientation with Zionism.

After Israel's war of independence, Churchill announced that the country's creation was a great event in world history. Upon reassuming power in 1951, he tried to bring British foreign policy more in line with supporting the interests of the new Jewish state.

GERARD BAKER

According to a 2005 poll conducted by the Daily Telegraph, British citizens view Israel as one of the countries most threatening to world peace, one of the least desirable places to visit or live, and -- in what is a truly remarkable evaluation -- one of the world's least democratic states. Even Britain's largest university teachers' union recently voted to boycott relations with Israeli universities. Given these trends, one has to wonder why both the intellectual elite and the broader English population have such deeply entrenched anti-Israeli views.

One reason could be the ninety-year decline of modern British Christianity, a religious strand sympathetic to Zionism. Another possible reason is the slant of British media. The BBC, which plays an extraordinary role in shaping British elite and popular opinion, is profoundly anti-Zionist. At times, BBC coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes the network appear to be an apologist for Palestinian suicide bombers. Sympathy for Israel certainly declined after 1967, when the image of persecuted Jews gave way to the image of persecuting Israelis. The conflicts in 1973 and 1982 further affected British public opinion, but the Lebanon war in 2006 did more than any previous development to tilt British opinion in favor of the Palestinians and against Israel.

Despite increasingly vehement anti-Zionist sentiment at home, British policy in the Middle East has not changed to reflect public opinion. At the political level, despite clear changes in the increasingly anti-Zionist Labour government, Britain remains undeniably pro-Jewish. Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, and now Gordon Brown have been steadfastly supportive of Israel. But in any democratic government, policy will almost always be aligned with public opinion in the long run. Paradoxically enough, the British public -- which has tended to support the Palestinians following past suicide attacks against Israelis -- has become less hostile toward Israel amid the recent decrease in such attacks.

Gordon Brown is personally pro-Jewish, religious, and committed to working with the United States and Israel. Despite a strong first three months in office, however, his recent apparent weakness -- revealed when he retracted his decision to hold early elections when it appeared his party would not prevail -- has cost him public support. Brown is now prey to the media and public opinion, while Blair's continued presence as a public figure limits his options.

SIMON HENDERSON

In the 1960s, many English students traveled to Israel to volunteer at kibbutzim. Today, their counterparts are more likely to volunteer for Palestinian causes. Indeed, there has been a clear shift away from the Britain that backed the Balfour Declaration to a Britain that is wary of Zionism.
Prime Minister Brown is considered a leader who acts on opinion polls, not convictions.

 Nevertheless, he has publicly declared that Israel will always be Britain's ally, and he expressed revulsion at the academic boycott of Israeli universities. At the same time, the website of the British Foreign Office contains no significant mention of the Balfour Declaration, and very little mention of Arthur James Balfour himself. The prime minister's website, however, has a whole page on Balfour.
Zionism has become a dirty word in Britain. No member of the British royal family has ever officially visited Israel. British relations with Israel have never been good, and now are uncomfortable. And there is a widespread perception among Britons that it is possible to be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic. Clearly, the relationship between Britain and Zionism remains, at best, ambiguous.

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CounterPunch
Israel's Dangerous Shell Game

The Real Nuclear Threat in the Middle East

by SHELDON RICHMAN 
To get a sense of how badly the regime in Iran wants sanctions relief for the Iranian people, you have to do more than contemplate the major concessions it has made in negotiations with the United States and the rest of the P5+1. Not only is Iran willing to dismantle a major part of its peaceful civilian nuclear program, to submit to the most intrusive inspects, to redesign a reactor, to eliminate two-thirds of its centrifuges, to get rid of much of its enriched uranium, and to limit nuclear research — it must do all this while being harangued by the nuclear monopolist of the Middle EastIsrael — which remains, unlike Iran, a nonsigner of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and faces no inspections or limits on its production of nuclear weapons.

This is something out of Alice in Wonderland. The Islamic Republic of Iran, born in 1979, has not attacked another country. (With U.S. help, Iraq attacked Iran in 1980.) In contrast, Israel has attacked its Arab neighbors several times its founding, including two devastating invasions and a long occupation of Lebanon, not to mention repeated onslaughts in the Gaza Strip and the military occupation of the West Bank. Israel has also repeatedly threatened war against Iran and engaged in covert and proxy warfare, including the assassination of scientists. Even with Iran progressing toward a nuclear agreement, Israel (like the United States) continues to threaten Iran.

Yet Iran is universally cast as the villain (with scant evidence) and Israel the vulnerable victim.
You’d never know that Iran favors turning the Middle East into a weapons-of-mass-destruction-free zone (a nuclear-weapons-free zone was first proposed by the U.S.-allied shah of Iran and Egypt in 1974), and beyond that, Iran over a decade ago offered a “grand bargain” that contained provisions to reassure the world about its nuclear program and an offer to recognize Israel, specifically, acceptance of the Arab League’s 2002 peace initiative. The George W. Bush administration rebuffed Iran.

At the last NPT review conference in 2010, Iran renewed its support for the zone, the BBC reported at the time: “Tehran supports the ‘immediate and unconditional’ implementation of the 1995 resolution [to create the zone], declares the [then] president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”

The United States and Israel claim in principle to support having the Middle East free of nuclear weapons — but not just yet. The Israeli government said in 2010 that implementation of the principle could occur “only after peace agreements with all the countries in the region.” ABC News quoted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as saying that Israel might sign the NPT “if the Middle East one day advances to a messianic age where the lion lies down with the lambs.”

That is classic Netanyahu demagoguery. As noted, the Arab League in 2002 — and again in 2007offered to recognize Israel if it accepted a Palestinian state in the occupied territories and arrived at a “just solution to the Palestinian Refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.” At that point the Arab countries would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region”; i.e., they would “establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.”

Thus Netanyahu’s position is a sham. He could have peace treaties in short order if he wanted to. But, as he said before the recent elections, he will never allow the Palestinians to have their own country.
For its part, the United States “broadly agrees with Israel that conditions for a nuclear-weapons-free-zone do not yet exist in the Middle East,” the BBC reported. In other words, the Obama administration slavishly takes the Israel-AIPAC line.

While politicians and pundits lose sleep over an Iranian nuclear-weapons program that does not exist — are they having nightmares of the United States being deterred by Iran? — they support Israel, the nuclear power that brutalizes a captive population, attacks its neighbors, threatens war against Iran, and refuses to talk peace with willing partners.

Sheldon Richman keeps the blog “Free Association” and is a senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society.

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Shlomo Sand Books: The Invention of the Jewish People
                                  The Invention of the Land of Israel
                                  How I stopped being a Jew 

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There is still a great deal more that has to be filled in in this story of disaster in Palestine and the middle east, but the end needs to be about the subject matter of the heading: Jake Lynch, Nick Riemer, University of Sydney, Zionism.

Not that long ago there were conspiracy theorists who, combined with their anti-semitism, declared the  Jews had taken over the world or were busy taking over the world, and discussions along those lines.

What has happened with zionists around the world?

Universities - once those great seats of learning and open thought processes - now sack academics who are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and do their best to provide information to the world at large as to what apartheid zionist Israel is doing to cause the genocide of the Palestinians. Campaigns are launched to silence the voices of dissent and anybody who breaks ranks is anti-semitic and worse - such as self-hating Jews and other choice epithets. "Universities" in countries all over the world include zionist controls in France, Spain, UK, USA, Australia, South Africa and many others. Insidious zionist propaganda suggests that supporters of a free Palestine are anti-semitic and placing Jews around the world at risk of verbal and physical abuse and worse. This pernicious campaign is waged from Israel with the idea that all Jews around the world will be intimidated and leave theeir country of domicile and move to Israel!!

All of this is part of the zionist activities around the world supported by so many of our governments whose ultimate goals themselves re to get rid of the Jews and pack them off to Israel, whether they want to or not.

World powers, large and small, have pinned their colours to the mast of zionism and Israel and to say otherwise is being the traitor and must be dealt with accordingly.

Enter Jake Lynch and Nick Riemer - some of the Australians caught in the maelstrom of zionist politics.

What has been happening with them - and others of their persuasions and beliefs - shows the forces at play by zionists - Jewish, Christian and other denominations - who believe that Israel - the "only democracy in the middle east" - must exist as a homeland for all Jews throughout the world. Anti-semitism - propagated and assisted and spouted by Israeli governments - will assist Jews to move to Israel permanently as life becomes untenable in their homelands.

The main problem with this is that half the world's very small Jewish population of about 13 million stays where it is in countries scattered around the globe and do NOT want to move to Israel!  My belief continues to be that the British christians who started in all in the mid-19th century saw it as a way to solve the Jewish question by getting them out of Britain and Europe permanently and into Palestine which really did not belong to any of them to dispose of as they wished - but no matter, they did it anyway!

Jake Lynch and Nick Riemer, amongst many hundreds of others, have got in the way - free Palestine and human rights for all in middle eastern and other countries - not to be considered under any circumstances - it is all anti-semitism writ large!

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90 years old, political gay activist, hosting two web sites, one personal: http://www.red-jos.net one shared with my partner, 94-year-old Ken Lovett: http://www.josken.net and also this blog. The blog now has an alphabetical index: http://www.red-jos.net/alpha3.htm

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