“Cursed is one who kills his neighbor…Let all the people reply, ‘Amen!'” Deut. 27:24
It’s time…
…for the world to rise up, especially Christians, and recognize what Israel is and stands for.
…for the World and the Church to BOYCOTT the Apartheid genocidal criminal state of Israel, a country that is the epitome of the anti-Christ spirit of Hate Thy Neighbor.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! The demonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people must end.
Everyone must follow the examples below of the fearless Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett (tweet posted by the brave Roger Waters of Pink Floyd), the valiant Mark Ruffalo, star of Avengers’ Bruce Banner/Hulk, the ever beautifully courageous supermodels Gigi and Bella Hadid, the indomitable Richard Gere, and the talentedly intrepid Dua Lipa. It’s time to shout the truth from the rooftops, and then start acting on those words.
Below are some excellent posts to shed insight on the matter of Defending Palestine.
“Death To Arabs!”: Who’s Defending Palestinians From Jewish Pogrom Mobs and Occupation Forces?
Killing Gaza
In the feature-length documentary film “Killing Gaza,” journalists Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal documented Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza. Yet this film is much more than a documentary about Palestinian resilience and suffering.
It is a chilling visual document of war crimes committed by the Israeli military, featuring direct testimony and evidence from the survivors.
“Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen’s powerful new film, ‘Killing Gaza,’ offers an unflinching and moving portrait of a people largely abandoned by the outside world, struggling to endure.” -Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, best-selling author and activist Chris Hedges.
(To see the translations of the Arabic-language interviews, turn on the CC captions.)
This Must End
Open letter from the director of Gaza Community Mental Health Programme
I am writing this letter looking at my terrified 6-year-old son, who keeps putting his hands over his ears trying block the sounds of Israel’s bombardment, my two daughters, aged 13 and 10 and my wife. These faces show the anxiety of not knowing where they can be safe now. My two older sons, 16 and 15, sit stunned and silent and I know they are reliving the memories of the previous three offensives on Gaza Strip and the family members we lost. These are the feelings that every family in the Gaza Strip are living through.
We Palestinians have lived decades of humiliation, injustices, and maltreatment. In 1948, we were expelled from our land; over 600 villages were fully destroyed; hundreds of thousands of us were killed or uprooted. Nearly eight hundred thousand ended up living as refugees in different places around the globe.
This happened under the eyes of the International Community, who have promised us, a sovereign State over about one fifth of our original homeland. That decision was only accepted in the 1990s by Palestinians believing in a two-state solution.
Twenty-six years later, we look at the conditions in the promised State of Palestine and we see a West Bank divided and occupied by hundreds of thousands of settlers living in settlements built on the rubble of Palestinian homes, and who are making the lives of the Palestinian people a living hell.
We see the Gaza Strip under blockade for more than 14 years, leaving us deprived of basic living conditions. Not only that, but having suffered three large offensives in this small area which killed, destroyed and traumatized thousands of our people.
And we see East Jerusalem, with its holiest sites for Muslims and Christians alike continuing to be under constant threat as settlers take over Palestinian homes and neighborhoods.
A week ago, Israeli settlers started to attack Sheikh Jarrah trying to seize more homes of Palestinian families. Everyone saw it. No one intervened.
In one of the holiest Ramadan evenings, Israel decided to evict tens of thousands of worshipers who were just praying at Al-Aqsa. These were mostly Palestinians who live in Palestine ’48 – now Israel. Everyone saw the brutal use of military power by Israel. No one intervened.
The violent scenes in Sheikh Jarrah and the Al-Aqsa compound have lit a fire in Palestinian hearts not only in historic Palestine, but also everywhere in the world.
While we demonstrated in Akka, Jafa, Nazareth and the West Bank, rockets were fired from Gaza demanding an end to the atrocities in Jerusalem.
The Israeli army response was to attack Gaza with even more violence than in the terrible days of previous offensives. This time causing the deaths of more than 80 people including 17 children and 7 women. Bombardments hit tower blocks, apartments, governmental and police buildings and even whole streets. Everyone is seeing it. No one intervenes.
How long will the world just sit idly by while we here in Gaza suffer like this? The people of Gaza need more than just statements and resolutions, while Israel receives the arms which are killing and terrorizing us.
I am a father first and a psychiatrist second. My dream is for my children to live, to grow, to learn, in safety. This is the same dream as that of every one of the clients I see. There will be more of them today, and tomorrow. It is my job to give hope. I will tell them what I tell my children and my wife. “Because this injustice for Palestinians has gone on for seven decades, that does not make it normal. The world is increasingly full of people who do not accept it is normal. There will be change.”
Concrete political action is needed NOW to end not only the current deathly bombing raids, but also this illegal occupation and siege of Gaza by Israel, immediately.
Our current living conditions under the siege are an affront to human dignity. I tell my children and my clients, “we Palestinians have the right to live as any other people in the world: to live in peace, in dignity and to enjoy our rights. It will come.”
The International Community MUST NOW fulfil its promise of a sovereign Palestinian state. Respect for international law demands that every civilized country must recognize the State of Palestine now.
After more than seven decades of occupation and misery, we remain resilient and will never give up. But there is no father who can bear to see his children live like this.
Israel’s Illusion of Normality Collapses
For decades Israelis have basked in the light of success. After fifty years of brutal, illegal occupation and control of the whole of Palestine, they have managed to habituate the world to the realities of Israeli Apartheid. They even started believing that they have managed to get the Palestinians to accept such success. Israel was gearing up to welcome many tourists in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis in Europe and elsewhere, being one of the only countries which have managed to control the virus successfully. Israel may not have a properly elected government for the last 28 months, its Prime Minister is facing criminal charges in court, and the ICC is preparing its case against Israeli war crimes, but none of this stopped Israel from committing more war crimes daily.
Israelis lived under – or upon – a volcano, believing themselves to be immune from standard legal and societal norms. Their control of over six million Palestinians seems to be safe from intervention, criticism or challenge. They believed the Palestinians have been completely neutralized by their new reproachment with the Gulf dictatorships.
May 2021 has shattered such bizarre illusions.
Having succeeded in controlling the COVID-19 virus, the government returned with energy to the main task, as seen by most political parties in Israel – control of Palestine. The front is ranging across all sectors of society. The main task is not new – freeing the land of its indigenous people, removing Palestinians from their houses, fields, towns and villages – moving towards an Arabrein Israel in the whole of Palestine, through far-reaching racist legislation such as the new Nation State Law. From a de facto racist state, Israel has become an Apartheid state de jure.
This is not a simple project, but Israel has a long history in perfecting the methods of ethnic cleansing – much longer than the history of the state. For over a hundred years the task of clearing Palestine of its people has had the support of the west – the strongest entities on the planet have protected the Zionist project since 1917 and the Balfour Declaration, and continue to do so – without qualifications, legal or moral boundaries or standards of behavior. With such staunch support for illegality Israel is guaranteed success.
Palestinians evicted out of their homes in 1948 by Fake Hebrew Terrorists: nothing has changed since it’s still happening
The three decades of British control over Palestine have imported methods of dispossession developed in Northern Ireland, employed in the country by the Black and Tans – the volunteer force supporting the British police and army in Ireland during its struggle for independence. The brutality they affected in Ireland was soon to be used in Palestine as many were sent there by Winston Churchill in 1922, to serve under the famously vicious ex-RIC commander, Henry Hugh Tudor, who became the chief of the Palestine Police Force. The racism practiced against Catholics in Ireland, has become even more virulent against the Palestine Arabs. During the Mandate years British support of the settler-Colonial project of Zionism was crucial in building a base – military, social, financial and industrial – for the future Israel. The brutal methods of the PPF and the British Army which supported it during the suppression of the Palestine Arab Rebellion 1936-39 have become the stock-in-trade of the Zionist militias, forerunners of the IDF, only to be further perfected and amplified after 1948. Israel has become “a little loyal Jewish Ulster,” in the Middle East, in the words of Sir Ronald Storrs, first Military Governor of Jerusalem; This Little Ulster proved to be much nastier and more powerful than Ulster ever was.
Palestinian refugees whose homes got stolen by Jews in 1948
The war in 1948 was almost successful in offering Zionism most of Palestine – 78% of the country. Many in Israel considered it unfinished business – the rest of the country had to be taken over, they believed, like Ben-Gurion, Israel founding father and first Premier. In a letter to his son, on October 1937, he explains: “My assumption (which is why I am a fervent proponent of a state, even though it is now linked to partition) is that a Jewish state on only part of the land is not the end but the beginning.” What could not be achieved in 1948, will have to be done later. And it was.
En route to occupying the whole country in 1967, Israel has changed partners from the decrepit British empire to the French ‘colonial democracy’ ending up in De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic. France has not only armed Israel, but also enabled its nuclear military option, pushing the Palestine conflict into new, uncharted territory. Israel paid back by joining the two colonial empires, Britain and France, in an illegal and outrageous attack on Egypt in 1956. This act of naked, unjustified aggression has clarified the long terms aims of Israel. Israel behaved like a foreign settler colony ever since its establishment, and since 1967 this has been the permanent modus operandi of all Israeli governments.
For over five decades, Israel has denied all rights to the Palestinians under its control, has stolen most of their resources – agricultural land, water and forced taxation which serves only the occupier. Tens of thousands of houses were destroyed, millions of trees were burnt or uprooted, tens of thousands of Palestinians were jailed for trumped-up charges, including thousands of children, and more than 15 thousand innocent Palestinians were killed by the IDF. Ambulances and medical teams were shot at and many were killed in the act of offering medical assistance. Schools and Universities were forced to close for years, and the vulnerable infrastructure of communication, water, health, education, electricity, roads, industry and food production and distribution were destroyed time and again in periodic attacks on Gaza and the West Bank, as well as those of Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. Over 250,000 Palestinians were expelled in the aftermath of the war in 1967, and a similar number had left their land since as a result of other war crimes which made their lives insufferable. Human Rights Watch has pointed out the facts of Israel’s decades of occupation in a major report in 2019. Even the UN, so careful not to invoke Israel’s ire, has finally given up the pretense, in a report published recently. It is now official – Israel is an Apartheid state committing periodic and continuous war crimes.
None of these crimes could have taken place without the active support of the US, the European Union, the UK, Canada and Australia, who have provided Israel with a diplomatic umbrella at the UN, and made it impossible to pursue the peaceful option used in the case of Apartheid South Africa – Boycott, Divestment and Sanction against Israeli Apartheid, illegal occupation and war crimes over more than seven decades. You may wish to put BDS into a search engine, only to find that the official sites of such organizations are blocked for users. It does not take a genius to work out who is responsible for such a digital hacking of the campaign.
Every time Israel forces the situation into an explosive juncture, the US and its allies are insisting on Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’, as if destroying Gaza or Beirut is a form of defense, or as if the denial of rights, and imposing an illegal total blockage is a way of resolving conflict. Not once did the western nations mention the right of Palestinians to defend themselves – apparently, they have no such right, as far as such ‘democratic’ nations are concerned. They also lack human rights of all kinds – the rights for self-determination, for living in peace, owning property, education, health or employment. Palestinians have no political rights, the right to be free of occupation and oppression – all rights invoked on behalf of other nations the west purports to support, such as the Ukraine.
Indiscriminate bombing of Gaza
What we are now witnessing is far more serious than the two intifadas and the attacks on Gaza – it is typified by the coming together of Palestinians on both sides of the erased Green Line – erased by Israel. Israel has started a fire it may not be able to extinguish. Palestinians in Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh, Haifa, Nazareth, Acre and of course in Jerusalem and Gaza, are rising against the racist, brutal and unjust settler-colonial society which has destroyed their life for over a century, ever since the start of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Israeli society has never been more conceited, racist and nationalist than in the last decade under Netanyahu. The four years of the Trump administration have greatly contributed to the illusion of total impunity, and the government has increased the tempo of land confiscation, illegal destruction of houses, and settlement building, proving that they intend to squeeze out as many Palestinians out of their country, and make the life of the remaining ones so impossible that they will leave to wherever they may be able to. The process is over a century long, and succeeded in granting Israel total control over the whole of Palestine, so why doubt its further success? Israelis, of left, right and center, do not doubt that they can continue to oppress and suppress Palestinians with impunity.
But now the streets are burning. Palestinians – those with the few rights still conferred on them by Israel, or their brothers and sisters in the ‘occupied territories’ (all of Palestine is occupied) who lack any form of rights, are now acting together against the atrocities of Israeli colonial control. What have they got to lose? Only their lives; and their lives are not safe under Israeli rule, for sure. They have had enough, much more than enough, for many generations, and those who advised them to wait, were false messiahs and snake-oil merchants.
Let us consider the dangers of this new, unprecedented situation. The so-called international community, weak and powerless at the best of times, is now less inclined than ever to move towards a just solution in Palestine, by applying sanctions against Israel. The Arab regimes of all colors are in a crisis of identity, embroiled in colonial wars started by the west – in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, and most have signed up to the Trump New World Order deal with Israel, taking themselves out of the conflict and away from any support of the Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority – a creature of Israel and an arm of its control – has cancelled the first elections called since 2006, as we knew they would, under Israeli pressure. One of the ‘Arab’ parties in Israel, Ra’am, has been in talks with both sides of the political divide, prepared to work with either in defiance of the Palestinian public sentiment; This at least had collapsed within days of the Jerusalem attacks, and may lead to a more united Palestinian front. Palestinians have been abandoned by the west, by the Arabs, by Israeli liberals, and by liberals the world over. This realization is dangerous – for Palestinians and Israelis alike; dangerous times call for desperate measures.
We know that Israel has been preparing for many years for a window of political opportunity – a historical juncture which will enable it to vacate Palestine of most of its remaining indigenous population. All governments in the west have proved their fickle credentials on Palestinian rights in the last couple of decades. Israel is safe in presuming international lack of political will to intervene in case of further war crimes. The temptation may prove too much for Netanyahu – the choice between jail and becoming the national hero of racist Israelis through further ethnic cleansing is simple to work out. He will certainly be supported in any attack by his many political rivals, who are vying with him in aggressive utterances. The fire is now well lit, and will consume many innocents. Some Israelis are arguing that he only does this to stay in power, as if this explains it away.
What more is needed for an urgent, principled political intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, forcing Israel into a just peace in the Middle East? What more is required to prevent an endless series of communal massacres, war crimes and forced expulsions? Is this crisis beyond the ken and the will of the world community, tired and beaten as it is by the health crisis? Must we stand aside while Israel ignites the Middle East?
One certainly hopes this is not the case.
Palestine Has The Right To Defend Itself
We have entered a new era in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The old days of Israel committing war crimes against the downtrodden, captive Palestinians are over. The world has done zero to address Israel’s fundamental crime of nation-stealing: a megalith crime that can only be described as the longest and most vicious war crime in our modern history. A crime that millions of people around the world consider to be even worse than the holocaust. After some 73 years of enduring relentless Israeli terrorism, land-theft, cultural appropriation AND the silence of the world, the Palestinian Resistance has finally taken charge and has, literally overnight, turned the tables against Israel. From here on, there will be accountability for Israel for any crime it commits against the Palestinians. From here on, all previous Israeli red lines will be crossed in favor of the Palestinians. From here on, the death of Israel is no longer a far-fetched fantasy. From here on, the Palestinian Resistance will take charge of Palestine’s destiny. And its destiny is total liberation.
Whether this liberation takes place in a day, in a week, in a month or a year, the gates of liberation are now open, and nobody on earth can close them.
The situation in the holy land is currently fluid – rocket and missile strikes continue by both sides with no end in sight as I write this. There is no point in talking casualties and targets in this article as this is not a journalistic report but a brief look at America’s strategy in the Middle East.
The pertinent question here is: with Israel’s hegemony being in an evident state of profound decline, will the US drop Israel in order to preserve its remaining influence in the Middle East? Or, will it stick to a weak and dying Israel and thus be evicted from the region with it? We know that both China and Russia are waiting on the sidelines for an opportunity to snatch America’s influence in the Mideast region. There will not be a vacuum left once Israel falls and takes the US down with it. China and Russia will collect the prize and immediately fill in the vacuum. Begs the question here therefore: is America prepared to lose to China and Russia just to appease a limping Israel?
Simply: what is more important for America: maintaining its own superpowerdom, or supporting Israel indefinitely and unconditionally?
This is a serious strategic conundrum for the current US’s State Department, for the Pentagon and the Deep State, not to mention the White House as well, and mindful here that all these high offices in DC are infiltrated and already controlled by AIPACers and by Jewish power. With the Palestinian cause now being globally more popular than ever, and with the Palestinian Resistance now being an offensive-and-defensive power to reckon with, the oft repeated undemocratic and nauseating American phrase of ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’ is now transforming into ‘Palestine has the right to defend itself’.
Indeed, any fair-minded person would support an occupied people’s right to self-defense. Apropos, any justice-loving person would support the slogan of ‘Palestine has the right to defend itself’.
The history of America’s total and unconditional support for the state of Israel goes back to the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. There was support for Israel before then, but not unconditionally and not fanatically so. For some 58 years now, American administration after American administration has favored Israel above any other nation in the world, especially above all other nations in the Mideast. It justified this blind support by using warmongering Israel as both a showroom to exhibit and sell its arms from, as well as an attack dog that fights against Arab nationalism that back in the day was aligned with the Soviet Union. Not forgetting here that American Jews of Hollywood also manufactured a ‘moral’ reason for America’s support of the Jewish state by pitting America as the absolute hero and savior of Jews from the holocaust, even though US forces entered WW2 belatedly, and did so under dubious circumstance, I may add.
But the above three main reasons are no longer valid this side of the 21st century. Let us inspect them one by one.
FIRST, Israel as the American MIC showroom is no longer effective and profitable, and this is because, despite Israel having the most advanced American weapons in the region, it has not actually won a single war since 1973 – and even that war was won by a hairline when the West came to rescue Israel at the 11th hour. We can say here that the supermodel has aged and her chin is too cracked to sell beauty products. Sales of American weapons in the Middle East are no longer dependent on Israel’s so-called war heroism and victories, but on inter-Arab fighting that’s instigated and incited by a treacherous, jingoistic Israel. Experts on Arab history will tell you that Arab tribes are stuck in a make-war-then-make-peace cycle, and not in a permanent make-eternal-war posture, as indeed Israel’s State motto appears to be. We see evidence of this historians’ view today with the current rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia. After a decade of hostility and head-chopping warfare between them, these two Arab enemies are now making a concreted effort towards genuine peace. So if Saudi Arabia is no longer needing to buy billions of dollar’s worth of US weapons per year to defend itself with, and when Riyadh is also simultaneously offering peace concessions to Iran as well, can MIC rely on Saudi Arabian patronage like it used to? There are simply no more big wars between Arab-on-Arab and Arab-on-Iranian to be had in the foreseeable future. These projects have already been tried and attempted and dropped, and so all possible lucrative weapons contracts no longer exist. For MIC, as well as for any other mega corporation, it’s the ‘bottom line’ that decides all at the end of the day. Clearly, MIC can no longer rely on either Israel’s war victories, or on its insidious war-brokerage for its lucrative annual profits. MIC is presently looking eastwards to make its future profits. The Middle East has been milked dry right to the last drop. The MIC reason for supporting the Jewish state therefore is no longer valid.
SECONDLY, as we all already know, the Soviet Union has long gone and a Russian Republic has assumed its place. Arab nationalism too has also transformed into something more fluent and nifty, otherwise now known as ‘The Resistance’. Resistance against Israel and its Apartheid practices, that is. Resistance against Jewish supremacy and racist Zionism. The Arab Resistance today is enjoying more popularity than ever, despite the spinelessness of some Arab leaders, and despite the fake ‘Deal of the Century’ that 4 Arab nations have signed up for – two of them reluctantly so, I may add. Really, the Deal of the Century is seen by Arab citizens as a Jewish-Chabadist scam that collapsed in its infancy with Trump’s failure to secure a second White House term. There are currently several hundred million Arab citizens from all over the Arab world who remain fully committed to the Resistance. Nay, a considerable chunk of them are even ready for martyrdom if it helps aid the Resistance in its war against all occupational forces in the Middle East, starting and ending with the eviction of Zionism and Zionists from the region.
Here, Palestine, actually, more precisely the city of Jerusalem is the ultimate symbol and very location where the enemy must first be confronted. Arab passion for liberating Palestine, and especially the city of Jerusalem is not only a moral, ethical and patriotic issue for them, but first and foremost, it is a collective profundity: a religious duty for the majority of both Christian and Muslim Arabs. No Israeli propaganda or Jewish bribe can dilute or alter this passion for Jerusalem that rattles and keeps growing in the breast of Arab citizenry. The Israelis who first established the state of Israel by force of arms used to confidently say of the Palestinians: “the old will die and the young will soon forget,” meaning: the 1948 Arab generation resisting the initial Jewish invasion will soon die and the next generation will forget their parent’s cause. Evidently, the Jews here gravely miscalculated: no such thing ever transpired. New generations of Palestinians born from 1948 and onward only got more resistant, more resilient, more motivated and more attached to their land that was usurped by the invading Jews of Europe. No Palestinian ‘forgot’ their parental trauma – how on earth could they when daily Israeli brutality was heaped upon them, thus reminding them daily of their parent’s agony and catastrophe? Nobody forgot the ethnic cleansing, the numerous massacres and the injustice committed against their parents by racist European Jews. The current eruption of violence between Israel and the Gaza Resistors, who only two nights ago bombarded Tel Aviv with endless streams of rockets like never before, while simultaneously, literally all Palestinians living inside of Israel proper or under Israeli occupation took to the streets in raging protest: all this is notable and loaded with electric shocks. Here we see a new optic and we understand from it a new reality: the whole of Palestinian society, though divided by Apartheid walls and territorial fragmentation imposed by Israel, are currently united in simultaneous rage and cries for freedom, cries for resistance, despite Israel having for decades created political divisions between them. This current and united military and civic Palestinian resistance is a testament to the facts stated above. Palestine lives! It has not ‘forgotten’, or been forgotten. Yes, the Palestinian individual and collective memory is irrepressible and indelible. Only true justice will dull down this impossibly painful memory: this 73 year old nightmare that the Jews have inflicted on the native Palestinians. The Palestinians being mostly capitalist traders have not aligned with any old-school Soviet nation or leaders for material protection or for economics: the Palestinian Authority under Abbas has been nothing but 100% compliant with Western wishes and instruction. For decades now Palestine has been aligned with and reliant on Western material charity and aid, despite the West’s blatant support for their Jewish occupiers. This excuse of support for Israel being due to Arab alignment with Soviet Russia is now completely and absolutely moot. Anyone, be they a politician or a propagandist citing the ‘Soviets’ as reason for supporting Israel should be laughed right off the stage.
This leaves the THIRD justification of ‘America the good guy saved the victim Jews from Nazi Germany’ to dissect. Without getting into the finer, historic details of WW2, suffice it to say here that the Arabs are a completely different people than the Germans, and their struggle with the Jewish state is based on Israel’s occupation of Arab land and not on belief in the Nazi manifesto. Furthermore, Israel is a wealthy nation who is in possession of actual nuclear weapons, therefore it cannot possibly be categorized as a ‘victim’ in the context of the Arab-Israeli struggle. In America, it is basically Hollywood and the Christian-Zionist community who carry the majority of genuine support for Israel. Most of the Senate and Congress are corrupt and support Israel because of bribes, blackmail, or coercion, therefore their support cannot be considered as genuine. Currently, Hollywood is hemorrhaging influence and power, just like Israel is, and can presently exert but little influence over the American psyche. And the Christian-Zionists remain an enclaved minority with influence only within their own communities: outside of their communities, they are disrespected and referred to as ‘Jesus freaks’ by the rest of the American populace. Everyone is allowed to believe what they want, but issues of belief do not the decision-making for Empire make. Empire, in order to survive must make decisions that are steeped in cold pragmatism and based on security and prosperity interests, not on ethereal ideology or group superstition, especially minority group superstition. Empire has no permanent friends or permanent enemies. Its powers are drawn, above all, from its ability to make stable, long-term decisions that propagate its longevity. Whether American troops saved the Jews or not is now beside the point. The crux of the matter is that Empire now finds itself supporting a dying horse in the guise of Israel and there is no more medicine to be found for the horse. As any sound rancher would tell you: stop the hugging and start digging a grave for your four-legged pal. If Americans really believe that they are ‘the good guy’, then they should start acting like it and start making funeral arrangements for Israel before its dead belly bloats and festers in the sun.
To those who still believe that Israel is almighty powerful and doubt that Israel’s end is approaching, I say the following: you are reading Jewish and Jewish-centric media where nothing is real.
Considering the intractable, negative military position that Israel finds itself in today: surrounded by an armed and capable, eclectic Axis of Resistance without, and infiltrated by an armed and capable Palestinian resistance within, no US weapon can now provide it with a certain measure of security. Politically speaking, Israel is in its worst domestic crisis ever: with four failed elections and a fifth one on the way inside of two years, incendiary and divisive rhetoric between all Jewish parties is the current zeitgeist and order of the day.
The West can believe it or not, but in the Levant, the latest rocket and strike exchanges between Israel and the Palestinian Resistance – a combat that finds the Palestinian Resistance crossing all previous Israeli-imposed red lines; a combat that the Palestinian Resistance is utilizing to establish a deterrence against ongoing Israeli crimes of ethnic cleaning and home-evictions – the view is crisp and clear: Israel is at its weakest ever, and the Axis of Resistance is stronger than ever, therefore Israel’s grim reaper is in sight.
Israel’s death is now a fait accompli, a foregone conclusion.
But even if readers are still unconvinced by this Levantian reality and facts on the ground, for the sake of wisdom and the future stability of Empire, it still behooves all Americans to now openly discuss the pros and cons of supporting the dying Israel project. This open soul-searching should be solely focused on this question: do all humans have the right to defend themselves, or only some of us have this inalienable right?
My personal answer to this question is obvious. Everyone has the right to defend themselves against harm. Impossible therefore to deny the occupied Palestinians their right to self-defense.
Yes. Palestine has the right to defend itself.
Either that, or enjoy living in your Animal Farm.
Palestinian Refugees Deserve To Return Home. Jews Should Understand.
Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.
The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during Israel’s founding. It can also evoke the many expulsions that have occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.
Among Palestinians, Nakba is a household word. But for Jews — even many liberal Jews in Israel, America and around the world — the Nakba is hard to discuss because it is inextricably bound up with Israel’s creation. Without the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, Zionist leaders would have had neither the land nor the large Jewish majority necessary to create a viable Jewish state. As I discuss at greater length in an essay for Jewish Currents from which this guest essay is adapted, acknowledging and beginning to remedy that expulsion — by allowing Palestinian refugees to return — requires imagining a different kind of country, where Palestinians are considered equal citizens, not a demographic threat.
To avoid this reckoning, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies insist that Palestinian refugees abandon hope of returning to their homeland. This demand is drenched in irony, because no people in human history have clung as stubbornly to the dream of return as have Jews. Establishment Jewish leaders denounce the fact that Palestinians pass down their identity as refugees to their children and grandchildren. But Jews have passed down our identity as refugees for generations. In our holidays and liturgy we continually mourn our expulsion and express our yearning for return. “After being forcibly exiled from their land,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion.” If keeping faith that exile can be overcome is sacred to Jews, how can we condemn Palestinians for doing the same thing?
In addition to telling Palestinians they cannot go home because they have been away too long, Jewish leaders argue that return is impractical. But this too is deeply ironic because, as a refugee rights advocate, Lubnah Shomali, has pointed out, “If any state is an expert in receiving masses and masses of people and settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.” At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, Israel took in about 500,000 immigrants. If millions of diaspora Jews began moving to Israel tomorrow, Jewish leaders would not say taking them in was logistically impossible. They would help Israel to do what it has done before: build large amounts of housing fast.
When most Jews imagine Palestinian refugees’ return, they probably don’t envision it looking like Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they predict Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. But the tragic reality is that not many Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since it is believed that only a few thousand remain intact. Ms. Shomali estimates that more than 70 percent of Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. And the Palestinian activists and scholars who envision return generally argue that large-scale eviction is neither necessary, nor desirable. Asked in 2000 about Jews living in formerly Palestinian homes, the famed Palestinian literary critic Edward Said declared that he was “averse to the notion of people leaving their homes” and that “some humane and moderate solution should be found where the claims of the present and the claims of the past are addressed.”
None of this means refugee return would be simple or uncontested. Efforts at historical justice rarely are. But there is a reason the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay on reparations for segregation and slavery with the subprime mortgage crisis that forced many Black Americans into foreclosure in the first decade of the 21st century. The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past. That’s also the lesson of the evictions that have set Israel-Palestine aflame. More than seven decades ago, Palestinians were expelled to create a Jewish state. Now they are being expelled to make Jerusalem a Jewish city. By refusing to face the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies ensure that the Nakba continues.
Perhaps American Jewish leaders fear that facing the crimes committed at Israel’s birth will leave Jews vulnerable. Once the Nakba taboo is lifted, Palestinians will feel emboldened to seek revenge. But more often than not, honestly confronting the past has the opposite effect.
After George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American law professor, wrote about the house in Jerusalem that his grandfather had built and been robbed of, a former Israeli soldier who had lived in it contacted him unexpectedly. “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong, but I participated in it and I cannot deny it,” the former soldier said when they met, and then added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.” Mr. Bisharat later wrote that he was inspired to match the Israeli’s humanity.
“Just that response, writ large, is what awaits Israel if it could bring itself to apologize to the Palestinians,” he wrote. In that moment he saw “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples.”
There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former soldier: “teshuvah.” It is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. That means the return of Palestinian refugees — far from necessitating Jewish exile — could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life.
“The occupier and myself — both of us suffer from exile,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer Jews deny the Nakba, the deeper our moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.
Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter, and is editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a version of this essay appeared.
Palestine Before The Zionists Stole It
By Biblicism Institute
Not one inch of Palestine belongs to the converted Jews of today since they are NOT the Israelites of the Bible.
Israel Has No Right To Exist
Excerpts from an article by The Saker
What the IDF (Israel Defense/Deviant Forces) is very experienced at is terrorizing Palestinian civilians and executing what could be called a slow-motion genocide of the Palestinian people.
The sad and disgusting reality about the Zionist entity (Apartheid Israel) is truly coming out, seeping under the propaganda walls of the (American) Empire, and slowly but inevitably resulting in a common reaction of outrage and utter disgust for what is nothing else but the last officially racist country on the planet, the only country with an open air concentration camp it surrounds on all sides, the only country which truly, openly and sincerely does not give a damn about international law or about the lives of non-Jews (while calling their own lives sacred, of course!).
This is a state which constantly repeats the mantra about the supposedly “sacred” blood of Jews while, at the same time, committing a slow motion (but very real) genocide of the Palestinian people while using non-stop terrorist attacks against any country daring to defy the order of the latest, and hopefully last, wannabe “superior race” in human history. This is also why the “crime of crimes” for politically correct and successfully brainwashed people is to declare that Israel has no right to exist. This is such a major crimethink that I want to conclude by committing it right now and asking others to join me in this “crimethink”!
Israel has no right to exist whatsoever first and foremost because it is an artificial creation of West European imperialist powers. Second, it is a country which has always engaged in atrocities and massive violations of international laws and norms.
Instead, Israel is based on a racist ideology which is, for all practical purpose, indistinguishable from Hitler’s Nazi ideology (both National Socialism and Zionism have the same roots in both time, space and culture, both being products of European secularism and nationalism). For these reasons, Israel, and the Zionist ideology which supports it, are both a clear and present danger for international peace and stability (for details on Zionism as an ideology and its toxicity, please see here).
Furthermore, the only possibly way for the Palestinian people to ever recover their land and their rights under international law is for the Zionist “regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” (to quote the often mistranslated sentence by Ayatollah Komenei). By the way, this awareness also presupposes a clear understanding that the so-called “Two State Solution” (2SS) is an impossibility.
In truth, there is only one true “solution” to this war: the so-called “One State Solution”, meaning that those who live in this land will get to choose their leaders and lifestyles according to the old “one person, one vote” principle. All other “solutions” simply perpetuate the current genocide!
As for those Jews who still want an ethnically pure state of Israel, they can either grow up and get real, or they can choose to colonize some other planet. As long as they don’t persecute local lifeforms, that might work. But if they do this will all happen again, over and over.
America On A Leash
When it comes to appeasing Apartheid Israel and genuflecting before the Jews, even when Israel is at its worst criminal self (which is 24-7), there are none better than coward, ass-licking American politicians, followed only by spineless Western European leaders.
But don’t take our word for it. It’s quite easy to witness in the Jewish-controlled MSM their vomit-inducing support for the racist Jewish-only state (i.e., a state where only Jews have full rights), along with the putrefying diatribes of bribed analysts and gutless TV hosts.
Israel: Scourge Of Empires
By Biblicism Institute
America is now infected with all the symptoms of an Empire near collapse – a tumble precipitated by America’s obsession with the needs of the racist Jewish state to reconfigure the Middle East to benefit the Apartheid country. In the process, the US got blindsided while China and Russia became powerhouses themselves, ready to knock the US Empire off its perch. Such happenstance is truly God’s doing to impede the Evil American Empire, as wagged by the Evil State of Israel, to become much worse than it already has.
How To Stop Apartheid Israel
By Ronni Kasrils in South Africa
It is imperative that we of the international community redouble our efforts to aid the Palestinian people in solidarity actions.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign remains the most formidable weapon in our arsenal. It worked to bring about the demise of South African Apartheid behind the internal people’s resistance struggle, and is growing in scope and efficacy, to the extent that Israel has identified the non-violent global movement as a strategic threat. Israel, like apartheid South Africa, must pay for its crimes—above all by sanctions.
We South Africans must continue to urge our Government and the African states, to break off all relations with Apartheid Israel. We must appeal to Africa to reject Israel’s sugar-coated bribes to ensnare them. We must apply full sanctions against the Apartheid state and become an international standard bearer for the Palestinian cause.
South Africa should convene an international conference of solidarity with Palestine aimed at discussing a program of global action by governments, trade unions, and civil society to isolate Israel, strengthen the BDS campaign, end the occupation, lift the siege of Gaza, dismantle the illegal settlements, remove the apartheid wall and separation barriers, ensure the right of return of all refugees, ensure freedom of access to East Jerusalem and the rights of Palestinians residing there, declare equal rights for Palestinians within Israel.
Israeli war criminals must face the International Criminal Court and must pay reparations for all the death and destruction it has caused. Some will laugh because of the impunity in which Israel basks.
What therefore is additionally required is a boycott of USA products, everything from Coca Cola to Caterpillar Tractors, to pressurize the Biden administration and corporate business to end its strategic support for Israel, its $3.8 billion annual blood money of military hardware and aid—together with its diplomatic protection and the emasculation of United Nations resolutions that if implemented could shake Israel’s intransigence to the core.
It is a crime against humanity to allow Israel to continue to crush Palestinian lives. The world must place the USA in the dock alongside Israel, an Apartheid state. We accuse the Western cohort nation states with the same crime of complicity.
South Africans, along with international humanity, raise the battle cry Mayihlome in solidarity with the Palestinian people’s just resistance—our anger rises for the battle. There can be no neutrality in the fight for freedom and justice. A people united will never be defeated.
Palestine will be free from the river to the sea—for all who live there in peace, equality and security.
Zionism’s Endgame Has Begun
Last week the Guardian newspaper in London expressed shame over one of its worst errors of judgment: that in 1917 it supported and facilitated the Balfour Declaration, the imperial document that awarded Jews the “right” to make a homeland in Palestine. This counter-declaration was met with rage by Israel supporters.
And well it should, for it represents another blow to the legitimacy of Zionism in the west. All around us today we hear these blows falling on the central creed of Israel: the supposed right of a Jewish collective to national self-determination in a land populated by others.
I’ll remind you of some of those blows: Human Rights Watch has issued a report saying that Israel is guilty of the crime of “apartheid and persecution” against its Palestinian subjects, and millions of Palestinians have the right to return to the homes from which they were expelled in 1948. The leading human rights group in Israel, B’Tselem, said that Israel is an “apartheid regime” of “Jewish supremacy” from the river to the sea. The Carnegie Endowment has called for America to use pressure for equal rights for all in the land, and an author of that report, Zaha Hassan, echoes the “apartheid” finding. A leading Jewish writer (with AIPAC on his resume), Peter Beinart has thoroughly apostacized in the last year, calling for an end to the two state model and equal rights for all between the river and sea, and in today’s Times Beinart says that Palestinian refugees “deserve to return home.”
The social justice movement that has rocked the United States in the last year is crashing up against the door of apartheid Israel, which of course only gets more rightwing politically. At the J Street conference last month, Isaac Herzog, the head of the Jewish Agency, pleaded with young American Jews not to abandon their state, the Jewish state. But that abandonment is going on before our eyes. You can’t be opposed to white nationalism in the United States and support Jewish nationalism in Israel. Israel’s most effective propagandist in the United States over the last 20 years, Jeffrey Goldberg, has checked out of Hotel Zionism. He is nowhere to be seen as Israel pounds the Gaza Strip for the third or fourth or 500th time.
Of course the news headlines are the greatest source of delegitimization: Israel’s own brutal conduct. Yesterday Benny Gantz, the former general who earlier bragged of bombing Gaza back to the stone age in a campaign to be prime minister, threatened to do even worse to Gaza in a video message that blames 2 million people under siege for their own destruction. “This is it, this is what Israel is. Pridefully threatening (even worse) murder. And then glibly transferring all responsibility for it to its victims,” writes an ally.
Bear in mind, this Gantz was once the American liberal Zionists’ hope for saving Israel from Netanyahu.
And the liberal Zionists’ current favorite, Yair Lapid, if he helps form the next government, will not depart at all from the Gantz line. Yes, this is what Israel is. If you watch i24 News, you will see one Jewish Israeli after another justifying massive violence against Gaza because the people there have dared to defy their imprisonment– for 13 years, with no freedom of movement, and their fishing boats shot at, and sewage in their water supply.
The simple truth of Israel’s existence is that it has never found an answer to its core constitutional problem: It is a “Jewish state” though half the population it governs is not Jewish. Its answer to that problem has never been greater freedom for Palestinians, it has always been violence. Ethnic cleansing. Shooting the refugees who wanted to return. Putting them behind barbed wire and worse. Bombing their apartment buildings. Burning their olive trees.
And Israel’s leaders and its apologists in the United States have struggled to remove the problem by changing the subject. The problem is Not what Israel is doing to Palestinians, but Islamic terrorism, or Iran’s desire to destroy Israel, or some other fiction. Lately they were able to maintain their claim that the Palestinian problem will disappear by signing several diplomatic/bribery deals with Arab neighbors who were willing to overlook Palestinian rights in order to gain an audience in Washington.
These lies are crumbling in plain sight. We are all witnessing yet another violent attack by Israel on its Palestinian citizens and subjects, yet another demonstration of Israel’s failure to give Palestinians rights. The violence began with valiant protests over the continued ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem. And today the only thing that is retarding Israel’s violence against Gaza is that Palestinians who are citizens of Israel have risen up in solidarity with the other Palestinians, and so Israel fears a “civil war.”
Israel is having a rendezvous with democracy. On i24 News, Israeli reporters are expressing the “shock” that instead of uniting Israel, this war is exposing the fundamental inequity in that society.
Crumbling in plain sight? We are witnessing the end of the Oslo delusion, as Mustafa Barghouti explained, and American supporters/defenders of Israel are being forced to reckon at last with its core problem. Peter Beinart has been a real leader; and he acknowledges that it is apartheid. Eric Alterman says it’s apartheid. Nicholas Kristof, a champion of human rights, highlights the recent apartheid findings in the New York Times today and all but accepts the term.
Kristof reflects the new Democratic normal: He says that U.S. aid should not go toward “bombings of Palestinians.” It is clear that conditioning the billions we send to Israel– what John Whitbeck calls “tribute” — is the next step in U.S. liberal Democratic discourse. And BDS will be sure to follow.
Even rightwing supporters are getting tired of the self-defense lie. Neocon Max Boot confesses this is not about Iran, it’s about an expansionist Israeli government pushing Palestinians out of their houses: “Israel’s continuing land grab in East Jerusalem + West Bank.”
While Yaacov Lozowick, the author and former archivist for the state of Israel, says Israel must face its constitutional issue:
“Here is an idea we have not tried in 74 years: a Jewish party leader will emerge and announce that if he wins the election he will strive, first and not in retrospect, to form a government that will include representatives of Arab citizens; Its purpose will be that they will feel equal citizens in their country.”
But the news is that the Israeli government is only going to be more rightwing.
There is no going back in the global discussion. Zionism created apartheid rule in one state; the U.S. establishment is finally beginning to acknowledge this. Palestinian resistance has never stopped. Ultimately there is only one answer to that resistance, equal rights. These truths are becoming clearer to all outside observers thanks to the struggle over a few houses in occupied East Jerusalem. Just as Ali Abunimah said we would, we are entering the last phase of the Zionist story. It has run its course, we’re in the endgame.
h/t Dave Reed and James North and others.
Have you heard the news? In the last several weeks alone, more than 35 local, regional, national, and international church bodies have taken bold actions in support of Palestinian rights!
