September 20 2014
Day Twelve: the Zionist shibboleth: a New Anti-Semitism, Never Forget, Never Forgive, Never Again
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Voltaire
Before we returned to our Hotel in East Jerusalem after the visit to Yad Vashem, our group traveled to the town of Jaffa, an ancient port city located along the Mediterranean Sea near Tel Aviv.
The Jaffa City is famous with its association with many Bible stories of Solomon and David…after the series of occupations by the Babylonian/Phoenician/Roman Empire/Saladin/Ottoman/NapoleonBonaparte/British Mandate, a majority of Arab residents in the village were evicted in 1948 by the Jewish Haganah run by David Ben Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister.
When the Haganah attack on the city had ended, only four thousands of Arab population remained in town and about fifty thousands permanently ran away from the killing sprees of Jewish attackers and they havenever returned home scattering around Gaza Strip/West Bank/Jordan.
Our group was invited by the Jaffa Chapter of the BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions against the Israeli products) and exchanged/formulated our opinions about many issues in a round table format…we specifically talked about the basic assumption of anti-Semitisms, since our tour in the Israeli-occupied land of Palestine came to an end and return home next day.
Someone in our discussion team asked: “Can you criticize Israel’s military actions and a lot of its policies without being anti-Semitic?” Yes.
“Can you do it without having some people accuse you of anti-Semitism?” No, you can’t.”
A conventional thinking about the anti-Semitism has been simply/exclusively a form of ethnic hatred against Jews…it has been a heinous racism historically rooted back to the origins and rise of Christianity in Europe prohibiting and restricting Jews of owning the land/residence property, and allowing them only in the business of lending money.
Contrarily, anti-Semitism in the Islamic world has been relatively rare or mild compared to the virulent form of racism in the Hitler’s Germany, and the Jews had enjoyed the freedom of worship in the Middle East as a religious minority…until the Zionist movement had established the state of Israel in the Palestinian land after forceful eviction of aboriginal Arab population from their habitats. (In the discourse of contemporary anti-Semitism, we have made an error, claiming that Jews are only Semite, even though Arabs are Semite too…‘Arabs are Jews upon horseback’.)
Then, there has been a different kind of hatred against the Israeli Jews emerging around the world in the course of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and ill treatments on the aboriginal Arab population
…Zionist Jews dubbed it as a new anti-Semitism, and whenever Israel is attacked under the international pressure to withdraw from the Occupied Territories in the Palestine, they allege that the world is still awash with anti-Semitism.
In other words, this new anti-Semitism was fashioned into an ideological weapon to de-legitimize the criticism against the Israeli occupational policies…the rhetoric of the new anti-Semitism is used as a political tool to ward off or at least tone down all critiques on Israel.
In the past, ‘anti-Semite’ was someone who hates Jews…nowadays, it is other way around. An anti-Semite is someone the Jews hate.
Professor Finkelstein argues that “organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League have brought forward charges of new antisemitism at various intervals since the 1970s, “not to fight antisemitism but rather to exploit the historical suffering of Jews in order to immunize Israel against criticism”, as in a case of comparing the Apartheid policy of the S. Africa with the state of israel as an anti-Semitic activism.
Here the central contention is that criticizing the state of Israeli policies against the Arab population is thinly disguised hatred toward Jews as people and Judaism as religion, therefore critics of Israel are denigrated as anti-Semites as indistinguishable Jew-haters and it allows the Israeli Government to hide its criminal policies and practices toward the Palestinian Arabs by invoking the memory of The Holocaust and long history of Jewish victimization: hollering in a stentorian voice “Never Forget! Never Forgive! And Never Again!”
Day Thirteen: Theodor Herzl’s “the Greater Israel”: from the Brook of Egypt to the Confluence of Tigris and Euphrates
At the wee hour on the last day in the Palestinian Land, we, the tour group from the Inter-Faith Peace Builders, quietly boarded the bus heading for the Ben Gurion Airport…we were scheduled to depart at 6:30am via Vienna Austria toward Washington DC USA. When we got to the gates of the heavily fortified airport, the armed guards got on the bus to check visually on the passengers and let us get through the inspection without any hassle… and three and half hours later we were able to board the plane after a series of stringent exit inspection and the Austrian Plane took off the tarmac flying high toward the blue horizon of the Mediterranean Sea…we are finally out of choke-hold reaches from the Zionist Jewish State of Israel.
For two weeks in the Israeli-occupied land of Palestine, I have been witnessing/experiencing the incarcerated lives of the Palestinian Arabs in the archipelagoes of open-air prison camp/the weapons laboratory (Gaza Strip) surrounded by a sea of Israeli colonial settlers/hundred miles of the separation walls/flying checkpoints and tanks of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).
On the plane, I brooded over how I, as an Arab neighbor, were supposed to love Jews when they deny me a life of peace…when the Jews expelled me from my job/home/land and killed my dad/mom/siblings/kids en masse with no mercy…when the Jews enjoy endless supply of fresh water/boundless travel around the country/bountiful subsidies for the Settler communities…you’d surely beobnoxious/crazy/unconscionable/colonialistic to ask me where a Palestinian Gandhi is…where a Palestinian Mother Teresa is…
The notion of Jewish nationhood is the 19th Century invention by the Zionism headed by Theodor Herzl…a conceptual ideology, it assumes that part or all of the Palestinian Land belongs to Jews. (From early Century up to the 19 Century, there was no united Jewish history, but an episode of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahim, and Ethiopian Jews scattered all over the world.)
The notion of ideology on the Greater Israel was described by Herzl as an area of Jewish State stretches from “the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates” and detailed in ‘Yinon Plan’ after the establishment of Israeli State that became the vision of many Prime Ministers of Israel including Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu.
The Plan operates on two essential premises: in order for the Jewish Israel State to survive, it must become an imperial regional power and to balkanize the current Arab states into small/weak states.
Furthermore, Zionists entertain two essential paragraphs from the Hebrew Bible…Genesis 15:18 (To your descendants I give this land from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates) and Deuteronomy 11:24 (Every place you set the soles of your feet shall be yours. Your borders shall run from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea.)
From the Nile River to the confluence of Tigris/Euphrates
Some scholars argue that the war in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (2003), the Israeli invasions of Lebanon(1982/2006), and the Death of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya (2011), ongoing war on Syria/Iraq/Kurdish region (2014) should be viewed in the current context and understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East…in the balkanization of Iraq into Sunni/Shia/Kurd nations, the ISIS war against the Assad Regime in Syria in addition to the military coup-detat in Egypt and the economic sanction against Iran, the raging chaos in the region in time of the withdrawal of the US military operation from Afghanistan can be construed not as of misguided/pointless policies of the US and British/France of former colonial powers but a premeditated/managed policies of the Military Industrial Complex and the Zionist State of Israel.
The US-Israel game plan in 2007 tells in details about the partition of Iraq…that then-Senator/present Vice President Joe Biden’s non-binding resolution to divide the Iraq into three parts, Kurdish/Sunni/Shia region, had passed overwhelmingly in the US Senate…coincidently, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, declared that Israeli Government should support the Kurdish aspiration for independence, reminding that Israel has had military/intelligence/business ties with Kurds since 1960s. (Joe Biden is a self-confessedZionist/a hidden Jew?…his ancestor lived in Iraq/emigrated to Irish/then to US…now he poises to become a President in 2017)
Saddam’s Iraq was the greater obstacle to a Zionist’s endeavor to establish the empire of the Greater Israel and control of the regional wealth of natural resources, and the first stage to weaken the Iraq was the eight years of the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s and the Sunni/Shia conflict later was the turning point to bring the Kurdish independence into fruition…when your enemies are fighting each other, weaken them both…fishing in the troubled water. By fomenting racial/ethnic/religious infighting, the Zionist Jews try to create too divided/weak/factional statelets to resist the Israeli empire in the region. Divide and conquer is an age-old strategy for the Empire-builders.
One of the US Army Lt. Col. solemnly declared years ago: “We have entered an age of constant conflict.”
“There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts … around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. US armed forces will keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing.”
For decades, I have been entertaining a pipe dream of ‘two-state’ solution in the Palestine as if ‘Liberal Zionists’ advocate/hope to build peace while safeguarding the Israeli State as Jewish, and I believed that somehow there should be a peaceful solution to satisfy both Jews and Arabs in the region…even though I did not believe that the United States of America has been an unbiased arbiter in the peace process for decades.
After two-weeks of the intensive/bodily searches on the possibility of solution, I came to a decisive conclusion that there would be neither one nor two-state solution but a continuation of hostile conflict in the region…that is, for sometime status quo remains as non state quagmire reaches up to an explosive point.
I mean the Zionist Jews would never relinquish their colonial control/oppression on the Palestinian Arabs as far as Uncle Sam makes them to stop…and Uncle Sam can’t/won’t find ways to force Israel to make peace with Arabs.
After returning from the trip, I am relieved in a sense that I, as a philosophical anarchist, am able to telldecisively the readers of my diary: the peace process in the region has been a sham/charade for two decades/the chest-thumping Western corporate media tells a mountain of lies to their audience of ‘sheeple’ for the benefit of the Military Industrial Complex/there is no viable option that is worth pondering except the total capitulation to the US hegemony and neo-colonialism/the Zionist Settlers’ wet dream of Greater Israel.
I only found the sorry state of perpetual hopelessness/despair in the region.
September 20 2014 Dale Han in Toronto Canada