Poetry for Palestine: Articles

A letter from Paul Grenville

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:41:16 GMT

Dear Nahida

I just read your piece, "You want a solution" so I have got one Palestinian perspective. I am English, born in 1956. I have never been to Palestine. But I know enough history to know that it was my nation who marched into Palestine in 1917 and gave a huge boost to the Zionist colonization which eventually made you homeless and stateless. This is my piece, below. It is on the site. I agree with your piece. It is better than mine. Ethically speaking, the Israeli state is a simple case of theft, murder and genocide. But it has only been partially "successful", unlike the American state, also founded as a result of the theft of land and the genocide of many indigenous peoples. So there is hope.

Just some questions. How can the "Zionist occupiers" give back the land and rebuild all the 500 destroyed villages and still live there? They will never never do this. I do not think the Zionists want a solution, as in peace. I think they can live with war, with torture, with genocide, and with the wall. I think they have to leave. They will only leave when things become too uncomfortable for them politically. This can only happen when the America stops financing its little colony. The defeat of Zionism will lead to an exodus of Zionists from the country. Jews who remain will not be Zionists. Palestinians will start to come home. There will be justice.

Then another question: who are the occupiers? 90% of the Jews who went to Palestine before 1948 were Europeans. They form most of the Zionist establishment today. After 1948 they recruited all the Arab Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Russian Jews, and so on. These are all profiting from the theft of Palestinian land and resources but mostly they are not the ruling class, the political Zionist elite. Today Jews can live anywhere in the world, free of persecution. There was never any need for a Jewish state: even today only 40% of the world's Jews live there. The Nazi genocide of the Jews was a moment of history, a consequence of fascism. Did the European gypsys, also murdered by the Nazis in their concentration camps, get a state of their own?

I have just finished reading Hakim Kaneenah's book "A doctor in the Galilee: the life and struggle of a Palestinian in Israel". I highly recommend it. He shows just what is possible for the Palestinians living right in the heart of the occupation state, in the Galilee. He also shows all the methods by which the Israeli state keeps the Palestinians in subjection, and how much collaboration is going on.

I shall keep my promise never to visit Israel. Being a tourist in a country signifies that you agree with what goes on there, and especially in the case of Israel, with its sickening worldwide media campaign, and a worldwide movement on its side,

with best wishes, Paul Grenville

===

I shall visit Israel

I shall visit Israel when the olive trees are in bloom

I shall visit Israel when Arabs can marry Jews

I shall visit Israel when the fabrication of history and archaeology has stopped

I shall visit Israel when Torah Jews are no longer beaten up in the streets of Jerusalem and are recognized for having reminded their countrymen of the commandments of Moses

I shall visit Israel when the speaking of Arabic in certain neighbourhoods no longer causes heads to turn

I shall visit Israel when the learning of Arabic is mandatory in school

I shall visit Israel when Arab and Jewish children all go to the same schools

But will it still be Israel?

I shall visit Israel when the 7 million refugees from the land of Palestine have chosen between a country they can call their own, or compensation for what they lost

I shall visit Israel when the invaders have left or those who remain have made peace with the invaded (not the other way about)

I shall visit Israel when West Bank settlers have gone and no longer shoot to kill the natives as a patriotic duty

I shall visit Israel when the shooting of children has stopped

I shall visit Israel when the Ashkenazi elite has followed Avraham Burg to Europe, from whence they came

I shall visit Israel when the Wall has gone and all people between the river Jordan and the sea can move freely

I shall visit Israel when the house demolitions have ceased

I shall visit Israel when 600 West Bank checkpoints have been taken down and the bullying, humiliation, beating and rape of Palestinian citizens has stopped

I shall visit Israel when to be born Palestinian is not a reason to be hunted and spied upon

But will it still be Israel?

I shall visit Israel when Jews have stopped arriving from far away and calling it their land

I shall visit Israel when the expulsions of Palestinians have stopped

I shall visit Israel when Gaza is no longer the cruel laboratory experiment in slow genocide that it is today

I shall visit Israel when her planes have stopped bombing and strafing towns in Gaza and terrifying the people at night with sonic booms

I shall visit Israel when the Lebanon and Gaza have ceased to be grisly testing grounds for new weapons

I shall visit Israel when Israel has ceased to invade her neighbours on the slightest of pretexts and cause devastation

I shall visit Israel when 11,870 Palestinian prisoners and 51 Palestinian MPs have been released from jail and pardoned for acts or words of resistance

Against a state that took their country by force of arms and terror

I shall visit Israel when the routine practice of torture has stopped

But will it still be Israel?

I shall visit Israel when Lieberman has left the country

I shall visit Israel when the illegal villages have been made legal

I shall visit Israel when the Bedouin of the Negev are free to live as they wish

I shall visit Israel when Arab towns and villages have been granted the same status and funding as Jewish ones

I shall visit Israel when the land has been shared by all Semites - Arabs and Jews

I shall visit Israel when the rich white Jews no longer freely water the lawns of their villas in Tel-Aviv, the West Bankers have to buy their drinking water and the Gazans have nothing safe to drink at all

But will it still be Israel?

I shall visit Israel when the people of Gaza reach a great white city North of Jaffa, raise the flag and live there

I shall visit Israel when Al-Quds has become the capital

I shall visit Israel when the Jewish state has become an unhappy memory

I shall visit Israel when Nazi war crimes against the Jews are no longer the excuse for every imaginable cruelty in a land to which they came as uninvited guests and remained as conquerors…

I shall visit Israel when the name of Israel is no longer another excuse to hate the Jews

Because Israel has vanished from the page of time.

When these conditions prevail

I shall be happy to visit Palestine when the olive trees are in bloom.

Paul Grenville 1st-4th July 2008

A Genuine Peace Movement Cannot be Zionist

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:56:43 GMT

A Genuine Peace Movement Cannot be Zionist

Source:
http://zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18478

August 19, 2008

By Jason Kunin

"Radical simply means ‘grasping things at the root.'" - Angela Davis

It's common practice among those of us outside Israel who have been frustrated by the hostility and intimidation we encounter whenever we voice criticism of Israel to point to the fact that there is greater freedom to criticize Israel in Israel. "Look at the critical articles published in Ha'aretz," we will say. "Look at the Israeli peace movement. Look at Peace Now and Gush Shalom." Tactically, this is a useful point to make in an argument. I know because I've used it myself.

The truth is, unfortunately, that this much vaunted criticism within Israel - by the liberal media, by the so-called Israeli Left - is overwhelmingly inclined to blame the oppression of Palestinians merely on specific leaders or policies. Uri Avnery, for example, the founder of Gush Shalom and one of the most far-left public figures in Israel, writes a regular syndicated column in which he blasts the brutality of this or that general, the cruelty of this or that politician, the unfairness of this or that law. He's often quite incisive and witty. Avnery, like most of the Israeli left, is a Zionist - a critical one, to be sure, but a Zionist nonetheless who believes that a good movement has been corrupted by bad leaders and who periodically scans the horizon for the leader who can finally set Israel on its righteous path. [1]

Israeli violence and oppression, however, is rooted not simply in a few laws or politicians, but in the ideological foundations of the state itself. The problem, in short, is Zionism. Any opposition to Israel rooted in Zionism can only seek to mitigate Israeli apartheid and racism, not end it, because apartheid and racism are what Zionism - and by extension, the Israeli state - are all about. Zionism is rooted in the fundamental premise that the state be a Jewish state and that it occupy the physical space of an ancient Arab Christian and Muslim culture. Because it is impossible to achieve these two goals simultaneously without violence and racist oppression, you cannot have a genuine peace movement that is Zionist.

In mainstream Jewish circles, hardly anyone self-identifies as a "Zionist" anymore, though almost everyone is. Today, it's probably more common to hear words like "Zionist" and "Zionism" used by Palestinian solidarity activists than it is by "supporters of Israel," a newer preferred term for a Zionist. "Supporting Israel," however that gets understood, is simply for many a natural function of being Jewish, whereas the term Zionism, even if it amounts to the same thing, makes supporting Israel sound rather ideological. Which of course it is.

One of the functions of ideology, as Marxists have long argued, is to embed beliefs that support a particular set of power relations into "common sense" so that they become invisible. Antonio Gramsci called this "hegemony." When a theory or system of beliefs passes into a reflexive pattern of thought, it has transformed into ideology, and this is exactly what has happened to Zionism. To be called a Zionist is somewhat like being called "white man" if you happen to be a white man: you may acknowledge the accuracy of the description but resist the "politicization" of a position you regard as neutral.

Support for Israel, of course, is not neutral, and in order to begin to undo the damage that such support has caused over the past century, the first order of business is not just to name it, but to expose its ideological nature. Like whiteness, it is wrapped up in positions of power and privilege that white Jews, like me, don't often acknowledge we have. Yet for those of us who truly wish to see an end to the destruction of Palestine and its people, it is not enough to protest merely what Israel does, because what Israel does is an extension of what Israel is - namely, a Zionist state.

Zionist ideology informed Israel's creation, guided the foundation of its bureaucratic institutions, set the terms for its relations with its neighbours, and established a sophisticated global network of organizations, campus clubs, and schools to sustain and perpetuate Zionist ideas in Jewish communities and beyond. It continues to guide the state violence that has created one of the world's largest and longest human rights catastrophes. True, many people on the Zionist left try to identify a moment in Israel's past when this "Jewish liberation movement" turned into something terrible. For some it was the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. For others, such as those in the Peace Now movement, it was the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. For still others, those with a more radical analysis, the problems go back to 1948, or even, as Hannah Arendt argued, to the 1942 Zionist Congress that shut down for good all discussion of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state. Indeed, there are still a few purists with a knowledge of Zionist history who idealize the "cultural" and bi-national Zionism of Hebrew University founder Judah Magnes and the philosopher Martin Buber. Yet the fact is, despite liberal fantasies that try to locate some primal moment in Zionist history when the movement was still pure and good, Zionism is and always has been a fundamentally racist movement shaped by the most violent and oppressive ideological forces of the nineteenth century. It is a testament to the racism of even the most enlightened Zionists - the ones who supposedly promoted Jewish-Arab cooperation - that Judah Magnes referred to Arabs as "half savage" [2], and Martin Buber lived after 1948 in the confiscated house of Edward Said's family, despite their letters imploring its return.

To understand the basis of Zionism, it is important to start not in the 1890s with Theodore Herzl and the Dreyfus trial - the point of origin from which Zionist history usually begins - but about a century earlier, to the flourishing of Romanticism in Germany and Europe in general. Rejecting the supremacy of reason that had governed European thought during the neo-classical age, the Romantics emphasized the centrality of emotion, irrationality, and spirit. (Many were borderline mystics, fascinated by the supernatural and Eastern religions.) Against the backdrop of an emerging Industrial Revolution, which precipitated the emptying of Europe's countrysides and the swelling of its cities, poets, philosophers, and intellectuals began to romanticize the vanishing peasantry and contemplate the "divinity" of nature. Those who tilled the soil and worked the land were viewed as closer to nature, and therefore closer to divinity and spirit. Blut und Boden, or "Blood and Soil," was a term that emerged in Germany by the late nineteenth century with the emergence of Romantic Nationalism, which held that nation states derive their legitimacy as a natural consequence of the organic unity of the people and the land. Blut und Boden eventually became a slogan of the Nazi party, popularized in the 1930s by race theorist Richard Walther Darré. [3]

Meanwhile, as the nineteenth century progressed, European imperialism and the colonization of "the darker nations" flourished. African slavery was still widespread, and even where it was outlawed retained enormous legitimacy among the ruling classes. Successive generations of physical and sexual exploitation of African slaves, mind you, had introduced the "problem" of miscegenation - a problem because light or white-skinned slaves threatened to unravel the fiction of race. Jews, newly emancipated from their medieval ghettos and "passing" for gentiles, posed a similar challenge to the racialized social order. Science, however, rose to the occasion, and soon the best scientific minds of the day produced a highly elaborate and eminently respectable science of race that persisted until the early twentieth century. This racial science had some interesting things to say about Jews, which in turn were absorbed into Zionism.

Racial science was predicated on comparative biology and depended upon observable difference, which was not always evident among the pale Ashkenazi Jews of Europe. Jewish physiognomy was scrutinized for signs of "blackness" and darkened in representation. In art and literature of the nineteenth century, the Jew's "exotic" features were exaggerated or made more pronounced. The hair was black (or red, to symbolize the devil), the eyes dark, the complexion swarthy. The physiognomist Johann Caspar Lavatar wrote of the Jews' "short, black, curly hair, their brown skin colour" [4]. In The Races of Men (1850), Robert Knox described Jewish physignomy as having "an African look" [5]. During the Middle Ages, Christian art had always emphasized the metaphorical blackness of the Jew - the black synagogue would be juxtaposed against the white church, for example - but racial science tried to make this metaphorical blackness into a literal blackness that was inscribed in the biology of the Jew. In both Jews and Africans, blackness was further associated with diseases, such a congenital syphilis, which would also be the marker of moral degeneracy.

The problem was that many European Jews simply didn't look black. Many had fair hair, light eyes, and Slavic or Nordic features. Here's where another nineteenth century science, sexology, came in to shore up racial science. Sexology, a now antiquated discipline that was established by people like Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, established a "scientific" basis for normative sexuality in men - aggressive, strong, heterosexual - and a "degenerate" sexuality - passive, weak, homosexual - that was soon widely associated with the Jew (who was usually configured as male). Jews were seen as prone to "neurasthenia," a condition "discovered" by the physician George M. Beard in which the finite "nerve force" of the body is depleted resulting in weakness, lethargy, fatigue, paleness, and stunted sexual development. Neurathenia, which mirrored Krafft-Ebing's masturbatory illness, was believed by Beard to be brought on by "over-civilization." It was a by-product of the increased pace and technology of industrialized society, and was confined exclusively to "highly evolved" races. It was frequently associated with "superior intellect." Sandar Gilman, who has made a career writing about racial science, notes that in medical literature of this period there was a virtual "interchangeability of the image of the neurasthenic and the Jew" [6].

Jewish accomplishment was thus made the marker of sexual dysfunction and racial degeneracy. The Jew was unathletic, a bookworm, a sissy, a degenerate (and probably a homosexual). A creature of the city, the Jew had no connection to the soil - from which sprang life and energy and health - and thus had no connection to or place in the gentile national body. The Jew was deracinated and therefore diseased and degenerate. In was in these terms that European anti-Semitism, which would soon turn so deadly, was framed.

Zionism was nurtured in this intellectual climate, and it accepted virtually all of these premises. Zionism concurred with the anti-Semites and scientific racism (as it later became known) that yes, the Jew was deracinated and weak and degenerate and "over-civilized." To reverse this degeneracy, Jews needed to connect with the soil from which they sprang, the Biblical heartland and birthplace of the Jewish people. (Never mind that, as Paul Kriwaczek notes in his recent book Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation, many of the Jewish people of Europe were descended from gentile European converts [7].) "Blood and Soil" is as central a concept in Zionism as it was in Nazi fascism. The confluence of racial science, nineteenth-century sexology, and Zionism was embodied in the physician Max Nordau, an early and prominent leader in the Zionist movement who openly hoped that Zionism would create of a new race of "muscle Jews" that would revive the degenerate Jewish race. Martin Englander, another prominent early Zionist, wrote in The Evident Most Frequent Appearances of Illness in the Jewish Race (1902) that Jews' disposition to neurasthenia was cultural, the result of "over-exertion of the brain" [8] caused by two thousand years of diasporic struggle.

So at root, Zionism is not just racist, but anti-Semitic as well, and it was rightly perceived as offensive by the vast majority of European Jews when it first emerged. Religious Jews, of course, rejected Zionism on Talmudic grounds - there could be no Jewish state until the Messiah - but Zionism was also heartily rejected by secular Jews, who were still largely committed to the Enlightment project and were put off by Zionism's assertion that they were eternal strangers in their nations. Jews they may have been, but they were also Europeans who had contributed to their societies, valued European culture, and had little interest in relocating to a strange and "primitive" new land where life would be hard. Opinion, of course, would change with the rise of Nazism. By the end of the Second World War, the surviving Jews of Europe had almost universally adopted the Zionist narrative.

In Philip Roth's short story "The Conversion of the Jews," the young protagonist, Ozzie Freedman, complains about his mother's response to a plane crash. Scouring through the published list of victims, she finds eight Jewish names, and "because of the eight she said the plane crash was a ‘tragedy'" [9]. Roth here pokes fun at a tendency among Jews to focus only on Jewish suffering, though he also captures in a nutshell Zionism's approach to Jewish history.

Naturally, Jewish history should focus on Jewish suffering, as well as Jewish triumph and other matters concerning Jews. That is, after all, the point of Jewish history, and there are valid reasons for why we need it. In recent years, post-modern theories have challenged "grand narratives" of history as partial and selective and traditionally serving the interests of power, all of which is true. For several decades, historians have attempted to correct the distortions of "official" historical narratives by writing specialized histories of marginalized peoples, such as women, workers, people of colour, and LGBT people. The purpose of such histories is to reinsert a people or social class back into a historical narrative that has excluded them and to see their contributions to a history that, through the very inclusion of their narratives, is changed and broadened. Jewish history has done and should do the same thing.

The Zionist narrative, however, has opposite aims. Because it is underwritten by a belief that Jews are eternal outsiders everywhere but in the Biblical homeland, a Zionist framing of history minimizes Jews' connection to their societies, thus removing them from history. Jewish suffering during the Holocaust - which, it should be emphasized, was immense and not to be minimized - takes on a different meaning when it is divorced from its the larger context. There is no disputing the murder of millions of European Jews during the Second World War, just as there is no disputing the fact that they were killed simply because they were Jews, even if they did not self-identify as Jews. These are incontrovertible facts. But how different the facts take on meaning when you say, "the Nazis killed three million Polish Jews" than when you say, "six million Poles - about 22% of the population - were killed by the Nazis, half of whom were Jews." To frame facts in this way, however, is to risk being accused of "minimizing" the Holocaust, though one could easily argue the opposite, that it enlarges the tragedy. The Zionist narrative of the Holocaust, unfortunately, discourages Jewish acknowledgement or identification with the suffering of others (unless, as in the case of the Kurds or Darfur, it happens to coincide with U.S. and Israeli interests). Many Jews, for example, are unaware that the Israeli government refuses to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Back in the eighties, a cross erected near Auschwitz on the site of a Carmelite convent to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of Christians who died there was relentlessly opposed by Jewish groups, who insisted the camp remain a symbol of Jewish suffering exclusively, for if Auschwitz were anything but an exclusively tragedy, it would undermine the argument for an exclusively Jewish state. (Auschwitz, we should remember, is the first stop on the "March of the Living," a Zionist program that follows the visit with a trip to Israel.) Even no less a person than Elie Weisel, the famed Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, has opposed the inclusion of a Romani memorial in the U.S. Holocaust museum, though the Nazi campaign against them - the Porajmos, as they call it - was equally devastating proportionally. Indeed, unlike the Jews of Europe today, the Roma still face pre-Nazi levels of oppression. In Italy they have even been reghettoized.

Zionists argue that the Holocaust proved correct Theodore Herzl's thesis that no matter how well they assimilated into European society, Jews would always be regarded with contempt and were always in danger of being stripped of their recently won rights and killed. Yet a basic fact that hardly seems to need mentioning yet which rarely does get mentioned is that the Holocaust spread only to those countries under Nazi occupation. The Holocaust did not happen in England, for example. And while it is true that anti-Semitism was rampant throughout Europe and that the Nazis found no shortage of eager collaborators among the nations they occupied, Jews only lost their rights and lives under the rule of one nation, Nazi Germany. The Holocaust, in short, was a Nazi phenomenon, not a universally European one. Though Daniel Goldhagen has tried his best to prove that almost all Europeans were "willing executioners" to Hitler, few professional historians regard either his thesis or his argument with much credibility. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in both Eichmann in Jerusalem and in her magisterial study of anti-Semitism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the Holocaust was an inconsistent affair that varied from country to country, "taking almost as many shapes and appearances as there existed countries in Europe" [10]. In Bulgaria, for example, the population overwhelmingly defied Nazi-imposed anti-Semitic laws so that by the time the Red Army liberated the country in 1944, "not a single Bulgaria Jew had been deported or died an unnatural death" [11]. In Denmark, 8,000 Danish Jews were transported by sea to safety in Sweden in what is one of the most remarkable rescue operations initiated by ordinary people. Even the vicious Vichy regime in France, which had few qualms about turning over to the Nazis Jewish refugees from other countries, made efforts to give comparative protection to its own French Jews. So to say that the Holocaust proves that a violent anti-Semitism lies like a sleeping dog beneath the surface of all gentile nations is an oversimplification and distortion of history. Zionism, however, only retains its credibility if all gentiles are closet anti-Semites.

"If it is true that mankind has insisted on murdering Jews for more than two thousand years," Hannah Arendt argued, "then Jew-killing is a normal, and even human occupation and Jew-hatred is justified beyond the need of argument" [12]. Arendt warned that this "thesis of eternal antisemitism" was dangerous and would "absolve Jew-haters" of their crimes [13]. And yet this belief in eternal anti-Semitism is what informs the political program of Zionism and justifies the need for a Jewish state to protect Jews from the next round of anti-Semitic violence that will surely come. As Arendt noted about Israeli attutides toward the Holocaust during the Eichmann trial, "In the eyes of Jews...the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler...appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered" [14]. Certainly, this is how history appears if, like the mother in Philip Roth's "Conversion of the Jews," your focus is only on the tragedies that befall the Jews. Jewish persecutions, however, have always taken place in the context of other persecutions. The Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492, to take one example, was a catastrophe, though so was the Muslim expulsion that followed in 1497. The violent transfer and expulsion of populations, to say nothing of persecutions, were, alas, among the terrible but not uncommon features of the rule of kings during the period in which the Jews of Europe experienced their worst treatment. Mahmood Mamdani offers an even broader perspective on the Holocaust when he notes that the Nazi intent to destroy the Jewish people as a whole was "unique - but only in Europe" [15] and that, in fact, "the first genocide of the twentieth century was the German annihilation of the Herero people in South West Africa in 1904" [16]. Indeed, as Sven Lindquist points out in The History of Bombing, one of the things that made Hitler so monstrous was that he fought a "civilized war" as if it were a "colonial war," and European powers had traditionally made distinctions between the two. ("Civilized wars" follow the laws of war. "Colonial wars" do not and often see the extermination of "lower races" as a biological necessity.) This has implications for how we understand the annihilation of European Jewry as well. Summarizing Lindquist, Mamdani writes:

The Nazi plan...was to weed out some 10 million Russians, with the remainder kept

alive as a slave labor force under German occupation. When the mass murder of

European Jews began, the great Jewish populations were not in Germany but in

Poland and Rusia, where they made up 10 percent of the total population and up to 40

percent of the urban population ‘in just those areas Hitler was after.' [17]

No people on earth who have survived as a people as long as the Jews have enjoyed an absolute and uninterrupted protection from persecution. Yet this is precisely what Zionism demands as the right of all Jews. Moreover, it argues that this eternal safety can only be safeguarded by an exclusively Jewish state and a regional monopoly on nuclear weapons - ironically, conditions that guarantee a state of perpetual war. One hears often how Israelis long to be considered just a "normal" state. Yet the model of "normality" that Zionism looks to is the nineteenth century imperial state, with all of its fascist trappings, such as the belief in "Blood and Soil," the promotion of a muscular national character, and the mythology of an exclusionary national identify based on a common racial/ethnic background. As the rise of Nazism resulted in the Jews of Europe being stripped of the privileges of "whiteness," which anti-Semitism defined in contrast to the Jew, emigration to Palestine under the Zionist project allowed Jews to regain their whiteness, which in this new context was defined against the indigenous Arab - but only if a colonial relationship were maintained. A whiteness that is defined through its dominant position vis-s-vis darker-skinned people is also part of the "normality" that Israel craves because it is based on the "normality" of whiteness in imperial Europe.

Zionists did not immigrate to Israel to be neighbours. They had no interest or intention of learning the local language or contributing to the local culture, as one normally would when moving to another country. Zionism, rather, was predicated on taking over the land and replacing the local culture, not fitting into it. And yet Zionist history refuses to interpret Arab resistance to Jewish immigration during the Holocaust as resistance to this colonial project, not hostility to Jews per se. Nonetheless, pointing to Arab complicity in the Holocaust serves the myth of eternal anti-Semitism and justifies not only the need for a heavily militarized Jewish state but also the on-going brutal treatment of the indigenous people of Palestine.

As for the actions of the Zionist leadership during the actual Holocaust, much has been written about their efforts to prevent other countries from taking in Jewish refugees of Europe, lest the availability of potential immigrants to Palestine be depleted. The World Zionist Organization, for example, boycotted a thirty-one nation conference held in France in 1938 that was convened to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees. As Ben- Gurion said, "If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by Transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would chose the second." More extreme Zionist factions, such as Irgun, actually tried to form an alliance the Nazi government. The young Zionist who wrote the letter making the proposal, the man who noted the "common interests" that existed between the Zionists in Palestine and the Nazis government, was the future Prime Minister of Israel Yizhak Shamir. [18]

Liberal Zionists - and I would say that most Jews today are probably liberal Zionists - believe that there exists a solution to the conflicting national projects of Jews and Palestinians: a two-state solution. Like the oft-cited "critics" one finds in Israel, liberal Zionists may openly dislike one or another Israeli leader - maybe Sharon, maybe Netanyahu - support the creation of a Palestinian state, and occasionally even express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. If you ask them why such a two-state solution has not yet come into being, they may blame Palestinian leaders for "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity," as Abba Eban once obnoxiously remarked, or they may, if they're really liberal, blame the Jewish settlers for holding the Israeli government hostage. Regardless of why liberal Zionists believe a two-state solution has not yet come into being, they will all share a belief that Israel's leaders have consistently sought peace.

Where does such blind faith come from? Partly from the fact that it's true. Israel's leaders, in fact, have consistently sought peace - on their terms! Since 1948, they have sought peace with their neighbouring Arab states - provided they accepted Israel's regional supremacy and were willing to drop completely the subject of the Palestinians (which would include any compensation or financial assistance to countries that have taken in Palestinian refugees). They have also sought peace with the Palestinians - but provided they relinquish any claims to their land, forget their history, and, preferably, disappear off the face of the earth. True, since the first Intifada, Israel has taken a more moderate stand and has genuinely sought peace through the creation of a Palestinian state - provided that such as state be completely demilitarized, split into reservations, confined to a minimal amount of the most worthless land, governed by a puppet police state that will do its bidding, and produces for the rest of its existence not a single individual who will engage in any act of resistance. Any Palestinian leader unwilling or unable to meet these expectations has been declared by Israeli leaders as an unsuitable "partner for peace," and they have likely believed it in all sincerity. This is because, if you buy into the Zionist project and its thesis of eternal anti-Semitism - which entails that another Holocaust could erupt at any moment - it is impossible to conceive of any compromise that does not simultaneously preserve a strong Jewish state and ensure the weakness of everyone else, lest they become the next Nazi Germany. It is impossible as well to conceive of any solution that does not allow Israel to retain its status as a "white" nation - remember, this is the model of "normality" that Israel seeks - and therefore any settlement that would see Israel become part of the Middle East is precluded. (Israel's soccer team, not surprisingly, plays in the European league.)

Liberal Zionists who insist that a two-state solution along the 1967 borders is a reasonable compromise are really only in disagreement with hard-line Zionists over how much stolen Palestinian land should be kept for Jews' exclusive use. And since few liberal Zionists, because they are Zionists, are willing to concede the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and there can be no true justice - and therefore no guaranteed peace - without the right of return, two-state Zionism will always be a dead end. Moreover, two-state Zionism is ideologically unprepared to accept the reality that the settlements and settler roads have made a genuine two-state solution possible, leaving only the options of a one-state solution or eternal apartheid. If all you buy into of Zionism is the thesis of eternal anti-Semitism, you will always opt for the latter before the former, for you will be unable to compromise the so-called "security" guaranteed by a Jewish state.

For those who have grown up with Zionism programmed into them from birth, there are simply certain places that the mind cannot go. For this reason, Zionism is the greatest obstacle to peace. Challenging it, unfortunately, is no easy feat since it has become an integral part of all Jewish community life everywhere. The Jewish school, the Jewish camp, the Jewish campus clubs, the Jewish day care, the local Jewish community center, even the shul - in all of these places one absorbs Zionist ideology through osmosis. Unless you belong to one of the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox sects such as Neturei Karta, to reject Zionism is to tear yourself apart from the connection to friends, family, and Jewish life. Increasingly, there are small anti-Zionist Jewish spaces opening up, and though they are marginal and not always accessible, their importance should be underestimated. Only if there exists the ability to participate as an anti-Zionist and a Jew in some sort of Jewish life will the risk associated with breaking from Zionism diminish. And only by rejecting Zionism can we who are Jewish break free from the trap we have created for ourselves, the trap of a Jewish state.

Jason Kunin is a Toronto teacher. He can be reached at jkunin@rogers.com.

[1] See, for example, Avnery's cautiously optimistic column on the election of Amir Peretz as Labour leader. (http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/22362). From the vantage point of Perez's brief but brutal reign as defense minister during the 2006 invasion of Lebanon, this is a good example too of how misplaced Avnery's hopefulness was and always is.

[2] Letter to Felix Warburg, Sept. 7, 1929. Reprinted in Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Ed. Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. (New York: Grove Press, 2003.)

[3] The definitive scholarship on the continuity between German Romanticism and German fascism has been done by George L. Mosse. See in particular his landmark study The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).

[4] Quoted in Sander L. Gilman, The Visibility of Jews in the Diaspora: Body Imagery and Its Cultural Context. (Syracuse: Syracuse University, 1992): 7.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Sander L. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985): 156.

[7] Paul Kriwaczek notes many historical instances of gentile conversion to Judaism in European history. He writes, "It should come as little surprise that the missionary efforts to bring lost Jews back to the Torah should spill over into the Christian and pagan world, and that Judaism should attract proselytes among the Slavs. Jewish-owned slaves, while they were still legally allowed, had good reason to convert, for they might thereby gain their freedom. But there were also many who found that the spiritual wealth of the Jews, as well as their worldly success, offered greater rewards than their own Christian lifestyle." Yiddish Civilization: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation. (London: Phoenix, 2005): 120-121.

[8] Quoted in Difference and Pathology, 156-57.

[9] Philip Roth. "The Conversion of the Jews." Goodbye, Columbus. Toronto: Bantam, 1986): 102.

[10] Hannah Arendt. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. (New York: Penguin, 1992): 154.

[11] Ibid., 188.

[12] Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. ( A Harvest Book: San Diego, 1976): 7.

[13] Ibid., 8.

[14] Eichmann in Jerusalem, 267.

[15] Mahmood Mamdani. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. New York: Doubleday, 2005): 7.

[16] Ibid., 8.

[17] Quoted in Mamdani, 7.

[18] For a more complete account of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, see Lenni Brenner, 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis. (New Jersey: Barricade Books, 2002).

Implications for a two-state solution

Zionism's Use of the Holocaust

The Origins of Zionism

Zionism as Ideology

The problem is not Israel, it's Zionism

CRIMES... upon CRIMES... upon CRIMES

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:35:32 GMT

Today, I received thie email written by Lauren Booth

On Board Bulletin, from the FreeGaza
Friday 15th August

Today I was intending to write about about practical developments, here in the waters around the Greek islands. Of setting sail again, of bumpy seas and equally churning stomachs.

However, the subject of today's bulletin has changed to that of; psychological terrorism. Over the the past 72 hours almost a dozen aggressive messages have been received by members of the group both on board the ships and in Cyprus. In Nicosia where twenty human rights campaginers including Hedy Epstein await to board the Freegaza and the Liberty, anonymous callers have been making threats to the general well being of all concerned.

Some of these texts, calls and answer messages focus on the ships being 'blown up' or 'detroyed killing all on board.' Unnerving enough. But today I can reveal even more pernicious acts of psychological violence on those both reprorting and supporting this effort to ease the blockade of Gaza by Israel.

Since Monday, some Palestinian campaigners, (who I will not name here for obvious reasons), have received phone calls made to their mobiles. In an increasing number of cases these threats are being made to family members of the crew who live in the occupied territories. Imagine for a moment hearing a relative report being told 'you will see your uncle soon if xxx continues this action' named uncle having been shot dead by the IDF

Now, it is my turn. Yesterday afternoon, on the 14th of August 2008, an anonymnous young man called my home in France as my daughters played hide and seek in the garden . This stranger spoke to my husband, warning him that 'your wife is in great danger. These ships will be blown up.'

My husband asked how it was this person had obtained our private home number. No response was forthcoming, but the illicit threats carried on.

Who is behind these phone calls? Who benefits by upsetting the families of those onboard the Freegaza and the Liberty? Who would wish to unsettle journalists aboard as unarmed ships set sail towards the waters around Gaza and almost certain interception by Israeli forces?

You decide.

I will carry on reporting from the waters around Greece, Cyprus and who knows some day soon, even Gaza.

My husband will carry on recording these malicious calls to my home in France.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Silence is the bullies best friend. And.
Lauren Booth
Journalist and Broadcaster

My message to the Jews

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 11:20:04 GMT

My message to the Jews

By Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2008/03/10/my-message-to-the-jews/

Settler Graffiti in Hebron [10/03/2008]
I realize very well that you are not carbon copies of each other. And I also know that there are many Jews around the world who truly despise what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in your name.

I earnestly commend these conscientious Jews for their morality and human decency. It is these honest people who enable us to retain the hope that counting on Judaic morality is not a lost cause.

Non the less, there are huge numbers of Jews who have found themselves transformed into soldiers of darkness and advocates of evil. There are Jews who shamelessly advocate the total annihilation of the Palestinian people. Unfortunately, these psychopaths are not isolated or marginal figures. On the contrary, they are highly respected by their hundreds of thousands of followers.

It is these misguided and misguiding multitudes of Jews I am addressing in this brief article. And, in truth, my ultimate goal is not to vilify and demonize, but rather to warn and admonish them to wake up from worshiping this modern Golden Calf, otherwise known as the State of Israel.

To begin with, I would like to remind you of a Talmudic story, which I believe is familiar to many of you. The story is told that a heathen came to Shammai with the request to be accepted as a convert on condition that he was taught the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. The Rabbi drove him away with the yard-stick which he was holding. He then went to Hillel with the same request; and he said to him: “What is hateful to you yourself, do not do to your fellow-man. That is the whole of the Torah and the remainder is but commentary. Go, learn it.”

Yes, yes, what is hateful to yourself, don’t do to your fellow-man. What beautiful words of light and wisdom!

Now are you mentally prepared to accept this universal law, which nearly every Jew on earth would agree encapsulates Judaic (and supposedly Jewish) morality?

If you are, then you should thoroughly examine your attitudes toward Israel, a state that has more in common with the ideas of Hitler than it doses with the teachings of Moses.

Israel is deceiving you, lying to you and betraying your moral legacy, the legacy bequeathed by the Israelite prophets, and their (our) forefather Ibrahim, who taught mankind “thou shall not murder, thou shall not lie, and thou shall not steal…..and be just.”

I am sorry to speak in such a harsh tone, but, in truth, Israel and Zionism succeeded through the years in transforming you from a people who believe in justice and value morality into murderers and justifiers of murder, into thieves and justifiers of theft, and into liars who have to change the black into white and the white into black in order to cover up their shame, and then call the lies strange names such as hasbara and public relations and political correctness.

In your name, Israel, knowingly and deliberately, is slaughtering innocent people, including children.

This is not done by mistake as Israeli leaders and spokespeople would falsely claim. When “mistakes ” happen every day and every hour and every minute, they are no longer mistakes. They are policy. Besides the images are too graphic to be ignored and too obscenely brazen to be dismissed as “Arab propaganda.” They transcend reality.

In your name, Israel has been carrying out ethnic cleansing, in its ugliest forms, all under the pretext of “maintaining Israel’s Jewish identity!!” you see the pornographic oppression, coming from a people who claim to adhere to the Ten Commandments.

In your name, Israel in the summer of 2006 dropped millions of cluster bombs or bomblets all over South Lebanon. Is this the light upon the nations that you claim to be? Shame on you!

It is because of your crimes against man and God that we, the Palestinians, have effectively become “the Jews of our time,” while you have effectively become the “anti-Semites of our time.” You, the Jews, the victims of the holocaust, and the numerous pogroms and inquisitions, have turned out to be like all underdogs, when you get on the top, you become as murderous and as brutal to your victims as your former oppressors were to you when you were underneath.

The Nazis looked down on Jews and others as untermensch, and you are looking down on us as “Arabs”.!! The Nazis sought expansion at their neighbors’ expense and called it “lebensraum.” And you are doing the same, under the pretext of building “housing units for Jews.” The Nazis carried out “pacifications” in which innocent people were mercilessly killed; and you carry out “defensive operations” during which you wreak death and havoc on innocent people. At least the Nazis didn’t lie about their criminality as much as you do about yours. You are not only evil murderers and great child killers. You are also nefarious liars.

The Nazis believed in an Aryan “master race” and you, Zionists, are trying to make a “race” out of Jews. Your methods are similar and your goals are nearly identical.

You can’t deny this; we are not naive North Americans or Europeans whom you think you can bamboozle very easily. We have been through it all, from creation to destruction.

I am saying this because in the final analysis when people, any people, including Jews, behave and act as the Nazis did, they themselves become Nazis. Evil, whether done by a “master race” or a “chosen people” is evil. Evil can’t be kosher. True, there are no gas chambers in Gaza and Hebron. But you are killing us with F-16 fighters and tanks and artillery and apache helicopters. So, the outcome is the same. Besides, the writing is literally on the wall. Come to Hebron and see for yourselves.

Too harsh?

No, it is not, because if what is happening today in Palestine at the hands of holocaust children and grand children and great grandchildren is having no effects on your individual and collective conscience, it is immensely naive to think that you will experience a moral awakening when the pharaohs of Israel, people like Matan Vilnai, choose to carry out their threatened “greater holocaust” against our people.

Many of you may be forgiven for being ignorant of Israel’s reality of evil. But you are not a people of ignorance. Which means you are doing and supporting evil knowingly and consciously. If so, you are no better than your past tormentors.

Don’t be so excited about America’s unlimited and unrestricted support and backing. America is not helping you to uphold your moral principles, America is “helping” you to destroy these principles, which you are doing anyway.

Needles to say, when an evil power “helps” you corrode your moral system, this should not be a cause for joy and satisfaction. I am sure that wise men and women amongst you understand the meaning of my words.

Finally, I call on you to wake up from this toxic arrogance of power, this collective megalomania and false sense of triumph. You are actually experiencing a collective psychosis, a virtual moral meltdown. Hence, you are really in a big trouble.
And, now, a few words to Jews in Israel-Palestine. Soon you will be celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary, which is for us is a profoundly inauspicious occasion commemorating evil and genocide. Because you destroyed our homes, obliterated our towns and villages, perpetrated untold massacres, and expelled the bulk of our people, at gun point, to the four corners of the globe. And you had the audacity to call all of this evil “war of independence” and to claim that “they just fled away…”!!!

Notwithstanding , you are still as blind as you are brutal despite the passage of 60 years.

If you had invested a fraction of the means at your disposal; if you had used your energies and industriousness and creativity for peace with your neighbors, peace would have been realized a long time ago.

But you were not interested in peace then as you are not interested in peace now. Instead you were busy then and as you are busy now stealing our land and building thereon Jewish-only settlements inhabited by fanatical settlers who are taught that the only way to expedite the appearance of the “redeemer” is by shedding non-Jewish blood and doing evil.

Well, since when murder and evil can produce good?

Non the less, it is perhaps not too late to try to rectify your evil ways and morbid thinking.

Try to reach out to the Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims. Remember, this is a predominantly Muslim region, and in a few decades, there will be 700 or 800 million Muslims in your vicinity. Think about your future generations. Maybe, just maybe, America’s military and economic power will have gone with the wind by then.

More over, try to show respect to Islam, because without respecting Islam, you don’t really respect Judaism. This is instead of vilifying the religion that describes the Torah as “a book of light.”

And stop this dishonorable alliance with those pseudo-Christian maniacs who advocate and actively push for a worldwide Armageddon in which hundreds of millions of people, including 99% of Jews, would perish, all in order to induce the second advent of Jesus.

But above all, stop killing and tormenting the helpless Palestinians for you had been helpless yourselves. Stop killing their children. Stop destroying their homes. Stop confiscating their land. Stop imprisoning their sons unjustly. Stop narrowing their horizons. Stop your mass murder, mass terror and mass oppression. Stop making a hell out of our daily life. Yes, stop it, if not for justice and human decency, then for your own safety. Oppression boomerangs as we saw recently in Jerusalem.

And don’t get emboldened by American officials who tell you …Kill, kill, kill and we will stand by you! because America and its immoral politicians are thousands of miles away…but we are destined to be neighbors, or even citizens of the same state.

And remember, it is not an act of heroism to murder unprotected innocent civilians, using the state-of-the-art of America’s technology of death. History won’t be kind to you.

What heroism is there in having an F-16 fighter rain death on sleeping children and women at a refugee camp?

Shame on you.