By Chris Hedges
February 24, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" - The Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic
hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples
with claims to the same land. It is a manufactured
conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial
occupation by
Zionists and later Israel, backed by the
British, the United States and other major imperial
powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of
Palestinian land by the colonizers. It is about the
rendering of the Palestinians as non-people, writing
them out of the historical narrative as if they
never existed and denying them basic human rights.
Yet to state these incontrovertible facts of Jewish
colonization — supported by innumerable official
reports and public and private communiques and
statements, along with historical records and events
— sees Israel’s defenders level charges of
anti-Semitism and racism.
Rashid Khalidi, the
Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at
Columbia University, in his book “The
Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of
Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017” has
meticulously documented this long project of
colonization of Palestine. His exhaustive research,
which includes internal, private communications
between the early Zionists and Israeli leadership,
leaves no doubt that the Jewish colonizers were
acutely aware from the start that the Palestinian
people had to be subjugated and removed to create
the Jewish state. The Jewish leadership was also
acutely aware that its intentions had to be masked
behind euphemisms, the patina of biblical legitimacy
by Jews to a land that had been Muslim since the
seventh century, platitudes about human and
democratic rights, the supposed benefits of
colonization to the colonized and a mendacious call
for democracy and peaceful co-existence with those
targeted for destruction.
“This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been
subjected to where they have no use for us,” Khalidi
quotes Said as having written. “The best Palestinian
for them,” Said wrote, “is either dead or gone. It’s
not that they want to exploit us, or that they need
to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South
Africa as a subclass.”
Zionism was birthed from the evils of
anti-Semitism. It was a response to the
discrimination and violence inflicted on Jews,
especially during the savage
pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late
19th century and early 20th century that left
thousands dead. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in
1896 published “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish
State,” in which he warned that Jews were not safe
in Europe, a warning that within a few decades
proved terrifyingly prescient with the rise of
German fascism.