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.
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Britain’s support of a Jewish
homeland was always colored by
anti-Semitism. The 1917 decision by the
British Cabinet, as stated in the
Balfour Declaration, to support “the
establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people” was a
principal part of a misguided endeavor
based on anti-Semitic tropes. It was
undertaken by the ruling British elites
to unite “international Jewry” —
including officials of Jewish descent in
senior positions in the new Bolshevik
state in Russia — behind Britain’s
flagging military campaign in World War
I. The British leaders were convinced
that Jews secretly controlled the U.S.
financial system. American Jews, once
promised a homeland in Palestine, would,
they thought, bring the United States
into the war and help finance the war
effort. To add to these bizarre
anti-Semitic canards, the British
believed that Jews and Dönmes — or
“crypto-Jews” whose ancestors had
converted to Christianity but who
continued to practice the rituals of
Judaism in secret — controlled the
Turkish government. If the Zionists were
given a homeland in Palestine, the
British believed, the Jews and Dönmes
would turn on the Turkish regime, which
was allied with Germany in the war, and
the Turkish government would collapse.
World Jewry, the British were convinced,
was the key to winning the war.
“With ‘Great Jewry’ against us,” warned
Britain’s Sir
Mark Sykes, who with the French diplomat
François Georges-Picot created the secret treaty
that carved up the
Ottoman Empire between Britain and France,
there would be no possibility of victory.
Zionism, Sykes said, was a powerful global
subterranean force that was “atmospheric,
international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and
unwritten, nay often unspoken.”
The British elites, including Foreign
Secretary
Arthur Balfour, also believed that Jews
could never be assimilated in British society
and it was better for them to emigrate. It is
telling that the only Jewish member of Prime
Minister David Lloyd George’s government, Edwin
Montagu, vehemently opposed the Balfour
Declaration. He argued that it would encourage
states to expel its Jews. “Palestine will become
the world’s ghetto,” he warned.
This turned out to be the case after World
War II when hundreds of thousands of Jewish
refugees, many rendered stateless, had nowhere
to go but Palestine. Often, their communities
had been destroyed during the war or their homes
and land had been confiscated. Those Jews who
returned to countries like Poland found they had
nowhere to live and were often victims of
discrimination as well as postwar anti-Semitic
attacks and even massacres.
The European powers dealt with the Jewish
refugee crisis by shipping victims of the
Holocaust to the Middle East. So, while leading
Zionists understood that they had to uproot and
displace Arabs to establish a homeland, they
were also acutely aware that they were not
wanted in the countries from which they had fled
or been expelled. The Zionists and their
supporters may have mouthed slogans such as “a
land without a people for a people without a
land” in speaking of Palestine, but, as the
political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed,
European powers were attempting to deal with the
crime carried out against Jews in Europe by
committing another crime, one against
Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless
conflict, especially since giving the
Palestinians under occupation full democratic
rights would risk loss of control of Israel by
the Jews.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of the
right-wing ideology that has dominated Israel
since 1977, an ideology openly embraced by Prime
Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel
Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu,
wrote bluntly in 1923: “Every native population
in the world resists colonists as long as it has
the slightest hope of being able to rid itself
of the danger of being colonized. That is what
the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they
will persist in doing as long as there remains a
solitary spark of hope that they will be able to
prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into
the ‘Land of Israel.’ ”
This kind of public honesty, Khalidi notes,
was rare among leading Zionists. Most of the
Zionist leaders “protested the innocent purity
of their aims and deceived their Western
listeners, and perhaps themselves, with fairy
tales about their benign intentions toward the
Arab inhabitants of Palestine,” he writes. The
Zionists — in a situation similar to that of
today’s supporters of Israel — were aware it
would be fatal to acknowledge that the creation
of a Jewish homeland required the expulsion of
the Arab majority. Such an admission would cause
the colonizers to lose the world’s sympathy. But
among themselves the Zionists clearly understood
that the use of armed force against the Arab
majority was essential for the colonial project
to succeed. “Zionist colonization … can proceed
and develop only under the protection of a power
that is independent of the native population —
behind an iron wall, which the native population
cannot breach,” Jabotinsky wrote.
The Jewish colonizers knew they needed an
imperial patron to succeed and survive. Their
first patron was Britain, which sent 100,000
troops to crush the Palestinian revolt of the
1930s and armed and trained Jewish militias
known as the Haganah. The savage repression of
that revolt included wholesale executions and
aerial bombardment and left 10% of the adult
male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned
or exiled. The Zionists’ second patron became
the United States, which now, generations later,
provides
more than $3 billion a year to Israel.
Israel, despite the myth of self-reliance it
peddles about itself, would not be able to
maintain its Palestinian colonies but for its
imperial benefactors. This is why the
boycott, divestment and sanctions movement
frightens Israel. It is also why I support the
BDS movement.
The early Zionists bought up huge tracts of
fertile Palestinian land and drove out the
indigenous inhabitants. They subsidized European
Jewish settlers sent to Palestine, where 94% of
the inhabitants were Arabs. They created
organizations such as the Jewish Colonization
Association, later called the Palestine Jewish
Colonization Association, to administer the
Zionist project.
But, as Khalidi writes, “once colonialism
took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era
of decolonization, the colonial origins and
practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed
and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the
West. In fact, Zionism — for two decades the
coddled step-child of British colonialism —
rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement.”
“Today, the conflict that was engendered by
this classic nineteenth-century European
colonial venture in a non-European land,
supported from 1917 onward by the greatest
Western imperial power of its age, is rarely
described in such unvarnished terms,” Khalidi
writes. “Indeed, those who analyze not only
Israeli settlement efforts in Jerusalem, the
West Bank, and the occupied Syrian Golan
Heights, but the entire Zionist enterprise from
the perspective of its colonial settler origins
and nature are often vilified. Many cannot
accept the contradiction inherent in the idea
that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in
creating a thriving national entity in Israel,
its roots are as a colonial settler project (as
are those of other modern countries: the United
States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Nor
can they accept that it would not have succeeded
but for the support of the great imperial
powers, Britain and later the United States.
Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a
national and a colonial settler movement at one
and the same time.”
One of the central tenets of the Zionist and
Israeli colonization is the denial of an
authentic, independent Palestinian identity.
During the British control of Palestine, the
population was officially divided between Jews
and “non-Jews.” “There were no such thing as
Palestinians … they did not exist,” onetime
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir quipped. This
erasure, which requires an egregious act of
historical amnesia, is what the Israeli
sociologist
Baruch Kimmerling called the “politicide” of
the Palestinian people. Khalidi writes, “The
surest way to eradicate a people’s right to
their land is to deny their historical
connection to it.”
The creation of the state of Israel on May
15, 1948, was achieved by the Haganah and other
Jewish groups through the ethnic cleansing of
the Palestinians and massacres that spread
terror among the Palestinian population. The
Haganah, trained and armed by the British,
swiftly seized most of Palestine. It emptied
West Jerusalem and cities such as Haifa and
Jaffa, along with numerous towns and villages,
of their Arab inhabitants. Palestinians call
this moment in their history the Nakba, or the
Catastrophe.
“By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian
polity had been devastated and most of its
society uprooted,” Khalidi writes. “Some 80
percent of the Arab population of the territory
that at war’s end became the new state of Israel
had been forced from their homes and lost their
lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3
million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks
to this violent transformation, Israel
controlled 78 percent of the territory of former
Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the
160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to
remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab
population.”
Since 1948, Palestinians have heroically
mounted one resistance effort after another, all
unleashing disproportionate Israeli reprisals
and a demonization of the Palestinians as
terrorists. But this resistance has also forced
the world to recognize the presence of
Palestinians, despite the feverish efforts of
Israel, the United States and many Arab regimes
to remove them from historical consciousness.
The repeated revolts, as Said noted, gave the
Palestinians the right to tell their own story,
the “permission to narrate.”
The colonial project has poisoned Israel, as
feared by its most prescient leaders, including
Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin,
who was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish
extremist in 1995. Israel is an apartheid state
that rivals and often surpasses the onetime
savagery and racism of apartheid South Africa.
Its democracy — which was always exclusively for
Jews — has been hijacked by extremists,
including current Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, who have implemented racial laws that
were once championed mainly by marginalized
fanatics such as
Meir Kahane. The Israeli public is infected
with racism. “Death to Arabs” is a popular chant
at Israeli soccer matches. Jewish mobs and
vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing
youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, carry out
indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence
against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs
and the hapless African immigrants who live
crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has
promulgated a series of discriminatory laws
against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist
Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in
Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law
permits exclusively Jewish towns in Israel’s
Galilee region to bar applicants for residency
on the basis of “suitability to the community’s
fundamental outlook.” The late Uri Avnery, a
left-wing politician and journalist, wrote that
“Israel’s very existence is threatened by
fascism.”
In recent years, up to 1 million Israelis
have
left to live in the United States, many of
them among Israel’s most enlightened and
educated citizens. Within Israel, human rights
campaigners, intellectuals and journalists —
Israeli and Palestinian — have found themselves
vilified as traitors in government-sponsored
smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance
and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli
educational system, starting in primary school,
is an indoctrination machine for the military.
The Israeli army periodically unleashes massive
assaults with its air force, artillery and
mechanized units on the largely defenseless 1.85
million Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in
thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded.
Israel runs the
Saharonim detention camp in the Negev
Desert, one of the largest detention centers in
the world, where African immigrants can be held
for up to three years without trial.
The great Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
whom
Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of
Israel,” saw the mortal danger to Israel of its
colonial project. He warned that if Israel did
not separate church and state and end its
colonial occupation of the Palestinians it would
give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp
Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Religious
nationalism is to religion what National
Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who
died in 1994. He saw that the blind veneration
of the military, especially after the 1967 war
in which Israel captured the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, would result in the degeneration of
the Jewish society and the death of democracy.
“Our situation will deteriorate to that of a
second Vietnam [a reference to the war waged by
the United States in the 1970s], to a war in
constant escalation without prospect of ultimate
resolution,” Leibowitz wrote. He foresaw that
“the Arabs would be the working people and the
Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials,
and police — mainly secret police. A state
ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2
million foreigners would necessarily become a
secret-police state, with all that this implies
for education, free speech and democratic
institutions. The corruption characteristic of
every colonial regime would also prevail in the
State of Israel. The administration would have
to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and
acquire Arab
Quislings on the other. There is also good
reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force,
which has been until now a people’s army, would,
as a result of being transformed into an army of
occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who
will have become military governors, resemble
their colleagues in other nations.”
The Zionists could never have colonized the
Palestinians without the backing of Western
imperial powers whose motives were tainted by
anti-Semitism. Many of the Jews who fled to
Israel would not have done so but for the
virulent European anti-Semitism that by the end
of World War II saw 6 million Jews murdered.
Israel was all that many impoverished and
stateless survivors, robbed of their national
rights, communities, homes and often most of
their relatives, had left. It became the tragic
fate of the Palestinians, who had no role in the
European pogroms or the Holocaust, to be
sacrificed on the altar of hate.