What we see now is a purposeful program of terror and it is merely the latest, in form and intent, of what Palestinians have endured since the Nakba.
Jaramana Refugee Camp in Damascus, Syria, established after Nakba, 1948. (Wikimedia)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
The shattering events of the past few weeks in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip require us at last to understand the apartheid state for what it is. It is a Frankenstein created and sustained by those Western powers that have for the past 73 years encouraged and materially enabled its racist program to destroy Palestinians as a people — which is to say any semblance of a Palestinian polity with the autonomy and rights all people deserve.
No one with a head and heart that have not been deadened, and eyes that propaganda has not blinded, can any longer defend this nation’s conduct — not credibly, not morally. No one with a conscience can any longer wish it well, given what its leadership has made of it.
“It has the potential to unleash an uncontainable security and humanitarian crisis,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said of the current reign of violence during an emergency session of the Security Council over the weekend. This is a tragic circumstance, but we must correct the secretary-general on several points.
Palestinians have endured a chronic humanitarian crisis of Israel’s making for seven decades and some. It is the same on the security side: Israel, as the readily available record shows, began to unleash this crisis with the intent of terrorizing Palestinians even before the British Mandate expired in May 1948. It is the Palestinians’ legitimate aspirations that have since been “contained,” and it is these that must be unleashed from Israel’s chokehold if a lasting peace is to be achieved.
The inhumane, criminal assaults on Palestinians throughout Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza we witness daily now began a month ago with a shockingly uninhibited campaign to evict Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah section of East Jerusalem. While these cases were pending in the Israeli Supreme Court, Israeli police provocatively attempted to restrict Palestinians’ access to al–Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, another Muslim holy site—this during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month.
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Israeli security forces then began three nights of intrusive raids on al–Aqsa during times of prayer — tear gas, “skunk bombs,” rubber bullets, boots trampling prayer mats, the lot. Then came the horrible frenzies — no other words for these—of crazed Israeli teenagers celebrating the murders of Palestinians and the destruction of their shops and homes.
Then came Hamas’ retaliatory rockets fired into Jerusalem from Gaza after an ultimatum it issued to retreat from al-Aqsa was ignored. And now we watch Israel’s fourth attack on Gaza in the past dozen years. And now we read in our corporate press of Israeli–Arab “clashes” and of Israel’s “right to self-defense.”
Can anything good come of these crimes and inhumanities? The question borders on preposterous given all we see daily on videos shot by eyewitnesses and all we read from those few independent correspondents with integrity enough to write honestly of what they witness.
But the answer is yes, and evidence in support of this conclusion is now all around us.
A Turning Tide?
Richard Falk, former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, in 2017. (Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
The entire world can now see that Israel is a laboratory monster whose animating electrodes must be cut. No one can any longer dispute its intent to ethnic-cleanse Palestinians: Israelis, from senior government officials to systematically deranged adolescents dancing in the streets, now tell us this. Neither can anyone question that the “Jewish state” has made itself the worst possible memorial to the 6 million killed in the Holocaust that anyone could possibly conceive of.
Israel is another South Africa, a terrorist state bent on creating “Palestans” as Africa’s apartheid regime herded Africans into Bantustans — worthless specks of land with no access to the outside world but through the controlling power. Israel’s conduct resembles the Nazis’ by way of its day-to-day realities and its intentions. By the day, very many more people now come to consider whether these statements are the exaggerations they were long taken to be.
It is early days yet, but the tide may at last be turning in the way the world understands Israel and the way it has long felt obliged to treat it. To be noted at this moment: The power to determine this lies with Palestinians at least as much as it does with the Israelis.
In an extended exchange with Richard Falk several years ago, the noted scholar, attorney, activist, and U.N. special rapporteur on Palestine spoke of what he called the Palestinians’ “legitimacy struggle” — the power conferred by legal and moral superiority as against “hard power.” The future of Palestinian resistance is up to Palestinians and is now an open question. But there is no question of their gains, as measured by Falk’s war by legitimacy, during these past weeks of suffering. Ask them on the streets of Chicago, or Glasgow, or Sana’a, or in numerous other towns and cities around the world. [Watch CN Live!‘s interview with Falk.]
Long Obscured
David Ben-Gurion pronouncing the Declaration of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel. (Wikimedia)
It has long been remarkable the extent to which the history of Jewish colonization of Palestinian lands, with the backing of the U.S., Britain, and the United Nations, has been obscured. The events leading to David Ben–Gurion’s declaration of the independent state of Israel on May 14, 1948, have long been explained as expressions of the humanitarian debt the world owed all Jews who survived the Nazis’ terror regime. This is how the creation of Israel was sold to citizens of the Western powers, but “humanitarian” has little place in this story unless we think of it as “instrumental humanitarianism.”
A swift, non-scholarly examination of the history extending back only to 1948 is sufficient to reveal the Jewish settlement of Palestinian lands was humanitarian only if one does not count Palestinians as human — as many at the time did not. The strategy deployed on the ground was plainly and simply terror. Terrorize the Palestinian population until they simply go away.
I do not write anything new here. This, indeed, is my point. The late Edward Said, with his usual command of history, published The Question of Palestine in 1979. Curiously enough, that same year a British scholar living in Lebanon, Rosemary Sayigh, brought out Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. It is a different sort of book, closer to the ground than Said’s. Here is an extract, deriving from Sayigh’s research among Palestinians dwelling by her time in refugee camps but with memories of the Nakba, otherwise known as the Palestinian Catastrophe. The event at issue is an Israeli massacre in a village called Deir Yasseen (now Deir Yassin) in April 1948, a month before Israel’s independence:
“I interviewed many of the womenfolk in order to glean some information on any atrocities committed in Deir Yasseen, but the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault…. The recording of statements is hampered also by the hysterical state of the women, who often break down…. There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered. Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed….”
These sorts of accounts are plentiful enough. But they have been buried for seven decades beneath dense layers of propaganda and an incessant campaign of enforced forgetting. Now this history is again accessible; 1948 is no longer shrouded in the mists or deemed too far in the past to matter. I chose the above passage because it was disseminated via Twitter over the weekend by one Louis Allday:
This disturbing extract is illustrative of the calculated & extreme campaign of violence that Zionists used against the Palestinians during the Nakba in 1948. Up to this very moment the violence committed against them, & the grim logic behind it, has never ceased. #NakbaDay pic.twitter.com/RmhdkjFRjO
— Louis Allday (@Louis_Allday) May 15, 2021
To marshal history in this way is a source of power. In this case it tells us something vital about what we witness now. The Israeli method remains what it was in the late-1940s: What we see now is a purposeful program of terror and it is merely the latest, in form and intent, of what Palestinians have endured since the Nakba. There is no longer any cause to doubt this.
The manipulation of history took another turn after Israel’s victories in the 1967 War, when its use as a strategic asset in the American imperial constellation grew more significant. We enter now upon what Norman Finkelstein did us the great service of calling “the Holocaust industry” in his 2000 book of this name — for which he suffered a merciless and costly ostracism in the academy and in the pages of our corporate media.
Some readers may recall the 1970s and 1980s in this connection, when Holocaust museums and assorted memorials sprouted around the country like milkweed in an abandoned pasture. It was during this period when guilt and a preeminent debt to Israel were made into eternal features of the Western consciousness. If readers can think of a grosser abuse of the suffering of 6 million people than this, the instrumentalization of their suffering, please resort to the comment thread.
It is difficult to overstate the consequences of this appallingly cynical ploy. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the diabolic AIPAC, founded in 1963, began to accumulate what is surely unprecedented influence in American politics and policy in the post–1967 years. At this point, perfectly fair to say, the most powerful nation on earth does not have a foreign policy in the Middle East: This is Israel’s to determine.
Here are President Joe Biden’s White House flacks on his first conversation with Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu, during which he swerved not an inch from the “unconditional support” for Israel Hillary Clinton made a de rigueur tenet of American political culture during her first failed presidential campaigns:
Today the President spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, reaffirmed his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza, and condemned these indiscriminate attacks against Israel. pic.twitter.com/baHWh1b6Q2
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 15, 2021
More idiotically, here is Ned Price, the voice of American hypocrisy at the State Department, reiterating Israel’s right to self-defense but refusing to acknowledge the Palestinians have any such right themselves:
We had better understand this for what it is. Given the Israeli leadership’s stated intent, and the delirious passions of the nation’s citizenry, these sorts of equivocations in Washington amount to licenses to massacre.
This is what manipulated history has done to the leadership and the policy cliques in the Western powers. Beyond them, criticism of Israel is on the way to being punishable. The British Labour Party and mainstream Democrats in the U.S. may stand as extreme cases, but the phenomenon is poisoning all political discourse in (what remains of) the Western democracies.
The U.S. claims to hold to a “working definition” of anti–Semitism adopted by an international alliance of nations in 2016. It reads:
“Anti–Semitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti–Semitism are directed toward Jewish or non–Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
This is measured, correct, and useful. But the State Department, in the Newspeak Ned Price now typifies, accepts but does not accept this definition all at once. As it elaborates on its website:
“Manifestations might include the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity. However, criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as anti–Semitic.”
One would ask for help understanding what these sentences mean back-to-back, but the department relieves such confusion by explaining that identifying Israel as racist, or comparing its conduct with that of the Nazi regime, or holding Israeli citizens responsible for what their government and military do are to be counted anti–Semitic.
In other words, the official language is in place to charge that critics of Israel are anti–Semites.
I take vigorous exception to this. Nobody who does not know another’s beliefs, principles, associations, loyalties, and so on has a right to label anyone an anti–Semite. The state of Israel is prima facie racist at this point and one is obliged to say this. Comparing Israel with the Nazis seems to me exaggerated, but the thought that there are similarities between the conduct of the two is anyone’s to entertain and deserves a place on the table whether or not one accepts this as true.
Let us shine a bright light on this ridiculous bit of hocus-pocus so as to dispose of all efforts to use a label as an instrument of intimidation, for the events filling our news pages require this. All one needs is a pair of quotation marks. With strenuous objections, I accept that by the official State Department definition (and not by any rational definition) I am an “anti–Semite.”
It is time to look at ourselves and see what our Frankenstein has done to us these past 73 years. We in the West, and Americans and Britons above all, have lost all morality and decency in the service of this grotesque creature. We can no longer think for ourselves. We are no longer capable of reason or rational discourse, language itself having been mutilated. We can no longer see straight, for blindness has been essential to the furtherance of the Israeli project as it has been and as we now have it. Our press, not least, has thoroughly lost its way on any topic of concern to the Israelis — Palestine, Iran and Syria chief among these.
It is yet worse when we consider what has become of Israeli society. Decades of overindulgence and the instrumentalization of what began as a legitimate debt owed to the world’s Jews have turned Israel into a nation that proudly proclaims its hatred of Palestinians, celebrates their suffering, and dances jigs in the streets while mobs attack them. “We have a right to hate them,” one middle-aged Israeli said on cameralast week. No one can deny this. All must pity it.
As is always the case, we must note, the victimizers are victims, too. (And this is emphatically something Israelis and Nazis share, as victims of their own warped ideology, their own fears, and consumed by their own hatreds.) The great volume of video and film recorded on Israeli streets and disseminated over the past couple of weeks show us a warped people. This is what Israeli schools are turning out and what training for service in the Israeli Defense Force makes of its conscripts: They have created hate and violence machines. This is what far-right politicians (who have a new presence in the Knesset as of elections two months ago) want Israeli youth to be. In dehumanizing Palestinians, Israelis have dehumanized themselves.
There are those in Israel who raise their voices in objection. In doing so they preserve their humanity. It is time we all take the lesson: So must we object if we are to remain human.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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I refuse to buy anything made in the pariah state of Israel. The only way to change things is to hit them in their pocketbook. The world community did it with S. Africa over their apartheid policy. It can be done with Israel as well and the sooner the better.
Brilliant article! It is obvious now that one must either love humanity en masse or stand accused of being an anti-Semite. I stand with humanity against hatred. You cannot deconstruct the nihilism of what used to be called representative democracy. The US can either stand up against tyranny or stand down with the rest of those empires which followed their own exceptional pathways to the dustbins of history.
A powerful essay. Thank you, Mr. Lawrence. One feels a rapid tectonic shift in attitudes toward Israel. Many people and journalists have had enough. This is a sentiment that has been shared globally but is a new awakening here. Palestinians rights have for too long not been a consideration. It is a good thing that U.S. influence is diminishing in the Middle East. We still have a political class that operates from policies developed when Lawrence Welk and Ed Sullivan ruled the airwaves. The U.S. won’t change but the world will.
What makes Lawrence’s article even more disturbing is the fact the we, in the US, with our unqualified political and financial support, are chiefly responsible for this carnage (those are American-made weapons slaughtering children). Our spineless politicians, all the way up to Biden, are terrified that their political careers would be threatened if they chose to defund this apartheid state.
I am so sad to hear that Biden is supporting Netanyahu in this badly balanced overkill of the people of Palestine.
Something not discussed here or in the many articles concerning the latest installment of Israeli ethnic cleansing.
Israel IS NOT an ally of the US. Israel is no-one’s ally. Try to imagine that Israel would give the US “unconditional and unequivocal” support in ANY matter. It is literally unimaginable. There are in fact many instances of just the opposite, where Israel has turned viciously on the US on those occasions when the latter even slightly deviated from the designs of the former.
If the US were to come to its senses and cut Israel loose completely – no more aid , no more weapons, no more ammunition – the US would suffer a spate of assassinations and infrastructure attacks just as those visited now upon Iran. I stand by this conclusion. It is not that Israeli attitudes toward the US would change; hardly – Israeli Zionists despise the US and Americans just as equally as they do just about everyone else; maybe more so because the entire US government is so completely compromised and duped (see Karamotsov, below.)
In the same sense that Patrick Lawrence tried to thread the needle above, I too must now be considered an “anti-Semite.” This did not have to be so; a boomer, like most others I grew up hearing/learning about the Nazi death camps and the mass murder committed against Jews and many others. And over the decades I’ve seen that history turned into a cudgel to beat down any criticism of the crimes committed by the State of Israel – the continuation of the cycle of human violence that has hardly changed for 5000 years.
If, as Mr. Lawrence posits several times above, there was a “legitimate debt owed to the world’s Jews” that debt has been paid under outrageous usurious terms many times over. And I consider even that premise as being highly contentious. It would be more appropriate to say that Europe (and the US, as Europe’s bastard child) and Russia owe a legitimate debt. Asia during the early years of the last world war was under assault by Japanese imperialism, and Africa was and remains a disaster of ongoing tribal warfare in which no entity existed to come to the moral or physical aid of Jews under Nazism.
No lectures please: I’ve dug quite deep to try to understand the roots of Zionism, and I fully get it. But it is not right nor justified, and in the end does not serve well the interests of Jews or humanity.
Again, Patrick Lawrence swings for the fences and connects. This has needed saying so much and now it is so. For me it represents another first step in a necessary building a house of facts, truths that must be beheld and raised up in the world’s consciousness until the point is reached where the fever finally breaks and the patient begins to heal.
I will only add that Israel to me is the extremely ill patient as well as being the sickness itself. This is what remains to be learned by the Israelis within their convoluted rationales and twisted justifications for their treatment of the Palestinian people. And the world at large, too, especially the United States with its supporting cast of rapture-longing evangelicals and the Zionist Industrial Complex in all of its many perturbative iterations.
The issue at hand which must be recognized and come to terms with is that they themselves are caught up, enraptured and captured both in such a profound individual and national psychosis that so many of them cannot even begin to acknowledge, let alone come to see their way out of it under these conditions of constant reinforcement. And especially now within Netanyahu’s throes of last stand desperation, his embrace of criminal zealotry into his coalition, the welcoming of the actually clinically insane Kahanists into government.
It is their contemporary raison d’être to figuratively and literally burn the Palestinian house down, to eradicate, but not only Palestinians fro Eretz Israel, but any and all of the ‘Other,’ but for their expressed purposes for human slavery, which they actually propound for unashamedly in public, their hubris on full display in all of its inflated-to-bursting confidence as if buttressed by high dosage prednisone. But no, it is actually the fever-induced adrenaline fomented by Meir Kahane’s form of criminal madness. Anyone thinking Israel could not go much further down the wrong path is due for a comeuppance. Israel has changed recently. For the worse.
Normal-enough people will recoil, be aghast at what the Israeli state under the Kahanists is doing to perpetuate and strengthen its delusional supremacist policies, a cross between imperial edicts and raving bullet and bulldozer lunacies. With a smiley face.
David Sheen is a brave Israeli man and like so many others in my opinion, has been enabled and encouraged by the greatest and longest-suffering Jewish hero of our times, Norman Finkelstein. I urge you unconditionally to hear Mr Sheen out in his presentation of the now-dominant modern Israeli state consciousness in this, his exposé, “Messiah Mode.”
hXXps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFl4U2NRJTg&t=2s
Thank you Patrick-This was a reckoning-a tour. de-force
Dear Mr. Lawrence:
I can hardly talk about this matter with equanimity anymore.
Israel is, as so many scholars and thinkers have written, a colonial-settler project, launched by Britain and sustained politically, and materially by the U.S. while the rest of the world winks.
What horrifies me is that there is a parallel with the way Israel is attacking the Palestinians and what Jews were subjected to in Nazi Germany–gradual extermination.
Thank you for this essay.
“the most powerful nation on earth does not have a foreign policy in the Middle East: This is Israel’s to determine.”
— An idiotic commentary in The Globe and Mail in the last few days opined that Biden is powerless to curb Israel’s attacks.
In fact, he is obviously the person most able to do so, simply by threatening to cut off military aid. It’s just that he won’t.
BTW, Frankenstein in the story was a scientist. I think you mean to refer to his monster.
Speaking of which, if Israel doesn’t want to be compared to Nazi Germany, it should stop acting like Nazi Germany.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that ,”The ultimate logic of racism is genocide”.
That, it seems to me ,perfectly sums up the Israeli/Palestine conflict in a nutshell.
Deeply entrenched Israeli racism has carried on for the last sixty or more years -getting more brutal by the decade-as if Palestinian people are mere inferior subhumans and to be treated as disposable insects .
Naturally people not blinded by racist ruthlessness see the merciless bombing and endless tormenting of the Palestinian people as frighteningly bewildering and incomprehensible.
“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide”,as Dr. King eloquently pointed out long ago.
I remember during the diabolical warcrime of the USA “SHOCK AND AWE” attack on Iraq in 2003 and Iraqi women crying in horror on a video and were translated as saying “Why,Why,Why”-was this mad bombing taking place.
Of course we all know now with overwhelming documentation that the war against Iraq was based on lies intentionally promulgated by the Bush administration.
If you can abstract yourself out of the horror and justified human emotion of being in the process of being shock and awe bombed into oblivion and get an eloquent answer as to “WHY WHY WHY “ the USA bombed mercilessly and with no justification the Iraqi civilian population and infrastructure in 2003 and WHY the Israeli’s unceasingly continually brutalize and torment the Palestinian people without a shred of conscience or mercy, it seems to me one need go no further than Martin Luther King’s profound observation put into seven word sentence-“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide”
(we won’t mention here the long list of other countries experiencing similar USA military treatment in the past,Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. etc.-See all the films of John Pilger and the book by William Blum entitled “Killing Hope” for that)-Ramsey Clark’s “The Fire This Time” book also a soul shaking wakeup call to the absolute diabolical degrees of cruelty, violence and unbridled genocide that “the ultimate logic of racism” leads to.
I lived in Israel in 1978 , and totally agree with all your points of your article. I remember dating a light skin Israeli women , her parents had no problem with a light skin man dating her daughter . There are three groups of citizens in Israel first class , light skinned , second class middle east Jews , and third class Palestinians .
Well said
From the article: “As is always the case, we must note, the victimizers are victims, too. (And this is emphatically something Israelis and Nazis share, as victims of their own warped ideology, their own fears, and consumed by their own hatreds.) ”
“The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,” an astute Jewish psychologist once observed. Why? Because, as Frederick Douglass wrote, “Men do not love those who remind them of their sins.”
If Israel persists on its present course, that Jewish psychologist’s insight will be recast as “The Jews will never forgive the Palestinians for Gaza. “
A memorable passage from Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamotsov” concerned old man Karamotsov talking to a “friend” about another acquaintance of the old man’s. Karamotsov: “I once played a dirty trick on that man, and I have hated him ever since.”
Great article.
Caitlin Johnstone put the matter very well: “You don’t get to drop an entire colony on top of an inhabited country, grind those inhabitants into the dirt for generations, and then claim self-defense every time they retaliate. That’s not a thing.”
As I personally have too much Jewish ancestry to be called an “antisemite” but too little to be called a “self-hating Jew” (although these smears can be hurled at anyone ), I think I can see the matter more-less objectively.
It is clear that Zionism developed in reaction to, and as part of, the various ethno-nationalisms that were the curse of Europe in the late 19th century and first half of the 20th century – the deformed child, as it were, of European imperialism – which reached their apogee in fascism. And there is in Israel a certain mirror reflection of German Nazism – not in terms of the genocide which the Jews were the principal victims of – but rather as to how the Nazis treated neighboring countries and peoples. Israel’s actions in occupied Palestine is not that far removed from Germany’s wartime treatment of occupied Poland – where the Poles living under occupation had their land and businesses confiscated, were treated like subhumans, were subject to constant supervision and harassment. Generalgouvernement Palestine…
And sadly the Zionist project has itself has served to a large degree to eradicate Jewish culture in Europe and the Arab Middle East, continuing the work of European Fascism. For example, the once vibrant Sephardic population of Bulgaria – which was saved from destruction under a collaborationist regime by the actions of a few very courageous politicians, intellectuals and the leaders of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church – was induced after the war to leave for Israel – to the extent of 90% of the Jewish population. And likewise throughout the Middle East and elsewhere. And, as Yasha Levine points out in his writings, inducing Soviet Jews to leave their homeland for Israel was the next step in this process. Sephardic Spanish is dead in Bulgaria (as well as in Greece, where the Sephardic population was killed by the Nazis), and Yiddish is dead in Eastern Europe.
But the main victims of the Eretz Israel project were the Palestinians. Why should they have been made to suffer for crimes carried out by far-away Europeans – mainly “the Germans” – against their Jewish population? As the late André Vltchek wrote, a fairer compensation would have been to hand over Bavaria for Jewish settlement. And the idea of “going back” to a homeland where one’s putative ancestors lived 2,000+ years ago is patently ridiculous. 2,000 years ago Central Europe was Celtic, the Hungarians lived in the steppes of Russia – should the Irish, Welsh and Scots therefore be given Switzerland, Austria and Hungary, and the Hungarians part of Russia? And the Palestinians can more strongly argue that their ancestors lived in Palestine, including Christian and Jewish communities going back to antiquity, some still speaking old languages like Aramaic.
The main problem is, on the one hand, that the broad mass of people in the West have little knowledge of history – and those who are a bit more informed and intelligent lack courage.
Thank you for this article.
Amen. I would add Ilan Pappe’s meticulously researched work, “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” to your list of sources.
I once heard an Amiri Baraka haiku (what he called ‘low-q’s for black people’) that went something like this:
The Nazi’s worst crime
was its turning its victims
into one of them
Debt jubilee now, defund Israeli fascism. Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (or end all sanctions on all countries as acts of war).
Super haiku/low-q (although that wasn’t the Nazis’ worst crime).
Also great pseudonym/handle.
“Neither can anyone question that the “Jewish state” has made itself the worst possible memorial to the 6 million killed in the Holocaust that anyone could possibly conceive of.”
Exactly right.
Re: No Longer Shrouded in the Mists
Moshe Dayan: “Jewish places were built in the place of Arab villages. There is not one single place in the country that did not have a former Arab population” cited by John Pilger in his 1977 (forty-three years ago) documentary: Palestine Is Still The Issue | Real Stories
hXXps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYF0td7Ykus (Despair)
Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin in Luxembourg in November 2018 (some forty-one years on)
hXXps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu6mpsH1WXc (Hope)
Boycott the obvious bully Israel. Boycott Israel in any way you can. Boycott goods coming from there and boycott goods heading there. Keep these goods from having anywhere to go because they are tainted in the worst way. They have blood on them.
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Study up and refuse to buy goods associated with Israel. There is a “BDS” list for this. The site is another “.org”.
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Sadly, and I know some might disagree, after that maybe it will be time to boycott the other bully who has facilitated this travesty and it is full of ignominy.
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We know who the other bully is, but after this other bully is subsumed by wiser minds, then things will get better, but I reckon the transition ain’t gonna come easy. Oh well. Eff the 20th century and lets move on shall we. Lets do what must be done. All bullies get their due in the end, cause you must know, within the heart of a bully is the most pathetic human attribute that is very contagious – FEAR. Don’t succumb to it, and then love will prevail – as it should. Bonk a bully on the head and help them wake up to the 21st century. Many of us, most of us, are ready for something better and there are better ideas in the wind.
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Sometimes when you get boycotted it teaches you a lesson regarding self sufficiency and maybe that is lesson that needs to be learned.
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I support the Palestinians and I’m tired of the hypocrisy, just like i suspect most of the readers here are as well…..fed up with it. Time for a change and the time is NOW!
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Lets make it happen with all that we have got. I’m all in.
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BK
In college, all those many years ago, I wrote a paper on the founding of Israel. From that day to this (around 1971), I have never (knowingly) bought a product manufactured in Israel.
It is amazing how quick Israeli values evaporate when studying Israel’s true history.
This experiment shows what happens in a police state free of accountability, terribly troubling as well is the absolute U.S. cowardice exhibited when dealing with it’s spoiled illegitimate child.
I genuinely have not one bit of respect for anyone claiming the ruling elite in Israel are their friends. It is not a thing and the Israeli prove it every time they are ambiguous which is pretty much constantly.