Zionist efforts to remove the Palestinian
Arabs from their land long predated Hitler's rise as a historical
figure. In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson's King-Crane Commission
reported back from the region that, "No British officer consulted by the
Commissioners believed that the Zionist program could be carried out
except by force of arms . . . only a greatly reduced Zionist program
should be attempted . . . and then only very gradually initiated." The
Commissioners called for a serious modification of existing plans for
unlimited Jewish immigration culminating in Jewish statehood. Regarding
Britain's 1917 Balfour Declaration, which had promised the Jews a home
in Palestine, King and Crane wrote: "A national home is not equivalent
to making Palestine into a Jewish state nor can the erection of such a
Jewish state be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities." At the time,
"existing non-Jewish communities" were Christian and Muslim Arabs
constituting 93% of Palestine's population.
During
the course of the King-Crane Commission's inquiry, Jewish
representatives had not concealed their ultimate hope of dispossessing
the Arab inhabitants of Palestine by various forms of purchase, in spite
of the fact that ninety percent of the latter were completely against
surrendering their land to the Zionist project. "To subject the people
so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration and to steady financial and
social pressure to surrender the land would be a gross violation" of
Wilsonian principle, the Commissioners wrote, "and of the people's
rights, though it be kept within the forms of law." Leaving aside the
dubious equation of Wilsonian principle with self-determination, it is
safe to say that overriding a 93% indigenous majority with whatever forms of pressure can hardly be described as an exercise in democracy.
Sadly,
the gross violation the Commissioners warned against occurred, and
Israel was founded, but commentary in the U.S. has almost completely
ignored the peculiar history behind the event. To wit: a largely
irreligious people reclaimed land after an absence of two thousand years
based on fantastical Biblical texts few of them believed in; Jehovah's
carvings on a Tablet in the Bronze Age became the basis of Near East
politics in the 20th Century; a "Jews-only" state bent on conquest and
expansion was hailed as a model of democratic socialism with unique
sensitivity to morality and human rights. Zionist leaders embarked on an "in-gathering" of the Jewish Diaspora and
plotted the exodus of Jews from lands they had lived in for centuries
while intoning the words Hitler had used in carrying out the Holocaust:
"You are not a German, you are a Jew - you are not a Frenchman, you are a
Jew - you are not a Belgian, you are a Jew."
The
heart of the problem was and remains a serious and deliberate confusion
of nationalism with religion. Organized Jewry, a staunch supporter of
separation of Church and State outside the Holy Land, condoned their
union in Israel, demanding the loyalty of Jews everywhere, whether or
not they identified themselves as such. Diasporan Jews supported Israel
out of religious duty, though they may or may not have been aware of
what Zionist ideology actually entailed. Jewish identity became the
basis of Israeli citizenship, with political debate naturally centering
on the vexing question, "What is a Jew?" Since Jews, like most people,
have a mixed ancestry, Jewish supremacist myth-makers buttressed weak
territorial claims with appeals to historical continuity, blurring
distinctions between Hebrew, Israelite, Judean, Jewish, and Judaism,
while forestalling recognition that these were different people at
different times in history with different ways of life. Neither the Jews
nor these varied forebears ever constituted a race or even a
distinctive pure ethnic grouping, and since Judaism had been of
declining significance for most Jews for some time, it quickly became
clear that Jewish identity was to be as arbitrary as it was convenient
for Israel to have it. Not surprisingly, only Palestinians can't belong.
Inevitably,
Israel's birth was traumatic. In November 1947, a Washington-dominated
U.N. passed a resolution awarding over 56% of the land of Palestine to
650,000 Jews, who represented just a third of the population and owned
some 6% of the land. Britain, its empire near collapse, began
withdrawing from its colonies the following Spring when its mandate over
Palestine expired. As the British pulled out, Zionist armies attacked
Arab villages, driving out roughly three-quarters of a million
Palestinians in the process of forging a Jewish state with a sizable
Arab minority, the latter forced to choose between exile and perpetual
discrimination.
The
fundamental injustice in the new state was rooted in the divorce of
citizenship from territoriality. Jews around the world had rights in the
Jewish state, but there could be nothing like full human rights for
non-Jews and only the most limited progress towards a just society. The
Jewish National Fund purchased lands on behalf of the Jewish people,
from which non-Jews were necessarily excluded. According to official
Israeli figures 92% of the state's surface prior to June, 1967 was
restricted to Jewish use - in perpetuity. Palestinians had no claim on
the land they had lived on for centuries.
Israel
acted to guarantee a permanent Jewish majority while establishing the
exclusivist institutions that statist Zionism called for. A huge effort
was made to attract the Jewish Diaspora to Israel, while expelling as
many Arabs as possible. Jews were ceaselessly reminded of the dangers of
anti-Semitism and the hopelessness of assimilation. At the same time,
and long before Menachem Begin and the Likud bloc took power, Israel's
Labor Party gradually incorporated a supranationalist "Greater Israel"
movement into its program, preaching expulsion to the Arabs, fear to
Diasporan Jews, and reflexively accusing anti-Zionist Gentiles of
anti-Semitism.
The Zionist
triumph placed a borderless Jewish island in a sea of angry Arabs.
Expansionism and new frontiers were its by-products, and war was quite
inevitable.
In the seventy-seven years since Israel came into existence as a Jewish state it
has not only taken hold of the land but also the structure of opinion
and commentary in the West, in such a way that the Palestinians have
been quite literally obliterated as a people with any claim to rights or
historical continuity. At the same time, the history of Israel that has
produced this appalling result has likewise been obliterated,
especially in the United States. It is nearly impossible to find
mainstream commentary referring to Israel's assassinating children at
will, bulldozing homes, bombing schools and hospitals, uprooting orchards, arresting,
deporting, and torturing anyone posing a "threat" to Jewish supremacy, and locking an entire people in a giant, outdoor
cage. On the contrary. Everything is carefully filtered through the lens
of "little Israel," victim of eternal anti-Semitism, in which
Palestinians are congenital terrorists yearning to kill Jews, especially
children. The fact that Israel introduced terrorism against
civilians to the region, that it originated in conquest, that it has
repeatedly invaded and occupied its neighbors, and was instrumental in
instigating the blood-drenched disaster in Iraq, never rises to
perceptibility in the U.S. media or in American political discourse. In
the official optic Israel bears no responsibility for "terrorism"
and is, in fact the victim of the peoples it occupies and kills.
Every
media comment about Hamas or Hizbollah or Iran invokes a cartoon-like
fantasy of total despotism, infantile rage, and savage violence, all
targeted at "us," the good people who save Jews from gas chambers and
otherwise pursue our charmingly harmless lives in a world devoid of
illegitimate authority and oppression. Never is there the slightest hint
that "extremist Islam" caused us absolutely no harm until Washington
backed Jewish supremacy over Arab lands, overthrew the democratically
elected government of Iran (1953), planted permanent military bases near
the holiest sites of Islam, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Iraqi
children with economic sanctions. And all this was before the neo-cons
engineered the invasion and dismemberment of Iraq.
Seventy-seven years on it is more than time to recognize that "little Israel" is a
permanent disaster fully capable of ringing down the curtain on the
entire human race. Racist, nuclear armed, violently delusional, it seeks
in the name of "security" to destroy any and all resistance to Jewish
domination. Though success on these terms is impossible, the attempt to
succeed can only yield a succession of unprecedented horrors.
