Israeli: the Pirate State

The president of Turkey today accused Israel of state terrorism for its totally illegal, immoral, and unjustified assault and massacre on the Free Palestine Movement's flotilla of ships trying to bring material aid to Gaza despite the Israeli blockade. State terrorism is an appropriate term, but, given the circumstances, I prefer the term piracy. This is by no means Israel's first act of piracy. The Israeli nuclear weapons program obtained its first  supply of uranium by hijacking a ship at sea with a cargo of uranium. Then they signed their1976 agreement with apartheid South Africa to help them with counterinsurgency, to harden their military vehicles, and to jointly develop nuclear weapons in exchange for a supply of yellowcake uranium from South Africa. Secret details of that agreement have just been published in the UK. Israel also conducted the first airplane hijacking, the first car bombing, and the kidnapping of antinuclear whistleblower Morcechai Vanunu from Rome. The state of Israel has no respect for the laws of nations. Its army  has no honor or respect for human rights. This has been true since 1947. Israeli spokesmen announce that their soldiers were "attacked" when they landed on the Free Palestine Movement's ships in uncontested international waters. Even if that is true (and Israeli accounts of such affairs are routinely proven to be falsified), since when is there something wrong with the use of force to repel pirates on the high seas. Israeli propaganda exists in a netherworld of illogical and unrealistic fantasy which nobody believes in with the exception of a few diehard supporters of Israel in the United States (which unfortnately always includes the US government executive and legislative branches). The use of piracy, defiance of international law, state terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and the other tools of out-of-control rogue states is no accident. It derives from the essential nature of the Israeli state, which is to defend at all costs the spoils of colonial conquest and to extend them as far as they can possibly go.

For five decades, Israel with the reprehensible support of foreign governments, most notoably that of the United States, has ruled its region t itwith naked force and repression. Now, that is finally beginning to reverse. The feeble forces of Hamas resisted Israel's brutal attack on Gaza. Hezbolleh in Lebanon threw back an Israeli invasion and now promises to respond to any future attack with a fullscale attack against Israel. Everyone takes that seriously, including Israel's government, which knows that Hezbolleh's leader does not make false promises and that he has the force to back it up. Secondly, American public opinion is finally waking up to Israel's reality. What has begun with student governments is spreading further. Of course, the American public is alienated with its government over many, many issues: health care, bank bailouts, pointless wars, etc. Let us hope that increasing hostility to Israeli policies will find a way to express itself in this mix.

Israel: The Anti-Jewish State

I have covered this theme before, but now I am looking at it from a slightly different angle and a profoundly Jewish angle. Israel claims to be the state of the Jews, the state of the "Jewish people." But how could such a state, even if there were such an entity as the Jewish people, be founded on an ideology which is profoundly racist against Jews. A state for Jews would have used its resources to help Jews in Argentina. Israel armed the anti-Jewish regime. A pro-Jewish movement would have used its resources to help European Jews to escape from fascism during World War II. The Zionist movement refused to do so. Let us remember that Zionism was born in Europe in the 19th century amidst a swirl of political movements ranging from socialism to the most perverted forms of racist nationalism. The Zionists had nothing in common with the socialists. To be sure, they represented a range of views, from the unapologetic fascists of Jabotinsky to the pro-Imperialists like Weizmann and Ben Gurion. But what they agreed on was that Jews did not belong in Europe, should leave, and create their own state. In other words, they internalized the program of the European anti-Semites,  made it their own, and called it Jewish. But that is a profoundly anti-Jewish program, an assault on Jewish self-respect and integrity. It is hardly surprising that such a movement did not draw many supporters, especially in the United States, where most Jews saw Zionists as crazy. A history of the Zionist movement in the United States praised Justice Brandeis for keeping the movement going when nobody would support it. The Zionists fought to establish a foothold in the rabbinical seminaries of the 1930s and 1940s, but they did not even manage to garner significant Jewish support in 1948. Ironically, it was Israel's war of aggression in 1967 which engendered the first significant support from American Jews and, much more importantly, from the US government. There are many signs that American Jewish support for Israel is in steep decline. I doubt that this results from a full or conscious understanding of the deeply anti-Jewish basis of the Israeli state, but I would not be surprised if there is a subtle psychological rejection of Israel's blatant identification with everything Jews learned to despise during centuries of persecution in Europe. The psychosis of 1967 has begun to heal, and let us hope that an awakening about the anti-Jewish nature of Israel will occur.

The Cancer of Zionism

I had a discussion recently with a friend which made clear to me that most people still don't understand the essential nature of the state of Israel. I commented that the only workable solution was a democratic one as in South Africa. My friend thought that would mean the death of the Jews living in Israel. I think that is far-fetched, no more likely than that the black Africans of South Africa would slaughter the whites of European descent there, which, of course, they did not. More importantly, it perpetuates the myth that Israel exists to protect Jews from something. To understand this conflict, you need to take that myth and put it through the mirror. Israel exists to expel Palestinians from Palestine. That is its fundamental organizing principle since 1947 and still today. Palestinians can have no security as long as a state exists which is designed to remove them from their homes. In that sense, the State of Israel is like a cancer. If you let a cancer grow, it takes over the body and kills it. If the State of Israel continues to exist, it will metastasize throughout the West Bank until Palestinian life there is even more untenable than it is now. Israeli leaders have been clear about that since 1947. The only thing stopping or slowing them is limited resources and international opposition. When a cancer is growing in your body you either have it cut out or you kill it with radiation. Let us hope that nobody tries radiation treatment. The racist, expansionist strategy of ethnic cleansing which is inherent in the present State of Israel must be cut out of it for any just peace to be possible. If the State of Israel were to become the democratic state of its citizens, it would not matter if there were one or two states in Palestine. So long as it is a state determined by political Zionism, it will be a major obstacle to peace.