More on moral voids

People who support the Israeli state’s actions in Gaza and more widely in the region either support the Zionist fascists who’ve stated openly that their intention is to destroy Gaza, annex the West Bank, remain in the occupied territories, and deny the Palestinians any sort of state – or they fail to challenge them. 

Either way makes them supportive of Israel as an openly far-right, aggressively colonising arm of US foreign policy in the Middle East. 

Who, in all seriousness can deny that the Palestinian people in Gaza, the West Bank, the occupied territories and the wider diaspora are the tragic victims of a vicious imperialist power play? 

Progressive Palestinians in exile and supporters in the 70s and 80s warned of the way that the US and Israel and their allies were demonising the Palestinian left, promoting factionalism, and backing terrorism and religious extremism. 

Fast forward to this century and Israel actively enabled Hamas by channeling Qatari money to the organisation, and there is compelling evidence that the Israeli state either orchestrated or let the October attacks happen to justify escalating the conflict with the aim of creating the Greater Israel that sits at the heart of the Zionist project. 

Israeli far rightists state openly and proudly that there never will be a Palestinian state; the choice for Palestinians is to live in perpetual exile from their homeland, or in forms and degrees of subjugation within it. 

The death of an Israeli settler in the West Bank as a result of what was effectively a suicide attack by two eighteen-year-old Palestinians from Hebron, gave rise to expressions of outrage from supporters of Israel. 

Given the events of the past seven decades and the massive escalation of IDF and settler violence against Palestinians over the past two years, such expressions of outrage over one dead Israeli serve to reinforce the Zionists’ precept that one Jewish life is worth one hundred or more Palestinian lives. 

It was the same with the Jewish man who was stabbed in London and the second victim who the police shot accidentally, the expectation that we should feel those deaths more keenly than the tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, the West Ban, Lebanon etc.  

On a personal level we should feel pity for the victims and their families, but we must also see them, not just as hapless victims of a deranged or desperate Muslim/Arab/Palestinian, but as victims of malign geopolitical manoeuvres by the powerful psychopaths and malignant narcissists who dominate politics in the region.

A wise person said the only thing Jews fear more than antisemitism, is no antisemitism. I would add the rider – right-wing Jews fear that.

To paraphrase Golda Meir, the Nazi holocaust gave Zionists a perpetual get out of coloniser jail free card. It serves both to create a perpetual guilt among the descendants of the perpetrators and colluders, and a sense of perpetual victimhood, fear and anger among Jews which now combines with an ideology of exceptionalism that makes Americans look positively modest. 

It’s toxic and harmful to Jewish people, and it risks fuelling real Jew hatred, not the ideological confection that apologists trot out to deflect away from the Israeli state’s appalling actions. 

It’s why so many progressive Jewish people would never live in Israel or support the Israeli state especially now that it has now lurched closer to actual fascism. 

The fact is, most of the Jews in Israel today, including most of the illegal settlers, have not fled from anti-Jewish persecution or even a viable threat of it.

They are there because of an ideology rooted in a spurious claim of indigeneity derived from a 3000-year-old religious text. That text also served to breathe life into the patriarchal kinship arrangements which spawned many of the world’s phallocratic regimes and institutions – a fact that too many Israeli-supporting feminists choose to ignore.

The politics of the Middle East and Palestine/Israel are hugely complex but what is simple is the fact that among the ruins caused by these geopolitical machinations, millions of real people who want nothing more than a simple life in peace and security, are suffering torments.

That is the horrible truth of it all.

Zionist Israel is wrong. It was wrong in its conception and its development. It may now be so wrong, it can never be put right. 

 

Moral Voids

In the USA’s Jim Crow era, a large majority of white citizens supported the racist status quo and either actively supported or failed to oppose the acts of terror – carried out by racist vigilantes and on occasion, the state – that were aimed at maintaining the economic and socio-political subjugation of black Americans.

In South Africa, the repressive apartheid apparatus and the racist lies on which it was built were also aimed at maintaining white economic and socio-political hegemony.

The colonialist ideologies underpinning both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were far-right and white supremacist, and the tactics used to oppress the target populations were terroristic and brutal in the extreme but the aim was not genocide or expulsion.

The same European colonialist, white supremacist ideology that underpinned Jim Crow and apartheid, had merged with the Zionist belief that the wording of the 3000-year-old founding text of their religion granted its modern-era adherents the divine right to settle in and control what they deemed to be Eretz Israel.

The flimsy leash on the genocidal potential of Israel’s form of apartheid was weakened with the current coalition of right and far-right parties under Netanyahu’s leadership. 

It was wholly removed when the Hamas attack gave the Israeli right the excuse to carry out mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza and destruction of infrastructure, moving rapidly towards military occupation of the whole of “Greater Israel” including parts of Syria, bombing other sovereign states, and even killing heads of state. 

Israeli terror tactics in Gaza have included massive bombardment aimed at the obliteration of all civil infrastructure, the use of drones, boobytrapping, and sniping in the targeting of non-combatants such as medics, journalists and aid workers, and the killing of children; the use of starvation and access to water as weapons. 

In the 1930s, the Nazis created a vicious paramilitary, routed the left, cowed the centre, and took control of the entire state apparatus. The political architects and administrators of the Nazi concentration and death camps and the high command of the uniformed death squads went to great lengths to hide their crimes, (albeit also meticulously recording them). 

Ordinary German citizens had the excuses of genuinely not knowing the full extent of what was being done by the Nazis and collaborators, and/or the fear of the fascistic apparatus being turned on them. 

There’s no get-out-of-genocide-jail-free card for Israelis. 

As so much of what the Israeli military has done has been captured on camera and broadcast hourly to the world, ordinary Israelis cannot claim ignorance of what their government is doing. 

Nor can they claim they’re silent out of fear of state reprisals given they claim to live in the only democratic, liberal society in the Middle East.

A large majority of Israelis and their global supporters (real and opportunist) have either: steadfastly denied the Palestinian genocide by claiming that documentary evidence of it is Hamas propaganda, either staged, or produced by AI; or, they have claimed what the IDF has done is justifiable and wholly proportionate to the existential threat Israel faces from Palestine as an Iranian proxy.

Increasingly, the sheer weight of incontrovertible documentary evidence of Israeli atrocities means the latter argument now dominates. 

The slaughter of non-combatants, the obliteration of infrastructure, and the proposed expulsion of all or most Palestinians are deemed to be politically, militarily and morally justifiable because October 7th proved the entire Palestinian people – even babies, small children, the elderly and the disabled – to be actual or potential enemy combatants who have to be killed or dispersed in order to ensure Israel’s security.

Both denial and justification demonstrate that a scarily high percentage of Israelis are in the grip of a moral panic of such scope and intensity it has incinerated common sense and empathy leaving a political and moral void in which anti-Palestinian atrocities are not only excused or condoned, but openly celebrated. 

The Samson Principle

I wrote this yesterday and got so depressed I couldn't finish or publish it. Today, the crazed fascists running Israel have launched a "pre-emptive" strike on Iran, so here it is. 

A person on X claims there’s an “Islamic Regime” that wants to “commit a Holocaust, the likes of which the world has never seen …finishing what Hitler and the Nazi Regime started."'

If he’s referring to a global Islamic threat, his claim is as absurdly reductionist and extremist as anti-Semitic claims of a monolithic Zionist / Jewish cabal that controls the world.  It ignores the many national, sectarian, linguistic-cultural differences in the two billion people who identify their religion as Islam – a religion that sprang from the root of patriarchal, monotheist Judaism, which also contains national, sectarian and linguistic-cultural differences that the establishment of the state of Israel and creation of an Israeli national identity attempts to gloss over.

But the truth of it is, he's referring to a specific country, and the “Islamic Regime” is code for Iran which right-wing Zionists claim is using Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO as proxies to soften up Israel while it prepares to deliver the final, nuclear, holocaust.

It’s a short ideological step to the stark conclusion – “we must neutralise them before they build the capacity to kill all of us.” Israel's “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem" is justified by claiming to be defending itself against the “Islamic Regime”, the heart of which is in Iran.

In effect, this person seeks to justify Israel’s wholesale slaughter by fire, starvation and disease, of Palestinian non-combatants, the on-going theft of Palestinian lands, and the erasure of Palestinian identity by placing all Palestinians within the orbit of the evil “Islamic Regime", and uses the same insane argument to justify its illegal, deadly incursions into other countries.

Claims to "self-defence" are rendered unbelievable when the majority of those they are killing are small children, women, the elderly and the infirm; and when they destroy civilian infrastructure including hospitals and sources of clean water, and when they slaughter animals, uproot ancient trees, raze fields.

Those are not defensive actions; they are the indefensible actions of an out-of-control colonising power, in which a scarily large proportion of the population are in the grip of a sort of collective psychosis.

This angry fellow not only positions ALL Jews as being at risk of imminent annihilation by the “Islamic Regime”, he ignores the historical role played by Israel itself, and more so by its main patron, the US, in the emergence of Islamic theocracies, most pertinently in Iran, and in aiding and abetting Islamist terror cells across the world. 

He ignores or possibly is too ignorant to know how political Islam was used, cynically and cruelly, first to combat socialism and to break the Non-Aligned Movement, and latterly to replace the spectre of global and domestic communism, with the spectre of “Islamic Terrorism". 

Like communism, Muslim terrorism is ideologically positioned as a threat that is both within and without, which is useful in justifying external wars and internal repression. 

* * * *

To embed the need for a Jewish homeland in Israel into the Jewish psyche, the architects of the Zionist state first weaponised Eastern European pogroms and the wider canon of anti-Semitic tropes. 

Post WW2, they weaponised the Nazi holocaust, creating a deep soil of perpetual grief, fear and anger in which their right-wing Zionist ideology would grow fast and strong. 

It is surely one of history’s cruellest ironies, that the right-wingers who held sway in the creation of Israel, and whose successors still dominate the Israeli state, behaved towards the “enemies” they created much like the Nazis had towards Jews. 

The Nazis didn’t start out with the aim of exterminating all Jews – they built up to it. The processes of demonisation, dispossession, ghettoisation and political oppression all preceded and laid the ideological tracks to the death camps.

What is wrong with our world, what is the root cause of all the harms being caused to people and the planet, is that right-wingers, whose thought processes are governed by their amygdala, wield immense economic, military and ideological power – and nowhere more so than in Israel.

Common sense, logic and rationality struggle to survive in the intense heat of a fear and rage-driven emotional state. The far more easily incinerated emotions of empathy and a sense of common cause don’t stand a chance. 

 

The crucible of Zionist Israel has created a majority population that is as completely in the grip of an irrational Islamophobia as a majority of Americans were in the grip of an irrational anti-communism during the Cold War. 

There is no difference between the Americans who allowed their right-wing governments to commit war crimes in North Korea and South-East Asia in the name of fighting communism, and Israelis who allow their far-right government to commit war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.

This X-man’s appeal is to his counterparts in the west – those who are in their own throes of rage and revulsion against “immigrants”, be they Muslims, or the wrong sort of Catholic. 

He dives deep into the stinky barrel of far-right tropes and comes up railing against liberal governments, university administrators, Jewish fellow-travellers, the woke left, the silent majority … in truth, pretty much everyone who won’t listen to him and back Israel in the war it wants to wage on Iran.

In keeping with his inflamed state of mind, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that such a war could well usher in a third world war and given the fragile state of the planet, it may well signal the end of humanity. 

I suspect far too many Israelis and their zealous supporters suffer from the Samson Psychosis – if they cannot dominate, they will bring it all crashing down.

  

 

On Propaganda

I just had a conversation on Facebook in which some people were trotting out Israeli propaganda in its most undiluted – almost self-parodying form – in which the harm done to Israelis is amplified and magnified, whilst the harm done to Palestinians and others is denied, or minimised, or justified as necessary and proportionate.

In fact, such is the breadth of the Israelis' denial of harm, where it is acknowledged at all it is excused as unavoidable collateral damage caused by the actions of the enemy “other”. 

By means of the argument that by having forced "the world's most moral army" to be killers of tens of thousands of non-combatants, the enemy has inflicted psychological harm on them, the slaughter is then added to the harm done to Israelis. 

In both the style of warfare it wages, and in the type of propagandising about it, Israel follows the US.

I was accused by one of the people in the conversation of claiming that "Muslim extremism" is “Israel’s fault”, which actually occurs because Islam is an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler religion". As proof of that she claims Islamic terrorists have committed 40,000 acts of terror across the globe in the last decade alone, and cites several especially horrible examples.

This is classic Israeli spin. Israel's critics describe it as an "expansionist, supremacist, colonising, settler state" so the Israeli spin doctors turn that back on Islam which, like Christianity still is, was the religion of empires. 

Only an ideologue or an idiot would claim that Israel alone has caused terrorism committed by people who are Muslim or in the name of Islam, although the right in Israel has played a major role in its genesis and growth. 

The Israeli state itself was rooted in terror; it always was and still is an “expansionist supremacist colonising settler” state that has cynically weaponised the holocaust, and promoted anti-Arab racism and wider anti-Muslim feeling to ensure enough support for its expansionist, supremacist, colonising tactics. 

Leaving aside the antisemitism implicit in the idea that it is Jews wagging the US or wider West’s tail, the originator and main beneficiary of Islamic terrorism is the USA which has the biggest stake in its creation and perpetuation. 

It's very hard to justify a global, on-going "War on Terror", with all the pouring of $trillions into the military-industrial complex, without the public seeing an obvious and terrifying terrorist enemy.

Trump’s ritual self-anointment (dick-waving) as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the least developed countries in the world, allegedly in pursuit of Islamic State. 

People surely cannot ignore the global manoeuvres of US Inc which have contributed to the genesis of Islamic militancy.

Surely all these pro-Israelis admit how odd it was for an estimated 6000 Hamas fighters inside a geographically tiny and heavily surveilled region to have been able to plan and train for an attack on a vastly more powerful neighbour without that neighbour’s much-vaunted military and civilian intelligence apparatus knowing a thing about it.  

We’re expected to believe that an intelligence apparatus which later could plan what, if it was carried out by an Islamic country or group would be called a "terror attack", on a mass of individual Hezbollah operatives living in a sovereign state, did not know an attack involving upwards of 6000 fighters was being planned by Hamas in an open-air prison? 

Israel is governed by a far right coalition which is being held to ransom by a gang of fascists who’d happily carry out their own “final solution” against Palestinians, and some of them are lunatic enough to use the nuclear weapons they’re not supposed to have on the basis that, “if we can’t have it, no one will”.

Exposing the lies that are pumped out to obscure the truth, is not being antisemitic; in fact, it’s antisemitic to not call the liars and warmongers to account because, however powerful the Zionists think they are, it’s power by proxy. 

If it is expedient to do so, the real power holders will pull the military aid plug and do deals with compliant Arab regimes because this is all about US Inc and control of trade routes, oil, rare minerals and fresh water. 

You could cite endless examples – historical and contemporaneous – of acts of group and individual terror committed by people motivated by some form of religious bigotry / zealotry, and keep ignoring the wider context of the extent to which some states have been and are complicit in those acts of individual/group terror whilst using them as justification for committing vastly greater acts of state terror.

Israel’s primary ally and role model terror-bombed Japanese and German cities at the end of WW2, including using nuclear weapons against civilian targets, and it planned to use them against the USSR. 

It then bombed North Korea into oblivion in a proxy war against the USSR and China, killing upwards of 20% of the total population.

To protect western oil interests, the US toppled a secular government in Iran, installed a brutal tyrant whose repression of the left and intelligentsia opened the door to the current Islamic theocracy which the US now wants to wage war on.

It blanket bombed Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, poisoning the land and water with carcinogenic  and DNA damaging chemical defoliants. It used the same tired old excuse that they were not to blame for the mass civilian casualties because the “enemy” hid among them. 

It fomented Islamic extremism in Indonesia to topple the leader of the emergent Non-Aligned Movement, and to destroy the world’s largest per capita communist party, anywhere up to a million of whom were killed.

It armed anti-government rebels in Afghanistan and convinced a load of western liberals that the muhjaheddin were "freedom fighters" against the “Soviet-backed” socialist government. 

Now it lies about who armed the mujahheddin and thus provoked Soviet intervention, and blames it on the new target of its war-mongering, Islamic terror group, Al Qaeda.

It told blatant lies (remember the Kuwaiti babies hauled out of incubators?) to swing public opinion behind its appalling acts of state terror in Iraq. 

After using the twin towers attacks (carried out by nationals of its ally, Saudi Arabia) as the justification to intensify the “War on Terror”,  it invaded and heavily bombed Afghanistan before stealing Afghani state assets and abandoning the place to the Taliban, of which it now stands in pious judgement.

In alliance with NATO it destroyed Africa's richest nation, Libya. Trump’s self-anointment as US president was to bomb Somalia, one of the poorest countries in the world, under the guise of attacking Islamic State.

And then there are US Inc's maladventures across Central and South America, Europe , the Caribbean …. and on and on and on…. 

The defining characteristic of US Inc, of which Israel is a key part, is that in pursuit of the right to carry on exploiting, they lie, and they lie, and they lie ....

With “friends” like that, Israelis should not be surprised when they make enemies of pretty much everyone else and most people do not believe a word they say.

On Bigotry

Another post that started out as a thread on “X marks the plot” but grew too long.

Those who know me are aware that I've been an active anti-racist all my life, which includes opposing all forms of antisemitism. How can I not? My left-wing politics and knowledge of history aside, I have Jewish family, and I count many Jewish people among my dearest friends and comrades.

 

I know that among people who profess support for Palestinians are some who are antisemitic, just as among those who profess support for Israel are antisemites who currently hate and fear Arabs and Muslim people more. 

 

I don't accept the highly ideological or idiotic premise that criticism of the policies and actions of a far-right Israeli government is actual or de facto antisemitism. 

 

Those who stick the labels of "racist" or "antisemite" on any argument or behaviour of which they disapprove, risk emptying the concepts of political and critical meaning, and as such they serve to weaken opposition to racism and antisemitism.

 

Israel is the de facto 51st state of the US. It couldn't exist without US federal backing; its interests align with those of the USA, albeit that the current ultra-right-wing Israeli government has slipped the leash and savaged more non-combatants than its imperial master might have wanted it to. 

 

It’s one thing justifying owning an attack dog by claiming it’s for defensive reasons because of the dangerous neighbourhood; it’s another thing entirely when the dogs get off the leash and rip a load of kids to pieces.

 

The old European imperial powers advanced their interests via settler colonialism. They declared a land to be “empty” of people or populated by people who lacked the ability to utilise its natural resources, and/or to govern themselves in what the imperialists deemed to be a "civilised" way.

 

Zionists couldn’t claim terra nullius in Palestine given the known history of the role of multiple empires in the region since people first settled it … Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Canaanite, Phoenician, Hebrew, Carthaginian, Minoan, Greek, Persian, Illyrian, Thracian, Etruscan, Iberian, Roman, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Arab, Berber, Ottoman, British … so they relied on what is a variation of the lies told by the white South African apartheid regime. 

 

They claim that when Jews began to arrive in Palestine in large numbers from Eastern Europe in the late C19th, only around 250,000 Arabs lived there, most of whom had arrived in recent decades, and all, according to the Zionists (many of whom were mired in European supremacism), were an inferior people.

 

Also, they claim, that although Muslim invasions of the region in the 7th century AD had resulted in Arabic being the main language and Islam the main religion, it was never exclusively an Arab region.

No-one has ever claimed it was but more than twelve hundred years of settlement and cultural-religious influences cannot be denied or deemed inferior without creating a justified backlash.

 

Many Arab nationalists saw the Levant as a logical part of a Greater Syria with a capital in the ancient city of Damascus. Greater Syria was a potential Arab powerhouse that was anathema to the old and new imperial powers which wanted the Middle East to be a collection of small states they could dominate and play off against each other to protect the trade routes and the oil.

The Balfour Declaration which promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the League of Nation’s Mandate that followed it, placated powerful Zionists in the UK and the US. \

It has been interpreted by Zionists as having granted a de facto legal right to sovereignty that was formalised by the 1947 UN partition resolution which established the state of Israel.

After the horrors of the Nazi slaughter of Jews became widely known, the UN resolution served as a political balm to assuage the guilt of the countries that had allowed the horror to happen and had refused entry to refugees.

The ultra-Zionists’ rewriting of a complex history rests firmly on the idea of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine as both a lesser people and as aliens, recent “invaders” of a land to which the Jewish people have both a divine right and an indigenous claim because their God promised it to Abraham, and there has been uninterrupted Jewish settlement from the time of Joshua. (Including the hyperbolic claim of being the “world’s first constitutional monarchy” around 1000 BC.)

It also sowed the seeds of the anti-Arab racism that is now a malignant cancer in the Israeli social body.

To ensure enough Israelis continue to elect right-wing governments and support their extremist measures, the population is heavily indoctrinated, with the IDF and compulsory military service playing a significant role in that. 

The most potent element of that indoctrination, apart from the fuelling of anti-Arab racism, is stoking fear and rage over the Nazi holocaust. That those right-wing governments directly and indirectly force young Israelis to participate in genocidal acts against mostly young Palestinians, is beyond tragic.

 

 

 

Jabotinsky’s Sword

Guest post By Joel Belasco

I grew up in a secular Jewish household after World War 2, with the Holocaust as a haunting frame of reference. There was a romantic attachment to Israel and we had a tin collecting box for the Jewish National Fund on the hall table. Israel could do no wrong because it was showing the world that Jews could be strong and would not tolerate the antisemitism that had been part of their history. 

What was not understood by those with a romantic view of Israel as the David facing Goliath, was that the realisation of Israel as a Jewish state was part of a longer term project to displace Arabs in the colonisation of Palestine.

The modern state of Israel was not the realisation of a biblical prophecy, and its belligerent, aggressive ethnonationalism is not a justifiable response to the genocidal barbarity that was suffered by Jews in the Holocaust. It actually pre-dated those horrors.

During the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement emerged among Ashkenazi as a response to antisemitism experienced by  Jews in Europe and Russia. The movement was religiously influenced, promoted the use of Hebrew as its language, and wanted a Jewish homeland in what it saw as its historic place of origin in Palestine. 

The Zionist project always was effectively colonial in nature, seeking to transplant people from a European or Russian environment into Palestine, which was already occupied by an Arab population who were Muslim, Christian and Druse. Displacing the Arab population of Palestine was always an objective of Zionists who espoused an aggressive ethnonationalism using biblical references as their justification. 

Theodor Herzl, a driving force in developing Zionism politically at the end of the nineteenth century, saw the establishment of a Jewish state as, “an outpost of civilization against Barbarism”. 

At this time Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire of Turkey. Jewish settlers from Europe and Russia had started to acquire land in Palestine during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Jewish National Fund was established in 1902 with the objective of supporting Jewish settlement in Palestine. 

Before the First World War ended, the British Government was lobbied by Zionists to support the establishment of a Jewish homeland. 

At the end of WW1, the Ottoman empire, which had been in alliance with Germany, was defeated. The British took control of Palestine and were subsequently give a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations.

Together with other political concerns, the British Foreign Secretary, Balfour published a declaration which stated:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

This objective was then incorporated into the mandate granted to Britain by the League of Nations.

Zionism did not then, and does not represent all Jews. The Bund, for example, held a contrasting position to the religious ethnonationalism of Zionism. It was left wing, secular, based on trade unions, transnational in outlook, opposed to war, and it promoted Yiddish as the common language of Jews. It did not support the idea of a Jewish homeland, but advocated struggling for equality and justice in the regions in which they lived.

In many ways, consigning Jews to their own homeland could be seen as getting rid of a problem nearer home.

The political radicalism of The Bund was smothered by the political machinations of Zionists, and ideologically by the support given to Zionism by influential Jews like Montefiore and Rothschild. 

Initially, Jewish settlement in Palestine was accepted by the majority population but as numbers increased following the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British Mandate, Jewish settlers met more resistance. 

The Haganah (Hebrew for “defence”) was formed in 1920 ostensibly to defend Jewish settlements. It was outlawed by the British authorities and operated with restraint until World War 2. As the British refused to open Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration, the Haganah used terrorist tactics to bomb infrastructure, and even a ship carrying Jewish refugees. (1) 

Once the state of Israel was established in 1948, the Haganah was dissolved as an underground force and integrated into the Israel Defence Force (Tzva Haganah le-Yisra’el).

The Irgun, which broke with the Haganah in 1931, was a self-declared Zionist paramilitary organisation based on the Revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky:

“Zionism is a colonising adventure and it therefore stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important to build, it is important to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonialization.” 

Jabotinsky’s “revisionism” rejected the notion that British Empire would support the creation of a Jewish state, and advocated establishing Jewish army to fight for Jewish sovereignty. Politically he was a nationalist and an economic liberal supporting a free market with minimal state intervention, and personal freedom, i.e., a right wing libertarian in today’s terms.

The Irgun was a terrorist organization and described as such by the British, the United States, and the United Nations. Among other acts, in 1946  they bombed the King David Hotel, which was HQ for the British Mandatory forces. The explosion killed 91 people and injured 46. The Irgun was also responsible for the Deir Yassin massacre, killing at least 107 Arab villagers in 1948. 

In a letter to the New York Times, Albert Einstein described the Irgun as a ”terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization”. 

After the establishment of the state of Israel, the Irgun was incorporated into the Israeli Defence Force. Its political wing was the right wing, Herut (Freedom) Party. 

Menachem Begin, a former leader of the Irgun, founded the Likud party and became Prime Minister in 1977. The Likud has been in government since 1977 and is currently led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), under the leadership of Avraham Stern, broke away from the Irgun in 1940. They described themselves as terrorist with the aim of evicting the British from Palestine to allow unrestricted Jewish immigration and the establishment of a Jewish state. The Lehi were fanatics whose pursuit of their Zionist ideological goal seems to have blinded them to political realities. Unbelievably, Stern sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in the belief that they would be more accommodating to Jews than the British. The modus operandi of the group focused on political assassination. Stern was shot by British detectives whilst being arrested in 1942.

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: {Ye shall blot them out to every last man}”– from the Lehi underground paper He Khazit.

Yitzhak Shamir, a leading member of the Lehi, who had argued for the legitimacy of the group’s terrorist actions, later became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983. 

The Israeli State initially integrated the Lehi members into the IDF but some of its members assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish nobleman (Count of Wisborg) and diplomat who was the United Nations Mediator in Palestine. Seeing him as a puppet of the British and the Arabs in advocating a peace plan, the Lehi shot him as he was driven through Jerusalem. 

The Israeli Government initially condemned the action and arrested Lehi members. However, before the first elections in Israel in January 1949, Lehi members were granted amnesty. In 1980, the Lehi Ribbon was introduced as a military award “for activity in the struggle for the establishment of Israel.”

There is a clear historical connection between the colonising aspirations of Zionists and their militaristic, religious ethnonationalism as given voice by the philosophy of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. 
In 2005 a memorial day was created to honour Jabotinsky. 

In 2017, Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the event, saying, “I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.” (Quoted by Lazlo Bernat Veszpremy in Hungarian Conservative.)

Zionism is a continuous thread in the Netanyahu family. Benjamin’s grandfather, Nathan Mileikowsky, was a Polish Zionist Rabbi. The family emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1920 and their name was changed to Netanyahu (Hebrew for Nathan). Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, the historian, Benzion Netanyahu, was Jabotinsky’s personal secretary when he was living in New York. Upon the death of Jabotinsky he became executive director of the New Zionist Organisation of America. 

In 2009 he is quoted as saying in an interview in Maariv, a Hebrew language daily:

“The tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence. His personality won’t allow him to compromise. It doesn’t matter what kind of resistance he will meet, what price he will pay. His existence is one of perpetual war.”

In the wake of WW2, with awareness of the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust, and with thousands of displaced people, the establishment of a Jewish State became a prominent international issue. But Britain still held a mandate of the territory of Palestine and had been negotiating with Arab leaders since WW1. However, the shadow of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, promising a homeland to Jews, loomed large. 

Proposals for power sharing were challenged strongly by Zionists who could see the realisation of the project they had been working towards for more than fifty years. 

Arabs living in Palestine, seeing the colonial aspirations of the Zionists, began armed resistance. 

The British surrendered the mandate in 1948, and the United Nations took control and made the decision to establish Israel as a Jewish state in Palestine. 

The Zionist government of Ben Gurion, which had recruited  groups of Zionist terrorists (the Haganah, the Irgun and the Lehi,) to the Israeli Defence Force, was immediately engaged in the Arab-Israeli war. 

For the Arabs, this became al-Nakba as they were expelled from villages, towns and areas in which they had lived for centuries. 

By the end of the conflict, 750,000 Arabs had been displaced and consigned to refugee camps, and by appropriating Arab land, Israel had expanded its territory from the 55% allocated by the UN to 78%. Around 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 6,000 Israelis. Hundreds of villages were sacked and there were in the region of 70 massacres of Palestinians. 

What was, initially, an expedient move was soon recognized as having a geopolitical strategic benefit in locating a state with European roots among the Arab countries of the Middle East, and the USA was quick to seize that opportunity. 

The Zionist project that had begun in nineteenth century Europe and Russia and given a militaristic, anti-Arab colonising philosophy by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, had become a reality. 

Its ethnonationalist, colonialist, aggressive xenophobia was usefully concealed by the sympathy extended to Jews after their experiences under the Nazis. The cultural and historical experience of the Nazi Holocaust has been used, cynically one might say, to recruit all Jews to the Zionist colonial project with romantic notions of Israel as the realisation of a religious prophecy. A powerful ideological exercise has been conducted by the Zionist Israeli State which has appropriated and weaponised the Holocaust, and used it to attack any criticism of it and its actions, as anti-semitic.

The Zionist project is deeply embedded in the Israeli State; two former Prime Ministers were active leading members of Zionist guerilla terror groups, and the current Prime Minister comes from a family of Zionists with strong links to Jabotinsky, and he recognises him as a guiding political influence. 

I have read that he has Jabotinsky’s sword in his office.

(1)   In 1940 the Patria was carrying about 1800 European Jewish refugees who, having been refused entry to Palestine, were bound for Mauritius. While it was anchored in the port of Haifa, the Haganah exploded a bomb on the ship which was intended to cripple it and prevent it leaving. The blast sank the ship and killed 256 people and injured 172 others. The survivors were rounded up by the British authorities, put on another ship and taken to Mauritius where they were kept in abominable conditions by the British until the end of the war at which point, they were given the choice of where they wanted to go. 
 

A Counter Analogy

I keep seeing analogies like this: "Am I the only one who thinks "what happened in (sic) Oct 7 is the inevitable result of the deprivation of being colonized" sounds an awful lot like "what did she think would happen going out dressed like that?"

They are so wrong, it’s hard to know where to start debunking them. So, to save my poor brain, here’s a counter-analogy.

 

A man, who claims to be homeless, is billeted in a house owned by a widow woman. 

 

She is not happy about the arrangement but her objections are ignored by the authorities.

 

After some time of co-habitation, and with the support of some very influential people, the man claims he has a legal and a moral right to ownership of half the house. 

 

The courts agree. 

 

The woman is angry and upset but none of her legal appeals are heard.

 

Emboldened by this, the man uses his greater strength and aggressiveness to take over even more of the house. Eventually he confines the woman and her children to a much smaller, colder part of the house, which he reserves the right to enter, and take stuff from. 

 

He also begins to physically discipline the children who both resent his presence and his treatment of their mother.

 

When the woman protests further, he threatens her with violence.

 

A neighbour tries to intervene on her behalf but he is badly beaten, and as the man claims self-defence in the context of a home-invasion, no action is taken against him. 

 

The woman tries again to argue in court that the house is hers, and the man should leave. 

 

He counters by saying she is barely competent to manage her own affairs, and that he has well-established legal and moral rights. 

 

The court orders her to continue to share the house with him.

 

The man now feels he can do what he wants, and he not only prevents the woman and her children from entering his parts of the house without permission, he requires them to get his permission to leave the house to go to work or to school. 

 

Eventually the woman loses her job and becomes reliant on welfare. Her children begin to truant and misbehave, and she is declared to be an unfit parent.

 

The man tells everyone who will listen that he has to take charge of the house and her as she is incapable of managing her own affairs. He claims both the legal right and the moral duty to take any and all steps necessary to control her and her unruly brood, in order to protect himself, his wider community, and what is now legally his.

 

As he has a very loud voice and a confident manner, and he persistently references his prior victimhood as a displaced person, he persuades many people that he is completely in the right.

 

In their increasing anger and desperation, the woman and her children begin to act as he has painted them, and one day, one of the children throws a stone at the man. 

 

When the man beats her child, the mother hits him. 

 

It is not a hard blow, except to his pride. In retaliation, he takes full control of their lives. He takes the woman’s welfare cheques; he restricts even further where she and her children can go in the house, and he tracks their every move outside of it. 

 

He intensifies his public depiction of them as feral or insane, as violent and aggressive – a danger, not just to him, but to the wider community. Any acts of resistance from them are depicted as a threat to him and to others.

 

Then, he invites relatives of his to move into the house, and they demand the use of the woman’s remaining rooms. 

 

They go into the rooms, steal what they want and throw the rest out of the window. They change the locks and force the woman and her children to sleep in a garden shed. 

 

Not content with eviction, they mock the women and her children daily, even encouraging their own children to do the same – saying the shed is a fit place for such crazy, lazy, incompetent people.

 

One day, the woman snaps. She sneaks into the house through an open window and stabs the man in the crotch while he is asleep. 

 

Her aim is symbolic; she is not trying to kill, but to emasculate. 

 

The man is not badly injured, and his retaliation is swift and terrible. First, he beats the woman viciously, then he destroys the garden shed and all her remaining belongings and flings her and her children out onto the street with nothing but the clothes on their back. 

 

When some people protest his actions and try to help the evicted family, the man declares them to be abetting criminals.

 

Anyone who defends the woman is deemed to be siding with a crazy, violent, man-hating bitch who, by biting the hand that fed and housed her and her spawn, deserves all she gets, and more. 

So angry do some of the people become, they chase the woman and her children out of the neighbourhood.

 

As the family flees, the anger at the incomprehensible injustice of it all grows in their hearts and minds until they can neither see nor hear anything except calls for vengeance.