A problem from hell in Gaza

“The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred” – Samantha Power (“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide) 

“Jerusalem is an old nymphomaniac who squeezes lover after lover to death, before shrugging him off her with a yawn, a black widow who devours her mates while they are still penetrating her” – Israeli Novelist Amos Oz (In his Tale of Love and Darkness)

In the hands of the victor, history is pure simple propaganda. This observation is attributed to historian A.J.P. Taylor whose principal focus was on 19th and 20th Century European diplomacy. 

Nowhere is this truer than in the struggle between what’s unfolding before the world today. 

The blood feud between ‘Settler Jew’ and the ‘Homeless Hopeless Arab’ in what’s called the ‘Occupied Territories of Palestine’ unfolds before our eyes. 

Arabs have always lived in Arabia. That’s why they are called Arabs. 

The Modern state of Israel is the result of the phenomenal courage, prodigious imagination, and supernatural guile of a band of people who founded the Zionist movement in the latter half of the last decade of the 19th century.

Zionist dream – An ethnonational state 

‘Dream’ is a key word for Zionists who founded modern Israel. It is a dream realised. The dream is for an ethnonational state. 

The state of Israel is an accomplished fact. It is a dream and a promise the Jewish people held on to, through 4,000 years. The ancient Jewish state came to an end in 70AD when Romans evicted them from their land. 

Viewed in the present context, it seems that uprooting people is an ancient business. 

The modern, powerful Israel is the singular achievement of the Zionist movement. 

What is Zionism? In his address to the United Nations in 1975 Yigal Allon Soldier, politician of the Labour party and Foreign Minster defined Zionism. 

“Zionism is the modern expression of the ancient Jewish heritage. Zionism is the national liberation movement of a people exiled from their homeland and dispersed among the nations of the world. Zionism is the redemption of an ancient nation from a tragic lot and the redemption of a land neglected for centuries.” 

A story our grandchildren should know 

Here, I must digress. I decided to write this brief essay for two reasons. My granddaughter Binali told me on WhatsApp: 

“Looking at history it seems so unfair that Palestinians even must defend their land. It’s rightfully theirs. I don’t know. It seems very unfair.” 

Born in the 21st Century she has no clue as to how British perfidy, American exceptionalism, Israeli adeptness and Arab dull wittedness made Palestinians refugees in their own land. 

Second, my desk research on the subject convinced me that there is much to learn about the subject or the topic of Terrorism in discussing this problem from hell. 

This is a meek, modest effort to arrive at a summarisation of a conflict that has lasted a century and more, with many forgetting how it all started. I intend it for my grandchildren and their generation. 

I owe it to them. I belong to the generation that watched the mercurial Yasser Arafat of the PLO who internationalised the plight of his people. Vietnam and Palestine in the sixties and seventies made it a global offensive against European perfidy and America’s off target design to be the world’s patrolman. 

That world changed in my lifetime. It happened in the sixties and the seventies in Palestine and Vietnam. 

Maestro image managers 

Since the founding of the state of Israel, the Zionist movement has succeeded in sustaining the most successful image management exercise in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

The destitute Palestinians burdened with destructive discord have never come near the sophistication of their adversary. 

US discovers Jews 

The world watched how President Biden assured Premier Netanyahu of ‘iron clad solidarity’ reaffirming Israel’s right of Self Defence – even if it means bombing Gaza into rubble. This is 2023. 

Let’s go back to 1939 when the Nazis got down to the serious enterprise now labelled as the holocaust. 

On 13 May 1939, more than 900 Jews fled Germany on board the cruise ship the SS St. Louis. The ship hoped to reach Cuba and then travel to the US.

It was turned away in Cuba and the US refused entry to any of its ports and was forced to return to Europe. More than 250 of them were killed in Nazi death camps. The story was retold in a film – ‘Voyage of the damned’. 

Therein lies the journey of the Zionist movements in the last hundred years. It has taken nearly a century for the United States to move from latent prejudice to unabashed admiration of the Jewish people. 

How did it all happen? 

How did Zionism take form and substance? 

It is a long story. Let us get the gist of it. The Zionist movement began with the rise of nationalism in 19th Century Europe. Marginalisation and outright persecution made Jews in their adopted homelands hungry for a Jewish homeland. 

The Church of Scotland appalled by increasing numbers of East European Jews arriving in Scotland from Hamburg to cross the Atlantic from its port in Leith decided to do something about it. It sent a clergyman Scottish Presbyterian Rev. Dr. Alexander Keith to the Holy land on a fact-finding mission to see if the land was ready for Jews to return. 

On his return he published a book describing his tour. He urged fellow Christians to help Jews –‘a people without a country’ to return to Ancient Israel which was now ‘a country without a people.’ 

The Clergyman did not see its Arab inhabitants as ‘a people.’ The myth of Jews returning to a land that had no people was quietly but surely framed in British elite circles. 

The Zionist movement seized the idea of a homeless people returning to a land without a people. 

There are many honourable Israeli historians such as Illan Pappe who have written volumes on the subject. His book Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine is a must read. So is Palestine Hijacked: How Zionism forged an Apartheid State from River to Sea by Thomas Suarez. 

Terrorism as a strategic argument 

Distinct focus of this essay is to focus on how Zionists used ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’ to advance their idea of a Jewish homeland. 

Benjamin Netanyahu has edited a book on the subject. “Terrorism – How the west can win”. 

Identifying terrorism as an existential threat only to the West is eloquent evidence of his fiendishly warped mind. 

Zionist operatives in Palestine launched a successful terrorist campaign to weaken British administration of pre-war Palestine. Precipitating a hurried disorderly withdrawal of the British created the environment for the declaration of a sovereign Jewish State in disputed territory. 

Disorderly British withdrawal enabled the founding of Israel while creating a Palestinian people dispossessed of their land. 

Successful Zionist terror tactics gave the fledgling State of Israel the strategic influence to demand the world’s attention and recognition. And so, it did. 

Israeli historians have catalogued the unpleasant war crimes of murder, torture, and theft by Hagenah soldiers.

A summary of orchestrated terrorism 

Count Folke Bernadotte was Swedish diplomat who negotiated the release of 31,000 prisoners from German Concentration camps. 

His humanitarian work at great risk to his life and that of family made him the obvious choice of the UN Security Council to mediate between Arabs and Jews. 

He was assassinated by the Zionist paramilitary group Irgun. The Zionists were in no hurry for Security Council Mediation just as the Israelis today. 

Menachem Begin the leader of Irgun later became Prime Minister of Israel. He founded the Likud party that is now led by Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The most horrific massacre carried out by both Hagenah and Irgun at the formation of Israel is the massacre of the Arab village of ‘Deir Yassin’. 

More than 100 old men women and children were brutally killed. The village was located west of Jerusalem. Hagenah, led an attack on the Arab village of Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem. Some 100 Palestinians (mainly old men, women, and children) were killed.

Enormity of its brutality was such that the Prime Minister David Ben Gurion sent an apology to King Abdullah of Jordan. Jewish philosopher theologian Martin Buber called it a black stain on the honour of the Jewish nation. 

Israel is a complex land. Some of its people who returned from the wilderness seem to be still trapped in some kind of moral wilderness. 

Menachem Begin’s hot knife through Arab butter

Menachem Begin, the founder of the Likud party, did not agree with David Ben Gurion. In his 1952 memoirs Menachim Begin claimed that without ‘Deir Yassin’ Zionist forces advanced “like a hot knife through butter”. 

You should be lucky to read the first edition. In subsequent editions of Begin’s memoirs ‘the hot knife through butter’ is erased. Erasing inconvenient history is a Zionist specialty. 

That brings us to the third Zionist terror outfit which was known as the ‘Stern Gang’. 

It was founded by Avraham Stern who called his outfit “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel”. He was killed by British forces in Palestine in 1942. Stern masterminded a spectacular series of terrorist attacks on British targets. It was Stern’s way of persuading the British to leave Palestine thereby securing Jewish independence in the holy land. 

His biographer describes Stern as implacable and extreme. While the war engulfed Europe, he waged war on Arabs and the British administration.

Patrick Bishop who has written about him – ‘The Reckoning – How the Killing of One Man Changed the Fate of the Promised Land’, says that the British saw him as the most ruthless of the Jewish terrorists. “The British saw Stern as a potential Quisling who was ready to do deals with the Italians and even the Germans. When Morton gunned him down Rommel was advancing on Egypt and threatening to break through into Palestine, where Britain’s suppression of the Arab rebellion had created sympathy for its enemies.” 

Yitzak Shamir who later became Prime Minister of Israel was an early recruit of the Stern Gang. 

Famous members of the Haganah include Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Moshe Dayan and Yigal Allon. 

Hebrew fascism 

Dan Tamir a Scholar in the Department of Politics and Government Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has produced a tract on ‘Hebrew Fascism in Palestine 1922-1942’. 

I have not read it. However, an abridged version is available on the internet. In it he observes that Pre-Independence-Jewish fighters for an independent homeland had its fair share of right-wing Fascists.

At some point in the struggle for a homeland Zionists embraced the most fundamental premise of fascism. 

They believed in the right of “the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, while the sole criterion defining it was the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.”