Walter Siegrist@RealWsiegrist
Things I learned about Israel recently
1) Zionism is a political ideology that hijacked and betrayed the teachings and values of Judaism to justify a criminal colonial project based on the systematic ethnic cleansing of the native inhabitants of Palestine through organized terrorism. As such Zionism is to Judaism what ISIS is to Islam: an extremist criminal ideology based on a grotesque distortion of the values and spirit of religion. Zionism promotes Jewish supremacism over non-Jews in Palestine and is thus the pinnacle of irony and hypocrisy considering its proponents decry Nazism’s Aryan supremacism over non-Aryans in Germany.
2) Zionist nationalism is based on a form of nationalism found in Eastern European nations such as Russia and Poland. This nationalism is based on ethnic ownership of the land. Poland is for ethnic Poles and Russia is for ethnic Russians. This contrasts with Western European nationalism found in places like France and the US where the land belongs to anyone who is a citizen of the state.
3) Zionism draws much of its arguments for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine from the 5 books of Moses and the book of Joshua. The latter is the story of how the ancient Israelites conquered the promised land of Canaan (present day Levant) under the leadership of Joshua and the full blessing of God by repeatedly perpetrating massacres of unfathomable barbarity against the Canaanites where no man, woman or child was left standing. The book of Joshua therefore legitimizes the use of ruthless violence by Zionists in their quest to conquer and dominate Palestine. The latest massacre of the people of Gaza through indiscriminate bombing of civilians, women, children, residential buildings, hospitals, schools and even humanitarian shelters follows the spirit of the book of Joshua to a t. Conversely, Jews in the West have a more universalist approach based on the tradition of the prophets.
4) Before declaring the independence of Israel, zionists had already committed 16 gruesome massacres against the Palestinians and ethnically cleansed 200,000 of them. All of this happened before neighbouring Arab armies decided to intervene. The zionist narrative claiming Israel was gratuitously attacked by the Arab armies is a lie.
5) Israel is the only country in the world without a constitution (Britain has the Magna Carta rather than a constitution). This means the supreme court of Israel can just make up laws as it goes along as there are no official principles setting the framework of the law.
6) The highest court in Israel has determined that “Israeli” is not an identity. As such Jewishness is the foundation of identity in Israel, not citizenship. Palestinians in Israel are considered simply "Arabs", since Palestinian identity is not recognized. However, this abstract pure Arab identity exists only in Israel. Everywhere else Arab people are Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian, Iraqi and Palestinian.
7) The Israeli regime fully meets the internationally recognized legal criteria of apartheid as defined in the International Covenant on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and which includes the following 6 categories of crimes:
- Massive violation of human rights and civil rights
- Imposition of inhumane living conditions, such as poverty
- Society-wide legalized discrimination in areas such as finance, housing, employment, education, and access to cultural events
- Isolating the victim group geographically, such as in ghettoes
- Exploitation of labor, such as slavery or forced labor or discrimination in wages
- Inhumane suppression of rebellion against apartheid
8) The apartheid state of Israel controls the entire land of Palestine from the river to the sea. On this land Jews are a minority with all the rights and privileges while Palestinians are a majority deprived of their most basic human rights. There are 4.55 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and 1.68 million Palestinians who are "citizens" of Israel, for a total of 6.23 million Palestinians. On the other hand there are 6.12 million Jews including the 0.5 million Jewish settlers living illegally in the West Bank. In order to arrive at a fictitious Jewish majority, The state of Israel doesn't statistically count the West Bank and Gaza (that it de facto dominates completely) as part of Israel's territory while simultaneously counting the Jewish settlers of those territories as citizens of Israel. The effect of this gerrymandering is to make the 4.55 million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation disappear magically. In other words a Jew in the occupied West Bank counts as a human being and a citizen, while a non-Jew counts as an invisible sub-human non-entity.
9) In the West bank Palestinians are subject to Israeli military law, while the Jewish settlers who live just next door are subject to Israeli civil law. Israeli soldiers in the West Bank can arrest, shoot and kill Palestinians without any repercussions, but they have no authority whatsoever on Jewish settlers. All over the West Bank there are roads and highways that are for Jews only and Palestinians are forbidden from using them.
10) Palestinians are subject to relentless persecution to the extent that they are not just punished for resisting, but also prevented from surrendering. Surrender entails that one is left in peace after surrendering. However Palestinians are not given that choice. They are humiliated, dispossessed and killed no matter what they do.
11) Palestinians in the West Bank are denied freedom of movement by being required to go through a multitude of Israeli checkpoints intended to humiliate and control them. Palestinians in need of medical assistance are required to have a permit to pass through checkpoints. These permits are issued to Doctors Without Borders who can then deliver them to Palestinians in need. However Israel frequently prevents Doctors Without Borders from entering the Palestinian territories and therefore the permits cannot be delivered to those who need them. This is a deliberate strategy by Israel to deny medical treatment to Palestinians.
12) During WW2 the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto smuggled food and weapons into the ghetto through tunnels. The Nazis called them terrorists. That's right, Jews who were simply trying to smuggle some food into their open air prison and some weapons to protect themselves against a supremacist regime bent on their utterly destroying them were labelled terrorists. And this is precisely what Israeli is doing today to the Palestinians who are locked into their open air ghetto prisons and labelled terrorists for resisting Zionist oppression and defending their dignity against unthinkable horror.
13) The letter bomb, parcel bomb, barrel bomb, market bomb, and car bomb were all introduced into the Middle East by zionist terrorist paramilitary groups such as the Irgun, Lehi and Haganah. One of the most famous zionist massacres in Palestine is the massacre of Deir Yassin. The peaceful village which had declared neutrality during the 1948 hostilities was depopulated following the massacre of over 250 villagers, half of them women and children at the hands of Irgun and Lehi commandos. This event helped trigger the 1948 exodus of more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled from their homes or fled fearing other zionist massacres. The culture of terrorism and ethnic cleansing inaugurated and pioneered by zionist paramilitary groups and upon which Israel was founded continues to be the modus operandi of the ironically named IDF which is an aggressive occupation force specializing in terrorizing civilians.
Things I learned about Israel recently (2/2)
14) Israel is among the top 10 exporters of weapons in the world. This is all the more remarkable considering it is a very small country that competes with much larger countries like the UK and China in terms weapons sales. One of the main selling points of Israeli weapons is that they are marketed as being “combat proven”. This means the weapons have been successfully tested on Palestinians. Israel is involved in the sales of weapons to 190 countries (there are only 193 countries in the world!). This means that many countries that appear on the surface to be enemies of Israel are actually customers of its weapons behind the scenes.
15) Israel sold weapons to Rwanda and Serbia while these countries were in the midst of horrific genocidal campaigns. So to spell it out clearly, the state of Israel which condemns the horrors of the Holocaust when genocide was committed by the Nazis against the Jews has absolutely no problem selling weapons to groups who are committing genocide against another people. It follows that for Israel it’s only genocide when Jews are the victims. When someone else is the victim it’s just a business opportunity.
16) The West Bank and Gaza are laboratories for the testing of weapons and population control techniques. Palestinians are the guinea pigs. The end users are people around the world whose police forces are trained by Israel and whose prisons are supplied by Israeli technology. This includes many western countries among which is Canada, by virtue of the Canada-Israel “Public Security” Agreement signed in 2008. When the police of a country is “Israelized”, it follows that its people are “Palestinianized”. The state of Israel is effectively becoming a template and ideal for state control and domination around the world, ranging from authoritarian China to the current far right Canadian government under Stephen Harper who is a notorious zionist extremist. The Palestinians are also becoming a template and ideal of subjugation and pacification to be gradually imposed on people around the world. The success of Apartheid Israel’s system of oppression and domination is a threat to the entire global populations who will find themselves increasingly “Palestinianized” as their governments adopt “proven" Israeli strategies and techniques of pacification and subjugation.
17) Many military and police officials from various countries including the US and China visit Israel to learn Israeli crowd control techniques, propaganda and warfare strategies. A Chinese general recently visited Israel to learn how the IDF framed and executed the massacre in Gaza. The Maryland police department among many others is trained by the Israeli police and military. Israel is also responsible for supplying weapons to various police departments around the world. These weapons are designed for crowd control and urban warfare and include armed drones, urban warfare vehicles and potent tear gas canisters all tested on Palestinians and sold to countries like Brazil and Singapore among others.
18) During Israel’s short existence since 1948, Israeli military experts have provided support to the following regimes:
- Dictatorship of Manuel Noriega in Panama
- Dictatorship of Sani Abacha in Nigeria
- Dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile
- Dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania
- Dictatorship of Mengistu Mariam in Ethiopia
- Dictatorship of Jorge Videla in Argentina
- Dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire
- Dictatorship of Ne Win in Burma
- Apartheid regime in South Africa
- Paramilitary death squads in Colombia
- The current government of China
Keep this list in mind next time someone tells you Israel supports democracy.
19) Israel has nuclear and ballistic missiles capable of reaching as far as Europe in addition to German made Dolphin-class submarines capable of delivering cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. It also has 10 satellites in orbit spying on various parts of the world and the Middle East in particular.
20) Israeli soldiers are cowards who specialize in bullying unarmed civilians and mostly target women and children with rubber-coated bullets. They have a deliberate strategy of maiming children by targeting their eyes and kneecaps. They routinely kill peaceful Palestinian protestors by shooting them in the head during demonstrations. They carefully monitor the number of such casualties to ensure it remains just shy of what would cause international public outrage.
21) The so called “peace process” involving a “two state solution” has been a sham from the very beginning and was always intended as a decoy to buy time for Israeli to steal more land, build more settlements and create more facts on the ground under the cover of a vague interminable peace process that never went anywhere.
22) The two state solution is officially dead and buried after the failure of the Kerry initiative. Israel has fully assimilated the west Bank to the extent that trying to get it back in one piece for the establishment of a Palestinian state is the equivalent of trying to get your sandwich back after someone has swallowed it. The electricity, water and road infrastructures are unified across Israel and the occupied territories. Furthermore Israel never had the slightest intention of implementing a fair and just “two state solution” since it always refused to accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state with an army and sovereignty over its borders and air space. In other words the “two state solution” is just an empty formula used by Israel and its allies to describe a hypothetical future Palestinian ghetto under Israel domination, which is no different from the present situation in the occupied territories.
23) It follows that those who keep talking about the "two state solution” are either very naive or trying to mislead people by appearing to have the interests of the Palestinians at heart while actually attempting to salvage the idea of a supremacist Jewish state in Palestine by reinforcing the erroneous idea that peace will come from further segregating the Jews and the Palestinians, when in fact segregation is the root of the problem rather than its solution. Before the arrival of the zionists, Jews, Christians and Muslims in Palestine lived together harmoniously in a land that has always been a mixing place at the crossroads of continents and civilizations.
24) The only viable alternative to the current Israel regime of occupation, apartheid and ethnic cleansing is a binational democratic state similar to Switzerland and Belgium. Such a state would guarantee equality for all and the right of Palestinians to return to their rightful homes anywhere in Palestine. A two state solution would not guarantee this fundamental right. If people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds can get along in countries like Canada and the US there is no reason why Jews and Palestinians can’t get along in a binational democratic state in Palestine. What stands in the way of peace is not Iran, ISIS, Islam or any other scapegoat that Israel is always so keen to distract the world with. The real and only obstacle is Zionist Jewish supremacism which is a vile ideology no different from white supremacism or Nazism. Slavery ended, segregation ended, Nazism ended, South African apartheid ended and Zionist apartheid and occupation must inevitably end too. Israel is on the wrong side of history, fighting a battle it can never win.
25) The condition for putting hatred behind and turning a new page is the acknowledgement by Israel of the historic injustice it committed against the Palestinians and reparations for the crimes perpetrated. This will be the beginning of a healing process that will allow Palestinians and Jews to live together peacefully as equals.
What famous Jews have said about Israel and zionism:
Sigmund Freud:
“I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.”
Albert Einstein:
“The (Israeli) state idea is not according to my heart. I cannot understand why it is needed. It is connected with many difficulties and a narrow-mindedness. I believe it is bad.”
Erich Fromm, social psychologist:
“The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse.”
Primo Levi, writer and Auschwitz survivor:
"Everyone has their Jews. For the Israelis they are the Palestinians."
Marek Edelman, last surviving leader of the 1943 Warsaw uprising:
Edelman wrote a letter in support of the Palestine resistance, comparing them to ZOB, the Jewish fighters in Warsaw. He opened with, "Commanders of the Palestine military, paramilitary and partisan operations - to all the soldiers of the Palestine fighting organisations.”
Isaac Asimov, novelist:
“I find myself in the odd position of not being a Zionist ... I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind. It is delightful to have the human heritage exist in a thousand varieties, for it makes for greater interest, but as soon as one variety is thought to be more important than another, the groundwork is laid for destroying them all.”
Hannah Arendt, political scientist:
“The trouble is that Zionism has often thought and said that the evil of antisemitism was necessary for the good of the Jewish people. In the words of a well-known Zionist in a letter to me discussing the original Zionist argumentation: 'The antisemites want to get rid of the Jews, the Jewish State wants to receive them, a perfect match.' “
I.F. Stone, US journalist:
“Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist.”
Noam Chomsky:
“In the Occupied Territories, what Israel is doing is much worse than apartheid. To call it apartheid is a gift to Israel, at least if by "apartheid" you mean South African-style apartheid. What’s happening in the Occupied Territories is much worse.”
Gabriel Kolko, one of the leading historians on modern warfare:
“The large majority of Israelis are not in the least Jewish in the cultural sense, are scarcely socialist in any sense, and daily life and the way people live is no different in Israel than it is in Chicago or Amsterdam. There is simply no rational reason that justifies the state’s creation.”
Miriam Margolyes, actor:
“The black South Africans asked for our support and now it's the Palestinians who are asking for our support. I hate what Israel is doing over there to the Palestinians. I think that boycotting is a very active and non-violent way of protesting."
Uri Avnery, ex-Israeli army officer:
Avnery wrote that after an Israeli military victory, “What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”
Henry Siegman, Rabbi and director of the U.S./Middle East Project:
“Israel has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”
Richard Cohen, US columnist:
“The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake … the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.”
Roseanne Barr, US comedian, writer, director, presidential candidate:
“I am sick of Israel and I am sick of Zionists. They are propped up by evangelical Christians who cannot wait for the Arabs to kill them so that their genocidal war god whom they misname Jesus can come back."
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine:
“If a Jew today goes into any synagogue in the U.S. or around the world and says, 'I don’t believe in God or Torah and I don’t follow the commandments,' most will still welcome you in and urge you to become involved. But say, 'I don’t support the State of Israel,' and you are likely to be labeled a 'self-hating Jew' or anti-Semite, scorned and dismissed."
Richard Falk, the former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:
Falk has called Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories “a crime against humanity.” Falk also has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Falk has said, “I think the Palestinians stand out as the most victimized people in the world.”
