The Lone Ranger and Tonto are watching a horde of Indian braves bear down on them in full battle fury. "Looks like we're in trouble, Tonto," says the Lone Ranger to his pal. "What you mean 'we,' white man?" Tonto responds.The situation in Palestine mirrors very closely the problems faced by Native American Indians from early American settlers. The American settlers came up against, and ultimately annihilated the Native American Indian populations. Of the estimated 15 million Native Americans, nearly all of them were wiped out. According to some estimates, only a few million people in the U.S. today can claim significant heritage from Native American Indians. Those that were not murdered where simply 'bred' out of existence, either by rape or intermarrying with 'white men'.
It's important to note that the eradication of the Native Americans took a very long time, with many successive 'invasions' and land 'confiscations', as well as small wars and rebellions. The specific history of this conflict is well-known, and where it is not, the reader is invited to review extant information on the topic. The comparison between early American settlers and Israeli settlers is striking and disturbing.
We all know how often 'white men' mourn what was done by their ancestors in the 'New World'. It's a list of crimes that many wish could be undone.
Some of the deeds included:
- Buffalo hunted to extinction simply to remove a major food source of the Native Americans. While many were also slaughtered during settlement operations, or while making railroads, actual plans to 'starve' Native Americans by killing Buffalo were implemented.
- Blankets and supplies intentionally infected with smallpox and 'gifted' to Native Americans, slaughtering whole populations by a slow and painful death. These were not accidents.
- Both official and unofficial 'posses' routinely hounded and slaughtered Native Americans, often on the pretext of some crime. White criminals took to disguising their crimes by leaving Native American paraphernalia at the scene or scalping their victims.
In 16th century Italy, a by now well-known book was written by a former politician named Niccolò Machiavelli. In this book he establishes two types of nations, one of which he calls 'Principalities'. These types are either old or new. That is, you either ascend to rule a nation that has existed for a long time (it is old), or suddenly - through arms, intrigues, or fortune - you find yourself at the head of a 'new' nation, as Israel was in 1948. Principality is perhaps a better word, but instead we will use meaningful terms like nations, regions, or cities, as these are more or less interchangeable in a political sense. A Nation is a collection of regions; a region a collection of cities, or city-sized pieces of land.
All states and all dominions that have had and continue to have power over men were and still are either republics or principalities. And principalities are either hereditary, in which instance the family of the prince has ruled for generations, or they are new. And the new ones are either completely new, as was Milan for Francesco Sforza, or they are like members added to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them ... and they are gained either by the arms of others or by one's own, either through Fortune or through cleverness.He goes on to make many pertinent statements:
~ The Prince - Chapter 1
But it is the new principality that causes difficulties. In the first place, if it is not completely new but is instead an acquisition (so that the two parts together may be called 'mixed'), its difficulties derive from one natural problem inherent in all new principalities: men gladly change their masters, thinking to better themselves; and this belief causes them to take arms against their ruler; but they fool themselves in this, since with experience they see that things have become worse. This stems from another natural and ordinary necessity, which is that a new prince must always offend his new subjects with both his soldiers and other countless injuries that accompany his new conquest; thus, you have made enemies of all those you injured in occupying the principality and you are unable to maintain as friends those who helped you to rise to power, since you cannot satisfy them in the way that they had supposed, nor can you use strong measures against them...On how to maintain a newly acquired state, and how to expand:
The better solution is to send colonies into one or two places that will act as supports for your own state; for it is necessary that either the prince do this or maintain a large number of infantry and cavalry. Colonies do not cost much, and with little or no expense a prince can send and maintain them; and in so doing he offends only those whose fields and houses have been taken and given to the new inhabitants, who are only a small part of that state; and those that he offends, being dispersed and poor, cannot ever threaten him, and all the others remain on the one hand unharmed (and because of this, they should remain silent), and on the other afraid of making a mistake, for fear that what happened to those who were dispossessed might happen to them.And this:
~ The Prince - Chapter 2
Moreover, anyone who is in a province that is unlike his own in the ways mentioned above should make himself the leader and defender of the less powerful neighbors and do all he can to weaken those who are more powerful, and he should be careful that, for whatever reason, no foreigner equal to himself in strength enter there. And it will always happen that the outsider will be brought in by those who are dissatisfied, either because of too much ambition or because of fear, as was once seen when the Aetolians brought the Romans into Greece; and in every other province that the Romans entered, they were brought in by the inhabitants.And this:
In the provinces that they seized, the Romans observed these procedures very carefully; they sent colonies, kept the less powerful at bay without increasing their strength. Put down the powerful, and did not allow powerful foreigners to gain prestige there.And this:
As I have said, when those states that are acquired are used to living by their own laws and in freedom, there are three methods of holding on to them: the first is to destroy them; the second is to go there in person to live; the third is to allow them to live with their own laws, forcing them to pay a tribute and creating therein a government made up of a few people who will keep the state friendly toward you.There is much more said in this work that applies to the current situation but we would end up quoting the work in its entirety, which is not the purpose today. Our purpose is to discuss Israel's larger strategy, even if that means sacrificing some of the smaller nuances. Before we can understand the ultimate purpose of their propaganda, we must understand what they are actually doing, and where they are heading.
While the exact reasons for the decline and eventual fall of the Ottoman Empire are subject to some amount of debate, we can assign it to a couple of significant factors: 1) The sultans' erroneous belief that agriculture was the most significant wealth-producing industry (China made the same mistake). This led to 2) Their lack of technological progress and ability to protect their lands, now coveted by the industrialized West because they were being 'wasted'. Some argue that if you look broadly at manufacturing and include artisans in the picture, they were not so badly off, but such 'quaint' production facilities producing knick-knacks are beside the point: the most important industry in the Western capitalist world is the military industry. It is very difficult to take over another country - or defend your own - with furniture, no matter how pretty the inlay or sturdy the construction.
The Ottoman Empire, along with imperial Russia, Germany, Britain, and France were the main actors on the political stage coming out of the 19th century. As you can note, both the Ottoman Empire, Germany, and Russia were promptly dealt with by the West. Thanks to WW1 and the bought and paid for "Bolshevik revolution", Russia was made impotent and Germany, the Ottomans' largest European ally, was defeated. This gave Britain the ability to 'destroy' the Ottoman Empire by breaking it up into smaller pieces and pitting each against the other. No former member of the Ottoman Empire, or any Middle Eastern state, ever managed to become a significant threat to Western hegemony in the 20th century, mainly because they lacked the psychopathic greed and cunning necessary to devise an efficient strategy.
During the First World War, Britain had mobilized and trained various terrorist organizations, largely made up of religious fundamentalist tribesmen, to use as insurrection forces and destabilizing influences among the Arab population. Many of these individuals later played important roles in ensuring that no one was happy enough with what they got, so they could never again achieve anything resembling peace.
We have casually glazed over what was really a long and torturous decline of the Ottoman Empire, with many moves and counter-moves on the world political stage, but the thing to understand and take away is that the Ottoman Empire was a powerful competitor to Europe, at least in potential. They were defeated and broken up into smaller states, and infighting was strongly encouraged. Britain taught the puppet regimes the value of terrorism against each other and their local populations, then trained and supplied them to that end.
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 the achievement of 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.As you will note, WW1 hadn't even ended when Chaim Weizmann got this carte blanche from Britain on behalf of world Jewry. But once the United States joined in on 6th April 1917 after the "collapse" of the Russian Government in March under the Wall Street financed Bolsheviks and Russia's exit from the war, it was deemed sure that the Allies would ultimately achieve victory.
~ Lord Arthur James Balfour, 2nd November, 1917.
At the time of writing this declaration, the Ottoman Empire looked more or less like this:
The Treaty of Sèvres (10 August 1920) was intended to be the peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and Allies at the end of World War I but it was not ratified, thus aborted and never entered into force. The Treaty of Versailles was signed with the German Empire before this treaty to annul German concessions including economic rights and enterprises in the Ottoman sphere. Also, France, Great Britain and Italy signed a secret "Tripartite Agreement" at the same date. The Tripartite Agreement confirmed Britain's oil and commercial concessions and turned the former German enterprises in the Ottoman Empire over to a Tripartite corporation. The terms of the Treaty of Sèvres were far more severe than those imposed on the German Empire in the Treaty of Versailles. The open negotiations covered a period of more than fifteen months, beginning at the Paris Peace Conference. The negotiations continued at the Conference of London, and took definite shape only after the premiers' meeting at the San Remo conference in April 1920. France, Italy, and Great Britain, however, had secretly begun the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire as early as 1915.The Treaty of Sèvres was never ratified as is, but became the Treaty of Lausanne when the Turkish National Movement opposed the Treaty of Sèvres due to its significant loss of territory. The Treaty of Lausanne was signed in 1923.
~ Wikipedia
The large number of moves and counter-moves, and mandates of this and that, make for a tedious though important history of the region. What you should take away from this is that Europe had been planning the break-up of the Ottoman Empire since at least 1915, and that they planned to consolidate ownership and exploitation rights. They then split up the Empire into what seemed at the time to be politically expedient and useful demarcations (least likely to consolidate into a force against their hegemony).
This has historically been, and is still today, the dominant method of 'conquest' by the western powers. Remember what Machiavelli said:
As I have said, when those states that are acquired are used to living by their own laws and in freedom, there are three methods of holding on to them: the first is to destroy them; the second is to go there in person to live; the third is to allow them to live with their own laws, forcing them to pay a tribute and creating therein a government made up of a few people who will keep the state friendly toward you.This represents the 3rd option, installing a friendly (puppet) regime and making them pay tribute (interest on an IMF loan or by some other mechanism). It is the easiest way to have an empire without looking like you have an empire.
Remember that we are currently in the final stage of the era of nation-states and entering a fully 'globalized' era. So a great deal of what is going on today is somewhat new territory. In all of recorded history we haven't seen this precise situation before. While there have been large and expanding empires of various sizes in the past, the scope of the current geopolitical crisis is at least one order of magnitude greater.
Zionism developed in the midst of these great changes taking place at the turn of the 20th century. This movement was mainly political in scope, and predominantly secular. That is, Zionism has its roots in Jewish religion, history and philosophy, but it is more or less part of a kind of Jewish 'Enlightenment' that is particular to Jews rather than 'all men' or 'universal'. Zionism is somewhat liberated from the traditional religious beliefs of the Jews, but is really too complex to pigeon-hole. Zionism is still best explained as Jewish Nationalism, that is, the political desire for a Jewish state or nation, which cited as precedent 'Christian' states of the past.
The predominantly Christian West has had a love/hate relationship with the Jews for as long as they have both been around. On the one hand, Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism. It is in effect a 'new covenant'. Jesus was a Jew, and is still referred to as "the king of the Jews." Jesus was, supposedly, sent by the Jewish God to save "mankind." Curiously, the God of all men chose to send him to Palestine/Judea/Israel. This was certainly not the most populous part of the world; perhaps he was just testing the waters with a soft opening?
According to the Christian bible, Jesus came to save everyone, and the "Jews" killed him. This is of course a complex situation, as the Bible says the Jewish authorities of the time charged Jesus with blasphemy, and then asked Pontius Pilate (the Roman governor) if they could execute him. The whole situation is highly questionable for more reasons than need be explained. Suffice it to say that this fundamental belief in deicide (god-killing) has been a sore point for the Christian West and a justification for bigotry and racism. We prefer not to use the word 'anti-semitism' because 'semitic' is too broad a term.
The word "Semitic" is derived from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in Genesis 5, Genesis 6, Genesis 10: 21, or more precisely from the Greek derivative of that name, namely Σημ (Sēm); the noun form referring to a person is Semite.As time went on, Christians and later Westerners found all manner of reasons to view the Jews with suspicion, not least of which was their propensity to isolate themselves from the larger community in which they lived. This produced intermittent persecutions which eventually led them, or at least the Zionist leaders, to declare: "Screw you guys, we're going home."
The concept of "Semitic" peoples is derived from Biblical accounts of the origins of the cultures known to the ancient Hebrews. In an effort to categorise the peoples known to them, those closest to them in culture and language were generally deemed to be descended from their forefather Shem.
In Genesis 10:21 - 31, Shem is described as the father of Aram, Ashur, and Arpachshad: the Biblical ancestors of the Arabs, Aramaeans, Assyrians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Sabaeans, and Hebrews, etc., all of whose languages are closely related; the language family containing them was therefore named "Semitic" by linguists.
~ Wikipedia
The only problem is, they hadn't been "home" in two thousand years. Their "home" was now the "home" of another group of people, the Palestinians, and it was part of the Ottoman Empire until the 1920s when it was formally sliced up. Even worse, if we ignore the use of the bible as historical text, the actual historical evidence for the Jews ever being a cohesive people living for any significant length of time in any great numbers in the modern Middle East is non-existent.
The British Mandate for Palestine, or simply the Mandate for Palestine, was a legal commission for the administration of the territory that had formerly constituted the Ottoman Empire sanjaks of Nablus, Acre, the Southern portion of the Beirut Vilayet, and the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, prior to the Armistice of Mudros. The draft of the Mandate was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations on 24 July 1922, amended via the 16 September 1922 Transjordan memorandum and which came into effect on 29 September 1923 following the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne. The mandate ended at midnight on 14 May 1948.The Zionist movement, ostensibly a nationalist movement, but complicated due to being based on ancient religious texts of obscure origin, was, at the very least, worrisome. Its proponents were a group of individuals with a shared goal who were willing to go to any length to attain it. They were, from the Western and British perspective, a terrorist group in the making.
~ Wikipedia
The feelings of the time, which is still true today, were split in two co-linear forms. Those who disliked or even hated the Jews, saw the creation of a Jewish State as a way to "get them out of here" and to let them become someone else's "problem". Alternately, pro-Zionist Westerners sympathized with the Jewish status of victim. In 66 A.D. the Romans essentially destroyed Judaea and dispersed the Jews, or so the accepted history says. Rightly or wrongly, the Jews were seen as a historically slighted people who "just wanted to go home." In this context, fundamentalist Christians are a special case, as they are overtly the latter (sympathizers), but secretly the former (Jew-haters).
Fundamentalist interpretation of the bible leads to the belief by many Christians in the U.S. that the second coming of Jesus will happen only after Israel becomes a state and is then 'destroyed' in the Armageddon. Their support of Israel is facetious and dishonest, because their support is based on a belief that they are 'helping' the Jews to be slaughtered.
The Zionist movement then essentially set about attaining a state by cleverness, or intrigue. Now they must maintain that state, and history tells us that there is only one way to do it: destroy the natives.
The reason you must kill all the natives is thus: You will eventually lose the state unless you don't.
A couple of historical case studies: the Spartans and the Romans. The Spartans held Athens and Thebes by building therein a government consisting of a few people; eventually they lost them both. The Romans, in order to hold Capua, Carthage, and Numantia, destroyed them and did not lose them; they wished to hold Greece by almost the same manner as the Spartans held it, making it free and leaving it under its own laws, and they did not succeed; thus, they were obliged to destroy many of the cities in that province in order to retain it. For, in truth, there is no secure means of holding on to them except by destroying them.
In more modern times, all Latin American countries are an example of what happens when you allow the natives to survive. Although European imperialists did make a good effort at killing as many as possible, all formal ties with their European masters have been cut. Later, when the United States entered Latin America they installed a great many puppet governments and dictators, and currently they are seeing each one fall away from their US masters. First Venezuela, and now Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina and many others are courting Russia and other BRICS allies. Soon they will have to either destroy them (as they have recently been attempting in Venezuela) or lose them.
Britain lost physical control of most of its colonies, and certainly India, because of this issue, although some economic control was maintained.
So what is the ultimate plan of Israel? It is precisely what it must be, and what it always is during the establishment of a new state: the wholesale destruction and dispersion of the native population who could lay claim to the land.
Now, destroying a population can be done in two ways: slaughter or absorption. The method of absorption was often used by Rome, especially Julius Caesar, as the most merciful of the two options. To absorb a people is to grant them full rights and citizenship and integrate them as quickly as possible into the state. During the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the blacks, although not strictly 'natives', presented a very real problem for the American elites. The solution to the problem was to fully and completely absorb the black population, who had until that point been little more than a cheap labor force.
The United States currently occupies the Kingdom of Hawai'i, and has almost completely absorbed the local population. Although there is a resurgence of Hawai'ian culture and language, it is almost exclusively 'Hawai'ian American culture'.
France met with great success absorbing the Aquitaine and Languedoc regions in what is now southern France, whereas Spain messed it up with respect to Basque and Catalunya because it allowed them to retain their language and culture. The essential component of absorbing a population is outlawing and repressing their native culture and forcing them to learn an alternative language and history, one that usually justifies their absorption.
The problem with this option for Israel is that it would only be a matter of time before granting citizenship to returning Palestinian refugees leaves Israel with a majority Palestinian population. It's hard to imagine that the small will absorb the large. Since Zionism is interested in creating a "Jewish" State, this is doubly impossible. Unless of course the Palestinians could be coerced into converting to Judaism and learning Hebrew. This is still unacceptable due to the ethnic standards of Zionism: the Jews are both a religion AND an ethnicity. Palestinians could never be 'real' Jews because they are semitic.
That leaves only one option; killing all the Palestinians, which is essentially what Israel has been doing since it was established.
The problem this presents the Israeli elite is that the rest of the world has come a long way since the "Old Testament Days" where killing entire populations was common practice. People's sense of justice, humanity and tolerance simply won't allow it, unless of course the people being killed are sufficiently dehumanized. This is made worse by the fact that people's current sense of civilization won't even allow proper absorption either. France currently has a devil of a time with descendants of the people from their former African colonies, so much so that they have begun banning certain modes of dress, such as wearing a veil in public, to great outcry.
People as a general rule do not like killing dogs. However, there are two situations where people will accept killing a dog: 1) if it is very sick, 2) if it is rabid and a violent danger. The ultimate goal of the Israelis vis a vis the Palestinians is to create a situation where they can, or so they hope, laudably euthanize the population "for the greater good." To put it crudely, they wish to make them appear to be rabid dogs.
What counts as sufficient dehumanization? The threshold is less than you think. It suffices to demonstrate that the individuals killed were inhumane themselves, and criminal besides. Just as the Native Americans were "riled" up to revolt, and their primitive forms of warfare carted around as "barbarism." Of course they were "barbaric"; they mostly had flint hatchets. It's hard to quickly kill someone with a flint hatchet.
The wishful thinking in play here is of course absolutely boundless. It is the fantasy of all psychopaths to be praised and loved for their depravity. Ultimately they are defeated in this hope, but the cost to life is the real issue here. History will judge Western silence more harshly than Israeli brutality. The Israelis have a pragmatic and logical position (pragmatism and logic have nothing to do with humanity and morality). But that we accept their cruel and inhuman logic is the greatest crime of the modern world.
Part of the goal of destroying the Palestinians is this effort to completely dehumanize them. The myth of the Suicide Bomber is one tactic the Israelis use; the idea that Palestinians use their own children as "human shields" is another, a tactic that is as old as the hills. In ancient times it was customary to "exchange" hostages. The very word hostage takes its meaning from this practice. A key difference, however, is it was customary in ancient times to see to it that the "hostages" were fairly well treated.
It's curious to look back and note how in every major or significant conflict engaged in by the West before WW1, whenever images of slaughtered civilians surfaced, the established authorities immediately claimed they were "human shields."
The British Manual of Military Law, issued when WW1 broke out, noted that placing civilians on trains in occupied territory to prevent attacks "cannot be considered a commendable practice". And the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (IV): Commentary 208 (ICRC, J. Pictet ed., 1958) states:
"... public opinion was shocked by certain instances (fortunately rare) of belligerents compelling civilians to remain in places of strategic importance (such as railway stations, viaducts, dams, power stations or factories), or to accompany military convoys, or again, to serve as a protective screen for the fighting troops. Such practices, the object of which is to divert enemy fire, have rightly been condemned as cruel and barbaric ..."Michael N. Schmitt has this little gem Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law:
"In great part, the dramatic asymmetry characterizing many of today's conflicts engenders human shielding. Confronted with overwhelming technological superiority, weaker parties have embraced shielding as a 'method of warfare' designed to counter attacks against which they cannot effectively defend using the weaponry and forces at their disposal."While international law says quite a bit about Human Shields, and underscores that it is unequivocally a war crime, it says very little about what one should do when faced with human shields. The current practice, especially by Israel, is summed up well in that document by this:
The second, and correct, approach to voluntary shields avoids this unsatisfactory result by treating them as direct participants in hostilities. The rationale for this position is set forth above. Since direct participants are lawful military objectives, voluntary human shields obviously do not merit consideration either in the proportionality assessment or during consideration of alternative plans of attack that might minimize harm to the civilian population.Much work has been done, by both the West and Israel, to re-classify civilians as militants or insurgents in order to make them justified military targets. This can easily be done because the majority of Westerners are sufficiently displaced from the conflict that they can only know what they are told. And it sounds much more reasonable to say "100 insurgents were killed" than to say "100 children throwing rocks were killed".
I think this method of reclassification of civilians as insurgents has been an important development in politics because it is essentially the 'anti-Ghandi strategy'. Western elites in the 20th century have 'suffered' a series of setbacks at the hands of peaceful protests to their violent actions. Their response is two-fold: if a population eschews violence, send in agents provocateurs; if that fails, use false-flag operations. False-flag simply means moving a detachment of soldiers under another banner or flag, so that survivors will report seeing the flag of some other group and blame them. In today's practice, this means dressing and talking like a Palestinian or Arab and performing some terrorist operation, or enticing Arabs or Palestinians to participate in a terrorist action in order to blame them. This is a form of entrapment.
It has now become standard practice when civilians are killed, even by accident, during a military operation to reclassify them as combatants, insurgents, or human shields (especially voluntary). There are two types of people in an armed conflict: soldiers and civilians. Any and all attempts to alter this definition are fundamentally immoral. A soldier is a person conscripted into the military of an established state. They are paid by the state to defend it against invaders. When there is no state, and there is no army, then there are only civilians. If they commit a violent act against citizens of their own country, or those of another, then it is a 'criminal' act.
The question as to whether or not Human Shielding is even taking place is actually the wrong question. The real question is: why doesn't Palestine use more effective military means to protect themselves? Why guard 'rockets' with people when you can guard them with tanks? Or a missile defense shield? Oh wait, because they don't have that. They have zero defensive capability. Since Israel has never shied away from killing civilians to attain even a tenuous military objective, why even use human shields? They don't work against the Israelis. Something smells rotten in the state of Denmark.
This is the process of dehumanization - or more specifically 'de-civlianizing' - the Palestinians to make it easier to slaughter them. And it is a slaughter because, from the perspective of the Israeli Political Establishment, the Palestinians are troublesome animals interfering with their grandiose plans for Jewish statehood. And from a certain, albeit psychopathic, point of view, they are correct. The Palestinians do represent a primitive threat to the Israeli state. But not as 'terrorists'; rather as legitimate claimants to the land.
Remember, Israel exists due to pity. The British Empire took pity on the Jews who have suffered much, and gave them a state. Who is to say that in the future, someone won't take pity on the Palestinians, and give it right back?
This is specifically why the Israelis have virtually boxed the Palestinians in, and will not allow them to leave. They have nowhere to go, and they never will. Israel will ensure that no significant number of Palestinians will be left alive to come back and claim their land.
Summary so far:
- The Israelis' goal is to have a Jewish State; everything else is secondary.
- In order to have a Jewish State, they cannot simply absorb the numerous Arabs, so they have to kill them all.
- In order to kill them they have to publicly dehumanize and radicalize them, and politically re-classify them as combatants, insurgents, terrorists, or voluntary human shields.
Remember what Machiavelli said:
As I have said, when those states that are acquired are used to living by their own laws and in freedom, there are three methods of holding on to them: the first is to destroy them; the second is to go there in person to live; the third is to allow them to live with their own laws, forcing them to pay a tribute and creating therein a government made up of a few people who will keep the state friendly toward you.Here is where many people get lost. The wording here is easy to misinterpret: "who will keep the state friendly." It should actually be "who will keep the state working towards your goals." Israel doesn't want peace with Palestinians: they want a militant, yet completely incompetent, authority to rile up the population, and say ignorant and violent things to the media.
From this perspective, Hamas is the worst possible group of leaders for the Palestinians. They are almost like cartoon caricatures of a terrorist organization. One of their greatest hits, used to good effect by Israel:
"The hour of judgment shall not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, so that the Jews hide behind trees and stones, and each tree and stone will say: 'Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,' except for the Gharqad tree, for it is the tree of the Jews."Really? Are they completely without sophistication and guile? What the hell kind of terrorist organization introduces themselves as terrorists? With talking trees and rocks no less! The truth of course is that Hamas serves the needs of Israel more than anyone else. Their constant rhetoric is tailor-made to stall the peace process at every turn... and it's tailor-made by Israel.
The motto of the Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency is (more or less): 'By way of deception'. And they are very deceptive, by nature. It is well-known and accepted that the Mossad's network of intelligence is second to none. They say it. We say it. So exactly how is it possible to assume they haven't managed to infiltrate Hamas?
The entire Hamas vs Israel script plays out like a Roland Emmerich film.
Reviewers often criticize that Emmerich's films rely too heavily on visual effects, and suffer from cliché dialogue, flimsy and formulaic narrative, numerous scientific and historical inaccuracies, illogical plot development, and lack of character depth.Sounds about right.
~ Wikipedia
Hamas is an unsophisticated and cartoonish group of impotent radicals thrust upon the Palestinians, who are desperate and have been rendered uneducated and incapable of democratic society. The allusion to Hamas being democratically-elected is farcical. Palestine is an Occupied Territory controlled by Israel. There is no 'democracy' there. There is no democracy because there is no Palestine. There is only Israel, the IDF, and some slums where the disenfranchised Palestinians are trapped.
What Israel needs is for the Palestinians to 'help them out' by adopting militant dialog in the media and impotently firing ineffective rockets that are barely able to travel a significant enough distance to even be noticed by the Israelis. Hamas provides that in spades.
Remember, Israel's goal is a Permanent Jewish State. We mean 'permanent' in the hundreds of years - even, according to their fantasy, thousands of years.
Summary so far:
- The goal of the Israelis is to have a Jewish State, everything else is secondary.
- In order to have a Jewish State, they cannot simply absorb the numerous Arabs, so they have to kill them all.
- In order to kill them they have to publicly dehumanize and radicalize them, and politically re-classify them as combatants, insurgents, terrorists, or voluntary human shields.
- Israel needs (and, magically, it appeared) a political movement like Hamas in Palestine that helps to militarize them. In order for them to justify their aggression against the Palestinian people as part of the "War on Terror."
Once the slaughter is complete, all Israel needs to do is wait it out. After a few decades of denials, blocks, and political posturing the Palestinians will be dead, and Israel will be an accomplished state, like practically all other modern nations, built on the bones of murdered natives.
What can be done?
The chances of Palestinians surviving the next decade are very slim. As the timeline increases, the likelihood of survival decreases.
The problem is that Israel is not a backwater, but Palestine was and 'is'.
Israel is a modern and capable nation, with a well-trained army, innovative military technologies, an impressive economy, and incredible treaties and trade deals with virtually all modern nations. On top of this, it is a nuclear power. It has a large nuclear arsenal. Israel can play and fight at every conceivable political level. They are situated in such a way that any attempt to grossly interfere with them would either fail outright, or if it was sufficiently motivated would be so pyrrhic as to be infeasible.
Israel is a producer of arms and military equipment for the West. It is also a producer of essential computer technology (like Intel chips). Sanctioning them is not really practicable, as they are an important source of war tech. This has the converse effect that since they manufacture and distribute the very weapons that could or would be used against them, that means they have them as well, and therefore may or may not have developed countermeasures against them.
Since sanctions on any significant scale (beyond perhaps some token sanctions) are not practicable, and invasion is not practicable, then what can ultimately be done about Israel? Well, nothing. At least not in respect to the Palestinians. No country is willing to go to war with Israel over them, as the Palestinians would be killed anyway, and the death toll on the side of any attacking nation would simply compound the problem.
The rule for these situations is: When you can't win, draw.
The belligerent attitude of Israel is forgiven by Western masses because the 'War on Terror' has conditioned them into accepting that all Muslims are terrorists until proven innocent. Alternately, massacring Palestinians is justified as necessary for pacifying an insurgent militant population. Striving to peel away those 'plausible lies', made possible by decades of crafty Israeli propaganda, is one of the most fruitful counter-strategies all of us who see the totalitarian horror of the situation can do.
The Israelis work hard to dehumanize the Palestinians, and so rehumanizing them is an important defense. Israel's position in regards to the Palestinians is very tenuous because Israel is so strong and Palestine so weak that their propaganda campaign has to pour significant effort into maintaining the illusion of a militant and dangerous Palestinian population. The numbers simply don't match up. The Palestinian dead versus Israeli dead is usually 1,000 to 1 or more.
In ancient Rome, and many other countries where slaves were kept, the common punishment for a slave killing a master was to kill the slave and everyone immediately around him. Up to 200 slaves or more were killed. This method is being used on the Palestinians. If one Palestinian commits a crime, such as shooting a rocket into Israel, regardless of whether or not it kills an Israeli, then Israel invariably responds by killing hundreds or thousands of Palestinians in "retribution." This has led to a situation where Palestinians are damned to helplessness.
This is compounded by the fact that the majority of people committing such crimes are usually emotionally unstable and manipulated teenagers. The source of the manipulation is debatable because we know that Israeli security services exert a certain amount of influence on Hamas and other terrorist organizations, but we don't know precisely to what extent they encourage the practice of firing rockets into Israel to furnish the Israeli Political Establishment and Hasbara fodder for more propaganda. Then again, as Joe Quinn pointed out, chances are, agents of the state of Israel are the most likely culprits behind the kidnapping and murder of the three Israeli teens that was use to justify the massacre of 2000 Palestinians.
That it was recently revealed that the F.B.I. was directly involved in ALL terror plots in the United States since 9/11 (specifically, that they had either funded or supplied material in all of them), proves that it is conceivable and realistic that Shin Bet et al would be doing the same. Since this revelation is official and issued from an actual court finding, it is difficult to deny.
Re-humanizing the "insurgents" and "terrorists" is important so that they can be dealt with legally instead of militarily. Terrorism is a crime. No matter how you slice it, firing a rocket at Israeli civilians is as unjustifiable as Israelis firing rockets at Palestinian civilians. The important point here is how society deals with such crimes. They should be under the jurisdiction of traditional Law and Order mechanisms. Even if the military is used to capture or effect an arrest, they must invariably be working for the Judiciary of the interested parties.
Now the argument does exist that because Palestine is occupied by a foreign state, they are justified in using any form of resistance. This is fundamentally true, but strategically worthless. Only Israel wins from rockets being fired at civilian targets. I'm not saying that resistance is futile, but this form of resistance is certainly detrimental to Palestinian interests. The Palestinians are not militarily sophisticated nor are they politically sophisticated and so any and all violent resistance simply furthers the Israelis' goals. The right form of resistance is deceptive resistance, which the Palestinians are not cunning (or perhaps psychopathic) enough to employ, and anyway it's a bit late in the game for them to adopt it.
Then of course there's the problem of Israeli false-flag rocket attacks. That is when Israeli agents, dressed in civilian garb, either cross into Gaza or have their sleeper agents already within Gaza, fire some rockets. The only viable strategic response to this practice is to reiterate that 1) you condemn all rocket attacks and 2) insist that this is a legal matter, not military. Emphasize that there is no Palestinian military, so there is no need for the Israeli military to act.
In regards to Hamas, or other political organizations that may condone such acts, the fact that they have condoned them means 1) they do not represent the Palestinians and 2) they are criminal.
The obvious weakness of this argument is that it leads back to: "What else can we do?" The proper response of course is: Not kill women and children. From this argument you can segue into: "Israel isn't up to the security challenge."
The idea that a trained commando force is stymied by a few civilians milling about a weapons stash is of course ludicrous. The Palestinians cannot possibly be sufficiently armed to provide any significant resistance against IDF commandos, which has been shown again and again with each invasion of the Gaza Strip. The current invasion has led to about 2,000 (mostly civilian) casualties so far on the Palestinian side, and 66 on the side of the IDF. As has been shown in the past, a majority of IDF casualties can often be attributed more to friendly fire and tactical errors. That is, very often the Israelis accidentally kill each other. This is because Gaza is very small, militarily speaking, and fighting is at such close quarters that it's difficult to indiscriminately mow down civilians without killing any of your own.
The point being that all developed nations have to deal with crime. Including finding and raiding criminals hiding in civilian and suburban populations. They don't need recourse to bombing entire suburbs just because a single person may be hiding a meth lab in his garage, so why does Israel need too? Very often criminals hide out in apartment buildings. It could be said that they are using their neighbors as human shields, but that's unnecessary because the police of most civilized nations aren't planning to respond with Attack Helicopters and Hellfire missiles.
A serious issue with these arguments is that in the West, and Israel strongly supports this, it is believed that Palestine is a nation-state like many others. It is not; it is an occupied territory. It is not even a state. There are plans to make Palestine into a state, but it is not and was never a state in the real sense of the term. It went from being a region of the Ottoman Empire, to being under a British Mandate (i.e occupied by the Brits) to being occupied by Israel.
Right now, throughout the world, the majority of people do not want to kill the Palestinians; it is the psychopathic Israeli Political Elite who want this. Right now, a large majority of Palestinians within Gaza are there because they have been "culled" from the herd in Israel to help maintain the Jewish voting majority. The correct and humane strategy to solve the issue is to absorb all Palestinians and make them citizens. Any terrorists within that absorbed population can be judged according to laws and dealt with according to accepted norms.
In this way Israel can continue doing what it is good at - being a state - and the Palestinians can survive and become a part of a larger Israeli community. This is essentially halfway complete. Israel already maintains complete control of both Gaza and the West Bank, which is why Israeli propaganda is completely facetious. There is no real Palestinian Authority. There are just a bunch of wealthy-ish Palestinians that get on T.V. and spew a bunch of semi-militant nonsense whenever Israel needs them too. There is no Palestinian State. There is only Israel. The only Palestinian state there ever was in history was under the British Mandate. Palestine has been, more or less, a semi-autonomous region (read: ghetto) of Israel since 1948.
What about their rights to self-determination? What do you think? If all of the Black Americans decided they wanted a two-state solution in the United States, how well do you think that would work out? The two-state solution isn't going to work, and even if it happens, it will be the end of the Palestinian people forever. Once they are officially a state, Israel will trump up some nonsense rocket fantasy and declare war on 'Palestine' and carpet bomb them even further back than the Stone Age. The day Palestine becomes a real state, Palestinians' days are numbered.
It all comes down to which one you want: A Palestinian State or a Palestinian People. Israel has worked very hard, and very cleverly, to ensure there cannot be both.
Of course this isn't what the Palestinians want. But as the song says:
No, you can't always get what you wantIn this case, getting what they want is a trap, and they cannot even see it. Do the Palestinians really think that getting a state will somehow magically protect them from Israel? All the international law, UN bodies, and Human Rights organizations in the world haven't been able to protect them so far. There is absolutely no reason to assume that they will be any less impotent if there is a Palestinian state.
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need
Do not ask for what you cannot have.In the final analysis it comes down to: die on your feet, or live on your knees. Both certainly have their merits. But there is another way to look at the situation.
~ Asian proverb
You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.Sometimes, surrendering is the quickest way to victory. Rome conquered Greece. But Greek became the language of Rome. In the end, Rome was conquered by her own slaves. It did take some time, but it happened. Arab culture is strong; Palestinian culture is strong. The Jews lived for 2,000 years as stateless citizens of whatever country they found themselves in. And yet here they are today, with a state of their own, doing unto others what was done unto them.
~ Bruce Lee
When Jews move to America, they become American Jews; when they move to France, they become French Jews. They integrate and yet are apart. They keep their culture, their religion, but they are smart enough to know that you cannot fight force with force. So instead, they use manipulation and lies, just like everyone else, except, they're particularly good at it.
The Palestinians have lost their land. Perhaps they never really had it. But they do not have to lose their culture or identity.
Another option
Of course, surrendering to the Israelis is particularly onerous, especially with all the history between the two peoples. The problem for the Palestinians is that they are politically useless in a globalized world run by psychopaths. Israel is the world's supplier of high-tech killing machines. The elite of all western countries like having new toys to play with and to use in their 'black ops' and targeted strikes to destabilize up-and-coming nations.
Because the Palestinians are, on the whole, poor and dispossessed, to the West they appear only as an unfortunate burden.
If however they decide to persist in the statehood fantasy, and they actually manage to achieve it, there will be a slim window where they can define their place among the developed nations. In this case they can attempt as best as possible to follow China's example and willingly become the world's slaves, selling their cheap labor in foreign-owned assembly plants. In reality the future of the Palestinians is servitude; this they cannot escape today, but they might be able to escape it tomorrow if they play their cards right.
In order to facilitate this they would need to install an extremely repressive regime that fastidiously eschews any and all terrorist leanings and has a zero-tolerance policy for trouble-making. Unfortunately they would have to be friendly with Israel. They would need to convince Israel that they would make good workers and cheap labor which will fuel the Israeli economy to greater heights... for a while. Economies built on slave labor have a tendency to breed incompetent and entitled populations who can easily have the rug pulled out from under them. Just look at the USA.
This scenario is very unlikely. But it is the one of the few conceivable ways that the Palestinian State could survive if Palestinians pursue statehood.
In reality, because of their lack of 'political sophistication' (they have the nasty habit of telling the truth to the wrong people) they will quickly make a misstep, which Israel will use as a pretext to conquer the remaining territories. There will be a massive outcry on Twitter and Facebook. Ban Ki Moon will hem and haw about war crimes and promise an investigation. The United States will promise sanctions and an international investigation. And it will all come to nothing.
Summary
The goal of Israel is the same goal all nations throughout history have had when they take possession of a new territory: Kill all the natives. Or most of them (90 to 95%). The only hope for the Palestinians is to surrender to Israel and be completely absorbed into their state and to lobby for full citizenship. They won't get it at first. It will be full and equal on paper, but in practice it will continue for some time to be a racist and segregated state. After 2-3 generations they will be able to peacefully fight for real citizenship, at which point Israel will probably grant it. The only problem is, part of their surrender will be adopting the Israeli language and customs, and to some degree their beliefs. At least overtly. Covertly they can continue to practice their language and customs. But publicly, they will have to integrate into Israeli society.
Until then, keep on supporting the fundamental rights of Palestinians to freedom and justice, don't forget, they're your rights too, in theory anyway.
This is a trenchant and excellent analysis of the Palestinian people's plight and options. Jason Martin is to be commended for writing it, and SoTT for publishing it.