Way back in the mists of time, in 1988, a Gallup poll showed that 47% of Conservatives and 42% Liberals took Israel's side in the conflict with the Palestinians. Today Republicans sit at 87% while Democrats sit around 49%. A few decades of embracing Israel's 'War on Terror' have convinced the political Right in the USA that 'Israel is on our side' against the Muslims, while the Left still seems to see the conflict through the lens of the mainstream, which is having a difficult time rationalizing the increasingly pronounced episodes of Israeli brutality.
In this divisive political climate, it's useful to remember that truth transcends any political agenda.
Since the election of Donald Trump, many issues have come to a head: we've seen the criminality of the Washington Swamp in action; we've seen the true face of Leftist identity politics; and we're now being treated to the blatant criminality of their ideological brethren in Israel.
The Israeli ambassador to the UN has claimed that those 62 killed and thousands wounded in the recent Gaza demonstration "were not protestors, they were terrorists." But they were not terrorists; they were people standing in a buffer zone. Sure, their mere presence was antagonistic but that is what protest is, by definition. To Zionists they are all 'terrorists' just like, for Feminists, everyone who voted for Trump is a 'sexist', or how, for Racialists, all whites are 'white supremacists'.
Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan recently said the number of Palestinians killed at Monday's protest "doesn't indicate anything - just as the number of Nazis who died in the world war doesn't make Nazism something you can explain or understand." But Palestinians aren't Nazis seeking to eradicate the Jewish nation; they are Palestinians seeking their legitimate right of return, as refugees, to their homes. For Zionists, however, they're all just 'Nazis' because they don't belong in Israel.
Israeli Minister for Internal Security Avi Dichter stated that "the IDF has enough bullets for everyone." There is no official precedent for threatening genocide as part of the discourse of Western identity politics - at least not yet. If the skewed thinking of those enamored with identity politics continues gaining traction however, we can probably look forward to hearing similar death threats against anyone accused of being a white supremacist, Nazi, terrorist or sexist, etc.
Identity Politics is name-calling and virtue-signaling that poorly conceal what would otherwise be seen as blatant aggression. Just as Feminism is only tangentially concerned with the suffering of women, and in fact enhances it, and Black Lives Matter only tangentially concerned with the fate of African Americans while further victimizing them, Zionism has turned the suffering of Jews into a caricature that inflames an entire region and warps Western discourse. Political Zionism is Judaism's form of identity politics.
Zionist Identity Politics
In the late 19th century, the original political Zionists clamored for the creation of the state of Israel in order to, as they said, safeguard Jews from anti-Semitism, and as the means by which 'the hungry and motley mass of Jews could climb out of poverty'. Most Jews at the time, however, were inclined towards assimilation, and took little interest in the ideological mission of a few elite Jews to create a Jewish 'homeland'. It was clear to most that settling Palestine would require stealing the land from the Palestinians, which in turn would mean conflict with the entire Arab world.
During World War I the British promised the Arabs, under the leadership of Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashimi, an independent nation-state in the Levant, in return for their support in turning against the Ottoman Empire. They agreed, and their contributions to Allied victory were declared, at the time, as significant. But after all was said and done, the British reneged on 'the Arab Deal' (sound familiar?), choosing instead to divide the region between themselves and France, while giving Zionists parts of what was then called Palestine under a 'British Mandate'.
Over the course of British rule in Palestine, the conflict between Arabs and Zionists grew until, after the Holocaust, the war for an independent Israeli state gained much graver significance. Jewish fighters among the WW2 Allies returned to their respective homes in Europe to find their families dead, their land destroyed, their 'host' country in ruins, and most of their 'group' annihilated. The dream of 'assimilation' was wiped out, almost literally. Zionists no longer encountered resistance to the colonization of Palestine and its 'rebirth' as the state of Israel.
The 'never again' claim had a specific meaning for European and American Jews: never again would a Jew be forced to march to his or her death, corralled, reduced to the status of an animal fit to be slaughtered. Whatever had to be done would be done - anything was justified. And the state of Israel - armed and impenetrable - was founded on this basis.
The state of Israel, therefore, was always a Jewish state, a Jewish refuge - not an Arab one, and not a mixed one.
In November 1947, the United Nations signed off on the partition of Palestine for the creation of Israel. Jewish settlers then ethnically cleansed an estimated 700,000 Palestinians from the new state. These became refugees, while nearly all of urban Palestine was wiped off the map - destroyed, then built over - as up to 70 massacres took place. Israel fashioned for herself an intelligence apparatus and military that would rival those of the most developed nations. The Holocaust would become a new mystery religion, and National Security her hand-maiden. They would be used to justify future massacres, attacks against neighboring states, the stealing of Palestinian land, and Israel's disproportionate 'retaliation' when Palestinians defended themselves.
Since World War II, across the West, Jews have become one of the most successful ethnic groups, and for good reason. IQ is the most powerful predictor of success, and Jews have it in spades. 40% of the Nobel Prize winners are Jewish, and they number 16 in the top 40 wealthiest Americans, rendering absurd the view that anti-Semitism is an 'existential threat' to Jews in the West today.
But the threat of anti-Semitism - its mere suggestion, in fact, its mere utterance - remains a driving force in Zionist politics. The Palestinian is, for the Israeli, a permanent reminder of the enemy, the potential Holocaust, and those who would come and take their holy land. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is justified because Israel is for Zionists. One of the founders of the IDF, Vladimir Jabotinsky, once said:
To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view [of colonizing and ethnic cleansing] is unethical, I answer - absolutely untrue. This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes - not for any sweet words nor for any tasty morsel, because this (the Palestinians) is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall. (p. 120)There is an ethnic cleansing occurring in Israel. It is official. It is part of the DNA of the Zionist enterprise. And it couldn't have been otherwise without the connivance of cynical Western and Israeli elites that sought to use the conflict with Arabs as a tool for re-shaping the Middle East, and the world, in Western interests.
That Islam has its own issues is not in question - Sharia law, public executions, and extreme punishments for 'insulting the Prophet' are just a few. And yet the most backward regime - Saudi Arabia - remains a staunch Western and Israeli ally. Western governments' blanket support for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has led to the warping of an entire society. Reading headlines out of Israel today is like looking into a bizarre dystopian future, yet it's all too real and present.
It's in this context that the US held its 'festive inauguration ceremony' for its new embassy in Jerusalem, while IDF soldiers massacred Palestinian protesters barely 60 miles away. As I've said before, the protesters are refugees protesting for their right, guaranteed by the UN, to return to their homes. Clearly this cannot happen. Yet if Israel has a right to exist, don't the Palestinians as well? Or do they deserve their fate because they have the wrong identity?
Are we content to condone another mass slaughter, no matter how protracted, how stealthy its means, or how much we've been convinced that this particular group is evil? That those people don't deserve to live? That they are the real untermensch for which we need a Final Solution?
No. Identity politics and ideology of any kind, whether it comes from the Left and its drive for 'equality' at any cost, or from the Right and its drive for 'racial/religious purity', have driven both the Left and Right to violent extremes, and the rest of us into very frightening territory.
Reader Comments
Or, as Jordan Peterson might say, needless suffering is the one thing we know is real and morally bad. This gives us sort of a baseline for our moral compass. So, all ideological nonsense aside, can we at least agree that shooting children is a monstrous and reprehensible act we have a moral duty to "move away from"? Can we do that? Jesus!
Or something like that.
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Most of the images show areas of Palestine that are now recognizable as belonging to Israel, Jaffa, Hebron, Nazareth, Jerusalem and more. It was a modem vibrant Middle Eastern country.
I remember as a child, being told that Jaffa oranges were the best, Palestinian oranges were imported all over the world, now those groves are in the hands of occupiers, I wonder do they even exist now.
All that is lost, a country is being denied the right to exist, not just as a country, but a people, a culture and a civilization that has existed far longer than the state of Israel as we have been reminded recently only 70 years old and we are watching it being destroyed in real time.
All thanks to the most malevolent force that has ever entered onto the lands of the Middle East, thanks to the UK and it's affiliates, it's called Zionism, and has no relation to Judaism.
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If Stalin was on the left and Hitler was on the right, what's in between is still collectivist socialism. There has to be something better than that, and sticking with that false paradigm rules out anything other than a police state.
Capitalism seems to work because, as long as a system rewards competence, encouraging individuals and groups to sort themselves out and solve their own issues responsibly (for their own well-being), then the system can correct many of its failings. It is fundamentally rational. But it fails exactly where every other system fails - corruption, greed, ignorance, and the fact that people remain unaware of the fundamental difference between pathological people and normal people.
But the East is taking this system to its logical conclusion - mutually beneficial defense and economic ties that serve to enrich all those involved. I'd say this is a positive development, something better than a 'police state' as you say, even if it is far from perfect.
Normal human beings, like the Palestinians, only want to be left alone to live their lives as they see fit.