[rad-green] The Zionist Colonization of Palestine

*https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-zionist-colonization-of-palestine/
<https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-zionist-colonization-of-palestine/>*

*Truthdig          Feb 24, 2020*

*The Zionist Colonization of Palestine*

*By Chris Hedges*



*Mr. Fish / Truthdig*

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic
hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same
land. It is a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial
occupation by Zionists <https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Zionism> and
later Israel, backed by the British, the United States and other major
imperial powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of Palestinian
land by the colonizers. It is about the rendering of the Palestinians as
non-people, writing them out of the historical narrative as if they never
existed and denying them basic human rights. Yet to state these
incontrovertible facts of Jewish colonization — supported by innumerable
official reports and public and private communiques and statements, along
with historical records and events — sees Israel’s defenders level charges
of anti-Semitism and racism.

Rashid Khalidi <https://history.columbia.edu/faculty/khalidi-rashid/>,
the Edward
Said
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/sep/26/guardianobituaries.highereducation>
professor
of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, in his book “The Hundred
Years’ War on Palestine <https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627798556>: A
History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017” has meticulously
documented this long project of colonization of Palestine. His exhaustive
research, which includes internal, private communications between the early
Zionists and Israeli leadership, leaves no doubt that the Jewish colonizers
were acutely aware from the start that the Palestinian people had to be
subjugated and removed to create the Jewish state. The Jewish leadership
was also acutely aware that its intentions had to be masked behind
euphemisms, the patina of biblical legitimacy by Jews to a land that had
been Muslim since the seventh century, platitudes about human and
democratic rights, the supposed benefits of colonization to the colonized
and a mendacious call for democracy and peaceful co-existence with those
targeted for destruction.

“This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have
no use for us,” Khalidi quotes Said as having written. “The best
Palestinian for them,” Said wrote, “is either dead or gone. It’s not that
they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of
Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.”

Zionism was birthed from the evils of anti-Semitism. It was a response to
the discrimination and violence inflicted on Jews, especially during the
savage pogroms <https://www.history.com/topics/russia/pogroms> in Russia
and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century that
left thousands dead. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1896 published
“Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” in which he warned that Jews were
not safe in Europe, a warning that within a few decades proved terrifyingly
prescient with the rise of German fascism.

Britain’s support of a Jewish homeland was always colored by anti-Semitism.
The 1917 decision by the British Cabinet, as stated in the Balfour
Declaration
<https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-balfour-declaration>, to
support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish
people” was a principal part of a misguided endeavor based on anti-Semitic
tropes. It was undertaken by the ruling British elites to unite
“international Jewry” — including officials of Jewish descent in senior
positions in the new Bolshevik state in Russia — behind Britain’s flagging
military campaign in World War I. The British leaders were convinced that
Jews secretly controlled the U.S. financial system. American Jews, once
promised a homeland in Palestine, would, they thought, bring the United
States into the war and help finance the war effort. To add to these
bizarre anti-Semitic canards, the British believed that Jews and Dönmes —
or “crypto-Jews” whose ancestors had converted to Christianity but who
continued to practice the rituals of Judaism in secret — controlled the
Turkish government. If the Zionists were given a homeland in Palestine, the
British believed, the Jews and Dönmes would turn on the Turkish regime,
which was allied with Germany in the war, and the Turkish government would
collapse. World Jewry, the British were convinced, was the key to winning
the war.

“With ‘Great Jewry’ against us,” warned Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sykes>, who with the French diplomat
François Georges-Picot created the secret treaty that carved up the Ottoman
Empire <https://www.britannica.com/place/Ottoman-Empire> between Britain
and France, there would be no possibility of victory. Zionism, Sykes said,
was a powerful global subterranean force that was “atmospheric,
international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often
unspoken.”

The British elites, including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Balfour>, also believed that Jews
could never be assimilated in British society and it was better for them to
emigrate. It is telling that the only Jewish member of Prime Minister David
Lloyd George’s government, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Balfour
Declaration. He argued that it would encourage states to expel its Jews.
“Palestine will become the world’s ghetto,” he warned.

This turned out to be the case after World War II when hundreds of
thousands of Jewish refugees, many rendered stateless, had nowhere to go
but Palestine. Often, their communities had been destroyed during the war
or their homes and land had been confiscated. Those Jews who returned to
countries like Poland found they had nowhere to live and were often victims
of discrimination as well as postwar anti-Semitic attacks and even
massacres.

The European powers dealt with the Jewish refugee crisis by shipping
victims of the Holocaust to the Middle East. So, while leading Zionists
understood that they had to uproot and displace Arabs to establish a
homeland, they were also acutely aware that they were not wanted in the
countries from which they had fled or been expelled. The Zionists and their
supporters may have mouthed slogans such as “a land without a people for a
people without a land” in speaking of Palestine, but, as the political
philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, European powers were attempting to deal
with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another
crime, one against Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless conflict,
especially since giving the Palestinians under occupation full democratic
rights would risk loss of control of Israel by the Jews.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of the right-wing ideology that has
dominated Israel since 1977, an ideology openly embraced by Prime Ministers
Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin
Netanyahu, wrote bluntly in 1923: “Every native population in the world
resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid
itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in
Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there
remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the
transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’ ”

This kind of public honesty, Khalidi notes, was rare among leading
Zionists. Most of the Zionist leaders “protested the innocent purity of
their aims and deceived their Western listeners, and perhaps themselves,
with fairy tales about their benign intentions toward the Arab inhabitants
of Palestine,” he writes. The Zionists — in a situation similar to that of
today’s supporters of Israel — were aware it would be fatal to acknowledge
that the creation of a Jewish homeland required the expulsion of the Arab
majority. Such an admission would cause the colonizers to lose the world’s
sympathy. But among themselves the Zionists clearly understood that the use
of armed force against the Arab majority was essential for the colonial
project to succeed. “Zionist colonization … can proceed and develop only
under the protection of a power that is independent of the native
population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot
breach,” Jabotinsky wrote.

The Jewish colonizers knew they needed an imperial patron to succeed and
survive. Their first patron was Britain, which sent 100,000 troops to crush
the Palestinian revolt of the 1930s and armed and trained Jewish militias
known as the Haganah. The savage repression of that revolt included
wholesale executions and aerial bombardment and left 10% of the adult male
Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The Zionists’ second
patron became the United States, which now, generations later, provides more
than $3 billion a year <https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf> to
Israel. Israel, despite the myth of self-reliance it peddles about itself,
would not be able to maintain its Palestinian colonies but for its imperial
benefactors. This is why the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement
<https://bdsmovement.net/what-is-bds> frightens Israel. It is also why I
support the BDS movement.

The early Zionists bought up huge tracts of fertile Palestinian land and
drove out the indigenous inhabitants. They subsidized European Jewish
settlers sent to Palestine, where 94% of the inhabitants were Arabs. They
created organizations such as the Jewish Colonization Association, later
called the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, to administer the
Zionist project.

But, as Khalidi writes, “once colonialism took on a bad odor in the
post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice
of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel
and the West. In fact, Zionism — for two decades the coddled step-child of
British colonialism — rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement.”

“Today, the conflict that was engendered by this classic nineteenth-century
European colonial venture in a non-European land, supported from 1917
onward by the greatest Western imperial power of its age, is rarely
described in such unvarnished terms,” Khalidi writes. “Indeed, those who
analyze not only Israeli settlement efforts in Jerusalem, the West Bank,
and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, but the entire Zionist enterprise
from the perspective of its colonial settler origins and nature are often
vilified. Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that
although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national
entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project (as are those
of other modern countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand). Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the
support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States.
Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a national and a colonial settler
movement at one and the same time.”

One of the central tenets of the Zionist and Israeli colonization is the
denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity. During the
British control of Palestine, the population was officially divided between
Jews and “non-Jews.” “There were no such thing as Palestinians … they did
not exist,” onetime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir quipped. This
erasure, which requires an egregious act of historical amnesia, is what the
Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/jun/26/guardianobituaries.israel> called
the “politicide” of the Palestinian people. Khalidi writes, “The surest way
to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical
connection to it.”

The creation of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948, was achieved by the
Haganah and other Jewish groups through the ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians and massacres that spread terror among the Palestinian
population. The Haganah, trained and armed by the British, swiftly seized
most of Palestine. It emptied West Jerusalem and cities such as Haifa and
Jaffa, along with numerous towns and villages, of their Arab inhabitants.
Palestinians call this moment in their history the Nakba, or the
Catastrophe.

“By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most
of its society uprooted,” Khalidi writes. “Some 80 percent of the Arab
population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of
Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property.
At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks
to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the
territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000
Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the
prewar Arab population.”

Since 1948, Palestinians have heroically mounted one resistance effort
after another, all unleashing disproportionate Israeli reprisals and a
demonization of the Palestinians as terrorists. But this resistance has
also forced the world to recognize the presence of Palestinians, despite
the feverish efforts of Israel, the United States and many Arab regimes to
remove them from historical consciousness. The repeated revolts, as Said
noted, gave the Palestinians the right to tell their own story, the
“permission to narrate.”

The colonial project has poisoned Israel, as feared by its most prescient
leaders, including Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was
assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995. Israel is an
apartheid state that rivals and often surpasses the onetime savagery and
racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy — which was always
exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists, including current
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have implemented racial laws that
were once championed mainly by marginalized fanatics such as Meir Kahane
<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Meir-Kahane>. The Israeli public is
infected with racism. “Death to Arabs” is a popular chant at Israeli soccer
matches. Jewish mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth
groups such as Im Tirtzu, carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and
violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless
African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has
promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily
resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws
<https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws>
that
disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law
permits exclusively Jewish towns in Israel’s Galilee region to bar
applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s
fundamental outlook.” The late Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and
journalist, wrote that “Israel’s very existence is threatened by fascism.”

In recent years, up to 1 million Israelis have left to live in the United
States
<https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Why-more-Israelis-are-moving-to-the-US-501301>,
many of them among Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens. Within
Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli
and Palestinian — have found themselves vilified as traitors in
government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and
subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system, starting in
primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. The Israeli
army periodically unleashes massive assaults with its air force, artillery
and mechanized units on the largely defenseless 1.85 million Palestinians
in Gaza, resulting in thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded. Israel
runs the Saharonim detention camp
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelis-build-the-worlds-biggest-detention-centre-7547401.html>
in
the Negev Desert, one of the largest detention centers in the world, where
African immigrants can be held for up to three years without trial.

The great Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin
<https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/>called “the conscience of
Israel,” saw the mortal danger to Israel of its colonial project. He warned
that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its colonial
occupation of the Palestinians it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate
that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Religious nationalism is to
religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who
died in 1994. He saw that the blind veneration of the military, especially
after the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, would result in the degeneration of the Jewish society and the
death of democracy.

“Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam [a reference to
the war waged by the United States in the 1970s], to a war in constant
escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” Leibowitz wrote. He
foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the
administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A
state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners
would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies
for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption
characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of
Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the
one hand and acquire Arab Quislings
<https://www.google.com/search?ei=dPFSXvrCB4vz-gTE84KwCQ&q=definition+of+quisling&oq=definition+of+quisling&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i70i249j0i22i30l6.2339.6168..6703...0.0..0.145.2001.22j2......0....1..gws-wiz.....6..0i10j0i7i10i30j0i362i308i154i357j0i273j0j0i131j0i22i10i30.VJZshBkHEWw&ved=0ahUKEwj6zKjm0ejnAhWLuZ4KHcS5AJYQ4dUDCAs&uact=5>
on
the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force,
which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being
transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who
will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other
nations.”

The Zionists could never have colonized the Palestinians without the
backing of Western imperial powers whose motives were tainted by
anti-Semitism. Many of the Jews who fled to Israel would not have done so
but for the virulent European anti-Semitism that by the end of World War II
saw 6 million Jews murdered. Israel was all that many impoverished and
stateless survivors, robbed of their national rights, communities, homes
and often most of their relatives, had left. It became the tragic fate of
the Palestinians, who had no role in the European pogroms or the Holocaust,
to be sacrificed on the altar of hate.

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