[rad-green] In Classic Occupier Fashion, Israel Has H it Rock Bottom. And Now It’s Too Late.

*https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-israel-has-reached-the-bottom-and-now-it-s-too-late-1.8592825
<https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-israel-has-reached-the-bottom-and-now-it-s-too-late-1.8592825>Haaretz
         Feb 27, 2020*



*In Classic Occupier Fashion, Israel Has Hit Rock Bottom. And Now It’s Too
Late.B. Michael  *

[image: Israeli troops guarding captured Egyptians and Palestinians lying
on a roadside at Rafah during the Six-Day War, June 1967.]
*Israeli troops guarding captured Egyptians and Palestinians lying on a
roadside at Rafah during the Six-Day War, June 1967. David Rubinger / GPO*

Yes, yes, this is exactly how it happens.

But what was the original sin? The Nakba? Not separating religion and
state? The lack of a constitution? The terrible mistakes in absorbing
immigrants? The different school systems? The pipe dreams about “Jewish and
democratic”?

The corrupt Sinai Campaign of 1956? The corrupting war of 1967? The
unnecessary Yom Kippur War of 1973?

The occupation? The souls that were poisoned? The urges that were
liberated? The Judeoid paganism? The criminal settlements? The disregard of
the Zionist ultra-Orthodox monster ever since it was born? The
inconceivable (and unavoidable) evil of the military tyranny in the
occupied territory to our east?

The complete loss of restraint by government? The celebration of
corruption? The debauchery by lucre? The creeping weakness of the justice
system?

But what difference does it make? Really, what difference does it make?
After all, by now it’s too late. The exit from the corral is no longer in
sight. The path is clear, consistent. Here and there it’s a bit tortuous,
but it doesn’t deviate by a single degree from the one we’ve been sentenced
to.

There were people who warned us. There were people who foresaw what would
happen. Theodor Herzl, for instance, who in his rosy nightmares saw an
enlightened state where Jews and Arabs battled a chauvinist rabbi who
sought to take it over – and defeated him.

And Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, who in August 1902 sent a letter to Herzl
saying, “I tell you very frankly that I should view with horror the
establishment of a Jewish Colony ... it would be a Ghetto with the
prejudices of the Ghetto; it would be a small, petty, Jewish State,
orthodox and illiberal, excluding the Gentile and the Christian.”

And Lord Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish minister in His Majesty’s
Government back then, who in October 1917 sent the British cabinet a
memorandum titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present [British] Government.”
The government’s sin, he wrote, was its acceptance of the Balfour
Declaration, which was destined to create a synthetic nation in Palestine
and thereby provoke waves of anti-Semitism in which people would accuse the
Jews of dual loyalty and demand that they all be sent to Palestine. And one
could add many more concerned Jews to this list.

But what difference does it make? Really, what difference does it make?
After all, by now it’s too late.

After the 1967 war, there was also a minority that foresaw where the
country was heading. Just three months (!) after the war, a dozen members
of the Matzpen movement published an open letter in Haaretz, on September
22, 1967, saying, “Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into
a nation of murderers and murder victims.”

Similar warnings were made by Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz and three men who
were current or former ministers at the time – Haim-Moshe Shapira of the
National Religious Party, Pinhas Sapir and Yitzhak Ben-Aharon. One could
add many more concerned Israelis to the list. But the religious demon that
escaped from the cracks in the Western Wall could no longer be stopped.

What happened next was classic. Every occupying state has gone down this
path – a coarsening of the soul, a loss of good character, burgeoning
violence and oppression, an addiction to authority, hatred, evil and lucre.

And then, riding on all this, a contemptible man always attains power, a
corrupt man devoid of restraint who gathers evil men in his own image
around him – people who market hatred and wickedness, who dance on the
blood of others, holy priests with the greatness of God in their mouths and
bribes in their pockets.

And the masses are always drawn to their charm, because hatred is always
stronger than enlightenment. And absurd beliefs are always stronger than
cold logic. And liberated urges are always more tempting than the
restrictions imposed by good character.

And that’s how we got here. And from here we can see the darkness at the
end of the corral.

So what will be? What will be? “The Holy One, blessed be He, did justice
with Israel when He scattered them among the nations,” it says in the
Babylonian Talmud, tractate Pesachim, page 87b. And this, alas, shall be
our consolation.

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