by Khalid Amayreh-occupied Jerusalem
“Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not
even know the names of these villages, and I do not blame you because
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the
Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of
Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the
place of Hunefis, and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman.
There is not a single place built in this country that didn’t have a
former Arab population.”
Moshe Dayan, during an address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in
Ha’aretz, April 1969
“As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both
instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly
unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware
of changes in the air- however slight-lest we become unwitting
victims of the darkness.” William O. Douglas.
As a Palestinian who has been living under the yoke of Israeli
military occupation for over 40 years and who lost three innocent
uncles and several other relatives, in addition to tens of thousands
of my people to Zionist bullets and other tools of death, I should
have no problems comparing Israel with Nazi Germany.
It is true that Israel has not introduced gas chambers into
Palestinian towns and villages. (Gas chambers were not the main
method of killing in Nazi Germany). However, Israel has been killing
and tormenting Palestinians unceasingly in a variety of ways that, in
their brutality and sheer evil, don’t really differ in substance from
Nazi behavior.
Moreover, it is important to remember that the German Holocaust
didn’t begin with Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, but rather with an
idea, with a book and with a Kristallnacht, the sort of things that
are so rampant in Israel’s collective thinking these days as the
Israeli Jewish society continues to drift menacingly towards
religious and jingoistic fascism.
Indeed, any honest comparison between Israeli behavior and acts and
Nazi behavior and acts would reveal the striking similarity between
Zionist and Nazi thinking.
The manifestly racist public discourse in Israel is an expression of
a society that is poisoned by fascist thinking, a society without a
moral or even a human compass.
This is not liberal Zionism giving way to religious Zionism as some
Israeli and pro-Israeli apologists would argue. There is simply no
such a thing as liberal Zionism or democratic Zionism or even human
Zionism, just as there was no such a thing as liberal Nazism or
democratic Nazism or human Nazism. These are stark contradictions in
terms.
Indeed, the moment a Zionist Jew sets foot in Palestine and accepts,
enthusiastically as is usually the case, to live on a piece of land
arrogated from its rightful proprietors and to live in a house seized
at gunpoint from its native Palestinian owners, this Zionist Jew
loses his humanity and becomes an evil person.
Zionism, we are told, is about ‘building a national homeland for the
Jews.’ However, for millions of its victims, Zionism is a project of
dispossession, it is about the uprooting, expulsion and dispersion of
the bulk of the Palestinian people from their ancestral homeland to
the four corners of the world by way of organized terror and
violence. Indeed, Zionism has always been clear about one thing: The
Palestinians would have to leave by ‘hook or by crook.’ And there is
ample historical evidence to support this fact.
This is the ugly side of Zionism that much of the West doesn’t want
to recognize.
From its very inception, Zionism viewed Palestine as a land without a
people for a people without a land. This arrogant denial of my
people’s very existence didn’t originate in ignorance of reality. It
was rather an expression of virulent and violent racism, very much
like those white European barbarians who exterminated untold millions
of indigenous Americans and called the genocide ‘Manifest Destiny.’
The Zionists did know that Palestine was populated by hundreds of
thousands of Christians and Muslims. In 1897, two Austrian rabbis
visiting Palestine to assess the feasibility of making it a Jewish
state, sent a pithy telegram summing up the situation. “The bride is
beautiful but she is married to another man.”[1]
That ‘other man’ was none other than the Palestinian Arab nation,
long established as a political entity.
Yet, the Zionist movement insisted with unflinching determination on
wresting the bride from her lawful husband.
That was a sheer act of rape, it still is an act of rape and will
always be an act of rape, no matter how much the myth is glorified
and the mythmakers are celebrated. This act of rape has no moral
legitimacy. It has no right to exist.
In 1948, the Zionists ethnically cleansed more than 90% of
Palestinians in pre-1967 Palestine, banishing them to the four winds.
Now, they are dreaming, probably planning, to do it again, and they
want to ‘transfer’ millions of Palestinians to ‘the desert’ in order
to maintain Israel’s pure Jewish identity and have more ‘Lebensraum’
for ‘God’s chosen people.’
Yes, despite the passage of nearly sixty years of ‘Jewish Statehood,’
Israel’s undeclared but ultimate goal remains the expulsion of most
or all Palestinians from the area extending from the River Jordan to
the Mediterranean Sea.
Indeed, any casual observer of the Israeli media will be affronted,
nearly on a daily basis, by remarks and statements by Israeli
officials, including Knesset members and cabinet ministers, calling
for ‘transferring’ the Palestinians, not only from the West Bank,
Gaza and East Jerusalem, but also from Israel proper.
‘Transfer’ is not an innocent term. It is no less than a euphemism
for genocide, at least a partial genocide, since it is almost
impossible to effect the wholesale removal and ethnic cleansing of
millions of people from their motherland without resorting to mass
murder and mass terror.
Well, was not this the method used quite liberally by the legions of
Zionism to force the bulk of the Palestinian people to flee their
hometowns and villages in 1948? Didn’t Menachem Begin, in his book
‘The Revolt’ refer to the Deir Yassin Massacre as a miracle because
it made hundreds of thousands of terror-stricken Palestinians flee in
fear?2
It is imperative that we call the spade a spade, especially when in
the hands of our gravediggers. The Zionists are comparable to Nazis
because their actions and behavior are comparable and similar to Nazi
actions and behavior.
Just as the Nazis sought to obliterate Jews as a people, the Zionists
have been seeking to obliterate the Palestinians as a people. This is
more than Golda Meir saying dismissively “what Palestinians?”!! Or
some Israeli officials referring to us contemptuously as
‘Never-landers.’ The systematic destruction of some 460 Palestinian
towns and villages by Israel (1948-52) was a Nazi act of the highest
order. It embodied total disregard and total denial of ‘the other’ on
no grounds other than the victims being non-Jewish. The relics of
many of these towns can still be seen even today and are meticulously
documented in Walid Khalidi’s monumental work, ‘All That Remains’.3
Unfortunately, this modus operandi of hateful racism and terror
remains Israel’s central policy towards the Palestinian people. There
is no clearer proof of Israel’s malicious intent than the intensive
building of hundreds of Jewish-only settlements on occupied
Palestinian land. Yes, everything here is ‘Jewish-only.’ Jewish-only
settlements, Jewish-only roads, Jewish-only pools, even Jewish-only
rights and Jewish-only tunnels since non-Jews are viewed by Zionism
(religious and secular Zionism) as children of a lesser God or even
outright animals. Israeli and Zionist apologists may not express
these beliefs openly on CNN and BBC. They are not that stupid. But
the daily crimes of the Israeli state, its army and settlers, bear
clarion testimony to this virulent racism, which can only be compared
to the ideology of the Third Reich.
And now we have this evil gigantic wall, the stated goal of which is
to prevent Palestinian guerrillas from infiltrating into Israel,
whereas the real purpose is to carve and steal as much Palestinian
land as possible, under the largely false rubric of security, and to
narrow Palestinian horizons further and further by effectively
converting Palestinian towns and villages into de facto detention
camps. Perhaps a visit to the northern Palestinian town of Qalqilya
will be more eloquent evidence of the brutal ugliness of Zio-Nazism.
In 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that
the Wall was illegal and ought to be dismantled. However, Israel,
backed by its guardian-ally, the United States, arrogantly defied the
ruling and implicitly accused the court and its judges of
anti-Semitism.
In addition to the settlements, inhabited by some of the most violent
and racist-minded Jews anywhere in the world, Israel has always
sought to make Palestinian lives so harsh and unbearable in order to
coerce them to emigrate.
To realize this evil goal, successive Israeli governments (Labor and
Likud alike) employed every conceivable legal trick, including the
introduction of dual justice systems, a liberal one for Jews and a
harsh one for non-Jews.
One expression of this judicial apartheid is the open-ended
incarceration of thousands of Palestinian activists, students,
professionals and college professors as well as politicians,
including lawmakers and cabinet ministers, without charge or trial.
(Since 1967 Israel has arrested over 800,000 Palestinians).4
When the notoriously insidious system of institutionalized repression
failed to make significant numbers of Palestinians emigrate, Israel
resorted to brazen physical harm in the form of terrorizing and
killing the Palestinians at the slightest ‘provocation’, very much
like Hitler’s forces did throughout Nazi-occupied Europe more than
sixty years ago.
Needless to say, Israeli ‘pacification’ raids and incursions, like
Nazi pacification raids and incursions, would leave many children and
women killed, homes destroyed, farms pulverized, furniture and house
appliances vandalized and roads and infrastructures thoroughly
bulldozed. In short, everything, every conceivable crime is committed
by this Nazi-like entity, all under the rubric of fighting terror.
And then much of the Western media would just parrot the Israeli
narrative as if the Israeli army spokesmen were the paragons of truth
and honesty.
In the final analysis, when Jews (or anybody else) behave like Nazis,
they should be compared to Nazis. Indeed, a country that sends its
F-16 fighter-bombers to drop one-ton bombs on apartment buildings in
the middle of the night, where children and women are asleep, is not
morally that far from the Gestapo mentality.
A state that allows and instructs its army to bombard with heavy
artillery densely populated neighborhoods, as happened in Beit Hanoun
in northern Gaza on November 8, 2006, when 19 sleeping men, women and
children were murdered and dozens others maimed as they were
sleeping, is a Nazi state par excellence, even if it evokes the
Torah, God, Ten Commandments, and terror.
Moreover, an army whose soldiers blithely and gleefully murder
children on their way to school and then verify the killing by
emptying twenty more bullets into the child’s head, as happened with
Iman al Hams in Rafah nearly three years ago, and then the soldier is
exonerated and given financial compensation, is not really an army of
professional soldiers, but an army of thugs, gangsters and common
criminals. It is an army that differs very little from the Wehrmacht.
In 2002, Portuguese Noble Laureate Jose Saramago, who won the Noble
Prize for literature in 1998, toured the occupied Palestinian
territories and saw for himself the extent to which Israeli
repression of Palestinians resembled Nazi behavior during World War
II. Here is some of what he had to say about his impression following
the tour.
“We must ring all bells in the world to tell that what is happening
in Palestine is a crime, and it is within our power to stop it. We
can compare it to what happened in Auschwitz, even if we consider the
differences in place and time, it is still the same thing. From the
military view point, Ramallah is the barracks, and the Palestinians
are the prisoners inside.”5
When challenged by some Israeli spokespeople that the Israelis were
not shipping Palestinians to concentration camps, Saramago retorted,
telling them, “Gas chambers are not the only way to kill people.”6
In fact, Israel has been waging a ‘total war’ on a virtually
completely unprotected civilian population, and this fact alone
should justify the Zionist-Nazi analogy.
According to the Israeli Hebrew Daily Ma’ariv, quoted by the famous
British journalist Robert Fisk, an Israeli officer advised his troops
to study tactics adopted by the Nazis in the Second World War.
“If our job is to seize a densely populated refugee camp or take over
the Nablus Casbah, an officer must analyze the lessons of past
battles even to analyze how the German army operated in the Warsaw
Ghetto.”7
Well, the Israelis don’t have to learn from the Nazis or anybody
else. In many respects, the Israeli army has succeeded in emulating
and surpassing the Gestapo, the SS, and the Wehrmacht.
The Israeli army shoots and murders wounded civilians. The Israeli
army destroys homes, occasionally right on top of sleeping civilians;
the Israeli army bulldozes farms, olive groves, citrus orchards,
agricultural fields as collective punishment, and Israeli tanks smash
their way through the walls of refugee camp shanties, without the
slightest regard for the inhabitants.
In Jenin, the Israeli army converted the heart of the refugee camp
there into a ‘football field’ ( see the relevant chapter ),
demolishing hundreds of homes and either killing or maiming their
inhabitants. Even the physically and mentally handicapped were not
spared.8
Like the Nazis, Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, from 15
to 60 years of age, are routinely rounded up, many are stripped
naked, handcuffed, harshly interrogated and tortured. Politicians are
kidnapped and held hostage and left to suffer, often without food and
water. And Israeli occupation soldiers are give carte blanche to
torment, humiliate and even kill innocent civilians at evil
roadblocks manned by equally evil soldiers and border policemen.
In some cases, these soldiers even force innocent Palestinian
youngsters to drink their (the soldiers’) urine as was reported by
the Israeli press on several occasions.9
As with the Nazis, hundreds of wounded Palestinians are left to die
as Israeli troops deliberately block ambulances, and Israeli
warplanes, including F-16s and Apache helicopters, rain bombs and
missiles on major towns and refugee camps, such as Rafah, Khan
Younis, Beit Hanoun, Jabalya, and on cities such as Hebron, Bethlehem
and Nablus. Indeed, the discovery of a single resistance fighter
often results in the destruction of a huge multistory building as
this writer witnessed in Hebron several times.
And yes, like the Nazis detained and interned thousands of Jews in
special camps called concentration camps, the Israeli government also
imprisons thousands of Palestinians in detention camps
Israeli propagandists would argue that Israel could, from a purely
military viewpoint exterminate six million Palestinians in a few days
and that it doesn’t do so for ‘moral and ethical reasons.’
This is simply a big lie. If Israel were truly concerned about ‘moral
and ethical considerations’ it wouldn’t be carrying out these
horrendous daily crimes in Gaza, including the routine killing of
innocent civilians in Gaza and the West Bank and it wouldn’t be
terrorizing and starving the Palestinians by barring them from
accessing food and work.
The real reason preventing Israel from carrying out a final solution
against the Palestinians is the international public opinion.
In October 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boasted on the
Israeli radio that because of the clever behavior of his government
“we have been able to kill hundreds of terrorists and the world has
not reacted.”
Needless to say, according to the hard-line former Likudist, a
‘terrorist’ is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands
of Palestinian policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel.
These may be shot freely. ‘Terrorists’ are also the children, women
and men who are killed in the streets of their neighborhoods or,
indeed, while asleep in their own homes at night.
This war criminal, Olmert, can go on and on and on justifying these
daily acts of murder against innocent civilians simply because, as he
says, the world keeps silent.
In other words, it is the world’s reaction, not morality and ethics
that influences the Israeli approach toward the Palestinians.
Indeed, this is one reason why this book has been written, namely to
warn the international community about the Nazi nature of the Israeli
Zionist establishment.
Yes, Palestinian suicide bombers carried out attacks against Israeli
civilians and killed scores of Israelis, often in retaliation for the
killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli army and paramilitary
Jewish settlers. I totally and unhesitatingly condemn all attacks,
suicidal or otherwise, against innocent people, be they Israelis or
Palestinians.
Nonetheless, Israel can’t push the Palestinians to the edge of
physical extermination and national demise, which it is already
doing, and at the same time shout, “Hamas, terror, suicide
bombings.”!!!
Indeed, what would any people do after 60 years of Nazi-like
oppression that transcends reality? What would any people do when
forced to choose between death at the Jewish slaughterhouse and death
as suicide bombers?
Israel claims it doesn’t kill Palestinian children and civilians
deliberately. This is another cardinal lie amounting to fornication
with language. Mistakes happen once, twice, ten times. But when the
killing of civilians happens nearly on a daily basis, it means it is
policy. In the final analysis, killing knowingly is killing
deliberately.
Today, Israel, like the Gestapo did to the inhabitants of the Warsaw
Ghetto, is barring millions of Palestinians from accessing food and
work. In Gaza, under the pretext of freeing a captured Israeli
soldier, Israel has bombed or destroyed the bulk of civilian
infrastructures there, including schools, colleges, streets, bridges,
charities as well as thousands of homes. Israel has also destroyed
the only power station in Gaza, forcing 1.4 million Gazans to live in
total or partial darkness.
This is the same Israel whose army has just destroyed much of Lebanon
and dropped 1.2 million cluster bombs over southern Lebanon. Well,
1.2 million bombs can kill at least 1.2 million children. This is at
least an attempted genocide on Israel’s part.
I know that pro-Israeli apologists, including some who claim to be
followers of the left of standing up against oppression and
identifying with the weak and the dispossessed, are tempted to create
a certain moral symmetry between Israel and the Palestinians.
But, in all honesty, one might ask what symmetry there is between the
rapist and his victim, between the occupier and the occupied, between
the armed fanatical settler and the terrified Palestinian peasant who
has to rely on Western peace volunteers for protection from settler
vandalism and savagery? What symmetry is there between the Judeo-Nazi
soldiers who fire heavy artillery shells from their Merkava tanks and
the helpless recipients of death who are killed for no other reason
than that they do not belong to ‘the holy cult.’
Is there hope for a peaceful solution to this enduring bitter
conflict? Certainly there is, and it lies in dismantling Zionism and
in the creation of a unitary, civic and democratic State in
Palestine-Israel whereby Jews and Arabs can live equally as citizens
as many Jews and Arabs are living in Europe and North America and
many other parts of the world today.
Europe, we should remember, couldn’t have the taste of peace until
Nazi Germany was dismantled and buried in the graveyard of history. I
am convinced that the Middle East and the world at large will not
have peace and stability until Zionism is dismantled and buried in
the graveyard of history.
I say Zionism ought to be dismantled because the anachronistic
concept of ‘Jewish State’ necessarily implies intrinsic racism and
violence against non-Jews. Indeed, Israel is constitutionally defined
as the state of ‘all’ Jews irrespective of where they live. This
means that Israel is also the state of millions of people around the
world who are not Israeli citizens, while it is not a state of nearly
one quarter of Israeli citizens who are followers of different
religions. This scandalous anomaly must come to an end if there is to
be peace and stability in Palestine/Israel.
In short, there can be no civil equality between Jews and non-Jews
under Zionism as long as Israel remains a Jewish state. Hence,
Zionism, as an inherently racist philosophy and political ideology,
must be dissolved.
However, there is much work to be done before dissolving Zionism. It
is necessary to label Zionism as an inherently racist ideology, it is
also paramount to undermine America’s blind support for Israel as an
exclusivist Jewish state. It is important to demolish the myth that
Zionism is a noble ideology of national liberation, and it is
important to make the world realize that Israel’s occupation of
Palestine and oppression of its native Palestinian people are
motivated by a racist ideology.
Moreover, it is always important to underscore the fact that Zionism
can’t correct, let alone undo, its sins since doing so would undo
Zionism itself because the main components of Zionism are racism and
dispossession and if these are eviscerated, Zionism becomes
meaningless.
Indeed, unless these essential pre-requisites are met, no one will
ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary to
force Israel to relinquish the occupied Palestinian territories.10
Needless to say, the ultimate moral and human alternative to Zionism
will have to be a democratic state where all citizens, regardless of
their ethnic and religious backgrounds, are treated equally under the
law. Fortunately, there are Jews of conscience and good will who
would agree with this human solution. These are our natural partners
for peace.
· The bulk of this article, ‘Zionism Must Be Dissolved for Peace’ was
originally published in the Spanish newspaper Diagonal[1] in October
27, 2006 as part of a debate about Zionism, which included, along
with the author, Gilad Atzmon, Santiago Alba-Rico and Rául
Sánchez-Cedillo, with an introduction by Manuel Talens. See Squaring
off on Zionism – Four Perspectives” (
http://www.tlaxcala.es/pp.asp?lg=en&reference=1405 )
Endnotes
[1] The quote, “The Bride is Beautiful but she is married to another
man,” was found cited in several books and articles, including
“Palestine: A Personal History” by Karl Sabbagh, and “As the World
Looks on Ineffectually-Vanishing the Palestinians” by Ghada Karmi,
Counterpunch, July 17-18, 2004.
2 Menachem Begin, The Revolt, 1948; reprint, Los Angeles, Nash
Publishing, 1972
3All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated
by Israel in 1948, Editor Walid Khalidi, Institute for Palestine
Studies, Washington, D.C., 1992
4 Palestinian Prisoner Club, interview by the author, 6 February,
2007
5 Portuguese Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago, Thursday, March 28, 2002,
during a visit to the West Bank.
6 Ibid
7 Robert Fisk, The Independent, London, 30th March, 2002
8 See the chapter on Jenin.
9 See the chapter on Zionist sadism.
10 Zionism as Racist ideology, Kathleen and Bill Christenson,
Counterpunch, page 4, http://www.counterpunch.org/christison11082003.html
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