Sadly, duty calls to reinforce a weak-point under attack (how they love to choose Christian festive seasons for such attacks!), here through a recent (Dec 18th) screed in the online newspaper, Barbados Today, by Mr Commissiong of Barbados. For in his article, he outright characterises Israel as a Nazi, genocidally racist colonialist state rooted in theft of the land from the native Palestinians, and dedicated to oppression. If you doubt me in this summary, let me clip under rights of fair comment and well merited reply:
It literally boggles the mind that the political leaders of a nation and people that historically suffered a fate so similar to that of the Palestinian people could not find it within themselves to demonstrate a practical empathy with the Palestinians by joining with the vast majority of the international community and voting in favour of allowing Palestine to get a foot through the UN door! . . . .
The Peoples Empowerment Party would like to remind Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, Foreign Affairs Minister Senator Maxine McClean, and indeed all the members of the Cabinet of Barbados, that they are the descendants of a black African people who, over a period of 300 years, suffered the most horrendous forms of racist oppression and colonial imposition.
We would also like to point out to them that if we scour the entire world today, we would be hard pressed to find a nation and people whose current condition so closely approximates the racist colonial condition of our own Barbadian ancestors, as the nation and people of Palestine.
Simply put, the Palestinians have been the hapless victims of two of the most powerful, oppressive and violent forces of the modern world – Zionism (or Jewish Fascism) and European imperialism. (And we hasten to add that there is a distinction – a big distinction – between the political movement of Zionism and the great and humane religion of the Jews known as Judaism.)
Over the past 100 years, the Zionist Jews of Europe and North America, acting in cahoots with the political and economic elites of Britain and the United States, have imposed the most horrific type of genocidal settler colonialism upon the Muslim and Christian Arabic people of Palestine.
One hundred years ago, the land of Palestine belonged to approximately 700,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs who had lived there for hundreds of years in relative peace with a few thousand adherents of the religion of Judaism. But unfortunately for these peaceful inhabitants of Palestine, hundreds of miles away in Europe, members of the European Jewish middle and elite classes were in the process of establishing a Jewish nationalist movement dedicated to the construction of a materially powerful, exclusively Jewish, nation-state. This movement was labelled “Zionism”, and ultimately set its eyes upon the land of Palestine as the desired location for its Jewish state.
As a result, over the past 100 years every conceivable technique of colonialist imposition and domination has been used against the Palestinian Arabs, ranging from the utilisation of international Jewish capital to purchase land and disposes its Arabic occupiers; the imposition of economic and politically discriminatory measures; the use of organised campaigns of murder, rape and physical destruction to terrorise and intimidate; and outright warfare and physical annexation of so-called “conquered land”.
The Zionists, with the complicity of the British and Americans, acquired their Jewish state, Israel, in 1948. Ever since then, there have been five major wars fought – all of them with the ultimate aim of further expelling the Palestinian Arabs and expanding the Zionist state.If that sounds like an accurate, fair or truthful summary to you -- and unfortunately, for many of us, it will -- I am sorry, but you have been sadly deluded.
(I will explain below, but first we need to do some rooting up of underlying problems that have given rise to a situation where this sort of disappointing, twisted-about, slanderous assertion can sound true to so many of us. Yes, this characterisation is demonstrably and easily -- cf. here and here for starters (much more here), with here and here on how we can gain the skills not to be so easily taken in again -- shown to be a false narrative. But twist-about rhetoric like this is now a commonplace conventional wisdom among our region's elites and it is taken as gospel by many on our streets, who make the mistake of projecting certain typical views on our own colonial past unto a very different and far more complex situation in the Middle East.)
Now, for some roots of bitterness.
It is said that politics makes for strange bedfellows and that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so perhaps it should not be surprising to see the sort of alliance between the secularist- neopagan, anti-Christian form of the de-Christianising movements of our civilisation and the Radical IslamISTS from without. And yes, these are intimately connected as the sole remaining stable mass support of Jews, Judaism and Israel are Christians who take the Bible seriously and therefore accept the promises of God therein and the prophecies concerning restoration of the Jews to Israel as a part of our blessed hope -- the culmination of the ages as the world rushes to the Return of David's Son, Messiah.
That is, in material part we are seeing yet another manifestation of the two tidal waves challenge to our region that we have so often spoken of here at KF:
But, we need to pause and brief ourselves on the specific nature of that alliance, so let us please pause and watch:
In short, we immediately need to understand that there is such a thing as reborn, cultural and institutional marxism that thinks of history, policy and progress in terms of how various victim groups have been oppressed by the wicked blue- eyed capitalist devils; and so they say that we need a vanguard of champions to rescue us, offering us to lead us to some form or another of a big government, state-centric utopian socialist paradise.
(Somehow, the actual track record of incompetence, oppression, chaos, mass murder, economic mismanagement etc of such political messiahs and their proposed utopias over the past century just does not get the headlines it needs. Yes, colonialism, slavery and so forth were horribly oppressive in many respects, but one would not be wise "fe swap black dog fe monkey." Wisdom is to instead seek genuine liberation in light of truth and justice, and it will take note that those who paint false political pictures designed to manipulate us through rage are by that fact disqualified from the trust required to take up high office. If we ignore that lesson of history, we simply will doom ourselves to repeat some drearily sad and oppressive chapters yet again. Also, rage and agitation led on by falsehoods projected as truths are poor qualifications for high office, neither are they good guides to voting or thinking.)
Before we go on to a point by point analysis of the clip from the article, let us therefore pause to listen to a wiser voice, Bernard Lewis, in his epochal essay, The Roots of Muslim Rage :
. . . The accusations are familiar. We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet . . . .
In having practiced sexism, racism, and imperialism, the West was merely following the common practice of mankind through the millennia of recorded history. Where it is distinct from all other civilizations is in having recognized, named, and tried, not entirely without success, to remedy these historic diseases. And that is surely a matter for congratulation, not condemnation. We do not hold Western medical science in general, or Dr. Parkinson and Dr. Alzheimer in particular, responsible for the diseases they diagnosed and to which they gave their names.The sound route to a brighter future is sober and balanced reflection on truth and right, leading to repentance, renewal and reformation, thus God-blessed transformation, rather than the way of agit-prop half truths and outright slanders and rage. Rage, notoriously, being a blinding emotion. And where, the old Jewish mother's saying is all too true: a half truth is a whole lie.
Also, I must add overnight: we must understand (and be able to critically assess [cf. references here, here, here] as well as positively respond to) Islam, and especially radical, global subjugation IslamISM in light of core claims, talking points directed at the Christian faith and gospel, the centrality of the military imperative aspect of Jihad expressed in key Quranic jihad texts such as Surah 9:5 and 29, which has first led to the 1,000+-year problem of dhimmitude under subjugation by Muslim conquerors in the Middle East, Southern Europe and the Indian subcontinent, and the Jihadists now envision reducing the whole world under their rule over this century. And yes, you will not see the likes of the following -- which I first saw on the Internet in the days following 9/11 in an Islamist site [it is now in the Wayback machine] -- on CNN or BBC or in Wikipedia etc:
 |
| The 100 year Islamic Dawah and Jihadist thrust to reduce the world under the control of Allah, his prophet, the teachings and law of Islam and the warriors of Islam across this century. Indeed, we should note that strictly speaking, "Dawah" [the Islamic term behind "Mission" in the above chart] means a call to surrender, with the implication being that the alternative is subjugation by force. Key documents for this thrust include the Muslim Brotherhood world plan of 1982 captured from an Islamist financier after the 9/11 attacks by Swiss financial police, and the Settlement Jihad subversion plan exposed through the Holyland Foundation trial in the USA. (HT: Wayback Machine) |
It literally boggles the mind that the political leaders of a nation and people that historically suffered a fate so similar to that of the Palestinian people
1 --> Notice the simplistic projection from our own experience as filtered through cultural marxism unto a very different historical and cultural situation.
2 --> First and foremost, the Jews are historically rooted in the Land of Israel, for over 3,000 years, and though driven out and/or oppressed by conquerors many times, they have always returned and have always sought to restore their homeland. This is a first premise of basic, easily accessible historical truth that must be reckoned with.
3 --> Where also, over the centuries since the Roman, second Persian, Arab and Turkish conquests, Jews have repeatedly returned; being willing to live even as an oppressed minority in their land. Mr Commissiong's article refuses to acknowledge that history, of an exiled people who have maintained movements of return for 2,500 years.
4 --> Similarly, he fails to admit that there are two relevant Middle East refugee populations, the Palestinian Arabs [who largely left in the context of an invitation by their brother Arabs in 1947/8 to leave while they invaded the land and slaughtered its Jews] and the 820,000+ Jews of the Middle East who were driven out from the Arab dominated lands in the context of the creation of Israel by UN Mandate in 1947 and the failure of the genocidal invasion that sought to wipe out Israel at its birth. Of these, some 620,000 settled in Israel and they and their descendants over two generations now form the core Jewish population of that land. That is, there was an exchange of refugees as happened all over Europe and Asia in the aftermath of World War II and related conflicts such as between India and Pakistan. That is, the basic legitimacy of Israel as a land of refuge for the expelled Jews of the Middle East, is a crucial pivot for any genuine solution and a test for the soundness of any proposal to resolve the matter. (Kindly read the summary history of Modern Israel here.)
5 --> He also refuses to acknowledge that in 1947, in light of that history, the resettlement since the 1870's and redevelopment of the land by Jews from ruinate condition, and the previous mandate of the League of Nations, the UN voted by mandate to partition the Western portion of Palestine [the eastern part, Trans-Jordanian Palestine, is now the state of Jordan, whose population are 80% Palestinian Arabs . . . i.e. there is already and has long been a Palestinian Arab state on 3/4's of the post WWI League of Nations Mandate territory of Palestine], to create a solution to the contentions between the longstanding and recent immigrant Arab population drawn in by Jewish investment and development, and the longstanding and immigrant Jewish population. The Jews in the land of Canaan are simply not colonialist invaders moving in by power and might.
6 --> Further, if there were a reasonable intention to acknowledge mutual legitimacy and find a compromise the main time when this should have been done was 1947/8. Similarly, after Israel survived a second attempt "to drive the Jews into the sea" in 1967, defeating Egypt, Jordan and Syria (during which Israel took and legitimately held land used as platforms for genocidal aggression, and repeated artillery bombardment of civilians and for terrorist attacks; pending a resolution of the underlying conflict), Israel sought to rebuild a compromise, but was rejected through the infamous three no's of Khartoum. Let me clip CAMERA's apt summary:
After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel was — in Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's famous phrase — "waiting for a telephone call" from Arab leaders. Israelis expected to hear that now, at last, their neighbors were ready to talk peace. Having escaped not only feared annihilation, but also winning a seemingly miraculous victory, Israel's leaders did two things: They vowed not to return to the vulnerable armistice lines of 1948 and '49 or to a divided Jerusalem, and yet to be "unbelievably generous in working out peace terms," as Foreign Minister Abba Eban put it. In direct talks with Arab countries, "everything is negotiable," he said.
7 --> But, all of this is history, a generation or two old. What is directly relevant to the current situation is that in the aftermath of the 1990/91 Gulf War, there was a major global effort at settlement that led to the Oslo Process intended to result in a genuine peace, it is under that that Mr Arafat (despite his murderous terrorist past) was able to establish the Palestinian Authority, as a nascent state from 1994 on, and it is the context in which -- despite a lot of terrorist provocation, a negotiation process led up to an offer at Camp David in 2000 of about 97% of the West Bank (with compensating land elsewhere) and 100% of Gaza, with a connecting highway and US$ 15 billions in development aid. So, by the time of the proposed Camp David deal of 2000 under US President Clinton, there was on the table as good an offer as could be reasonably had. Arafat walked away to terrorist war, on what has subsequently been acknowledged as an excuse. {U/D 12/28: Note admission by Arafat's widow, Suha in a MEMRI-translated clip from Dubai as discussed in Israel National news:But, as Maj. Gen. (later president) Chaim Herzog noted, "Israel's belief that the war had come to an end and peace would prevail along the borders was quickly dispelled. Three weeks after the conclusion of hostilities, the first major incident occurred along the Suez Canal." . . . .
[Then] the leaders of thirteen Arab states gathered at a summit conference in Khartoum, Sudan from August 29 to September 1. There they pledged to continue their struggle against Israel. Influenced by Nasser, "their conditions were quite specific: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and 'maintenance of the rights of the Palestinian people in their nation.' The Khartoum Declaration was the first serious warning to the Israelis that their expectation of an imminent 'phone call' from the Arab world might be a pipe dream" (Sachar).
INN: “Yasser Arafat had made a decision to launch the Intifada,” Suha told Dubai TV on December 16, in an interview translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
“Camp David had failed, and he said to me: ‘You should remain in Paris.’” [--> this is July 2000, long before Sharon's visit to Temple Mount that was blamed as the cause at the time, the "fail[ure]" was by Arafat's walkaway from an offer that was as generous a compromise as could be hoped for]
“I asked him why and he said: ‘Because I am going to start an Intifada. They want me to betray the Palestinian cause. They want me to give up on our principles [--> i.e., on fair comment, to compromise and make a real peace], and I will not do so.’”
“’I do not want Zahwah’s friends in the future to say that Yasser Arafat abandoned the Palestinian cause and principles. I might be martyred, but I shall bequeath our historical heritage to Zahwa and to the children of Palestine,’” Suha said in the words of her late husband, referring to their daughter.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak had offered to withdraw from 97 percent of Judea and Samaria, as well as 100 percent of Gaza. In addition, he agreed to dismantle 63 Jewish communities. In exchange for the 5 percent annexation of Jewish lands, Israel would increase the size of the Gaza territory by roughly a third.
Barak also made concessions on Jerusalem that many Israelis find unthinkable, agreeing that Arabs would maintain control over their holy places and have "religious sovereignty" over the Temple Mount.
Arafat flatly rejected the proposal, which has been more that any Israeli leader had offered in the past, deciding, instead, to unleash a war of terror against the State of Israel.}
8 --> And in 2005, Israeli PM Sharon took the step of simply handing over Gaza lock, stock and barrel; only to lead to seven years of rocket bombardment targetting civilians under the religiously motivated genocidal vision of the ghastly Gharqad tree Hadith that is embedded in Clause 7 of the Hamas Charter:
"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews , when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).Sahih Muslim, 41:6985, see also Sahih Muslim, 41:6981, Sahih Muslim, 41:6982, Sahih Muslim, 41:6983, Sahih Muslim, 41:6984, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:56:791,(Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:52:177)9 --> So, in that context, it is plain that the recent UN vote -- in which several Caribbean territories unwisely failed to sufficiently address the above context -- is tantamount to destruction of the Oslo process of negotiations towards a two-state compromise between two legitimate populations with claims in the land, to the de facto recognition of civilian-attacking genocidal terrorists as a legitimate state. Predictably, this will lead to rivers of blood, and those who voted for this, bear sobering responsibility for what is almost certain to follow; especially if they allow the sort of twist-about rhetoric we are commenting on to lead to the perceived delegitimisation of Israel and the enabling of the sort of genocidal antisemitism repackaged as anti-Zionism we are here seeing.
could not find it within themselves to demonstrate a practical empathy with the Palestinians by joining with the vast majority of the international community and voting in favour of allowing Palestine to get a foot through the UN door! . . . .
10 --> Irresponsibly suppresses the above context and the implications of the destruction of the Oslo process.
The Peoples Empowerment Party would like to remind Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, Foreign Affairs Minister Senator Maxine McClean, and indeed all the members of the Cabinet of Barbados, that they are the descendants of a black African people who, over a period of 300 years, suffered the most horrendous forms of racist oppression and colonial imposition.
11 --> Inappropriately extends our historical situation as filtered through a cultural marxist prism, to a very different situation, with intent to improperly branding the Jews of Israel as colonial invaders, racist genocidal robbers of land, and imposers of an apartheid state.
We would also like to point out to them that if we scour the entire world today, we would be hard pressed to find a nation and people whose current condition so closely approximates the racist colonial condition of our own Barbadian ancestors, as the nation and people of Palestine.
12 --> Drumbeat repetition of falsehood does not transmute it by rhetorical magic into truth.
13 --> But, if -- because we have been willfully or negligently misled by those we trust to lead us aright on matters of opinion and policy guidance -- we do not know better, we may be led to accept the false as truth and distort our judgement in dealing with the issues of justice and compromise in a complex and delicate situation hat could easily lead to a lot of bloodshed. Such neglect or rejection of duties of care to truth, balance and fairness is irresponsible, irresponsible in a context that predictably will cost blood..
Simply put, the Palestinians have been the hapless victims of two of the most powerful, oppressive and violent forces of the modern world – Zionism (or Jewish Fascism)
14 --> This is willful slander of the worst, twist-about kind, multiplied by invidious association of the victims of Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party's "Final Solution of the Jewish problem" with those who sought to murder them by the millions. (And yes, Fascism -- despite Stalin's successful propaganda branding of it as "right wing" -- was and is a statist, messianistic political movement of the Left that identifies a victim group and proposes a saviour who is a Nietzschean superman above morality who rescues the victims from their oppressors by any means he deems necessary, without regard to justice or natural law of basic human rights. While we are at it, contrary to the sort of rhetoric that is now being pushed all across the Internet, Hitler was no Christian, and Nazism was an anti-Christian politically messianistic idolatry. Truth is important. Including the foundational truth of the gospel of the risen Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Indeed, it is plain that a major spiritual dimension of the sort of ideological posturing and agendas we are seeing is to seek to undermine the credibility of the gospel and the Christian faith. So, solemn warning: those who cause the naive to stumble be rejecting the well-warranted good news of truth and hope that leads to salvation have a weighty burden of responsibility to answer for in That Day in which God will judge the world in righteousness by Him whom he has ordained and has authenticated to all men by raising him from the dead with 500 witnesses.)
15 --> On fair comment, the editors of Barbados Today, now owe the regional and global public a correction of and apology for this re-assertion of the Zionism is racism (and by implication, Nazism) smear that was voted by the UN General Assembly in the 1970's and served as a watershed moment that forever robbed that institution of legitimacy and trustworthiness as a forum of truth and fairness. Yes, they did pull it back in the 1990's, under pressure, but here we see it again being brazenly put forth as though this poisonous lie is the truth.
16 --> On further fair comment, Mr Commissiong needs to seriously rethink the roots of his thought that have led him to echo that poisonous slander and blood libel. Then, he needs to publicly apologise and recant the evident deception that led him to such a poisonously false accusation. Thereafter, he needs to undergo a process of rethinking and learning so that he can stand for the truth and the right, instead of finding himself spreading such blood libel laced smears. And, if he refuses to do so, he has by this single step of propagating blood libel excluded himself from the pale of civil discussion.
and European imperialism. (And we hasten to add that there is a distinction – a big distinction – between the political movement of Zionism and the great and humane†religion of the Jews known as Judaism.)
17 --> Weasel words, Zionism is simply the legitimate nationalist movement of the Jewish people, who are an ethnic group that is in large part characterised by a covenantal religion, Judaism. Which embeds in its core the concept of being a people of blessing to the whole world.
Over the past 100 years, the Zionist Jews of Europe and North America, acting in cahoots with the political and economic elites of Britain and the United States, have imposed the most horrific type of genocidal settler colonialism upon the Muslim and Christian Arabic people of Palestine.
18 --> Here we see the false accusation of genocide being laid out explicitly, as a twisted about distraction from the actual historical evidence of resettlement and redevelopment from the 1870's that faced a campaign of violence and terrorism under the Mufti Hussein (who went on to ally himself with Nazi Germany) and onward the attempted genocidal destruction of Israel in 1948 and 1967.
19 --> To make this false accusation of genocide more plausible, it is tied, simplistically, to our own memory of our colonial experience, as filtered through cultural marxism.
One hundred years ago, the land of Palestine belonged to approximately 700,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs who had lived there for hundreds of years in relative peace with a few thousand adherents of the religion of Judaism.
20 --> False, in many ways, mostnotably by implying that there were only thousands of Jews in Ottoman Palestine circa 1900, when there were about 60,000 by the 1890's who formed an organised Hebrew-speaking community, and by also adding hundreds of thousands to the numbers of Arab residents in the cis-Jordanian Palestinian region. There was no state of Palestine, there were administrative districts of the Ottoman Empire that cut across the borders we see today, there was no palestian national identity [Arabs there saw themselves as Syrian], by far and away most Arabs were landless tenant-farming peasants [a typical lot for a very large part of humanity for much of the world for thousands of years] or city dwellers, at the turn of C20 there were some sixty thousand Jews in Israel who by then had rebuilt Hebrew as a modern living language, Jerusalem by the mid C19 had a majority Jewish population [the Jewish Quarter being in East Jerusalem which was beseiged by and lost to Jordan leading to driving out of the Jews from their homes in 1948 . . . but I doubt that those displaced Jews show off the keys to their houses in vindication of their claims as though others have no legitimate claims] and more, much more.
21 --> From the 1870's there were movements of agricultural resettlement which bought land and rebuilt, then founded the city of Tel Aviv on seashore dunes in 1909. As a result, we saw economic growth and waves of immigration of both Jews and Arabs, in the lead-up to the First World War.
22 --> In that war, the Ottoman Turk Empire allied with Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary, and so faced campaigns in Gallipoli [which they won], in Arabia [including the Arab nationalist uprising with which Lawrence of Arabia is associated] and in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and in Palestine.
23 --> During the same war, Chaim Weizmann as a research chemist saved Britain in 1915 by creating a bacterial process to make acetone (critically needed to make cordite propellant for guns and artillery), and sought the relief of the plight of his people as his reward. That is the context of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which reads:
His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors 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.24 --> Not exactly a violent, colonialist, genocidal imposition! Subsequently, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, as a part of the attempt to resolve nationalist questions in Europe and the Middle East, there was an agreement in January 1919 between Weizmann (representing the Zionist federation and subsequently first President of Israel) and Feisal Hussein (representing the Arab leadership that emerged from the uprising, and subsequently king of Iraq, which along with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel were produced by the same process in and around the postwar settlements and the setting up of the League of Nations) towards the mutually supportive development of the Arab and Jewish nations in the Middle East. Indeed, astonishingly to our ears, the Jews were identified as "Palestinian," i.e even the very word "Palestinian" has been turned around in meaning. (The Jerusalem Post, the famous Israeli newspaper was originally the Palestinian Post. And, Palestine, under the League of Nations Mandate, was the designated area of resettlement under the terms of the Balfour Declaration and subsequent agreements. That is why money, signs, stamps, Maps etc used English, Hebrew and Arabic as three recognised main languages. The stamps and the like of Palestine that we may see as suggesting an Arabic Palestine "stolen: by the Zionists, come from that era and situation under international agreements to resolve various national interests.)
25 --> So, at this time, had there been a willingness to work together, we would have had a resettlement and redevelopment of a peaceful and prosperous Middle East with a global injection of Jewish talent and treasure that worked hand in hand with the Arab peoples to create mutual prosperity. Sadly, and in the main due to violent extremists on the Arab side who slaughtered not only Jews but Arab moderates, we have had a very different history since about 1925.
But unfortunately for these peaceful inhabitants of Palestine, hundreds of miles away in Europe, members of the European Jewish middle and elite classes were in the process of establishing a Jewish nationalist movement dedicated to the construction of a materially powerful, exclusively Jewish, nation-state. This movement was labelled “Zionism”, and ultimately set its eyes upon the land of Palestine as the desired location for its Jewish state.
26 --> A patent distortion of the actual history as just outlined."Exclusively Jewish" is particularly willfully deceitful and poisonous, as it is easily seen that some 1/5 of Israel's population -- well over a million citizens -- are Arabs with full rights, up to being in the parliament and on the Supreme Court. Indeed the Supreme Court judge who just sentenced the Jewish former president of Israel to gaol on conviction of sexual abuse is an Arab. It is not without irony to note that the only place in the Middle East where the Bahai religion -- founded in what is now Iran -- could have its world headquarters in peace is In Israel; in Haifa. Yes, there are ethnic and religious as well as political tensions in Israel, the Israelis have their fair share of wrongs done to others, and so forth, and Arab citizens, Ethiopian Jews and the Oriental and Russian Jews have faced social barriers or challenges, but it is grossly, inexcusably slanderous to the point of blood libel to imply that Israel is a racist settlement in a context where Zionism is equated to "Fascism," a plain euphemism for Nazism and an invidious implicit comparison to Hitler and Nazi Germany.
As a result, over the past 100 years every conceivable technique of colonialist imposition and domination has been used against the Palestinian Arabs, ranging from the utilisation of international Jewish capital to purchase land and disposes its Arabic occupiers; the imposition of economic and politically discriminatory measures; the use of organised campaigns of murder, rape and physical destruction to terrorise and intimidate; and outright warfare and physical annexation of so-called “conquered land”.
27 --> Further distortions of the actual history. The Jewish resettlement was on their historic homeland, which was in the relevant areas underpopulated and largely ruinate land, which was often sold at exorbitant prices by absentee Arab and/or Turkish land holders. Modern techniques were then used to restore it to productivity, creating the land we see today.
28 --> If you doubt this summary, here is a summary by Sir William Ramsay (a founder of the discipline of Biblical geography), c. 1902, some twenty-five years after resettlement efforts had begun but before they achieved critical momentum in the following decades:
The scenery, more especially in the central and southern regions, is . . . devoid of the rich beauty of high cultivation and productiveness. The hills as a rule are bald, bare and featureless. The terraces by which in happier times the soil was supported on the slopes have almost everywhere been destroyed, and the soil has been washed down into the hollows, where it impedes the outflow of the waters and produces marshes [NB: malarial]. Thus the land is desolate and unattractive. In general the slopes and hillsides are a wilderness of stones and rocks, where a few scanty shrubs can barely find a hold, and the glens a wilderness of marsh, with a scanty rim of cultivable land above the level of the bare rocks, just sufficient to grow food for the miserable and scanty population. [ The Education of Christ. New Canaan, CT: Keats Publishing: 1981. p. 78. Explanatory note on Malaria and italics added.]
29 --> Similarly, in the already linked historical summary, it was noted:By the late 1800’s, the geographic region of Western/Cis-Jordanian Palestine was largely ruinate land. From the 1893 Ottoman Census and Vital Cuinet’s independent 1896 Geographical work, Syrie, it also had a relatively light population: ~ 92,000 “Arabs” (including significant numbers of non-Arab Muslims and Christians[23]) in the ~ 8,000 sq. mi. areas that became modern Israel.[24] The rest of Cis-Jordanian Palestine had another 300 – 400,000 “Arabs.”
[--> NB: it is this pattern of longstanding land settlement that led to the situation where the main modern Jewish settlements were in the relatively unpopulated areas and not in the historic main heartland of Judaea and Samaria, apart from of course Jerusalem (the historic capital and holy city of Judaism for 3,000 years) and environs. At the same time, even after the recapture of their historic capital in 1967, the Israeli authorities were willing to respect the status quo on Temple Mount, where a Mosque sits on what is the traditional site of the Temple. A tradition that is amply supported by archeological evidence, including the rubble from further development of Mosques in ways that ignore archaeological concerns. The tip rubbish from these developments alone is enough to more than authenticate the historic testimony in the Bible. But, believe it or not, there has been an attempt to suggest that there is no historic connexion of Jews and Jerusalem. THAT is how poisonous the rhetoric and propaganda are.]
At this time, there were also ~ 60,000 Jews in the area West of the Jordan[25]; who had their own established communities and had recovered Hebrew as their mother-tongue.
The Zionists, with the complicity of the British and Americans, acquired their Jewish state, Israel, in 1948.
30 --> This conveniently ignores the facts of a duly debated and voted UN Mandate, based on the earlier League of Nations Mandate, as already described; which was motivated in no small part by the issues outlined above and the associated history. It also tries to present -- falsely -- the establishment of Israel as an Anglo-American Colonialist project. The Zionist movement across the Mandate period was in fact increasingly in opposition to the British holders of the League of Nationas Mandate, as a nationalist movement, not as invading colonialists. And, the American elites -- who generally drive foreign policy -- were (and to this day are) by and large rather cool to the Zionist movement. It is overwhelming popular support multiplied by the plain justice of the case on the merits and backed up by the obvious strategic interests of supporting the only stable, pro-western democratic state in a turbulent region that best explain American interests. (It is worth noting also that up to the turn of the 1980's the ideological balance of power in Israel was held by socialist movements, not by any right wing groups. It is perhaps overlooked that it is the time when Israeli politics and economic policy shifted to the centre-right in light of the dramatic difference in economic performance of a pro free enterprise policy, that the secular left's hostility to Israel seems to have been cemented. Let us never forget, too, that the Kibbutz, the foundational agricultural communal enterprises that so shaped Israel's founding era, were the only long term successful socialist experiments.)
31 --> In addition, this sort of distortion of history is sickeningly familiar, and is here joined to scapegoating of the Jews.
Ever since then, there have been five major wars fought – all of them with the ultimate aim of further expelling the Palestinian Arabs and expanding the Zionist state.
In short, the summary presented by Mr Commissiong and hosted by Barbados Today is materially false and falsely accusatory to the point of blood libel by invidious association of Jewish nationalism with Nazism. It should be corrected and apologised for. More broadly, we should beware of drawing simplistic parallels from our own situation to the much more complex Middle East situation.32 --> This -- I am sorry, this is so recklessly in disregard of duties of care to the truth and so obviously also hoping to profit by the destructively false being seen as true -- is an outright lie. (Cf. definition, here.) The war in 1947 - 49 surrounding the UN vote of partition was driven by Arab leaders who REJECTED a compromise brought forth by the UN in light of the historical rootedness of Jews in the land and the mandatory process, and openly sought to wipe out the Jews, inviting Arabs to leave the area of fighting pending the then apparently obvious defeat of the Jews. It failed, and led to twenty years of re-armament and a second major declaratively genocidal attempt in 1967, which also failed.
33 --> In 1956, in order to break the Egyptian stranglehold of the Straights of Tiran in defiance of the 1949 settlement, israel made cause with France and Britain who had disputes with Nasser over the seizure of the Suez canal. In 1957, Israel handed back the Sinai on a UN brokered deal that was supposed to prevent blocking the straights and terrorist or military attacks.
34 --> In 1967, Nasser asked the UN to leave and restored the blockade, which cut Israel's oil lifeline. This was backed by moving his air force and tank corps into the Sinai, which could easily have thrust across southern Israel cutting off Eilat, the oil port of Israel. This was an act of war in violation of armistice agreements, and was backed by open declaration of intent to drive "the Jews" into the sea. But, Israel took a major military gamble and struck first by air and with an armoured force based on largely obsolete 1940's Sherman tanks that had been reworked to take on 1950's and 60's Russian tanks. Jordan was asked to keep out, but insisted on intervening and so was also defeated. Syria, which had spent twenty years bombarding farmers in Galilee from the Golan heights (which had been handed over to Syria by the British in the 1920's) then faced an attack that captured the land used as a platform for that aggression.
35 --> In 1973, Egypt and Syria struck again, and came within an ace of wiping Israel out, especially the Syrian breakthrough in the Golan. Israel went to nuclear alert, and a behind the scenes international crisis comparable to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, played out. In the aftermath, the situation in the Golan was more or less restored to roughly the lines of 1967, and the Egyptians regained a foothold in the Sinai.
36 --> Subsequent peace efforts led to the 1977 trip to Israel by Sadat, which then led on to the 1979 peace deal and restoration of the Sinai to Egypt. For this, Sadat paid with his life at the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood now in power in Egypt. Further negotiations with Jordan led to the threshold of a compromise in 1986, which was scuppered by the Palestinian terrorists under Arafat.
37 --> This leaves off he conflicts with the Palestinians and Iranian surrogates in Southern Lebanon, but the summary of that is simple. The region -- in the context of the breakdown of Lebanon as a unified and reasonably stable state through civil war in material part provoked by the Palestinians [similar to the civil war in Jordan in 1970] -- was used as a terrorist base and so the Israelis invaded to stop it. This led to a period of Israeli occupation and to the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 to Tunisia.
38 --> In 2000 the Israelis left Lebanon, only to be presented with a debate over two small patches of land transferred to Syria in the 1920's used as the pretext for further terrorism and stockpiling of rockets intended to be used to bombard northern Israel. This is the context for the 2006 Israeli counter attack after Hezbollah attacked an Israeli patrol on the border. (And of course, at the same time, there was a similar attack on the Gaza border leading to the 2006 Israeli incursion and withdrawal.)
Failing such, we should recognise the nature of the behaviour we are seeing and take due note of and draw appropriate conclusions regarding the credibility of those who indulge in or enable such. END
