(Originally posted on 09 June, 2011)
By Jay Janson
Israel is in bed with a US business elite that once heavily invested in Hitler, was itself anti-semitic in outlook, and coldly indifferent and even complicit during the Holocaust its investments made possible. A popular quip in Yiddish goes, “with such friends, who needs enemies?” Arabs saved Jews from Christian persecutions in 637, 1187, 1492. Now Christians are persecuting Arabs. Needed! Jewish-Arab Semitic solidarity. With the world evolving and changing, how long will Israel remain merely a U.S. outpost in the Middle East and servant of America’s business run foreign policy of world hegemony in disregard of its own safety and that of everyone else.
Part 2: DISTORTION
Right-wing activist Baruch Marzel dances with Jewish men during the annual parade marking the Jewish holiday of Purim in the divided West Bank town of Hebron on March 5, 2015. Zionists, a form of Jewish chauvinism, refuse to consider themselves semites, as the Arabs, yet they are. Christian zionists have now embraced the same convenient lie. (Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]onfucius, was once asked, "What one thing, if it could be accomplished, would benefit society most?" The sage is said to have answered, "The rectification of names." ("Calling things what they really are.').
Now that there is so much hate and fear of Muslims and attacks on Islam in the Christian world, why not embrace the term 'anti-Semitism' in its clear, complete and useful meaning, rather than exclusively for hate and fear of Jews and attacks on Judaism. Such an corrected understanding and correct use of the word, "anti-Semitism' would put Jews and Muslims together in the same boat, both experiencing Christian racism and imperialism.
Yours truly believes another expression has come to need clarification: Years ago, before money became so important a consideration in career choice, we would often hear of people being "called' to a profession and dedication, to have felt "chosen' by God or destiny to be a musician, doctor, engineer, etc. When we heard that Jews thought of themselves as a 'Chosen people,' it sounded impressive, self-confident in dedication to be good, do good things, build hospitals, make discoveries to benefit everyone, play and write masterpieces in music, literature, the graphic and performing arts for all society to enjoy. "Chosen people' never sounded like "Master race' which brings to mind arrogance, contemptuous superiority, apartheid and brutality. "Chosen people' reminds one of the amazingly great number of revered and beloved inspiring heroes of great accomplishment for all Mankind throughout history, wise world citizens and Jewish.
Then there is that biblical excuse for oppression, 'God gave us the Land,' that needs rectification. It correlates somewhat with that "Lebensraum" excuse of another superiorly armed people who once caused Jews (among other peoples) untold suffering.
"God gave the land' in primitive times under primitive conditions and circumstances and the Jews took this same land from others and left no one alive in Jericho. Would God want the land retaken three thousand years later in the age of instant communication and abundance? Surely, a good amount of sacred ancient places could be purchased or designated UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
In the space age, one need not own the land to enjoy it with others. Territorial imperative would seem to be a throw back to less learned times.
In the 1930s, fellow Europeans expelled the Jews from their homes. In the new millennium, a fellow Semitic people continue to expel Arabs from their homes. What a bizarre twist of fate.
Also, that concocted phrase used by imperialists to divide and conquer, "these two peoples just can't get along" needs to be debunked. Palestinian Arabs look up over the wall at their keepers and try to remember how it was to be free, come and go as one pleased. Israelis look down on the Palestinians and remember how it was like being walled in, despised, dispossessed, exiled, poor, hungry and threatened, and they say to themselves "never again." Desperation on both sides.
The ugly wall of the Warsaw ghetto. ow it is the former victims who impose a brutal containment wall, while applying gradual extermination.
Upon detailed investigation, this desperation is for someone else's benefit. Outside forces, have been inciting misunderstanding suspicion, enmity, fear, confrontation, violence and war between these two ancient peoples since before the end of WW II. First, the non-socialist Greater Israel Zionists made life difficult for the Zionist majority and the indigenous Jews of Palestine, convincing, frightened and provoking Jews and Arabs into unbridgeable mistrust. Partition did the trick of creating a war which U.S. policies have sought stoke violence and keep war smoldering until now. And always with the cover story "these people just cannot get along with each other."
How many dozen civil wars in the third world has the U.S. empire been purposefully involved in between the Korean and today's Libyan, its corporate mass media building support for intervention with the most preposterous of lies, disinformation and half-truths? No, if not for the intentions of dominating outside investment interests, Arabs and Jews and all the other peoples could "get along fine."
In our time, Confucius would have suggested 'terror' is a word that if rectified, would be of great benefit to society.
Warsaw ghetto uprising (1943). Desperate Jews rose in a heroic attempt to break through or die trying. Isn't that what Palestinians are doing today?
Those who fire rockets targeting randomly at whomsoever, or suicide themselves in in order to take "enemy,' civilian if not military, along, are certainly intending to terrorize a whole population including the innocent children of the enemy. What drives this calculated insanity?
The answer is an initial insanity! The insanity of being willing to kill anyone in the area of one's target. Collateral death over and over again is no longer accidental. It becomes intentional collateral killing. It is also random in nature. One may take care to "kill as few (collaterally) as possible', as opposed to the "as many as possible' of your enemy, but it is still terrorizing a whole population.
If over years, nine or ten times more people are killed collaterally than the other side kills intentionally, confusion arises over which is the greater crime, especially if those resorting to killing intentionally have not the weapons to kill collaterally, nor are able to defend themselves from the enemy that does have them and is using them.
Getting terror and counter terror understood will go a long way toward stopping the killing of each other's children, whether with warplanes accidentally in great numbers, or intentionally by random rockets or by making oneself into a human bomb to explode in suicidal retaliation.
In a hopefully not to distant future the two populations of Palestine will again recognize and appreciate each other's uniqueness, nobility and charm, as these two kindred peoples, did over centuries living next to each other as neighbors in their Middle East.
Now the sides are unevenly matched, with the European settlers far and away on top in every way, but there were centuries when Arabs were the technologically, militarily and culturally advanced civilization doing the conquering. Arabs introduced, to a Europe in the dark ages, the classical literature and philosophy of its Greek provinces that would spark Europe's Renaissance. Couldn't first world Jews in Israel be leading a Middle East Renaissance of technology?
Since there were those times during the Christian persecution of Jews when Arabs came their rescue, now when the Jews are now the stronger, might it not be a propitious moment for some pay back. To Use that power the U.S. gave Israel to do good things for the Palestinians. Share with them Israel's greatness. Allow them to prosper, allow them to be happy. Use the billions of dollars for weapons to pay well any Palestinian who will accept selling his land, and begin to give back the land to those who fled in terror in "47, or make restitution to their families.
.
Were Israel truly free, it would do this, in the long run, for its own benefit as well. Some of us have faith that Israel will someday be free, free from being forced to serve a global financial-military conspiracy that threatens all of us with privation and wars.
Having reviewed some truths that have been so fastidiously swept under the rug and forgotten or made inconvenient to remember, we turn, for happier thoughts in closing, to what well might have been, and finally, to what must eventually come to be, if the ever accumulating injustice, violence, hatred and homicide is to cease.
Part 3: IMAGINING
[dropcap]L[/dropcap]et us seriously imagine that instead of the partition, which barely won UN approval, a plan that called for a single democratic state had won UN enactment.
The UN never reached a unanimous conclusion for partition. A strong minority had felt that nothing in the terms of the postwar treaties and the mandate precluded the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish state denominated along the lines of a 'domestic dependent nation. [11]
The dilettante and anodyne statesman A. Balfour ended up inscribing his name in history, almost accidentally.
Also, the wording in Balfour's 1917 letter, "His Majesty's government" views with favor a national home for the Jewish people," brought forth "The conclusion seems to be inescapable that the vagueness in the wording of both instruments was intentional. The term "National Home" was employed, not "State" or "Commonwealth." [12]
"There were, as well, important preliminary legal questions regarding the competence of the United Nations or its members to enforce a solution against the wishes of the majority of the existing population." The Colombian delegate had led this argument.[12]
Why was Balfour letter to Zionist organizations interpreted perforce to mean a completely separate state? Swiss Germans and Swiss French both have a home state within a larger single state. Not all that complicated, and eminently peaceful.
There could have been no bloodshed at all. If the U.S. and the hard line Zionist lobby had failed to push and pressure through partition, the British Mandate Government would not have fled irresponsibly in cowardly complicity, before the fully expected outbreak of bloody violence. Britain had announced it would accept the partition plan, but refused to enforce it, arguing it was not acceptable to both sides! [13 ]
A UN transition trusteeship would have to the establishment of a single democratic state, not frenetically in haste, but with calm deliberation in which all parties would have had participation. Menachem Begin's faction would of have held fast to the goal for somehow eventually arranging a separate Jewish political entity, but the stronger socialist faction Zionists, with its strong vibrant pioneering spirit among the Kibbutzim etc., would have worked to make a Jewish homeland within a new state of Israel-Palestine (Arabs going along with Israel-Palestine rather than Palestine-Israel out of respect for the ancient Kingdom of David and Solomon of the Bible described with reverence in the Qu'ran antedating Arab ancestors' arrival in the 7th century)
The partition plan made provision for a continuing influx of Jewish settlers. The UN interim authority would have surely also done so. As the constitution of the state was being planned, Arab opposition to substantial Jewish immigration would have been overcome by compensating factors of new wealth and investments coming in from abroad in support of Palestine Jewry building a better country for everyone.
Jews would have had the access to the entire Mandate of Palestine that militant Biblical devotees now seek encroaching kilometer by kilometer on what islands of land is presently left for the Arabs to call home - a blockaded and occupied home, at that.
In this kind of imagined format, how easy it might have been for Yehudi Menuhin's "only possible solution" to have developed , namely, the kind of federated republic that is French-German Switzerland (the Italian part comparable to Druze and Bedouin autonomous areas).
Given the strong tradition of Jewish cohesion and unity for maintaining customs and Jewish uniqueness, a single undivided Democratic Israel-Palestine eventually might have morphed peacefully and carefully negotiated into two such federated states within one united republic. This would have been extremely logical and entirely possible.
'Have your cake and eat it 'two.' ' One state solution and two state solution at the same time. Neither of them phony, like the present Swiss cheese mapped, unsustainable Arab state proposed that no one really wants, nor the now unrealistic, for being 63 years late, single democratic state proposal that Arabs, Ahmadinejad and moral Orthodox sects like Neturei Karta call for - unacceptable for most all Israelis and unthinkable for its politicians.
On the other hand, with all the intellectual prowess that immigrating Jews were bringing as engineers, doctors, scientists and workers knowledgeable in advanced technology, and the international financial connections available to their leaders, both sides might have opted to stay mixed, legislating a great degree of regard for cultural, religious and distinctions that would see Jews sharing results with Arabs in a Israel-Palestine smack in a sea of Arab nations accepting a Jewish lead in the affairs of this one unique mixed Jewish-Arab state.
Instead of deepening animosity and hatred born in fear and violence, there could have been lots of trade offs - a huge market for a Jewish managed small powerhouse state in a greater Arabian community of nations enjoying the benefits of economic development spreading from a modern ethnically blended state within it, quickly sprung up their Middle East so long held down by colonialism and neocolonialism.
Arabs stopped the Christian persecution of Jews twice, now Jews would have been helping liberate Arabs from Christian exploitation while building a Jewish home in Israel-Palestine.
What is the point of bringing up all this largely blacked out history now? Well, if all the early support for Hitler and shutting the door on Jewish escape was just appropriate to business profit margins, then might we not assume the subsequent assuaging of conscience for feeling responsibility for the plight of Holocaust survivors, and arranging a war for the founding of Israel and defending Israel's every policy ever since, must have been just appropriate to business profit margins as well. In both cases, that of fomenting war in Europe and that of fomenting war in Palestine, the arms manufacturing industry reaped and is reaping an unsurpassed level of profits.
reconstruction flourished.
If 'good for business' always means persecution and war, maybe this thieving and chaotic rule by the wealthy we allow to be explained away as a rational economic 'system' (Capitalism) - now a globalized 'system' - needs to be thoroughly investigated and substituted by something more rational, sane, humane, peaceful, appropriate to life on earth, and less violent, destructive and murderous.
With the world evolving and changing, how long will Israel remain merely a U.S. outpost in the Middle East and servant of America's business run foreign policy of world hegemony in disregard of its own safety and that of everyone else?
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FOOTNOTES to Parts Two and Three
[11]
AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION, REPORT OF SUB-COMMITTEE
[12]
The 1917 letter from Britain's Foreign Secretary Balfour to Baron Rothschild for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. in 1917 read, "His Majesty's government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours 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. The AD HOC COMMITTEE ON THE PALESTINIAN QUESTION, REPORT OF SUB-COMMITTEE had noted that the term "National Home" was employed, not "State" or "Commonwealth."
There were also suggestions that the Mandate should have been placed under the UN trusteeship program in accordance with the guiding principles contained in Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 of the UN Charter. All members were required to recognize the 'fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion' when dealing with non-self governing peoples. The Colombian resolution requesting an advisory opinion was defeated. Four days later, the plan of partition was approved with the provision that it be imposed by force [United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 November 29, 1947]
Yet the Palestine Mandate contained dispositive clauses that required the establishment of a perpetual system of safeguards for the religious rights and immunities which had been under international guarantee during the mandate period. Those provisions would become operative in the event that a decision was taken to terminate the mandate.[Article 28 of the Palestine Mandate]
The notion that a letter expression a view of His Majesty's government of Britain in 1917 should have been binding upon the UN in 1947 was disparaged. [UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON PALESTINE REPORT TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, A/364, 3 September 1947, II. THE ELEMENTS OF THE CONFLICT , para. 141]
[13]
Britain announced that it would accept the partition plan, but refused to enforce it, arguing it was not acceptable to both sides. In September 1947, before any plan for a smooth transition of power had been formed, the British government unilaterally announced that the Mandate for Palestine would end on May 14, 1948.. [Brooks, Stefan (2008). "Palestine, British Mandate for". In Tucker, Spencer C.. The Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. ]
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