Zionists say Palestinians don't Exist. The real story: Israelis don't Exist

One of the standard retorts from hard core supporters of Israel is “Palestinians don't really exist,” or that the term Palestine is a cover up for what is a group of fungible, generic Arabs who should stop causing trouble and go live in some Arab country where they belong.

This supposedly argument-clinching line is usually delivered with a triumphant smile (or grimace). “Ha! top that, Arab-lover!” is the sub-text and quite frequently the spoken aloud text.

I'm reading and hearing this more often from champions of a greater, ethnically pure Israel. This is most likely because they know that Israel and its sponsor, the United States, are becoming increasingly isolated and criticized. To their minds this is because the preponderance of the world’s population hate Jews and want to destroy them.

It doesn’t occur to them that the frenzied escalation of violent attacks upon Palestinian villages in the West Bank by armed settlers, the routine killing of civilians by the Israeli Army on the borders of Gaza and in the West Bank and other acts of ethnic cleansing (burning Mosques, evicting Palestinians from East Jerusalem, making some speech and actions by even Jewish citizens of Israel in support of Palestinian rights illegal etc.) has come to international attention and perhaps fair-minded people don’t approve.

So it’s time to deploy the heavy artillery of polemics: the existential issue -- States of being, non-being, real being vs. fake being (I guess the Zionist argumentative class isn’t interested in nothingness, just leave that to readers of Sartre and Heidegger).

Declaring any minute criticism of the Israel state as an existential threat which will lead to the destruction of world Jewry, Zionists now have what they think is the trump ontological gambit: we can’t be persecuting and pushing out some group of people who actually do not exits!

Denying the existence, or humanity of the inhabitants of Palestine has been a cornerstone of Zionist policy since the time of Theodore Hertzl and the founding Congress of the World Zionist movement in 1897. At first the convenient fiction was that the land was uninhabited, “a land without people for a people without a land,” was the watchword coined in the early days of the coalescing of the Zionist ideology in Europe. When Max Nordeau, a close associate of Hertzl, communicated to him about his visit to Palestine, then a part of the Ottoman Empire, he was shocked and despairingly reported, “the bride is already married!” There were people living there!

But wait! That’s no real problem. The European conquerors and colonizers flooded into the Americas killing and chasing off the indigenous inhabitants without any moral misgivings. Because these alleged people were not really people like the invading Spanish, French, English, et al. They were just tribes, or wandering stone age leftovers, without civilization. This racist colonialist attitude was part and parcel of the world view of the European Zionists as well. It was the normal way of thinking of the European upper and middle class, of which the Jews who led the Zionist project were a part.

Thus the predictable reaction of the Zionist leaders was to not accept the reality that for thousands of years people known as Palestinians have lived in a geographical area that has also been known as Palestine for thousands of years. It was Palestine for the 500 years it was part of the Ottoman Empire until it’s collapse at the end of WWI and the start of the British Mandate. It was Palestine when the Roman Emperor Hadrian abolished the Roman province of Judea and declared the land to be Palestina Syriana in the 2nd Century AD. And the region was also known as Palestine for thousands of years prior to that as the area in which the Philistines lived (Jews and other peoples also lived in that area ) But forget about that. The Zionists wanted the land to colonize and were looking for sponsors, wheeling and dealing with different World powers (Hertzl sounded out the Ottomans and the Germans until his successor, Chaim Weitzman, got the backing of England). To make the case that the whole area should belong to the Jews, a new historical narrative had to be thought up and marketed worldwide. Any people called Palestinians were not part of the sales pitch. God promised the land to Moses; it was the home of all the Jews of the world and now was the time to return (this is the secular argument for those who were not big on god or religion). Any other people were just passing through, nomads, or traders Cameling through the area from one place to another…they were or are just ephemera, we are the real people here.

However nomads or passersby don’t build and live in cities and villages, cultivate crops, build schools, engage in commerce, have a literature, music, culture…or develop profound attachment to the land, their land and their ancestors land. There is a place called Egypt, so the continuous inhabitants are known as Egyptians, the same with every other country in the world. Ah, but what about those Arabs of no particular nationality? Why don’t the Arabs mistakenly living in the land of Israel (whose borders are elastic) go live with other Arabs and let us Jews have our own land?

This is a corollary argument to the “Palestinians don’t exist” thesis. These so-called Palestinians can find their own home by living with some other group of Arabs. This idea makes as much sense as telling the Bolivians that they should go live in Uruguay or Costa Rica since all these people are the same: speaking Spanish and being of the same Latin American “group.”

Lebanese, Yeminis, Saudis, Egyptians, Libyans, etc. are all Arabs, but this language and cultural group is divided into nations and a Lebanese most likely would not want to be mistaken for a Yemini, or be forced to live there. These are separate nationalities with different histories and cultures and even languages (many dialects of Arabic are radically different from each other). The Palestinians happen to be a nationality in the Middle East whose national rights were thwarted by the combination of the British and the Jewish colony that the British countenanced in the Palestinians' own home. Where Egypt, Syria, Iraq and other peoples were able to gain national independence from European colonial powers, Palestine was not able withstand the onslaught of England and the Yeshuv, the Jewish proto-state under the British Mandate from 1917 to 1948.

Presently, the number of Jews and Palestinians in the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is approximately equal. The Demographics point towards a Palestinian majority. Within this area Israeli Jews have rights and the Palestinians don't. On the West Bank they live under martial law. In Gaza they are basically imprisoned by a comprehensive blockade. Inside the borders that most of the world recognizes as the state of Israel, there are 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (equaling about a quarter of the total population) who at best live under a Jim Crow system as existed in Alabama or other southern US states before the Civil Rights movement forced its abolition.

The disparity in rights, treatment and even conceptualization of the two populations living inside the state of Israel raises the question: “What does Israeli citizenship mean?”

Israel's leaders and the world wide Zionist leadership proclaims to the skies that Israel is the “Jewish State.” Not only that, it's the homeland of all the Jews of the world, all they have to do is just show up and they're in: citizens with all the rights and benefits.

But, of course, they add, it's a Jewish and a democratic state. But Israel is an ethnocracy. By definition it is not democratic. To maintain a Jewish state for the Jews, it's necessary to discriminate against the non-Jewish population and police their numbers so that the Jewish majority can be preserved. It has to be undemocratic to survive as a Jews only state. It cannot and does not have full equality under the law for every citizen. Jewish citizens are always more equal compared to “the Arabs” who are Israeli citizens.

In terms of land ownership rights, housing rights (the Israeli courts have recently sanctioned the right of town councils to exclude non-Jewish residents), voting rights and participation in elections there is no equality. Palestinian political parties are often declared illegal, Palestinians who are elected to the Kenesset have had their membership rights suspended or have been expelled for the crime of free speech – which is always covered up as an issue of “national security.”

Across the board, Jewish rights trump any so-called “rights of a citizen of Israel.” Before the law, and in daily life, being Jewish is the standard by which citizenship rights are judged. The term “Israeli citizen” is an empty category. It doesn't apply. It isn't meaningful. The “Jewish State for all the world's Jews” is not a democracy. It is not a state for all of it's citizens or for all of it's subject people (in Gaza and the West Bank).

Apologists for Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing like to claim that Israel is a democracy like Western countries and any injustices will be solved by a impartial justice system. Many Americans wrongly believe that Israel is like the USA, a multi-ethnic society in which peoples of different races and religions demand equal treatment as their natural right. This is false, There is no such thing as an Israeli citizen with full rights – only Jews who lord it over Palestinians, both Christians and Muslims.

UNITED AGAINST CULTURAL FASCISM – A LETTER TO EVERY CULTURED PERSON IN THIS COUNTRY

If you agree with this letter, please share it with your friends...

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/united-against-cultural-fascism-a-letter-to-every-cultured-p.html

By Gilad Atzmon



There was a time when Jewish politics and culture were associated with liberalism, human rights, pluralism and freedom of expression. Those days are clearly over. Nowadays, it is pretty much the opposite.

Here in Britain, Jewish nationalist lobbies are engaged in several kinds of repressive behaviour. Their practices include: bullying and harassment, disinformation, smear campaigns.

This kind of activity does not serve the Jewish community or its interests. In fact, it gives the Jewish community, as a whole, a thoroughly bad name.

Last week, American academic Norman Finkelstein and I were on the front of the Jewish Chronicle (JC). We were presented as Public Jewish Enemies Number One. We were branded together with BNP leader and a racist Nick Griffin. This was obviously a clear outburst of Zionist hysteria.

This week, in an embarrassingly crude attempt to stop my new book The Wandering Who, the JC now appear to be launching an attack on music. Together with the Board of Deputies of British Jews and other Jewish groups they attempted to pressure the British Arts Council to withdraw its funding from a music festival I am playing at.


What we see here is scarily similar to the experience of Jazz musiciansin Germany during the Nazzi era. Astonishingly enough, it is Jewish representative bodies such as the Board of Deputies that are actively engaging in trying to restrict artistic expression. Apparently, some people out there, really drew the wrong lesson from that disturbing era.

Needless to say, they didn’t get far. The Arts Council, stood by its principles of freedom of expression and in a statement responding to the JC's demands, they suggested that The Arts Council shouldn’t "restrict an artist from expressing their views." They stated that the council believes in funding events and artists that show "a diverse view of world society”. Once again, their campaign had backfired.

Of course, the JC wasn’t at all happy. It appears to want to transform the British music scene, cultural gatherings and festivals into Stalinist enterprises and demands the right to dictate its own political agenda to the British public. The JC even went as far as to openly call for its subservient lobby-funded politicians to impose an “immediate sanction”. Reading the JC today, I wonder how long it will take before Ava Nagila becomes a compulsory part of our national musical curriculum.

This is the reality: The most radical exponents of the most vile form of Jewish racist and supremacist ideology are accusing me, an anti-racist campaigner, of being an anti-Semite. Considering that I lead one of the most ethnically varied musical ensembles on this planet - this accusation is absurd, amusing or sad and probably all three. But here’s the good news. On every possible front they are failing. No matter how much these Zionist supremacists convince themselves that I am the ultimate Jew-hater, they have failed to convince anyone else.



By bullying British cultural institutions and assaulting artists in the name of the Jewish community, Jewish organizations are achieving nothing but the defamation of the whole of British Jewry.

So, to the Jewish Chronicle and the Board of Deputies of British Jews: You are acting against openness, pluralism, freedom of expression and artistic freedom – probably the most precious values this country has. Perhaps it is worth bearing this in mind.

All the best

Gilad Atzmon

The Wandering Who-A Study of Zionist Hysteria , available on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk



http://youtu.be/sBcuVBcLXVM

The Bloom(berg) is off the Rose

The Bloom(berg) is Off the Rose

This may be belaboring the obvious, but can't everyone see that the Mayor is a piece of shit? People who have a background in leftist politics certainly know this by now. Hard core anti-capitalists saw it from the start of his first election campaign. But now his sneering dumb ass self-serving proclamations and the consequences of his police state actions make it easy to see him for what he is. But, you never know, many more “practical” sorts caught up in lesser-evilism still might not get it.

It's not just his latest crime, pushing Occupy Wall Street out of Zuchotti Park and setting his mad dog police thugs upon anyone who crosses their path, but from way back everything he's done was predictable-- allowing the cops to rampage through black and latin communities harassing, falsely arresting, and from time to time riddling innocent bystanders with bullets (and getting off), trampling on free speech and assembly rights, and of course the fundamental job of any NYC mayor, making sure Wall Street and real estate speculators get whatever they want.

The Bloombergers were relieved when Rudy Guliani was finally out as mayor. Rudy was (and remains) an embarrassing, low brow slob. Flagrantly racist, he rallied the Archie Bunkers of the outer boroughs to his side. But Bloomberg exudes class. Billionaire class. He addresses all the mundane issue of city government with an arrogant gesture of having sympathy for the peasants, or he used to.

Not so deep down, he's the same as Rudy, He just has a lot more money and better suits. How about a recall campaign?

Joseph Massad on Israel's Nukes

Nuclear Israel revisited

To have or not to have nuclear weapons is a question of human security and not European privilege.

November 10, 2011 | Joseph Massad | Al Jazeera

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - How many times must this story be retold? It is common knowledge in the United States, in Europe, in the Arab World, indeed in the entire world. The international press has been reporting on it since the late 1960s. The historical details of the story are also well known. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower gave Israel its first small nuclear reactor at Nahal Sorek; in 1964, the French built for Israel its much larger and major Dimona nuclear reactor in the Naqab (Negev) Desert; in 1965, Israel stole 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from the United States through its spies at the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation company in Pennsylvania; in 1968, Israel hijacked a Liberian ship in international waters and stole its 200-ton shipment of yellowcake. Israel has possessed nuclear bombs since the early 1970s. Despite official US denials, Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel, reportedly prepared to launch 13 nuclear bombs on Syria and Egypt in 1973 and was stopped short of committing this genocidal act when Henry Kissinger gave Israel the most massive weapons airlift in history at the time to reverse the course of the 1973 war (as Time Magazine reported the story). Israel has had an ongoing nuclear weapons collaboration with the South African Apartheid regime for decades, which only ended with the collapse of the regime in 1994.

Since then, experts have estimated that Israel has upwards of 400 nuclear devices, including thermonuclear weapons with megaton range, as well as neutron bombs, tactical nuclear weapons, and suitcase nukes. It also has the missile delivery systems to launch them with a reach of 11,500km (which can reach beyond Iran). Israel also has submarines that are capable of launching nuclear attacks as well as jet fighters that can deliver Israel’s nuclear cargo.

Israel has diligently prevented its neighbours from even acquiring nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. It violated international law by bombing the Iraqi French-built Osirak nuclear reactor still under construction in 1981 in an unprovoked raid even though the reactor was going to be used, according to the French and Iraqi governments, for peaceful scientific purposes. Israel also bombed what intelligence reports allege was a North Korean nuclear reactor under construction in Syria in 2007. Israel’s Mossad has also been linked to the assassination of numerous Egyptian, Iraqi, and Iranian nuclear scientists over the decades. Israel continues to refuse to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses to allow members of the International Atomic Energy Commission to inspect its Dimona reactor.

Israel, a predatory and aggressive country that has consistently launched wars on all its neighbours since its establishment, expelled hundreds of thousands of people, created millions of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Egyptian refugees, murdered tens of thousands of civilians and used internationally-banned weapons (from napalm to phosphorous bombs, to name the most notorious cases), continues to occupy the Palestinian territories and the Palestinian people in violation of international law, is governed by a foundational anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist state ideology to which all its leaders, governing structures, and institutions adhere, as does its popular and political culture and a variety of its laws. Indeed, Israel not only consistently launches wars against its neighbours but also urges world powers to invade these neighbours as well, and in the meanwhile sponsors anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist campaigns of hatred in the United States and across Europe in addition to integrating such racism in its school and university curricula and much of its cultural production.

Racist policies

Israel’s protector, the United States, is the only country on Earth that has ever deliberately used nuclear bombs against civilian populations and continues to defend this decision 66 years after this genocidal act, and inculcates its population, in its school curricula and in the media, to defend it. The United States has also made certain that Israel’s nuclear arsenal would not ever be discussed at the UN Security Council despite persistent proposals over the decades to discuss it. Indeed, the United States insistence on keeping Israel’s nuclear capability an open "secret" is engineered, among other things, to keep United States aid to Israel flowing, especially as a key legal condition of receiving such aid is for recipient countries to be signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Israel refuses to sign.

Yet the United States and Israel, which have been the major threats to world peace and indeed the major global warmongers since World War II, insist on telling the world that Iran, a country whose current regime never invaded any country (but was rather invaded by Saddam’s Iraq in 1981 at the behest of the dictatorial ruling Gulf oil-rich families and their US and French sponsors), is a threat to world peace were it to possess a nuclear device.

The racist policies of the United States as to who should get to possess nuclear weapons and who should not (according to racial criteria of whether they are European or of European stock or not) aside, it must be made clear that the extent to which there is a nuclear race in the Middle East, it is one fostered by Israel’s warmongering and its possession of such weapons of mass destruction. If the Middle East is to be a nuclear-free zone, then the international effort to rid it of such weapons must begin with Israel, which is the only country in the region that possesses these weapons, and not with Iran who may or may not be developing them.

The racism of the Obama administration against Arabs and Muslims clearly knows no limits, but for the people of the Middle East (Arabs, Turks, and Iranians), Obama’s racist criteria are not terribly persuasive. To have or not to have nuclear weapons is a question of human security, as far as the people of the region are concerned, and not one of European racial privilege. While the US may not fear Israeli nukes, Israel’s neighbouring countries and their civilian populations have for decades been (and continue to be) terrorised by them; and for good reason. Once Obama learns this lesson, the people of the region will reconsider US credibility about its alleged concern about nuclear proliferation.

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York.

Unholy alliance: Israel's right and Europe's anti-Semites

Published 03:06 06.11.11
Latest update 03:06 06.11.11
from Haaretz

Politicians like Le Pen have exchanged the Jewish demon-enemy for the criminal-immigrant Muslim, but they have not really discarded their ideological DNA.
By Adar Primor Tags: France Islam


Marine Le Pen hit the jackpot. She invited about 100 diplomats to a luncheon last week during a visit to UN Headquarters in New York. Four accepted: There were the envoys from Trinidad and Tobago, Armenia and Uruguay, who obviously are of no concern to her at all. But the entrance of the fourth guest, Israeli UN Ambassador Ron Prosor, made the event a sensation and worth her whole trip.

No official American representative agreed to meet with France's extreme-right leader. Neither did any leader of the Jewish community. She failed in her attempt to stage a photo op at the Holocaust Museum, and skipped the visit. The French ambassador to the UN sent a sharp message that she is persona non grata in the United Nations building. But the Israeli envoy? He shook her hand and spoke of the importance that must be accorded to a wide variety of opinions.

"We flourish on the diversity of ideas," Prosor said. "We talked about Europe, about other issues and I enjoyed the conversation very much," Prosor was quoted as saying. Even before he went into the hall where the luncheon was being held, he told shocked reporters that he was a "free man."

The Foreign Ministry now claims there was a misunderstanding; the ambassador "thought he was attending an event hosted by the French UN delegation. When he realized his error, he skipped the meal and left." User comments on leading French news websites over the weekend were derisive, including all the French equivalents of LOL and ROFL in response to the explanation.

No one believes it was a coincidence. Prosor is a proven professional. He would certainly want to forget the fact that he became the first representative of the Jewish state to meet with a leader of the National Front. He would probably be happy to smash the camera that documented the smiling encounter. But his mistake did not happen in a vacuum. It has the odor of a symptom. The odor of a very unholy alliance being formed between members of the Israeli right-wing and a number of the most nationalistic and anti-Semitic figures in Europe. Over the past year, among visitors to Israel were the populist Dutch leader Geert Wilders, the Belgian racist Filip Dewinter and the Austrian successor to Jorg Haider, Heinz-Christian Strache.

These politicians, like Le Pen, have exchanged the Jewish demon-enemy for the criminal-immigrant Muslim. But they have not really discarded their ideological DNA. The Israeli seal of approval they seek to get is intended to bring them closer to power. Le Pen herself has decided to leave behind the anti-Semitic scandals of her father, Jean-Marie. She wants to make the National Front a popular and legitimate party.

She is already popular (19 percent in the polls). Legitimate? In two interviews she gave to Haaretz in the past, she attacked President Jacques Chirac for his historic 1995 declaration in which he took, in the name of France, responsibility for Vichy war crimes. She adamantly refused to denounce French fascist crimes and showed that she cannot really disengage from her father, his heritage and her party's Vichy and anti-Semitic hard core.

It is easy to guess what would happen to an Israeli ambassador if he found himself at an event hosted by the "disgraced" Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas - or, perish the thought, at a Hamas or Hezbollah event. The earth would tremble. Even tar and feathers would not be enough under such circumstances. But Le Pen is blonde and she has blue eyes. Oh, and she hates Muslims.

Let us hope the incident at the United Nations will not give her votes that will allow her to repeat her father's sensational results in the 2002 French presidential elections, and go on to a second round in the upcoming French elections.

We must see a complete and public disavowal by Israel to prevent an ostensibly minor incident from becoming an accident of history.