XPost: talk.politics.mideast, talk.politics.usa, soc.culture.israel   
   From: al92653@xyz.com   
      
   Zionism for Dummies   
   by William James Martin / September 11th, 2009   
      
   In pondering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I have found that very few   
   people actually have a basic understanding of the conflict nor could they   
   define it in even rough approximating terms.   
      
   Thus one sometimes hears that it is all about Arab/Palestinian 'terrorism'   
   and suicide bombings and the ultimate goal of the terrorists-Palestinians is   
   to 'push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive" and that their motives   
   are those of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Those who hold this view see   
   the conflict as one of the survival of the Jewish state amid a sea of   
   irrational hatred.   
      
   That is the view of the Zionists, and the one they would like for the world   
   to accept.   
      
   One also hears that the conflict is a religious one between Jews and Arabs   
   and that it has been continuous for 'thousands of years'.   
      
   Neither is correct.   
      
   The first Palestinian suicide bombing occurred in 1994, 40 days after the   
   massacre by the Brooklyn native Baruch Goldstein of 29 praying Muslims at   
   the Al Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron. The '67 War and the Israeli occupation of   
   the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip was 25 years old at that   
   time. Thus an entire generation of Palestinians had grown to maturity   
   knowing nothing but occupation before the first suicide bomber struck.   
      
   The phrase, "push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive", can be traced   
   to a 1961 speech to the Knesset delivered by Prime Minister David Ben   
   Gurion. This apparently was the first use of this phrase by a significant   
   political personality, and thus, for all intents and purposes, the phrase   
   has a Jewish and not an Arab origin. The propagation of this emotional   
   phrase throughout the Israeli-Palestinian debate has its source the Israeli   
   Prime Minister himself. (See "Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?")   
      
   The view that the conflict is religious and that it has been ongoing for   
   thousands of years is inaccurate. For approximately 2000 years Jews and   
   Arabs enjoyed a harmonious relation, and for four hundred years up until   
   World War I, as citizens of the Ottoman empire with equal rights. Indeed,   
   Jews enjoyed high government position within the Ottoman Empire.   
      
   Change occurred in 1896 with the publication of Theodore Herzl's book, The   
   Jewish State, in which Herzl propounded the idea of inevitability,   
   immutability, permanence, and omnipresence of anti-Semitism and argued that   
   the only solution was a separate state for Jews.   
      
   Herzl's understanding of the inevitability of anti-Semitism was possibly   
   self fulfilling, for rather that opposing anti-Semitism in the first half of   
   the 20th century, the Zionists found common cause with Hitler, Eichmann and   
   the Nazis and used anti-Semitism and Nazism as a means of achieving their   
   end which was the establishment of a Jewish state. The two reactionary   
   movements shared the view that German Jews were living there as a 'foreign   
   race' and that the racial divide was essential to maintain. (Historian Lenny   
   Brenner has written three excellent books on the Zionists-Nazi   
   collaboration.) The Zionist's use of Nazism involved, among other things,   
   the blocking of avenues of escape to other countries of Europe's Jews and   
   diverting them to Palestine, even as the death trains began to roll in   
   Europe. The rise of Nazism and Hitler to power was never, or almost never,   
   opposed by the Zionist prior to the establishment of Israel.   
      
   History might have been very different had the Zionists component of Jewry   
   opposed Nazism and there might never have been a Holocaust. And there might   
   never have been a state of Israel, as many of the Zionists well understood.   
      
   Lenni Brenner puts it:   
      
     . of all of the active Jewish opponents of the boycott idea [of Nazi   
   Germany], the most important was the world Zionists Organization (WZO). It   
   not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new   
   customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers.   
      
     The WZO saw Hitler's victory in much the same way as its German affiliate,   
   the ZVfD [the German Zionist Organization]: not primarily as a defeat for   
   all Jewry, but as positive proof of the bankruptcy of assimilation and   
   liberalism. (Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators)   
      
   Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, as well as with the Fascists and   
   Mussolini is a deep and extensive topic and must be abandoned here.   
      
   Though a region of Argentina as well as Ethiopia were considered by Herzl,   
   Palestine was the site for which there was the greatest consensus.   
      
   Of the indigenous Palestinians, of which there were about a million at the   
   time living in Palestine, he said: "[We shall] spirit the penniless   
   population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of   
   expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and   
   circumspectly."   
      
   Thus the concept of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionism was   
   introduced.   
      
   It is not rocket science. If you want to create a state exclusively of   
   European Jews in the heart of the Middle East, you must first get rid of the   
   Arabs.   
      
   Herzl went on the found the World Zionists Organization, whose intent was to   
   establish a Jewish state in Palestine and to make itself into   
   proto-government from which the actual state government would seamlessly   
   emerge upon the establishment of the Jewish state.   
      
   Though the world seems not to understand the intent of the Zionist program,   
   there was no misunderstanding among the Zionists themselves.   
      
   In his 1923 book, The Iron Wall, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder to the   
   "Revisionists" wing of Zionism, wrote   
      
     There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between the Arabs,   
   not now and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the   
   exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete   
   impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of   
   Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a   
   country with a Jewish majority.   
      
     Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they   
   will be the complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new   
   master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us   
   that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden   
   formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the   
   Palestinian Arabs.   
      
     The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark   
   of hope.   
      
     It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization.   
   Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by   
   every Jew and every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the   
   nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)