Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The United States has had no qualms about casting its lot with the most openly and thoroughly racist regime Israel has ever produced. That fact has been obscured, or intentionally disappeared, in the fog of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The coalition of far-right Jewish supremacists, homophobes and religious extremists Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu surrounded himself with, entered office promising to be even tougher on an already beleaguered and defenseless Palestinian population.
Since taking power in December 2022, Netanyahu and his racist coalitionists have faced no meaningful opposition from the Biden-Harris administration. Israel’s 11-month siege of Gaza has, in truth, also exposed the racism of America’s political class.
President Joe Biden, by his words and deeds, has given the nod to the terrorist thugs in Tel Aviv to kill as many Arabs as the Western world will tolerate. It is difficult to comprehend Washington’s absolute indifference toward Palestinian lives through any lens other than racialism.
American support of Israeli racism was not born in October 2023 but in May 1948, when U.S. President Harry S. Truman issued a statement recognizing the new Zionist government, making the United States the first country to do so.
In that year, Israel’s founders and its U.S. enablers began the “two-state solution dance”—simply an illusion, never to be realized. Since then, Israel has used the two-state illusion to firm up its racist policies with the intent of marginalizing and finally driving out native Palestinians.
Ethnic cleansing is inherent in Israel’s national identity and underlies it today. Its founders were well aware that to create a national home for Jewish people meant the exclusion and ultimate removal of non-Jews, the indigenous Muslims and Christian Arabs of Palestine. It also meant the denial and erasure of Palestine’s 4,000-year history.
In his 2003 book, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited,” Israeli historian, Benny Morris, clearly stated Zionist intentions: “Transfer [euphemism for ethnic cleansing] was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism—because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of the Arab population….”
The supremacist world view on which the Jewish state was built and that sustains it is reflected in the statements of Israel’s leaders past and present. Zionism is replete with chauvinistic manifestations of contempt and hostility toward the indigenous Palestinian population.
In his 1896 pamphlet, “The Jewish State,” Israel’s Zionist founding father, Austro-Hungarian Theodor Herzl, wrote that he envisioned the Jewish homeland as a rampart of Europe against Asia, “an outpost of civilization against barbarism.”
In 1969, then prime minister, Golda Meir (1969-74), stated: “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out….They did not exist.” And 54 years later in March 2023, Israel’s current finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, echoed the same sentiments, saying there is no such thing as a Palestinian nation, history and no Palestinian language.
Zionism, Israel’s national ideology, underpins the country’s political ethos. In 2018, it passed the “Nation State Law” a racist statute that officially affirmed Israel as a state solely of and for the Jewish people. Superior rights and status are determined by ethno-national identity; on Jewishness defined by the state.
The similarity between Israel’s Nation State Law and the Nazi regime’s Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 is glaringly notable.
The Nuremberg laws made Jews legally different from their non-Jewish German neighbors. The Reich Citizenship Law (Nuremberg Law 1), for example, defined a citizen as a person who is “of German or related blood.” This meant that Jews, whom the Nazis defined as a separate race, could not be full citizens with political rights in the German state.
Based on the Nation State Law, citizenship is defined as exclusive to the Jews of Israel—the only members of the polity deserving of the rights and privileges of the Jewish state. The law excludes and discriminates against 2.1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, denying them the same national and collective rights. It essentially negates their existence; thereby, jeopardizing their security within the state.
The racism that afflicts both Israel and the United States has fortified their bond of oppression and militarism. America, well practiced in racial bigotry and removal of native populations, has been Israel’s natural partner.
Months of unhindered genocide in Gaza bears witness to the continuity of U.S.-Israeli hegemony begun decades ago. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood (7 October 2023) provided Israel the pretext to fully execute its long-standing plan to remove non-Jews and conquer all of Palestine.
A haunting question that weighs heavily is why another Holocaust—this one televised—has been tolerated in Gaza when the world declared after the Second World War, “Never Again?” The answer rests partly with Israel’s extensive and perpetual propaganda offensive begun in 1948, whose intensity level increases whenever Israel confronts infrequent criticism.
Tel Aviv has tactically exploited Jewish pain and Western guilt over one of history’s most defining events to obscure its racism, apartheid occupation and to render powerless challenges to and criticism of its settler-colonial project and genocide.
Claiming to speak for all Jews, Zionist propagandists have successfully made Israel fundamental to Jewish identity, especially in the United States. They have been effective in creating an emotional connection between the Holocaust and the Israeli state among diaspora Jews, as well as non-Jews. Israel has portrayed itself as the only safe place for Jews, and that only the Jewish state can protect them from another genocide. Hence, they are enticed to believe that they are duty-bound to defend it.
Israeli dogma has also made certain to connect Zionism and Judaism—nationalism with religion—making criticism almost impossible. As evidenced today, even the mildest criticism of Israel is pilloried as an attack on Jews or declared antisemitic. Tragically, the apocalypse the Netanyahu regime has created in Gaza has made Jews less secure.
It is worth noting that the European Holocaust has become deeply ingrained in the consciousness of Americans. It is widely taught in schools, countless movies and documentaries have aired, while the Holocausts of Black and American Indians in U.S. history have been marginalized.
Although Israel’s apartheid policies toward Palestinians are unquestionably racist, it has falsely propagated the idea that Palestinian resistance is rooted in hatred of Jews. That Jews and Arabs lived together fairly peacefully for centuries, before European Zionists began moving to British Mandate Palestine in the early 20th century, has been willfully left out of the Israeli narrative.
It is important to acknowledge, that the Palestinian liberation struggle has been against apartheid Zionism, not hatred of Jews. Then Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the late Yasser Arafat (1969-2004), made the goal of the Palestine national movement explicit when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly in 1974; stating: “Its target has never been the Jew, as a person, but racist Zionism and undisguised aggression.” He went on to say, “We do distinguish between Judaism and Zionism. While we maintain our opposition to the colonialist Zionist movement, we respect the Jewish faith.”
It is also significant, that in 2017, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, released its “Document of General Principles and Policies,” in which it moved away from its original 1988 charter. In addition to accepting the 1967 boundary as the basis for establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel, Hamas stated that in its struggle to liberate Palestine, the conflict was with the Zionist occupiers, not with the Jews because of their religion. They also observed that it is the Zionists who continuously identify Judaism and the Jews with Israel and its colonial project.
There were questions in December 2022 about how Biden would engage with a racist regime with elements of fascism at its core. He has answered by repeatedly stating his “ironclad commitment” to Tel Aviv.
Biden has “engaged” by transferring massive amounts of lethal firepower to Israel, over 100 weapons shipments (bombs, bunker busters, missiles, fighter jets, small arms) since October 2023, as well as vetoing three United Nations Security Council resolutions calling for a humanitarian ceasefire.
The statements that came from the Biden administration shortly after the new Israeli regime took office are revelatory. At a December 2022 conference of the political advocacy group, J Street, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that the administration would gauge Israel by its policies rather than its personalities. And it would oppose any acts that undermined prospects of a two-state solution, including “settlement” expansion, annexation of the occupied West Bank, change in the status of holy sites, evictions and incitement to violence. Israel has, however, acted against Washington’s stated concerns, with no condemnation or opposition.
Biden has yet to censure or hold Israel accountable for killing over 41,252+ and wounding 95,497 Palestinian civilians, including 16,500 women and children in Gaza and murdering 705+ Palestinians, including nearly 150 children, in the West Bank (17 September 2024).
Furthermore, the United States, in its fealty to Israel, has been willing to break its own laws. The administration, for example, is currently violating the Foreign Assistance Act, 1961; Arms Export Control Act, 1976; War Crimes Act,1996; Genocide Convention Implementation Act (Proxmire Act), 1987-88; and the Leahy Laws, 1997-98 that prohibit funds to assist military individuals or foreign security forces engaged in gross human rights violations.
Washington has also swept aside the murder of American citizens by the Israeli military. Since January 2021, Israeli soldiers have killed five Americans in the occupied West Bank:
+ In January 2022, Omar Assad, 78, was killed by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Netzah Yehuda Battalion in Ramallah.
+ In May 2022, prominent journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, was shot in the head while she was covering an Israeli military raid in the Jenin refugee camp.
+ In January 2024, Tawfiq Hafez Tawfiq Ajaq, 17, was murdered by a Jewish squatter with the help of Israeli soldiers in Al-Mazra’a Al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah.
+ In February 2024, Mohammad Ahmed Mohammad Khdour, 17, was shot in the head while driving in Biddu, a town close to Jerusalem.
+ In September 2024, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, 26, was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper while peacefully protesting in Beita, near Nablus.
+ In each case, the United States feigned “deep concern,” sanitized Israel’s violence, then did nothing. They have used insipid terms such as “not acceptable” to explain away Israel’s murders.
President Biden, for example, when asked about the latest murder of American citizen, Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, used the same “unacceptable” refrain, adding a “totally” to the passive sound bite, citing Israel’s version that her death was a tragic error and unintentional.
It is worth noting that in early September, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would be investigating the death of Israeli-American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who died while in captivity in Gaza. No such Justice Department inquiry has yet to be afforded the other Americans killed by the Israeli military.
Additionally, the U.S. government has never held Israel accountable for the murder in 2003 of American Rachel Corrie, a member of the pro-Palestinian Solidarity Movement. Twenty-three-year old Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer as she protested the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah in the Gaza Strip.
In response to Washington’s inaction, Rashida Tlaib, U.S. Representative (D-MI), aptly wrote “Dear Americans, if you are killed by the Israeli government, our country won’t care.”
The racism and fascism of Israeli society can no longer be disguised—polls show that the vast majority of Jewish Israelis either approve of their government’s razing of Gaza or want even more of it. And the willingness of America’s political class to support and tolerate Israel’s barbarity has exposed its parochialism and inhumanity.
The world cannot and should not tolerate the existence of a regime that has remorselessly violated the laws and norms of civilized society. International order, stability and humanity will die in the rubble of Gaza if there is a failure to act.
The post Palestinians in Occupied Palestine: Defying Zionism and Imperialism appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by M. Reza Behnam.
M. Reza Behnam | Radio Free (2024-09-20T05:57:16+00:00) Palestinians in Occupied Palestine: Defying Zionism and Imperialism. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2024/09/20/palestinians-in-occupied-palestine-defying-zionism-and-imperialism/
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