About Zionism

About Gaza, Cynthia McKinney and
“The Spirit of Humanity”

What happened in Gaza this year, the utter brutality and destruction visited upon an helpless imprisoned population, is only the top of the iceberg. What happened to Cynthia McKinney and the crew of the “Spirit of Humanity” has happened in some way or another to many other people from all over the world who felt compassion for the people of Palestine. Not all of them survived the encounter with the Israeli state or it´s Zionist organizations.

The first man coming from an international body, who saw the injustice being done to Palestinian people and felt moved to compassion by their suffering, was a man from Sweden, who came to Palestine in 1948.

This is the story of Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator:

When he saw the situation of the Palestinian refugees after the creation of the state of Israel Bernadotte wrote:
“I’ have made the acquaintance of a great many refugee camps; but I have never seen a more ghastly sight than that which met my eyes here, at Ramallah (a West Bank city north of Jerusalem and still the site of a refugee camp in 1995). The car was literally stormed by excited masses shouting…that they wanted food and wanted to return to their homes· There were plenty of frightening faces in that sea of suffering humanity. I remember not least a group of scabby and helpless old men with tangled beards who thrust their emaciated faces into the car and held out scraps of bread that would certainly have been considered quite uneatable by ordinary people, but was their only food. “

Bernadotte had been chosen the United Nations mediator for Palestine four months earlier in what was the U.N.’s first serious attempt at peacemaking in the post-World War II world. As a hero of the war, when his mediation efforts on behalf of the International Red Cross saved 20,000 persons, including thousands of Jews, from Nazi concentration camps, Bernadotte seemed a natural choice for the post. The terms of the mediator’s mandate were to “promote a peaceful adjustment of the future situation in Palestine” and to allow him to mediate beyond the terms of the Partition Plan.

(On) Sept. 17, 1948, … Jewish terrorists assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden as he sought to bring peace to the Middle East. His three-car convoy had been stopped at a small improvised roadblock in Jewish-controlled West Jerusalem when two gunmen began shooting out the tires of the cars and a third gunman thrust a Schmeisser automatic pistol through the open back window of Bernadotte’s Chrysler. The 54-year-old diplomat, sitting on the right in the back, was hit by six bullets and died instantly. A French officer sitting next to Bernadotte was killed accidentally.

The assassins were members of Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel—Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), better known as the Stern Gang. Its three leaders had decided a week earlier to have Bernadotte killed because they believed he was partial to the Arabs. One of those leaders was Yitzhak Shamir, who in 1983 would become prime minister of Israel.

Bernadotte was not the last international, murdered, because he had a sense of justice and compassion which put him on the side of an oppressed people.

Read here the story of Rachel Corrie and the story of Tom Hurndall.
And here is the story of Bryan Avery, who survived being shot into the face.

But the reason, why international human rights- activists and international organizations are there in Palestine in the first place, is the number of nearly indescribable crimes committed against the Palestinian people, all in the name of the Zionist ideology.

One of the first of many massacres was the one of Deir Yassin on April 9, 1948. Read the story the whole story here on “Deir Yassin Remembered”.

But Israel´s attitude towards Palestinian civilians has not changed as we can see from what happened in Gaza this year.
And this year´s attack on Gaza was not so different from earlier attacks.

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Khalid Amayreh cites Chris Hedges book “War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning“, where Hedges tells a chilling story from his trip to the Gaza Strip during the intifada, or the second Palestinian uprising, against the Israeli occupation.

Hedges watched, ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children being lured to their neighborhood’s perimeter fence by taunts from a loudspeaker on the Israeli side.
“Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!
The Israeli voice barked insults at the boys’ mothers. The boys responded by hurling their rocks at the jeep with the loudspeaker. The Israelis shot at them with M-16s fitted with silencers. Hedges found the victims in the hospital, children with their stomachs ripped out, and with gaping holes in their limbs.

Writing for “Harper’s Magazine” (see The Nation, March 11, 2002), Hedges wrote:

“Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered. Death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights in Sarajevo, but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

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Below is a list of links to articles and books, available for online reading, documenting Israel´s ruthless behavior towards the Palestinian people and it´s other neighbors.

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And on the page:
About the War against Palestine
links to video material can be found on Palestine, Zionist history and on the way the issues are presented or rather misrepresented in the mainline media.

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But first here is an analytical article about the roots of Zionism´s violent nature :

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Why violence is integral to Zionism

by M. Shahid Alam
November 4, 2007
Source

In recent times, no nationalist project has been so completely mythologized by its partisans as Zionism. In the construction of nearly all aspects of its history, the official Zionist narrative is often at variance — even complete variance — with the facts as they are known to the rest of the world: and, more recently, even as they have been documented by some Zionist historians.

Yet few Zionists would deny one central fact of their history: and that is the history of violence that has attended the insertion of Jewish colons into the Middle East. The history of the Zionist movement in Palestine — it can scarcely be disputed — has been attended by violence between the Jewish settlers and the Palestinians; it has led to unending conflicts between Arab societies and Israel; and these conflicts continue to draw western powers, especially the United States since 1945, into ever widening clashes with the Islamic world.

The history of this violence was contained in the Zionist idea itself. Violence is integral to Zionism: not incidental to it.

This violent history of Zionism had been foreseen by the early Zionists in their private musings; and certainly, the risks inherent in Zionism could scarcely remain hidden once its victims began to resist the colonization of their lands. However, the Zionists chose to shelve these concerns, convinced that the ‘natives’ lacked the will, organization and resources to derail their plans.

Thus it is that the Zionists, who engaged in voluminous and intense discussions about the nature of their movement, never developed a coherent “Arab doctrine” that would examine and appraise the unfolding Arab response to Zionism.

In part, they may have felt that this was unnecessary. After all, many of the early Zionists — according to Ahad Ha’am writing in 1891 — believed that “the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around them.” Why worry about these “savages,” when they were sure to be swept away by the inexorable advance of civilization the Jewish settlers were introducing into the region?

Other Zionists who took note of the incipient Arab resistance nevertheless chose to dismiss their concerns with wishful thinking. Once the Palestinians would begin to reap the benefits of Jewish colonization –– in rising land prices and new employment opportunities — they would welcome the settlers with open arms.

In the Zionist worldview, the Palestinians were not a people; they had no national identity, no national aspirations.

In any case, it would have been impolitic for the early Zionists to air their concerns in public. In the face of open discussions about the violent consequences of Jewish colonization, and the resistance this was certain to evoke among Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, the meager support that Zionism enjoyed among Jews would quickly have dried up. At this stage, Zionism could not have survived sober consideration of its long-term, violent consequences.

Despite the absence of a public debate, these concerns could not have been limited to the Zionist leadership. How else can we explain — despite the putative Jewish yearning for Zion — that only a trickle of Jews had heeded the call to colonize Palestine in the years before the rise of Nazi Germany? Weren’t they afraid that they might be walking into a trap?

The Zionists also made an effort to overcome Palestinian resistance by invoking pan-Arab nationalism. In return for help from Jews, who would advocate their cause in the councils of great powers, the Arab nationalists could be persuaded to sacrifice Palestine for a higher objective, the creation of an Arab kingdom stretching from Morocco to Iraq.

The historic centers of Arab civilization — so the Zionists argued — lay in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, not in Jerusalem. Why would the Arabs grudge the loss of Jerusalem if this would help them realize their dream of restoring the ancient Arab empire? The Zionists met with some initial success in these efforts. In 1919, at the Conference of Versailles Chaim Weizmann persuaded Emir Faisal, a leader of what is known as the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, to cede Palestine to the Zionists.

When he confronted Arab anger at this surrender of Islamic lands, the Emir inserted a clause making his contract with the Zionists conditional on the creation of the Arab kingdom that he and his family sought. This conditional agreement too was short-lived. Under Arab nationalist pressure, the Emir was forced to repudiate his deal with the Zionists.

The Zionists could not long maintain their fiction about somehow creating a Jewish state in Palestine without violence; the challenge came from the right wing of the Zionist movement. In an essay that laid the foundations of Revisionist Zionism in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky punctured the fiction that the Palestinians would voluntarily surrender their historical rights to their country. He wrote that the Arabs would “resist alien settlers as long as … they possess a gleam of hope that they can prevent ‘Palestine’ from becoming the Land of Israel.”

Jabotinsky argued that a change in the stated Zionist strategy was imperative: in order to succeed, the Zionists would have to extinguish the Arabs’ “gleam of hope.”

If the Arabs were not going to sell their lands and move out, they would have to be defeated and driven out. Settlement would proceed, in the words of Jabotinsky, “under the protection of force that is not dependant on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.”

Jabotinsky had forced into the open what was always implicit in the Zionist idea — and, indeed, in the thinking of the Zionist leadership. Despite appearances, they had always known what Jabotinsky now challenged them to acknowledge openly.

The use of violence was not the Zionist fallback plan: privately, the Zionists knew that this was the only plan that had a chance of succeeding. Covertly and openly, with or without British support, they had always prepared for a showdown against the Arabs; and they had prepared well.

When the showdown came in 1948, the Zionists achieved their goals almost in their entirety: they defeated five Arab armies to create a Jewish state in 78 per cent of Palestine nearly cleansed of its Arab population. Eight years later, in alliance with Britain and France, in a lightning strike, Israel occupied all of Egyptian Sinai.

And less than twenty years after its creation, in the June war of 1967, Israel went on to inflict a crushing defeat on three Arab armies, occupied the rest of Palestine, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights — and, in the process, quadrupled its territories. Most importantly, however, they had dealt a stinging blow to the power of Arab nationalism, a humiliation from which it would not recover.

Yet, despite these dramatic successes, Israel has failed to attain normality — or, more likely, its interests are not served by normality. Many Israelis now openly acknowledge that something has gone awry.

Despite two massive rounds of ethnic cleansings in 1948 and 1967; despite repeated military victories over Arabs; despite a ten-fold increase in its Jewish population; despite unlimited U.S. support; despite its deepening strangulation of Palestinians; despite the largest economic and military transfer from one country to another in history; despite one of the most powerful armies in the world; despite the sustained support of a Jewish diaspora, more powerful and better organized than ever before; and despite the readiness of all Arab states to recognize Israel, the Zionist project has not come to rest.

Israel has yet to break away from its dependence on western powers; it has not succeeded in extinguishing the Palestinians’ “gleam of hope;” and Israelis are far from being assured of a secure future.

Why have Israel’s triumphs — and no one would question the magnitude of these achievements — failed even to secure confidence in its survival?

Nearly six decades after its creation — six decades of impressive military, territorial, demographic and economic gains — Israel is still working to destroy its neighborhood, out of insecurity and to remove the last pockets of resistance to its hegemony.

After defeating nearly all its Arab adversaries, after successfully urging the United States to occupy Iraq, after devastating Lebanon in a new war in the summer of 2006, Israel is once again urging the United States to unleash its war machine against Iran.

Despite the “iron wall” that Israel erected against Palestinians in 1948, despite the wall of apartheid it has built in the past few years, the Palestinians have not disappeared. Indeed, the Israelis continue their policy of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in slow motion, all the while preparing to launch a final round of ethnic cleansing to finish the job they had begun in 1948. Israel is now seen as one of the leading threats to world peace. What is worse, Israelis are increasingly seen in nearly every country barring the United States as oppressors, as racists, the inheritors of South Africa’s apartheid.

Is it the case — as Hugo Bergmann, a young Jewish philosopher from Prague had feared in 1919 — that Palestine had become a Jewish state but only by betraying Jewish ideals?

In short, the creation of Israel has not solved the ‘Jewish question;’ it has changed its locale, its form and name. The Europeans had long wrestled with what they called the ‘Jewish question.’ Israel has transformed the ‘Jewish question’ into the ‘Zionist question’: and made it global.

Anxiously, the world now waits for the Zionist creation — Israel — to make its next significant move.

Anxiously, the world hopes that this next significant move will be historic and not destructive: that it will secure the rights of Palestinians, all Palestinians; that it will redress the wrongs done to Palestinians, all Palestinians, in the same way that Jews still demand redress for the wrongs done to them by the Nazis.

Yet, there is little reason for optimism. Israel cannot render justice to the Palestinians without abolishing its exclusively Jewish character, without dismantling the apartheid that grinds the Palestinians.

No colonialism yet has restrained itself because the colonial masters had acquired a conscience. It was force that stopped them: countervailing force, with or without violence.

The challenge before the western world, before the Americans especially, is to develop the countervailing force that can compel a solution without violence.

If the West — if the Americans — fail here, if they fail to nurture this countervailing force: they only leave the room wide open to violent solutions.

The writer is professor of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of “Challenging the New Orientalism” (2007).

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Another article by M. SHAHID ALAM, about the early years of Israel and the criminal behavior of Israel´s army and cold-bloodiedness of it´s leadership then, is titled:
Voiding the Palestinians – An Allegory

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More articles and online book-resources on Palestine and Zionism´s history

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HERZL ZIONISM (1895-1905)
The Voice of Palestine, a Palestinian Information Center, analyzes the
work of Theodor Herzl, who is officially seen as the founder of the Zionist movement, (although some suggest,that the movement to physically separate Jewish people from non-Jews to prevent the “danger of assimilation”, was well on it´s way before Herzl´s involvement.)

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“The Mentor Who Shaped Begin’s Thinking: Jabotinsky”
Mark Bruzonsky explains, the fascist ideology of one of Zionism´s early strategists and how it shaped the world-view of the Israeli Prime minister Begin:

Ze’ev Vladimir (a) towering figure who broke with mainstream Zionism in the 1920s, Jabotinsky founded a movement called Revisionist Zionism and always insisted on total, unquestioning devotion to “the only and single idea of establishing a Jewish state” with “a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.”)

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51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis
Lenni Brenner presents undeniable documentary evidence about the collusion of Zionist leaders with the German Nazi-regime.

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The Brutal Zionist Role in the Holocaust
From the website “True Torah Jews Against Zionism”  – While some Zionists cooperated and even supported the Nazis, others refused to help poor or elderly not-useful European Jews to leave Nazi occupied territories. They  even refused to send monetary aid to the suffering Jews of Europe. The elderly Jews weren´t wanted in Palestine, but they weren´t allowed to leave for other places either. The Zionists had a different purpose for them:

I was asked: “Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?” I replied, “No.” … From the depths of the tragedy I want to save … young people [for Palestine]. The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They are dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world … Only the branch of the young shall survive. They have to accept it.
Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel

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Oral History Interview with Edwin M. Wright
(from the Truman Library:
Wright describes the pressure, that was put on those who worked in State Department shortly before and after founding of the state of Israel by American Zionist power-brokers. Especially remarkable is their audacity and arrogance. Any attempt by a state-department employee to show a minimally balanced approach between Zionist positions and those of their Middle-Eastern neighbours ended with him being “purged” from the department.)

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Video-Documentary:
“The Israel lobby – The influence of AIPAC on US Foreign Policy’”
The video describes a similar pressure being put on the whole of the American Congress by the “Lobby” starting with Israel´s 1967 war until today.

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ISRAEL’S ANTI-SEMITISM POLICY
Harun Yahya describes in the 4.chapter of his book on Zionist history the immigration policy practiced by Israeli Zionism against the Jewish diaspora. Jewish people around the world were threatened and tricked -often by false flag terrorism- to immigrate into Israel. Ethiopian Jews even were bought from their home government and send to Israel by planes with identification numbers written on their foreheads.

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The Hidden History of Zionism
A book written in 1988 by Ralph Schoenmann, human rights activist and host of the “Taking Aim” radio-show. Schoenmann deals with the overall history of Zionism, but especially with Israel´s involvement in destablizing Lebanon, where Schoenmann became witness to the Israeli instigated massacres of Sabra and Shatila.

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ISRAEL’S SACRED TERRORISM
written by Livia Rokach, is a study based on Moshe Sharett’s, second prime minister of Israel, personal diary, and other documents. In the 1980s, Livia Rokach,daughter of Israel Rokach, Minister of the Interior in the government of Moshe Sharett, was found dead in a Rome hotel room.
This online publication is dedicated
To all the Palestinian victims of Israel’s unholy terrorism, whose sacrifice, suffering and ongoing struggle will yet prove to be the pangs of the rebirth of Palestine..

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The Zionist Plan for the Middle East
Translated and edited by Israel Shahak, the late Israeli human rights activist, scholar and political author. Shahak writes a detailed commentary on a strategy paper written in the beginning of the 1980s by Oded Yinon
“A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties”
Yinon, a well connected insider, makes suggestions on how best to “balcanise” the Middle East along ethnic and sectarian lines, starting with the dismantling of Iraq.

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A Clean Break:A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
A strategy paper written by a group of American neocons in 1996, basically repeating the same strategy suggestions as Yinon.The authors are the very the same people who, after 9/11, through the near-autonomous “Office of Special Plans” within the CIA became the main planners for the American invasion into Iraq. The group was led by the often called “Prince of Darkness”, Richard Perle.

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Hasbara, Shmuel Rosner and the Israel Factor
Laura Knight-Jadczyk analyzes the Hasbara-handbook, a manuel designed to train Jewish people outside Israel in rhetoric tricks and propaganda-tools for the benefit of Israel.

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• About the War against Palestine