Are you my terrorist, Daddy?
Who is your terrorist?
The first [wave] of conquerors killed about 80 to 100 [male] Arabs, women, and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead… One commander ordered a sapper to put two old women in a certain house… and to blow up the house with them. The sapper refused… The commander then ordered his men to put in the old women and the evil deed was done. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clean the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby. Benny Morris. Israeli historian quoting Israeli soldier.
The right to exist
You have a right to exist— but does Israel?
A better question, however, might be: is the state of Israel a fictional national state, created to fit a mythology? Is it just a group of true believers with guns, convinced of their own superiority and their right to do anything they please?
If authentic existence is difficult to confirm for individual people like you and me, it is much harder for nation states -- especially those arbitrarily created by the dispossession of one people by another – which leaves political legitimacy in question -- an open issue that refuses resolution –an open wound that refuses to heal and infects the whole body public.
Israel was created through the terrorist violence that resulted in the infamous Nakba. a word gradually becoming synonymous with Palestinian Holocaust
Terrorist violence has become a tradition as the Zionists, most of them immigrants from other countries, Germany, Russia, North Africa, the US and other places-- Jewish perhaps, but of questionable Semitic heritage, seeking to re-create the mythic Jewish Empire described in the Bible-- using—as true believers – biblical methods.
The right to kill
Here's what that proto-Zionist guy-in-the sky Yahweh prescribed:
10 When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace.
11 If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you.
12 If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city.
13 When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it.
14 As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. And you may use the plunder the Lord your God gives you from your enemies.
15 This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. (Deuteronomy)
In other words, slaves make good neighbors.
For nations nations that border Israel, but are not within the lands given to Israel by God, . Israel should offer peace-- but only through servitude and slavery. If these nations resist – all the men should be killed – in the nation, plundered. (Deuteronomy)
This is of course the strategy applied by American colonists to indigenous peoples, including Mexicans in North America. The American colonists put the Old Testament to good use to justify their greed— just as Zionists, who are mostly secular, do the Torah.
The strategy applied to create a greater Israel is as extreme today as it was in ancient times.
16 ... in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.
17 Completely destroy[a] them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you. (Yahweh again)
The face of genocide
That is genocide of course --a step beyond terrorism and something which Western countries officially recoil at, but politically accept where convenient. So, for years the West has accommodated Israel's policy of slow-motion ethnocide. Thousands of men, women and children have died. Rich people in Washington, New York, London, Berlin, wherever get to buy new condos.
Shaked has gotten attention mostly because she's cute but not the kind of attention she deserves. People chuckle and say, "she's cute, but she's an outlier" when in fact she represents the opinions of a lot of Zionists—not, of course, Jews – but Zionists—who are actually in conflict with modern Jewish humanism. She's the face of mainstream racism. Which is always helped by makeup and a good stylist.
She is also not particularly original – Golda Meir said it all before
Big lies—someone dies
As I’ve mentioned before, Israel operates under the influence of just a few very very Big Lies—about half a dozen – a convenient number for busy people.
While all nation states—just like ordinary people – have their mythologies, those counterfactual belief systems can have a useful, moral basis and be positive—or not. In some cases, as that of Zionist Israel, they are evil – certainly by the standards of all the major religions.
Zionist belief systems are ultimately little different from Nazi belief systems—which were incentivized by American Colonialist belief systems.
In each case, you have a “Chosen people”. White Christians, Aryans, Jews. Those who are not chosen are “damned”. Sorry kids – only one of you goes to heaven.
Which brings up that much abused question: does Israel have a right to exist?
Such a "right" could only be confirmed by representation of all the people who live in Palestine –not to mention those forced out during the Nakba.
If that is not the case, then Israel is not a valid national state as most people think— but the exploitative colonial state –which it now seems to be— since its existence is entirely predicated on the theft of other people's lands and resources, including human resources by means of violence and terror.
Israel is affluent— but that is only because the United States of America supports it with no conditions as it would any of its own states.
It's the 52nd state— but pampered in a way that none of the other 51 states are.
Is there a solution?
Of course, there is! And it's pretty obvious. Simple in the abstract – but difficult to realize, practically speaking.
You cannot kick out people who have settled in Israel for almost a century now. But you can compensate the dispossessed and oppressed. It is simply justice and quite do-able—with the expense yielding benefits in the long term.
The US and other countries spend enormous sums of money to support Israel financially and militarily including illegal settlements and theft of Palestinian land . That money needs to go instead to the creation of a single Palestinian state-- perhaps a federal state--as in the Russian Federation-- multiethnic and multi-confessional. People would benefit. The economy would benefit. The world would benefit.
The Russian Federation is composed of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and animists. Yet they all get along. But you cannot get mutual acceptance and tolerance without justice. Nor can you get the synergy it comes from diversity.
“We all pray for peace and hope that there will be no more wars. But peace with murderers is, by definition, impossible, every terrorist organization must be isolated and dismantled.” Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar (Russia)
While the solution to the problem is simple and fairly obvious – so is the obstacle – the existence of Israel as a terrorist apartheid state. As the Rabbi says— there can be no peace with murderers. Of course, he thinks the bad guys are the Gazans.
No peace with murderers
The existence of the Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the IDF to kill soldiers or civilians taken hostage has been spotlighted recently.
According to Israeli sources, Hamas fighters massacred 112 Israelis in the kibbutz before the Israeli military was able to respond.
However, according to Porat’s account, her Hamas captors treated her and other captives “humanely,” believing they would be allowed to retreat safely to Gaza due to the protection the Israeli captives would provide as human shields. However, when Israeli soldiers arrived, “they eliminated everyone, including the hostages. There was very, very heavy crossfire,” Porat said.
Her testimony is complimented by evidence from Israeli soldiers who described how the Israeli military shot tank shells into buildings where Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives were hiding, Mondoweiss notes, citing an 11 October report by journalist Quique Kierszenbaum in The Guardian. Jonathan Cook.
So it is that Israeli bombing has to date killed a number of Israeli hostages as well as their captors – perhaps 50 hostages in all. Some dispute the numbers; no one disputes that it has happened. The Israelis don't care. This callous policy dovetails with that the Dahiya doctrine – another institutionalized crime against humanity.
There is a pattern here. Call it "Deuteronomic".
You cannot be "neutral" in this case-- although some commentators try to be what they call "evenhanded" or "objective".
Both Scott Ritter and Larry Johnson tried to do that in articles about the bombing of the unfortunate Al Ahli hospital in Gaza-- although subsequent analyses indicate that the damage was done by Israeli bombing and not by the Palestinians themselves. Let’s say 95% probability.
Forensic Architecture, a research group based at the University of London, analysed photos of the impact crater at the scene, saying that “patterns of radial fragmentation on the southwest side of the impact crater, as well as a shallow channel leading into the crater from the northeast” indicate the projectile likely came from the northeast – “the direction of the Israeli-controlled side of the Gaza perimeter”.
Chris Cobb-Smith, an investigator and explosives expert, also agreed the evidence indicated the projectile may have come from the opposite direction claimed by the Israeli military, according Forensic Architecture.
This lined up with the conclusions of a so-called “Doppler Effect analysis” by the Earshot audio investigation group, which looked at sound waves related to distance, and found that the missile likely approached from the northeast, east, or southeast, but not from the west as Israel’s military has claimed.
You can forgive Ritter and Johnson for erring on the side of objectivity since they routinely attacked as being anti-Semitic if not anti-American.
The Israelis lie consistently and unabashedly as Chris Hedges notes. Just as with Ukrainian lies, the mass media tends to give credence to such propaganda–although remarkably, they have recently been less comfortable with the way Israel gives the finger to conventional notions of morality – which assumes an exceptionalism that only Americans think their due.
Israeli supporters thirst for these lies. They do not want to know the truth. The truth would force them to examine their racism, self-delusion and complicity in oppression, murder and genocide.
Most importantly, the Big Lie sends an ominous message to the Palestinians. The Big Lie states that Israel will wage a campaign of mass terror and genocide and never take responsibility for its crimes. The Big Lie obliterates the truth. It obliterates the dignity of human thought and human action. It obliterates facts. It obliterates history. It obliterates comprehension. It obliterates hope. It reduces all communication to the language of violence. When oppressors speak to the oppressed exclusively through indiscriminate violence, the oppressed answer through indiscriminate violence.
Both Ritter and Johnson are great are great analysts-- who you should read and support—but they tend to rely on sources within the American military and intelligence communities. They are committed to finding out the truth. But big lies do not make it easy for either of them to do their jobs.
As we saw with the Pentagon papers-- there is a lot of disagreement within the military and defense communities Ritter and Johnson are plugged into.
In any case, I'll go with Jonathan Cook, Hedges, and Alastair Crooke on Middle Eastern matters. Cook and Crooke live in the Middle East. Hedges seems to have spent half of his life there.
Let's just call a spade a spade. An illegitimate state. an illegitimate state. Terrorism, terrorism. Let's hope Israel will evolve.
Unfortunately, Israel will continue in its present form as long as the US continuesas it's neocolonial overlord.
For Israel to mend its ways, the US may first need to burn-- and hopefully rise from the ashes is something different and better.
Wagging tales
If you're getting depressed about human beings, pet your dog. You'll feel better.
Dogs don't talk but they communicate better than most human beings Dogs don't lie. Dogs are wise. And dogs can be very brave and very good – like this one that ran into a burning house to save a kitten.
When you rescue a dog – it is you who is being rescued in the end.
The Buddhist priest I wrote about last time—the one who started that temple for his dog— thought that animals were moral exemplars and spiritual beings.
I think so too.
I wish I had a dog. But my cat Ichi he thinks he's a dog so I get along.
"You cannot kick out people who have settled in Israel for almost a century now".
I don't accept that for a moment. Why on earth should criminals - or their descendants - be allowed to remain in possession of their ill-gotten gains? Ill-gotten not just by robbery or fraud, but by mass murder.
Alleged Nazis from WW2 are still being dragged in front of courts and consigned to prison for what remains of their shaky, befuddled lives. Yet even the Nazis' crimes were slightly less, in some respects, than those of Israel. The Germans sought to extend their territory, in search of "Lebensraum", but driving out or killing the people who lived to the east. But the Israelis had no original territory in Palestine! They came in from outher continents, mostly, and drove out the people who had lived there not just for "almost a century" but for many centuries.
Why is it that having lived in a given place for nearly a century, or for millennia, gives a right to remain to some people but not to others? One has to be very careful to avoid giving any particular people a special status. The Jews already do that for themselves; others should not allow themselves to be conned into falling into line.
It seems odd that after hundreds of years of white settler-colonialism and experiencing the downside of a genocide of indigenous people that the US would want to have anything to do with a similar nation state. But it does! So perhaps that explains why the US gives so much money to Israel...sort of like a parent supporting a child. Two white settler-colonizing projects that have done so much wrong in the world and support each other in their genocidal ways. Two that need to be taken out before they can do even more harm in the world. #FreePalestine !