Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 6, 2024
Mahmoud Mushtaha
Palestinian gather as humanitarian aid arrives on Al-Rashid Street, northern Gaza Strip, February 28, 2024. (Omar El Qattaa)Palestinian gather as humanitarian aid arrives on Al-Rashid Street, northern Gaza Strip, February 28, 2024. (Omar El Qattaa)
Palestinian eyewitnesses say troops shot directly at a starving crowd trying to get flour for their families, killing and wounding many in the mayhem.
In the early hours of Feb. 29, more than 110 Palestinians were killed and several hundred wounded in northern Gaza when a convoy of trucks carrying humanitarian aid reached Gaza City, where a starving crowd had amassed near the coast. Israel immediately denied responsibility for the casualties, releasing edited drone footage purporting to show that its forces “didn’t open fire on those seeking aid” and shot only at “several individuals” who “posed a threat”; instead, Israel accused the Palestinians of “trampling other Gazans to death.” However, testimonies gathered by +972 Magazine from Palestinians who survived what they are calling the “starvation massacre” describe Israeli forces opening fire indiscriminately on the crowd.
On the evening of Feb. 28, tens of thousands of the Palestinians who remain in northern Gaza — who number approximately 300,000 and are beginning to starve to death as a result of Israel’s intensified siege since October 7 and the severe lack of aid reaching the north — started amassing along Al-Rashid Street, west of Gaza City. At around 9 p.m., according to eyewitnesses, Israeli forces conducted a sweep of high-rise blocks still standing in the area. Tanks fired shells at some of the buildings, while soldiers fired their guns into the air to frighten the crowd.
“At that point, my uncle wanted to go home, saying it was too dangerous,” Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi, 22, who was waiting on Al-Rashid Street with his uncle Abbas and 15-year-old cousin Moatasem told +972. “But people reassured us that the army conducts these sweeps just to intimidate us, and they won’t directly harm us. There was a sense of hope and even joy that we would get flour to take back to our families.”
The convoy of aid trucks eventually arrived at around 4.45 a.m., before sunrise, and was immediately swarmed by the crowd. “I couldn’t see the truck; I just saw its lights, and people rushing toward it,” Al-Fayoumi continued. “Suddenly, intense gunfire erupted from the Israeli tanks. I got separated from my uncle and cousin. I didn’t know what was happening; I just wanted to survive and escape. Everyone was screaming and fleeing. There were bodies on the ground, and wounded people crying for help.”
Al-Fayoumi looked around desperately until 9 a.m., but couldn’t find Abbas or Moatasem. He returned to where his family was staying to check if the pair had made it back, but they hadn’t. He decided to go to Al-Shifa Hospital with his uncle’s wife, where many of the dead and wounded had been brought by donkey cart. “The hospital was full of dead and injured people, and mothers looking for their missing children,” he recalled.
A Palestinian woman waits for humanitarian aid to arrive on Al-Rashid Street, northern Gaza Strip, February 26, 2024. (Omar El Qattaa)
A Palestinian woman waits for humanitarian aid to arrive on Al-Rashid Street, northern Gaza Strip, February 26, 2024. (Omar El Qattaa)
After hours of searching, they found Abbas standing in front of a body covered with a bloodied white blanket. Moatasem, his son, was lying lifeless with parts of the inside of his head exposed. Abbas explained that when Israeli forces opened fire on the crowd, he and his son had tried to take cover behind debris from previous bombings. Moatasem lifted his head for a second, and was struck by an Israeli bullet.
“My uncle couldn’t stop crying in front of his son’s body, saying, ‘I couldn’t bring you flour, forgive me,’” Al-Fayoumi continued, with tears streaming down his face. “The only reason he went with his son was their dire need to bring home food.”
It was the same scene at hospitals across Gaza City. The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital told the New York Times that they received the bodies of 12 people killed by gunshots and another 100 with bullet wounds. At Al-Awda Hospital, the interim manager Dr. Mohamed Salha told the BBC that they had received 176 wounded people on the morning of Feb. 29, of whom 142 had bullet wounds. A UN official who visited Al-Shifa in the aftermath of the incident described seeing dozens of patients wounded by bullets, and told the BBC that Israeli forces had “shot into the thickest part of the crowd.”
‘The scene was like doomsday’
“The situation was catastrophic,” Said Al-Suwairki, another survivor of the massacre — who, as the eldest sibling, had taken on the responsibility of getting food for his family — told +972. “After hours of waiting, the first aid trucks arrived and everyone rushed toward them. People were scrambling and pushing each other to get a bag of flour. Once people crowded the trucks, the Israeli army vehicles opened heavy gunfire on us. I saw the bullets hitting people directly.
“As soon as I witnessed this, I started leaving,” Al-Suwairki continued. “I wanted to survive. As I was retreating, I stumbled over something. I lit my phone torch so I could see in the darkness, and I discovered a dead body on the ground.
“The scene was like doomsday,” he went on. “No one cared for anyone there. Everyone just wanted to get flour or anything they could from the aid truck. There were dead bodies on the ground and wounded people screaming for help, but no one was paying attention to them. Hunger drove people to extremes, pushing them to death.”
Aid trucks arrive at the Palestinian side of the Kerem Shalom border crossing, southern Gaza Strip, February 17, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)
Salameh Rafiq Obeid, 27, told +972 that he arrived at Al-Rashid Street around midnight, by which time it was already extremely crowded. “Almost every resident in the north came out that night to get flour — women and men alike,” he explained. “No one wanted to go back to their children empty-handed. Everyone advanced toward the trucks; there was no distance between the Israeli tanks and the people.
“When the crowds descended on the aid trucks near the Israeli forces, the army responded by indiscriminately firing at everyone who was there, forcing them back,” Obeid continued. “Seeing this unfold, I desperately searched for my relatives to head back to the school [where Obeid’s family is sheltering]. “The situation was extremely difficult and dangerous.
“We returned to the school, but some of us were missing,” he went on. “My 13-year-old cousin, Nidal, was shot dead while attempting to get a bag of flour from a truck near the Israeli army.”
Chaos and panic
Amid the panic induced by the gunfire, many Palestinians were also killed and wounded as a result of being crushed by the crowds and the aid trucks themselves. Haitham Jarrada, 51, suffered a broken right foot amid the chaos. “I was waiting for aid, just like everyone else,” he told +972. “When the first truck arrived, people rushed in to get flour, and then there was random gunfire from the army. At that moment, I didn’t know what was happening.
“It all unfolded in the blink of an eye,” Jarrada continued. “We were waiting in darkness. Some truck drivers kept moving, fearing harm from the gunfire. I tried to escape, but because of the crowding, people pushed me in front of the truck, and it crushed my leg.”
Mohammed Mushtaha and his brother Raed (this author’s second cousins) were also among the crowds trying to bring back food for their children and elderly parents, waiting since 5 p.m. on Feb. 28. “Since the first ceasefire [in November], we have had no flour — almost 100 days,” Mohammed told +972.
“Before we went to Al-Rashid Street, I told Ra’ed, ‘Let me go alone, and you stay with our mother and your wife and three children,’” Mushtaha recounted. “He refused and said to me, ‘I am a father, I must feed my children. Let’s both go, and each of us will bring back one bag of flour. We don’t know how long this crisis will last.’”
When the gunshots started ringing out and the chaos unfolded, Mushtaha lost sight of his brother, and went to wait for him at a meeting point they had agreed on in advance in case they were separated. For two hours, he waited in fear and anxiety, but his brother never showed up. After the crowds had dispersed, he returned to the coastal road and found his brother’s lifeless body on the ground. Ra’ed, Mushtaha insists, was killed by a tank shell fired into the crowd of people waiting for aid.
Mushtaha now mourns the loss of two of his brothers: Ra’ed was preceded by Ahmed, who was killed in early December when Israel shelled his home in the Shuja’iya neighborhood.
In response to a request for comment on the events described in this article, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office referred us to the army’s previous statements and added that they will publicize a fuller account following the completion of an internal investigation in the coming days.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/03/ ... aeli-fire/
Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MARCH 6, 2024
Ralph Nader
From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.
Since the Hamas raid penetrated the multi-tiered Israeli border security on October 7, 2023 (an unexplained collapse of Israel’s defensive capabilities), 2.3 million utterly defenseless Palestinians in the tiny crowded Gaza enclave have been on the receiving end of over 65,000 bombs/missiles plus non-stop tank shelling and snipers.
The extreme right-wing Netanyahu regime has enforced its declared siege of, in its genocidal words, “no food, no water, no electricity, no fuel, no medicine.”
The relentless bombing has destroyed apartment buildings, marketplaces, refugee camps, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, bakeries, schools, mosques, churches, roads, electricity networks, critical water mains – just about everything.
The U.S.-equipped Israeli war machine has even uprooted agricultural fields, including thousands of olive trees on one farm, bulldozed many cemeteries and bombed civilians fleeing on Israeli orders, while obstructing the few trucks carrying humanitarian aid from Egypt.
With virtually no healthcare left, no medications, and infectious diseases spreading especially among infants, children, the infirm and the elderly, can anybody believe that the fatalities have just gone over 30,000? With five thousand babies born every month into the rubble, their mothers wounded and without food, healthcare, medicine and clean water for any of their children, severe skepticism about the Hamas Health Ministry’s official count is warranted.
Netanyahu and Hamas, which he helped over the years, have a common interest in lowballing the death/injury toll. But for different reasons. Hamas keeps the figures low to reduce being accused by its own people of not protecting them, and not building shelters. Hamas grossly underestimated the savage war crimes by the vengeful, occupying Israeli military superpower fully and unconditionally backed by the U.S. military superpower.
The Health Ministry is intentionally conservative, citing that its death toll came from reports only of named deceased by hospitals and morgues. But as the weeks turned into months, blasted, disabled hospitals and morgues cannot keep up with the bodies, or cannot count those slain laying on roadsides in allies and beneath building debris. Yet the Health Ministry remains conservative and the “official,” rising civilian fatality and injury count continues to be uncritically reported by both friend and foe of this devastating Israeli state terrorism.
It was especially astonishing to see the most progressive groups and writers routinely use the same Hamas Health Ministry figures as did the governments and outside groups backing the one-sided war on Gaza. All this despite predictions of a human catastrophe in the Gaza Strip almost every day since October 7, 2023, by arms of the United Nations, other besieged international relief agencies on the ground, eyewitness accounts by medical personnel, and many Israeli human rights groups and brave local journalists in that Strip, the geographic size of Philadelphia. (Unguided Western and Israeli reporters and journalists are not allowed to enter Gaza by the Israeli government.) (See the open letter titled, “Stop the Humanitarian Catastrophe” to President Biden on December 13, 2023, by 16 Israeli human rights groups that also appeared as a paid notice in the New York Times.)
Then came the December 29, 2023, opinion piece in The Guardian by the Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, Devi Sridhar. She predicted half a million deaths in 2024 if conditions continue unabated. (See her piece here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... s-conflict).
In recent days, the situation has become more dire. In the March 2, 2024, Washington Post, reporter, Ishaan Tharoor writes:
“The bulk of Gaza’s more than 2 million people face the prospect of famine — a state of affairs that constitutes the fastest decline in a population’s nutrition status ever recorded, according to aid workers. Children are starving at the fastest rate the world has ever known. Aid groups have been pointing to Israel restricting the flow of assistance into the territory as a major driver of the crisis. Some prominent Israeli officials openly champion stymying these transfers of aid.”
Tharoor quotes Jan Egeland, chief of the Norwegian Refugee Council:
“We must be clear: civilians in Gaza are falling sick from hunger and thirst because of Israel’s entry restrictions.” “Life-saving supplies are being intentionally blocked, and women and children are paying the price.”
Martin Griffiths, the United Nations lead humanitarian officer, said:
“Life is draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed.”
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, according to the Post, warned of an
“‘unknown number of people’ – believed to be in the tens of thousands – lying under the rubble of buildings brought down by Israeli strikes.”
Volker Turk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said
“All people in Gaza are at imminent risk of famine. Almost all are drinking salty and contaminated water. Health care across the territory is barely functioning.”
“Just imagine what this means for the wounded, and people suffering infectious-disease outbreaks. …many are already believed to be starving.” UNICEF, the International Rescue Committee, the Palestinian Red Crescent, and Doctors Without Borders are all relating that the same catastrophic conditions are getting worse fast.
Yet, and get this, in this article, the Post still stuck with the “more than 30,000 people in Gaza have been killed since the ongoing war began.”
Just like the entire mass media, many governments, even the independent media and critics of the war would have us accept that between 98% and 99% of Gaza’s entire population has survived – albeit the sick, injured and more Palestinians about to die. This is lethally improbable!
From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.
Imagine Americans, if this powerful U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people would have been killed?
Daily circumstantial evidence of the deliberate Israeli targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructures requires more reliable epidemiological estimates of casualties.
It matters greatly whether the aggregate toll so far, and counting, is three, four, five, six times more than the Health Ministry’s undercount. It matters for elevating the urgency for a permanent ceasefire, and direct and massive humanitarian aid by the U.S. and other countries, bypassing the sadistic cruelty against innocent families of the Israeli siege. It matters for the columnists and editorial writers who have been self-censoring themselves, with some, like the Post’s Charles Lane fictionally claiming that Israel’s military doesn’t “intentionally target civilians.” It matters for accountability under international law.
Above all, it lets weak Secretary of State Antony Blinken and duplicitous President Joe Biden be less servile when Netanyahu dismisses the low death toll by taunting them: what about Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
As a percentage of the total population being killed, Gaza can expose the Israeli ruling racist extremists to a stronger rebuttal for ending U.S. co-belligerent complicity in this never-to-be-forgotten slaughter of mostly children and women. (The terrifying PTSD on civilians, especially children will continue for years.)
Respecting the more accurate casualty toll of Palestinian children, mothers and fathers presses harder for permanent ceasefires and the process of recovery and reparations for the survivors of their Holocaust.
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2024/03/ ... s-in-gaza/
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Why the State of Israel is a Tool of Western Colonial Domination in the Middle East
Eduardo Vasco
March 6, 2024
Zionism can be considered as fascism adapted to the conditions of the Middle East and the aspirations for domination of Anglo-American imperialism over that region, Eduardo Vasco writes.
The central thesis of this article is that the State of Israel is a pure imperialist invention to facilitate the domination of Western Asia by the great powers, a domination that can only be exercised through fascist methods. We seek to prove this thesis by analyzing the history of the Zionist movement from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, using as sources the works of some of the greatest scholars on the subject worldwide, many of them Jews.
The common origins of German Nazism, Italian fascism and Israeli Zionism
The 19th century was the most important in the history of humanity. It was there where the greatest political, economic and social transformations of modernity took place, which opened the way for an unlimited development of human capabilities following the industrial revolution.
It was when the different peoples of the world, particularly those of Europe, which was the center of these transformations, tried for the first time, on an international level, to free themselves from the chains that bound them to backwardness and oppression. Nationalist movements were born in several nations suffocated by colonial empires.
To justify their action, the ideologues of nationalism often resorted to the invention of myths in order to present the purpose of building a nation as a natural historical result of the development of a people’s struggle. The myths had as their fundamental characteristic a religious, racial and territorial basis.
The ideologists of Zionism, that is, of the colonization of Palestine by Jews, taking advantage of the need for protection of Jews after centuries of oppression in Europe, followed the example of the Germans and Italians, for example, who tried to unify their nations and build their own National State propagating the territorial rights of people of the same race and religious creed. In these three cases, their leaders evoked a mythical past, of heroic and superior peoples of whom they were their legitimate descendants and heirs.
Israeli historian Shlomo Sand writes, in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People”, that
In the image of other “patriotic” trends in 19th century Europe, which looked back to a fabulous golden age with the help of which they forged a heroic past for themselves (classical Greece, the Roman Republic, the Teutonic tribes or the Gauls) In order to prove that they had not been born ex nihilo, but had existed for a long time, the first adherents of the idea of a Jewish nation turned to the resplendent light that radiated from the mythological kingdom of David and whose strength was preserved for centuries in the heart of walls of religious faith.
In “Rome and Jerusalem”, from 1862, the socialist intellectual Moses Hess said that “the Jewish race is a pure race that reproduced all its characteristics, despite different climatic influences. The Jewish type has remained the same through the centuries.” And he added: “It is of no use to Jews and Jewish women to deny their origin by getting baptized and mixing with the masses of the Indo-Germanic and Mongol peoples. Jewish types are indelible.”
A racist, reactionary tendency was already noticeable within this movement of Jewish intellectuals. The same trend that generated the fascist far-right phenomena in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.
The religious basis attracted the most primitive instincts of the community and seemed something a little outdated after the consolidation of Enlightenment ideals and the era of reason and science. Therefore, nationalist ideologues had to adapt religious myths to a pseudoscientific discourse.
Nazi historians, archaeologists and researchers struggled to find evidence of their supposed mythological past. His “science” was nothing more than a revision of history in order to manipulate it for the purposes of the Third Reich. “Science” served the official ideology and its falsification of history.
At around the same time, the Zionists were going down the same path. When archaeological discoveries contradicted religious writings, Zionist researchers preferred to adopt “the ‘truth’ of the theological text over the truth of the archaeological object”, according to Sand.
Ukrainian Ben-Zion Dinur, professor of Jewish History at the University of Jerusalem in the 1930s, is the author of the book “The History of Israel: Israel in its Country”, first published in 1918 and later expanded in 1938. According to Sand’s words, that author decided to “rewrite” the Bible, “adapting it to the ‘scientific’ spirit of his time”.
This does not mean that, at some point, he doubted the historicity of the Holy Scriptures. From the account of the life of Abraham the Hebrew to his return to Zion, he remained faithful to every detail and every event reported.
“The most important contribution of ‘biblical historiography’ to the elaboration of national consciousness certainly consisted in establishing the relationship with the ‘land of Israel’”, Sand states.
The Bible served mainly as an “ethnic” mark that indicated the common origin of women and men whose secular cultural data and components were completely different, but who were detested due to a religious faith to which they practically no longer adhered.
The idea was in gestation that modern Jews were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Israel two thousand years ago, who had been expelled and who should retake that land. They would not accept the statement that all peoples and civilizations once belonged to a certain land and were expelled from there by other peoples, and that they also took lands from other peoples, consequently. Nor does the idea that modern Jews, like the descendants of all peoples who have had extensive contact with others, are heirs of a series of races, are not a pure race, and that they had little in common with the inhabitants of ancient Israel . They preferred to adopt the same racist prejudices as the ideologues of Nazism and fascism, that their race was pure and superior to others.
Zionism, a movement started by the British big bourgeoisie
When Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, in the mid-19th century, Great Britain – the great colonial and capitalist power of the time – installed its consulate in Jerusalem. In 1840, Lord Palmerston proposed that the Crown found a European Jewish colony in Palestine in order to “preserve the more general interests of the British Empire”, in his own words. Until then, around 500 thousand people inhabited those lands. Two-thirds of these were Muslim Arabs, 60,000 were Christians and only 20,000 were Jews, according to Ilan Pappé (“History of Modern Palestine”).
A few decades later, the British purchased Egypt’s part of the newly built Suez Canal, which guaranteed them the presence of troops there to protect the navigation of their ships and a strategic presence at the gates of Palestine and its growing rival, the Ottoman Empire.
While Great Britain penetrated Palestine, important sectors of the European bourgeoisie organized this colonization movement ideologically and politically. Theodore Herzl, a Jew from a banking family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is considered the main founder of Zionism. In 1896, he wrote “The Jewish State”, in which he elaborated the main theses of Zionist colonialism, the fundamental thesis being the need to build a state of its own in Palestine.
In this book, he already indicated that the Zionists were powerful bankers, and exposed their racist views. “Supposing His Majesty the Sultan handed over Palestine to us, we could in return take care of regularizing finances in Turkey. We would form a civilization there in the face of barbarism,” he wrote. On the other hand, he also addressed the European powers, stating that the Jewish State would be, “for Europe, a piece of fortress against Asia”.
The following year, Herzl led the first Zionist Congress, held in Switzerland. Congress gave a huge boost to the movement and set the goal of founding the Jewish State within 50 years. In the words of researcher Marcelo Buzetto,
From then on, Zionists ran around the world to raise financial resources and political support for their proposal. Herzl and his followers will establish contacts with the governments of England, Germany, the Turkish-Ottoman Empire, and Jewish and non-Jewish bankers, industrialists and merchants, aiming to strengthen the idea of the need for a Jewish State. The European Jewish community is divided, and not everyone supports the Zionist idea, but this movement obtains the help of the Jewish bourgeoisie and important sectors of the non-Jewish European bourgeoisie. (“A questão palestina”)
Britain was preparing for imminent war against Germany and its Turkish allies. For this, in addition to commercial gains, it was essential to establish positions in Suez and within Palestine. According to Ralph Schoenman, in “The Hidden History of Zionism”,
For years the British used the Zionist leadership to obtain support from banks and large Jewish capitalists in the United States and Great Britain for their war against the German Empire.
Sérgio Yahni explains the British imperialist project through the Zionists in Palestine:
For Great Britain, Palestine was a base of operations for the Royal Navy and Zionist colonization, with resources it had to finance industrial development, was part of a strategy that guaranteed maritime transport, controlling access to the Suez Canal, and facilitated the transport of Iraqi oil through territories controlled by the British Empire. To achieve these objectives, His Majesty expected military security and social stability in the country through a system of immigration certificates that required a minimum economic capacity on the part of immigrants. Great Britain guaranteed the colonization of sectors of the middle class, thus alleviating class contradictions […] (“A questão palestina”, Prefácio)
With the aim of settling Jewish settlers on land acquired in Palestine, in 1905 the Jewish National Fund began purchasing Arab properties.
European Zionists, noticing the flowering of Arab independence sentiments against Turkish rule in Palestine in the early 20th century, organized to support the Ottoman Empire in repressing the Palestinian independence movement. While they supported the Turkish empire’s repression of the Arabs, they acted against the Turks in favor of the British. Still according to Schoenman, the Zionists began to give full support to the English in the face of the imminent implosion of the Ottoman Empire with the defeat in World War I.
In 1914, the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chain Weizmann, declared:
It is quite acceptable to say that if Palestine falls into the British sphere of influence and Britain encourages Jewish settlement there as a British dependency, in 20 or 30 years we could have a million Jews there, or perhaps more. They would develop the country, restore civilization and form a much more effective guard for the Suez Canal.
The Zionists and British were not the only ones interested in the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, organized themselves and actively fought for independence and even received a promise from Great Britain that they would have their own country if they helped defeat the Turks. The British, however, did not fulfill this promise. On the contrary, in the final months of the war they publicly declared their intention to create a Jewish state.
Such was the character of the infamous Balfour Declaration, by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, addressed to the leader of the Zionists in Great Britain, the banker Lionel Walter Rothschild, member of the powerful Rothschild family, published on November 2, 1917. It said:
His Majesty’s Government views favorably the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will do everything in their power to facilitate the attainment of that object.
With the end of the war and the defeat of the Turks, the Ottoman Empire was artificially divided by the victors and Great Britain transformed Palestine into a protectorate, without giving it the promised independence. But it was not yet time to transform it into a State for the Jews, as their presence in the territory was still negligible.
From the turn of the 1920s to the 1930s, the Jewish company, financed by bankers and large Jewish businessmen, began to buy large amounts of land to install Jewish settlers in Palestine. By the early 1930s, twenty thousand Palestinian peasant families had been expelled from their land by European Zionists. In the middle of the decade, the company Africa Israel Investments was founded by important South African (white) investors and businessmen, which began acquiring land in Palestine.
The Mandate government gave Jewish capital a privileged status, granting it 90% of the concessions in Palestine. This allowed the Zionists to gain control of the region’s economic infrastructure (road projects, Dead Sea minerals, electricity, ports, etc.) By 1935, the Zionists controlled 872 of Palestine’s 1,212 industrial companies. (Ralph Schoenman, “The Hidden History of Zionism”).
Blood brothers unite to promote “the greatest tragedy in the history of humanity”
National mythology has always been used by the ruling classes to dominate and manipulate people’s legitimate feelings and needs for independence and freedom against external oppression.
The nascent imperialist bourgeoisie at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century perfectly maneuvered with these feelings among the European peoples in order to suppress the workers’ movement that was gaining strength and represented a growing threat to it dictatorship.
It was from the need to suppress the enormous proletarian movements that took over Europe, and which encouraged the national struggle in colonized nations, as well as to expand their sphere of domination of world markets, that the great bankers and industrialists promoted the birth of Nazi fascism – and its blood brother, Zionism.
The first embryos of the European fascist movement had the collaboration of Zionist leaders. This was the case of the tsarist repression in Russia against the Bolsheviks – who had strong support within the Jewish proletariat, so much so that four of the seven members of the revolutionary leadership of 1917 were Jews –, supported by Herzl and Weizmann.
Simon Petliura was a Ukrainian fascist who personally directed the pogroms that killed 28,000 Jews in 1897 in separate massacres. [Vladimir] Jabotinsky [one of the founders of Zionism] negotiated an alliance with Petliura, proposing a Jewish police force that would accompany Petliura’s forces in the counter-revolutionary struggle against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution – a process that involved the murder of peasants, workers and intellectuals who defended the Revolution. (Schoenman, “The Hidden History of Zionism”)
When the fascist movement had fully developed, the Zionists increased their support for it.
Mussolini formed squads of the Betar Revisionist Zionist youth movement, wearing black shirts in the same manner as his own fascist bands. When Menachem Begin became head of Betar, he preferred to wear the brown shirts of Hitler’s gang, a uniform that Begin and the members of Betar wore in all meetings and concentrations – in which they saluted each other, opening and closing the meetings, with the fascist salute. (Idem)
But the darkest episode in the history of Zionism in the first half of the 20th century was yet to come. Particularly, from the end of the 1920s in Germany: active support for Nazism and even the Holocaust itself.
When the Nazis came to power, Schoenman writes, based on documents from the time, “the Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933,” hailing the “revival of national life” and “principle of race” that guided the new German State. The Congress of the World Zionist Organization confirmed this position in 1933, when it rejected, by 240 votes to 43, “a resolution that called for action against Hitler”. And the main Zionist entity went further: it broke the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime by signing a commercial agreement between the Anglo-Palestinian Bank of the World Zionist Organization with Germany, becoming “the main distributor of Nazi products throughout the Middle East and northern Europe”.
“The Zionists took Baron Von Mildenstein, from the SS Security Service, to Palestine on a six-month visit in support of Zionism”, which earned Joseph Goebbels much praise for Zionism and even the order to mint it “a medal with the swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.”
The researcher points out that, in 1937, when the persecution of Jews by the Hitler regime had already begun, the Haganah (armed Zionist organization) sent an agent to Berlin “to offer espionage to the SS Security Service, in exchange for the release of Jewish fortunes to be used in Zionist colonization.” Zionist agent Feivel Polkes told Adolf Eichmann that “Jewish nationalist circles were greatly delighted by German radical policy, since with it the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would grow to such an extent that, in the foreseeable future, the Jews would reach have numerical superiority over the Arabs.”
Schoenman defends the thesis that the Jewish-Zionist elite supported Nazism and the Holocaust because the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Europe would naturally lead to emigration to Palestine, the historical objective of the Zionists. According to the author, they organizedly sabotaged the emigration of persecuted Jews in Europe in the 1930s, because they were not heading to Palestine, but to America or other Western European countries. David Ben Gurion, who would later become Israel’s first head of government, said in 1938: “If I had known that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by taking them to Britain and only half of them by transporting for Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], I would opt for the second alternative.”
They just wanted to save the young, healthy Jews, to build Eretz Israel in Palestine. Those considered old and incapable were easily discarded to the death chambers, as occurred from 1944 onwards, when a secret pact signed by the Zionist elite with the Nazis led to the abandonment of 800,000 Jews in Hungary to save 600 “pre-eminent Jews”, according to Schoenman. “If they come to us with two plans – to rescue the masses of Jews from Europe or to rescue the land – I vote, without hesitation, for the rescue of the land”, expressed Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a Zionist leader.
Schoenman reports that, on January 11, 1941, Avraham Stern, another Zionist leader, proposed a pact between the Zionist National Military Organization (NMO) and Germany, which stipulated, for example, that:
There may be common interests between the establishment of a New Order in Europe, according to the German conception, and the authentic national aspirations of the Jewish people, personified by the NMO.
Would cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed nation of the National Hebrew people be possible, and
The establishment of a historic Jewish state, on a national and totalitarian basis, united by an alliance with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a continued and strengthened future position of German power in the Near East.
Stern concluded his document by offering NMO support to Germany in World War II. In Schoenman’s opinion, Zionists would rather see millions of Jews killed by Hitler than allow mass emigration to anywhere other than Palestine.
We all know what the fate of European Jews was at the hands of the Nazis. In the calculations of Raul Hilberg, the “main authority on the Nazi Holocaust” in the words of Norman G. Finkelstein, no less than 5.1 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Many representatives of the international community and the main world institutions call this event “the greatest tragedy in the history of humanity”, as Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said in 2022.
Perhaps it was because of this active support from the Zionist elite that the Holocaust was forgotten during the first two decades after World War II. In his book “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering”, Finkelstein raises some hypotheses for the cover-up by the Jewish elite in the US of crimes against Jews. For example, West Germany (where numerous Nazis were incorporated into the new regime) was an ally of the Americans in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Also, the denunciation of Nazism – and the welcoming of many Nazis by the US and its allies – was an important agenda of the American left, which, following the centuries-old Jewish tradition, had a large Jewish following. And the main Zionist organizations in the US at the time, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, collaborated in the witch hunts for communists during McCarthyism. “Remembering the Nazi Holocaust was labeled a communist cause” and, in order not to be confused with the left, the Jewish elite sabotaged any type of anti-Nazi campaign, according to Finkelstein.
In the author’s assessment, it was only after the 1967 war between Israel and the Arab countries that the Holocaust began to be remembered, both by the Jewish elite and by the United States government. And the strong propaganda campaign that we know today was started. He does not take into account the possibility that this was done because the US realized that there would be intense opposition to the establishment of the State of Israel in the Middle East and this could compromise its domination in the region and, thus, began to label any criticism of the Zionism as anti-Semitism and apology for the Holocaust. It is needless to note that this remembrance did not include the Zionist elite’s support for Nazism and the Holocaust itself.
Colonial and racist ideology and practice
Concomitantly with the gradual Jewish colonization of Palestine, driven by European bankers and the British Empire, Zionist leaders developed and expressed their colonial and racist ideology.
In his 1923 book “The Iron Wall”, Jabotinsky argued that there was a “complete impossibility of reaching a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine to transform Palestine from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority”. He recalled that colonization never “happened with the agreement of the native population” and admitted that “the natives fought because any type of colonization, anywhere, at any time, is unacceptable for any native people”.
He fully confessed the colonial character of the Zionist enterprise when comparing it to the arrival of the Spanish in America or the massacre of the American Indians. He said that the Arabs
look at Palestine with the same instinctive love and the same authentic fervor with which any Aztec looked at his Mexico or any Sioux contemplated his prairie (…). Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. Any colonization, even the most restricted, must be developed in defiance of the will of the native population.
Jabotinsky ended his argument by recognizing that Zionist colonialism should be supported by the British colonial Mandate:
Through the Balfour Declaration or through the Mandate, external force is indispensable to establish in the country the conditions of domination and defense by which the local population, regardless of their desires, is deprived of the possibility of preventing our colonization, in physicists or administrative terms. Force must play its role, with energy and without indulgence.
Zionists first widely put Jabotinsky’s ideas into practice in the second half of the 1930s. In 1936, the Palestinian people carried out a huge rebellion against the British yoke and imperial forces reacted violently. But they were unable to contain the revolt, which was armed, and resorted to the support of Zionist groups that had already immigrated to Palestine. “Zionist forces were integrated into the British intelligence services and became the police that enforced draconian British rule,” Ralph Schoenman says.
Great Britain armed the Zionists, who had thousands of members within the Haganah and Irgun, and from then on had a number of armed fascist militias to crush the Palestinians, trained by British officer Charles Orde Wingate, according to Schoenman. At the end of the Arab uprising, in 1939, there were more than 14 thousand fascist-Zionist militiamen organized and commanded by British officers.
This suppression of the Palestinian uprising of 1936-1939 was a vital event in the preparation of the Zionist armed forces that would facilitate, through ethnic cleansing, the invasion of 1948, authorized by the United Nations on November 29, 1947. This UN resolution occurred with just one month remaining before the end of the 50-year period stipulated by the Zionists, in 1897, for the creation of the State of Israel. If, at the end of the 19th century, Zionism gave signs that it was an imperialist project of European bankers – particularly the English ones –, in the middle of the 20th century it became clear that, in addition, it had become a project of world imperialism, now led by the US bourgeoisie, the great victor in World War II, along with the Soviet Union.
As the Second World War ended with an agreement to divide the world into different zones of domination by the great powers, the Soviet government agreed with the US and Great Britain that that region of the Middle East would be theirs. Perhaps to get rid of his own Jews, Stalin participated in the creation of the State of Israel as part of the new era of collaboration, not confrontation – so the Stalinist bureaucracy thought – with its Western partners.
The cruel and historic persecution of the Jews in Europe, which resulted in the Holocaust, was the great justification for the imperialist powers to impose the creation of a State for the Jews in Palestine. Even though the Jewish community was not consulted, much less the inhabitants of Palestine, the majority of whom were Arabs. The claim of the World Zionist Organization, a body founded and run by European bankers, was worth more than the opinion of the Jewish and Arab people.
The increasing colonization of Palestine by bourgeois European Zionist Jews during the British Mandate served as an argument to prove that Jews wanted to emigrate to Palestine and were already doing so. In the early 1930s, four thousand Jews arrived in Palestine each year. In the middle of the same decade, this average reached sixty thousand (Marcelo Buzetto, “A questão palestina”). Even so, until 1947 only 6% of the land in Palestine was Jewish-owned, according to Schoenman.
In 1939, there were 445 thousand Jews in a total population of 1.5 million inhabitants, according to Gattaz cited by Buzetto. In the year of the partition of Palestine by the UN, Jews represented one third of the country’s population (630 thousand), while the other two thirds were Arabs (1.3 million). Only 10% of Jews were originally from Palestine, according to Henry Cattan, while the overwhelming majority were European settlers.
Ralph Schoenman states that the fascist-Zionist organizations Irgun and Haganah, even before the creation of Israel, “seized three-quarters of the land and virtually expelled all the inhabitants,” displacing 780,000 Palestinians and massacring thousands of others in identical terrorist actions those carried out by the Nazis in the Soviet Union. David Ben Gurion, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, all future Prime Ministers of the State of Israel, played an important role in these massacres.
When the State of Israel was founded, on May 14, 1948, 90% of the land in Palestine had already been stolen by Jewish settlers. “In the territory occupied by Israel after partition, there were around 950,000 Palestinian Arabs. They inhabited around 500 villages and all large cities”, Schoenman points out. “After less than six months, there were only 138 thousand people left”, he adds. “Around 400 towns and cities were razed to the ground in 1948 and 1949. In 1950, they did the same to several others.”
The Nakba (the great “catastrophe”) began for the Palestinians, which continues to this day, seven decades after its beginning. The institution responsible for this genocide, therefore, is the UN itself. The Zionist settlers felt completely at ease, even though they still constituted a minority within Palestine, to terrorize and expel the Arabs en masse from the moment that the United Nations, in an absolutely arbitrary and illegitimate way, granted more than half of the Palestinian territory to them.
Conclusion
Ever since they became aware of the strategic geographic position and enormous natural riches of that region of Western Asia, European empires have coveted it. As has been known for millennia, the best strategy for a colonizer is to divide and rule. This is what European, and later American, imperialism did to the Middle East. First, they divided it, and then they installed their representatives. It would not be possible to govern solely through puppet Arab regimes, as these – as we can clearly see today – are exposed to pressure from their population. It would be necessary to establish a colonial regime. But traditional colonialism was in crisis after the First and Second World Wars.
Therefore, the Zionist project, which had been in the works for half a century, was ideal for dominating that region of the planet, which connects Europe with Asia and Africa, through which the main maritime routes that control world trade and where there is an abundance of such vital resources as gas and oil. Zionism, that is, the doctrine of the creation, maintenance and expansion of the State of Israel, is the great pretext manufactured by the imperialist bourgeoisie to dominate the most important geographic region in the world.
Theodore Herzl already claimed, in 1904, “all of Lebanon and Jordan, two-thirds of Syria, half of Iraq, a strip of Turkey, half of Kuwait, one-third of Saudi Arabia, the Sinai and Egypt, including Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo”, highlights Schoenman.
In 1938, Ben Gurion declared that “the State will be only a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion.” And he elaborated: “the borders of Zionist aspiration include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, present-day Jordan, the entire West Bank and Sinai.” This meant that the objective of imperialism with Israel was not limited to the creation of a state for the Jews – in fact, this was just idle talk. The objective was to use it as a spearhead in the effort to dominate and subjugate the entire Middle East.
In fact, since the artificial creation of Israel, with increasing support from the united imperial powers, the Zionist entity has come to occupy Sinai in Egypt, southern Lebanon and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights in Syria, which are still under Israeli power.
Schoenman describes that, in “Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary”, former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett (1954-1955) revealed the objectives of the high Zionist political-military leadership: “to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement and create puppet regimes under Israeli regional power.” On October 26, 1953, he wrote that “1) The Army considers the current border with Jordan absolutely unacceptable. 2) The Army is planning the war in order to occupy the rest of Eretz Israel.” Sharett also documented meetings that discussed the annexation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the “green light” given by the CIA to attack Egypt.
This proves that Israel’s conquest of Arab territory was not a war reparation due to the aggression of the Arab nations against the Zionist entity, but rather a planned objective of domination, which is part of an even greater goal that encompasses the entire region.
Schoenman highlights two more documents that point in this direction, both dated 1982. An analysis by Oded Yinon published in the newspaper of the Information Department of the World Zionist Organization highlighted the strategic need to fragment the countries of the Middle East as much as possible through the exploitation of ethnic and religious differences. He proposed extending this plan to North Africa, covering Egypt, Libya and Sudan. In the same year, a senior official from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Y’ben Poret, declared: “neither today nor in the past is there Zionism, there is neither colonization nor a Jewish state without the removal of all Arabs, without confiscation.”
The military dictatorship with a civil and pseudo-democratic facade that imposed an apartheid situation in Palestine occupied by Israel, in which Arabs are second-class citizens, suffer segregation and discrimination, are arbitrarily arrested, tortured and executed, lack civil and political rights and – as seen by the genocide that began on October 7, 2023 – have their homes bombed, there is no fundamental difference to the former apartheid regime in South Africa or the former Nazi regime in Germany. The State of Israel, however, has an aggravating factor: while Nazism was created by German imperialism and apartheid was created by white South Africans themselves, Israel was created and is maintained to this day by the entire global imperialist system as a whole. This makes his life longer than the lives of the Third Reich or Apartheid.
Despite being an agent agreed and shared by the world’s imperialist powers, there is clearly a predominance of American imperialism over the State of Israel. In practice, it is the 51st state of the United States of America, taking into account all the economic and military investment made by Washington since 1948 and, particularly, since 1967, in Israel. The Zionist entity is absolutely dependent on North American funding and, without it, could easily cease to exist if it were attacked jointly by Arab and Islamic states. The Israeli government itself officially recognizes that it is “a country of immigrants”, with its population having increased almost tenfold since its creation. About three-quarters of Israelis are Jewish, half of them of European, American or Soviet origin. It is absolutely common to see blond white people talking in English on the streets of Tel Aviv, for example. Now, the native population of that region is neither white, nor blonde, nor does it speak English.
Israel is, without a shadow of a doubt, a colonial entity artificially created and governed by imperialism – particularly American – using fascist methods to subjugate the people of that region of the planet. Another proof of this is the total impunity that Israel enjoys in the international political and diplomatic arena, including in the United Nations Security Council (responsible for its creation), being immune to any type of serious sanction even after more than seventy years of evidence which prove numerous human rights violations, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, political prisons and mass extrajudicial executions. Everything we saw being carried out in Gaza between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 in an amplified form.
The dream of Western imperialism would be for the entire Middle East to become an Eretz Israel – more or less as the Zionist elite planned – which would thus be completely under its control with the Zionist entity as an intermediary.
Fascism is a natural consequence of the “higher phase of capitalism”, imperialism, as Vladimir Lenin defined it. It is a new political form of imperialist domination, which began to replace parliamentary democracy when it was unable to stabilize the regime and the domination of the bourgeoisie in different countries. It is the subjugation by brute force, and not by liberal-democratic mechanisms, of the workers and people of their own country and abroad, with the imperialist expansion of the country in question. This domination is justified based on national mythology, which produces and reproduces chauvinist and racist feelings. Zionism, in turn, can be considered as fascism adapted to the conditions of the Middle East and the aspirations for domination of Anglo-American imperialism over that region. After all, as seen by the descriptions contained in this article and by the reality of apartheid experienced by the Palestinian people over the last 76 years, the characteristics of Zionism are very similar to those of traditional fascism, adapted to the conditions of the time and geographic location. The State of Israel was manufactured by imperialism and incorporated Zionist mythology into its education system and other forms of reproduction of official ideology, as well as fascist militias into its armed and police forces. Zionism – the State of Israel – is fascist imperialism applied to Palestine.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... ddle-east/
Martyr Izz El-Din Al-Qassam Brigades spokesman, Abu Obeida, delivers a speech today, March 8th 2024, marking six months on the 154th day of Al-Aqsa Flood. pic.twitter.com/mlGiQzSVEG
(@WAR3138) March 12, 2024
