[Peace-discuss] On Israel/Zionism

[Morton K. Brussel]

A propos of the proposed panel discussion on "The Confrontation of  
Israel With Its Neighbors.", I submit a strong reflection on the  
troubles in the Mideast that have arisen due to the policies and  
presence of Israel.

I must say that I am somewhat concerned that the proposed panel may  
not delve into the latest horrors with Lebanon and Palestine/Gaza --  
which seem to make obvious the motives and actions of Israel and the  
Bush administration.

In any case, below is the long piece by Kathleen Christison. I only  
regret that she does not mention the United States involvement in  
more depth.

  To whet your appetite, her conclusion is that …

This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either  
Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle  
Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary  
state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land  
this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully  
imaginable now.

Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed  
by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before  
their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By  
hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the  
colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision.  
That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress  
means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or  
reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent  
neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to  
form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In  
Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion,  
its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in  
Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work  
anywhere in the Arab world.

We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined  
by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may  
dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in  
the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this  
is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.

--Something to think about:

--mkb

The Coming Collapse of Zionism
Former CIA Analyst

by Kathleen Christison
September 12, 2006
Counterpunch
Printer Friendly Version
EMail Article to a Friend 
Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have  
noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously  
on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see,  
the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?

Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be  
that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew  
it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the  
racist principle that underlies it?

Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming  
the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as  
the exclusivist state of Jews?

Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the  
fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and  
natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that  
excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples.  
Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the  
natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology.  
Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and  
superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral  
restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an  
ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.

Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to  
its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space  
within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well,  
extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet  
seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat  
and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews  
always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all  
natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally  
subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its  
attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon  
that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason  
that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region  
and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with  
any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position,  
for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential  
threat.

In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to  
destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism  
would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate  
themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's  
last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after  
the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli  
bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been  
mending power and water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British  
correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what  
Israel intended was that "Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be  
allowed to keep Beirut alive." Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the  
man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he  
felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a  
one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the  
night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of  
the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago  
Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the  
remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.

The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake  
Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its  
Arab population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy.  
Cluster bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading  
manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode  
in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre  
area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and  
are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their  
homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000  
unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in  
southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been  
killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire  
last month.

Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas  
is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of  
military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of  
Israel's cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN  
humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the  
cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire  
resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further  
effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to  
depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks  
that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes  
in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation's entire  
civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that  
continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the  
Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over  
1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in
  ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel's war  
can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep  
the region safe for Jewish dominion.

In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to  
return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or  
unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been  
cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah,  
except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and  
its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not  
conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series  
of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually  
initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for  
the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood.  
It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient,  
that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not  
bow to Israel's will. It was a war on people and their way of  
thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote  
Zionism and Jewish hegemony.

Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another  
since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's  
longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The  
Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate  
problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they  
forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population  
that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish- 
majority state. You can't have a Jewish state if most of your  
population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to  
expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those  
Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still  
around after all, threatening the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.

In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely  
directed -- with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon -- toward  
making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic  
cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land  
and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on  
commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright  
deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement  
restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft  
of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine,  
including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a  
majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians  
are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a  
million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one- 
tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis  
what it did in Lebanon in a month's time -- killing civilians,  
destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable.  
Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day.  
Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life  
in the Zionist scheme of things.

Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide  
(ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every  
Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a  
further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a  
phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says "the  
daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now  
reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in  
microscopic fonts." His prediction is that continued killing at this  
level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians  
remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will  
result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the  
world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for  
its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy  
"into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda." If the  
world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic  
cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more drastically."

And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this  
horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by  
its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the  
total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential  
illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even  
the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and  
the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is  
committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for  
Jews?

Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed  
observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have  
noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an  
unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness  
of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness  
of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi,  
writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the "indiscriminate  
wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be  
assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley  
(Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal,  
peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat  
its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its  
ethnic/racial character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza  
had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z  
Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing  
and institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the  
West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in  
violation of all purported enlightenment values."

Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently  
running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has  
found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by  
the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic  
of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel  
Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July  
30, 2006) is the "full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one  
is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a  
'threat' identified with a community" -- or, in Israel's case, with  
all non-Jewish communities.

The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being  
promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the  
rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara,  
a leading Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al- 
Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the  
world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs.  
them, is accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double  
standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order  
of things. This has always been Israel's natural order of things: in  
Israel's world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews  
and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with  
surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.

In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a  
sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of  
the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its  
arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can  
be limited. The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel  
Warschawski speaks of -- the arrogant colonial approach of old, now  
in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that  
assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of  
apocalyptic clash between the "civilized" West and a backward,  
enraged East -- has been seen for what it is because of Israel's mad  
assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power  
by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony  
and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute,  
unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri  
observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week
into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine,  
having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the  
political response of populations "that have been degraded and  
occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the  
Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as  
we see now, the direct support of the United States."

Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much  
Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S.  
and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of  
Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence  
that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular  
have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's  
best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their  
existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world  
is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.

Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United  
States supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and  
more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to  
notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict  
some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which  
it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews  
into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be  
defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony,  
stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending  
Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.

Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout  
the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for  
Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their  
imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but  
others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in  
which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex- 
Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees  
Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he  
calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis.  
It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people,  
he says, who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and  
humanism," while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death,  
and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are  
falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel  
as, ultimately, "an historic event" and a "dead entity."

Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss  
the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been  
deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its  
leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a  
surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and  
agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a  
unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006)  
foresees the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in  
Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South  
Africa, a "critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of  
the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to  
justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under  
duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition,  
along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,  
Galloway  along with many others -- sees only "war, war and more war,  
until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli  
leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads."

This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either  
Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle  
Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary  
state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land  
this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully  
imaginable now.

Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed  
by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before  
their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By  
hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the  
colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision.  
That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress  
means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or  
reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent  
neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to  
form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In  
Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion,  
its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in  
Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work  
anywhere in the Arab world.

We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined  
by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may  
dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in  
the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this  
is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.


Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked  
on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions  
of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.
-------------- next part --------------
Skipped content of type multipart/related