thats the Core issue of todays world issrael issue. u wud realy like to know abt it. the article is wriiten br M shahid Alam
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| Israel: consequences of ‘uniqueness’
By M. Shahid Alam |
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| WHY did the creation of Israel engender such deep but opposing emotions in the Islamic world and the West, leading to Arab wars against Israel and Israeli wars against its Arab neighbours, producing tensions that have poisoned relations between Islam and the West, and, now, arguably, pushing the United States into a direct occupation of two Muslim countries?
The Zionists claim that Israel is a ‘normal’ state, like India, Iraq or Indonesia. They equate their ‘struggle’ to establish a Jewish state in Palestine with the movements for national liberation in Asia, Africa and elsewhere during the 20th century. The hostility of Arab and Muslim peoples to Israel, they claim, is motivated by their anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews implanted by Islam itself. In recent years, this hostility has also been explained as the result of an Arab or Islamic envy of Israeli democracy. We face a difficult choice here between Israeli and Arab normalcy. If Israeli statehood is normal, then it follows that there is perversity in the Islamic opposition to it. On the other hand, if Israel is not a normal state — like India, Iraq or Indonesia — then we are justified in investigating this lack of normality, or ‘uniqueness,’ and probing into its consequences. It may turn out that Islamic hostility to Israel did not proceed from perversity but, instead, is a legitimate response to the ‘unique’ conditions surrounding Israel’s creation. This Zionist claim to normalcy — that Israel belongs to the same species of states as India, Iraq or Indonesia — is based on two superficial similarities. First, Israel was created as an independent state out of Palestine, a British colony since 1917. Second, after 1945, some of the Jews in Palestine took up arms against the British to force them out of Palestine. On the basis of these partial truths, the Israelis claim that Zionism was a nationalist movement aimed at liberating Palestine from the British occupiers. Incidentally, the Palestinians are completely missing from this narrative about Jewish statehood in Palestine. This claim is not tenable: one intransigent fact militates against it. The Jews who created the state of Israel in Palestine were not indigenous to Palestine. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of them were settlers from Europe, having entered Palestine after its conquest by the British in 1917. In the 1940s, the European Jews had a legitimate claim to our sympathy, but, as Europeans, they had no legitimate nationalist claim to statehood in Palestine. In other words, Israel is a ‘unique’ case of nation building. Sadly, the Jews of Europe could not have staked a nationalist claim to any part of Europe either. They did not constitute a majority in any of the territories which they shared with other Europeans. This was the unstated problem the ‘nationalist’ Jews confronted in Europe during the 1890s. The oppressed nations in Europe could stake a valid claim to sovereign statehood. Not so the Jews: they may have been a distinct people, and some of them were still oppressed, but they were not a nation. In order to become ‘normal’ — that is, in order to transform themselves into a European nation — the Jews of Europe would first have to create a Jewish majority in some part of Europe. This path of ‘normalization,’ however, was not open to Europe’s Jews. It would have been opposed. Indeed, it would have amounted to courting disaster. Nevertheless, there would be poetic justice in the creation of a Jewish state in Europe. After all, the Jews were a European people; the history of their continuous presence in Europe goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks. Since the European Jews — as minorities — have historically faced persecution, and, under the Nazis, many Europeans participated in a fiendish attempt to exterminate them, one can argue that it was Europe’s moral responsibility to accommodate the Jews as a nation inside Europe. The historical wrongs done to a segment of the European population should have been corrected by Europeans inside the geographical boundaries of Europe. At least, this might have been the right thing to do. But when has Europe shown magnanimity of this order? Unable to stake a nationalist claim in Europe, those European Jews who sought ‘normalization’ as a nation had another idea. After all, this was the 19th century, the age of colonization and of settler-colonialism. If the British and the French could establish settler-colonies in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Algeria, among other places, why not the Jews of Europe? In its early stages, during the 1890s and 1900s, when the project to create a Jewish state was being broached in some Jewish circles of Europe, several locations for this state were considered. Although Palestine was his first choice, at various times Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was willing to settle for Uganda or Madagascar. Earlier, others had scouted Surinam, Argentina, Missouri and New York! However, Palestine won easily. It would appeal to Jewish emotions associated with religious Zionism, and the Messianic Christians would support the idea of a Jewish return for their own eschatological reasons. If political Zionism does not qualify as a movement for national liberation, was it a scheme for establishing a colonial-settler state similar to those being established or consolidated in the same era? I will argue that it was, but with two differences that make Israel rather unique among states of this species. Unlike the other colonial-settler states, Israel was not the creation of another state ethnically allied to it. Israel had no mother country. A Jewish state did not yet exist. Indeed, the Zionist movement sought to create such a state; this would be its end point, not its point of departure. Secondly, there was an important difference in the goals of the colonial-settlers in Africa or Australia and the political Zionists. The former intended to expropriate the natives so that they could use them as cheap labour on the lands they would expropriate. In other words, they did not intend to expel the natives from their colonies. On the other hand, the Zionists intended to expropriate the Palestinians and remove them from Palestine. They wanted a Palestine without the Palestinians; this was their goal, not the serendipitous consequence of their settlement activity. In its conception, then, Zionism was a colonial-settler project with a difference. This ‘unique’ project had several vital implications. First, in the absence of a Jewish mother country, the Zionists had to find a surrogate, a western power that would use its military to implement their colonial-settler project. This would not be too hard to find. For more than two hundred years several western powers — in league with Christian messianic groups — had worked on various schemes to persuade the Jews of Europe to establish a Jewish state in the Levant, a state that would serve as the staging post for their colonial ambitions in that region and farther East. Wisely, the Jews rejected these overtures, suspecting that that they were traps to get them out of Europe and into greater trouble. However, the emergence of political Zionism in the late 19th century turned the tables. Starting in 1897, after the First Zionist Congress, the Zionists began courting the ‘powers’ to take on their cause. Their efforts were directed primarily at Britain, the greatest colonial power of that era. Success in this venture came almost exactly twenty years after the First Zionist Congress in the shape of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. This document stated that His Majesty’s Government “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object...” In fulfilment of this commitment, the British created the mandate (euphemism for colony) of Palestine. Under the terms of this mandate, duly approved by the Council of League of Nations in July 1922, the British administration in Palestine would work with the Zionist organization to “secure the cooperation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Thanks to British support, the Zionist project was in motion. The Zionists converted the absence of a Jewish mother country into an advantage. Political Zionism appealed to the West for at least three reasons: messianic Christians saw the Jewish return as a prelude to the Second Coming; western powers were eager to acquire control over the Middle East because of its strategic value; and the West was still animated by an antipathy to Islam. In September 1922, the US Congress passed a resolution endorsing the Balfour Declaration. When British support for the creation of a Jewish state wavered in the 1940s — coincidentally, just when British power was being superseded — the United States stepped into the breach, thanks to Jewish votes, money and influence in that country. The western sponsorship of Zionism would evoke historical memories in the Muslim world. In time, many Muslims would come to see the creation of Israel as the return of the Crusaders, an escalation of western Christendom’s campaign to undermine their faith and civilization. This was a dynamic that contained the seeds of a clash of civilizations. The goal of a Jewish state in Palestine with a Jewish population had an unavoidable corollary. As the Jews entered Palestine, the Palestinians would have to be ‘transferred’ out of Palestine. As early as 1895, Theodore Herzl had figured this out in an entry in his diary: “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.” Others took a more direct approach: “As soon as we have a big settlement here we’ll seize the land, we’ll become strong, and then we’ll take care of the Left Bank. We’ll expel them from there, too. Let them go back to the Arab countries.” At some point, when a dominant Jewish presence had been established in Palestine, and the Palestinians had departed or been marginalized, the British could end their mandate to make room for the emergence of a Jewish state in Palestine. This plan ran into two problems. The Palestinians would not cooperate: they refused to leave and very few were willing to sell their lands. As a result, in 1948, the year that Israel was created, nearly all of Palestine’s “penniless population” was still in place. In addition, more than 50 years after the launching of political Zionism, the Jewish settlers owned only seven per cent of the lands in Palestine, not the best lands either. During the Second World War, the Zionists ran into a problem with the British too. In order to rally Arab support during the war, in 1939 the British decided to limit Jewish immigration into Palestine to 75,000 over the next five years. However, these problems would not derail the Zionist project. The Zionists would achieve under the fog of war what they had failed to achieve through money and discriminatory policies. In cooperation with the British colonial authorities, the Zionists had been establishing since 1918 a parallel government in Palestine, consisting of a network of Jewish organizations that brought in Jewish settlers, acquired Palestinian lands, organized Jewish settlements, supported Jewish businesses, and established Jewish educational institutions. In addition, as early as 1920, the Zionists had set up the Haganah, a grass-roots military organization. Fifteen years later, the Haganah consisted of 10,000 mobilized men and 40,000 reservists, equipped with imported and locally manufactured weapons. When the British refused to lift the restrictions on Jewish immigration after the war, the Jewish military organizations started a campaign of terror against them. Partly in response to this terror, the British announced their premature departure from Palestine before the conflict they had spawned could be resolved. The Zionists found their opportunity in the British loss of nerve. On May 14, 1948, on the termination of the British mandate in Palestine, they declared the emergence of the Jewish state of Israel under a UN partition plan. Although the Jews in Palestine owned only seven percent of the land, the UN plan assigned 55 per cent of Palestine to Israel. The Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states decided to resist the UN partition plan. But the ranks of the Palestinian resistance had been decimated before by the British, and the Arab armies were poorly equipped, poorly led, and their leaders lacked nerve and commitment. They were decisively defeated. In the process, the Zionists occupied 78 per cent of Palestine, and 800,000 Palestinians were expelled or left their homes under duress. Israel, Mark I, had arrived in the Middle East, a Jewish state in Palestine with only ten per cent of its Palestinian population. |
who beleives in truth and integrity! You have quoted, perhaps, one of the better articles of today. Nowadays we have the media being infiltrted by the government, while the government(Canadaian and American) dances to every request of the zionists! Hence the media (which most educated peoples keep up with) is controled by the zionists.... distance from North America.For the most part, conveying that muslims, particularily the modernizing ones and those who are steadfast in there religion as 
"terrorits" I really appreciate your post and please do keep it up! 
