29 September 2003

The whys and wherefores of the massive con job that the rulers of Israel have done on the people of this planet will no doubt be the subject of innumerable books at some time in the future. A future that’s not afraid to speak out on the issue of Israeli racism and imperialism and the massive injustice that has been and is being done to the Palestinian people. And all in the name of defending the ‘Jewish race’ (of which purportedly I am a member). Now what constitutes a Jew is the subject of yet another essay, but suffice to say, that its mutability is part of the confidence trick that’s been pulled on the part of the racist Zionists of Israel and elsewhere and especially on those who call themselves Jews, to justify the theft and displacement of a nation.

I for one, make no connection between being Jewish and being Israeli. Is a Catholic a citizen of the Vatican? What is an Arab Israeli (or is it Israeli Arab)? The blurring of the line between being Jewish by virtue of one’s religious persuasion, or being Jewish by virtue of being Semitic (in which case, Jew and Arab are one and the same thing), and further, in the dim and distant past, because of mass conversions of Christians to Judaism, the term Jewish race becomes a nonsense. And finally, being Jewish because of one’s cultural inheritance, such as my own, have conveniently muddied the waters.

As a Londoner, raised with the knowledge of my Russian-Jewish ancestry, I knew from an early age what had happened to the Jews under the Nazis, but I also knew what had happened to the Roma (another part of my mongrel ancestry), Slavs, homosexuals, Communists (yet another part of my ‘inheritance’), Catholics, trade unionists and the other millions who were deliberately selected for extermination in the death camps.

For the Jews alone to appropriate the horrors of the Holocaust as their private property is an affront and an insult to those other millions who perished. And moreover, to practice a comparable horror on the Palestinians, makes a mockery of all those who died, Jews included.

Emboldened by the US imperialist land grab, Israel is now prepared to ‘go the distance’ and push for the total expulsion of the Palestinian population into neighbouring Jordan. The real objectives of the Zionist imperialists are thus revealed for what they are, a naked land grab. And history shows that this was their plan all along and that the ‘war on terror’ has been used as a pretext to complete the construction of a ‘Greater Israel’.

Paradoxically, the actions of Sharon and his racist cohorts have all but put paid to the ‘two state solution’ by carving up what remained of the putative ‘Palestinian state’ into tiny Bantustan prisons, thus making a separate Palestinian state a practical impossibility regardless.

At this point, one must surely ask the question of Sharon and his fascist collaborators, that by on the one hand appearing to go along with the farcical ‘road-map’ whilst continuing the building of settlements, ‘collective punishments’ (made infamous by the German Nazis), assassinations and ‘lock downs’ of entire populations, the road-map was dead before anyone could reach the on-ramp. And that this was surely the purpose of it from the getgo, a sop handed out to those whose consciences bothered them just a little, and to put the stamp of approval on Blah’s supposed ‘quid quo pro’ for going along with the US Iraqi imperialist project.

The cynical words of the western media on the issue of the ‘road map’ only compounds the problem by refusing to recognise the sheer impossibility of constructing a separate Palestinian state given Israeli policies which at every step puts road blocks on the road map. Meanwhile, the Palestinians are labelled as the obstacle even as the ‘state in waiting’ is systematically destroyed both physically and politically.

But is a two-state solution viable – the roots of which lie in the so-called Oslo agreement forced on the Palestinian Authority in 1992? On the other hand, a secular single state embracing all seems about as likely as the Taliban acceding to a secular Afghanistan. Yet as things stand, short of the total expulsion of what remains of the population of the projected Palestinian state, a single state solution is the only future remaining for the Israelis and the Palestinians if only by virtue of the exclusion of any other solution.

Is such a solution possible? More to the point, what other viable future is there regardless of what the Israelis currently think? Consider the implications of expulsion of the Palestinians, assuming that is, that the Jordanians will accept such a ‘solution’. Given the direction that the current situation is headed in – genocide of the Palestinian people – can it be too long before a significant section of Israeli society realizes that the only option for their own survival lies in the creation of a bi-national secular state? The alternative is just too horrible to contemplate.

And what of those Israeli Arabs left behind, already second class citizens in what is supposedly the only ‘democracy’ in the Middle East? Will these become non-persons, denied the rights of ‘real Jews’ in the land of their birth or will they too, be expelled in order to construct a nation of the ‘pure’?

Those who try and rationalise the irrational and spurious notion of a nation state based upon a a pyramid of myths – the Jewish ‘race’, a particular version of an ancient religion and the idea of a Jew which is just that, an idea, a state of mind, must surely realise just as Christian fundamentalists who supposedly take specific interpretations of the bible as verbatim and immutable, or those who chose a specific interpretation of the Koran, are taking a giant step backwards in time, in a world that’s taking its first tentative steps towards a world beyond the nation state, let alone a fundamentalist religious nation state.

And in any case, is it really based on race or religion, the alleged words of long dead prophets, but on money and power, in a cynical manipulation of history where both Jew and Arab become pawns in the hands of international capital. How much longer can the myth of defending a settler state, with little separating it from the defunct apartheid state of South Africa, which also used the separation of the ‘races’ in order to justify oppression and expulsion, be justified?