For The Sake Of Jewish Sensitivities

by Gilad Atzmon

It occurred to me recently that the Palestinian solidarity discourse is spiritually, ideologically and intellectually driven by some very misleading terminology: crucial notions such as Zionism, colonialism and apartheid (heard in every discussion, and present in every text book about the conflict), are either confusing, or even delusional: I believe that they are there to actually block any attempt to grasp the true spirit and ideologies that drive the Jewish State rather than to clarify the situation.

Zionism

Many of us tend to refer to Zionism as the ideological driving force behind Israel.

But make no mistake: Israel is not Zionism, and Zionist ideology and politics have very little at all to do with Israeli politics or practice.

It must be understood that Israel and Zionism are, by now, two distinct categories. While Zionism was defined by its founders as an attempt to ‘transform the Diaspora Jew into an authentic and civilised human being’, Israel can, nowadays, only be seen as the pragmatic product of such an ideology.

It may surprise many of you to hear that these days, Israel is not driven or even particularly inspired by Zionism any longer -it is, instead, engaged in self-maintenance. More so, Israelis are hardly even that familiar with Zionist ideology. For most Israelis Zionism is little more than a dated and archaic concept - it may have historical significance -but it has zero meaning in daily life.

Zionism is, in fact, a Jewish Diaspora discourse. It is there to differentiate between world Jewry that largely supports Israel, and a few sporadic Jewish secular voices who want to maintain their Jewish national identity while opposing the Jewish State.

The Zionist/ anti Zionist debate is, in fact, a debate that takes place within the Jewish Diaspora, and not within Israel itself. It belongs to the realm of Jewish identity politics. It has very little political significance out of that context.

Because Israel and Israelis are actually impervious to Zionism, ‘Anti Zionist’ activity and ideology have very little impact at all on Israel and Israelis.[1] Israelis are only concerned with direct actions against their Jewish State, and for them, sanctions are a matter that concern and worry them a great deal. Israelis though, are hardly concerned at all with seeking solutions to the so called ‘Jewish Question.’ From an Israeli perspective the Jewish state is the ultimate solution for the ‘Jewish Question.’ I guess that from a realistic and pragmatic perspective, one may have to agree, Israel didn’t really solve the ‘Jewish Question’ it just moved it to a new place.

Why do we then, continue to make this crude mistake, and always refer to Israeli crimes as a Zionist symptom? Why don’t we refer directly and openly to the ‘Jewish State’, because at the end of the day, this is how Israel defines itself.

The answer is simple: it is because we really do not want to offend anyone. We accept that Jews have suffered all through their history and we accept their unique sensitivities. Hence, voluntarily, we self-censor ourselves. We voluntarily give up on our capacity to think freely, coherently, openly and critically.

Colonialism

Zionism is not colonialism either. As much as many activists around us insist that we must regard Zionism as a colonial project, the truth must be stated: colonialism defines itself by having a clear material relationship between a ‘mother state’ and a ‘settler state’. In the case of Zionism however, it is impossible to determine what was, or is, the ‘Jewish mother State’. In fact there is no Jewish mother State and there has never been one. Zionism is not a colonial project and it has never been one. It is indeed true that the Jewish State exhibits some colonial symptoms.[2] But then, some brain cancer patients also exhibit some symptoms of migraine. A proper diagnosis aims at discovering the true cause behind symptoms. To diagnose is to trace a true disease rather than provide a superficial explanation that may be linked to a number of sporadic symptoms.

But it is also clear why so many of us love the colonial paradigm, despite it being flawed: the followers of the colonial paradigm accept that Israelis are not different from the British, French or Dutch; they just happen to celebrate their ‘colonial’ expansionist symptoms ‘100 years after everyone else’. Also the colonial paradigm promises a ‘solution’ at the end of the road -- a post colonial reconciliation is just a matter of time, they stress.

Again, I am sorry to disappoint so many people I really care about, but I have to say it: Zionism is original and unique of its kind, and it has no precedent in history. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit into any materialist model, for the aspiration behind Zionism was, and still is, spiritually driven.

So why do we continue to make this crude mistake, and always refer to Zionism as colonialism? Why don’t we refer to Zionism as what it is; a totally unique Jewish ideological project? Simple, because we do not want to offend some of the very few Jews who are kind enough to support Palestine. We accept their sensitivities, and voluntarily remain quiet about it all. We would do whatever it takes to keep everybody happy. After all, we are a peace movement.

Apartheid

And what about apartheid? Is Israel an apartheid State? In Israel we clearly witness racial separation and legal discrimination. However, I would argue that Israel is not an apartheid system for apartheid was set in place to exploit the indigenous peoples, yet, to keep them living on the land. Israel, on the other hand, is there to destroy the indigenous population - the Israelis would be relieved if they woke up one morning to find out that the Palestinians had simply left the region.

Those who are Naïve enough to buy into the apartheid narrative probably believe that Israel may collapse soon, because this is what history teaches us about apartheid. Again, we like the apartheid model because it makes Israel look (relatively) ‘ordinary’. We do not want to offend anyone, especially the few Jews who support us.

But here is a question that I must address to righteous Jews and fellow Palestinian supporters around the world: do you really believe that the discourse of the struggle against the Jewish State should be shaped by ‘Jewish sensitivities’? Was the fight against Nazism shaped by German sensitivities? Did we take on board the Afrikaners' touchy spots when campaigning against the apartheid? Isn’t the time ripe to call a spade a spade? I do accept the crucial importance of Jews in this movement and I try to work with as many Jews as possible. Yet, I wonder, isn’t it time for Jews to overcome their sensitivities and look into the subject with open eyes? Isn’t the time ripe for all of us to do the same? Shouldn’t we question the supporters of the Jewish State, and ask exactly what Jewishness stands for?

I believe that this is exactly what we have to do-for the sake of a better future in Palestine, we must openly engage in these crucial questions. I also believe that more than anyone else, it is Jews who must confront these questions. I would expect Jewish activists within our movement to lead this move rather than trying to silence it.

[1] Zionism may be a useful term when referring to Jewish lobbying around the world. It may throw light on the activity of Sayanim around the world, and it may explain the inclination of some Brooklyn Jews to make Aliya. It may also explain why some Jewish Leftists join forces with rabid Zionist institutions as soon as someone questions what Jewishness stands for.

[2] It can be reasonably argued that the relationships between Israel West Bank Settlers and the indigenous peoples could be understood in colonial terms.

Netanyahu, Obama and the rest of them are polarizing the world, and this is a very good thing indeed

Yesterday I watched with some amazement how the entire US Congress stood up and down and up and down and up and down again "interrupting" Netanyahu's speech with obligatory standing ovations and thought to myself, is there any way at all a country could humiliate itself any more?  Keep in mind that the man for whom the US Congress folks were obsequiously hopping up and down is the same man who humiliated the US president in public, inside the White House.  Now, setting aside all the empty rhetoric, was was Netanyahu's message to Congress and the rest of the world?  Simply this: Israel does not give a damn about international law or public opinion and the only thing Israel will ever "negotiate" with the Palestinians is a wholesale unconditional surrender.

This is actually very good news.

It is good for the Palestinians because it makes any and all forms of "negotiations" with Israel look exactly like what they are: at best, a total waste of time, at worst, a euphemism for capitulation.

It is good for the (few) mentally sane Israelis who are not subscribing to the prevailing racist ideology because it makes the racist delusion of a "two state solution" unambiguously unachievable. 

It is good for the entire Middle-East because it further polarizes all politicians into two clearly separated groups: on one side Israeli puppets and traitors and on the other (more or less) popular leaders actually representing their constituencies.

It is good news for the USA because it now shows to those how still have a functioning brain that the real "President" of the USA is Benjamin Netanyahu and the real "Congress" of the United States is AIPAC.

The first necessary step in resolving any problem is to diagnose it.  Without that first step, no solution can every be found.  In this case, the entire planet has a problem and that problem has two faces, like a coin: a secular one and a religious one:

The secular one is called Zionism and it can be summed up in the following sentence: "God does not exist, but He gave us the Holy Land".  This ideology is a co-product of 19h century European nationalism and it is therefore not surprising that it is racist, imperialist and colonial in its deepest core.

The religious one is called Talmudic/Phariseic "Judaism" (which has nothing in common with the religion of the Old Testament and) which can be summed up in the following sentence: "God created Jews in His image and likeness and He created the goyim from (a different essence from) the earth".  This belief in two different essences between Jews and goyims can only be described as Satanic (as Christ Himself said I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan Rev 2:9).

What we see in modern Israel is an inevitable fusion of these two initially distinct ideologies into a new one, which could be loosely referred to as the self-worship cult of the Jewish tribe.  This cult has a new, quasi Christ-like, messiah - the Jewish tribe as a whole who suffered during the so-called "Holocaust" for the sake of repairing the world (tikkun olam).  This collective messiah has lead the Jewish people back to the Land of Israel and he will restore peace to the entire planet by ruling the world from Jerusalem with the Jews as mediators between God and the goyim (hence the "undivided and eternal" capital of Israel).

This is not an ideology which can be negotiated with.  Certain ideologies or world views leave some room for compromise, but one which is both "God-given" AND racist does not.

Is this nuts?  Yes, absolutely.  Is this Satanic?  Totally.  Is this real?  You bet it is!  Just listen to Netanhayu and the rest of them.  They have finally come out of "their closet" and they are openly proclaiming their beliefs.  The predictable result of this great "coming out" (which, I would argue, began under Clinton) will be the inevitable polarization of the entire planet into the same two camps as in the Middle-East: those who are with "them" and those who are not (does that not remind you of Junior's "you are either with us or with the terrorists"?).

The stakes in his conflict are truly huge, way bigger than only Palestine or the entire Middle-East.  What is at stake is the soul of mankind, our very humanity.  Will we submit to the absolutely evil ideology combining secular racism and religious satanism, or will our civilizations fight for the idea of the common humanity and brotherhood of ALL humans?  Will we find it in ourselves to finally "globalize the Intifada" or will we submit to the Synagogue of Satan?

Though at times this Synagogue of Satan appears almighty, it is not and the real outcome of this struggle is not only external, but it is also internal: it is primarily fought inside the soul of each human being.  As soon as a person commits himself/herself to resist evil that evil is already instantly defeated in the soul of this person!    Sure, the Empire seems powerful, but its power is only external.  The reality is that it is being beat on all fronts and it is on the retreat - in particular inside the mind and souls of more and more people.  Just think of how many people reached their "breaking point" listening to Netanyahu, Obama and the rest of them in the past couple of days.  Whatever the figure, I can promise you that more people opened their eyes to what is really going on than were put to sleep by it all.

Netanyahu and Obama are probably doing more than anyone else to globalize the Intifada and, for that at least, we ought to be grateful.

The Saker

Reflections on the future of Palestine and the Middle-East

Things are clearly heating up in the Middle-East again: a US-Israeli attack on Iran appears to be in the final stages of planning. Israel, which has finally clearly given up any pretense of being a civilized, never mind democratic, state, is now preventing dissident American Jews like Finkelstein or Chomsky from entering Israel. Former DIA and CIA analyst Philip Giraldi is suggesting that Israel may have to strike at Iran before August. Finally, Israeli forces have murdered humanitarian workers during what can be called either an act of piracy or war in international waters against the Freedom Flotilla and Turkey. Turkey and Israel now appear to be on collision course and it is unclear what the outcome of this latest confrontation might be.

Professor John J. Mearsheimer has recently presented an absolutely fascinating talk about the prospects for Israel and Palestine in the mid to long term. In a presentation entitled "The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. the New Afrikaners" Mearsheimer's prediction is summed up in this paragraph:

"Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans – to include many American Jews – Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream".

Mearsheimer basically believes that Israeli Jews do not want a Two-State solution, and I agree with him on that point. He also believes that Israel will not be able to massacre and expel enough Palestinians and the US Jews will not support an Apartheid state in the long term. These two latter assumptions needs to be looked at in the context of the recent developments in the region,

The humiliating defeat at the hands of about 1000 second-rate Hezbollah fighters (the elite Hezbollah units were kept north of the Litani river) in 2006 left the Israeli deterrence potential in tatters. Worse, the three-week long Gaza massacre of late 2008 – early 2009 did nothing to restore the prestige (?) or credibility of the Israeli military. Neither Iran, nor Hezbollah nor Hamas have any fear of Israel and its 'massacre potential'.

Lebanon is now clearly “Hezbollah territory” and there is nothing at all Israel can do in the foreseeable future to change this. The massive US-Israeli operation “birth of a new Middle-East” to co-opt Lebanon via its “Cedar Revolution,” the Hariri murder, and the Syrian withdrawal has ended in total failure. Egypt is, for the time being, under the boot of the Mubarak dictatorship, but the regime is clearly threatened by the situation in Gaza as the population of Egypt looks in disgust at how the Egyptian government has turned into a Shin Bet franchise. There is no reason at all to suspect that the Mubarak regime is eternal. In fact, it is probably a safe bet to assume that, eventually, it will be threatened by Islamist forces.

While nobody seriously believes that Iran is developing nuclear weapons right under the nose of the IAEA and its inspectors, Iran is becoming a real regional power and it is doing so while openly defying both Israel and the USA and that is far more dangerous to the US-Israeli Empire than any nuclear weapon.

In Israel itself, a vast majority of Israeli Jews have reached what Gilad Atzmon has called a “point of no return”. 94% of them approved of the Gaza massacre and there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to suspect that they are now having second thoughts. Just one look at the images of the Israeli crowds rejoicing over their “naval victory” over the Freedom Flotilla and it becomes clear that Atzmon is absolutely correct.

Unsurprisingly, Israel's public image in the world is in tatters and world opinion is finally seeing Israel for what it is: an abominable experiment in imperialism, colonialism, racism and Fascism. The more the Israelis try to “teach the Arabs a lesson” by engaging in all sorts of atrocities, the more reviled that state is.

The exception to this quasi universal disgust with Israel is, of course, the USA, where the Zionists are now in total control of the White House, Congress and the corporate media. It is hard to imagine, but the Obama administration might well turn out to be even more subservient to Israel than the Neocon controlled Bush The Lesser's administration was: Rahm Emanuel is the “new Dick Cheney” but the latter was at least only a ruthless opportunist, not an ideologue a-la-Trotsky like Emanuel clearly is.

As for US public opinion, it is wholly irrelevant on any foreign policy issues. Each time Americans vote for something, they get the exact opposite and, yet, nobody seriously protests.

How long this control of the USA by Zionist interests will last is anybody's guess, but with the current economic crisis turning into a catastrophe, time is running out for Israel and some dramatic action needs to be taken by the Israeli leaders to stop the slow-motion weakening and eventual collapse of their “ethnically pure” state. If they want to prevent this outcome, Jewish leaders need to take dramatic action very soon. Mearsheimer believes that two factors will greatly restrict their margin of freedom:

a) the Israelis cannot kill or expel all the Palestinians

b) American Jews will not support a Jewish Apartheid regime in Israel.

I think that both of these assumptions are fundamentally mistaken.

The Gaza massacre has clearly shown that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are willing to commit any number of atrocities in what they would refer to as “self-defense” or in defense of self-perceived “existential interests of the Jewish state of Israel.” Not only that, but I would argue that most Israelis see the extermination of Palestinians as a vital necessity for their own survival. Why? Because of all of the horrors they themselves have inflicted on the native Palestinians since the creation of the “Jewish state.”

This is a well-known phenomenon in history, sociology and politics. The perpetrators of atrocities project themselves onto their victims and then become terrified of possible retaliation. Having watched the IDF bombard Gaza with White Phosphorus from specially organized sighting platforms (with drinks, snacks and binoculars), the Israeli Jews expect absolutely no mercy whatsoever from the Palestinians should the latter ever become free. Just like White Americans were terrified of their Black slaves revolting and killing them, the Israeli Jews have recurrent nightmares about a “second Holocaust” happening at the hands of the native population of Palestine and the rest of the Middle-East.

Israeli Jews have shown no mercy, no humanity, towards the Palestinians whatsoever and they expect none in return (regardless of what Palestinians might or might not feel).

It is true that the IDF has not killed all Gazans yet. Not even close, in fact. But that is not due to any kind of humanity, but only to the fact that this is politically impossible, at least for the time being. But, as I have shown above, the views on Israel are becoming increasingly polarized: the world at large loathes Israel while the US Government literally worships Jews and Israelis irrespective of what the latter are actually doing.

That is what is crucial here – there is probably very little Israel can do at this point in time to ingratiate itself with most of the planet, and there is definitely nothing the Israelis can do to alienate the US elites. So the argument that the Israelis cannot commit genocide in Palestine because of the political costs of such a crime is really not true any more. The arrogance and hubris with which the Israelis have insulted the Turks over and over again clearly shows that they don't care one bit about what anybody thinks. As long as they have the USA as a protector, the Israelis think they can afford to ignore the rest of mankind.

To simply assume that the Israelis are not capable of a Rwandan-style genocide in Palestine is extremely naive, in particular if a major massacre of Palestinians is committed concurrently with a war against Iran, when all the corporate media will be watching the events in Iran and when the Israeli propaganda machine will have no problem justifying a military operation to kill and/or expel most, if not all, Palestinians under the heading of “self-defense” and “preventing another Holocaust.”

What about an overtly Apartheid-like regime in Israel. Would US Jews oppose it?

Contrary to the delusions of visceral Jew-haters, American Jews are a very diverse lot. It is enough to read all the “oy veh's!” about intermarriage in US Jewish magazines and websites to realize that the so-called Jewish community is not nearly as monolithic as it often appears to be. Still, there is a powerful tribal reflex at work in most American Jews, including non-religious ones, and the binary world view of “us and them” has left a deep mark on most American Jews. Such a view is carefully and systematically maintained by an endless stream of discussions and in the media about the “Holocaust” and “anti-Semitism”. Add to this all the propaganda about terrorism, and you get a Jewish populace that is mentally “circling the wagons”.

Of course – some American Jews see straight through that nonsense, but what happens with them next is crucial to our argument: they break off their ties with the “psychological shtetl” of Jewish tribalism and re-join the rest of mankind. They do so either on their own initiative, or because they are firmly shown to the door. Tellingly, over 7'000+ of them have already been listed on the so called SHIT list (Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening list of Jews); one can, of course, dismiss such a list as the action of loonies, which it is, but the mindset is clear – Jews critical of Israel or Zionism are traitors who need to be ostracized and expelled from the tribe.

This is thing which Mearsheimer is missing: “J Street” notwithstanding, the more American Jews emancipates themselves from the oppressive confines of their “mental shtetl” of Jewish tribalism, the less influence they will have over other American Jews. The result of this constant process of “purification” is truly frightening: the hate of the other, the paranoid fear of a 2^nd Holocaust, the active support for any and all atrocities committed in the name of Israel - all of these have now become core defining elements of the US Jewish ethos. Thus we are faced with a great paradox: for all their superficial differences, US and Israeli Jews are very much alike in one crucial aspect: they suffer from unmistakable signs of sociopathic/antisocial personality disorder.

The term sociopath (or psychopath) is mostly used as an insult, yet it has a precise medical meaning. Here is the list of the traits exhibited by psychopaths of the “aggressive narcissist” type according to the famous Hare Psychopathy Checklist:

1. Glibness/superficial charm

2. Grandiose sense of self-worth

3. Pathological lying

4. Cunning/manipulative

5. Lack of remorse or guilt

6. Shallow affect

7. Callous/lack of empathy

8. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Is that not an excellent description of the Israeli ethos?

It goes without saying that this list was developed to diagnose individuals, not social or cultural groups, and the comparison can only go so far. Still, does that list not strike you as a perfect description of the Israeli mindset? Does it not also fit the US Zionists like a glove?

Still not convinced?

Check out this list of the traits of a dissocial personality disorder according to the World Health Organization:

1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy.

2. Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.

3. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.

4. Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence.

5. Incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment.

6. Markedly prone to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the subject into conflict.

7. Persistent irritability.

(Note that according to the WHO, it takes only three such traits to be diagnosed as being dissocial).

It really does not matter whether we refer to it as sociopathy, psychopathy or dissocial personality disorder. What is crucial here is to understand that collectively, if not individually, the vast majority of Israeli and American Jews clearly display unmistakable signs of a what we could call a “collective personality disorder” and that it would be therefore extremely naive to expect them to act in in accordance with what sane people would consider a rational manner.

As soon as we factor in the fact that a large majority of Israeli and American Jews display all the signs of well developed personality disorder we can make sense of behavior which otherwise would seem just bizarre, criminal or self-defeating. Take for example the fact that 94% of Israeli Jews approved of the way the Gaza massacre was executed. That is a clear example of the kind of “lack of empathy” which sociopaths or dissocial individuals display. Or take the systematic violation of all norms of international law. Is that not a case of a “gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules and obligations”. And does the famous statement of Rabbi Yaacov Perrin “"One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail" not qualify as an extreme example of a “grandiose sense of self-worth?” Norman Finkelstein is quite correct when he says that Israel is a “lunatic state”. That is quite literally true.

If we now look again at Mearsheimer's two assumptions (#1: Israelis cannot kill or expel all the Palestinians and #2: American Jews will not support a Jewish Apartheid regime in Israel) we can clearly see how deeply flawed they are. While “normal” people are unlikely to engage in mass murder or support racist repression, people with a “aggressive narcissist” disorder run amok are, in fact, very likely to support both.

What this means for the Middle-East is that Israel cannot be expected to act as a “rational actor”. No matter what the Palestinians will say or do, the Israelis will view them as an existential threat. No matter what Iran does, Israel will also view it as an existential threat.

To the Israelis the notion “one man one vote”, when applied to both Jews and Palestinians, does not mean just the loss of their “identity”, but a “2^nd Holocaust”, something which they will accept under no circumstances. In their paranoid mind, to demand democracy for non-Jews in Israel is nothing less than demanding a collective suicide and that they will oppose by all, and I mean all, means.

Remember, Israeli Jews have shown no humanity at all to the Palestinians, and they are therefore quite certain that should the Palestinians ever be allowed to rule over them, even by casting an election ballot, that will result in a “2^nd Holocaust”.

Likewise, the very idea that Iran might one day, even in the distant future, acquire a nuclear weapon, even a single one, also immediately conjures images of a “2^nd Holocaust” in the Israeli collective mind. As for the argument that even if Iran acquired one or many nuclear devices and delivery vehicles, it would never dare to use them against Israel since Israel has several hundered such nuclear systems, and since the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has promised that the USA would “obliterate Iran” if it attacked Israel (nevermind that the USA has no treaty of any kind with Israel), this argument is worthless for the Israelis. First, because they expect the “Mullahs” of being just as crazy as they are, and second, because in their eyes a Jewish life has an almost infinite value whereas the life of a non-Jew is essentially worthless (that is what Rabbinical Judaism, that creation of the sect of the Pharisees, teaches in numerous passages of the Talmud). Mutual assured destruction just does not make sense if you assume that your opponent is utterly insane and if you believe that your opponent's life is worthless too.

Bottom line: the Israelis will attempt to either kill or expel the vast majority of Palestinians currently living in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel proper and they will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against any state or force which would threaten their ability to do so.

The case of American Jews is somewhat different. Except for a very few truly crazy characters, most of them realize that they are under no personal threat whatsoever, nor is their community in the USA. The key to understanding the outlook of American Jews is to realize a simple thing: neither Judaism, nor Zionism is really central to their identity. Most American Jews are either secular or very superficially religious: only 16% attend synagogue at least once a month, only 1/6^th of them maintain a kosher diet, and even a short visit to pretty much any US Jewish website will convince you that “intermarriage” and “apostasy” are major issues in the Jewish community. Yet, 80% of US Jews also claim a “strong connection” to Judaism. What does this mean? If it's not Judaism as a religion, and if it is not Zionism (or they would be living in Israel), then what is left?

What is left is what the Israeli investigative journalist Shraga Elam calls the “Holocaust Religion”, which Gilad Atzmon describes in the following manner:

'The Holocaust' is far more than historical narrative, it indeed contains most of the essential religious elements: it has its priests (Simon Wiesenthal, Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, etc.) and prophets (Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu and those who warn about the Iranian Judeocide to come). It has its commandments and dogmas ('never again', 'six million', etc.). It has its rituals (memorial days, Pilgrimage to Auschwitz etc.). It establishes an esoteric symbolic order (kapo, gas chambers, chimneys, dust, Musselmann, etc.). It has its shrines and temples (Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum and now the UN). If this is not enough, the Holocaust religion is also maintained by a massive economic network and global financial infrastructures (Holocaust industry a la Norman Finkelstein). Most interestingly, the Holocaust religion is coherent enough to define the new 'antichrists' (the Deniers) and it is powerful enough to persecute them (Holocaust denial laws).

At the center of this religion's dogmatic theology is the truly terrifying notion that each “goy” is a potential Himmler and that the only thing which can prevent an otherwise almost inevitable “2^nd Holocaust” are only two things: eternal Jewish vigilance and Jewish power.

This Holocaust religion is what is really at the core of identity of US Jews and its power is such that it can elicit the most contradictory behavior from otherwise very sane American Jews. A perfect example of the latter is the case of the only socialist in Congress, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont, who has had a long track of rather progressive views, but who actually voted for a resolution supporting the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 2006. This resolution actually included the following words:

“...recognizes Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcomes Israel’s continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties.“

How does a putative “socialist” suddenly find a way to praise “ Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss”?! The fear of AIPAC cannot explain that (Sanders openly opposed the war on Iraq). Nor is Sanders known to be a religious Jew, or a big supporter of Zionism. And yet, on this crucial vote, he voted against everything he supposedly stands for. Amazing, no?

In a tragic sense, the case of Sander is emblematic of most US Jews. Yes, most of them are liberals (at least in the US meaning of the word), and most of them care about human and civil rights. But when it comes to Israel, they are either supporters or, at best, they remain strangely silent, looking away from what is happening there.

It is quite true that the mass murder in Lebanon in 2006, followed by the mass murder in Gaza in 2008-2009, the current blockade of Gaza and the daily systematic and wholesale violation of basic human rights in occupied Palestine are having an impact on many American Jews¹. However, as I mentioned earlier, most of them would rather leave than “fight from within” and face the hateful mob and its accusations of being a “moser”, a “meshumad” or their modern and secular equivalent: a “self-hating Jew”. At a time when a Zionist with stellar credentials like Richard Goldstone can be called an “anti-Semite” by no less than an Israeli Minister, who would want to speak up against Zionist crimes? Sure, courageous dissidents like Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Philip Weiss or Max Blumenthal will stand up and denounce the likes of Dershowitz or Lieberman, but most will just quietly leave in disgust.

For most US Jews the unconditional support for Israel and its policies is not a political choice, it is an existential issue, almost a soteriological one: be it because Israeli Jews need to be saved from the evil Arabs and Muslims worldwide, or because Israel needs to be preserved as a “Jewish state” in case the local goyim bare their fangs and re-start the gas chambers – the support for Israel is not something which US Jews are ever going to seriously reconsider.

Paradoxically, the fact that Israel has become a pariah state and that Zionism is, yet again, seen as a violent and ugly form or racism (UN resolutions abrogating each other notwithstanding), makes diaspora Jews not less, but even more pro-Israeli. They see the worldwide opposition to Israeli polices and Zionist ideas as a clear sign of a resurgent “new anti-Semitism”. Just like in Bertold Brecht's nightmares, most Jews sincerely believe that “"The belly is still fertile that gave birth to the vile beast"² – and no amount of evidence to the contrary will change that. Since Israel has no friends (well, besides the USA, of course, and some politicians in Europe), then who will help it?

Botton line: hearing the distant voice of Hillel the Elder saying “If I am not for myself, who will be? And when I am for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?" most diaspora Jews will also “circle the wagon” and defend Israel no matter what, quite literally.

The situation for Israel is deteriorating very rapidly: Israel is losing on all fronts simultaneously: military, political, demographic, public image, social and economic – all the signs of a soon-to-come Götterdämmerung (“Teufeldämmerung” ?) are at hand and Ahmadinejad is absolutely correct when he says that Israel “is aware that it has reached the end of the line and will soon fade away from the earth”.

Take for example the BDS movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions): while its economic impact on Israel is negligible, its public-relations effect is huge: by raising the comparison between Israel and South African Apartheid, the BDS movement is achieving the delegitimization of the “Jewish state” which the Zionists greatly fear. Why? Because the real effect of the BDS movement is to make the unconditional support for Israel very costly for European and US politicians. Not now, not yet – but in the long run, support for Israel will become as socially unacceptable as the support for Apartheid South Africa.

With the current ruling elites in Europe and the USA, Israel is quite safe since these elites will always put their subservience to Israel above the will of their peoples. So for the immediate and near future, this diffuse danger will not materialize into a specific threat. But combined with a severe economic crisis, this frustration might just combine with a general alienation from the ruling elites and result in an eventual overthrow of the Zionist ruling elite. That is the real danger: not the elites turning away from their unconditional support for Israel, but these elites being overthrown in the course of a collapse of the socio-political system currently in power. In other words, not a change in government – which happens in the West on a regular basis, but a change in regime – something which has never happened in the history of the United States.

This is one of the reasons why the ruling elite in the USA is so terrified of the 9/11 Truth movement. If the general public would somehow truly become aware of the fact that 9/11 was, indeed an “inside job” this would delegitimize not only the current government or the Administration of George Bush Jr., but the entire structure of power. And once that regime crumbles, the blowback against the decades of abuse, exploitation and deception of the American people by the Zionists will be truly massive. This is the “big fear” behind all the curtailment of civil rights in the post 9/11 USA.

The regimes in Israel and the USA have gone from allies to accomplices and they are locked together into a “do or die” dynamic in which both regimes need to either maintain total control over as much of our planet as possible or perish. The irony, of course, is that this misguided “survival strategy” puts these two regimes or, should I say, this single bi-national regime, on a collision course with the rest of the planet. Bush's idiotic slogan about “you are either with us or against us” is now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy and it appears that nobody, besides a small plutocratic elite, is with the USA and Israel.

Barring some totally unforeseen development, we should expect that neither Israel nor the USA will in any way soften or otherwise alter their course. Israel will pursue a mix of two fundamental policies: external aggression and internal slow-motion genocide against the Palestinians. At the same time, both the USA and Israel will become weaker and weaker, not only in military terms, but also in political terms. This will lead them into a desperate attempt to “restore order” and go on the offensive against their enemies.

An attack against Iran is therefore inevitable. As is the use of nuclear weapons by Israel at some point in time. And even though both of these lunacies will fail to accomplish their stated objectives, both of them are inevitable simply because these are all the cards left in the US-Israeli Empire's hands.

On the Palestinians side the only viable strategy is extremely simple: the Palestinians need to return to the “three no's” of the 1967 Khartoum Resolution: "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." Furthermore, at least the third of the three no's should be extended to the USA itself (what is the point of “negotiating” with Rahm Emanuel and his minions?).

The Palestinians simply have no other option. Peace with those who see your extermination as a vital necessity and who view your very existence as an “existential threat” is pointless. “Recognizing Israel” simply means agreeing to the genocide of Palestinians. And, needless to say, there is absolutely nothing to negotiate about. Sadly, the situation in the Middle-East is one example of something exceedingly rare in international relations: a real zero-sum game in which any gain by one side entails a loss for the other side. In such a situation there is only one possible outcome: a complete and comprehensive victory by one side over the other.

On one side, we have the last openly racist state on the planet which has also succeeded in taking all the key power centers of a superpower like the USA and on the other – we have the rest of the planet and the very notions of decency, humanity, democracy, freedom, truth, justice and peace. In a deep sense, we are all Palestinians and we must globalize the Intifada. And, of course, we will prevail simply because what Israel stands for is inherently inhuman and evil and nothing can be truly built on evil. The Soviet Union had far more nuclear weapons than Israel will ever have, yet it was defeated by the combined action of innumerable factors which all contributed to its downfall. The same thing will happen to the “Jewish state of Israel”. One need not be steeped in the Three Laws of Dialectics to realize how unstable the current situation is: the writing is on the wall for Israel as a “Jewish state” with all that this abominable concept entails. Just like all the other abominable and anti-human ideologies which caused the deaths of millions of people in the 20^th century, Zionism will eventually defeats itself and cause the collapse of the nations which embraced it.

The Saker

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1 Hardcore Jew-haters and assorted racists can deny that ad nauseam, but Jews are humans “just like us”: they have the same basic conscience (what the Church Fathers called the “Law of the Heart”), the same inner sense of right and wrong, and to assume otherwise is mimicking the worst racism of the Pharisees, Talmudists and Kabbalists who believe that God had created “real humans” and “apparent humans”. From a Christian perspective, to deny the common humanity of all races (assuming there is such a thing as a 'race', which I personally doubt very much) is a modern version of the Iconoclast heresy: a denial of the image of God in all humans (Christianity see all humans as living icons in image, but not in likeness. [I apologize for this digression which I include solely for the benefit of those who daydream about some “Western Christian civilization” while they themselves subscribe to racist views which are nothing short of a grievous heresy from a traditional Christian point of view].

2“Der Bauch, aus dem das Boese kroch, ist fruchtbar noch”

The Banality of Jewish Symbolism by Gilad Atzmon

by Gilad Atzmon

In a remarkable exposé of the Mossad operation in Dubai, The Times happens to refer to Meir Dagan’s (the Mossad chief) ‘philosophy’. “The tone of Dagan’s directorship is set by a photograph on the wall of his modest office in the Tel Aviv headquarters. It shows an old Jew standing on the edge of a trench. An SS officer is aiming his rifle at the old man’s head. ‘This old Jew was my grandfather’ Dagan tells visitors”. According to The Times, the picture reflects Dagan’s belief: “We should be strong, use our brain, and defend ourselves so that the Holocaust will never be repeated,”

Dagan’s interpretation of the photographic symbolism as a license to kill is rather banal yet common amongst Jews and Zionists in particular. However, this interpretation is far from being the only interpretation available. I haven’t seen the Photograph on Dagan’s wall but I guess that it must depict a devastatingly intense situation between a murderer in Nazi uniform and an oppressed Jewish man facing his death. However, Dagan and to a certain tragic extent, far too many Jews, are clearly fascinated by the role of the man with a rifle rather than with the ordeal of their collective grandfather, a defenseless venerable victim. Instead of grasping the Holocaust as a universal message against racism or oppression of any kind, Dagan and his Jewish State interpret the holocaust as a license to execute.

Though the photograph can be realised as a simplistic symbolic binary opposition between the innocent (Jew) and the evil (Nazi) there is a further element in these photographs that is totally dismissed by Jewish post war political, intellectual and ideological discourse namely universalism. Unlike the Zionist or in our case Dagan, who draws some immediate murderous ‘operative’ conclusions that are there to serve the Jewish tribe and that tribe only, a humanist would stare at such a photograph and try to come up with some ideas that may present us all with some positive prospects of a better future for humanity as a whole.

In the late 1940’s a few sporadic Jewish thinkers insisted that after Auschwitz the Jews should position themselves at the forefront of the battle against evil. Not only has this never happened, the Jewish state is now established as the leading danger for world peace. Moreover, Jewish lobbies enthusiastically support racist ideologies (Zionism) and push for colonial expansionist and interventionist conflicts around the world.

“This old Jew was my grandfather” says the Mossad’s chief. Indeed, after the big war many Jews wanted to believe that the Holocaust provided them with an entry card into humanity for the Holocaust redeems the Jews from the original sin of Crucifixion. The Iconic image of the persecuted venerable collective ‘grandfather’ provides the Jew with a suffering symbol that could easily have stood a competition with Christ or any other emblem of religious persecution. In 1979, Pope John Paul II called Auschwitz the "Golgotha of the modern world." Yet, along this line of thinking, something went horribly wrong. While Jesus’ suffering is interpreted by his followers as a call for mercy and compassion, Dagan’s grandfather’s shoa experience is interpreted by the national Jew as a call for retribution and vengeance. As disastrous as it may sound, the holocaust religion that was recognized by Israeli Philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz as the new Jewish religion, is nothing less than a crude and sinister call for murder. It is probably the most resentful religion known to man.

In 1844 Karl Marx argued that for humanity to liberate itself it first must emancipate itself of Judaism*. Karl Marx was not at all a racist, he was probably referring to Jewish ideology (Jewishness) which he knew closely. I would maintain that if we want to find the road to humanism we must liberate ourselves of the Holocaust religion. The Holocaust as a message failed to become a universal call. Instead it matured into a tribal religion that opposes every value humanity and humanism have ever stood for.

Many of us including me tend to equate Israel to Nazi Germany. Rather often I myself join others and argue that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. I want to take this opportunity to amend my statement. Israelis are not the Nazis of our time and the Nazis were not the Israelis of their time. Israel, is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany and the above equation is simply meaningless and misleading.

In the past I mentioned that unlike totalitarian Nazi Germany, the Jewish State is a ‘democracy’. In other words, the entirety of its Jewish population is complicit in IDF crimes against humanity. As if this is not enough, the fact that 94% of Israel’s Jewish population supported the IDF genocidal attack in Gaza just over a year ago makes the case against Israel solid like a rock.

But there is another point that must be mentioned here. As we all know very well, Nazi Germany didn’t like its Jews. It introduced racial laws, it aimed to cleanse Germany and even the rest of Europe of its Jewish population. It didn’t want to see Jews in politics, in the workplace, in shops, in the media, in the banks and in the streets. As resentful as Nazi policies were, one thing was clear. Germany did it all in the open. It didn’t hide a thing. It was racist and it was proud about its bigotry. Israel and its Jewish lobbies on the other hand, are doing it all in a deceiving method. Rather than saying we hate Arabs, we want Muslims out or even dead, rather than admitting its ethnic cleansing policies and practices, Israel always kills in the name of a grand ‘progressive’ ideology: in the name of democracy, pluralism, ‘moral interventionism’, ‘war against terror’ and so on. Israel’s supporters around the world are doing very much the same, they preach for war in the name of ‘noble motives’, they always want to ‘liberate’ other people, and to teach them about the greatest values of the ‘democracy’ through military expansionist interventionism.

The legendary Israeli humanist Israel Shahak wrote in the late 1980’s about his experience as a Jew under Nazi occupation: "if you enter a square from which there are three exits, one guarded by a German SS man, one by an Ukrainian and one by a Jewish policeman, then you should first try to pass the German, and then maybe the Ukrainian, but never the Jew."

I must say it loudly. I take Shahak’s advice very seriously. If I ever enter a square from which there are two exits, one Guarded by a Nazi officer holding a rifle and the other blocked by Meir Dagan holding a pillow, I will certainly go for the Nazi with no hesitation.

Mossad Chief Meir Dagan holding a pillow (photoshop collage)

* On The Jewish Question-Karl Marx 1844 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

After all I am a Proper Zionist Jew

by Gilad Atzmon

Yes, I am a survivor, for I have managed to survive all the scary accounts of the Holocaust: the one about the soap (1), the one about the lamp shades, the one about the camps, the mass shooting, the one about the gas (2) and the one about the death march (3). I just managed to survive them all.

In spite of all these fear inflicting stories, that were purposely installed in my soul since I opened my eyes for the first time, I have become a functional and even a successful human being. I somehow survived the horror against all odds. I even manage to love my neighbour. In spite of all these fearful, traumatic indoctrination I miraculously managed to master my cheering alto saxophone rather than the sobbing violin.

In fact, I have already decided that in case the Queen, or any other member of the Royal Family should ever consider to make me into a ‘Sir’ for my bebop achievements, or even for facing Zionist barbarism with my bare pen, I will immediately change my surname from Atzmon to Vive, just to become the first and only Sir Vive.

I am also totally against Holocaust denial

I clearly resent those who deny the genocides that are taking place in the name of the Holocaust. Palestine is one example, Iraq is another and the one that is set for Iran, is probably too scary to contemplate.

The Holocaust is a relatively new religion (4). It lacks mercy or compassion, instead it promises revenge through retribution. For its followers, it is somehow liberating because it allows them to punish whoever they like as long they gain some pleasure. This may explain why the Israelis ended up punishing the Palestinians for crimes that were committed by Europeans. It is rather clear that the newly emerging religion is not just about ‘eye for an eye’; it is actually an eye for thousands and thousands of eyes.

A month ago, while visiting in Auschwitz, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak left a note in the official visitors book: ‘a strong Israel is both the comfort and the revenge’(5). No one could summarise the aspiration of the religion any better. The Holocaust religion doesn’t offer redemption. It is a crude violent manifestation of sheer collective brutality. It cannot resolve anything, for aggression can only lead to more and more aggression. In the Holocaust religion there is neither room for peace or grace. Take it from Barak, revenge is where they find comfort.

To deny the danger posed by the Holocaust religion and its followers is to be complicit in a growing crime against humanity and against every possible human value.

I am also in total support of the Jewish National Project

Some believe that after 2000 years of ‘phantasmic Diaspora’ Jews are indeed entitled to an imaginary ‘national home land of their own’. The Zionists apparently meant it sincerely. The Jewish state is now realistic enough to have turned the entire Middle East into a ticking bomb.

Reviewing the Israeli record of crimes against humanity in the last six decades doesn’t leave much room for speculation. We are dealing here with a pathological sinister society. Hence, as much as some of us may agree that Jews should enjoy a hypothetical right for a land of their own, planet Earth is certainly not the ideal location for such an affair.

Hence, I would urge NASA to join in and to make a special effort to find a suitable alternative planet for the Zionist homeland in outer space or even in another galaxy. The Galactic Zionist project would signify the immediate move from ‘promised land’ to ‘promised planet’. I would enthusiastically stress that rather than searching for ‘a land with no people for a people with no land’, what we really want is a ‘lonely planet’. It can even be a ‘desert’ for they claim to know how to make the desert bloom. In a planet of their own the galactic Zionists wouldn’t need to oppress anyone, they wouldn’t ethnically cleanse either, they wouldn’t have to lock the indigenous people in concentration camps, for there won’t be any indigenous people around to abuse, starve, murder and cleanse. They wouldn’t have to pour white phosphorous over their neighbours for there won’t be any neighbours. I would highly recommend NASA to search for a planet with very low gravity just to make it light for people to wander around. After all, we want the new galactic Zionists to enjoy their futuristic project as much as the Palestinians and many others may enjoy their absence.

So here I am, a proper Jew after all: I am a survivor, I oppose Holocaust denial, I support the Jewish national aspiration. Even the chief Rabbi of Britain cannot ask for more than that.
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(1) Acknowledged recently to be a ‘myth’ by the Israeli holocaust museum Yad Vashem
(2) A historical fact protected by European Law.
(3) A slightly confusing narrative. If the Nazis were interested in annihilating the entire European Jewish population as suggested by the orthodox Zionist holocaust narrative, then it is rather ambiguous as to just what led them to march what was left of European Jewry, into their crumbling Nazi fatherland at a time when it was clear that they were losing the war. The two narratives i.e. ‘annihilation’ and ‘death march’, seem to oppose each other. The issue deserves further elaboration. I would just suggest that the reasonable answers I have come across may severely damage the Zionist holocaust narrative.
(4) The Israeli Philosophy professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz was probably the first to define the holocaust as the ‘new Jewish religion’.
(5) http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3790707,00.html

Zionism and the Colonization of Language

by Roger Tucker

Part II - The Emperor Has No Clothes: Of Genes and Memes

This is the second in a three part series that deals with the phenomenon we call "the State of Israel." This can only be a rudimentary sketch, of course, as the subject is vast and this essay must be very brief. Israel is not a nation-state like other nation-states, which accounts for the hysterical attempts of the Zionists to sell the idea that it is. Israel is what used to be called a Rube Goldberg machine , in this case a jury-rigged attempt to create a modern state out of nothing but an ideology consisting of tribal fantasies and deep-seated paranoia, and to do so through the violent colonization of an already well-established society. An excellent piece on this topic is Interpreting the Zionist Dream, by Gilad Atzmon. To put it another way, an ideology had to be constructed, a people had to be invented; a colony had to be planted in an arbitrarily chosen place, populated by this newly invented people who in turn had to be swindled into thinking they were doing something that made some sort of sense. That the con artists who pulled off this real estate scam were successful is a marvel that never ceases to astonish me.

Everything that happens is the result of previous causes and conditions, so how do we account for the establishment and continued existence of this house of cards known as Israel? I am going to take an unusual approach to this question, which involves understanding genes and memes. Charles Darwin, in his seminal works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, described the evolution of all living beings, including human beings. What he called the process of natural selection is now understood to be mediated through the mutations of genes, biochemical strands of coded information that make possible the replication of life forms. However, human genetic revolution effectively stopped occurring some five thousand years ago. Jared Diamond, in his masterful work, Guns, Germs and Steel, takes up where Darwin left off, describing the process of cultural evolution. He enumerates a broad set of conditions that are conducive to technological and economic development, but he postulates no mechanism similar to genes. A number of people are of the opinion that cultural evolution is mediated by a set of different transmitters of information, analogous to genes, that have been termed memes. Rather than consisting of biochemical units that together constitute a code, memes are mental in nature, consisting of patterned connections in the brain, which when strung together emerge as thoughts. As memes are culturally transmitted thoughts, they must be spread through the agency of language. The emerging science of memetics is new and not yet part of the canon - there is still a great deal of work to be done in that area - but the notion of memes has become popular and comes in handy when one tries to understand why people do what they do, particularly when it appears to be clearly against their own self-interest.

Memes are cultural replicators, just as genes replicate the information that organize the development of life forms. As memes are unconscious, we aren't aware of how they form our thoughts and ideas, which can lead to bizarre results. Memes that reinforce one another become "complex memes." To quote Roger Cohen, in an article in the NYT writes, "here’s Netanyahu’s summary of the struggle of our age: 'It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.'." The insanity of the Zionist project is encapsulated in those words, the projection onto the "other" of one's own psychopathology. It is Mr. Hyde pontificating about the primitive and dangerous Dr. Jeckyl. Cohen merely calls it "facile and unhelpful." The Nobel Prize winning South African novelist J.M. Coetzee, in his 'Waiting for the Barbarians,' illuminates this myopic, Eurocentric supremacist view and where it leads to. Until Cohen and myriads of other Gatekeepers like him wake up and see Israel and Zionism for what they are, the sufferings of tens of millions of people will just continue.

The most complex memes become organized into belief systems, in which all the various elements are solidified into one seamless whole. They manifest as ideologies and religions. Israel is the embodiment of the ideological belief system called Zionism, supported by its symbiotic religion, the Holycause. They are like the two sides of a sacred scroll, placed in a Sanctum Sanctorum dedicated to their new God, the Golem (a creature, like all gods, of their own making). If one can break the seal and take a peek inside, what do we find? - a little boy pissing his pants. Like all schoolyard bullies, imitating their abusers, the Israelis are craven cowards underneath all the macho bravado. When the media announced that primitive weapons like Scuds were being fired by the Iraqis, or Qassams by the Palestinians, all of Israeli society would go bananas in a paroxysm of fear, hiding in basements, taping up windows, donning gas masks and the like. In south Lebanon they ran like rabbits when they met any organized resistance. But they become ecstatic when their "boys" are murdering civilians by the hundreds - 85% of Israelis approved of the Gaza Massacre. It is a very sick society.

There would have been no Israel without the Nazi project of rounding up European Jews and sticking them in concentration camps. This dreadful process, a preparatory step to repeating an old, familiar pattern in European history (the 40th expulsion of the Jews from Europe), gave birth to the Holocult, a religion arising out of post-traumatic stress disorder and based on the mythology that became attached to it, a mythology fiercely protected by a new Holy Inquisition. Without it the fascist fantasies of the political Zionists could never have taken root nor have withstood the test of time. The complex memes of Zionism and the Holycause are symbiotic and must be deconstructed as an inseparable pair - a two-piece suit worn by an Emperor with no clothes - or they will just continue to replicate and the Jewish State will continue to bedevil and threaten the world with wholesale destruction.

How Does the World Protect Itself from Israel and the Scourge of Zionism?

by Roger Tucker

There are many people, "progressive" Zionists included, who loudly object to the Occupation in the Palestinian territories, but see no problem with the continued existence of an Israel that privileges Jews over all others who happen to live there, particularly the Muslim, Christian and other non-Jewish" citizens." These people are referred to by Zionists as the "Arab-Israelis," but they are, of course, Palestinians. This population also includes a small number of Jews, people whose residence in Palestine pre-dated the Zionist immigration that started in the late 19th century. Those among them - and they may constitute the majority - who never bought into the Zionist ideology and are opposed to the State of Israel are treated pretty much the same as the other Palestinians, as less than human, untermenschen. This may come as a surprise to many, but it is perfectly understandable when one realizes that the Zionist project, although initially proposed and marketed by Western Europeans, became in due course an entirely Ashkenazi endeavor dominated by Eastern Europeans, the kind of people despised by the highly educated, cosmopolitan Viennese Jews like Theodor Herzl. These Ashkenazim (my ancestors) spoke Yiddish as their first language, no matter which country they happened to have been born in. The form of Zionism they promulgated has become known as "political Zionism," dominated by the followers of Vladimir Jabotinski, the father of 20th century Zionism, and the progenitor of the Likud Party. The opposition Labor Party stems from Ben Gurion, but the two parties are like the Republicrats in the U.S., two sides of the same coin.

Political Zionism is a far cry from the idealistic form that refined, cosmopolitan Jews like Herzl and his Western European (and North American) admirers thought that they had bought into. That is why the vast majority of them became disillusioned with the whole project long before Kristallnacht and then WWII. People like Einstein, Freud, Hannah Arendt, Judah Magnes and Martin Buber smelled a rat, and they made it clear that they had no interest in supporting the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine. This was, in fact, the prevailing sentiment among the vast majority of Western European and North American Jews. All of that began to change in the late 30's and by the time of the liberation of the camps in 1945 this vociferous opposition faded away among Jewish liberals, progressives, socialists and humanists. European fascism of the Italian and German varieties ensured the success of political Zionism, the mirror image of Nazism, but with "the Jewish People" now cast as being simultaneously "the victims" and the "Master Race," just like their role models, the Nazis, before them. History not only repeats itself - it plays practical jokes.

Being against the Occupation is easy. After all, it violates numerous international conventions, entails daily crimes against humanity and just plain stinks to heaven. With a modicum of imagination, one can see that the Israelis, with their Matrix of Control, have erected a number of open air prisons, virtual concentration camps, but with the guards outside. So convenient - prisons in which the prisoners have to fend for themselves for the necessities of life - food, water, electricity - all of it supplied or witheld at the whim of the wardens who watch from a distance, utilizing collaborators and the latest in high-tech surveillance gear. Occasionaly, usually prompted by some act of desperation by a powerless people (a suicide bombing or a stray Qassam rocket, the modern equivalent of sling-shots), or merely a rumor that something's going on, they make periodic forays inside to "send a message," arrest "troublemakers," usually using Palestinian children as human shields and to touch off whatever booby traps might have been placed along the way. Occasionally, "sending a message" takes the form of a full-fledged massacre, as happened recently in Gaza. It's utterly despicable, reeking of the most egregious racism imaginable without even the slightest regard for human rights. But from the Israeli point of view the Palestinians aren't really human - they are "them," "the other," "the enemy."

However, there are those perfectly aware of the facts who still cling to the doomed fantasy of a Jewish State. They are people like Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who scrupulously chronicled the Nakba, but continues to support the existence of the Jewish State, even if that entails the total ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Likewise the old warhorse Uri Avnery, one of the most decent and courageous human beings I know of, who has heroically spoken out for decades against the obscenities perpetrated by Israel, yet clings to the notion that Israel could and should somehow survive as a Jewish nation, no matter how truncated. And then there is the army of so-called "progressives," who think likewise, and avidly support an imagined, reformed Israel while protesting against the Occupation. These people have co-opted any possibility that the world could easily come together to put an end to apartheid Israel as it did white supremacist South Africa.

The "Separation Wall" introduces an additional level of surrealism. Its similarity to the ghetto walls that the European Jews were so familiar with, that in a curious way provided a sense of comfort, familiarity and security to their residents - whatever the intentions of the builders may have been - has been noted by many. The transparently silly notion that it would "keep out terrorists" is far less convincing than the realization that it was a familiar reflex of the ancient paranoia - a tangible, if pathetic, defense against the goyim of whichever land the Jews were trespassing in. Always the trespassers, always the strangers in a strange land, doomed to stave off, for as long as possible, the inevitable rage their presence sooner or later engendered, the restrictions, the pogroms, and then, like clockwork, the expulsions. Behind the bellicose, militaristic, macho aggression of the Israelis - the arrogance and the gratuitous cruelty - lie the old fears, the inescapable paranoia, the unvoiced fear that "the Chosen Ones" were really chosen to suffer, and that sooner or later the ax would fall - as it surely will, because even the Zionists can't repeal the law of cause and effect. Who was it, Einstein, who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result?

But let's assume that, miraculus miraculorum, the Israelis decide to back off (or, much more likely, are pressured to by the Obama administration and/or other forces currently percolating just beneath the surface), and, having completed their Apartheid wall, agree to remain behind it, content in their air-conditioned ghetto. At this point in time such an action would involve an actual commitment to allowing the creation of at least some facsimile of a Palestinian State on the other side of the wall, to somehow overseeing the evacuation of some half million Israelis from the West Bank (which would entail the forcible eviction of tens of thousands of fanatical settlers), to giving up control of all of the major water sources, to allowing the Palestinians the freedom to come and go as they see fit, and so on and so forth. When looked at closely, ending the Occupation at this juncture would necessitate unimaginable difficulties, not the least of which would be giving up the Zionist fantasy of Greater Israel, from the river to the sea. I don't speak of the grander version, meaning from the Euphrates to the Nile, but merely from the Jordan River to the Med.

In fact, it would entail giving up on Zionism altogether, because ethnocentric tribal fascism has an internal logic to it, a compulsion to conquer and expand or die - perpetual war is a necessary precondition for maintaining the dominance of its ruling class, whose very existence is predicated on doing battle with and defeating "the enemy," over and over again. Such a process inevitably plays itself out in defeat, as Alexander and the Macedonians discovered, as did the Romans, and most recently the Nazis. The Israeli power elite may be very smart and knowledgeable, technologically and militarily superior, but they are clearly ignoring Santayana's maxim that those who don't know history are bound to repeat it. No people are guiltier of that mistake than the Jews, who after centuries of getting themselves expelled from country after country, are setting themselves up for something that will make even what happened to them under Hitler look like a cakewalk.

When we talk about Zionism we are discussing an ideology, a set of ideas, narratives and myths that together constitute the political world view of a those who self-identify as belonging to the group professing that ideology, in this instance "the Jewish people." Although ideologies may present themselves as being universally true, they are generally based on some sort of group identification: tribal, ethnic (racial), national, religious, caste, and most recently, economic status. There is always an "Us" vs. "Them."

What after all is Zionism, stripped of its racial romanticism and mythology? It's essentially the last gasp of the same old European colonialism that has characterized the "modern" period of history, during which various European powers came to dominate the political, technological and economic landscape of the planet. Zionism evolved as a political ideology and a strategy to solve the problem that European Jews found themselves in, stateless and dispersed following the predations of the Mongols under Genghis Khan and the subsequent collapse of the Khazarian Empire. Their status pretty much everywhere in Europe was that of a despised minority (for perfectly understandable reasons too complex to go into here). In response, they developed a tribal mythology, based mostly on some stories in the Hebrew bible, in which they played the role of "the Chosen People," heroes of an epic in which they were constantly set upon, persecuted and threatened with destruction, but somehow feisty enough to survive. In other words, one could say that they developed a collective case of paranoid schizophrenia, according to which they (simultaneously the Elect of God and His victims) were constantly under attack by superior forces, but could imagine a way to escape and secure for themselves the sense of security they so desperately sought, a ghetto with walls strong and durable enough to keep the wolf perpetually at bay.

All this came to a head in the 19th Century, when the idea occurred to Theodor Herzl that the way out of this depressingly familiar pattern would be for the Jews to have a nation state of their own. This happened, not coincidentally, at the height of European Colonialism. Based on this rather simple notion an entire ideology had to be constructed in order to sell the idea, not only to the major players themselves, but to the so-called Jewish people. In order to do that, and this is just one aspect of a very complicated and not very funny joke, the "Jewish People" had to be invented. This is the subject of the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand's book, The Invention of the Jewish People. The forthcoming English translation (it will be available on October 19th) is eagerly anticipated . We can leave aside the fact that the notion that a Jewish colony could and should be planted in Palestine was actually a hare-brained scheme concocted in the first decade of the 19th Century in the British Foreign Office, where the idea soon died a quiet and unlamented death. And nevermind that gathering the Jews together in a ghetto constructed in the very epicenter of a people understandably indisposed to being dispossessed might bring about precisely the fate that the Zionists were and are so terrified of.

If one roots around in the online repository called "Zionist Quotes" one can find the intellectual building blocks that created modern Israel.They reveal that very process of inventing the necessary ideology, as well as the development of an overall strategy for going about the creation of the colonialist-settler nation state. Contained therein are numerous reflections about the nature of "the Jewish People" and Jewish identity that would have "the Inquisition" (those who maintain the Zionist orthodoxy) in a characteristic uproar about "antisemitism" and "self-hating Jews." They largely saw themselves as outcasts, almost like lepers who have decided they themselves would build a leper colony wherein they could be quarantined and thus left alone. It becomes clear from these texts that the early Zionists almost reveled in guilt and self-hatred, something that is so characteristic of Jewish literature, and lies, shadow-like, at the root of modern, triumphalist Zionism. As Karin Friedemann points out, "The Palestinians’ ancestors created the Hasmonean Kingdom, composed the Hebrew Bible, followed Jesus, wrote the New Testament, compiled the Mishnah, and redacted the Jerusalem Talmud. The Palestinian people constitute the living link to the earliest beginnings of the heritage from the Torah and Gospel. Zionists are almost pitiable, for they are so ashamed of their own history that they have usurped one belonging to another people."

There is a category of political ideologies that Zionism fits perfectly into. It is called fascism. Although the dictionaries define fascism as the particular ideology espoused by Hitler and Mussolini in the 20th century, the roots of fascism go back to the very first emergence in human history of what could be termed political thought . Those familiar with the great spiritual traditions are aware that the principal obstacle to human wisdom and happiness is considered to be our habit of putting our own interests before those of others, as opposed to some variation of the Golden Rule, the point where all wisdom traditions, even theistic religions, agree. The opposite, neurotic tendency derives from the mistaken belief that we are solid, continuous individuals, self-existing and autonomous. Hence the notions of "self," or "soul," as well as belief systems that inculcate the notion that God (a religious metaphorical term that solidifies and embodies all that is not "me") is at least on "our" side. All wisdom paths teach that dissolving this mistaken belief in the existence of "ego" is the only way of arriving at any sort of genuine sanity.

What is not talked about so much is the problem of "group ego," which is essentially the same psychological phenomenon, but applied to a collection of people with whom we closely identify rather than just our individual selves. This propensity manifests itself first in our close identification with our family and then extends out to include our felt bond with friends, neighbors, town or city, and so on, until it includes such collective concepts as our co-religionists, our gender, nation, race, class and so forth. This is the Us and Them duality that mirrors the basic duality of Self and Other. It is the underlying rationale for all wars and acts of officially sanctioned aggression against the "Other." Consequently, building a sane human society is not possible without conquering this tendency to elevate and privilege "our" group over others. Psychologically speaking, rooting for the Red Sox or the Yankees involves the same psycho-dynamics that lead to deadly riots in soccer stadiums, and on to wars of aggression. It is neither good nor bad, rather it is simply a stage to be experienced and then left behind on the path to maturity, a condition that is characterized by, among other things, the awareness that all beings are connected and interdependent.

The development of both individual and group egos are artifacts of a natural psychological process. Just as the butterfly is the final form following embryo, larva and pupa; and the lotus flower follows seed, root and stem, human beings undergo a similar metamorphosis. Conventional political views are characteristic of an adolescent stage of life that primarily concerns itself with one's perceived individual and group interests. Such views naturally clash with how others perceive their interests, and the results are obvious when we watch the news. The conditions created by invoking the "I" as opposed to "You," or the "We" as opposed to "Them," creates a battleground wherein the destructive emotions of passion, aggression, ignorance, arrogance and envy are given full play. Clearly, human society as a whole has not yet evolved beyond this stage of social development. But the possibility is there, just as the seed prefigures the flower. A number of people, those who have embodied wisdom from many places and traditions, have shown the way, though few follow. The path to a genuine "adulthood" is difficult, particularly from within the lunatic asylum where we find ourselves, but it is traversible.

What we have been talking about is fascism, the ideological underpinning of the Jewish State. There is also a religious underpinning (not Judaism - the Jewish Zionists, after all, are and always have been overwhelmingly secular), and that is the Holycause (not to say that Jewish religious fundamentalism doesn't play a part). The ideology and the religion are symbiotic, as has always been the case in human societies. Church and State reinforce and support one another. The Holycause is remarkably similar to the underlying myth of Christianity, that someone, after undergoing unimaginable agony, died for our sins. In the case of the Holycause, six million Jews died so that Israel could be born. Never mind that the six million number goes back to 1912 (a vague guess at the number of Jews in Europe at the time) and only later became attached to the Jewish victims of the Third Reich (one of many disputed or easily refutable "facts" enumerated by the "official" version of the Holocaust, but woe betide any truthseekers who dare to undertake a critical analysis of what actually happened - you will be hauled before the ever vigilant officers of the Holycause Inquisition, and betimes taken to the rack). We are talking about a religion and therefore facts are fungible, as their meaning is symbolic rather than historical. And never mind that the actual survivors of that catastrophe who now live in Israel are a despised underclass (one third of them living in dire poverty), treated with utter contempt by the native born Israelis who are so fiercely proud of their manly, heroic battle against the fearsome foe. It is not the real victims who matter (the Zionists willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of European Jews in pursuit of their goal), but the symbolism of their victimhood.

The Zionists remain in total denial. As Saree Makdisi points out, they are able to blithely build a "Museum of Tolerance" above the graves of a centuries old Palestinian cemetary, the people they have been assiduously trying to exterminate, without showing any signs of cognitive dissonance. He refers to it as a horizontal wall, to complement the vertical Separation Wall being constructed in Jerusalem. The whole process of creating an impregnable ghetto, bristling with overpowering firepower, only invites destruction. This is, indeed, the goal of Christian Zionism, the cult of the Rapture, which foresees the end of the world and the final elimination of the Jews. They are perhaps even more psychotic than the Jewish Zionists. One could say, in the poetic language of the Abrahamic tradition, that the State of Israel is the Devil's masterpiece.

There is really only one way to resolve the dilemma posed by the existence of the Jewish state in humanity's heartland, and that is to change the existing configuration, a Rube Goldberg political contraption designed to maintain a Jewish majority in a putative Western-style democracy. The obvious alternative is the gold standard of contemporary nation states, a secular, pluralistic democracy consisting of all those who have an obvious right to be there (this includes all of the Palestinians, wherever they happen to be currently residing, as is clearly enshrined in international law), but does not necessarily include recent immigrants, particularly the fanatics from Brooklyn who form the majority of the illegal settlers (well, they're all illegal, but what is meant here is illegal even according to Israeli law), nor would it include recently arrived terrorists like the Moldavian Avigdor Lieberman. Anyone not born there would be subject to deportation. To use a well known phrase, this would entail wiping Israel off the map. That would be a great boon to the mapmakers, as the Israelis have always refused to define their borders, pending the establishment of Greater Israel.

This can be brought about through a purely political process that doesn't require the spilling of one drop of blood. It would be like extinguishing a raging fire that has gotten totally out of control and is threatening to consume much of the world. Yes, they do have nuclear weapons, and they aren't shy about what they call "the Sampson option." There is no use in hoping that governments will solve this problem - the Zionists have managed to get their hands on all the levers of power in most of what is called the First World, particularly in the U.S., the heart of the Empire. Only ordinary people, and most particularly those Jews who haven't fallen under the hypnotic spell of Zionist hasbara - by fearlessly proclaiming truth to power - have any hope of waking up slumbering humanity and avoiding the seemingly inevitable. Zionists take heed - to quote a poetic metaphor from the bible, "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I shall repay." Or, as it is expressed in post-modernist America, "what goes around comes around."