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January 07, 2009

More Israeli Jews speak out against Israel's mistreatment of Gaza

Yesterday it was Avi Shlaim with How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. Today it's Victoria Buch with The History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing.

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions:

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

The whole "Greater Israel" goal was part and parcel of the ideology of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was so odiously racist that he was shunned and his political party was banned in the very same Israel which Avi Shlaim is (justly IMHO) criticizing here. Yet who do the rhetorically jack-booted Israeli apologists here in America appeal to in making their arguments? Rabbi Meir Kahane. And as if to test the absurd extremities of glib irony, this one throws in the "anti-semite" charge against all who disagree for good measure.

Victoria Buch is an Israeli academic and anti-Occupation activist.

I arrived in Israel 40 years ago. It took me many years to understand that the very existence of my country, as it is today, is based on an ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The project started many years ago. Its seed can be traced to the basic fallacy of the Zionist movement, which set out to establish a Jewish-national state in a location already inhabited by another nation. Under these conditions, one has, at most, a moral right to strive for a bi-national state; establishing a national state implies, more or less by definition, ethnic cleansing of the previous inhabitants.

Albert Einstein grasped this fallacy a long time ago. A short time after WWI "Einstein complained that the Zionists were not doing enough to reach agreement with the Palestinian Arabs…He favored a binational solution in Palestine and warned Chaim Weizmann against `Prussian style` nationalism"

I recognize that my continuing to harp on this subject is probably an exercise in futility. The harsh reality is that racism is a seamy underbelly of far more of our fellow humans than we'd like to believe. I have repeatedly and consistently repudiated Hamas and it's bloodthirsty ideology and I'm doing so yet again here. Hamas is racist, bloodthirsty and ultimately bears enormous responsibility for the suffering of Gazans. Nothing mitigates that self-evident reality. Neither does anything mitigate the somewhat kinder and gentler, but nonetheless bloodthirsty, racism of Zionists which more and more Israeli Jews like Shlaim and Buch are pointing out.

A pox on all their houses!

If only it were so easily dismissed. But it's not. MY tax dollars are funding the racist ideology of one side and MY national leaders continue to offer rhetorical aid and comfort to one side. That makes it MY ongoing problem whether I like it or not. But as futile as my insignificant pushback here may be, I'm at a loss as to how to more effectively pushback.

Posted by Kevin at January 7, 2009 01:50 AM