Posts Tagged ‘international boycott movement’
How Israel is Losing the Public Relations Battle
As if it is a matter of public relation that could clear up the evidences of apartheid activities and absolve the consistent atrocities committed on the occupied Palestinians…
Juan Cole In Informed Comment posted on July 12 under “Top 5 Reasons Israel is Losing the Public Relations Battle“:
Right wing Israeli officials are concerned about attempts to ‘delegitimize” Israel. They are heavily funding former officials and intellectuals to attempt to combat this perceived trend. (Just perceived?)
It seems obvious that Israel is gradually sinking in the perception of the outside world, and there are concrete reasons for this change.
Most of these reasons derive from the train wreck that is Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Israeli blockade on the civilians of the Gaza Strip.
Other reasons derive from the hawkishness of the Likud government and its Kadima predecessor. They have nothing to do with anti-Israel sentiments or hatred of Jews: No one is condemning the municipality of Haifa or the administration of Tel Aviv.
The criticisms are pointing at the aggressive expansionist and a trigger-happy government. The criticisms are getting louder and more mainstream, with potentially deleterious effects on Israel’s economy as time goes on.
1. Giving the finger to any “peace process”. Israeli land theft in the Palestinian West Bank has reached epic proportions under PM Binyamin Netanyahu, with settlement populations surging 18%. The right-wing in Israel is so isolated from the real world that they have begun claiming that the Palestinian territories are not even occupied.
They claim that the Palestinian rejection of Israel’s right to exist forces them to occupy Palestine (in fact, the PLO recognized Israel as part of the Oslo accords, after which the Israelis royally screwed the Palestinians over).
They distort history and say the most ridiculous things, such as that the League of Nations Mandate awarded to Britain in the 1920s allows them to keep stealing Palestinian land and water without recompensing them!
The brazenness and zombie-like relentlessness of this march onto other people’s land has provoked an increasingly influential international boycott movement, targeting the ‘settler-industrial complex’ that preys on the hapless Palestinians under Israel’s control.
That is why the Church of England recently endorsed a World Council of Churches-inspired program that brings people to the Occupied Territories to see for themselves what Occupation is doing to the stateless and rights-less Palestinians. The resolution was a major defeat for the Likud, right-wing branches of Zionism.
Likewise, the US Presbyterian Church very nearly adopted a resolution to divest from companies perceived as enabling the Israeli land grab in the West Bank. As it was, they urged positive investment to help the Palestinian victims of Israeli injustice. These votes are straws in the wind.
As Israel moves formally to incorporate the West Bank into itself, it must offer citizenship to the Palestinians on the land it covets, or else it would perpetuate the new Apartheid.
2. Hypocrisy: Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps threatening to launch a war on Iran and urging the Israelis to sacrifice their young people in order to stop Iran from continuing to enrich uranium (Iran says the enrichment is for peaceful energy purposes and there is no good evidence to the contrary).
Israel itself not only enriched uranium, it made 400 nuclear bombs. There are allegations by an Israeli and American journalist that Israel’s Mossad spy agency has murdered a series of Iranian scientists. (If Iran were alleged to have done something similar at Dimona in Israel, all hell would have broken loose).
And, it now turns out that Benjamin Netanyahu was involved in a spy ring that smuggled nuclear triggers out of the United States to Israel. Israel is alleged routinely to threaten to use its nuclear weapons if it doesn’t get its way, deploying a sort of nuclear blackmail. It is very hard to see why Iran’s population should be reduced to a fourth world standard of living by international sanctions for doing much, much less than Israel has done, or why Netanyahu should be able to smuggle US high-tech out of this country with impunity.
3. Disregard for the rule of law: The Israeli practice of kidnapping Palestinians at will and holding them indefinitely without trial is abhorrent to all civilized persons. (They call it ‘administrative detention in Tel Aviv.) (Over 60% of Palestinian youth have experienced Israel detention centers in order to prevent them from circulating…)
If a Palestinian is suspected of having actually committed a crime, then it should be possible to present evidence for it and to try the person.
Israel took the Palestinian soccer player Mahmoud Sarsak into custody three years ago, and only just released him under severe international pressure. The Israelis say he is an Islamic Jihad terrorist, but clearly have no good evidence for this charge or they would have tried him. Instead, they just put him away, apparently forever. He went on a hunger strike that endangered his life, and provoked widespread protests from the soccer playing lobby.
Sarsak’s plight also elicited a condemnation from the Austrian senate (Bundesrat). Israeli complaints that criticizing ‘administrative detention’ is ‘anti-Semitic’ and that after all Syria is doing something much worse are absolutely painful to hear.
It is playground ethics: ‘he hit me first,’ ‘you just don’t like me,’ ‘why punish me when other kids have done really bad things?’
The Israelis would benefit from a reading of the Universal declaration of Human Rights and of the US Bill of Rights on issues such as a fair and speedy trial for everyone arrested, and from an acquaintance with the basic international law of Occupations, which rules out most of their practices toward the Palestinians.
Note that when the Bush Jr. administration attempted to make Guantanamo a legal black hole, the US Supreme Court struck it down.
4. Punitive Policies toward non-combatants. The Israeli blockade on the civilian population of Gaza is evil, creepy and illegal in international law. That is why the international community is pushing back. For instance, UNESCO is establishing a science chair at a university in Gaza.
Israel is still the Occupying authority in Gaza, and is therefore bound by the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of its subjects. Some 40% of Palestinian families in Gaza are refugees from what is now Israel, expelled by militant members of the Yishuv in 1948, and many of them still live in camps.
The blockade of Gaza has reduced some 56% of them to food insecurity. Israel surrounds the Strip, and destroyed its airport and sea port several times, preventing Gaza from exporting most of what it makes and produces, and limiting imports.
The little Gaza territory of 1.6 million Palestinians suffers severe health as well as mental health damage from these Israeli policies. No Israeli official can explain what future the residents of Gaza might have that is not a kind of Israel-imposed hell.
(And no, they aren’t generic ‘Arabs’ who will melt into the great sea of other ‘Arabs’ as the more racist Israelis might hope.)
Israeli relations with Turkey, long excellent, have been deeply harmed by the blockade and Israel’s attack on a civilian Turkish aid ship that tried to get supplies to the non-combatant population there. Israel refuses to apologize for killing nine aid workers, including an American citizen.
5. Violations of international law: Israel’s occupation policies are pressing Israel into an entire range of illegal and reprehensible behaviors. This is nothing to do with Jews or Israel, it is to do with occupations.
The Israelis have been arresting minors, sentencing them to harsh terms and fines, and treating them much differently than they would Jewish minors guilty of the same offenses. The British Foreign Office has just condemned these practices.
Israeli policies are no more off-limits to criticism than are Argentinian or Indonesian ones, despite what the country’s remarkably thin-skinned and intolerant partisans often allege.
And, when the chorus of criticism is coming from Anglicans, Presbyterians, the UK Foreign Office, the Austrian Senate, and UNESCCO, that is a pretty wide-set of world institutions not easily pigeon-holed as mere bigots.
Maybe it is time for the Israeli government to reconsider the self-destructive course it is on, which likely will lead to the end of the state some decades hence, as Israeli President Shimon Peres is frantically warning.
“Super-nationalist Zionism contributed to the rise of the Third Reich”
Posted by: adonis49 on: May 15, 2012
“Super-nationalist Zionism contributed to the growth of the Third Reich”
I received an extensive reply to my post https://adonis49.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/hahkam-yesrael-weiss-zionism-is-colonialism-and-israel-is-apartheid-on-palestinian-land-day/, and decided to publish it in its integrity and in two parts, before I add a few comments.
The first part is on the genesis of Zionism
The second part is on the origins of Ashkenazi Zionist Jews and their role played in the Bolshevik Soviet Union revolution
Nalliah wrote:
“Zionism was created by Theodor Herzel and others at the end of the 19th Century. In that era it was commonplace to be colonialist, to be racist, to be super-nationalist, to adore the nation-state, so it was the idea of France for the French, Germany for the Germans, and then some state for the Jews. This all formed the basis for Zionism.
Zionism and Judaism are contrary to each other: Judaism is universal and humane, and Zionism is exactly the opposite.
Zionism is a very narrow ideology, very nationalistic, racist, colonialist, and all this. There is no “National Judaism.” There is Zionism and there is Judaism, and they are completely different.
Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism. Judaism – a Reform Movement- that is highly ethical. You cannot connect Zionism with “highly ethical.” You can only connect the words “aggressive,” “oppressive,” “stealing,” “robbing” and apartheid with Zionism. But not “highly ethical.”
Greedy and ideological Zionists contributed to the growth of the Third Reich via the so-called “Transfer Agreement”.
This was a business arrangement to transfer German Jews to Palestine before WWII. And in return, German exports would be bought through Zionist entities to ensure the economic growth and wealth of Palestine.
Most significant is the success of the 18th Zionist Congress to go against the international boycott movement by suppressing the Revisionists who demanded that the Zionists abandon their Super-Nationalist ideology.
If the boycott had prevailed, Germany may not even exist today and the Holocaust would have never happened.
The facts are clear that Zionists made Hitler’s 3rd Reich possible and ultimately spawned the Zio-Fascist and terrorist State that Israel has become.
Israeli Zionist leaders continue to indulge in the persecution of Jews by falsely claiming that Zionism is a goal of Judaism. It’s time to make a clear distinction between Judaism and Zionism, also known as Zio-Fascism.
Late terrorist Menaheim Begin, 6th Prime Minister of Israel wrote: “Our race is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.”
Does this narrative sound familiar to you? Think Nazi.
The Jewish people has been unique by its identity as a religious entity. Through the centuries its religious character had been a premise agreed upon by Jews and non-Jews alike.
Jewish religious and traditional history bears no aspect of racism. Hence, one of non-Jewish origin is capable of being proselytized and attaining the same status as a born Jew.
Conversely, one of Jewish birth who does not recognize his being bound to the Jewish Torah, is by Jewish law a heretic, and therefore forfeits his spiritual birthrights as a Jew.
Through the many years that Jews resided in the Holy Land and the southern and eastern Mediterranean Sea Basin they enjoyed tranquil and cordial relations with the non-Jewish population there.
The Zionist movement which was formed at the latter part of the last century, sought to endow the Jews with a nationalistic character which was heretofore strange to them. It sought to deprive them of their historically religious character and offered a nationalistic ideology and the possibility of establishing through political media, a Jewish national homeland.
During the period of the British Mandate, the Balfour Declaration recognized the eventual possibility of founding a Jewish national homeland, in Palestine, and it was affirmed to be the British government will.
The Jewish Agency was the Chief representative of Zionist interests in the Holy Land, and this agency was entrusted with the issuance of visas to the Holy Land, thus resulting in an increased Zionist immigration from various parts of the world, which ultimately succeeded in superseding in numbers, the veteran Orthodox Jewish dwellers.
Orthodox Jewry all over the world and the Orthodox Community in the Holy Land in particular, immediately sensed in this stage of Zionist success, the threat of grave danger for the religious future of Jews.
The Arab inhabitants began to exhibit open hostility to their Jewish neighbors. The British government failed to distinguish between the Orthodox community, who for generations inhabited the Holy Land, and the newly arrived Ashkenazi Zionist immigrants, coming from eastern Europe.
With the acquisition of the power to organize communities in Palestine, the Zionist nationalists formed the Vaad Haleumi Leknesset Yisroel (National Jewish Council Committee).
This committee ignored the rights of the Orthodox veteran dwellers who did not recognize this validity of Jewish nationality, and whose identification as Jews was solely with their loyalty to their religious heritage.
The religious inhabitants, on the other hand, shuddered at the prospects of spiritual disintegration of World Jewry, with the new rise to power of the Zionist nationalists.
The Orthodox Jewish inhabitants actively objected to being subject to the authority of the secularists. They appealed their cause to the League of Nations, who consequently granted them a “Right of exclusion” to be subjugated by the Vaad Haleumi, a rights that provided that any Jew wishing not to be incorporated into the Vaad Haleumi, may remain lawfully independent if he so stated his wish in writing. Thousands of Jews did so.
Such was the case until November 1948, when the United Nations finally sanctioned the establishment of a Zionist State by a majority of a single vote.
Zionists’ success in finally realizing their goal was due in great measure to their having misled the world into viewing the Zionist cause as the Jewish cause. The formation of the Zionist State resulted in the automatic deprivation of the autonomy heretofore possessed by the Orthodox inhabitants of the Holy Land.
The Zionists grasped the opportunity to openly disassociate themselves from any identification with Jews as a religion. They systematically began to orient the minds of their generations according to the tenets of Zionist nationalism.
Through the Ministry of Religions they employed part of the Rabbinate to assist them in their aims:
1. The religious Jews who by virtue of their faith, clearly contradicted Zionist nationalism, and who had lived peacefully with their Arab neighbors for generations, became unwillingly identified with the Zionist cause and their struggle with the Arabs.
2. They requested the United Nations that Jerusalem be designated as a defacto international city.
3. They appealed to the diplomatic corps assigned to Jerusalem – but to no avail.
The religious Jews were hence confronted with the choice of either becoming a part of the Zionist State, which diametrically opposed the interests of Jews as a religion, or abandoning the land of which their forefathers were the first Jewish settlers.
Judaism in its correct form is not a religion that Christianity, Islam or Buddhism…
Zionism, however, is a secular, geopolitical system of hate…it is NOT a religion. It is a power cult (hiding behind the Jewish faith) of death, greed, lying, avarice and self-aggrandizement which views with contempt and derision all who do not subscribe or submit to its dogma.
And now on the origine of the Ashkenazi Jews, who are not descendent of the “semitic Jews”
There was a Medieval Kingdom of Khazaria, 652-1016 AD that included part of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and a sliver of what is now Kazakhstan. This area was somewhat interesting in history because when considering the choice of Islam, or Christianity or Judaism the leaders of this ’empire’ decided to declare themselves Jewish.
That was a very odd choice in an area of the world which was predominately Islam and Christian.
The Khazaria Empire could not extend any further south because the Tatars and Turkmen proved to be about as obstinate as the Afghans have been throughout history…”(Follow the rest of the story in part 2)
Today’s Zionists are largely the descendants of these Ashkenazi who contributed in the slaughtering of over 30 million Russian Christians during WWI, WWII and the Soviet revolution.
These are the descendants of the thugs who participated in the planning for murdering 1.5 million Armenians by the new Turkish State from 1915 to 1918, and do not want to ‘talk about it’.
When US Congress voted to recognize the Armenian genocide, the AIPAC and ADL Zionist lobbies swung into action and forced the cancellations of the Resolution. And the US wonders why Armenia does not trust Zionist Jews and US at all.
These are the conniving, lying, genocidal beasts who wanted Iraq stomped to death by US and UK so Iraqis could not benefit from their own oil and natural gas wealth.
These are the same demented nuclear terrorists in control of 300 thermonuclear WMD who are now trying to force a war with Iran…
Even though Russia is already on the record saying that ANY attack on Iran will be viewed as an attack on Russian interests.
Zionists are always chattering about ‘peace’ but, in reality, it is the LAST thing they want. Peace is not profitable and is simply not going to pave the way for Zionism to dominate the planet. However, divide and conquer just might.
This is even all the more mind-boggling to most clueless Americans who cannot understand how a minority group of Zionists within the world’s total Jewish population of about 15 million can have come to control so much of the Western world.
Mind you that all former colonial powers are still implicitly and vigorously meddling in the internal affairs of their former “Independent States” through bogus economic programs.
Only Israel was unable to shake off its colonial ideology and persist on applying the colonial military and curfew laws on Palestinians, as substitute to civil laws, and regularly and routinely incarcerate Palestinian males of 15 of age, just to keep them out of circulation…
Actually, 60% of all Palestinian youth experienced Israel jails for no crime committed whatsoever, and never were put on trial: A far worse statistics than Black youth in the US…
Israel never relinquished her liberal capitalist system since it was recognized a State in 1948, by a majority of a single vote in the UN.
Note: I asked Nalliah if I may use her full name and communicate her email address. I did receive her agreement, just after I posted the article.
Adonis Diaries 