Adonis Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘Sephardic Jews

Tragedy in 3 acts? 

Anti-Semitism, Israel/Palestine, and Patagonia?

Note: Re-edit of “Israel & Palestine: A tragedy in three acts”

Israel did not arise from the struggle of a settled indigenous people fighting for territorial independence from Western colonial powers.

That was the case in dozens of nations throughout the Americas, Africa, Levant and Asia over the past two centuries.

Israel is No ordinary state. It’s in a class by itself. An implanted settlement by colonial powers that wanted to get rid the Jews in their midst and cut off the trade routes in the Middle-East

Israel was born of the iron will of a small, very close-knit and highly organized ethnic group bent on occupying a specific territory in obedience to ancient mythical religious tradition and highly doubtful historical continuity.

(Or more likely, a spear-head replacement colonial state to destabilize this oil-rich region in the Middle East)

<!–Adrian Salbuchi–> a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina, published this August 04, 2014

A Palestinian man salvages gas canisters from the ruins of buildings destroyed by what police said were Israeli air strikes and shelling in Khuzaa, east of Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip August 3, 2014. (Reuters)

Prologue

Cosmopolitan Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews combined their leaders’ immense political, financial, media and diplomatic clout to ensure European Jews would, against all odds, get their homeland in Palestine.

This entailed ignoring the interests and lives of millions of Palestinians living there for many generations, which for the past 80 years has meant untold suffering and millions of dead, maimed and injured throughout the Middle East; today, it even means risking a new global war.

The fight for a Jewish homeland is rooted in 19th Century movements promoting “Zionism”: the forced emigration of Central European Jews – notably from Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Germany – into Palestine, as well as North and South America.

The founding father of International Zionism was Viennese lawyer Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1898. His seminal book, Ein Judenstaat (“A Jewish State”) published in 1896 sets out the rationale, method and plan for founding a sovereign Jewish State, and discreetly leaving the door open for founding not just one but two Jewish states.

Act I: Persecuted European Jews in need of a place to settle

The Time and Place: 19th Century Eastern, Central and Western Europe.

Historically, Christian Europe discriminated against the Jews.

For centuries they poorer classes were second-grade citizens and were systematically expelled from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Britain, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Belorussia, Poland, Ukraine and many other nations.

Scorned by both Catholics and Protestants, they were segregated inside ghettos from where they focused on retailing and, with time, became Europe’s foremost international bankers.

A Palestinian protester kicks a burning tyre during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, outside Israel’s Ofer military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah August 1, 2014 (Reuters)

Resistance against them regularly flared, often into bloody pogroms. Zionist activists took advantage of this state of affairs to rally their flock into their movement.

This centuries-long targeting of Jews is called “Anti-Semitism”, and can only be explained in two basic manners:

  • Either the majority of Europeans, throughout its vast cultural and national geography and for centuries at a time, suffered a psychological pathology called “Anti-Semitism” which led them to recurrently attack and expel this tiny roaming community from their midst; a mental illness to which the Jews themselves were obviously immune; or
  • There exist certain recurrent traits and characteristics of Jewish social behavior that systematically generate rejection by a wide variety of peoples in all of Europe.
  • In such a case, “Anti-Semitism” should be reclassified as an irrational, unwanted and improper defense mechanism. Theodor Herzl himself spelled it out in his foundational book explaining that Anti-Semitism “exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers”.

Though “Anti-Semitism” certainly has its religious overtones, its root cause in modern times is not so much religious as it is social.

Contrary to Islam and Christianity which many times rose up in Holy War and Crusading to convert the heathen, Judaism never seeks to convert anybody by force.

Many Jewish sects claim they  are such by birth; by blood; by genetics.

Religious conversion is therefore not an option. In fact, historically there is only one example of conversion en masse to Judaism: the 8th Century Central Asian nomadic tribe of the Khazars who did so in order Not to fall under the powerful sway of neither Constantinople’s Christianity nor Baghdad Caliphate Islam.

These converted Khazars are the forefathers of modern-day Ashkenazim Jews who slowly made their way into Europe through Poland and Germany.

Today, they form Jewry’s elite core in Israel, America and Europe. They do not, however, have any significant blood relationship with the Semitic Israelites and Hebrews of the Old Testament.

Within this backdrop, the Zionist Movement came to life as a Pan-European movement.

A Palestinian protester throws stones toward Israeli troops during clashes following a protest against the nearby Jewish settlement of Qadomem, in the West Bank village of Kofr Qadom near Nablus May 16, 2014. (Reuters)

A Palestinian protester throws stones toward Israeli troops during clashes following a protest against the nearby Jewish settlement of Qadomem, in the West Bank village of Kofr Qadom near Nablus May 16, 2014. (Reuters)

Act II: The long, hard road to Jerusalem

The Time and Place: 20th Century Europe and the Middle East

For centuries, Jews would part company with the hope-filled greeting “Next year in Jerusalem”. Gathering in Zion was a leitmotiv of their hope to one day achieving nationhood in the land of Moses, Abraham and David.

Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion and other founding fathers fought to create Israel however at the turn of the 20th Century; the Holy Land was just not an option.

When Zionists petitioned Ottoman Turkey’s Sultan who reigned over Palestine to give them their state he simply refused. But they continued lobbying, leveraging and promoting their ideas and ideals, whilst through academia and the press they nurtured increasingly liberal social conditions necessary for them to flourish.

By then, extremely powerful European bankers with deeply embedded contacts and into every government, directly and indirectly consolidated and promoted the Zionist ideal.

They used long-term rather than short-term strategies; their names are symbols of the burgeoning international finance over-world: Rothschild, Warburg, Schiff, Lazard, Bleichroeder, Belmont, Hirsch, Montefiore, Goldschmidt, Oppenheimer, Goldman, Sachs, Erlanger, Speyer, Mendelssohn and many other powerful European bankers, brokers and traders who extended their power and influence throughout Europe and the Americas.

German billionaire Maurice Hirsch supported Herzl’s plans founding the Jewish Colonization Association that promoted emigration of Eastern European Jews to America, notably Argentina, a country ranking very high on Zionism’s priority list.

In fact, Herzl’s seminal Ein Judenstaat, includes a key chapter whose title says it all: “Palestine or Argentine?”

In it Herzl points out that that

Argentina in one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has sparse population…” and would “derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us…” for which Zion’s bankers could “assume part of its public debt…” (The Jewish State, Dover, NY, 1988, Page 95).

A general view of the Jewish settlement of Brukhim which is located near the West Bank village of Kufr al-Deek near Salfit May 26, 2014. (Reuters)

A general view of the Jewish settlement of Brukhim which is located near the West Bank village of Kufr al-Deek near Salfit May 26, 2014. (Reuters)

But then a century ago came World War I, which Germany, Austria and Ottoman Turkey lost in 1918 to France, Britain and the US, leaving Palestine as a British Mandate.

The year before, UK Baron Walter Rothschild secured from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur James Balfour a “Declaration” whereby Britain

“would favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object” subject to nothing being “done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This triggered a new wave of European Jewish emigration to Palestine. (Actually, it was Woodrow Wilson (US evangelical movement) who pressure England for that declaration before supporting it in war effort)

The 30’s and 40’s, however, brought a new wave of persecution under the Third Reich and World War II, generating in its aftermath renewed support for a Jewish homeland. (Nazi Germany was the main force that encouraged Jews to emigrate to Palestine, on condition to purchase German products)

That was finally achieved in 1948, not so much as recognition of Zionists’ right to impose a Jewish State upon Palestine, but due to unrestricted Western support for the Zionist Plan (with a single majority vote in the UN after undue pressure from USA). Ever since, Israel enjoys a blank check from the West.

Since then, Palestinians have been brutalized and expelled from their homes by terrorist organizations, notably the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which infamously blew up British Military Mandate headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 (led by Menachem Beguin, later Israeli PM and Nobel Peace” Prize laureate);

the Stern Gang (led by Yzakh Shamir who also became PM), which in 1948 assassinated UN Envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem as he tried to negotiate a two-state solution) and the Haganah.

In 1948 these three terror groups merged forming the IDF (Israel Defense Force).

The key question no one dares address in the West is: if European regimes persecuted European Jews in the 30’s and 40’s, why were the Palestinians forced to pay the unbearable price of having their country taken over and all but destroyed?

Act III: Zionism reinvents itself?

The Time and Place: 21st Century, the world.

Former Harvard University Dean Stephen Walt and Chicago University Professor John Mearsheimer in their 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” describe in convincing detail how AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Israel lobbies wield huge media, banking, diplomatic and political power in the United States in Israel’s favor, leading to its having its way time and again.

In recent years, however, something seems to be changing. Global public opinion looks on in horror as Israel commits genocide.

Rending their garments to the cries of “Anti-Semitism!” and “Holocaust!” doesn’t hold up anymore. As so often in the past, common people everywhere are once again growing very weary of Jewish behavior.

The writing is on the wall.

Surprisingly, in August 2012 a paper entitled “Preparing For A Post-Israel Middle East” commissioned by the US intelligence community comprising 16 agencies (including Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, DIA, DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, Homeland Security and Pentagon), concluded:

“Israel is currently the greatest threat to US national interests because of its nature and actions preventing normal US relations with Arab and Muslim countries”.

Then, in September 18, 2012, Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post quotes arch-Zionist Henry Kissinger saying ‘word for word’,

“In Ten Years there will be no more Israel.” Adding that “Kissinger’s statement is flat and unqualified. He is not saying Israel is in danger, but could be saved if we just gave it additional trillions of dollars and smashed enough of its enemies with our military…. He is not saying that if we bomb Iran, Israel might survive…. He is simply stating a fact: In 2022, Israel will no longer exist”.

Jewish immigrants build prefabricated houses somewhere in Palestine, in 1948. (AFP Photo)

Jewish immigrants build prefabricated houses somewhere in Palestine, in 1948. (AFP Photo)

Since this short article spans three centuries, it might be poignant to mention what 19th Century insider and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason Albert Pike (a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War) is said to have written in an oft-(mis)quoted letter to Italian fellow-Mason Giuseppe Mazzini.

He spoke of “three major global conflicts” to be unleashed over the next 150 years in order to “achieve the Masonic panacea of World Government.”

  • First, a World War whose primary goal would be to destroy the German, Austrian and Russian royal families, leading to Communism;
  • A Second War, pitting Nationalists against Zionists, leading to the erection of a Jewish State in Palestine;
  • Lastly, war between “political Zionists” and the Islamic World, sparking a Third World War, finally leading to the world government.

Epilogue

Here then lies a key question: is the fact Israel is totally out of control, a miscalculation, a huge mistake or is it part of a long-term ongoing process with its respective “achievements and transitory goals”?

Israel has cornered itself into a dead-end street; as it stands it is no longer a viable state.

Are Zionists about to accept a change in Israel’s status in exchange some other extremely attractive – even if less historical – far-off “Promised Land” where 70 or 80 percent of Israeli population can be re-settled in utmost comfort, security, wealth and peace?

Is Argentina’s (and Chile’s) Southern Patagonian expanse that Promised Land as founding father Herzl imagined and proposed back in 1896?

Is Theodor Herzl’s “Project Palestine or Argentine” about to become “Palestine and Argentine”?

Will Palestinian Israel become a huge military nuclear garrison? An impregnable “Fortress Israel” controlling the Middle East?

Patagonia: immense, under populated, and incalculably rich in all natural resources.

Patagonia: where since decades, tens of thousands of Israeli youths spend their sabbaticals right after military service.

It’s certainly taboo to even mention this in Argentina, a country defeated by the US/UK Alliance militarily (in the Falkland Islands), and by powerful global mega-bankers pushing it yet again to financial collapse.

Thankfully, Chile which shares a strip of Patagonia is far more conscientious.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Lebanese woman and Jew: On Sephardic Jews and Middle Eastern Cultures

“ARAB JEW

by Ella Habiba Shohat,   Irvi Nasawi

 

When issues of racial and colonial discourse are discussed in the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African origin are often excluded.

This piece is written with the intent of opening up the multicultural debate, going beyond the U.S. census’s simplistic categorization of Middle Eastern peoples as “whites.”

It’s also written with the intent of multiculturalizing American notions of Jewishness. My personal narrative questions the Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the denial of Arab Jewish (Sephardic) voices both in the Middle Eastern and American contexts.

I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S.

Most members of my family were born and raised in Baghdad, and now live in Iraq, Israel, the U.S., England, and Holland.

When my grandmother first encountered Israeli society in the ’50s, she was convinced that the people who looked, spoke and ate so differently–the European Jews–were actually European Christians.

Jewishness for her generation was inextricably associated with Middle Easterness. My grandmother, who still lives in Israel and still communicates largely in Arabic, had to be taught to speak of “us” as Jews and “them” as Arabs.

For Middle Easterners, the operating distinction had always been “Muslim,” “Jew,” and “Christian,” not Arab versus Jew. The assumption was that “Arabness” referred to a common shared culture and language, albeit with religious differences.

Americans are often amazed to discover the existentially nauseating or charmingly exotic possibilities of such a syncretic identity. I recall a well-established colleague who despite my elaborate lessons on the history of Arab Jews, still had trouble understanding that I was not a tragic anomaly–for instance, the daughter of an Arab (Palestinian) and an Israeli (European Jew).

Living in North America makes it even more difficult to communicate that we are Jews and yet entitled to our Middle Eastern difference.

And that we are Arabs and yet entitled to our religious difference, like Arab Christians and Arab Muslims.

It was precisely the policing of cultural borders in Israel that led some of us to escape into the metropolises of syncretic identities. Yet, in an American context, we face again a hegemony that allows us to narrate a single Jewish memory, i.e., a European one.

For those of us who don’t hide our Middle Easterness under one Jewish “we,” it becomes tougher and tougher to exist in an American context hostile to the very notion of Easterness.

As an Arab Jew, I am often obliged to explain the “mysteries” of this oxymoronic entity. That we have spoken Arabic, not Yiddish; that for millennia our cultural creativity, secular and religious, had been largely articulated in Arabic (Maimonides being one of the few intellectuals to “make it” into the consciousness of the West); and that even the most religious of our communities in the Middle East and North Africa never expressed themselves in Yiddish-accented Hebrew prayers, nor did they practice liturgical-gestural norms and sartorial codes favoring the dark colors of centuries-ago Poland.

Middle Eastern women similarly never wore wigs; their hair covers, if worn, consisted of different variations on regional clothing (and in the wake of British and French imperialism, many wore Western-style clothes).

If you go to our synagogues, even in New York, Montreal, Paris or London, you’ll be amazed to hear the winding quarter tones of our music which the uninitiated might imagine to be coming from a mosque.

Now that the three cultural topographies that compose my ruptured and dislocated history–Iraq, Israel and the U.S.–have been involved in a war, it is crucial to say that we exist. Some of us refuse to dissolve so as to facilitate “neat” national and ethnic divisions.

My anxiety and pain during the Scud attacks on Israel, where some of my family lives, did not cancel out my fear and anguish for the victims of the bombardment of Iraq, where I also have relatives.

War, however, is the friend of binarisms, leaving little place for complex identities. The Gulf War, for example, intensified a pressure already familiar to the Arab Jewish diaspora in the wake of the Israeli-Arab conflict: a pressure to choose between being a Jew and being an Arab.

For our families, who have lived in Mesopotamia since at least the Babylonian exile, who have been Arabized for millennia, and who were abruptly dislodged to Israel 45 years ago, to be suddenly forced to assume a homogenous European Jewish identity based on experiences in Russia, Poland and Germany, was an exercise in self devastation.

To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion.

This binarism has led many Oriental Jews (our name in Israel referring to our common Asian and African countries of origin is Mizrahi or Mizrachi) to a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms.

Intellectual discourse in the West highlights a Judeo-Christian tradition, yet rarely acknowledges the Judeo-Muslim culture of the Middle East, of North Africa, or of pre-Expulsion Spain (1492) and of the European parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Jewish experience in the Muslim world has often been portrayed as an unending nightmare of oppression and humiliation.

Although I in no way want to idealize that experience–there were occasional tensions, discriminations, even violence–on the whole, we lived quite comfortably within Muslim societies.

Our history simply cannot be discussed in European Jewish terminology. As Iraqi Jews, while retaining a communal identity, we were generally well integrated and indigenous to the country, forming an inseparable part of its social and cultural life.

Thoroughly Arabized, we used Arabic even in hymns and religious ceremonies. The liberal and secular trends of the 20th century engendered an even stronger association of Iraqi Jews and Arab culture, which brought Jews into an extremely active arena in public and cultural life.

Prominent Jewish writers, poets and scholars played a vital role in Arab culture, distinguishing themselves in Arabic speaking theater, in music, as singers, composers, and players of traditional instruments.

In Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia, Jews became members of legislatures, of municipal councils, of the judiciary, and even occupied high economic positions.

(The finance minister of Iraq in the ’40s was Ishak Sasson, and in Egypt, Jamas Sanua–higher positions, ironically, than those our community had generally achieved within the Jewish state until the 1990s!)

The same historical process that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights, was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries.

As refugees, or mass immigrants (depending on one’s political perspective), we were forced to leave everything behind and give up our Iraqi passports. The same process also affected our uprootedness or ambiguous positioning within Israel itself, where we have been systematically discriminated against by institutions that deployed their energies and material to the consistent advantage of European Jews and to the consistent disadvantage of Oriental Jews.

Even our physiognomies betray us, leading to internalized colonialism or physical misperception. Sephardic Oriental women often dye their dark hair blond, while the men have more than once been arrested or beaten when mistaken for Palestinians.

What for Ashkenazi immigrants from Russian and Poland was a social aliya (literally “ascent”) was for Oriental Sephardic Jews a yerida (“descent”).

Stripped of our history, we have been forced by our no-exit situation to repress our collective nostalgia, at least within the public sphere. The pervasive notion of “one people” reunited in their ancient homeland actively disauthorizes any affectionate memory of life before Israel.

We have never been allowed to mourn a trauma that the images of Iraq’s destruction only intensified and crystallized for some of us. Our cultural creativity in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic is hardly studied in Israeli schools, and it is becoming difficult to convince our children that we actually did exist there, and that some of us are still there in Iraq, Morocco, Yemen and Iran.

Western media much prefer the spectacle of the triumphant progress of Western technology to the survival of the peoples and cultures of the Middle East.

The case of Arab Jews is just one of many elisions. From the outside, there is little sense of our community, and even less sense of the diversity of our political perspectives. Oriental-Sephardic peace movements, from the Black Panthers of the ’70s to the new Keshet (a “Rainbow” coalition of Mizrahi groups in Israel) not only call for a just peace for Israelis and Palestinians, but also for the cultural, political, and economic integration of Israel/Palestine into the Middle East. And thus an end to the binarisms of war, an end to a simplistic charting of Middle Eastern identities.

Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies at CUNY. A writer, orator and activist, she is the author of Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Univ. of Texas Press, 1989) and the co-author (with Robert Stam) of Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge 1994).

Shohat co-edited Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Reflections (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and is the editor of Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, (MIT Press/The New Museum, 2000). She writes often for such journals as Social Text and the Journal for Palestine Studies.                                                      … more about the author

 

​Israel & Palestine: A tragedy in three acts

Israel did not arise from the struggle of a settled indigenous people fighting for territorial independence from Western colonial powers.

That was the case in dozens of nations throughout the Americas, Africa, Levant and Asia over the past two centuries.

Israel is No ordinary state. It’s in a class by itself. An implanted settlement by colonial powers that wanted to get rid the Jews in their midst and cut off the trade routes in the Middle-East

Israel was born of the iron will of a small, very close-knit and highly organized ethnic group bent on occupying a specific territory in obedience to ancient mythical religious tradition and highly doubtful historical continuity.

(Or more likely, a spear-head replacement colonial state to destabilize this oil-rich region in the Middle East)

<!–Adrian Salbuchi–> a political analyst, author, speaker and radio/TV commentator in Argentina, published this August 04, 2014

Prologue

Cosmopolitan Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews combined their leaders’ immense political, financial, media and diplomatic clout to ensure European Jews would, against all odds, get their homeland in Palestine.

This entailed ignoring the interests and lives of millions of Palestinians living there for many generations, which for the past eighty years has meant untold suffering and millions of dead, maimed and injured throughout the Middle East; today, it even means risking a new global war.

The fight for a Jewish homeland is rooted in 19th Century movements promoting “Zionism”: the forced emigration of Central European Jews – notably from Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Germany – into Palestine, as well as North and South America.

The undisputed founding father of International Zionism was Viennese lawyer Theodor Herzl who convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland in 1898. His seminal book, Ein Judenstaat (“A Jewish State”) published in 1896 sets out the rationale, method and plan for founding a sovereign Jewish State, discretely leaving the door open for founding not just one but two Jewish states.

Act I: Persecuted European Jews in need of a place to settle

The Time and Place: 19th Century Eastern, Central and Western Europe.

Historically, Christian Europe discriminated against the Jews. For centuries they were second-grade citizens and were systematically expelled from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, Britain, Portugal, Austria, Hungary, Russia, Belorussia, Poland, Ukraine and many other nations.

Scorned by both Catholics and Protestants, they were segregated inside ghettos from where they focused on retailing and, with time, became Europe’s foremost international bankers.

A Palestinian protester kicks a burning tyre during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, outside Israel's Ofer military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah August 1, 2014 (Reuters)

A Palestinian protester kicks a burning tyre during clashes with Israeli troops at a protest against the Israeli offensive in Gaza, outside Israel’s Ofer military prison near the West Bank city of Ramallah August 1, 2014 (Reuters)

Resistance against them regularly flared, often into bloody pogroms. Zionist activists took advantage of this state of affairs to rally their flock into their movement.

This centuries-long targeting of Jews is called “Anti-Semitism”, and can only be explained in two basic manners:

  • Either the majority of Europeans, throughout its vast cultural and national geography and for centuries at a time, suffered a psychological pathology called “Anti-Semitism” which led them to recurrently attack and expel this tiny roaming community from their midst; a mental illness to which the Jews themselves were obviously immune; or
  • There exist certain recurrent traits and characteristics of Jewish social behavior that systematically generate rejection by a wide variety of peoples in all of Europe.
  • In such a case, “Anti-Semitism” should be reclassified as an irrational, unwanted and improper defense mechanism. Theodor Herzl himself spelled it out in his foundational book explaining that Anti-Semitism “exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers”.

Though “Anti-Semitism” certainly has its religious overtones, its root cause in modern times is not so much religious as it is social.

Contrary to Islam and Christianity which many times rose up in Holy War and Crusading to convert the heathen, Judaism never seeks to convert anybody by force.

Quite the contrary: Jews are such by birth; by blood; by genetics. Religious conversion is therefore not an option. In fact, historically there is only one example of conversion en masse to Judaism: the 8th Century Central Asian nomadic tribe of the Khazars who did so in order not to fall under the powerful sway of neither Constantinople’s Christianity nor Baghdad Caliphate’s Islam.

These converted Khazars are the forefathers of modern-day Ashkenazim Jews who slowly made their way into Europe through Poland and Germany.

Today, they form Jewry’s elite core in Israel, America and Europe. They do not, however, have any significant blood relationship with the Semitic Israelites and Hebrews of the Old Testament.

Within this backdrop, the Zionist Movement came to life as a Pan-European movement.

A Palestinian protester throws stones toward Israeli troops during clashes following a protest against the nearby Jewish settlement of Qadomem, in the West Bank village of Kofr Qadom near Nablus May 16, 2014. (Reuters)

A Palestinian protester throws stones toward Israeli troops during clashes following a protest against the nearby Jewish settlement of Qadomem, in the West Bank village of Kofr Qadom near Nablus May 16, 2014. (Reuters)

 

Act II: The long, hard road to Jerusalem

The Time and Place: 20th Century Europe and the Middle East

For centuries, Jews would part company with the hope-filled greeting “Next year in Jerusalem”. Gathering in Zion was a leitmotiv of their hope to one day achieving nationhood in the land of Moses, Abraham and David.

Theodor Herzl, Leon Pinsker, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben Gurion and other founding fathers fought to create Israel however at the turn of the 20th Century; the Holy Land was just not an option.

When Zionists petitioned Ottoman Turkey’s Sultan who reigned over Palestine to give them their state he simply refused. But they continued lobbying, leveraging and promoting their ideas and ideals, whilst through academia and the press they nurtured increasingly liberal social conditions necessary for them to flourish.

By then, extremely powerful European bankers with deeply embedded contacts and into every government, directly and indirectly consolidated and promoted the Zionist ideal.

They used long-term rather than short-term strategies; their names are symbols of the burgeoning international finance over-world: Rothschild, Warburg, Schiff, Lazard, Bleichroeder, Belmont, Hirsch, Montefiore, Goldschmidt, Oppenheimer, Goldman, Sachs, Erlanger, Speyer, Mendelssohn and many other powerful European bankers, brokers and traders who extended their power and influence throughout Europe and the Americas.

German billionaire Maurice Hirsch supported Herzl’s plans founding the Jewish Colonization Association that promoted emigration of Eastern European Jews to America, notably Argentina, a country ranking very high on Zionism’s priority list.

In fact, Herzl’s seminal Ein Judenstaat, includes a key chapter whose title says it all: “Palestine or Argentine?”

In it Herzl points out that that Argentina in one of the most fertile countries in the world, extends over a vast area, has sparse population…” and would “derive considerable profit from the cession of a portion of its territory to us…” for which Zion’s bankers could “assume part of its public debt…” (The Jewish State, Dover, NY, 1988, Page 95).

A general view of the Jewish settlement of Brukhim which is located near the West Bank village of Kufr al-Deek near Salfit May 26, 2014. (Reuters)

A general view of the Jewish settlement of Brukhim which is located near the West Bank village of Kufr al-Deek near Salfit May 26, 2014. (Reuters)

But then a century ago came World War I, which Germany, Austria and Ottoman Turkey lost in 1918 to France, Britain and the US, leaving Palestine as a British Mandate.

The year before, UK Baron Walter Rothschild secured from Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur James Balfour a “Declaration” whereby Britain “would favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object” subject to nothing being “done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” This triggered a new wave of European Jewish emigration to Palestine.

The 30’s and 40’s, however, brought a new wave of persecution under the Third Reich and World War II, generating in its aftermath renewed support for a Jewish homeland. That was finally achieved in 1948, not so much as recognition of Zionists’ right to impose a Jewish State upon Palestine, but due to unrestricted Western support for the Zionist Plan. Ever since, Israel enjoys a blank check from the West.

Since then, Palestinians have been brutalized and expelled from their homes by terrorist organizations, notably the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which infamously blew up British Military Mandate headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 (led by Menachem Beguin, later Israeli PM and Nobel “Peace” Prize laureate); the Stern Gang (led by Yzakh Shamir who also became PM), which in 1948 assassinated UN Envoy Count Folke Bernadotte in Jerusalem as he tried to negotiate a two-state solution) and the Hagganah. In 1948 these three terror groups merged forming the IDF (Israel Defense Force).

The key question no one dares address in the West is: if European regimes persecuted European Jews in the 30’s and 40’s, why were the Palestinians forced to pay the unbearable price of having their country taken over and all but destroyed?

Act III: Zionism reinvents itself?

The Time and Place: 21st Century, the world.

Former Harvard University Dean Stephen Walt and Chicago University Professor John Mearsheimer in their 2007 book “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” describe in convincing detail how AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) and other pro-Israel lobbies wield huge media, banking, diplomatic and political power in the United States in Israel’s favor, leading to its having its way time and again.

In recent years, however, something seems to be changing. Global public opinion looks on in horror as Israel commits genocide. Rending their garments to the cries of “Anti-Semitism!” and “Holocaust!” doesn’t hold up anymore. As so often in the past, common people everywhere are once again growing very weary of Jewish behavior.

The writing is on the wall.

Surprisingly, in August 2012 a paper entitled “Preparing For A Post-Israel Middle East” commissioned by the US intelligence community comprising 16 agencies (including Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, DIA, DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, Homeland Security and Pentagon), concluded that Israel is currently the greatest threat to US national interests because of its nature and actions preventing normal US relations with Arab and Muslim countries.

Then, in September 18, 2012, Rupert Murdoch’s The New York Post quotes arch-Zionist Henry Kissinger saying ‘word for word’,

“In Ten Years there will be no more Israel.” Adding that “Kissinger’s statement is flat and unqualified. He is not saying Israel is in danger, but could be saved if we just gave it additional trillions of dollars and smashed enough of its enemies with our military…. He is not saying that if we bomb Iran, Israel might survive…. He is simply stating a fact: In 2022, Israel will no longer exist”.

Jewish immigrants build prefabricated houses somewhere in Palestine, in 1948. (AFP Photo)

Jewish immigrants build prefabricated houses somewhere in Palestine, in 1948. (AFP Photo)

 

Since this short article spans three centuries, it might be poignant to mention what 19th Century insider and 33rd Degree Scottish Rite Mason Albert Pike (a Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War) is said to have written in an oft-(mis)quoted letter to Italian fellow-Mason Giuseppe Mazzini. He spoke of “three major global conflicts” to be unleashed over the next 150 years in order to “achieve the Masonic panacea of World Government.”

  • First, a World War whose primary goal would be to destroy the German, Austrian and Russian royal families, leading to Communism;
  • A Second War, pitting Nationalists against Zionists, leading to the erection of a Jewish State in Palestine;
  • Lastly, war between “political Zionists” and the Islamic World, sparking a Third World War, finally leading to the world government.

Epilogue

Here then lies a key question: is the fact Israel is totally out of control, a miscalculation, a huge mistake or is it part of a long-term ongoing process with its respective “achievements and transitory goals”?

Israel has cornered itself into a dead-end street; as it stands it is no longer a viable state.

Are Zionists about to accept a change in Israel’s status in exchange some other extremely attractive – even if less historical – far-off “Promised Land” where 70 or 80 percent of Israeli population can be re-settled in utmost comfort, security, wealth and peace?

Is Argentina’s (and Chile’s) Southern Patagonian expanse that Promised Land as founding father Herzl imagined and proposed back in 1896?

Is Theodor Herzl’s “Project Palestine or Argentine” about to become “Palestine and Argentine”? Will Palestinian Israel become a huge military nuclear garrison? An impregnable “Fortress Israel” controlling the Middle East?

Patagonia: immense, under populated, and incalculably rich in all natural resources. Patagonia: where since decades, tens of thousands of Israeli youths spend their sabbaticals right after military service.

It’s certainly taboo to even mention this in Argentina, a country defeated by the US/UK Alliance militarily (in the Falkland Islands), and by powerful global mega-bankers pushing it yet again to financial collapse.

Thankfully, Chile which shares a strip of Patagonia is far more conscientious.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

Spain to ease naturalization of Sephardic Jews, who were expelled in the 16th century?

Spain has announced that it will ease the naturalization of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors were expelled 500 years ago.

And all the “Arabs” who dominated Spain and were expelled by the same Catholic monarchs and Church? Is their turn very soon for the easing up on their naturalization?

JTA in the Israeli daily Haaretz published on  Nov.24, 2012 “Change in policy to benefit descendants of Jews expelled 500 years ago; Jewish group urges legislating practice“.

Sephardic Jews already benefit from a preferential naturalization procedure that requires them to live in Spain for only two years before claiming citizenship.

But the change, which was announced on Thursday, means that Jews will have to present only a certificate confirming their ancestry to claim a Spanish passport. (Like what kind of certificates? And who is qualified to confirm the validity of certificates going 500 years back in history?)

The Federation of the Jewish Communities of Spain, an umbrella body, congratulated the government for “recognition of a right which does not depend on any government decree.” (Does this means that the Spanish Catholic monarchs and the Church violated recognition of rights?)

In its statement, the organization added that the announcement needs to “culminate in a legal text that will specify the conditions to be met to assume nationality.”

The government did not say how many Jews it expected to apply for citizenship, but it noted that a large number of Sephardic Jews lived in Turkey and across Latin America. (How many descendants in 500 years? Are we talking of 10 million who are still alive?)

While estimates differ, the number of Jews living in Spain – 25,000 to 45,000 people out of a total population of 47 million – is only a fraction of the number who lived in the country before 1492, when Jews were forced to convert to Christianity or go into exile.

If you can read ancient Spanish and decipher its calligraphy  read “The Alhambra Decree that ordered the expulsion of Jews from Spain”

The Alhambra Decree that ordered the expulsion of Jews.

Photo by Wikipedia Commons

Modern Day Crusaders: The Ashkenazi Spearhead “Jews”, (April 27, 2009)

Brief Ancient history:  Many waves of Crusading forces assembled in Medieval Europe with the avowed purpose of recapturing the Holy City of Jerusalem from the hands of the Moslem “Infidels”.

The successive crusading invasions were mainly of trading nature: the wealthy European new class of merchants wanted a cheaper trade for securing the spice and perfume routes of India and the Far-East Asia via Egypt.

The Crusaders failed to capture Egypt on 3 occasions and the objective of investing money in order to securing cheaper spices and perfumes that were transported by land routes through Iran and Turkey did not generate any return and the Crusading campaigns stopped.

The maritime crusading campaigns restarted in the 16th centuries by Portugal and Spain.

India and the Far Eastern Asian, sources of spices, perfume, and gold were colonized and maritime stronghold ports were established around Africa, India, Yemen, and the Persian/Arabia Sea.  The British recaptured most of these colonies and trading posts (comptoirs) and secured the direct administration of Egypt.

Slightly Modern history:  Britain, France, and Russia realized that it is too costly to colonize the former empires of Iran and Turkey for no major returns, since raw materials could be obtained relatively cheaply by maritime routes. Their best strategy was to weaken these nations and nibble on their neighboring regions.

Russia got interested in the Caucasus triangle of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.

France was interested in Syria and Lebanon.

Britain got mandate power over Iraq, Jordan, and Palestine.

And then oil was discovered in abundance in this region, starting in southern Iran around 1906.

The First World War used mechanized troops; diesel engines were substituted to vapor engines as mechanical workhorse for industries.

The USA got in the fray since 1920 for oil explorations in the Arabic peninsula and exhibited its colonial ambitions by conquering Cuba and the Philippines from Spain in 1911.

Modern history:  Britain enticed the Hashemite king of Mecca, supposedly from the same Quraich tribe of the Prophet Muhammad, to support the war effort against the Moslem Ottoman Empire.

Britain quickly realized that the Near Eastern population (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) would not mind a “nominal” nomadic king from Mecca, but the Levantine people were too independent and urban to relinquish their desires for autonomy.

Consequently, Britain and France decided that it would be too risky to allow the Near Eastern people to unite under a vital and critical Nation.

The alternative was found by using the Zionist movement as a spearhead to disrupting any unification of the region.  The British Foreign Affairs Balfour issued in 1917 a declaration of intent favorable to the settlement of the Zionist movement in Palestine.

In the same year, Britain and France decided to split their mandated powers over the Near East.  Consequently, the Ashkenazi “Jews” of Central Europe, were encouraged to build agricultural colonies in Palestine in order to establishing a “Jewish Homeland” with avowed purpose of re-capturing the Jewish Holy City of Jerusalem.

The modern crusade of the western nations is cloaked in Jewish biblical claims to destabilize this strategic region.

Since 1920, the Ashkenazi Jews were directed by International Zionism to buy and settle Palestine and it was supported by the European governments of Britain and France.

The beginning of Nazi Germany persecutions of Jews in 1933 encouraged the European nations to transfer the Jews to Palestine in order not to alienate Nazi Germany and succumb to its demands for repatriation of the Ashkenazi “Jews” into concentration camps.

It does not mean that the plan to establishing a “Homeland” for the Ashkenazi Jews was inevitable or that the people in the Near East were not aware of the plan and its existential danger.  The main troubles were:

First, this region had not credible institutions and lacked unified organizations to counter politically this harrowing plan;

Second, the surrounding empires of Turkey, Iran, and Egypt were struggling for survival and had no immediate interests in their backyard; and

Third, the mandate superpowers of Britain and France controlled and managed the region and its policies.

The people in the Near East are aware that the State of Israel is a western implant of the same kind of crusadering campaigns in the first millennia. The Zionist ideology prevented the leadership in Israel in alleviating and changing this perception for over 60 years.

There are indications that the USA and Europe comprehend that the game is over and are drawing plans for the counter immigration of the Ashkenazi to their original homelands.

The Sephardic Jews have practically nowhere to go, and they will manage to integrate Palestine as they did since ancient times.

It would be beneficial for the western nations to change their policies of “divide to dominate” in the Near East and start negotiating with the national resistance forces, even if they offer the image of religious resistance forces, because this is the most potent factor when secular conditions are weak.

The western nations need to negotiate with all resistances forces in the region as national resistance to a foreign implant, so that the new emerging nation does not fall to the extremist conservative religious ideologies.

This is a long term fight of 20 years and the secular democratic forces in the Near East need to have an opportunity for a fighting chance.

Note: I am perfectly aware that many would use the dismissive “anti-semitism” cliché in emulation of the lazy media approach to hot issues.  It is interesting to realize that effective and valuable communication is based on personal reflection with rational thinking as guiding rod.

Nietzsche’s “Christianity is a carbon copy of Judaism”, (Part 5, March 6, 2009)

Nietzsche said about his rational style: “Honest men do not exhibit their reasons by argumentation. What needs to be demonstrated is not worth the effort” He could not feign cold and impersonal objectivity.

He regarded the Socratic method of rational argumentation as “symbol of degeneracy”, a powerful poison that altered “the Greeks’ taste”. 

 

Since thoughts are required to generate ideas, and act on the written thought, Nietzsche demands from his readers to stimulate the value of patience in reading his works.

Philology, in a period when we read a lot, is the art of learning and teaching how to read.  We need to meditate half an hour on a paragraph; this habit has all the merit for interpreting aphorism”.  Nietzsche does write in order to be listened to and not to be discussed.

Nietzsche displaces the question of truth to the “value of truth“; and thus,

moral intentions, or the systems of value judgments in relation to the conditions of existence, constitute the germ from which the entire plant grew”. Consequently, the method of Nietzsche is to uncover the origin and the true genesis of the values disseminated by the philosophers, the preachers, and the prophets.

The free spirit should analyze the genealogy of values since “Truth is this type of error without which a certain type of living species would not know how to live. From life perspective, it is how we perceive values that all depend in the final analyzes” 

Amoral Nietzsche is a kind of hyper-moralist since he intends to free mankind of the poisons that himself secrete; poisons such as the value systems diffused in “symbols, masks, sickness, hypocrisy, misunderstanding, cause, remedy, stimulant, and poison.”

For Nietzsche, Christianity, and in general, religions and their sacerdotal caste systems are characterized by stifling and oppressing societies. In order to criticize Judaism and then Christianism Nietzsche had first to laud the origins of Judaism.

Nietzsche considered the Old Testament as a work of art “where we find men, things, and words in a style so grandiose that the Latin and Greek literature have nothing to lay upon it”.  (Actually, the written style of the Old Testament is the Levantine style, this Near-Eastern region on the east of the Mediterranean Sea and west of the Tiger River in Iraq.  The stories recount the customs and traditions of this homogeneous people in the Near East for thousand of years, sharing the Aramaic language and the same religion, sets of structured Gods, architecture of the temples, and mythical stories of the Land).

Nietzsche went as far as writing that the Jews “are the most remarkable people in the universal history to whom we owe the most influential moral law in the world” before the Jewish sacerdotal hierarchies transformed the religion into an instrument of interpreting happiness as a recompense, and misfortune as sin punishable for the disobedience toward God.  

(Actually, the moral values are the one of the Levant, and the horror war stories and genocides committed against Canaan and the Philistines are pure fictional stories that the Jewish scholars in Alexandria of 200 BC decided to attach to the history of the Levant in order to create for the Jews a place under the sun…

The psalms of David and Solomon are carbon copies of the psalms of the Land, from Babylon, to Canaan, to Assyria, and the religion of the Middle East, written over 2,000 years before the first Jewish scribe wrote the first chapters in Alexandria around 200 BC.)

For Nietzsche, Christianity emulated the worst kind of religious philosophy that the Jewish sacerdotal caste ended practicing and enforcing upon society, a carbon copy of the seriously altered Judaism.

Nietzsche considers that Christianity was conceived as the art of lying piously and has been perfected through many centuries of serious training techniques. Nietzsche claims that “Sin, as is felt wherever Christianity dominated, is a Jewish invention, a moral for slaves, and thus, Christianity endeavored to spread Judaism around the world”.

Note 1: I think that Christianity in Byzantium and Medieval Christianity in Europe tried to distance itself from Judaism on political ground by adopting pagan ceremonies, pomp, and symbols. The reformists of Luther, Protestants, and Calvinists steered Christianity back to the fold of Judaism.

I have read and published many book reviews and articles on early Christian sects. I have to concur that the early Christian sects were fundamental in disseminating Jewish customs, traditions, and laws.  They opened the way for Judaism to penetrate many “gentile” countries. 

A Jewish Kingdom Kazakh was established in the Caucasus by converted Jews (Ashkenazi) that had no origin with Near Eastern Jews (Sephardic). These Ashkenazi expanded to Central Europe, Russia, and Germany after their Kingdom was ransacked around the year 950 AC and now they established the Zionist State called Israel. 

Moslem religious sects emulated the early Christian-Jewish sects’ customs and dogmas and aided in the spread of Judaism even further toward East Asia.

 

Note 2: As Anti-Semitism was understood in the early 20th century, Nietzsche was not anti-Semite.  He lambasted this wave in Europe as “muddle and stupidity in the spirit, and conscience of Germany press that are leading the Jews to the slaughterhouse as a scapegoat in order to absolve all the public and private malaise”.  Nietzsche also blamed vigorously the wedding of his sister to an anti-Semitic leader. 

He wrote: “it fills me with melancholy and bitterness.  It is a question of honor for me to have a clear and neat stand against anti-Semitic attitudes and activities.  I fear and have great repulsion that this party might use of my reputation and my name for their own cause.” 

Nietzsche position is consistent with his quest to return to the original values that glorify life before the sacerdotal castes high-jacked the religious institutions and altered the moral values to enslave man.

 

Note 3: The Zionist State of Israel has been pressuring the world community to adopting a ridiculous definition of anti-Semitism: any State or individual that criticizes the Zionist genocide and apartheid policies against the Palestinian people should be labeled anti-Semite.  The USA, France, and Italy’s Berlusconi are slipping toward that dangerous path and trying hard to resist a vigorous denouncement of the recent Israeli’s genocide war in Gaza.


adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

March 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Blog Stats

  • 1,518,786 hits

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.adonisbouh@gmail.com

Join 764 other subscribers
%d bloggers like this: