A recent Haaretz editorial claimed, "Israel Is Losing Its Humanity in Gaza," but this ignores the brutal history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, of which the Gaza genocide is just the latest chapter.
Israel cannot lose a ‘humanity’ it never had – Mondoweiss On December 22, only days before Christmas, Haaretz’s Editorial Board issued an editorial titled, “Israel Is Losing Its Humanity in Gaza”. The short article outlined a fear that has for years been pervasive amongst Liberal Zionists: that the crimes being perpetrated in Gaza are betraying the values of an otherwise upstanding and moral settler colony. The Zionist project, to them, is something of a legitimate state that is only now failing to live up to the standards of conduct it is expected to commit to. A piece intended to be both an admission of guilt and a call to do better was ultimately nothing more than a fictitious accounting of the colony’s history – one that called upon a better, more moral time. By detracting from the history of violence resulting from the colony and painting a revisionist picture of a morally upstanding (though sometimes problematic) and ultimately legitimate, maybe even reformable, project, they did what many Liberal Zionists have attempted to do for decades: avoid an uncomfortable and inescapable truth about the project they so desperately cling to and support. There has never been a “good” Israel. The Zionist movement, and the horrors associated with it, predate the Zionist project itself. The roots of the colonization of Palestine by those who would call themselves Zionists go as far back as the 1880s, with the first settlements being planted in the land before the First Zionist Congress would even meet in 1897. These early efforts, though an abject failure in many senses, laid the foundations for what would soon come. With the creation and ratification of the Basel Program, the Zionist movement found itself coalescing around a concrete goal: to “establish a home in Palestine for the Jewish people, secured under public law.” Though the proposed location of the project would be challenged somewhat at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 with the proposal of the Uganda Scheme, in which a plan to colonize Uganda was assessed and ultimately ruled out, the colonial ambitions of the Zionist movement were always clear. Over the next years, the presence of Zionists would continue to increase in Palestine as settlers continued to flow into the project. Thousands upon thousands would join burgeoning settlements, acquiring land through unscrupulous purchases negotiated with absentee landlords and subsequently pushing Palestinians off of land their families had called their own for sometimes generations. Palestinian society continued to be challenged as the adherents of the Zionist project worked toward their ultimate territorial and national goals. The colonial nature of these goals was never truly hidden. In a now-infamous letter to Cecil Rhodes written by Theodore Herzl. This letter, which flaunted the true nature of the project, stated clearly: “You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews… How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.” Herzl was not alone in this analysis. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, spoke of this very colonial nature in his 1923 Iron Wall speech, comparing Palestinians to the Aztecs and Sioux – who had found themselves colonized by outside powers. He went so far as to state: Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel.” Other leaders of the Zionist movement put these words into practice, not only displacing Palestinians en masse but also training and arming themselves in preparation and eventual execution of military operations that would seek to create what some like Ben Gurion considered more favorable demographic compositions on the ground. By Ben Gurion’s own estimates, the land of Palestine would only be successfully colonized should the demographic breakdown of the land be 70% Zionist settlers and 30% colonized peoples (with later planners revising this figure to a 60:40 split). It is no surprise then that by 1929, around a fifth of Palestinian peasants had been made landless as a result of colonial activity that would advance the interests of the project and those supporting it. Palestinians would, as time went on, continue to organize and become increasingly militant in their defense of their land, culminating with a general strike turned Great Revolt in 1936 – one that was brutally put down by imperial British forces and their Zionist partners. As the national movement continued beyond the failure of the revolt in 1939, Palestinians struggled against an increasingly militant, organized Zionist movement – one that would move to realize its goals in the 1940s. The Nakba, or “the catastrophe”, entailed the mass ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians from upwards of 530 cities, towns, and villages. Cities like Jaffa were besieged and depopulated under Zionist sniper fire and bombardment. Villages like Deir Yassin were invaded and burned to the ground, with countless atrocities being committed against the people who called those villages home. Beyond being a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the Nakba was also a campaign of annihilation, culminating in the deaths of at least 10,000-15,000 Palestinians. This period is what Israelis celebrate every year as the foundational period for the official establishment of the colony. As we now know, the ethnic cleansing and subjugation of Palestinians would not stop in 1948 with the official formation of the Zionist colony – the one Haaretz’s editorial board claims lost its ‘humanity’ only in the past year. In the wake of the Nakba, thousands would live under Zionist military occupation, finding themselves brutalized, exploited, and attacked by their occupiers. Zionists would expel hundreds of thousands more Palestinians in 1967 as they attempted to put the final nail in the coffin of the Palestinian liberation movement, as well as more than 100,000 Syrians, who found themselves occupied in the Golan Heights. The project would later go on to occupy Lebanon as well until their forced eviction by Lebanese resistance fighters – fighters who have continued their resistance to Zionism up to today. Today, as millions live in refugee camps across the region, barred by the colony from ever returning to their homelands, and millions more suffer under apartheid, genocide, and continued invasion, Liberal Zionists find themselves unable to defend it. Their condemnation of the project’s current actions cannot let them get away with a revisionist history in which the colony they wish to preserve ever had moral legitimacy, let alone a right to exist at all. There can be no “good” or “moral” colonialism, no matter how desperately they might wish otherwise, nor can there be a “good” or “moral” government at the helm of such a project – whether Likud or Labor. The end of the Haaretz piece itself summed up the feelings of the board – finishing with what was meant to be a definitive statement of condemnation of the actions of the project and those who have been supposedly leading it down the path of no return: The more evidence emerges from Gaza, the clearer the nauseating picture of our loss of humanity becomes. The fact that many Israelis try to deny the testimony about what is being done there not only doesn’t help Israel in the international arena but also continues to legitimize crimes and injustices that tarnish the entire country’s moral and human character. We must ask ourselves what evidence today is different from the decades of evidence Palestinians have always flaunted, and why the core problem in this genocide is, to Zionists such as these, the state of the moral and human character of a project that should not and cannot exist in a just world. Liberal Zionists, as they wrestle with the continued loss of legitimacy their project is facing, will continue to propagate the same tale of a colony that can be, and at one point was, morally upstanding, but those of us who know the history will always know better than to seriously engage with such fantasy. The genocide and occupation of Palestinians today cannot be separated from the history of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. Those victims today are tied to those victims of decades past – victims of a Nakba that never truly ended, no matter how desperately supporters of the project may wish otherwise. We should not be looking back to an imagined past where colonists were somehow more “moral” than today, but be looking to a future without Zionist occupation – a future where the millions under the boot of Zionist colonialism can be free. The Zionist project did not lose its humanity in Gaza, because it never had humanity to lose.James Ray -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34358): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34358 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110395295/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
