An Islamophobic alliance of capitalists, fascists and colonialists (and scared little centrists) are behind Israel’s massacre of Gaza’s Palestinians
An Islamophobic alliance of capitalists, fascists and colonialists are behind Israel’s massacre of Gaza’s Palestinians.
Israel has always been a western colony, serving American and Christian purposes in the Middle East.
Western democratic capitalist countries have a history of supporting totalitarian mass-murdering dictators in other countries, if it serves their capitalistic interests.
The establishment of ongoing historical support of Israel is part of this.
Israel was imposed on the Palestinians, by the United States via the United Nations.
The Palestinians resist but neither the United States, the United Kingdom or Germany give a damn, because muffling the Palestinian cries helps muffle the fact that if any of these countries really felt moved or obliged to give Jews their own state, then they would have carved one out of their own territory. No! Let the Jews have Palestinian land, and lets stifle the Palestinians suffering together with out guilt and hypocrisy.
Furthermore since the establishment of Israel, the west have backed and continue to back and encourage Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and the annexation of Palestinians houses and villages.
When Israel was deciding its response on how it was going to flatten Gaza, did the United States intervene with a plan to bring peace to the region? Or to make arrangements for the resettlement of the 2 million Gazans whose towns and cities were about to be flattened? No, it made no attempt to open the southern border of Gaza and instead stationed one of its aircraft carriers in the eastern Mediterranean to warn off any country who thought it might try to stop the Israeli steamroller.
The establishment of Israel has also been a project for American Christians, who want to help usher the end of the world as depicted in the book of Revelations, which, it is said, will only happen when Israel turns to Jesus.
Since the holocaust there has been a global shift away from demonising Jews, to demonising Muslims.
This shift has been given more momentum since the attack on the World Trade Centre and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and since a more assertive and sometimes aggressive form of Islam has been expressed in western capitalist countries. The fact that there is a strong anti-Islamic feeling in India, China and Russia has also contributed.
This helps explains why the far right have begun to get behind Israel’s violence against Palestinians. There are new whipping boys, the Muslims, and Israel has become the playground bully’s enthusiastic sidekick in the Middle East.
In London, the far right, buoyed on by the far right politician and Tory Home Secretary Suella Braverman, opposed the right of people to march in solidarity for the human rights of people in Palestine. Braverman called those who march in solidarity with the human rights of Palestinians, ‘hate-marchers’. She called on the police to shut them down.
(The trick here, its a trick often used by the right, but can be used by anyone really, is that by calling the opposition one thing you are in actual fact laying the groundwork – to build the appetite and acceptability – for doing that very thing yourself to the opposition. Braverman says the people campaigning for Palestinian human rights are ‘hate marchers’ which serves to galvanise a sense of entitlement and strength to use hateful language and behaviour at those campaigners. In Spain, the right have a recent history of calling the democratically elected centrist government of the PSOE, dictators – its like rolling out the blue carpet to a 21st century Franco.)
In Paris Marie Len Pen from the French National Front today attended an anti-semitism march. This is an incredible development. Marie Le Pen’s father, previous leader of the National Front party, referred to the holocaust as a detail of history.
The level of hostility against those who oppose Israel’s violence have cowed even the centre-ground, so that they too have taken on stigmatising those who support Palestinian causes.
In the Labour Party Keir Starmer withdrew the whip from Andy McDonald MP, for advocating, “Justice” where “All people, Israelis and Palestinians, between the river and the sea can live in peaceful liberty”.
Mark Townsend, Tobi Thomas, Rajeev Syal and Toby Helm from the Guardian, foregrounded an unattributed interpretation of the meaning of the chant ‘from the river to the sea’ to suggest the possibility that many of the people who marched in the pro-Palestinian demonstration on the 11th November 2023 supported the elimination of the state of Israel. Their exact wording was, “While the pro-Palestinian demonstration was peaceful, many of those present chanted “from the river to the sea”, the saying identified by many as indicating support for the elimination of the state of Israel.” But who are these ‘many’ people who identify the chant as indicating support for the elimination of the state of Israel, and more importantly, what do those who chant the slogan actually mean by it? Probably different things. It would have been better for the authors to have done what they were paid to do as journalists, and that is found out by talking to the people who were chanting the slogan – rather than casting unevidenced assumptions. If you look up the slogan online you will find that it does indeed mean different things to different people – the fact that the journalists wanted the readers of their article to draw one particular conclusion – tells you something about the fact that they too contribute to this ideological oppression.
Deborah Feldman, and Israeli Jew, reported (Nov 23) on how she found, that in Germany, the assumption was that if you are critical of Israel you must be antisemitic.
Everyone, even in western countries, is now being bullied and subject to an ideological name calling and process of stigmatising, that has always been around, but which is now stronger than ever.
People have tried to stigmatise those who have criticised the establishment of the state of Israel or Israel’s actions, by claiming that to criticise Israel is to hate Jews, to be anti-semitic (and to imply a desire to want to repeat the genocide of Jews carried out by Nazi Germany).
It is against this classic and historic attempt to silence criticism of American foreign policy and Israeli violence, that Braverman castigated those who marched in support of the human rights of Palestine, as ‘hate-marchers’.
But there is no reason to think that the creation of Israel will prevent a genocide of Jewish people in some far away land like Germany again. Why should it? Its a perfectly tenable argument to suggest, as Israel Jew Deborah Feldman does, that ‘the only legitimate lesson to be learned from the horrors of the Holocaust was the unconditional defence of human rights for all, and that simply by applying our values conditionally we were already delegitimising them’. This intense 20th and now 21s century focus on Israel, arguably serves the function of enabling western society to avoid coming face to face with the horrors that created the holocaust, and either our powerlessness or lack of appetite (I’m not sure which) to do anything about the same forces, motivations, emotions and practices still at play today (see recent comments and policies all over Europe and the US on immigration).
In essence, what the far right, right and centrists are doing, what Braverman and Starmer and (what I suspect elements of the Labour Party and the Guardian) are doing, and have done for such a long time, is to try to silence people who speak for the equal human rights of Palestinians and Israeli Jews, in the land of Palestine and Israel, and then categorise them as anti-semitic and Jew hating, so that they can then punish and exclude them without fear of anyone trying to stand up for and protect them. It is a strategy of population level intimidation and bullying.
This strategy of intimidating, punishing and stigmatising those who speak out in defence of the human rights of Palestinians has been quite effective.
Israel has spent the last seventy odd years driving Palestinian families from their homes, destroying their houses and building Jewish Israeli settlements in their place, and no-one in the west has put up any sort of effective resistance or wanted to do much about it. Israel has been let off the hook, time after time after time.
