The establishment of the state of Israel in Palestine in 1948 was a very bad idea.
Why?
The establishment of Israel was imposed on the Palestinian people who lived there at the time.
It involved the ethnic cleansing of 700, 000 Palestinian people from the 1948 borders of Israel. The Palestinians were bullied and forced out of their homes and had to live in places like Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza – where their ancestors live today.
Israeli paramilitary groups slaughtered 108 Palestinian people in Dei Yassin (Gordon, 2023).
The imposition of the state of Israel on Palestine, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine, and the slaughter of 107 people in Dei Yassin, triggered seventy years of violence between Palestinian and Israeli factions.
In some ways, Israel followed the recipe for violence, concocted by James I when he bought across thousands of Protestants from Scotland to Northern Ireland.
What James I did has triggered over three hundred years of violence.
The imposition of Israel in Palestine appears to be triggering the same chronic levels of violence that is likely to continue for generations to come.
Some people argue that the establishment of Israel was necessary to ensure the safety of Jewish people across the world.
They say Israel was created by the United Nations after the German Nazis had murdered some six million Jews in an attempt to wipe out Jewish people from the face of the territories, they had control of.
But three things.
First, arguably there were other reasons for the establishment of Israel and the idea that Israel was established to prevent a second holocaust was created to hide the real reasons.
Israel was established as an American friendly territory in the Middle East. In other words, Israel was created by the United States to further political, military and economic objectives in the region.
Israel was a Christian wet dream. In the Bible it talks about the end of the world coming when Israel turns to Jesus and the Christian faith. To bring about the end of the world therefore required that Israel existed. In some sense then, the creation of Israel was as much to do with Christian desire and fantasies as Jewish ones.
Second, clearly, establishing Israel as a state has not made Jewish people safe.
The state of Israel has constantly come under attack.
Neither is there any clear reason to think that the existence of Israel would prevent some future superpower from attempting a second holocaust at some point in the future.
Admittedly, the existence of Israel gives people the opportunity to Jews to flee to a friendly country, but then, Jews in Europe during the 1930s and 40s had that too. The question is whether one can get out of the country that is doing the holocaust.
Whilst the ‘global community’ or some elements of it may feel that the Jews deserved their own state after the Holocaust, there is no justification for imposing that state on a people who don’t want to give it, the Palestinians.
If any peoples were to have the state of Israel imposed on them, it should have been those who had elected the officials, who had gone on to carry out the holocaust, the Germans. After the Second World War, Poland was expanded to the east taking German land, and millions of Germans had to vacate their homes and land to make way for the Poles (this was after the Soviets had taken eastern Poland during the second world war, and had resolved at the war’s end, not to give the land back to Poland).
Or the land for the state of Israel could have been sacrificed by two of the countries that were most determined to establish the state of Israel: The United States or the United Kingdom.
But no-one in Europe or the United States cared about giving Jewish people their own state so much that they were willing to give their own land to do it.
Better and easier to pick up on a weak and subjugated people, who historically had not been in control of the land that they and their ancestors had lived on for centuries. The Palestinians had experienced hundreds of years of Ottoman and then British control before the UN, backed by the US and UK, decided that the Palestinians would be the ones sacrificing their land, homes and livelihoods for the new Jewish state.
Furthermore, given that Palestine had, at the point that Israel was declared a state, been under the control of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years, and then the United Nations for some thirty years, a more sensible notion would have been a consultation of all the people who lived in Palestine at the time, to found a state, that included both Palestinians and Jews.
In some respects, post-world war II, post-holocaust, the western world has ensured that the Palestinians have displaced the Jews as the whipping-boys of the world, and they’ve done this by prostrating the Palestinians through the establishment and enactments of the Israeli state.
Now, in 2024.
After years and years of Israel ethnically cleansing Palestinian territories.
And now Israel is bombing Gaza to smithereens.
Western state apparatuses and politicians have begun to outlaw support for Palestinian nationhood and humanitarian concerns for Palestinian people.
They call support for Palestinians or criticism of Israel, anti-semitic.
In this way they have appropriated the term anti-semitic.
What remains of the term anti-semitic, is a fear of what might happen to one if one is perceived to be one. But what the term is now directed to is no longer acts of hatred or prejudice towards people because they are Jewish, but rather people who dissent against Israel’s ethnic cleansing and slaughter of Palestinians.
In this way anti-semitism, which was originally used to fight against racism, is now being used to further (and in some ways dissimulate) the racist ideology that is underpinning the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian homes and lands in the West Bank and the massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza strip.
Israel was a bad idea, but it’s here now.
The answer is how do you make the best of a really shit situation?
The answer to this question is not at all clear.
