Eurasia Press & News
Missing from thoughtful decision is that the Emirates bewildering moment and the shattered Palestinian moment are due to a misrepresentation of what is called the Middle East conflict. The misrepresentation has led to a fallacious approach for rectification, and an impasse for obtaining peace with justice.
Even the terminology seems incorrect. Is this a conflict between Palestinians and Zionists or has it always been a crisis that the Zionists imposed on the Palestinians? Providing a correction is more than semantics, it places the dispute in proper context, a starting point for organizing a response.
In a conflict, two parties have clashing interests for the same objective; both have reasonable narratives that allow pursuing the objective, and almost equal “skin in the game.”
The Zionist’s aimed at establishing an overwhelming presence in a land to which they had no title. The Palestinian objective has always been to remain in lands in which they have title. Compare the objectives; they are not the same. Correctly and honestly pursued, attaining both objectives was not contradictory, could have been achieved, maybe, with difficulty, but eventually. Khalil Sakakini, Palestinian nationalist, essayist and poet, and other Palestinian notables concurred.
I see no reason why the Jews and the Arabs cannot work together in this great country. There is room for all, and up to the present time there have been no serious quarrels. At the beginning, what little dissension arose has smoothed out, and I believe it is the desire at least of the younger and vigorous and open minded group of Arabs to do everything they can to work amicably with the Jews. We must say that the Jews have brought considerable progress, and as they are mainly spending their own money in developing the country, it would be wrong not to give them credit for efforts in trying to make a future and better Palestine.
On November 3, 1918, a day after the one-year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, a delegation of the Muslim-Christian Association handed a petition signed by more than 100 notables to Ronald Storrs, the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration military governor.
We noticed yesterday a large crowd of Jews carrying banners and overrunning the streets shouting words, which hurt the feelings and wound the soul. They pretend with open voice that Palestine, which is the Holy Land of our Fathers and the graveyard of our ancestors, which has been inhabited by the Arabs for long ages who loved it and died in defending it, is now a national home for them. These are words which displease the heavens. How do the Jews expect Palestine to be a national home when the Muslims and the Christians never asked that it should be a national home for those of them who are not inhabitants of Palestine? We Arabs, Muslim and Christian, have always sympathized profoundly with the persecuted Jews and their misfortunes in other countries as much as we sympathized with the persecuted Armenians and other weaker nations. We hoped for their deliverance and prosperity. But there is a wide difference between this sympathy and the acceptance of such a nation in our country, to be made by them a national home, ruling over us and disposing of our affairs. We Muslims and Christians desire to live with our brothers, the Jews of Palestine, in peace and happiness and with equal rights. Our privileges are theirs, and their duties are ours.
An internal conflict between the Zionists – the real conflict – prevented the occurrence; extremist Zionists sought their objective and tried to prevent the Palestinians from maintaining their objective. The cultural, political, revisionist, labor, reform, revolutionary, and religious Zionists fought a conflict among themselves, and a combination of revisionist, revolutionary, and religious Zionists won – chase them out and take their land – the Zionist objective was achieved and the Palestinian objective was defeated.
The Zionists had no reasonable narrative that allowed them to pursue their objective; just unproven and fantastic propositions that scattered Jewish communities throughout the world, who spoke different languages, had different histories, ate different foods, and practiced different customs, constituted a nation, and this nation, despite the fact that few Jews had lived, visited, or had any interest in the area for 2000 years, had a national home in Palestine. The latter concept succeeded from other preposterous suppositions that 19th century Jews, although separated by 100 generations, were direct descendants of Hebrew tribes that had wandered the area, and their wanderings, which left no significant footprint on the soil, were mesmerizing forces beckoning Jews to return. Compare the hypothetical and artificial Zionist narrative to the Palestinian narrative: Palestinians spoke a common language, practiced similar customs, ate the same foods, and walked, worked and prayed in the area for centuries, tracing themselves to the biblical populations that inhabited the area,
The “skin in the game” for the Zionists was zero. They had no original investment in the area, no physical attachment to the area, no care for its surroundings. The Palestinians had 100 percent “skin in the game”; they cherished every olive tree their ancestors planted centuries ago, every orange tree that gave aroma to their surroundings, and all the baba ganoush they could eat.
A crisis is an event that leads to an unstable and dangerous situation, which affects an individual, group, community, or whole society. Since 1948, the Palestinians have been in an unstable and dangerous situation. Since 1948, the Palestinians have had a crisis.
Due to clever propaganda and an unknowing and caring world, the crisis has been purposefully portrayed as two ethnicities struggling for national acclamation and contested land. The Zionists, who did not have the most basic requirements for national identity – speaking a common language and living together in the same place – have assumed a national identity. The Palestinians, who have all the requirements for national identity – a common language and living together in the same place for centuries – are perceived as seeking identity.
The Zionists had little ownership of property and nil existence in Mandatory Palestine. Palestinians had legal title to vast areas and centuries of living, tilling, nurturing the soil, and populating the lands in large numbers. Yet, the crisis is portrayed as two parties fighting for contested lands.
The true nature of the crisis is best described by posing questions: How did the Israel government manage to acquire 90 percent of the land in Israel? How did Jewish immigrants obtain housing on that land? How did West Bank settlers obtain land, water and other resources on land they did not own?
Palestinian experiences, two of hundreds of thousands, supply the answers.
From Remembering Jerusalem by Hala Sakakini
In 1953, five years after the year of the disaster, we settled close to Ramallah, so near to our Katamon neighborhood in Jerusalem, yet so far. A rigid Jordanian-Israeli border divided us from the family home that came to life over and over in our memories, as if we had left only yesterday.
In 1967, a month after the Six Day War, when people were allowed to go from one part of Jerusalem to the other, my sister and I made our way on foot into Katamon, yearning. Now, in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood called Gonen, on Yordei HaSira Street, Number 8, we found what had been, in our youth, our house, our mother’s and father’s and son’s and we two daughters’, and the house of relatives and friends and guests from near and from far. A building that housed a committee of wise men who considered all aspects of Palestinian life ceased in an instant to exist under the blows of the weapons of war and became, over time, with the help of contributions from American Jews, a WIZO nursery and kindergarten.
From Remembering the Palestinian Nakba by Nasser Barghouti
Twenty years since I (Rasmiya Barghouti) had seen Northern Galilee, I was finally given a permit by the Israeli military authorities to visit. I decided to take two of my daughters with me.
It took less than three hours to reach Safed, renamed Tsvat by Israel after 1948. The van stopped in front of the white stone home that held childhood memories. I proceeded to the familiar metal door, where I knocked. A large eastern European woman opened the door. We argued. I returned to the van, my hardened face wet with tears. “She wouldn’t let me in! She still has the same curtains I made with my mother.”
We proceeded in silence, as I wept discretely, to lunch at a hotel on Lake Tiberias, where my youngest child grew hyper. Instead of imposing my usual military-style discipline on the child, I encouraged her to “splatter water,” “make more noise” – a shock to the rest of the family. The Israeli waiter hurriedly came to the table demanding, in Hebrew, they stop the raucous behavior. It was then that my defiance exploded into cursing the waiter in Arabic. “We can do whatever we please! This is my father’s hotel!” Until that moment, my children had been sheltered from knowing anything about my dear loss.
One word summarizes the taking of another person’s property, livelihood, and dignity – theft! In this case, a specific type of theft, known as Raubwirtschaft, German for “plunder economy.”
In Raubwirtschaft, the state economy is partially based on robbery, looting and plundering conquered territories. States that engage in Raubwirtschaft are in continuous warfare with their neighbors and usurp the resources of their conquered subjects, while claiming security objectives and defensive actions against defenseless people.
Israel has gone further than Raubwirtschaft, using it as a springboard for transnational corruption — having its citizens extend the illicit activities to global networks of money laundering, human trafficking, drug smuggling, and general crime.
A Broad Brush of Israeli Involvement in Transnational Corruption
Blacklisted 16 years ago, Israel has gained entry to the Financial Action Task Force, yet new immigrants can bring in unreported income for 10 years and vast scams go unprosecuted. Not to mention complaints from law enforcement in places like France and the United States that Israel is not cooperating sufficiently on international financial crimes.
Ariel Marom, a Belorussian-born former banker and social justice activist who lives in Israel and frequently travels throughout Russia and Eastern Europe for work, told The Times of Israel he believes that hundreds of millions of dollars of dirty money from the former Soviet Union is being smuggled into Israel, including by new immigrants, a phenomenon he fears may have been lost on the FATF. There are certain branches of large Israeli banks, he said, that have developed a reputation among newcomers for looking the other way.
Much of it is black money, smuggled out of Russia or the Ukraine, Moldova or the Baltic countries that has been stolen from the government budget or constitutes the proceeds of prostitution, drug sales, weapons sales or oil sales in contravention of international law. “Israel is one of the financial havens for this black money,” he claimed, based on his conversations with businessmen and politicians in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. “A small percentage of this money is used to corrupt Israeli politicians,” he charged. “Russians – and this is no secret – fund the campaigns of a number of politicians, not just one party.”
Two Israelis shot dead in Mexico City were involved in money laundering and had links to local mafias, Mexico’s government said on Friday.
Fourteen Israelis are suspected by Colombian authorities of running a child sex trafficking ring which marketed tour packages from Israel to the Latin American country aimed at businessmen and recently discharged soldiers, according to reports on Monday.
In the recent past, Israel was faced with a severe phenomenon of human trafficking for prostitution. Since the mid-1990’s until around 2005, women were “imported” to Israel from poverty-stricken countries and forced into prostitution by criminal groups. According to police estimates, 3,000 women were trafficked for prostitution in the year 2003 alone, and there were 300-400 operating brothels and escort services. Other sources believe that these numbers were even greater.
In its annual report for 2012, the International Narcotics Control Board lists Brazil and Israel among the “countries that are major manufacturers, exporters, importers and users of narcotic drugs.”
Oded Tuito was alleged to be a global pill-pusher, whose Israeli mafia group was the biggest operator in a booming international trade in the lucrative “hug drug.”
“The profits were ploughed into Israeli real estate, being sent there from the US or Barcelona,” a police spokesman said. Police forces in various parts of the world said Mr Tuito’s arrest confirmed the alleged growing global influence of Israel’s loose-knit, but expanding, crime organisations.
Israel is at the center of international trade in the drug ecstasy, according to a document published last week by the U.S. State Department.
A seriously embarrassing record for a nation that was created to be “a light among all nations,” and claims to represent world Jewry.
Along with the kleptomania and civil violations, Zionists are guilty of massive killings. An Irgun soldier told me that when the Irgun entered a village, they were ordered to take seven Palestinians hostage, shoot them, and frighten the other villagers to leave. Kidnappings (called arrests), wanton destruction of property and resources, control of movement, and other crimes are committed by Israel, continually, day after day, year after year, with impunity and without care. Here is a recent one of thousands of examples, in which few are ever charged with the crime, and, if charged, are not penalized.
Palestinian Farmers Lose Hundreds of Olive, Fig Trees to West Bank Vandals, Haaretz
The Shai (West Bank) Police have opened an investigation following the uprooting of over 300 olive trees and 20 fig trees and vines in the plot of a Palestinian farmer in the area of al-Tawamin in the South Hebron Hills. The farmer, Abu Mahmoud Barakat from the town of Yatta, told Haaretz that he estimates the damage caused to him – which includes the destruction of the irrigation system at the site – to be about 200,000 shekels ($59,000).
Present day Israel behaves as an assortment of criminal elements that has evolved into and a criminal enterprise. It may not have started that way, but it became that way.
The Zionist experience closely resembles a previous criminal enterprise, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which financed the Puritans, enabled them to steal the land, and decimate the indigenous population. Similar to the Massachusetts Bay Colony financing the Puritans, International Banker Edmund Rothschild’s financing enabled the Zionists to form enterprises in the Kibbutzim. Rothschild provided funds for manufacturing and infrastructure, including wineries, agricultural firms, and power plants.
Possessing the economy was important to the Zionists, and Histadrut, General Organization of Workers in Israel, at its inception a Trade Union only for Jewish workers, sought and became the most powerful institution in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. After becoming a Trade Union, it evolved into the proprietor of businesses and factories and was, for a time, the largest employer in the country. Together with the government, Histadrut eventually controlled most of the economy, pauperizing Palestinian peasants and crippling Palestinian enterprises.
Puritans and Zionists – A Close Resemblance
.A small congregation of Puritans differentiated themselves from their co-religionists by being unwilling to reconcile their independent organization with the established Church of England. Desiring to preserve their identity and feeling constantly persecuted, they sought new places to live their unique social and communal life. Concluding they would never be accepted in Europe, they sought opportunity in a foreign and open land. Because they made a voyage to what they termed ‘their Promised land’ (not a land promised to them), they became known as the Pilgrims.
The Pilgrims did not intend to uproot native communities they anticipated they would encounter. Due to a series of contagious diseases resulting from contacts with European fishermen on the Maine coast, the land was sparsely populated. However, the Pokanoket Tribe and Federation, led by Chief Massasoit, controlled the entire area. After being wary of the newcomers to his territory, Massasoit concluded that his people could benefit from a cordial relationship with the Pilgrims.
When word reached England that the Pilgrim adventure, which had several times been near failure, had finally succeeded, due principally to Pokanoket assistance, other English — Puritans, entrepreneurs, adventurers, merchants, farmers — booked passage to the New England. They and Pilgrim descendants acquired an insatiable thirst for land and detoured from the original mission.
The Pilgrims bought their land from the Natives, but the Natives expected to continue to use the land’s resources. The colonists built fences where no fences had ever been before, closing off their property to make the land their own. Tensions had long existed due to the two cultures’ different ways of life. Colonists’ livestock trampling Native cornfields was a continuing problem. Competition for resources created friction. Regional economic changes forced many Natives to sell their land. – Nathan Philbrick, Mayflower.
Living behind fences, similar to the Palestinians who live behind a wall, the Pokanoket Indians became fearful of losing all their land, agriculture, and fishing rights. Their fear and insecurity generated fear and insecurity in the Puritans. After 40 years of a peaceful and helpful relationship, both sides contemplated a future without the other. Massasoit’s son, who gave himself the name of King Philip, felt betrayed by the Puritans and started a 14-month war to drive out the English, a war for survival, which he almost won.
Fourteen months of attacks and counter attacks devastated New England. The Puritans survived, but many of the area’s tribes lost their homes, their culture, and their way of life. Within a century, the Cape Cod Indians had been reduced to several hundred people, most of them living on reservations in the towns of Mashpee on the Cape and in Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard. The Sakonnets dwindled from about four hundred survivors to six men and nineteen women by 1774.
Specifying an ideology and a nation as criminal enterprises is a severe charge, controversial, and not easily accepted. Facts and logic lead to the charge, but, because they contradict the accepted norm, they can be conveniently discarded for made for consumption stories and carefully planned agendas, whose huge army of faithful followers spread the deception and numb the mind. It is difficult to replace the ingrained and more pleasant story – the Hollywood story of a nation built by the intrepid Kibbutz settler who diligently worked the soil during the day and guarded the settlement from evil forces at night. The label, criminal enterprise, needs and has support from an examination of other Zionist behaviors.
Case For The Charge of Criminal Enterprise
Israel has sufficient agriculture to feed its people and water to hydrate its population and irrigate its crops. Intended annexation of the Jordan Valley has several motives — gain valuable fertile land to produce crops for export, control the entire Jordan River for industrial purposes and deny the benefits of the Jordan Valley to the destitute Palestinians. Taking land from others for commercial purposes and calling it annexation is definitely the work of a criminal enterprise. How else can it be characterized?
Israel has not defined its borders, which allows for criminal extension of the borders by conquest and confiscation. In negotiations, Israel proposed trading land in Israel for incorporation of West Bank settlements into Israel. If Israel has available land for trade, why did it not populate the settlers in those lands? Answer: The West Bank lands have more importance to the Zionist enterprise.
Israel does not have a national identity that equates with citizenship. This arrangement develops competing ethnic identities and enables a majority ethnicity to gain more benefits from the national largesse.
Israel does not have a written constitution, which allows some laws to be applied arbitrarily, and be bent to favor the major ethnicity.
The greatest of all the crimes is the denial of ontological security for the Palestinians, a stable mental state derived from a sense of continuity in regard to the events in one’s life. Caused by the severe Israeli repression, which features terrorizing communities, isolating communities, destroying crops, diverting water, subjecting passage to checkpoints, disabling breadwinners, and reducing fatherly figures by humiliating the men, by breaking of bones ordered by the Rabin administration, and by brutal and senseless beatings. Add purposeful denial of agriculture, water rights, fishing rights, livelihood, and employment, and the absence of ontological security accelerates to total deterioration of the Palestinian community. Without law to protect them, the Palestinians are continuous victims of a criminal enterprise.
Why do the Zionists embrace their dubious connection with wandering tribes and errant kings and reject the well-established and historical memories of their most precious epochs and proud moments of history – their centuries of sojourn in Mesopotamia and Persia. In The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, winner of the 2012 National Jewish Book Award in Scholarship, by Maristella Botticini, Zvi Eckstein, Princeton University press, 2012, the authors claim that “Judaism reached its Golden Age in 800 -1200 A.D. During that time, Mesopotamia and Persia contained 75% of world Jewry with the rest in North Africa and Western Europe.” Readily absorbing the new wisdom they encountered after their exodus to ancient Iraq and Persia, the Jews compiled the Talmud, and moved rapidly into achieving almost total male literacy, obtaining economic advancement, and becoming leaders for progress and modernity. The answer to the first line question: This history, truth, and reality do not fit into their Raubwirtschaft agenda.
Proper Interpretation of the Crisis Leads to Improved Understanding of Events.
Characterize Israel as a criminal enterprise and
(1) The Emirates “normalization” of ties with Israel is better framed as, “You do not disturb my turf, and I will not disturb your turf.”
(2) Boycott, Disinvestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is more correctly described as a valid attempt to punish illegal activities and criminal actions.
(3) Realize that misinterpretation of the nature of the crisis led to a faulty approach to resolve it. Palestinians have always been in a no-win position, never having the power to counter overwhelming power, and could only hope for a suitable compromise, which was impossible – the Zionists want the entire enchilada. Those who honestly sought a reasonable compromise and solution of the crisis by negotiations did not factor into their arguments the true nature of the Zionist mission; there was nothing the Palestine Authority could do to change the situation. While deliberating negotiations, Israel did what it wanted, when it wanted, and where it wanted. That is how West Bank settlers obtained land, water and other resources on land they did not own.
(4) The failure of other nations and international institutions to intervene and modify the situation makes them guilty of aiding and abetting. An opportunity existed in 1956 when the U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower prevented Israel from seizing the Sinai Peninsula and, indirectly, moving its boundaries to the Litany River in Lebanon (A behind the scenes deal proposed by David ben Gurion). France assisted Israel in developing nuclear weapons, the U.S. and Great Britain enabled Israel to continue its criminal activities, and Germany donated funds for Israel to build infrastructure and submarines for nuclear-armed Israel to threaten all enemies.
Solution
The Palestinians have found themselves thrust in an unenviable role with specific challenges — expose the contrived narrative of the Israelis and impress the world with their narrative of continuous transitory life as Canaanites and Hebrews, to Christians, to Muslims, to Arabs, to citizens of the Ottoman Empire and finally to suffering the Al-Nakba, which started their route to being oppressed. Despite decades of mental, physical, and emotional fatigue, they owe this task to themselves, to their communities in Diasporas, to Jews who do not want to be involved in the injustices, to a Middle East that suffers from the expansion of the crisis, and to a world that might soon face a related catastrophe. Although, under present conditions, the outlook is not favorable, they must keep trying in the best manner they perceive. Only a change in Israel from a criminal enterprise to a democratic nation can resolve the situation. Not being imposed within, demands it be imposed from without. Without a just solution, the Palestinians and world Jewry will suffer.
Palestinians want what all peoples need for survival – self- identity that derives from being part of a state that protects its citizens. Loss of safety results in loss of trust and loss of self-identity. Nationality and religion enhance identity and are an answer to ontological security. The latter two words are more than an esoteric expression. They define what the Palestinians lack and most need. Without ontological security, the Palestinians will face deterioration leading to genocide. Be aware, it is not genocide until it is all over.
The biblical “Exodus” story did not free the Jews. Just the opposite, it has been used to keep Jews in perpetual bondage to a spurious history and to promote an attitude of constant victim hood, while distracting them from realizing the role they play in the injustices done to others. Hopefully, Jews who absorb actual history will awaken other Jews to the destructive impulses generated from Israel, which prevents them from recognizing the roots of modern Judaism and instead reverts them to become atavistic and reactionary relics of an ancient Hebrew and fictitious world.
