Monday 29th of April 2024

Es ist kein Krieg.....

Das Vorgehen Israels in Gasa ist jenseits von Gut und Böse. Es ist kein Krieg. Es ist die endgültige Vertreibung der Palästinenser aus ihrer besetzten Heimat. Diese völkerrechtswidrigen Morde und die Zerstörung von Wohnraum werden einen weltweiten Judenhass auslösen, gegen den Hitlers Politik wie ein Kinderspiel aussehen wird.

Von Peter Haisenko 

Israel’s actions in Gaza are beyond good and evil. It is not a war. It is the final expulsion of the Palestinians from their occupied homeland. These murders and the destruction of living space, which violate international law, will trigger a worldwide hatred of Jews against which Hitler’s policies will look like child’s play.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that “the battle will deepen in the coming days”. In the WallStreet Journal, he also named three conditions for peace: “Hamas must be destroyed, the Gaza Strip must be demilitarized and Palestinian society must be de-radicalized.” His approach will achieve the opposite. It is not only the Islamic world that is showing solidarity with the Palestinians, but also Jews around the world. The latter in particular can afford to call a spade a spade: Genocide! But it is more than that. Millions of Palestinians are being deprived of their livelihoods, their homes are being pulverized and they are being left to starve. The headline above all this is: If you want to live, leave the land.

The Western values, especially the FRG and Annalena, obviously can’t see anything reprehensible in this. I have to take a little trip to Ukraine. Putin states as his goal that the Nazis of the Azov Brigades must be destroyed, Kiev must be demilitarized and Ukraine must be denazified. Do you notice anything? Both announcements are almost word for word identical. But there are huge differences in their approach. Russia is sparing the civilian population and their homes as much as possible. Kiev itself has been shelling civilians for nine years and destroying everything that falls under Russia’s domain. However, during these nine years, Kiev has “only” murdered 14,000 civilians, while Israel has already killed more than 20,000 Palestinians within a few weeks. Russia is condemned and sanctioned, Kiev and Israel are not. Whether this has anything to do with the fact that Jews are at the top of both states, I don’t want to assume.

 Apartheid Israel has carte blanche for everything

For more than ten years, Israel has been bombarding Syria with rockets and bombs from airplanes. Residential areas and civilian airports. Whenever they feel like it. Just a few days ago, an Israeli missile attack hit a high-ranking Iranian who was in Syria. Every single shot fired by Israel into Syrian territory is a violation of the laws of war and international law. Although the UN has admonished Israel to moderate its actions in Gaza, the UN remains silent on the attacks on Syria. After all, it must be enough to sanction Syria, which is under attack. For 13 years now. There, too, it is mainly the civilian population that is suffering.

I visited Beirut and Tel Aviv for the first time in 1976. Beirut was really beautiful, with French flair and joie de vivre. Tel Aviv seemed like a poor simulation of a city compared to Beirut. Israel changed that shortly afterwards. No, it wasn’t Tel Aviv that became a pearl, but Beirut was destroyed and has not been allowed to recover to this day. I only mention this in passing, but it is symbolic for me. I can also tell you that the most beautiful places in Israel were built before the state was founded. To this day, the most sought-after residential areas in Israel are those that were built by German immigrants. The immigrants who were expelled from the country by England after 1945 because they were of German descent, but some of whom were already the third generation to live there.

If we now consider that 25,000 people are probably no longer living in Gasa, a comparison with Dresden comes to mind, where, according to official statements by several German presidents, “only” 25,000 people are said to have perished. It goes without saying that this is also a lie of the century. But if you look at the pictures of the destroyed Gaza, you can hardly avoid comparing it with Dresden after February 13. Could this be a reason why England in particular is not admonishing Israel? Did the Allies in Germany not act in exactly the same way as Israel is now doing in Gaza? On a much larger scale? How could they now condemn Israel for the same thing they did to Germany? And the expulsion of people from their homeland? With the Potsdam resolutions, 16 million Germans were expelled from their homeland. More than six million were cruelly murdered in the process. How could England and the USA now condemn Israel without running the risk of being reminded of this by Israel of all people?

You can find out more about the expulsion of Germans from the former eastern territories and the murder of six million of them in my book: England, the Germans, the Jews and the 20th century.

In addition, Israel and the USA have an almost identical past. Both states were founded by invaders who drove out the indigenous population with superior weapons, murdered them and banished them to ever smaller “reservations”. So is the USA the model for Israel in the sense that the indigenous people are now only kept in zoo-like mini-slaves? Disenfranchised and dependent on the gracious allocations of their masters? Well, in Israel this zoo is still too big and there are too many “animals” in it who are still resisting.

 There are five percent psychopaths in every ethnic group

And no, I am not a Jew-hater or anti-Semite. Anyone who has read my books knows that. I have also pointed out that Jews opposed the genocide of Germans during and after the Second World War. The famous “care packages” that saved many Germans from starvation were donated and delivered by a Jewish organization in the USA. Just as many Jews around the world are now taking to the streets to protest against Israel’s massacres in the occupied territories. No, it would be wrong to condemn all Jews for the crimes of Netanyahu and the Zionists. It is the three to five percent of disgusting psychopaths that can be found in every ethnic group. In every one! And they are the ones who don’t want the world to find peace because they profit from the misery.

The world situation has changed significantly since February 2022. The war in Ukraine has shown that the military of the NATO states can only invade defenseless, because technically inferior, countries with wars of aggression. But they cannot even achieve a lasting victory with a subsequent peace order. They leave chaos and failed states in their wake. My respect goes to North Korea and Vietnam, which have not sunk into post-American chaos. And of course Russia, which saved Syria from this fate. Russia, which put an end to Kiev’s ongoing killings in eastern Ukraine with the special operation.

 The state of Israel is delegitimizing itself

But back to Israel and what the consequences of the Netanyahu clique’s crimes in Gaza will be. Israel will lose. Morally, it has already lost. Even the UN has already cautiously hinted at this. Whether the state of Israel will still exist in this form in a year’s time is anything but certain. And here again, Israel has something in common with the USA. If you take a closer look overseas, you will see that it cannot be ruled out that the USA will break up into individual states. Secessionist movements can no longer be overlooked. But if the USA disintegrates, there will soon be a different political order in Palestine. Provided that our overqualified foreign minister allows this….

Just as Gil Ofarim did the Jews in Germany a disservice with his story of lies, Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza will have an impact on the lives of all Jews in the world. They, and especially those who are completely innocent, even those who have expressed their displeasure, will find themselves exposed to hatred not only from the Islamic world. This hatred will affect the lives of all Jews throughout the world, it can be deadly.

 Only the Jews themselves can defuse the hatred

So it is not only the decent Jews in Israel who can prevent a worldwide flare-up of deadly Jew-hatred. They are in the majority. They could do this by collectively standing up against the genocide in Gaza and campaigning for a completely new political order in Palestine. They can, because without their support and their money, Israel cannot exist. The 95 percent of decent Jews also want peace. But it is just as important that Netanyahu’s Israel is called to order by Western values, preferably before an international court. That the Western values ensure that the Palestinians are finally granted justice, including massive compensation and a credible apology.

 

A word about the Hamas attacks. Terrible? Inexcusable? Really? Isn’t it another twisting of cause and effect? What came first? That is clear. First came expulsion, occupation, disenfranchisement and years of bombardment by Israel. Then the Palestinians had to realize that no one was seriously coming to their aid. This gave rise to despair and then violent hatred. Deadly hatred. Which at some point has to come to a physical outburst. Can we still speak of gratuitous acts of violence? Especially knowing the Arab mentality? Israel knew what it had been doing for the last 75 years. So did the Palestinians.

Dear Jews in Germany, dear Jews of the world, unite loudly against the Netanyahu government, chase them to hell, because I don’t want to see all of you, the decent ones, having to live in constant fear for your integrity because of the crimes of the Zionists. With their policies, the real state of Israel has forfeited its right to exist. You, only you, can avert this.

https://www.theinteldrop.org/2023/12/29/after-gaza-jews-will-have-nowhere-safe-to-live/

 

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creating terrorists.....

The more Palestinians believe that Washington is condoning the unprecedented devastation of Gaza and the killing and injuring of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the higher the probability that Hamas’s resistance against Israel could expand into a global jihad and raise the terrorism threat against the United States. 

Will the absence of a settlement of the conflict through a two-state solution or some other fair and equitable modality usher in a new generation of Arab and Islamic global jihadists? Have U.S. policymakers considered the long-term implications of such a frightening development? Isn’t it tragic that, after spending over 20 years fighting al-Qaida and ISIS, the United States may be inadvertently contributing to the making of new cadres of violent jihadists, many of whom were not even born before 9/11?

 

Is US helping to create new global jihadists?After spending over 20 years fighting al-Qaida and ISIS, a new cadre of terrorists may be on the horizon

 

BY 

 

The frequent video broadcasts by Abu Ubayda, Hamas’s military spokesman, chronicling Al-Qassam Brigades’ purported successes against Israeli forces in Gaza are beginning to resemble announcements by former al-Qaida and ISIS military spokesmen, including in some cases, Qur’anic citations of suras and ‘ayas (Chapters and verses), mostly revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in Medina (versus Mecca). In previous Gaza wars (2008-2021), Hamas viewed Israel as its primary adversary, the so-called “near enemy.”

In the current war, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian militants, much like Wahhabi Salafi radicals in the 1990s and early 2000s, have begun to consider the United States as their other enemy, the so-called “far enemy.” Hamas spokesman Osama Hamdan articulated this view in the latest press conference on December 26.

To many of these radicals, the United States, in partnering with Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinians, has become a legitimate target for violent jihad. As this view solidifies within Hamas and the Palestinian resistance at large, not to mention across the Arab and Islamic worlds, terrorist threats against the United States — in the region and in the homeland — are likely to increase. Because of Washington’s persistent refusal to support United Nations resolutions calling for a permanent ceasefire, Washington has lost what little credibility it had left as an “honest broker” in the Palestine conflict.

According to a recent public opinion poll, majorities of Palestinians in Gaza — and more significantly in the West Bank — view the U.S. less favorably than any other time in recent years. As they become more radicalized and frustrated, Hamas and other Palestinian militants will increasingly adopt the view that America is their enemy, and they are therefore duty-bound to wage violent jihad against American facilities and personnel.

Al-Qaida has long viewed the United States as an “infidel” far enemy, and if the Gaza war continues in its present configuration, Hamas will follow suit and will join the global jihad. Thus, Hamas’s heretofore religious nationalist struggle in Palestine could evolve into a global Islamic jihadist ideology that could resonate among disenfranchised, angry, and unemployed Muslim youth across the Muslim world, including in some Western countries in which sizable Muslim communities live.

Palestinians believe that Israel created the first Palestinian displacement, or Nakba, in 1948. In the current Gaza war, Hamas believes that Israel and its partner, the United States, are creating the second Palestinian Nakba in 2023-2024.

 

Hamas’s likely ideological transformation 

As I wrote recently, Hamas’s war against Israel over the years has been primarily expressed in the form of resistance — military and political — against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and control of Gaza. Since the horrific October 7 assault on the Israeli communities in southern Israel and the massive Israeli military response, backed by Washington’s military, economic and political support, the United States has emerged in Hamas’ rhetoric as the second enemy.

In their mind, violent jihad against this new enemy is now permissible and legitimate. Adopting such a position would signal that some Hamas military leaders could move away from the Muslim Brotherhood’s mainstream Islamic ideology focusing on local Muslim communities toward the radical rhetoric of Sayyid Qutb, the most extreme thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood, and from there to Wahhabi Salafi jihadism.

Qutb, who was executed by Egypt in the mid-1960s, preached in his book Signposts (ma’alim fi al-Tariq) that the enemies of Islam are Muslim leaders who exhibit un-Islamic behavior and their supporters among foreign infidel leaders, such as Israel and the United States and their allies. He called the Muslim leaders the “near enemy” and the foreign leaders the “far enemy.” He urged Muslims to wage a necessary jihad against both groups of leaders and their countries. 

Qutb and subsequent radical Palestinian leaders moved closer ideologically to radical Wahhabi clerics and ulama in Saudi Arabia. They jointly began to articulate a common ideological front of global jihad against all infidels and unbelievers domestically and internationally, which set the stage for 9/11. It’s noteworthy to remember that Osama bin Laden frequently invoked Palestine in his speeches and messages railing against the United States.

Under the influence of Qutb’s writing, leading Hamas jihadists like Shaikh Ahmed Yassin moved away from the Egyptian Al-Azhar Islam, reflected in the three mainstream schools of jurisprudence in Sunni Islam — the Shafi’i, the Maliki, and the Hanafi schools — toward the Saudi Wahhabi interpretation, which primarily adheres to the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, the fourth and most radical school in Sunni Islam.

Under the Hanbali version of Islam, as articulated by the Saudi religious scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century, jihad is considered a sixth tenet of Islam — the other five being the traditional “pillars” of the religion: the Shahada (profession of one’s faith), Salat (prayers), Zakat (alms giving), Sawm(fasting), and the Hajj (Pilgrimage).

Of the 114 Suras in the entire Qur’an, 26 Suras, which feature a significant focus on jihad and fighting, were revealed to Prophet Muhammad in Medina while he was in the process of establishing his Islamic state and battling themushrikun (polytheists, pagans, idolaters, and disbelievers). Radical jihadis, including followers of al-Qaeda and ISIS, often cite ‘ayas from the Medinan Suras in their defense of waging violent jihad against the perceived enemies of Islam. Examples of these Suras are Surat al-Ma’ida, Surat al-Baqara, Surat al-Nisa’, and Surat Muhammad.

For Hamas and Palestinians in general, the Biden administration has been an integral partner in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war of retribution in Gaza and its lack of logic, proportionality, and humanity. The White House has argued that Arab regimes for the most part loathe Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic ideology and are therefore privately tolerant of Israel’s continued destruction of Gaza. This muddled logic, however, primarily focuses on Arab autocratic regimes, not their publics. The devastation of Gaza and the uprooting of nearly two million people will strengthen, not weaken, Arab publics’ support for Hamas or a successor group. Hamas is not just a group of militant jihadists comprising 30,000 plus fighters but an idea nurtured by the miserable Palestinian realities on the ground.

The way forward

To break the possibility of more terrorism, it’s time for President Biden to realize that the unprecedented and inhumane destruction of Gaza will not destroy Hamas or return the hostages safely. He should end his complicity in Israel’s war and work with Israeli and Palestinian leaders to remove Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas from their leadership positions and work with Israelis and Palestinians to elect new leaders.

If the Biden administration puts forward a clear path for the two peoples to live together, whether in a two-state paradigm or some other legitimate political arrangement, Hamas’ terrorism threat against the United States would fizzle. The Palestinian people, like other peoples in the region, are more interested in living, putting food on the table, and educating their children. Once Israelis and Palestinians agree to move from the destruction of Gaza to a negotiated political and economic reconstruction, only then will the slow process of bringing the bloody history of Hamas’ Yahya Sinwar and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu — the region’s newest warmongers — come to an end.

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/hamas-jihad-biden/

 

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saving israel....

 

Saving Israel by ending its war in Gaza   By Jeffrey D. Sachs

 

Israel’s brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat to Israel’s survival.

When Congress returns in January, President Joe Biden will push the case to deepen American complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza through another US armaments package for Israel. Americans should raise their voice in a resounding no.

An arms package for Israel is not only against America’s interests but also against Israel’s interests. The only path to real security for Israel is peace with Palestine. The US can help bring this about by ending the supply of munitions for Israel’s brutal war and by promoting the two-state solution as called for by international law.

I spelled out the diplomatic path to the two-state solution in a previous column for Common Dreams. That path remains open. It is actively promoted by the Arab and Islamic countries and supported by nearly the entire world.

Israel’s brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat to Israel’s survival. Because of Israel’s extraordinary violence, the world is uniting against Israel, while Israel is suffering massive military losses. Incredibly, some Israeli leaders are now openly advocating an even wider war in the Middle East, one that could well spell utter disaster for Israel.

The surging global opposition to Israel’s policies is not antisemitic. It is anti-genocide. It is also pro-peace, pro-Israel, and pro-Palestine. If Israel ends the genocide, it will end the global opposition it now faces.

Defeating Hamas is not Israel’s real aim in Gaza

The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure, including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false. There is no ethical, practical, legal or geopolitical case for destroying Gaza—killing tens of thousands of civilians, and uprooting 2 million people—to protect Israel against the kinds of preventable and controllable threats that Hamas actually poses.

During the years 2008-2022, Hamas and other militants killed around a dozen Israeli civilians per year, while Israel usually killed at least ten times more civilian Palestinians. There was a spike in 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza, with 19 Israeli civilians killed versus 1,760 Palestinian civilians. Hamas launches many rockets, but almost all are intercepted or cause little damage. Israel responds with periodic massacres (as in 2014) and with more regular airstrikes. The Israelis even have a cynical name for their periodic killing, called “mowing the grass”. It is common knowledge inside Israel that Hamas long served as a “low-cost” political prop used by Netanyahu to “prove” to Israelis that a two-state solution is impossible.

In all the years of Hamas rule in Gaza after 2007, Hamas has never captured Israeli territory, much less remotely threatened Israel’s existence or survival. Simply, it couldn’t do so even if it wanted. Hamas has around 30,000 fighters, compared with more than 600,000 active and reserve personnel in the IDF. Hamas lacks an air force, armored units, a military-industrial base, and any geographic maneuverability outside of Gaza.

On October 7, Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion into Israel that lasted that horrific day. This did not reflect a new super-ability of Hamas to invade Israel but rather a shocking failure of Israeli security. Israeli leaders had ignored extensive warnings of an upcoming Hamas attack and had inexplicably left the Gaza-Israel border severely under-manned. Even more astoundingly, they did so just days after Israeli extremists had stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, one of the Islam’s holiest sites. Hamas exploited Israel’s astounding security lapse by breaching the border in an attack that led to around 1,100 Israeli civilian deaths, and Hamas’ taking of 240 hostages, with an unknown number of the Israeli civilian deaths that day caused by Israeli aerial bombing and crossfire in the IDF’s counterattack.

By re-fortifying the border with Gaza, Israel has stopped further ground incursions by Hamas. Netanyahu has ordered the destruction of Gaza not to protect Israel from Hamas, but to make Gaza uninhabitable and thereby to fulfill his longstanding intention to impose permanent Israeli rule over the territory. Netanyahu gets the added bonus of clinging to power despite his grievous other failures.

The Israeli government’s more basic objective is to solidify its total control over “Greater Israel,” meaning all of the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its objective with the incursion in Gaza is to push the population out of the territory. On October 10, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” More recently, Netanyahu spoke of “voluntary migration” of the Gazan population—voluntary, that is, after Gaza has been laid to waste and Gazans told to evacuate. Metula Mayor David Azoulai declared that “the whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.” He later clarified that he would like to see the Gaza population “relocated,” not murdered. Most recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared fascistcalled for Gaza’s population to be cut to 100,000-200,000 from the current population of more than 2 million. Israel aimed from the start of its invasion of Gaza to push the Gazans into Egypt, but Egypt adamantly refused to be a party to ethnic cleansing.

In the 1970s, the aim of dominating Palestine to create Greater Israel as a Jewish state was a fringe belief. Now it rules Israeli policy, in part reflecting the enormous political weight of hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

“Greater Israel,” defined as Israel of pre-1967-War borders, plus Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, is home to roughly seven million Jews and seven million Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians. Israel can rule Greater Israel only by dominating seven million Palestinians, or by driving them out of their homes by war, violence, and extreme discrimination. The quest for Greater Israel in practice leads Israel to commit grave crimes against the people of Palestine. The ongoing crime is Apartheid rule, with its severe injustices and indignities. The graver crime is ethnic cleaning as Israel is attempting in Gaza. The gravest of all is genocide, witnessed in the thousands of deaths of innocent civilians occurring each week now in Gaza.

Israel’s turn towards extremism

The American people need to understand that Israeli politics has become dominated by extremists who mix religious fervor with murderous violence against the Palestinians. This ultra-violent side of Israel is readily apparent in Israel but is still largely unknown to the American public. Israeli brutality in Gaza comes as a surprise to many Americans, yet it has become par for the course in Israel itself, although some Israelis are no doubt in denial of the facts on the ground in the Occupied Territories. The Grayzone has put together a shocking compilation of Israeli soldiers and leading personalities celebrating Palestinian deaths.

Israel’s genocidal violence towards the Palestinian people appeals to much of the Israeli public for several reasons. First, always lurking in the shadows in Israel is the memory of the Holocaust. Politicians like Netanyahu have long stoked the terror of the Holocaust to argue crudely and falsely that all Palestinians want to kill all the Jews, so that the violent suppression of the Palestinians is a matter of life and death for Israel. Of course, as in any spiral of hatred, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy to Netanyahu’s rhetoric and actions, leading to counter-actions and hatreds from the other side. Yet rather than trying to solve those through dialogue, interaction, diplomacy, and peacemaking, the cycle of hatred is stoked.
Second, orthodox rabbis have expanded upon the security narrative by insisting that Israel has a sacred right to Palestine because God gave all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean to the Israelites.

Third, with 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian lands conquered in 1967, Greater Israel has become a fait accompli for a large part of the Israeli people, with a large voice in Israeli politics. These settlers moved into conquered territory and now fervently insist on defending their settlements. The UN Security Council (UNSC Resolution 2334) has unequivocally declared Israel’s settlements in occupied Palestine to be in flagrant violation of international law, yet Smotrich himself, in the inner cabinet, is a leader of the settler movement.

The emergence of this violent strand of Judaism dates to the early 1970s, just after the 1967 Six-Day War. The policy question in Israel after 1967 was what to do with the newly occupied Palestinian land. Drawing on the proposals of Yigal Allon, a leading Israeli politician, Israeli leaders decided to keep East Jerusalem and to establish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to put “facts on the ground” to protect Israel’s security. From the start, Israeli governments defied UN Security Council Resolution 242 (1967), which rejected Israel’s acquisition of territory by war.

What happened next was momentous. Ultra-religious Jews took up the cause of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as part of a messianic calling to make Israel the “Earthly support of the Lord’s throne,”(here p. 69). In 1974, Gush Emunim was launched as an ultra-nationalist religious settler movement by followers of the father-son rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose teachings combined the land claims of the Book of Joshua, Talmudic law, Chassidic mysticism, nationalism, and political activism.

The religious motivation of Greater Israel is that God gave the Jews all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In the Book of Joshua, probably completed in the 6th century BC, God instructs the Israelites arriving from Egypt after 40 years in the desert to annihilate the nations of Canaan in order to take the land for themselves. God promises the land extending “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites. (Joshua 1:4, New Living Translation). With God’s backing, Joshua’s armies commit a series of genocides to capture the land.

This extraordinarily violent text and related parts of the Bible (such as the annihilation of the Amalekites in the Book of Samuel), have become crucial points of reference for right-wing Israelis, both religious and secular. As a result, today’s Israel pursues a 6th century BC messianic vision of securing all of Palestine for the Jews. Supporters of Greater Israel often label the opponents of this ideology as anti-Semites, but this is wildly off the mark, as the former Executive Director of the Harvard Hillel has eloquently argued. The opponents of Greater Israel are against extremism and injustice, not against Judaism.

The Jewish settler movement led to a murderous disdain of the Palestinian. In his book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Prof. Israel Shahak draws attention to the religious zealotry of Rabbi Eliezer Waldman, a leader of the West Bank settlers:

“Let us say clearly and strongly: we are not occupying foreign territories in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. This is our ancient home. And thank G-d that we have brought it back to life … Our responsibility to Jewish faith and redemption commands us to speak up in a strong and clear voice. The Divine Process of uniting our people and our Land must not be clouded and weakened by seeming logical concepts of “security” and “diplomacy.” They only distort the truth and weaken the justice of our cause, which is engraved in our exclusive national rights to our land. We are a people of faith. This is the essence of our eternal identity and the secret of our continued existence under all conditions.” [2002]

In Jewish History – Jewish Religion (2nd edition, 2008), Shahak quotes the Chief Chaplain of the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army in 1973: “In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah (Jewish law) to kill even good [Palestinian] civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good” (p. 76).

The tactic of using violence to provoke mass Palestinian flight has been part of Israel’s playbook from its inception. On the eve of Israel’s independence, during 1947-8, Jewish militant groups used terror to provoke the mass departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in a sordid process called nakba by the Palestinians (“catastrophe” in Arabic).

Netanyahu’s government aims to repeat the nakba in the Gaza war by forcing Gazans to flee to neighboring Egypt or other parts of the Arab Middle East. However, unlike in 1947-8, the world is watching in real-time, and is expressing outrage at Israel’s blatant attempt at ethnic cleansing. Egypt told Israel and the US in no uncertain terms that it would not be a party to Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and would not accept a flood of Gazan refugees.

The quest for Greater Israel is doomed to fail

Israel’s attempt to violently create a “Greater Israel” will fail. The Israeli Defense Forces are suffering massive losses in the brutal urban warfare in Gaza. While Israel has killed more than 20,000 Gazans, mostly women and children, it has not destroyed Hamas’s capacity to resist Israel’s invasion. IDF leaders say that the battle against Hamas will require many more months, but well before then, global opposition will likely become insurmountable.

In desperation, Israeli leaders such as Defense Minister Benny Gantz want to expand the war to Lebanon and probably to Iran. US hardliners such as Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have dutifully and predictably chimed in, urging a US war with Iran. This Israeli gambit too will likely fail. The US is in no position to fight a wider Middle East war, after having drawn down its stockpile of munitions in Ukraine and Gaza. The American people too strongly oppose another US war, and their opposition will be heard in an election year, even by a Congress in the pocket of the military-industrial complex.

Israel’s diplomatic setbacks, unless reversed, will prove devastating. Israel has hemorrhaged political support worldwide. In a recent UN General Assembly vote, 174 countries, with 94% of the world population, voted in favor of Palestinian political self-determination, while just 4 countries with 4% of the world population – Israel, the United States, Micronesia and Nauru – voted against (another 15 countries abstained or did not vote). Israel’s hardline militarism has united the world against it.

Israel counts entirely now on its one remaining supporter, the United States, but US support is also waning. By a huge margin, 59% for and 19% opposed, Americans support a cease fire. Americans support Israel’s security but not its extremism. Of course, America has its own Christian and Jewish zealots who base their politics on biblical literalism/orthodoxy, but they are a minority of public opinion. American support for Israel depends on the two-state solution. Biden knows it and has reiterated US support for the two-state solution, even as the US supplies munitions for Israel’s war on Gaza.
While American Jews generally support Israel, they do not support Israel’s religious messianism. In a 2020 Pew Survey only 30% of American Jews believed that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” 63% believed in the feasibility of peace between Israel and Palestine through the two-state solution. Only 33% believed as of 2020 that the Israeli government was making sincere efforts towards peace with the Palestinians.

Even Orthodox US Jews are divided on the question of Greater Israel. Some orthodox Jewish communities such as the Chabad are believers in the biblically motivated Greater Israel, while others such as the Satmar community (also known as Naturei Karta) are anti-Zionists and outspoken critics of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people stating that Judaism is a religion not a nation concept. The Satmar community believes that the revival of the Jewish homeland must follow God’s timeline, and not a Zionist timeline.

Supporting Israel’s extremism is not in America’s interest

The US has been providing the munitions for Israel’s brutal war. This complicity has led to a lawsuit by Palestinian plaintiffs charging the US Government with violations of the Genocide Convention. As part of this legal effort, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has methodically documented the genocidal statements by Israeli leaders here and here.

The US is also facing severe and costly diplomatic isolation as it defends Israel’s indefensible actions. In recent votes of the US Security Council and the UN General Assembly, the US has stood almost alone in backing Israel’s hyper-violent and unjust actions. This is hurting the US in countless other areas of foreign policy and global economics.

The US federal budget is also under tremendous stress from military-related spending, which will reach around $1.5 trillion in total in 2024. The American people have had enough of the bulging military spending, which has been a central factor in raising the public debt from around 35% of GDP in 2000 to around 100% of GDP today. With soaring debts and the rise in interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans, the public is resisting Biden’s calls for more deficit spending to fund the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and will vociferously oppose a wider war in the Middle East, especially one that would draw the US into direct combat.

Of course, US open-ended support for Israel has seemed to be unstoppable in American politics. The Israel lobby—a powerful constellation of Israel politicians and wealthy Americans—has played a huge role in building this strong support. The Israel lobby gave $30 million in campaign contributions in the 2022 Congressional election cycle, and will give vastly more in 2024. Yet the lobby is up against the public’s growing opposition to Israel’s brutality in Gaza.

The two-state solution remains Israel’s true chance for peace and it’s security

Israeli leaders and diplomats have to stop shouting that critics are all anti-Semites and listen to what the world is actually saying: Israel and Palestine need to live side by side based on international law and mutual security. The support for a two-state solution is support for the peace and security of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, just as it is support for the peace and security of the Palestinian people in their own state. To the contrary, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and inflaming anti-Israel (and anti-US) sentiment around the world, is antithetical to Israel’s long-term security and perhaps even its survival. The Arab and Islamic states have repeatedly declared their readiness to normalize relations with Israel within the context of the two-state solution. This goes back to the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and includes the important Final statement of the extraordinary joint Arab Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, 2023. The US and Arab countries should quickly agree on establishing a joint peacekeeping force to keep both sides safe in the context of implementing the two-state solution.

Many zealous religious settlers will strongly resist a Palestinian state, asserting their right to do so based on ancient biblical texts. Yet the point of Judaism is not to rule over millions of Palestinians or to ethnically cleanse them. The real point is not to provoke global opprobrium but to use reason and goodwill to find peace. As Hillel the Elder declared, “Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.” The real point is to fulfill the ethical vision of the Prophet Isaiah (2:4), who prophesied that “nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” So may it be.

 

Original article published in Common Dreams on 1st January, 2024

https://johnmenadue.com/saving-israel-by-ending-its-war-in-gaza/

 

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