Israel: An Apartheid State Created & Propped Up By the West

[Riaz Haq]

As Israeli military pounds Gaza and kills large numbers of Palestinian men, women and children yet again, the western media and politicians are busy white-washing the Israeli crimes by repeating the same old mantra: "Israel has a right to defend itself". There's little mention of the decades-long occupation and continuing brutalization of the Palestinian people by the Israelis. Nor is there any discussion of how the West is culpable in this long-running injustice.

To put the current events in perspective, let us examine how we got to where we are today.  The foundation of the state of Israel as we know it now was laid when the British government issued a public statement in 1917 called the "Balfour Declaration" in support of the creation of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. This came at a time when the First World War was still ranging and Palestine was a province of the Ottoman Empire. The Balfour Declaration was contained in a letter of November 2, 1917 from British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the media on 9 November 1917.   

Palestinian & Israeli Flags

Later in 1937, famous British politician Winston Churchill disparaged Palestinians who had been living in the region for centuries as "dogs". Churchill said, "I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." Churchill's racist comments made it clear that the Israeli settler colonialism in the Middle East was no different than the European settler colonization of America and Australia. In an Israeli cabinet meeting in 1949,  Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion referred to Palestinians as "donkeys", according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. 

A large number of European Jews, including victims of Nazi persecution, poured into Palestine before the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were driven out of their land and their homes by these European Jews who had the full support of the West.  There were over 700,000 Palestinians in the land given to Israel by the United Nations controlled by the United States and major European colonial powers. Only 156,000 of the native Arab population remained after the Israelis dove out or killed the rest of them. Here's an excerpt of a story about the Israeli cabinet meeting as published in Haaretz:  

"The minutes of the meetings held by Mapai, which are stored in the Labor Party Archive in Beit Berl, outside Kfar Sava, attest to the deep dispute in the party over two conflicting approaches concerning the Arabs in Israel. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and his associates – Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense Forces chief of staff 1953-1958) and Shimon Peres, at the time a senior official in the Defense Ministry – urged a policy of segregation and a hard hand against what he argued was a communal threat to national security; while Sharett and other Mapai leaders – Pinhas Lavon, Zalman Aran, David Hacohen and others – promoted a policy of integration". 

Miko Peled, Israeli author of "The General's Son", has detailed and documented the history of forced mass expulsions of Palestinians by armed Jewish gangs during the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The following quote from an interview with The Middle East Monitor captures the essence of what Peled has been saying: "In hindsight, that was catastrophic for the Palestinians, because a lot of it has to do with why we are here today – the fact that they dropped the struggle."   

Danish Cartoon on Israel-Palestine History

The essence of what has happened in Palestine over the last century has been caricatured by a Danish cartoonist. In the first frame, labelled as “1946” – the cartoon shows a man sleeping comfortably in his bed, with a dog on the floor near the bed. The man is marked with the Palestinian flag, while the dog is labeled as Israel, bearing the Israeli flag. In the second frame, labelled as “1947”, the dog is shown sleeping in the bed, while the man is now pushed over to one side. By the third frame, marked “1967”, the dog is seen sprawling out across the bed, kicking the man in the face. In the final frame, labelled “2000”, the man is sleeping on the floor and the dog has the entire bed to itself.   

There can be no hope for peace in Israel and Palestine as long as Apartheid survives. The only way to achieve durable peace in the region is to establish equal rights of all of its inhabitants regardless of their race or religion. 

A video presentation by Miko Peled, author of The General's Son:

https://youtu.be/Z6PR7XrOQcM

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Here's a video on Israeli Apartheid targeting Palestinian citizens of Israel:

https://youtu.be/ZYhsKRngW88

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZYhsKRngW88"; title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>" height="315" src="https://img1.blogblog.com/img/video_object.png" width="560" style="cursor: move; background-color: #b2b2b2;" /> 

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

Nakbah, The Catastrophe Day

Jewish Power in US Congress

Pictorial Review of Young Gaza Victims 

Israel's Gaza Attack is Criminal, Not Defensive 

Warsaw's Nazi Concentration Camp 

Pakistani Media Revolution 

Gaza Flotilla Massacre and US Media Coverage

Riaz Haq's YouTube Channel

PakAlumni Social Network

[Riaz Haq]

Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent


https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n12/adam-shatz/israel-s-descent


The Zionist idea of ‘transfer’ – the expulsion of the Arab population – is older than Israel itself. It was embraced both by Ben-Gurion and by his rival Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Revisionist Zionist who was a mentor to Netanyahu’s father, and it fed directly into the expulsions of the 1948 war. But until the 1980s, and the rise of the New Historians, Israel strenuously denied that it had committed ethnic cleansing, claiming that Palestinians had left or ‘fled’ because the invading Arab armies had encouraged them to do so; when the expulsion of the Palestinians and the destruction of their villages were evoked, as in S. Yizhar’s 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh and A.B.Yehoshua’s 1963 story ‘Facing the Forests’, it was with anguish and guilt-laden rationalisation. But, as the French journalist Sylvain Cypel points out in The State of Israel v. the Jews, the ‘secret shame underlying the denial’ has evaporated. Today the catastrophe of 1948 is brazenly defended in Israel as a necessity – and viewed as an uncompleted, even heroic, project. Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, are both unabashed advocates of transfer. What we are witnessing in Gaza is something more than the most murderous chapter in the history of Israel-Palestine: it is the culmination of the 1948 Nakba and the transformation of Israel, a state that once provided a sanctuary for survivors of the death camps, into a nation guilty of genocide.

[Riaz Haq]

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1831300901828464911
Jonathan Cook
@Jonathan_K_Cook
Both Keir Starmer and Kamala Harris are faithful creatures of a permanent bureaucracy that was long ago captured by the West’s profit-hungry corporate war machine.

Its most favoured son is Israel, a highly militarised state – a colonial outgrowth of the West – implanted into an oil-rich Middle East like a bone stuck in the back of the throat. Israel is there to advance an openly belligerent Jewish supremacism, mirroring a western supremacism that nowadays prefers to veil its imperial ambitions.

From early on, Israel’s backers were given a perfect cover story for the crimes they sponsored against the native inhabitants of the land, the Palestinians – and one that could be adapted to justify Israel’s permanently warlike posture in the region.

In a self-serving narrative promoted by the West, the continuing threat of antisemitism required Jews to have their own militarised fortress state – a modern Pale of Settlement – as a bulwark against a future Holocaust.

Western capitals accepted one marker only of whether westerners were rehabilitated from their earlier Jew-hatred: they must agree to indulge Israel’s every military wish.

Those in the West who armed Israel and helped it expel the native Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, those who turned a blind eye as it built the region’s only nuclear arsenal, those who encouraged its wars against its neighbours, and those who lobbied for the undermining of international law in the pursuit of those wars, proved themselves to be free of the virus of Jew-hatred.

Those who opposed western imperialism and the excesses of its favourite Middle East client state, those who stood up for human rights and international law, could be dismissed and denounced as antisemites.

That well-worn formula, extraordinary as it seems, has persisted even as Israel has pursued Jewish supremacism to its logical end-point in Gaza: exterminating the population there.

Those in favour of arming a genocide are the good guys. Those opposed are the antisemites and supporters of terrorism.

Independent journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists are now being rounded up and intimidated under draconian anti-terrorism laws in Britain.

Social media platforms are limiting the reach of posts critical of Israel, herding opposition to the genocide into small online ghettoes.

Universities are starting to draft new rules to make being a Zionist – subscribing to Israel’s extremist political ideology – a protected characteristic, no different from being born Hispanic or Black.

The aim is to silence all Palestinian solidarity activism on campus as equivalent to racism, extinguishing any chance of a repetition of the large protests that swept US universities during the spring and summer.

This is an extract from my latest article You can’t arm a genocidal state into moderation. So why does the West keep trying? Read more here:

https://middleeasteye.net/big-story/west-israel-arm-genocidal-state...

[Riaz Haq]

Gentile News Network™
@Gentilenewsnet
But when I say this it's an antisemitic conspiracy theory.

https://x.com/Gentilenewsnet/status/1846975999650804034

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Rabbi Shmuley
@RabbiShmuley
Incredible. The new Prime Minister of Britain has a Jewish wife who is actively involved in the Jewish community and keeps tradition and observes the sabbath. President Biden has two of three of his children who married Jew’s. President Trump has a Jewish daughter and Jewish grandchildren. Kamala Harris is married to a committed Jewish husband.

https://x.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1810353861116223661

[Riaz Haq]

Australian judge rules senator broke race law by telling rival legislator to return to Pakistan

https://apnews.com/article/australia-racial-discrimination-pakistan...

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian judge ruled Friday that anti-immigration party leader Sen. Pauline Hanson breached a racial anti-discrimination law by crudely telling Pakistan-born Sen. Mehreen Faruqi to return to her homeland.

Faruqi sued Hanson in Federal Court over a 2022 exchange on the social media platform X, then called Twitter, under a provision of the Racial Discrimination Act that bans public actions and statements that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, color or national or ethnic origin.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Faruqi, deputy leader of the Australian Greens party, posted, “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized peoples.”

Hanson, the leader of the One Nation party, replied that Faruqi had immigrated to take “advantage” of Australia, and told the Lahore-born Muslim to return to Pakistan, using an expletive.

Hanson has been known for her views on race since her first speech to Parliament in 1996, in which she said Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” because of its non-discriminatory immigration policy. She once wore a burqa in the Senate as part of a campaign to have Islamic face coverings banned.