FEBRUARY2007

Prior to the onset of European colonization a century ago, generations of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians cohabited in the Holy Land with little or no conflict. Zionism's arrival opened a vein of intolerance that eventually grew into a river of bloodshed that flows directly into the sea of violence and chaos gripping the region today.

Like their present-day descendants, early Zionist colonizers glorified Jewish separation from non-Jews. They set themselves apart from the people and dreamed openly of claiming all of Palestine for the Jews. Foreign intruders and a law unto themselves, they posed a self-declared threat to the lives and land of the indigenous population.

Political Zionism had grown up in the ethnic nationalist fervor that swept Europe for several decades before and after World War I. These movements, which still smolder today, tended to borrow from the self-idolizing annals of 19th century racialist science, which in turn were a product of Europe's centuries of genocidal colonialism.

European ethnic nationalists held that a 'people' define a nation, which has the right to an independent state. By extension, residents of the state who not are not of the 'people' can be excluded from the affairs of the nation, if not expelled or exterminated. Nationalist movements in central and eastern Europe were often supported by Britain and France, to undercut Germany and the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.

Zionists took ethnic nationalism a step further by claiming the right of statehood for a religion. By promoting a 'Jewish race' with its own speculative bi-racial history, they leveraged the notion that a 'racial type' can define a (nation-deserving) 'people'. With the other hand, they accepted a religious definition of Jewishness. In this way they were able to hijack Judaism to serve the purposes of their politics.

After World War I shattered the old order in Europe and southwest Asia, western powers rewrote the map through the auspices of the League of Nations. In a vain attempt to restrain the genie of ethnic nationalism they had helped unleash, the League required its Balkanized 'democratic states' to respect the rights of their 'minority peoples'.

In practice, this 'assimilationist' stance was not significantly enforced. The charters of several new states fashioned citizenship along ethnic lines. Liberals debated the assimilation potential of ethnic groups to gauge their suitability for 'democracy'. Jews were the group most often defined as 'difficult' or 'impossible' to assimilate.

In his book, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), Professor Mark Mazower demonstrates that the democratic spring of post-Versailles Europe rapidly lapsed into the authoritarian custom of pre-Versailles Europe, without its stabilizing multi-ethnic structures. By the mid-1920s, fascism was a respectable and popular position across the continent. By the time Hitler took power, fascist governments had become so mainstream that the Nazis felt obliged to rejuvenate the movement with more virulent words and deeds.

In both Britain and Germany, transferring the 'Jewish nation' out of Europe was an attractive and even logical solution to Europe's long-standing 'Jewish problem.' Zionism promised to do just that, and so enjoyed support in the highest reaches of European society. The British occupation (on orders from London) largely ignored Zionist lawlessness and persecution of Arabs, while the Nazis hailed them as fellow travelers to a future of mutual 'racial' purity.

Of course it was intrinsically colonial to think that millions of Europeans could move en masse to any place outside of Europe, as if the world were a tabula rasa upon which The Continent could write off its worst bigotry with one large check. While political Zionism was part and parcel of Europe's 20th century infatuation with ethnic nationalism, its program belonged to the 19th, like Lincoln's mania to transfer black Americans to Central America.

By forcing itself on Arab Palestine, Zionism took nationalist ideology and threw it into historical reverse, with the 1948 inception of a colonial European ethnic state in the heart of a simultaneously 'de-colonizing' Arab Middle East. Israel was an anachronism at birth.

Funneled by the western nations' anti-Semitic immigration laws (which the Zionist lobby had encouraged) the 'Jewish nation' (which the Zionists claimed to represent) would transplant itself to Palestine to fulfill a divine commandment to reclaim the ancient nation of Israel. The extreme historical and religious sweep of this assertion easily trumped all other national mythologies and marked Zionism's enduring tendency to audacity.

The motive forces of Zionism have continued to conduct Israel as an expansionist colonial project into the 21st century, relentlessly appropriating, destroying, and annexing Palestinian land and water. This robbery-in-broad-daylight is accelerating, thanks in part to the 'separation barrier' Israel is building in the Palestinian West Bank. In Europe, walls have been used to delineate borders of nations and ghettoes. Israel uses them to continually expand its borders and carve up its ghettoes for its own use.

By responding to European intolerance and the Holocaust in the inherently racist terms of colonialism, Zionism tied the Jewish desire for freedom and security to the worst impulses of the human heart. It compounded the moral blindness of ethnic nationalism with the moral crime of ethnocide, and saddled Zionism with an incessant need to deny historical reality and the humanity of Arab and Muslim peoples.

These are the deeper roots of the lawlessness we see today in Palestine and Israel. No one has been spared. Israelis are awash in an escalating tide of crime, corruption, incompetence, and venality afflicting their government and society. Recently we learned the graft has consumed even the Israel Tax Authority, and probably the Prime Minister himself. Meanwhile, the State is leaking threats to attack Iran with nuclear weapons.

History suggests that Israel faces an inevitable reckoning with the moral and political bankruptcy of colonialism. It cannot maintain a state of war with its neighbors forever. There is a peaceful way out that begins with Israel's renunciation of colonialism and occupation. Whether Zionist ethnic nationalism would survive these changes is an open question. Without them, Israel may be blindsided by a day of reckoning it cannot control.

James Brooks serves as webmaster for Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel.
He can be contacted at: jamiedb@wildblue.net.

Holocaust-Politics
by Gilad Atzmon 

The United States hopes that the United Nations General Assembly will vote by the end of this week on a resolution that condemns "any denial of the Holocaust". (CNSNews.com)

"We respectfully urge your country to co-sponsor and support the Resolution on Holocaust Denial that is to be voted on in the General Assembly this Friday."
(from a letter to UN ambassadors, Glen S. Lewy, ADL National Chair and Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director 23 January, 2007)

The draft resolution proposed by the US "condemns without any reservation any denial of the Holocaust," yet, it doesn't single out any specific country for criticism. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that it is Iran’s Ahmadinejad who the Americans are after. Clearly, the new American initiative at the UN, which is aiming at transforming the world into a ‘Holocaust Denial Free Zone’ has very little to do with genuine truth-seeking or an authentic interest in historical research. The Americans are there to furnish us all with the futureless nightmare of hard capitalism. They mistakenly believe that they can do so as long they restrict our vision of the past. If, to be honest, it isn’t really Abe Foxman and the ADL that the Bush Administration is caring for,( and it should be evident that the American decision makers could not care less about the notion of history or the truth of European Judeocide,) what is it about, then? America wants oil and Ahmadinejad has plenty of it. Not wanting to stop there, America also has as its priority stopping Iran from joining the nuclear club that they themselves lead. Yet, It is rather amusing that America - with all its fleets, airplane carriers, cruise missiles, ultimate air power and nuclear might - needs the Holocaust to win what seems to be its next war.

I am not a Holocaust scholar nor am I a historian. My primary interest is not the story of Auschwitz nor the destruction of European Jewry. But I am very interested in Holocaust politics, in the range of discourses that employ Auschwitz. I happen to ask, how come America, once the leader of the ‘free world’, finds itself engaged in ‘global thought policing’?

It is clearly beyond doubt that America foreign affairs needs a popularity injection boost. American ideological hegemony is in a state of total bankruptcy. Bush’s administration desperately craves for support within the European community. It is not a secret that Continental Europe, in itself a multi-ethnic community, doesn’t succumb in the same way to the Anglo-American notion of cultural clash. The Europeans so far have refused to join Blair and Bush’s war against Islam in a real, dynamic way. Yet, with the new holocaust denial resolution, America hopes to introduce a change of spirit. Rather than conveying the repeated false image of Judeo-Christian versus Islam, this time it is the ‘Holocaust’ versus its ‘Deniers’. Rather coincidently, the Holocaust conformists (us) need oil, the ‘deniers’ (them) happen to possess it.

As foolish as it may appear, America finds itself slipping into the trap wittily dug by Iranian President Ahmadinejad. The American administration has managed foolishly to approve that the Holocaust is indeed the demarcation line between East and West, between so-called ‘evil’ and ‘good’. Yet, the definition of this separation can be seen as that which stands between the ‘free thinking West’ that enthusiastically seals its past in a black box and the ‘open minded East’ who dare to raise questions about the past. The Holocaust resolution draws the future battlefield between the uprising of (yesterday’s) Slave and the decay of (today’s) Master. Ahmadinejad threw the bone, the Bush administration was stupid enough to pick it up. It affirmed that the Holocaust is the new medium of resistance.

Within the framework of the new American Holocaust resolution, it is ‘us’ - the West, those who ‘know’ the ‘truth’ and ‘them’ – nations who aren’t counted in that hegemonic group, who fail to see it. Yet it is ‘us’ who make our past into a graveyard and it is ‘them’ who grasp that it is the dynamic past that shapes the future.

Without getting myself into the debate regarding the truth of the Holocaust, the ugly face of Holocaust-politics cannot be hidden anymore. The Holocaust is now officially becoming an ideological weapon against Islam and also against Arab resistance. It is there to establish a fake western collective identity based on blind conformity and total marginalisation of the other.

However, in the short term, the new American Holocaust as a political initiative may prove to be productive. The notion of the destruction of `European Jewry’ unites some major political powers. It unites the European parliamentary left together with the conservative liberals as well as America’s most radical expansionist forces. They all need the Holocaust for different reasons. In Europe the Holocaust is there to dismantle the emerging far right, In the Germanic States the Holocaust is the core of the post-war symbolic order. For the Anglo-Americans the Holocaust is there to push away any real ethical engagement with Dresden, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Palestine and Iraq. Most importantly, the new Holocaust denial resolution provides the Americans with the pretext for the next Genocide. In other words, the next Holocaust is actually a collective punishment of Holocaust denial.

Regardless of what the truth of the Holocaust is and what its denial may entail, to seal the past is to give away the vision of a better future. The end of history is the end of the West. Bush’s America may just want to take us there. With the death toll in Iraq numbering 650,000 and 3,000,000 displaced refugees, with millions of Palestinians locked in concentration camps for almost 40 years, neither Bush nor Blair nor any other Western politician can offer us a cheerful vision of the days to come. Instead they encourage us to stop looking into our past.

STOPOPRESS:The Guardian - a Toady to Tyranny.
"Don't study History" Shimon Peres

The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger on Saturday Jan 27th reported from Davos in an astonishing betrayal - and yet confirmation, of the reason for the precipitous plunge that sales of that newspaper took shortly after his appointment as Editor that revealed the Guardian's new agenda, a startling increase in its pro-jewish material.

After his dinner Master Rusbridge attended a fringe event where Shimon Peres, whom many describe as the cardinal sinner of the remaining old generation Zionists in Israel, took the platform. Rusbridge reveals that he had already attended Peres' earlier platform and swelling with enthusiasm he notices "the added power and the intimacy of the event" (private invitations?) where young people listened to this disciple of Satan addressing them "with some force and energy": " 'Don't study history,' he told them, 'There's nothing to study except a chain of mistakes and many wars.' He told them of politicians who inherited history (and borders) and did their best . It was more important to use imagination than memory. Science knew no borders. The great issues facing us - energy, fresh air, water, science, human relations - were borderless (were borderless?, what a gasp of rage this should have engendered in his young audience, for if there is one border we know he is responsible for we know of, and also the racial laws of Israel , the ghetto walls he is placing around the Palestinians stealing their land and water resources).

" His words were greeted with total silence," admits the eager Rusbridger, and adds: "The great politician is reaching a Prospero moment. He as a politician, did his best with the hand he was dealth with by history. But now, late in his long life, during which so much has been left unresolved, he was speaking about the failure of politics, of politicians. I am not sure many in the room realised quite the power of what he was saying - but that was in a sense a tribute to the man.In some mouths his message could have been one of bitterness 'Think rather than remember,' he had urged them, 'What may happen has nothing to do with what has happened',"

Thus we learn, from the above, that what had been one of the UK's greatest newspapers, a new young toady to commercialism and tyranny now has to report and recommend to the British public in his "unprecedented project COMMENT is FREE" this weekend. A report from those seriously important business meetings of the World Economic Forum, Get it?J.Braddell, editor.


A student site in Leeds University that UK Zionists have pin-pointed for Attack

On the Holocaust Memorial Day

27th January 2007

I'm a Palestinian; I'm also a Human, and thus I care for people like me, whether Muslims, Christians, Jews, followers of other religions, or atheists.

I'm a Palestinian; I can be a Muslim Palestinian, a Christian Palestinian, a Jewish Palestinian, or an atheist Palestinian.

I don't hate the Jews, simply because they are humans like me. Yet I oppose Zionists because they stole or supported the theft of my homeland. And my ultimate aim will remian the freedom of my land, Palestine, and my people, the Palestinians.

I don't deny the Holocaust that was committed seven decades ago by the Nazis and their collaborators and in which many Gypsies, Poles (Catholic/Christian, and Jewish), Serbs, Soviet military prisoners of war, civilians on occupied territories including Russians and other East Slavs, mentally or physically disabled, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists and political dissidents, trade unionists, Freemasons, Eastern Christians, and Catholic and Protestant clergy were persecuted and killed. I totally condemn this crime and I'm disgusted by its savagery and severity. For me a crime is a crime whether ten or ten million innocent people were killed.

I do condemn the 1930s' Holocaust, but I also condemn, even more, the apathy and the silence of the whole world on the 58-year-old still ongoing Holocaust committed against the Palestinians by the Zionists in the name of the victims of the first Holocaust. It is the support and approval -even by silence- to this current Holocaust that should be considered illegal and it is today’s Genocide that is now more demanding to be remembered and stopped immediately.

I condemn the 1930s’ Holocaust, but I also condemn the cheap exploitation of that horrific crime to justify the displacement of the Palestinian nation, the occupation of their homeland, and the continuous killing of innocent Palestinians. Likewise, I denounce the cheap use of the 11^th of September’s massacre and its innocent victims to justify the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the killing of hundreds of thousands of other innocent victims. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights; this is what the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, and unfortunately this is what we first forget when we deal with each other’s conflicts and disputes. There are no chosen people for God; we are all equal, and those who fulfil their duties as humans are the ones who deserve their humanity the most.

Finally, this year Bolton Council decided to replace the Holocaust Memorial Day with a more inclusive Genocide Memorial Day which will include among its activities both the Nazi Holocaust and the ongoing genocide and human rights abuses of Palestinians by Israelis. I strongly encourage you to campaign for a similar action in your own locality. Remembering the cruelty of the past must be enough of a motivation to make us work hard to stop today’s cruelty from taking more innocent lives around the world.

Posted by Jabal at http://www.akramawad.com/