It was believed by the Jews and also by the U.S. and the European Powers who helped to divert Jewish immigration towards Palestine, that the establishment of the State of Israel would finally bring the two-thousand-year-old Jewish trauma to its end.
Of course, none of these powers admitted that it was they and the Christian Church that were mainly responsible for bringing about this trauma in the first place.
And so, when it was suggested to Theodor Herzl that he should consider the establishment of Israel in Palestine, he sent two Rabbis for a fact-finding trip to this historic land.
After they had made their survey, they sent him a cryptic telegram which said: “Though the bride is beautiful, she is already taken.” i.e. that though Palestine was a beautiful place, it was already inhabited by another people.
After this, when it was decided that Israel would be established in Palestine, it was clear that in order to do this, the local population would have to be pushed off the land to make way for the settlement of the newcomers.
In short therefore, in order to bring about an end to the Jewish trauma, it would first be necessary to transfer this trauma onto the Palestinians. And this would necessitate ethnic cleansing of the local inhabitants.
This ethnic cleansing project began well before May 15, 1948, Israel’s Independence Day. By the time its first phase was completed, a good 750000 Palestinians [half their population] had been driven off their land and made refugees, and thousands were killed. All major towns which had Palestinian majorities were cleansed of their presence. And 500 of their villages were leveled in a manner so complete that not even a sign of theirs remained–even trees planted to cover their sites were imported from Europe.
For decades the real facts of the Palestinian “Nakba”, their catastrophe, lay covered up. It was only after the 1967 Arab Israeli War, when another 350000 of them were made refugees, and the Israeli settlement program in the West Bank was begun, did the facts of the Palestinian trauma slowly began to become known, beyond those who had committed the atrocities on the Palestinians, and those who had witnessed these. And it could reasonably be assumed that Israel would never consent to the formation of a Palestinian state, and that though Israel would no longer resort to large scale expulsion of the Palestinians, it would nevertheless subject them to a regime of slow asphyxiation to drive them out.
And as this slow genocide of the Palestinians went ahead, it was the Western powers led by the U.S. that provided Israel cover to proceed with this lingering atrocity unhindered. The U.S Government role was much like Ariel Sharon’s, when his divisions cordoned off the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1981, and then allowed the Lebanese Phalangist Militia a turkey shoot in these camps.
The slow genocide of Palestinians is especially painful, packaged as it is with dehumanizing humiliations, helplessness, and complete insecurity of Palestinians in the West Bank. Settlers descend on Palestinian homesteads at midnight under army security cover and order them to vacate their homes at gunpoint. This is common enough an occurrence not to be considered news. There are reports of young women abducted, jailed, raped, filmed and released, and then blackmailed to act as spies against their own people. Two-thousand-year-old olive trees which have been giving fruit and sustaining families since the time of Jesus Christ are randomly cut down. The settlers can have all the water for their swimming pools and their gardens, but for the locals a perpetual drought is the order of the day. More than 5000 Palestinian women and children are in Israeli jails without charge. Kids as old as ten-year-olds are languishing in jail for throwing stones at Israeli tanks. Some of these kids have had their arms snapped by the Israeli army and these have not been allowed to set properly so that they will never again be able to fling stones at the Israelis! And Gaza, being totally sealed off for decades, has a population condemned to live like animals in a badly managed zoo, subject to periodic Israeli raids in order to “mow the lawn”. This population is born in a concentration camp, is condemned to live there, and can find release only in death when it comes to them.
It is beyond being understood that a people having suffered the appalling atrocity of the holocaust would, within three years of it, become so bereft of empathy that they would readily visit such an atrocity on another people, as the Zionists have done to the Palestinians. What is even more difficult to understand is how the dehumanization of the Palestinians comes packed with the snarling hatred that radical Jews direct toward them.
And now they are bent on obliterating Gaza from the face of the earth, killing indiscriminately the old and the young; men women, and children; all!
Eighty-six percent of Israelis stand behind this objective. No simple loathing is enough to build up such hatred unless God is invoked in the crime.
So, it would be instructive for you to read what God has to say on this subject in the Hebrew Bible. And remember, this is God speaking to Moses, Deuteronomy, Chapter 20; Verse 16: ” But in the cities of these peoples that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance, you shall save alive nothing that breathes.”
Verse 17: ” You must put them all under the ban [i.e exterminate]-the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and the Jebusites–just as the LORD, your God, has commanded you, so that they do not teach you to do all the abominations that they do for their gods, and you thus sin against the LORD, your God.”
Thus, the order is clear and is beyond being redeemed by a lenient interpretation. It is for a Genocide without restraint because nothing that breathes is to be left alive in these cities–not even an ass or an ox, nor bird nor reptile.
After 9/11, radical Christians and Jews often quoted the Verse of the Sword from the Holy Quran to portray Muslims as bloodthirsty villains. This verse, except when subjected to the most jaundiced interpretation, allows no such open-ended license to kill. Indeed, by laying out boundaries, it curbs the instinct to do so.
But today, when the Genocide of Palestinians is the open order of the day, I hardly hear any of my compatriots quote the above verses from the Old Testament from which this atrocity draws its legitimacy! And that is so because they simply did not take the trouble to find out.
And what takes the ultimate cake in the face of this atrocity, is the squeak which has yet to escape the lips of those who constitute the government and the high command of Pakistan. What a show of whimpering loyalty to their Western masters by our pious elite– men used to performing multiple Umras and taking Haj junkets at the cost of the people of Pakistan!
O’ what a bloody shame!