Middle East

Where Israel has gone wrong  

Traumatized by their own experience of racism, the founders and leaders of Israel perpetuate racism’s worst manifestations   

by Michael Nenonen  

In July 2006, following Hezbollah’s abduction of Israeli soldiers on Lebanese soil, Israel launched a massive military campaign against Lebanon. In a country with fewer than four million people, hundreds of civilians are reported dead, thousands are still buried beneath the rubble, and over 800,000 have been displaced. Lebanon’s pitiful infrastructure has been thoroughly destroyed. The invaders don’t care that the feeble Lebanese government has little influence over Hezbollah, or that Hezbollah’s actions followed months of Israeli aggression against the people of Gaza.

It doesn’t matter to the invaders that, since Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, Israel has continued occupying a portion of Lebanon, Israeli jets have regularly violated Lebanese air-space, an Israeli spy ring has assassinated people on Lebanese soil, and Israeli mines have remained hidden beneath Lebanese feet. The lives of Israeli soldiers are apparently worth infinitely more than those of Arab civilians and the viability of the Lebanese state.

Stories of Israeli atrocities are beginning to emerge from Lebanon. On July 16 2006, Robert Fisk reported in The Independent that the Israelis commanded the Lebanese civilians in Marwaheen to leave their village, and then bombed their departing convoy of civilian cars. Twenty civilians were burned alive, including at least nine children. If Stephen Harper sees this as “measured,” then his moral yardstick is obviously broken.

Is it a coincidence that Israel’s cruelty so closely resembles that of fascist regimes? I have my doubts, doubts that go deeper than Israel’s penchant for military aggression, the militarization of Israeli society, and Israel’s constant use of arbitrary detention, torture, and collective punishment. Israeli fascism can also be found in Zionism’s ideological history, the Zionist exploitation of the Holocaust, the Zionist’s conduct of the war of 1948, Israel’s institutionalization of racism, and Israel’s close association with neo-fascists in other parts of the world.

As Norman Finkelstein points out in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995), the founder of Jewish Zionism, Theodor Herzl, agreed with the underlying principles of German Anti-Semitism. Herzl and the German Anti-Semites both sub-scribed to the ideals of romantic nationalism, a movement that rejected Enlightenment values in favour of the theory that each nation is an organic unity whose members share profound, non-rational bonds that “naturally” unite some people while “naturally” excluding others. To the Zionists, Anti-Semitism was the logical response of non-Jewish social organisms to the infection of Jewish bodies within their midst. The Zionist solution for this problem wasn’t the elimination of Anti-Semitism, but rather the creation of a state where Jews would form a national organism and where they could defend themselves against non-Jewish infections. Finkelstein demonstrates conclusively that from the beginning, Zionists planned to forcefully expel the non-Jewish residents of Palestine.

According to Ron David in Arabs and Israel for Beginners (Writers and Readers Publishing, 1993), the Holocaust provided Zionists with the perfect opportunity for the fulfillment of their plans. Already in 1941, the Stern gang, notorious for its terrorist attacks against Arabs and the British occupiers in Palestine, offered to create a Jewish state “on a national and totalitarian basis, which will establish relations with the German Reich.” This deal would have protected Nazi interests in the Middle East.

American Zionists were so committed to the formation of Israel that they helped prevent the survivors of the Holocaust from coming to the United States. In 1948, Morris Ernst, an advisor to President Roosevelt, wrote that American Jewish leaders demand-ed that Jewish refugees be given the sole option of emigrating to Palestine, and that he “was amazed and even insulted when active Jewish leaders decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor” for suggesting that these refugees be allowed to emigrate to the US.

Irgun, a Zionist terrorist group led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, played a significant role in coercing those refugees to relocate to Palestine. Irgun controlled the police forces inside the camps for displaced persons following the war. According to a January 10, 1948 official report of the Office of the Military Government for Germany-US, “This is an old technique in Eastern Europe and in all police states. By controlling the police, a small, unscrupulous group of determined people can impose its will on a peaceful and inarticulate majority; it is done by threats, intimidation, by violence, and if need be by bloodshed. . . they have embarked upon a course of terror within the camps.”

Israel’s founding war is shrouded in Zionist myths. Finkelstein draws upon recent Israeli scholarship to debunk these falsehoods. Contrary to popular belief, “the Zionist movement did not in principle support the partition of Palestine; the surrounding Arab states did not unite as one to destroy the nascent Jewish state; the war did not pit a relatively defenceless and weak Jewish David against a relatively strong Arab Goliath; Palestine’s Arabs did not take flight at the behest of Arab orders; and Israel was not earnestly seeking peace at the war’s end.”

Israeli tactics during that war were often horrendous. For example, in the village of Deir Yassin in April 1948, Irgun terror squads, under the command of Menachem Begin, massacred 254 Arab civilians, many of them women, children, and old men. Besides raping women and looting and demolishing houses, there are reports that the Zionists cut off their victims’ hands and blinded children. It’s hard to confirm these reports, because the bodies were all thrown down a well. The Irgun command sent a message to its men stating “As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere.” Albert Einstein was one of the American Jewish leaders who signed a December 4, 1948 letter to the New York Times condemning the Deir Yassin massacre and raising serious concerns about Menachem Begin’s "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut). The letter described Tnuat Haherut as “a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

Racism is the only way to justify such savagery. Just as Nazis referred to Jews as “vermin,” so Begin referred to the Palestinians as “two-legged beasts” and “cock-roaches,” sentiments shared by many Israelis today, particularly in Israel’s illegal settlements, which are breeding grounds for messianic fundamentalism and ultra-right-wing politics. Racism is also expressed in Israeli law, which discriminates against Israel’s Arab citizens; by Israeli courts, which allow soldiers and settlers to abuse and kill Palestinians with relative impunity; and, of course, by Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinian land.

In The Fateful Triangle (Black Rose Books, 1984), Noam Chomsky describes Israel’s extensive ties with neo-fascist regimes. Israel had close economic and military ties with Apartheid-era South Africa, a regime created by men who had studied in 1930’s Germany and who warmly embraced National Socialist ideals. Israel went so far as to help South Africa evade a military embargo. Israel also provided ample military aid to Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Somoza regime in Nicaragua while the US-trained military forces of these countries were committing massacres and widespread torture against their own population. Charles Maechling, the man who led counterinsurgency operations under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, has described the US trainees as “indistinguishable from the war criminals hanged in Nuremberg after World War II,” and has said that “for the United States, which led the crusade against Nazi evil, to support the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads is an outrage.” High-ranking Israeli politicians and military figures even had friendly visits with Argentina’s neo-Nazi generals during the height of that country’s massacre of approximately 1,000 Jews.

While fascism may not dominate Israeli society, it could well influence Israeli politics and culture in the same way that unconscious fears, desires, and hatreds secretly exert their influence over an emotionally traumatized person’s conscious mind. The invasion of Lebanon may only be the latest expression of Israel’s traumatized and fascist shadow-side, a side that threatens the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbours, but also poses a danger to Israel’s many cultural virtues, its democracy and its economy, and, ultimately, its own people. If the 20th century has taught us anything, it’s that fascism is as suicidal as it is murderous. In its blind fury it is willing to bring the temple walls tumbling down, crushing itself as well as its enemies. As I watch Israel’s actions, I find myself wondering if Samson has begun pulling on his chains.