Ter kennisgeving (en zie mijn schrijven onder het hieronder opgenomen artikel van Gerald Sussman over de aanval op het konvooi van World Central Kitchen):

(als je het Engels niet machtig bent, zet dan de tekst om in Nederlands met behulp van Google translate dat je rechts bovenaan deze pagina ziet staan, klik eerst in het menu op ‘Engels’, waarna je weer kan klikken op die vertaalapp, daarna zie je bovenaan in het menu ‘Nederlands’ staan >> klik daarop en de hele tekst staat vervolgens in het Nederlands, de vertaling is van een redelijk goede kwaliteit.)

BY GERALD SUSSMAN

MARCH 31, 2024

Israel’s War Psychosis Palestine: The Ongoing History of Terrorism, Racism, Confiscation, and Dispossession

Bomb-shattered buildings in Gaza. Photo: Tasnim News Agency, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Genesis: The origins of confiscation and dispossession Zionist history in Palestine is one of prolonged terrorism, racism, confiscation, and dispossession. The first openly ethnic war in Palestine in 1947-1948, culminated in 750,000 Palestinians being expelled from their homeland with no right of return. For Palestinians, this is called the Nakba (Catastrophe). Today in Israel, it is a crime to commemorate Nakba, May 15.

Armed attacks on Palestine’s villages and displacement of its people was the first phase of David Ben-Gurion’s plan for ethnic cleansing. Ben-Gurion became Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister. Most of the dirty work of reducing the Palestinian presence was undertaken by terrorist gangs, such as the Haganah, and the most ruthless groups, Lehi (also known as the Stern Gang), and Irgun. The leader of Irgun (1943-1948) was Menachem Begin, who helped form the Israeli rightwing Herut (“Freedom”) Party.

Begin later became prime minister under Herut’s successor organization, Likud, the party currently headed by yet another terrorist, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has organized far more deadly attacks on Palestinians than anyone before him. In the 1940s, the most radical group, Lehi, also counted the assassinations of British and Swedish diplomats among its achievements.

The Irgun was notoriously known for having bombed the British administrative headquarters in Jerusalem, the King David Hotel (1946). Joined by Lehi and led by another future Likud prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, the Irgun committed a slaughter of non-combatant Palestinians, the Deir Yassin village massacre, in April 1948. Deir Yassin, one of numerous massacres in Palestine, involved the murder of dozens of children, women, and elderly people. Another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, was a member of the Haganah, which became the IDF.

The atrocities prompted Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook, Seymour Melman, and other prominent Jewish American leaders and intellectuals to denounce Israeli terrorism in 1948 in an open letter to the New York Times. They described Herut and its leaders as a “terrorist, right wing, chauvinist organization” that is “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

From the beginnings of the Zionist idea, which sprang from a late-19 th century Viennese Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl, it was understood that the resident population of Palestine would have to be forcibly resettled. There was never any plan to share the territory of Palestine with Palestinians. Herzl viewed the existing Palestine habitation as an “outpniost…of barbarism.”

The original Zionist plan was settler colonialism.

One of the early Zionists, Chaim Weizmann, who would later become president of Israel, said that Palestinians were “obstacles that need to be cleared.” For the Zionists, Arabs were no better than useless rocks and pebbles.

Under a British dispensation, the Balfour declaration, Palestine was designated and intended as no more than a “home” for Jews. Jewish migration to Palestine accelerated in the 1930s with the rise of European fascism and increasing concern in the Middle Eastern countries about Zionism. Backed in 1947-1948 by a North American and Europeandominated UN, Israel started out as a mildly Labor-socialist experiment enthusiastically supported by the USSR, the first country to extend de jure recognition to the state. At the time, Israel functioned as a primarily secular political system, but in the years that followed, the religious right gained control and has been the main instigator of the illegal Jewish settlements in the post-1967 West Bank and Gaza, the latter settlers withdrawn in 2007.

In Jerusalem and the West Bank, some 100,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished since 1967, along with 800,000 of their olive trees. Meanwhile, 700,000 Jewish settlers have taken over land in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights as part of the long-term strategy of confiscating the whole of historic Palestine and southern Syria.

This project of giving confiscated land to Israeli Jews has a parallel with the Nazi plan of lebensraum (living space), by which the wartime Germans sought to capture the whole of the Slavic regions to enable the “Aryan” peoples to expand their land holdings. To date, the Israeli war machine has obliterated at least half of Gaza with an obvious design to ethnically cleanse the entire territory, if not commit what many see as an outright genocide of its people. The current policy of destroying the land and inhabitants of Gaza has been fully backed militarily (and de facto morally) by the Biden administration, which makes it a central party to massive war crimes. If the Nuremberg Tribunal were reconvened under UN supervision, Biden, Netanyahu, and many others in their governments would be on the docket.

The Second Nakba

The singular act of brutality by Hamas on October 7, 2023 should not obscure the fact that Palestinians in Gaza have been living in the world’s largest outdoor prison since the Israeli occupation of 1967. Gaza draws comparisons to the Warsaw Ghetto and the efforts the armed Jewish partisans made to break the Nazi siege of its forced enclosure. Like the Palestinians, the Warsaw Jews were forced from their homes to live in a cramped, barely survivable existence, terrorized by a modern and racist military force. Gaza is one of the mostly densely populated areas of the world where more than half the population before the latest Israeli invasion were living in abject poverty.

Although Israel claims it has not been occupying Gaza since 2007, it has controlled and severely limited every aspect of life in that narrow land corridor (5 miles wide, 25 miles long). Its police state administration determines access to water, food, medicine, electricity, liquid fuel, its coastal resources, virtually every person and every item that goes in and out of the territory, down to the level of chocolate and potato chips, according to Norman Finkelstein, a leading scholar on the Israeli state. Blockading of food, water, medicine, and fuel into Gaza, which Israel was carrying out even before October 7, by itself amounts to genocide.

The IDF invasion launched in October 2023 has been determined by Netanyahu and his cabinet to be the apartheid state’s final solution to the Palestinian question. On November 14, 2023, Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich called for the “immigration of Gaza Arabs to the countries of the world.” The attacks on civilian neighborhoods, hospital patients, medical personnel, journalists, and refugee camps, which date back to the 1947- 1948 war, are certainly war crimes, as is the suppression of basic human needs, a cordon sanitaire, in the beleaguered region. Mass starvation threatens at least half the population**. Finkelstein decries the intensity of bombing and deliberate targeting of hospitals, falsely claimed by Israeli authorities to be Hamas cells, as an unprecedented level of barbarism*.

Ruthless bombing and missile attacks since October, indiscriminately targeting children, women, and the elderly, are quickly turning Gaza into one of the world’s largest cemeteries. The number of Palestinian civilian casualties by late March 2024 amounted to 33,000, with at least 75,000 wounded. Hundreds more have been murdered by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. At least half of the Palestinian deaths are women and children, and the recorded number of those killed does not include some 8,000 bodies estimated to be still buried under the rubble. The Save the Children organization found that four out of five Gaza children are living with depression, grief, and fear, and more than half have considered suicide.

Over the years, Israeli Jews have hardened their attitude against the Gazans. A recent poll revealed that 57.5% of Israelis believe the IDF is not using sufficient firepower against the Palestinians. The US-backed Israeli government refrain is that the country has a right to defend itself. But few ask if Palestinians have a right to defend themselves, nor for that matter whether an illegally occupying force can claim rights of self-defense.

Almost all protest marches in Israel since October 7 have focused on recovering the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. Not one has protested the genocidal policy in Gaza and the West Bank as crimes against humanity. Israel’s wholesale destruction and mass murder of the people in Gaza is outlawed under the prohibition of collective punishment under International Humanitarian Law, which dates back to the Hague Convention (II) of 1899. With its lethal assistance, the Biden administration in support of its ally, like the Hitler regime’s aid to the Spanish fascists in the late 1930s, has turned Gaza into another Guernica. The Israeli scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994) wrote in 1986: “Whoever condemns the terrorism of the Palestinian organizations must at the same time condemn the terrorism of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.” He later declared in 1991: “A Nazi-like mentality also exists in our country [Israel]. That is a fact.”

The Nazi Psychosis

The October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israelis followed by the extremely disproportionate IDF assault on Gaza has been accompanied by a slew of racist invective by Israeli leaders. Dan Gillerman, the former Israeli ambassador to the UN, referred to Palestinians as “horrible inhuman animals.” Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, used the same hate expression. Netanyahu called Gaza a “city of evil,” summoning the Old Testament tale of Sodom and Gomorrah, in which the Israeli government now gets to play God.

Netanyahu has also repeatedly invoked the biblical Amalek story to mobilize public support for a final solution to the Palestinians. In the fable, the ancient Hebrews slaughtered a resident tribe in what is contemporary Israel, the Amalekites, while enroute from their escape from Egypt (another fiction, as documented by Israel’s leading archaeologist, Israel Finkelstein). Netanyahu’s imagined ancestors killed everyone but confiscated their resources (sheep, clothing, work animals). The Palestinians are the new Amalekites.

For some Israelis, it’s the Palestinians who are the new Nazis, not the Israelis themselves. In a radio interview, Israel’s heritage minister Amichai Eliyahu proposed a plan to flatten Gaza with a nuclear bomb. He opposed any humanitarian aid going into the region, arguing “we wouldn’t hand the Nazis humanitarian aid.” Hillary Clinton, former secretary of state, had a different solution to the problem of the Gazans electing Hamas as their government. While still a US senator for New York, she proposed that: “We should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” For the US, that is indeed the normal order of how democracy promotion works.

Jerusalem’s deputy mayor Arieh King tweeted a photo of more than 100 naked captured Palestinians, whom Israel claims are Hamas members. He explained: “The IDF is exterminating the Nazi Muslims in Gaza”. . . . “we must up the tempo”. . . . “If it were up to me,” he added, “I would bring 4 D9’s [bulldozers], place them behind the sandy hills and give an order to bury all those hundreds of Nazis alive. . . . they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated” (italics added).

Who are the Nazi descendants?

Israel’s minister of communications, Shlomo Karhi, stated that Israel’s war policy is to encourage “voluntary migration” of Palestinians through the infliction of unending collective punishment. “Voluntary migration” here is akin to the “Trail of Tears” that Native Americans were forced to suffer, as part of the government’s Indian Removal policies in 19 th century America. Eliminating Hamas is not the primary goal of the assault, it is the destruction of Gaza and its people as an entity and the territory’s confiscation by Israeli state and commercial interests.

Overt Nazi rhetoric flourishes in Israel. David Azoulai, the mayor of Metula, a northern Israeli city bordering Lebanon, offered this openly fascist solution: “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.”

The war psychosis is Israel after 75 years of land grabbing, periodic mass assaults on the Palestinians, what Netanyahu cynically calls “mowing the lawn,” and daily harassment and arrests of West Bank and East Jerusalem Arabs has been part of its increasingly violent policy of apartheid. But apartheid wasn’t enough. The Israeli government used the violent and desperate Hamas-led resistance to cite the organization as “terrorist,” as if thousands upon thousands of Palestinian citizens being blown to bits by Israeli bombs and artillery shells over the past 17 years is not terrorism. Who are the terrorists?

Gerald Sussman is a professor of urban studies and international communications at Portland State University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe. He can be reached at: sussmang@pdx.edu.

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(On the top right hand side of this page you can choose for a translation in the language of your choice in Google Translate)

* Het laatste ziekenhuis dat volledig werd vernield door het fascistisch gewelddadige leger van Israël is het Al-Shifa-ziekenhuis, dit was tevens het grootste ziekenhuis van de Gazastrook (de link naar het artikel van Al Jazeera met foto’s van dat vernietigde ziekenhuis >> met dank aan Ton Geurtsen)

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** Op WDR 5 in het nieuws van 15.00 u. vanmiddag het bericht dat Netanyahu heeft toegeven dat de luchtaanval op het konvooi van World Central Kitchen (WCK) inderdaad door Israël is uitgevoerd. Bij die laffe aanval kwamen 7 medewerkers van WCK om het leven, ofwel vermoord door het fascistisch genocidale Israëlische leger. ‘Een vergissing’ aldus de corrupte, psychopathische massamoordenaar Netanyahu….. ‘Een vergissing’ terwijl de route en uitdeelplaatsen van maaltijden waren besproken met datzelfde leger….. De organisatie heeft zich teruggetrokken. Eerder zei Netanyahu dat de VN verantwoordelijk is voor de grote ondervoeding van de Palestijnen, terwijl zijn leger meer dan 200 VN medewerkers heeft vermoord, mensen die zich bezighielden met het uitdelen van voedsel en Israël met opzet de vrachtwagens met voedsel, water en humanitaire hulpgoederen tegenhoudt….. Laten we hopen dat Netanyahu, zijn kabinet en zijn legerofficieren te zijner tijd tot levenslang zullen worden veroordeeld door het Internationaal Strafhof in Den Haag (International Criminal Court >> ICC). Daarover gesproken: intussen is men in Den Haag op initiatief van oorlogsmisdadiger Rutte (die tevens mede verantwoordelijk is voor de genocide in de Gazastrook) doende een speciaal tribunaal in te richten voor ‘oorlogsmisdaden begaan door Rusland’, terwijl men zelfs niet één sanctie heeft getroffen tegen Israël vanwege NB de genocide op de Palestijnen….. TE ZOT VOOR WOORDEN!!!!

#Israel has killed over 30,000 #Palestinian people, it has now bombed #Iran‘s consulate in #Syria and killed 7 members of the #WorldCentralKitchen who were volunteering in #Gaza. We mean, seriously, if this was any other country in the world the #US would have invaded by now… https://thecanary.co/editorial/2024/04/02/israel-geneva-vienna-conventions/…

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Zie ook: ‘VS overspoelt Israël met wapens, terwijl Biden en Blinken er bij dat ‘land’ hypocriet op aandringen de Palestijnse burgers te ontzien…..‘

‘EU funds weapons firm playing “pivotal role” in Gaza genocide‘

‘US-supported Israel kills 30,800 in Gaza genocide‘

‘Israeli hostage tells of captivity in Gaza‘: Hamas guards covered us with their bodies to protect us from our own forces’ shooting.” Het zoveelste bewijs dat de Hamasstrijders allesbehalve inhumane ‘beesten’ waren…. Zie wat dat betreft ook ////:

‘UN report launders Israel’s fraudulent “mass rape” propaganda‘ En zie de artikelen die één en ander wel onderuit halen: The Electronic Intifada, The Grayzone and Mondoweiss and the Twitter user @zei_squirrel En zie:

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Let op!! De ruimte om reacties weer te geven werkt niet altijd. Als je commentaar hebt en het lukt niet op de normale manier, doe dit dan via het mailadres trippleu@gmail.com, ik zal deze dan opnemen onderaan in het bewuste artikel, althans als je geen geweld predikt, voorts plaats ik jouw reactie ook al staat deze diametraal tegenover dat bericht. Alvast mijn dank voor jouw eventuele reactie, Willem.