In line with the protocol of settler colonialism, since the late 19th century Zionist terrorist, mainly Jewish settlers escaping the vicious antisemitism of Europe, have systematically attacked Palestinians to occupy their lands.
But the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.
Jews comprised 5% of the population at the start of the Zionist settler colonial project. While 75% were Muslims and 20% were Christians living in well-nigh harmony in what is now Israeli-occupied Palestine.
Yet the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.
30,000 Palestinians (mostly civilian babies, children, women, and men) have died at the hands of Israeli settlers and the United States-backed Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in vengeance for the Hamas resistance of October 7th killing 1,200 people, and the taking of hostages.
However, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.
The people of Palestine resist Israeli incursion, occupation, and oppression with rocks hurled by children, inaccurate and marginally effective rockets, and guerilla-style tactics against a vastly superior, regular IDF military equipped with state-of-the-art tanks, bulldozers, bombs, and jet fighters, many manufactured by US companies and subsidized by the United States.
Conversely, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.
IDF wantonly bomb to rubble Palestinian hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, churches, and camps in Gaza resulting in 1.4 million Palestinian refugees (67% of the total population) dying from exposure, starvation, wounds, and disease.
Still, the state of Israel has the right to defend itself.
The state of Israel commands and blockades roads, airspace, and waterways leading to the Palestinian territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan Heights. Hence, Palestinians are at the complete mercy of their occupiers for food, fuel, medicine, and potable water to survive. Meanwhile, uniformed people continue to wonder why Palestinians, from the young and old, resist the oppression of the United States-backed IDF.
Again, Israel has the right to defend itself.
As written by President Jimmy Carter in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (2006), Palestinians live in an apartheid state in their territories and the state of Israel.
Israel has the right to defend itself, say President Joe Biden, my US Senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler, and similar Zionist apologists in Washington, D.C.
To grasp the Question of Palestine, a person willing to learn must evaluate the historical nature of Zionism that laid the foundation for the creation of the apartheid state of Israel 76 years ago.
Austrian Theodore Herzl galvanized Zionism, the colonial settlement of Palestine by Ashkenazi Jews, principally, for his people to escape the virulence of antisemitism in central and eastern Europe. To define this movement, in 1896 he published “The Jewish State” and the next year organized the first Zionist congress. Zionism, however, must not be equated with Judaism, especially when one considers that Herzl was an atheist; especially as many non-Jews may conflate Zionism with Judaism. Nonetheless, as a settler colonial project, Zionism patterns itself after the merciless, capitalist schemes of Belgium, Britain, France, Spain, the United States, and other market-driven empires. Hence, let’s be clear that violence—that involves state terrorism and genocide—structurally undergirds empire. Always has and always will.
In 1923, Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky published two articles in the Ha’aretz newspaper that serve as the policy template of the state of Israel. Jabotinsky held that only a brutal “Iron Wall” could maintain and advance Israel’s settler colonial project; accordingly, the will and hope of Palestinians must be crushed. Journalist Richard Becker declared in Palestine: Israel, and the U.S. Empire (2009), “Jabotinsky continued his ‘honesty’ in a letter to Jewish lawyer and friend Oscar Grusenberg: ‘We Jews are Europeans…What do we have in common with the ‘Orient’? And everything in the Orient is doomed.” (36-37)
Despite written and cinematic portrayals that romanticize the oppressions of empire with gaudy uniforms, close-order parades accompanied by triumphal music, and the exhibition of formidable weaponry, the conquest of indigenous peoples—whether they be Palestinians, Native Americans, people of India, the Irish, or Africans of the Congo—stem from nation state-sanctioned military terror, torture, and the recruitment of indigenous quislings. Settler colonial aggressors then brand indigenous people who resist (i.e., fight back) and defend themselves—whether they be Palestinians or the Wampanoag of 17th century New England—savages, heathens, human animals, and terrorists. As propaganda and narrative domination are chief components of the machinery of empires. This is why US news from Palestine is censored by the state of Israel. In Gaza, journalists, especially Palestinian reporters, are assassinated by IDF snipers. But today social media reels of catastrophic civilian deaths and destruction, and Israeli hostages and civilian Palestinians waving white flags of surrender and peace killed by IDF snipers contest the state of Israel’s Iron Wall of censorship.
To sanction settler colonial projects, imperial governments also exploit religious myths and discourses to sanction violent occupations to achieve total domination. For example, in the case of Spain, the Catholic church hubristically authorized the division of the Western Hemisphere (the Americas) between Portugal and Spain with the Inter Caetera papal bull of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494. In a 1630 lay sermon, John Winthrop, who governed the Massachusetts Bay Company, promulgated the notion that God covenanted—if you believe in a God—the Puritan colony as an exceptional City Upon the Hill. Ipso facto, the colonists and the people of the United States, as subsequently reprised by President Ronald Reagan in his 1989 Farewell speech, believed in a chauvinist mission to reform the world. And like how Aztec imperialist viewed their tribe in Tenochtitlan, Zionists, most of Ashkenazi lineage, view Jews as the chosen people of God; an affirmation for the lethal invasion of Palestine and expulsion of its indigenous Arab majority. Zionists weaponize scripture, in addition to Holocaust history, to contend that the people of the state of Israel possess a “Biblical deed” to the land of Palestine based on the book of Genesis. Forsooth Zionists conflate Judaism with their settler colonial project to deny indigenous Palestinians any right to their land. Zionists also negate the existence of a Palestinian people. According to Amnesty International, the public display of the flag of Palestine in Israel is outlawed. Moreover, the conquest of Palestinian lands is marked by steady Israeli assaults dating back to the late nineteen century, institutionalized in 1948 with the founding of the state of Israel and Nakba by Haganah and Irgun terrorists, and hastened after the Six Day War of 1967. To the present, Israeli settlements in the occupied territories continue in violation of international law as declared by United Nations resolutions. However, the United States government does not recognize this history in the issuance of its hypocritical, morally corrupt propaganda. Protecting its strategic geo-political oil and trade interests in the Middle East by way of the state of Israel is all that matters.
Money talks and all else walks.
Historically, how is nation-state terrorism of empire by the British in India and Ireland, French in Algeria and Vietnam (for this watch the films The Battle of Algiers of 1966 and Indochine of 1992), Spanish throughout Latin America, and the United States in North America, for example, acquiesced to, if not defended, by the citizens, residents, and subjects of these countries? The popular inculcation of national myths portrayed as history by way of textbooks, radio, and television is how. Spain’s Hernán Cortés, destroyed the codices of the Aztecs after 1521 to rewrite Mexico’s cosmology. In the United States, in addition to Winthrop’s City of Upon the Hill screed, journalist John O’Sullivan’s 1845 Manifest Destiny declaration permitted ethnic European (read, white) Americans and immigrants to fanaticize that they enjoyed God’s command to violently conquer Native civilizations and Mexicans of North America by expulsion, the establishment of concentration camps called reservations, and genocide. Forsooth, before the United States assault on Mexico in 1846 to acquire Aztlán—what is today the Spanish-language titled states of Tejas, Arizona, Nuevo Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, and California inspired by Sullivan’s vision and realized by the presidency of John K. Polk—President Andrew “Indian Killer” Jackson ethnically cleansed 100,000 Native Seminole, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek from what is today South and North Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. The US National Park Service estimates that over 10,000 Native Americans died on this Trail of Tears. Those who survived the forced removal ended up in the moon-like territory of Oklahoma. The US Army killed Natives who resisted. Later the Texas Ranger, aka los rinches, killed Mexicans to drive them off their lands. The state of Israel, it seems, has studied the history of the United States.
With television, children consume the mendacities of hit shows such as Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983) in which the opening credits of each episode farcically depict the covered wagon of the Ingalls family “pioneering” empty plains. From this show and its afterschool syndicated reruns which I maturated through middle school, I internalized Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier (unpeopled land) thesis that contended that the US West defined the exceptional, elected, culture of its citizenry in contrast to quailed Europe. Tropes of the frontier, or empty land for the taking, were complemented by other fantasy TV series and movies such as Bonanza, F Troop, Fort Apache, Gun Smoke, Stagecoach, High Chapparal, True Grit, and The Lone Ranger, to name a few. Each in their own manner indoctrinated viewers with insidious, white supremacist narratives as historical fact.
From my recent study of the Los Angeles Times, I have learned that Israeli television networks similarly make sure that its citizens do not get any sense of the history and experience of Palestinians as this would humanize them. The myth of empire must be preserved. Not historical truths. Otherwise, the lies of settler colonial Zionism would fall apart.
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