THE CHARTER OF THE ISRAELI STATE

October 4, 2010 posted by Debbie Menon ·

By Avigail Abarbanel
Growing up as an Israeli provided me with an intimate understanding of Israeli-Jewish psychology.


I had the privilege of hearing Ali Abunimah speak at a dinner organised by an Australian pro-Palestinian activist group. Abunimah, an author and an editor of the Electronic Intifada website, is a supporter of the one-state solution in Palestine/Israel, and so am I. One democratic and secular state for both peoples with a right of return for the Palestinian refugees is the only just solution to the long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Abunimah is optimistic about what is possible. I would like to be as optimistic but am not so sure I can.
Growing up as an Israeli provided me with an intimate understanding of Israeli-Jewish psychology. Ever since I can remember, we in Israel were told that Jews have nowhere else to go because the world didn’t like Jews. Seventeen years ago, when my former husband and I were about to migrate to Australia, most of the people we knew were dismayed by our decision. I was told by many that I was making a big mistake. My father’s heart surgeon for example, was in complete shock when he heard our news. He took me aside and said that he did not understand how I could leave; that he would never be prepared to live anywhere where there might be even one anti-Semite alive. Like many others he believed that Jews can only safely live in Israel.
This idea that Israel is the only safe place for Jews is critical to understanding the roots of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Israel’s policies and perspective in the present. The majority of Jewish people do not trust non-Jews as life-long compatriots. Experience and cultural narrative have been telling them that since antiquity, rulers and governments as well as populations have become hostile to Jews without warning. This means that no matter how long Jews have lived anywhere, no matter how unobtrusive and well integrated they have been, or how much they contributed to their society, things could turn against them overnight.
With a history of European persecutions, pogroms, discriminatory laws, expulsions, medieval and modern ghettos and a systematic plan of total annihilation in what was considered an enlightened European country, it’s hard to blame people for feeling insecure.
Israel was not born in 1948 or because of the Holocaust. Its origins are with Zionism, the Jewish national movement, which was born in the late 19th century. Zionism was to put an end to the precarious situation of European Jews by creating an exclusively Jewish state. The logic was simple: if Jews could not trust that they could ever be unconditionally welcome or safe in the countries in which they lived, they needed a state of their own. This means a state governed by Jews only, and that was largely free of non-Jewish people. The location of the ‘Jewish national home’ was debated at first but eventually the entire Zionist movement agreed on Palestine because of the spiritual meaning it had for Jewish people. The fact that Palestine was populated was known, and openly recognised by the leaders of the Zionist movement. The mainstream view was that it was unfortunate, but that the plan to create a national home for the Jewish people could not be abandoned, because the Jews were in dire need.
Zionists have always believed that Jewish fear justifies ethnic cleansing. Ideas about transferring the existing non-Jewish population of Palestine — the Palestinians — elsewhere to make room for an exclusively Jewish state existed long before 1948. The word ‘transfer’ entered modern Hebrew, as a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, an idea or a plan to move the Palestinian population en masse elsewhere, as far away as possible from the borders of Israel.
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine started in 1948 behind the smokescreen of war, but it was not completed. It is not only continuing today but Israeli scholars like Ilan Pappé believe that it is escalating. Zionist ideology is directly responsible for the charter of present day Israel. Attempting to understand the dynamic of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or to analyse Israel’s behaviour without understanding this charter is bound to be flawed, and to lead to more confusion and misunderstanding.
Since the foundational belief is that Jewish people can only be safe in an exclusively Jewish state, Israel’s charter is simple. Israel is required to maintain itself as a safe haven for all Jewish people. Based on their past experience and national and religious narratives Jewish people deeply believe that it’s only a matter of time before the tide once again turns against them. When (and not ‘if’) this happens, the state of Israel will be there to take them all in and save them. I am using ‘they’ instead of ‘we’ because I have personally abandoned this narrative, and have chosen not to live my life in its shadow. This is seen by many Israelis as naive or even insane. But I decided to take my chances in the wider world because I do not believe that I can live a full life and make a contribution in the world if I live in a permanent state of fear.
The development of the state of Israel and Israel’s behaviour in the region have always been consistent with its charter. Israel sees that it would need as much land and natural resources as possible (such as water, which is scarce in the region), in order to accommodate the 13 millions Jews who are expected to flock to it from around the world, ‘when’ a new era of Jewish persecution begins. Israel would have to have enough housing, infrastructure and a functional economy. It would have to be a modern state in which Western Jews accustomed to technology, capitalism and affluence can feel comfortable. There is nothing inconsistent or strange in what Israel is doing to the Palestinians if you understand this charter. It surprises me that this is never discussed openly in any political analysis that I see.
At the heart of this conflict is not economics, oil, ‘war on terror’, religion or various regional loyalties. Rather it is an age-old psychology of persecution and survival to which all other considerations are subservient. Israel’s loyalties are utilitarian. There is no great love there for any other peoples or countries. Israelis always think in terms of what is good for the Jews and what isn’t, and they watch the world carefully from within this prism. Israeli children learn to see life from this point of view from a very young age. I was the same when I was growing up.
Only when we grasp this we can understand why negotiations with Israel mean so little; why Israel has never stopped building settlements on Palestinian land and has been consistently expanding its territory; why it’s making life for Palestinians inside and outside of Israel so unbelievably hellish; why it’s brutally restricting them to ever diminishing territories and why Israel is responding to Palestinian resistance with such disproportionate and overwhelming violence. Breaking down Palestinian resistance is critical from Israel’s point of view not only because of the pain that Palestinian armed resistance causes in Israel, but also in order to destroy any aspirations Palestinians might have to return to their ancestral lands. Israel simply cannot afford this if it wants to stay an exclusively Jewish state.
Israel is a country based on racist considerations because of its very charter, and the circumstances through which it came into being. From the point of view of Israelis accepting the one-state idea, would change Israel into just another country where Jews live among non-Jews. The whole idea of a Jewish safe haven would have to be abandoned and there will be no guarantee that the new pluralist state would take in Jews if they were ever in need of rescue. Israeli Jews and many Zionists around the world believe that to ask them to live together with the Palestinian people is to ask them to go back to a state of insecurity and potential victimhood. They simply do not believe that this is reasonable, and therefore would never willingly agree to any solution that compromises their safe haven. This is one of the reasons Zionists counteract any criticism of Israel with persistent cries of anti-Semitism. They really believe that to end the exclusively Jewish state would leave all Jews anywhere in the world, vulnerable to another potential Holocaust.
It is clear to me that if justice is to be achieved for the Palestinians this fear-based, racist and immoral ideology has to be overcome because the fear of one people cannot and must not justify the destruction of another. But I do not believe that the Palestinians can afford to wait until Jewish psychology changed by itself, and Jews felt sufficiently safe in the world to let go of the idea of an exclusively Jewish safe haven.
I believe it will take serious international pressure on Israel, or a real change of heart on the part of Israelis for a one state solution to become a reality. I would like to be optimistic and think that this change of heart will happen eventually but am not sure I can. My doubts come from my own experience — after all it used to be my psychology too. Thus, in order to save the Palestinian people the world must take decisive action in this conflict, as it did in South Africa, or continue sacrificing one people for the sake of another.
Avigail Abarbanel  is a humanist and psychotherapist. Her website: www.avigailabarbanel.me.uk. This article was first published in Electronic Intifada on 26th May 2008 under the title ‘A change needs to come’

HOW MERCHANTS OF DEATH RULE THE WORLD

GORDON DUFF: THE MACRO-ECONOMICS OF PHONY TERROR AND CONTRIVED CONFLICT

September 30, 2010 posted by Gordon Duff ·

 

HOW MERCHANTS OF DEATH RULE THE WORLD

By Gordon Duff STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor

Both elements of “Al Qaeda” along with its clear history as a CIA established organization make every mention of it suspicious.  Whenever there is a need for a “wag the dog”news story, “Al Qaeda” is dragged out as the whipping boy.  Never has any organization, one as mysterious and insubstantial as this one, whose supposed leader, Osama bin Laden,  has not only been dead for years but when he was alive, not only worked directly for the CIA but comes from a family directly tied to, not only the Bush family, but, in fact, close friends and business partners for decades at every level.

Since the end of the Second World War, national intelligence organizations have gained direct control over almost every non-governmental entity working for political and social change.  We aren’t just talking about trade unions and political parties.  We are talking revolutionary groups and, in particular, terrorist organizations.  Israel alone has an estimated 300 agents among the top leadership of Muslim organizations, be they the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Hizbollah or Al Qaeda.  When arrests are made or we see drone strikes or even assassinations, are they meant to destroy capabilities or are they simply helping an intelligence organization consolidate control over an operational asset, one used to manipulate world events to serve an agenda.

We know for certain that the latter is the case.

We are now told the CIA has saved American tourists in Europe from being kidnapped, dragged off the Eiffel Tower, bludgeoned at the Tower of London or lassoed at the Louvre.  This isn’t July.  America is in the middle of a depression, kids are back in school, finding an American tourist in Europe would take some work, even for CIA trained terrorists that make up Al Qaeda.  The story would have almost passed muster if it didn’t carry the embellishment of mysterious training camps and personal directions from Osama bin Laden.

This is just another scary story to go out on internet news letters filled with conspiracy tales about Obama the Muslim-Socialist from Kenya.   These are the “good conspiracies,” the ones that frighten, confuse, anger, blind and keep the public from looking “behind the curtain.”

Many experts contend that Al Qaeda is a construct made up for the news, for duping the President, not all that hard according to Bob Woodward, or the fools in congress.   Never has an organization been as ethereal or as timely.

Both elements of “Al Qaeda” along with its clear history as a CIA established organization make every mention of it suspicious.  Whenever there is a need for a “wag the dog”news story, “Al Qaeda” is dragged out as the whipping boy.  Never has any organization, one as mysterious and insubstantial as this one whose supposed leader, Osama bin Laden,  has not only been dead for years but when he was alive, not only worked directly for the CIA but comes from a family directly tied to, not only the Bush family, but, in fact, close friends and business partners for decades at every level.

If we can’t make a decent enemy out of Iran or North Korea, then we can always reinvent Al Qaeda and keep reinventing it, moving it to any part of the world that needs destabilization to promote the interests of powerful multi-national corporations or Israel.  Our current scare, a “pre-election special,”  is based on, we are told, stories received from an “informant” held by the CIA, the same CIA whose “reliable informants” sent 5,000 Americans to their death in Iraq looking for non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

We are told all this information comes from a source being held at the infamous Bagram detention center, a “source” claiming that groups trained in Waziristan under the direct supervision of Osama bin Laden are now all over Europe, top quality passports, probably made in Israel, hunting down Americans.  I don’t buy a word of it.  When CIA Director Leon Panetta said nobody had heard from bin Laden since 2001, do you think he was trying to make a point?  Won’t anyone come out and say it, bin Laden has been dead for nearly a decade.  Why don’t we admit it, keeping the ghost of Osama bin Laden alive is now seen as saving a valuable franchise, in effect, a license to lie, steal and kill.

Even when he was alive, bin Laden worked for the CIA.  He always worked for the CIA, and we are told continually, “Nobody ever quits the CIA.”  We can prove, beyond a doubt, that bin Laden was a major CIA asset in Afghanistan.  What we can’t prove is that he ever quit.  Did he go to work for Israel instead?

This idea of terrorist training camps is also a crock.  Please, load me on a plane, get me a Pakistan visa ( I have one) and fly me into Lahore.  3 ISI agents will follow me out of the airport, one will be driving my cab.

"Hey, this isn't the way to Waziristan!"

“Please take me to Waziristan, either north or south, I don’t care which, just get me to the nearest terrorist training camp as quickly as possible.  See if you can lose the guy following us, yes, the one on the motorbike with the AK-47.  No, the other one on the motorbike with the AK-47, the guy with the blue T-shirt. No, the dark blue shirt, plus, that guy has an MP 5 sub-machine gun and, anyway, I think that one is a girl.”

Driving in Lahore is alot like Detroit.

We aren’t saying there aren’t terrorists.  In fact, there are more terrorists today than ever before, the United States has been running a huge recruiting campaign for terrorists.  Not only do our wars recruit terrorists but our Predator attacks that have killed so many innocent civilians are bringing more and more onboard.  Even more successful is our campaign of wanton slaughter of civilians by death squads, referred to lovingly by the American press as “killing for sport.”  This recruits terrorists.

HOW THE MEDIA RECRUITS TERRORISTS

This is the conventional cover story:  Saudi Arabia gives millions of dollars to extremist Mullahs.  Poor children, boys only, go to these schools, memorize the Koran and bang their heads on the ground all day.  Upon graduation, each student is either given a suicide vest or sent to America to learn to fly aircraft into buildings.

Poor and semi-illiterate children aren’t very “telegenic,” however.  So, when television has to depict terrorists, it picks dark skinned “bad boys” who are both threatening but somehow compelling.  Most TV terrorists have one thing in common.  They are Jews.  After all, these are highly valued roles, playing the “heavy.”  Thus, our “TV terrorists” are tall, well groomed, highly educated, expensively dressed, have the best cars, stay in the best hotels, eat in the best restaurants.

Where do I sign up?

Who are the “real” terrorists then?  They are all educated, speak several languages, fly “first class” only and bounce around the planet like “jet setters.”  Funny thing is, we never find out who pays the bills, helps them through airports, sponsors and co-signs their visa applications, helps them rent apartments.

“What we do know is that none of them come from the primitive border regions of Af-Pak, where America, NATO, Pakistan and dozens of agencies, mercenary armies and assassination teams, not to mention scores of lethal drone aircraft, search day and night for, lets be honest, something that doesn’t exit and never has.”

The “terrorism franchise” driving, not only American TV, but British television as well, is far from entertainment.  Benny Hill is entertainment.  Dancing with the Stars is entertainment.  The tireless selling of terrorism, not only as a threat but, in view of the fact that these TV shows are all seen in the Islamic world as well, as an attractive alternative lifestyle, is both duplicitous and sinister. A few years ago, we learned how TV and movies influenced organized crime in the United States.

During a number of trials of organized crime figures in recent years, it was revealed that the Godfather films and others like them,  supplied the historical context used by real organized crime to establish a distinctive group identity.  Without the movies, they said they wouldn’t know how to talk like gangster, how to stage “hits” (assassinations)  or hold initiation ceremonies.  The movies told them how to organize on the basis of ancient Roman traditions. Problem is, the things they learned were fiction.  The “Mafia” as seen on television never existed and the Italian based crime organizations established to mirror fiction could very well be considered a “construct” of the entertainment industry.

Well, the exact same thing is true for terrorists.  They learn how to dress and act, how to pick out targets, even how to evade authorities from watching TV.

It is probably true that, without American television, most “terrorists” would never have imagined a career in that kind of thing.  After all, it isn’t the first thing that pops into mind after getting a degree from a university.

TERRORISTS WOULD BE HELPLESS WITHOUT “HELP”

We aren’t talking training.  There hasn’t been a credible terrorist attack that doesn’t have the signature of an intelligence agency on it in years.  Even the “Crotch Bomber” and the “Time Square Fizzler” had clear trails, perhaps dual trails, showing them to be “terrorists” but also showing the magic hand of fate, passing through airports, doors mysteriously opening for them, helping hands everywhere.  There are even doubts about Dr. Hassan,  the “Ft. Hood killer.”  When his name was found on the “premium” guest list at a security conference for Bush officials we wondered.  When we contacted the conference and got a lame cover story and then watched the whole thing disappear as though it never happened, as is so often the case, we may have found another “hybrid.”

In a world “gone mad” with security protocols making travel a near impossibility, the only group of people capable of getting anywhere anymore are terrorists.  Is there, perhaps, a special passport they are given, like diplomatic passports but better?  Who has that kind of power?  Does a country that does things like this come to mind?

HYBRID TERRORISTS

The concept of “privatization” is a recent one for terrorists.  Traditionally, most terrorist organizations were organized and financed as part of Cold War initiatives, either under the guise of anti-colonialism or, as with the establishment of the State of Israel, ethnic cleansing.  Little or nothing is allowed to be taught about the Zionist movement and its allegiances to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia or the infiltration of the corridors of power and finance in London or Washington.  Zionism would be the “third movement,” neither purely communist nor capitalist but both ethnocentric and predatory but largely economic in nature.   Much less is taught about the roots of Israel and the terror war waged against, not only the residents of Palestine but the British administrative forces in the region as well.  Even less is discussed about the efforts to force Jews to relocate to Palestine and how “doors were closed,” not by anti-Semites but Zionists themselves.

In fact, Jews killing other Jews, directly or indirectly, in order to push for the establishment of Israel is one of the best kept secrets of the 20th century.

COLD WAR REALITY

The period of the Cold War, typically 1947 through 1990, is described by most scholars as one during which there were three power bases, the “communist” East, the “capitalist” West and the non-aligned nations.  East and West were seen in a half-century struggle over the ‘hearts and minds” of the former colonial world, Africa, Latin and Central America, the Middle East and Asia, particularly Southeast Asia.

There was a special group of powers seen as both aligned and “non-aligned.”  These were spoken of as “surrogates” or “puppets” or even “rogue states.”  They were Israel, Iraq, Iran, South Africa, North Korea, Libya, Cuba, East Germany, Turkey, Taiwan, Rhodesia, Czechoslovakia and South Africa.  Another of the “great secrets” of the 20th century is that these nations often operated in unison, sharing intelligence services, weapons, jointly spying on the United States in particular, and, in general, making up a real “axis of evil” in much the vein spoken of by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George “W” Bush.

Working closely with them were “off center” groups within the intelligence agencies of the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, Pakistan, India and others.  Helping facilitate the relationships between these nations, the “off center” intelligence groups and a myriad of customers, terrorist groups, revolutionaries and criminal organizations were the arms dealers, including Bush family members, Saudis, Israelis, Rhodesians, South Africans and hundreds of others from around the world including international bankers, diplomats and UN officials.

Osama bin Laden came from this shadowy world.  200 more names could be put behind his, constituting some of the most dangerous people in the world.  Most are still around, many are still active, still in business and growing richer every day.  When a powerful United States Senator vacations on a yacht in the Mediterranean, his host is likely to be one of these 200.  When that same Senator visits a head of state, chances are, the message he is carrying is not an American one, but from his vacation host.  It isn’t just “senators” and it isn’t just one.  These “merchants of death” control more political leaders than any other group, any lobby, even more than the State of Israel, although, and this is no secret, a significant number of these “merchants of death” are Israelis.

Their trade, bio weapons, nuclear centrifuges, German submarines, American cluster-bombs, anthrax, land mines, missiles of all kinds, shapes and sizes, is a 300 billion dollar industry, working hand in hand with global espionage and drug rings, money launderers, “military contracting” companies and, oh yes, the oil industry.

Welcome to reality as it exists, not “TV” reality but one that explains the real world. 

These three great powers, two representing opposing power blocs and the third financing both sides and playing one against the other, all used terrorism extensively around the world to support their aims.  Any populist leader or agrarian reformer would quickly find himself inundated with offers of weapons and training.  Some became dictators and potentates while others strayed and became “axis of evil” cartoon bandits.  All, at one time, served the West, the East, Zionism or all three.

Let’s look at a few names:  Castro, Chavez, bin Laden, Marcos, the Shah, Noriega, Sukarno, Saddam, Karzai, Pinochet, Duvalier, Diem, Ho Chi Minh, Chaing Kai Chek, Pol Pot, Robert Mogabe, Idi Amin, Franco, Suharto, Somoza, Trujillo, Mobutu.

This is the top of a list of those who rose to power, some at the behest of the West, some the East, many both, more than a few financially entangled with our Israeli friends and the mechanisms for generating a control far more pervasive than simple politics or economics through sovereign debt manipulation.  When you add another hundred names to the list, not just the warlords and dictators but the “liberation movements” that have been infiltrated with cash or taken over through “surgery,” assassinations and manipulation, you can develop a clear picture of how revolution, dissent and terrorism are used to support oligarchical agendas.

What is the “oligarchical agenda?”

Oligarchy is about control, about ignorance and about power through centralized wealth through distribution of, not wealth but debt.

Were they hypotheses presented here to be valid, there would have to be a consensus as to whether a historical model of the past 50 years is described, one that seems to fit.  Are people getting poorer, less powerful and is the world increasingly controlled by unseen and unexplained forces capable of creating conflict at will and successfully hiding who they are?  Are we continually bombarded with opposing “conspiracy theory” and yet find the “world view” we are presented, the “official and certified” version,  as unsatisfying  and unable to describe the world convincingly?