However many bombs are dropped on the Lebanon or on Palestine, however many may be the deaths, the kidnappings and acts of torture of Palestinians and of Lebanese, whatever may be the arrogance of all Israeli governments and the impunity which they enjoy, the evidence is clear: the Zionist master-plan has failed.
« Our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding that history cannot be wiped out as on a black-board, to allow « us » to write our own future and impose our way of life on « inferior races ». Edward Said
Coming from a bad start, the State of Israel, born of a lie (« a land without people for a people without a land ») very convenient for the big powers who thus escaped at low cost from their crimes towards the Jewish people, and also acquired a brutal task-master in this strategic part of the world, could have chosen to integrate into the world of the Near East where it had decided to set implant itself. Such a coexistence, wished and called for many times by its Arab neighbours, could have ensured that it had an extraordinary economic, scientific and cultural development.
Instead of which, Israel has always chosen brutality and contempt. It has based its policies on the disappearance of the Palestinians, on brain-washing (of its own population as of that of the rest of the world) and on rewriting history.
And it has lost.
The Zionist master-plan has failed, and the lack of restraint of the Israeli armed forces is both the result and the proof of this failure.
Negationism has had a far reaching effect
Zionism has counted on the disappearance of the Palestinian people, thinking that it was enough to deny its existence, then to drive it away or to reduce it to such a state of despair that it will abandon all its rights. It has tried in vain to dehumanise it. The negation of the other is a constant element in any colonial enterprise.
However, neither negationism nor ethnic cleansing has borne the expected fruit. It has managed to resist 40 years of occupation and 60 years of expulsions, of destruction and boycott. Neither the massacres nor the humiliations have succeeded in eradicating the Palestinian populations. Worse still, it has advanced, cultivated and become stronger using both the arm of demography and that of education.
Neither worse nor better than any others, the Palestinians, despite the corruption of certain leaders, despite a certain falling back on religious values – which one can see everywhere in a world scared of so much barbarism – have stood up to the shock.
The Israelis have not managed to break the unity of the Palestinians, or to succeed in creating the total chaos which they were fomenting, with the aid of pressures and repressions, well-tried methods of bringing about division or collaboration. The Palestinians, despite having a terrible feeling of having been abandoned, have resisted.
Israel : a society in a bad way
– Its population has never escaped from living a war. Although the exactions are committed in the name of the « security of Israel ». The Israelis have never known security. As any occupier, they live in fear. The young and less-young suffer from this, being obliged to spend 3 years of their lives (two for the girls) in the armed forces, then to go back regularly as reservists. Domestic violence, an inevitable consequence of behaviour aimed at dehumanising the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, has not stopped growing in Israel, which worries many Israeli sociologists.
– The economic situation is very bad. Israel only survives thanks to American financial support. Its economy, entirely aimed at making war, to the detriment of all other sectors, is hardly attractive to investors.
– There are also the divisions and inequalities between different categories of populations and layers of immigration : Oriental Jews, Ashkenazi, Russian, Palestinians from 1948, are full of menace. Better treated than the Israeli Arabs, the Oriental Jews remain second class citizens (which is why they turn towards the Likkud and the religious parties : the Ashkenazi having traditionally put their trust in the secular left). The immigration conditions for a million Russians (Jews or supposed Jews) have created a clan little appreciated by the other groups in the population. As for the 250,000 non-Jewish slaves imported to replace the Palestinian workers, they are hardly likely to strengthen the cohesion of Israeli society, a cohesion whose sole glue is the fear of the « common enemy » carefully nurtured by the Israeli leaders. The famous « It’s us or them », used endlessly, takes the place of a « melting pot ».
– Israeli has shed, as if it were a scab preventing it from growing new skin over a wound, almost all the Jewish traditions of the diaspora (out with Yiddish, the Judeo-Arab culture, the culinary specialities and even Jewish humour, a form of laughing at themselves considered to be linked to the « ghetto mentality » and thus inadmisible). And by what have they been replaced? By the recognition of force alone, by a militaristic culture alone?
– Many Israelis have had enough and that has resulted in a non-negligeable number of departures. The figures are, of course, carefully covered up, but the fact is there : a considerable number of Israelis leave the country, creating a worrying brain-drain – of which Israel takes care not to speak, prefering to stress the number of new arrivals, those who make their « aliyah », but who probably do not make up for the departing Israelis, without fuss or fanfare, most often announcing that they were leaving temporarily to study or work abroad (mainly to the USA, Canada or Europe) and who never return or only briefly to see their family.
A disastrous image in the world
Israel has also lost in terms of image.
We are now far from the sympathies widely spread around the western world for this small brave people which wished, after having suffered so badly, to set up socialism by developing the kibbutzim, the country which claimed great principles of democracy, equality and secular principles.
Israel is today the most hated country in the world. The world feels repulsion for its brutality, for its contempt for others, including the Jews of the diaspora who have not chosen to go to install themselves inIsrael, for its wish to create chaos throughout the Middle East, for its permanent stigmatisation of the Arabs, and for its endless nerve when it raises the red rag of religion – that of others.
A religious state, founded on inequality, on the notion of the chosen people, giving different rights to its citizens depending on whether they are Jews or not, studded with dangerous religious fanatics, who do not only do their worst in the colonies implanted in the Occupied Territories, but also at the highest levels in the state structure and in the education system. Israel is a fundamentalist state, with the atomic bomb, which only inspires sympathy among sorcerers’ apprentices.
Blackmail by accusations of « antisemitism » : a real boomerang
The sympathy for Israel shown by those who consider that their interest lies that way or who systematically take its part, should not make us forget the enormous aversion, including on the part of those who keep quiet or who remain « politically correct ». This aversion, which tends to reflect on all Jews, arises particularly in countries such as France, where many of them come forward to give their unconditional support to Israel and few reject its criminal policies.
Thus the state, which put itself forward as a haven of peace and safety for all the Jews in the world, has thrown its population into permanent insecurity and has become the « major propagator of the virus of antisemitism », to take up the expression of the Israeli militant of Gush Shalom, Uri Avnery.
Isreal has in effect got itself stuck in a satanic logic : its leaders need antisemitism to show themselves as « the » victims, to take attention away from what they are doing to the Palestinians, and to incite more Jews to come to settle in Israel. However, the blackmail by accusations of antisemitism , this intellectual and moral terrorism, these constant lies passed on by politicians and the media take away support by a growing number of citizens. Also, most Jews of the diaspora, who have no wish to go to settle in Israel, are likely to suffer from it.
Even the use of the genocide of Jews is proving less and less effective. All those who are active in opposing the repetition of such crimes against humanity are aware that the « Shoah » has paradoxically transformed Naziism and the rise of fascism into taboo subjects of analysis. There is no opportunity to ask the questions, of seeking to understand how such horrors were possible. Hitler = Satan – full stop. No question of analysing, of comparing, of finding out that Hitler was not a wolf who fell to earth whom the leaders of the world, by their great naiveté or by stupidity, allowed to enter the sheepfold. No question of examining the fact that the rise of fascism did not happen from one day to another, but took some ten years during which the attrocities, extermination of Jews, of communists and of resistants were covered up by the kindly democratic régimes, who often saw in them a good barrier against the contagion of communism. The wolf Hitler having happily filled his belly, diplomatic relations with him were only broken off by the western powers towards the end of 1939, whereas the concentration camps were already in existence. A taboo subject.
Should not the genocide of the Jews suffice to cover up the criminal activities of the State of Israel?
Our « philosophers » and other scribblers, noisily in favour of the right to intervene to keep peoples down, unanimously in favour of the attack on the Lebanon just as they have supported the strangulation of the Palestinian people and applauded the invasion of Iraq, can always sing us the song of the « clash of civilisations » and of the the superiority of Judeo-Christian culture, but the fact is that might is not always right.
In fact, Israel is now beginning to learn this when it sees the defeats suffered by its highly sophisticated armed forces from people who refuse to bow beneath its yoke. Let our Sarkozy and Co., so keen to swear allegiance to the occupiers, and to surround themselves with acrobats such as Finkielkraut and Klarsfeld, follow this line. They have not necessarily chosen the right path. The resistance has not had its final word.
Olivia Zémor
CAPJPO-EuroPalestine
Translated by Robert Thompson
