John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE INDEPENDENT

 

‘The creation of the state of Israel was fundamentally wrong’

 I know The Independent is trying to be quite provocative here, but the truth is, there is nothing wrong with Livingstone’s statement. It is not hateful, it is painfully accurate.

Many, many thoughtful people have said more or less the same thing.

It has absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

It is simply a reflection of all the misery and turmoil Israel, as a state, has generated since 1948.

Albert Einstein himself – often called a Zionist – had a highly qualified view of Israel. He liked the idea of displaced Jews finding homes in the Holy Land, but wrote very forcefully against the kind of state we have seen emerge, one governed only for the benefit of Jews and with a powerful army. He was strongly against that happening.

One of the leading early Zionists, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, established a terrible principle called “the iron wall” which was completely adopted by re-created Israel. The principle is that Jews should show only an iron wall to their neighbors in the Middle East.

How can anything good come of that? Well, it cannot, and it hasn’t.

Had Israel been founded along lines Einstein advocated, the whole story might well have been different, but it did not. It adopted “the iron wall” and has treated its neighbors pretty much with contempt, and nearly endless aggression, since 1948.

The Six Day War, we know from various historical sources including blunt observations from de Gaulle, was deliberately created by Israel. It had calculated and knew that it could win handily against divided and poorly-led Arab states enticed into war. There were a whole series of provocations laid out, and Israel got just what it wanted in terms of land, and the Arabs were left looking like failed aggressors against poor little David. It was a military and propaganda triumph.

The results are what we see today: millions living as prisoners with no rights or future, slow-motion depopulation of the captured territories in favor of new owners, the outright theft of people’s homes and farms week-in and week-out, the disruption of ancient life patterns through walls (built on other people’s land) and countless barriers, the theft of many other resources such as oil from Syria’s Golan Heights or gas from a seabed which should belong to Gaza, theft of precious water supplies through many diversions and projects, and a very great deal more.

How can that kind of state behavior ever produce peace or anything else good? Of course it cannot. It is not meant to do so.

The truth is Israel is not even a very good place for many Jews in which to live. It is an awfully inefficient economy, always heavily subsidized. Prices are terribly high. It is difficult to afford a home. Good jobs are not plentiful. You must see your children in the army, and enforcing the ugliness of the occupation. And you must accept all the noise and ugly violence that goes on. The wealthy class in Israel, many or most of whom are dual-citizens, do very well and are safe in the idea they can easily migrate if required or desired.

Israel has attacked every neighbor that it has, some numerous times. It is always making threats, as against Iran, and the threats are unwarranted because Iran has attacked no one in its modern history and does not threaten Israel. Various modern leaders have demanded American attack every place from Iraq to Iran, and they very much got their way in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Likely a million have died, and for what?

Well, in the end, re-created Israel is a fact, even if a mistake, and the world can accept it if only it can play by the rules, return to the Green Line, and live in peace with its neighbors. This is the view of people like Uri Avnery whom I support. But voices like his are extremely rare in Israel. So what hope is there ever to see peace and progress with dark figures like Netanyahu or Sharon? None.

Israel will only respond to pressure from Western states, and that is why it is completely right to criticize and try to alter the political environment which allows Israel’s bloody excesses to flourish. It is not anti-Semitism, it is human decency, and I am sure most Jewish people really understand that but feel fearful of saying so.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

“Just as fascism and communism were the great struggles of previous generations, terrorism is the great struggle of ours.”

And what about state terrorism, the largest and most lethal form of terrorism?

State terrorism is an everyday practice today by the United States, and it has been a building block of Israel since the foundation.

The early Zionists called it “the iron wall,” and that phrase encapsulates Israel’s every policy since 1948.

A significant part of Israel’s 1940s effort to carve out a state included the work of terror gangs like Stern, Lehi, and Irgun – all of whom assassinated, planted bombs, and generally terrorized Arabs.

Israel today sits back and claims terror is such a threat, but Israel itself is a garrison state, grotesquely over-armed and ready constantly to assault any neighbor it disapproves of, and it disapproves of virtually all of them.

It is a lawless state, possessing atomic weapons against all international rules and desires, and a state moreover that was willing to proliferate atomic weapons technology with South Africa, something it has never even received censure for.

Israel also stands in contempt of a list of UN Resolutions, the very kind of thing the United States has used as an excuse to bomb some government it doesn’t like.

It also stands in violation of dozens on international agreements and protocols.

Israel does not hesitate to kill children – having slaughtered 400 of them in its vicious attack on Gaza, and according to the UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, Israel has killed more than 1,200 children since the year 2000.

Israel does not hesitate to kill peace workers, such as those aboard the Gaza humanitarian fleet attacked on the high seas, pictures and eyewitness reports from which clearly show Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed crew members in cold blood.

And don’t forget, while Israel was bombing Southern Lebanon a few years ago, dropping about a million cluster bombs (the world’s most ghastly, inhumane weapon) to maim and kill women and children and farmers for years to come, it also killed 4 UN observers, including a brave Canadian who died at his post.

John Baird’s boss, our glorious prime minister, after that cold-blooded murder said only he couldn’t understand why the UN had observers there: that is the fetid pool of thought from which John Baird’s words come.

On a per capita basis – the only fair way to compare – Israel is pretty much the world leader in brutality and abuse.

It keeps about ten thousand – the number is always changing – Palestinians illegally in prison.

Nearing half a century, it keeps more than 4 million Palestinians under occupation, totally illegal occupation, and it abuses them constantly with checkpoints and endless red-tape.

It helps itself each week or so to any parcel of someone else’s land that it chooses, indeed it has cobbled together a set of laws and regulations designed specifically to allow it to do this to Palestinians who cannot possibly meet the vicious laws’ requirements – anywhere else this would be called theft by a state.

It decides whether it will assassinate leaders that it does not like, and it does so regularly, with complete impunity – that’s the purest form of police-state terror you can come up with.

To carry out these dozens of assassinations, it breaks laws in many countries and it regularly abuses national passports by stealing and altering them or forging them, and Canada’s passport has been a frequent victim of this criminal behavior.

It does all these criminal acts with the complete support and approval of the United States, without whose influence and twisting of arms and rules, Israel might well collapse of its own gross excesses.

You do not and cannot get peace from a state which behaves as Israel does. It’s like saying the blacks in apartheid South Africa could have had peace by talking to the apartheid government – it literally is that absurd.

Only influence from outside can remedy what Israel has inflicted for decades.

But that influence will certainly not come from the dark bulk who represents less than forty percent of Canadians.

He’s too busy trying to please the United States in every nicety and detail, and he is too busy trying to appeal to the minority of intense Israel apologists, hoping to secure his party’s long-term financing, hoping to establish the same kind of arrangement which now absolutely determines the ongoing injustice of American foreign policy for the Middle East.

The dark bulk is ruining our international reputation, in every area of endeavor, making of us a sort of unofficial 51st state in the world’s eyes.

This is a nightmare world John Baird defends, a world where war is peace and hatred is love, but he does it unblinkingly and aggressively like a Joseph Goebbels defending his master’s bloody deeds.
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FROM A READER:
“Recognizing the Zionist Stab in the back as the cause of their hardship, was the only reason that Germany democratically elected the Nazi party, to keep the Jews from repeating history.”

Absolutely wrong in every detail.

I’m no friend of Israel’s bloody work, but I deal in facts and logic, not ignorance and distortion.

Hitler was never elected.

The highest vote the Nazi Party ever got in free elections was about 37%, and that was after years of furious effort.

He was appointed Chancellor by the aging President, von Hindenburg, who wanted to stop the turmoil and fighting in the streets, part of which was of course Hitler’s own efforts through his private army of Brownshirts, the SA.

The Nazis conducted an elaborate coup with the burning of the Reichstag, and the aged and much admire war-hero president died. Hitler rammed through legislation giving him the presidential powers and more.

Once firmly in power, the Nazis conducted a number of plebiscites, and they got the kinds of votes you always saw in the Soviet Union’s elections, figures like 98%, but if you accept those as valid you really are a sad, uncritical soul.

As for “the stab in the back” there was no such thing. It was a figure of Hitler’s vivid and fetid imagination.

Hitler considered the Weimar Republic itself a stab in the back. He always hated any form of liberalism or popular government.
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“Being surrounded by Muslim-only states does that. 4 million Jews live in a tiny state surrounded by a billion Muslims in 57 states, and it is apparently racist for Israel to be a Jewish state. Wow. But I can understand why the Jew haters want this “right to return”; flood Israel with enough Muslims and then you have 58 Muslim states!”

Simply appallingly ignorant.

What does the make-up of other states have to with Israel?

Nothing, and indeed when you make this appalling argument, your words closely resemble those of Hitler in his demands for lebensraum for the German people and his claims that Germans deserved a special space in which to flourish for the future, that too many other European states held more land than they needed.

In case you don’t know it, Israel has about 1 million non-Jewish citizens – I don’t mean the more than 4 million of the occupied territories but people who carry Israeli passports.

These are the descendants of the Palestinians who refused to run from Israeli terror in 1948.

Israel didn’t want them, but it was pretty much stuck with them.

However, Israel has found many ways of treating them through contrived laws as second-class citizens.

More than one prominent Israeli has advocated running them off the land.

The current ethically-obtuse Foreign Minister is definitely sympathetic to that kind of filthy thinking.

So if Israel is formally recognized as “the Jewish state,” what happens to those poor citizens?

I think we can all guess, and it won’t be pleasant.

And do you not recognize the irrational nature of the demand for a single ethic/religious state? It is no different at all to fundamentalist Islamist demands for Islamic states.

The truth is that Israel in concept was an outdated 19th century concept. It has proved divisive and destructive its entire brief history. It ranks among the world’s most unjust states.

But nevertheless, mistake or not, the world accepts its existence so long as it stops violating every law and moral concept we know to maintain its ethnic purity.

Is it too much to ask that it retreat to its borders and to finally start treating its neighbors as human beings?