Eamonn McCann: Why the West has let Israelis get away with ethnic cleansing

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Today, Israel celebrates its 60th birthday. To Palestinians, this is the Day of Nakba — the Disaster.

George Bush and Queen Elizabeth are among scores of Heads of State who have showered Israel with congratulations on its anniversary. In a message on Tuesday to President Shimon Peres, Elizabeth II said: "It gives me particular pleasure to send Your Excellency my congratulations on the celebration of your National Day, on the 60th anniversary of your Independence. I extend my best wishes for the happiness and prosperity of the Government and people of Israel in the coming year."

To the Palestinians, no word even of condolence. Hemmed in by checkpoints and the Apartheid Wall or huddled into horrendously overcrowded refugee camps scattered across the region, the Palestinian people continue to seethe and suffer.

Palestinians have to be demonised so as to render this oppression acceptable. So ferocious has been the propaganda onslaught against them that many reasonable people have come genuinely to believe that Israel is defending itself in a measured way, in civilised contrast to Palestinian fighters damned for targeting civilians.

Far more Palestinians are being killed by Israelis than Israelis by Palestinians, and the disproportion is widening year on year. In 2002, the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli fatalities in the conflict was 2.5 to one. Last year, it was 25 to one. And a significantly higher proportion of the Palestinians have been children.

This reproduces the pattern of 60 years ago, when Zionist forces set out to 'de-Arabise' the territory.

Zionism is widely presented today as the authentic defining ideology of the Jewish people down the ages. This is a sedulously cultivated myth with no basis in history. Zionism was invented in Russia just over a century ago, in response to the extreme anti-Semitism of the Tsarist regime. It became a major tendency within Judaism only after Hitler took power in Germany with the acquiescence of countries which were later willing to declare war on him over other offences but not over the persecution of Jews. At the heart of Zionism was the notion that there could never be an accommodation between Jews and Gentiles, that it was, would always be, futile for Jews to strive for acceptance into any wider society, that for a Jew to aim at assimilation was sacrilege, that Jews must have a land of their own, exclusively theirs.

The ideology was to be expressed, once the Zionists had settled on Palestine as the land on which to construct their State, in an invincible belief that any who stood in the way of their manifest destiny could justifiably be driven out, and must be driven out, or put to death.

The early Zionists were well aware of how useful their project might be to the European powers. Theodor Herzl wrote in Zionism's founding document, Der Judenstaat: "For Europe we shall constitute there (in Palestine) a sector of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as the vanguard of culture against barbarism." For Europe ...

The germ of the War of Civilisations.

In 1956, future Israeli chief of staff Moshe Dayan, speaking at a graveside facing Gaza, told an audience of young men: "We are fated. Before their (the Palestinians in Gaza) very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived ... This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life."

Contrarywise, the anti-Zionist Jewish writer Uri Averni recalls with gentle regret: "That night, we attacked al-Qubab. When we entered the village, it was already deserted. I broke into one of the homes. The pot was still warm, food was on the table. On one of the shelves I found some photos: a man who had obviously just combed his hair, a village woman, two small children. I still have them with me."

Between February and October 1948, heavily armed Zionists systematically emptied and destroyed more than 500 villages and 11 towns. Massacres were too many to mention. In those months alone, half of Palestine's native people were ethnically cleansed. In all, 700,000 fled.

None has been given a right to return. Meanwhile any Jew or child of a Jew, from anywhere in the world, irrespective of whether they or their ancestors have ever set foot in Palestine, is entitled to full citizenship of Israel.

Today, the main reason the US and its allies offer uncritical, unconditional, unlimited support to Israel in its continued hounding of the Palestinians has to do with the strategic value of the racist State in a key region of the world.

The main reason they get away with it in the eyes of decent people is rooted in a European wish to atone. It's far easier to pay for the evil of the Holocaust by giving Zionism free rein than it would be to look history in the face.