by Joshua Blakeney* - It was the finest and most dignified event in Jewish history when, in April and May of 1943, the beleaguered inmates of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against their fascist occupiers. A song by the partisans spoke of the brave Jewish prisoner’s dilemma: “they could die on their knees or fight and live forever.”
Indeed, they chose to rise up and live forever as legends rather than die of hunger and disease on their knees. The Nazi state’s industrialized mass murder of 6 million Jews was undeniably the most hideous and reprehensible crime ever committed in the history of humanity. The state-led ethnic cleansing campaign compelled the global community after 1945 to enshrine many international laws, ostensibly to restrict states from committing such crimes again. Human rights such as freedom of movement, self-determination and conventions prohibiting genocide and collective punishment were all enshrined to protect stigmatized groups from state persecution.
Displaced Palestinian families from the northern Gaza Strip who survived an Israeli attack on a UN school where they were seeking refuge, take refuge yet again at a hospital in the Jabilya refugee camp, 17 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)
Another product of WWII was the bankrupting of the British Empire, which increasingly sought to rid itself of its colonies—of which Palestine was one. In light of Britain’s aspiration to decolonize and return Palestine to its indigenous inhabitants, the Zionist movement (which was a movement set up by a small group of secular Jewish businessmen in collusion with the anti-Semitic British statesman Lord Balfour) began a systematic campaign of terrorism against the people of Palestine and their British mandate authority, blowing up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people.
The Holocaust had created a large number of Jewish refugees, many of whom came to live in countries like Australia, Canada and the US, whilst many stayed in Europe and lived out peaceful lives. Others conversely chose to buy into the mythology of Zionism and went to Palestine to assist in the expulsion of the indigenous majority. The Zionist terror campaign culminated in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, an event best chronicled by the Jewish-Israeli dissident scholar Ilan Pappe, whose book is aptly entitled The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
In 1967, the American government egged on the Israelis, arming them with guns and bombs, to illegally and violently seize the few scraps of Palestine that had been sanctioned by the UN for the indigenous majority to inhabit. Since 1967, the politics of the region has been characterized by Israel and their imperialist masters in Washington, ceremonially producing bogus “peace plans” such as the Oslo Agreement, which effectively served as smoke screens to divert attention from the perpetual and illegal ethnic cleansing of the indigenous majority which is ongoing.
Even former US president Jimmy Carter now describes Israel as an “Apartheid State,” comparable to the US-backed South African apartheid regime during which Nelson Mandela, now venerated, was described by western governments as a “terrorist.”
These important historical nuances, adumbrated above, must be fathomed if as students, we are to unmask the pro-Zionist depiction of this recent wave of the tragedy that has, as usual, been tendentiously represented by the western media.
The western media more generally plays an equally instrumental role in portraying the west as “pro-democracy,” a notion laughable to most Arabs and Muslims, who live under puppet presidents and corrupt kings throughout the Middle East from the Atlantic to the Gulf. Such tyrannical, kleptocratic regimes could not sustain their autocracy for 24 hours were it not for the support—both financially and militarily—they receive from western governments such as Canada, the US and Britain.
Indeed, the only democratically elected government in the region, Hamas, upon being elected in 2006, were informed that all humanitarian funding by western governments like Canada was to cease because the Palestinian people had voted for a government which Harper, Bush, and the rest of this crazed Neo-Con gang didn’t like.
Even more hypocritical has been the west’s fifty year-long, undivided support for the country that has violated more UN conventions than every other country in the world put together—namely, Israel.
We often hear of vacuous threats by non-nuclear powers to “wipe Israel off the map,” while our media and governments – without a hint of irony - mask the truism that the Zionist state of Israel has already wiped Palestine off the map and, moreover, illegally possesses hundreds of nuclear weapons with which it could wipe any of its neighbouring countries off the map within seconds. Such cant and hypocrisy is allowed to occur primarily due to the strategic location of the Zionist state, which serves the west’s imperial project of fragmenting coveted polities in the region.
Washington has armed Israel with US made guns, bombs, planes, helicopters and chemical weapons, all funded by the US taxpayer. In return, they act as a kind of henchman for Washington’s imperial project.
The elected government of the Palestinian people, Hamas, are signatories to the Arab Peace Plan, which they signed 7 years ago, in which they unambiguously recognize the right for Israel to exist. This fact is constantly and consciously omitted by pro-Zionist mouthpieces such as the CBC, BBC and CNN, who seek to condition concerned opinion into viewing the Palestinians as the terrorists and the Israelis as the freedom fighters, employing the same methodology used when apartheid South Africa was the west’s ally and needed normalizing via disinformation campaigns.
In this latest wave of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, it is adduced by our media that Hamas broke the ceasefire. This is a categorical lie; it was in fact Israel, on November 5th 2008, who entered the Gaza ghetto and massacred 6 members of Hamas. In reply to this Zionist atrocity, the half-starved captives of the Gaza ghetto (just like the residents of the Warsaw Ghetto) realized that their occupier was murderous, racist and unwilling to resolve issues passively and thus retaliated. The resistance was effectively starved and provoked into adopting non-passive means of resistance by Israeli policies, which had rendered the besieged residents of the Gaza ghetto bereft of any dignity or human rights.
The hand-made, pathetically inaccurate rockets fired by the resistance, were the regrettable product of Israel breaching of the truce, which Hamas had abided by despite unconscionable suffering, mass hunger and poor health amongst its electorate. The Zionist colonizer did not choose to abide by its theological obligation to take merely an eye for an eye. They instead have so far- with the use of illegal chemical weapons- massacred men, women and children to the tune of almost 600 people. Indeed, the death toll so far in this conflagration has been roughly 4 Israeli pairs of eyes for 600 Palestinian pairs of eyes.
Mahatma Ghandi famously opined that “an eye for an eye would leave the whole world blind.” Will it take 6 million Arabs and Muslims to be killed by western state-terrorism until the people in countries such as US, Canada and Britain wake up to the crimes our governments are in active connivance with?
Is there a difference between the Nazi crimes in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Israeli government’s illegal herding of 1.5 million people (whose race and religion is unfavourable to them) into a brick walled, barb-wired ghetto with sealed off entrances and exits, in which the huddled masses are denied food, medicine and electricity?
Is there a reason why progressive anti-Zionist Jews such as Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe are not interviewed on our media stations, yet war criminals and apologists for these crimes are?
Do western governments really believe that by supporting Israeli crimes and supporting repressive autocracies throughout the Arab and Muslim world, the repressed citizens of these polities will find us more likeable?
Is there a difference between state-terrorism and private terrorism?
Is there a moral difference between a suicide bomber and a stealth bomber?
If we really purport to live in a democracy that boasts a free media, then it is vital that such questions enter public discourse before any more western pogroms are allowed to occur under our noses.
* Joshua Blakeney is the Vice-President of SPHR chapter at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada
