Is the Zionist State Now Doing Itself In?
Is the Zionist State Now Doing Itself In?
Remarks to the Community Church of Boston
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)
By Video, 4 October 2024
There will always be an Israel. It is a theological ideal and mythic memory that has survived millennia in the minds of observant Jews. Some Christians link Jewish dominance of Palestine to the second coming of Christ and the End of Days. The multinational religious communities that profess Judaism will ensure Israel’s permanence as an idea. But both the Zionist State of Israel and the Jews who inhabit it are now in jeopardy. Palestine is where the humane values of Judaism have gone to die.
An abbreviated history seems appropriate.
The first Christians were Jews, but European Christendom never applied the brotherly love Jesus taught to the Jews in its midst. Instead, it classified them as socioreligious pariahs – an alien caste. Like the castes of India, Jews married only each other, had a distinctive religious identity, and were restricted to specialized socioeconomic roles. In the case of European Jews this meant occupations involving money lending and other sorts of financial engineering. European xenophobia, called “antisemitism” when directed at Jews, resulted not just in their persecution but in their occasional pillage and murder, for example by Crusaders preparing to conquer the Holy Land from its mostly Muslim inhabitants. It is fair to say that the Holocaust – the greatest atrocity of the 20th century among many – was less an innovation than the culmination of centuries of prejudice and persecution of Jews by other Europeans.
Against this background, it is easy to understand the appeal of Zionism – an effort to transform Jewish religious identity into a national identity and to set up a state in which Jews would be a ruling majority rather than a vulnerable minority. Zionism’s proponents argued that Jews, like other European ethnolinguistic groups, were entitled to self-determination. Ironically, Zionism thus embraced European Christendom’s antisemitic designation of Jews not as adherents of a religious faith but as a “people” distinct from other Europeans.
European antisemites thought it would be just dandy to get rid of the Jews in their midst. But where should they go? What better than to export them to one of European colonialism’s many overseas colonial dominions?
Most of the original Zionists were not themselves religious but they judged correctly that locating their proposed state in the mythic homeland of Judaism – Palestine – would grant it a religious legitimacy it would otherwise lack. As Ilan Pappé, the noted Israeli historian, has quipped: they did not believe in God but insisted that He had promised Palestine to them. And, with the racist condescension typical of European imperialism, they ignored the presence of an indigenous population in their proposed homeland, describing Palestine as “a land without people” for the “people without land” that they were in the process of inventing.
As the Ottoman Empire imploded during the First World War, Britain – in an act intended to undermine Jewish support for Germany – declared its support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” provided that “nothing shall be done … [to] prejudice the … rights of existing non-Jewish communities” there.[1] But for the Jews colonizing Palestine the whole point was to establish Jewish supremacy there, not to affirm the rights of its non-Jewish inhabitants. A multifaceted Zionist campaign to dispossess the indigenous Palestinian Arab population was soon underway.
In the late 1930s, the increasingly brutal Nazi persecution of Jews in Germany led to a surge in Jewish emigration to Palestine. This set off the 1936 – 1939 “Great Palestinian Revolt” against both British rule and Zionist colonization. Britain reacted in 1939 by issuing a “White Paper” proclaiming a policy of establishing a Jewish homeland through regulated Jewish immigration to an unpartitioned, independent state of Palestine, which was to come into being within ten years.[2] Palestinian leaders feared this policy would dispossess them and firmly rejected it. For their part, armed Zionist settlers violently resisted its implementation, charging that it would put them at the mercy of Palestine’s Arab Muslim and Christian majority.
Prior to World War II, most European Jews opposed Zionism or were indifferent to it. The Nazi Holocaust understandably convinced them that to protect themselves and their posterity from genocide they needed to set up an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine.
After the war, with more desirable safe havens – like the United States – denied to them, a mounting flood of European Jews sought resettlement in Palestine. Zionist paramilitaries simultaneously launched violent campaigns against the British authorities, Palestinian Arabs, and Jewish dissenters. Their aim was to achieve self-determination and establish an exclusively Jewish state by ridding Palestine of its indigenous inhabitants. Their targets included civilians as well as security personnel, government figures, and infrastructure. (In 1991, Yitzhak Shamir, a participant in this terrorist campaign who had become the prime minister of Israel, justified Jewish terrorism on the grounds that the Jews, stateless and persecuted, had no choice but to engage in it. By contrast, he asserted, the Palestinians, are “fighting for land that is not theirs. This is the land of the people of Israel.”) Zionism’s morally blind sense of entitlement and reliance on terrorism against its opponents have never varied.
In the face of this, in 1947, the British threw up their hands and tossed the problem of Palestine into the lap of the United Nations. The UN – then dominated by colonial powers – imperiously recommended the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with the city of Jerusalem under international control. At the time, the population of Palestine was two-thirds Arab and one-third European Jewish. The UN plan nonetheless awarded fifty-six percent of the country, including most of its best agricultural land, to Jewish colonists, while allocating only forty-two percent of it to its native Arabs.
Palestinian leaders, joined by every state in the region and newly independent India, opposed both partition and the UN plan for it as unfair. For newly independent states, the award of territory in Palestine to European Jewish settlers was a terminal affront as the age of racist Western colonialism sputtered to an end.
Under intense pressure, including death threats from Zionist activists, the UN General Assembly voted to approve the plan. Zionist leaders accepted it, while complaining that it would burden their proposed state in Palestine with a forty percent Arab minority. They began planning to seize more territory and Jerusalem if they could.
The British right to rule in Palestine was due to expire at midnight on May 14, 1948. In April of that year, newly augmented Zionist forces began an offensive to secure the cities and territories the UN partition plan had allotted to the proposed Jewish state, to encourage its indigenous inhabitants to leave, and to position themselves to seize even more land if the opportunity presented itself.
A few hours before the British began their scheduled withdrawal from Palestine, the World Zionist Organization proclaimed the State of Israel and mobilized its armed forces. The next day military contingents from Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq entered Palestine. In the ensuing conflict, Zionist forces – many of them battle-hardened by warfare in Europe – took not only the territory assigned by the UN to a Jewish state but sixty percent of the territory designated for Palestine’s Arabs. The new Israeli armed forces and Jewish militias conducted over seventy documented massacres of Palestinians and terrorized over 720,000 of them into abandoning their homes and fleeing to neighboring countries. Israeli forces also seized West Jerusalem, voiding its proposed status as part of an international city and complicating Jerusalem’s continuation as a point of pilgrimage for the world’s Muslims and Christians, for whom it was also a holy city.
While Jews in the new state of Israel celebrated, those in the broader Arab world almost at once suffered the consequences of their European coreligionists’ violent expulsion of over half of Palestine’s Arab Muslim and Christian populations. Over the course of the next decade, the hate-filled reaction to this catastrophe – النَّكْبَة – in Arab countries led increasing numbers of Jewish Arabs to abandon their homes and flee to Israel. Israel’s surprise attacks on Egypt in 1956 and on Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 as well as its several invasions of Lebanon then cemented Arab enmity to the Zionist state, fomented Arab and Muslim antisemitism, and resulted in the departure of all but a few of the ancient Jewish communities in the Islamic world. Once in Israel, Arab Jews were indoctrinated in the evils of the European Holocaust and assimilated to a national culture based on fear of renewed slaughter of Jews by hateful antisemites – equated with the 99.08 percent of non-Jewish human beings.
In its 1967 “Six Day War,” Israel gained control of all of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, as well as Syria’s Golan Heights. This marked a fateful choice for Zionism. Having invented a “Jewish people” to populate what it had proclaimed was “a land without people,” Zionists now faced the inconvenient reality that the land they had seized was, in fact, already populated. Israel could use its victory and its control of Palestine to dictate a basis for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence. Or it could persist in implementing policies designed to rid the West Bank and Gaza of its captive Arab populations. True to its Zionist origins, Israel chose to pursue the goal of eradicating all but a vestigial Arab Muslim and Christian presence in the Holy Land.
In the territories of pre-1967 Israel, a system of apartheid evolved, in which the twenty-percent Israeli Arab Muslim and Christian minority is discriminated against, segregated from Jewish Israelis, and denied many of the benefits available to Jewish citizens. In the West Bank, martial law evolved into a Kafkaesque system of checkpoints that oppressed and atomized its Palestinian inhabitants by separating them into 165 or so disconnected enclaves and progressively evicting them to make way for Jewish settlements and outposts in hundreds of places selected for their military value to the Israeli occupation and its annexationist agenda.
The cumulative result is the Israel of today, in which non-Jewish Arab Israelis are second-class citizens, Arabs in the occupied West Bank are disenfranchised and subject to Jewish settler and military terrorism, while the inhabitants of Gaza are being slaughtered and starved to death. As I speak, the extermination campaign in Gaza has been extended to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Occupation brutalizes the forces conducting it. Israel has been no exception. As time has gone on, the Israeli occupation forces and the conscripts that man them have become ever less constrained by morality or empathy for those they violently oppress.
In the beginning, Israel used pseudo-legal procedures to dispossess Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank but, as time went on, it came to rely ever more on terrorism by Jewish settlers, aided and abetted by the Israeli military. It is now openly applying the murderous techniques it pioneered in Gaza to the West Bank and Lebanon.
After the withdrawal of Israeli settlements from Gaza in 2005, Israel transformed it into the world’s largest concentration camp. It controlled Gaza with periodic invasions and massacres of its inhabitants in a policy that it sardonically called “mowing the grass.” On October 7 last year, Palestinians in Gaza – a persecuted people without a state of their own – responded by applying the logic of Yitzhak Shamir’s justification of Zionist terrorism to the Israeli settlers and military reservists on Gaza’s periphery.
The Zionist state’s aim has been to create conditions so intolerable that Palestinians would voluntarily leave, transforming Palestine into the “land without people” it originally envisaged. In its effort to rid Palestine of its non-Jewish inhabitants, Israel has emerged as the world’s most brazen violator of the norms enshrined in international law and the post-war Geneva conventions. Ironically, the world enacted these conventions precisely to preclude a recurrence of the cruelties that the Nazis and Japanese militarists had inflicted on occupied populations during World War II – most notably the genocide of Europe’s Jews. With its behavior, Israel has turned the star of David on its flag into a global symbol not of resilience and redemption but of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
Israel’s policies toward its captive Palestinian populations now blatantly violate the norms the post-war conventions enshrine. To cite a few obvious examples:
- Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stipulates that an occupying power must not transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies, yet the Zionist state’s settlement of occupied Palestinian lands is still its central mission and activity. Some 720,000 illegal Israeli settlers have dispossessed and now lord it over Palestinians in the West Bank.
- The same article provides that “collective penalties and all measures of intimidation or terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” Yet these measures are the very means by which Israel has long terrorized the inhabitants of both Gaza and the West Bank.
- Article 76 of the same Convention prohibits an occupying power from murdering, torturing, mutilating, beating, or otherwise brutalizing the population under its control. Yet Israel relies on such sadistic practices – including sodomy and rape – to punish Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are detained without charge.
- The separate Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948 defines genocide as destroying a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group in whole or in part. It criminalizes this behavior, the conspiracy to commit it, public incitement of it, the attempt to commit it, or complicity in it. The government of Israel and its army are currently committing every one of these crimes. The foreign governments supplying Israel with arms and protecting it in the United Nations have yet to face formal charges at the Hague but are full accomplices in this genocide.
- The United Nations Charter demands that all states refrain from the threat or use of force against other states. Customary international law requires reprisals for violations of this prohibition to be proportional to the injury suffered. It restricts preemptive or anticipatory defensive actions to circumstances in which there is “a necessity of self-defense, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” Yet Israel repeatedly retaliates disproportionately to any and all affronts, attacks its neighbors preemptively without regard to whether there is evidence of an imminent threat from them, and assassinates both their own officials and Palestinians on their soil.
This is not, by any means, a complete list of Israel’s violations of international law and human decency. Israel offends these norms – to which the United States and Europe loudly proclaim allegiance – because it has Western backing to do so.
The Zionist state has gotten away with criminally scofflaw behavior because:
- Europeans guilty of antisemitism, including aiding and abetting the round up and slaughter of Europe’s Jews, have conferred compensatory immunity on the Jews of Israel.
- A powerful, unregistered lobby in the United States and United Kingdom, directed by the Israeli government and funded by native Jewish plutocrats, has made it politically fatal to criticize the behavior of the Zionist state.
- The Western bloc in the UN Security Council – the United States, United Kingdom, and France – has shamelessly protected Israel by vetoing every and all attempts to hold it accountable for its outrageously illegal behavior.
- Until recently, Israel – aided by biased, self-censoring Anglo-American media – was careful to keep its gross violations of Palestinian human rights below the radar screen. But the October 7 breakout of Palestinians from their incarceration in Gaza inevitably focused global attention on the outrageous Israeli treatment of them that had inspired their criminal atrocities against Israelis just outside Gaza. Israel’s subsequent effort to exterminate the Palestinians in Gaza has indelibly shattered the image of Israeli and other Jews as eternal victims. The world now sees Israelis not as survivors of genocide but as vengeful perpetrators of it, heirs to the Nazis who sought to exterminate them as they now seek to exterminate the Palestinians. In much of the world, the Star of David has come to evoke the same revulsion as the Nazi swastika does in the West.
Israel is not a casual scofflaw. Since its establishment, it has systematically sought to normalize behavior that contravenes international law. As a former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ (IDF) Legal Department argued:
“If you do something for long enough the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries . . .. International law progresses through violations.”
A colleague of his pointed out that:
“The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.”
This Israeli strategy of “lawfare” has succeeded in eroding international law and eliminating American compliance with it. Tolerance of illegality abroad fosters tolerance of it at home and vice versa. American enablement of Israel’s brutal oppression of its captive Arab population and its wanton warfare on its neighbors has corrupted American politics and constitutional democracy in the United States as much as it has deformed American foreign policy.
The result is the current U.S. advocacy of an autocratic, so-called “rules-based order” as an alternative to traditional consensus-derived international law. The United States and its close allies assert the right to proclaim the rules and decide to whom they should and should not apply. Might is once again to make right. The strong are to do what they can and the weak to suffer what they must. The world at large considers this approach, which the unconditional U.S. protection of Israel epitomizes for them, to be prima facie sociopathic.
For Israel and its neoconservative sycophants in the United States, the ends justify the means, and the ends transparently equate to the establishment of Jewish supremacy not just in Palestine but in West Asia. Since its founding in 1948, Israel has steadily expanded without agreeing borders with either the Palestinians or its Arab neighbors. The stripes on the Israeli flag symbolize bodies of water – a river and a sea or another river. The uniforms of some Israeli troops are adorned with a notorious map that depicts the State of Israel as extending from the Euphrates to the Nile. This reflects the belief of religious Zionists that God once promised this vast territory, consisting of part of Egypt, most of Iraq, all of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria as well as northern Saudi Arabia to the Jews. This is a vision of depopulation through slaughter.
Israel now exists. Does Israel justly claim “a right to exist?” Not if that implies that no one else has the right to exist “between the river and the sea.” Does it deserve to exist? Not if its existence depends on sadistic violations of human decency and international law. Can the world tolerate the existence of a state that has institutionalized an ethnoreligious democracy that survives by dehumanizing and terrorizing a disenfranchised captive population, while aspiring to exterminate it? Can it fail forever to take action to stop Israel’s indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians and Lebanese? What’s your answer to that?
These questions have become, I believe, the transcendent moral issues of our times. The world is watching and weighing the amorality of American enablement of Israeli genocide, persecution, and ethnic cleansing of its captive Arab populations. America’s reputation and global leadership are at an historic nadir. Ever more Americans of conscience object to Washington’s complicity in Israel’s gross violations of human rights and international law.
If there is no path to peace in the Holy Land, Israel’s state terrorism will inevitably stoke terrorism against it and the United States as well as the escalating opprobrium of Israel’s neighbors and the global majority. To preclude this, Israel now seeks a regional conflagration – an apocalypse from which its current government believes that, with American backing, it will emerge triumphant.
The blank check we have given to Israel is not a strategy. It is a tragedy in the making. And it is one for which the world will justly hold the United States responsible.
Let us not forget that U.S. taxpayers pay for the Zionist state’s misdeeds. Israel has been and still is by far the largest single recipient of U.S. foreign aid. In 1964, in return for financial support from wealthy Jewish American donors for his presidential campaign, then President Lyndon Johnson agreed to drop America’s post-Suez arms embargo on Israel. Since then, the United States has provided about $250 billion in military aid to Israel. Keeping Egypt at peace with Israel has cost the United States another $165 or so billion. Americans are responsible for Israel’s persecution of the Palestinians and wars on its neighbors in ways we are not in other countries whose evil behavior we do not subsidize but whose conduct we condemn.
In normal times, Washington funds about fifteen percent of the Israeli defense budget, while unofficially suspending the Leahy law, which prohibits arms transfers to countries using them to violate human rights and international law. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court have both found that that is exactly what Israel is doing. Washington has nonetheless continued to support Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, turned a blind eye to its pogroms in the West Bank, and backed its murderous attacks on Syria and now Lebanon with at least another $40 billion in emergency aid and over 50,000 tons of weaponry. The government of the United States is funding, arming, and excusing Israel’s inexcusable behavior toward both the Palestinians and its neighbors.
The world is now calling Americans to account. Will we continue to exempt Israel from accountability for its gross violations of our proclaimed values, our laws, and international norms? Will we persist in allowing it to manipulate our elections to facilitate its suicidal policies? Will we continue to enable its campaign of genocide in Palestine and now Lebanon? Will we follow it into the wider war in West Asia that its current government persists in trying to ignite?
I heard nothing at all about these questions at either of our major parties’ national conventions.
What is to be done? And if we don’t demand that it be done, who will?
[1] The “Balfour Declaration,” 2 November 1917.
[2] White Paper, May 1939, stating British policy in Mandatory Palestine.