Straight talking about Israel

Which country is this?

Nuclear-armed and lying about it.

A theocracy.

A state which frequently attacks its own people.

In the Middle East and a threat to the stability of the region.

Am I talking about Iran?

No. I am talking about Israel.

I want to try to unpick some of the baloney talked about Israel’s ancient history because of the way it is used to justify the government’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

That sentence alone would be sufficient in some quarters to earn me the label anti-Semite. The subject of Israel is so potentially toxic that it is safest to leave it alone. Any criticism of the country, explicit or implied, falls foul of the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism and is enough to earn expulsion from Starmer’s Labour Party. But I am prepared to walk on eggshells because I worry so much about the potential for yet another war in the Middle East and about the endless suffering of the Palestinian people. I am concerned that the history of Israel should be based on fact, rather than mythology, based on recorded history and archaeology, rather than the handed-down legends of the Old Testament and the Torah, which provide the philosophical basis of Zionism.

Zionism claims that Palestine has always been the rightful homeland of the Jews, to the exclusion of any other claimants. This falsehood needs to be exposed and demolished.

Let’s begin by talking about the fertile crescent, the area of the middle East forming an arc from the Mediterranean coast of Egypt to the Persian Gulf, embracing northern Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Kuwait and parts of Turkey and Iran.

That area is fortunate in having the rivers Jordan, Tigris, Euphrates and Nile, watering a lot of what would otherwise be entirely arid land. The Nile, in particular, periodically overflows its banks, covering the land with enriched silt and soaking the underlying soil. The fertility of the land explains why this extended crescent, arching over the Arabian Desert, was settled by the earliest agriculturalists in the Neolithic era, from around 10,000 BCE. Over thousands of years the land was cleared of trees and scrub, irrigated and modified for the growing of crops and the rearing of livestock. The selection of the best specimens of wild plant species gave rise to wheat, barley and rye, the seeds of which were ground to flour to make them more edible. The selective breeding of animals within the Crescent and beyond resulted in sheep, goats and cattle. Dogs had already been domesticated from wolves. The higher yields of their domesticated plants and animals made it possible for the hand-to-mouth existence of the hunter-gatherers and nomadic herdsmen to be replaced by the settled life of the farmer. There was now not only a dependable supply, but even a surplus of food, rendering it possible for some members of the family or tribe to take time out from farming and foraging in order to acquire and practice new skills, becoming artisans, manufacturers, rather than growers, a proportion of their wares being bartered or sold.

The Crescent’s position between the civilisations of ancient Egypt to the west and Persia and the Indian sub-continent to the east, made it a cross-roads for trade and the exchange of ideas and technologies, including the processes of smelting and moulding, producing superior metal tools and weapons. The main travellers’ route took them, their pack animals and herds round the arc of the crescent in order to circumvent the waterless trek across the deserts of Syria and Arabia.  Eventually camel caravans established a short-cut, a more direct route, using a chain of desert oases.

The Fertile Crescent’s greater food security and the ferment of new ideas facilitated the birth of civilisation. It was in Mesopotamia, the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates that the need to keep accounts of trade and storage was the driver behind the invention of writing, representation of the spoken word by means of marks on stone, clay or papyrus. Literacy made easier the transmission of information between regions and between generations.

 

The fertility and prosperity of the Crescent attracted people to move there and the resultant population pressure led to conflict between tribes competing for the best ground with a water supply, conflict which continues to this day. The tribes were nomadic or dwellers in small towns, most towns comprising a palace for the king, temples for the gods and dwellings for the herders and artisans. The remains of many such towns in the region have kept delving archaeologists busy for centuries.

It is against this historical background that I view Israel’s claims for special treatment. The principal claim is that Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and they were given Zion by God himself, as if it were a vacant lot. This was their promised land of milk and honey, including Jerusalem. In propagating this story, Israel is supported by the wealthy and powerful right-wing Evangelicals of the USA, who choose to read the legends in the Bible as being the literal truth handed down by God. One version of the story is that the Old Testament   was written by Moses as dictated to him by God.  Alternatively, there were lots of authors, all of their words inspired by God. Take your pick. Either way, the Old Testament and Torah are collections of myths and handed down questionable history, originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic.

The main religions of the Middle East share their beginnings in Abraham, AKA Ibrahim, who, if he really existed, hailed, according to the Book of Genesis, from the Mesopotamian city of Ur, home of the Chaldean tribe. Abraham was not the only tribal leader to declare his god, Jehovah, AKA Jahveh, to be the sole god, the Creator, and all the idols of rival tribes to be the false gods of heathens.

 

Shared belief in the single Abrahamic God has not been sufficient to settle Jews, Christians and Muslims into peaceful coexistence. Although Jews and Arabs alike claim Abraham/Ibrahim as their common patriarch. This shared descent has obviously not endeared the Jews and Palestinians to one another.

It is eminently believable that the Habiru (Hebrew) tribe was taken into Slavery by Egypt. The desert tribes and the empires of Egypt, Assyria and Persia were continually warring over Crescent territory, slaughtering and taking plunder, tribute and slaves.

It may well have been Moses who later led the Hebrews out of Egypt, but it is doubtful that they were wandering in the desert for as long as forty years. A roundabout route from central Egypt to Canaan in southern Palestine is 8,400 kilometres. If they really did spend 40 years on this trek, they must have been walking only half a metre per day. On their exodus from Egypt there was no need to cross the Red Sea, no need for the miraculous parting of the waves. They could simply have walked on land from the Nile delta, making a diversion to the Sinai Peninsula, so that Moses could keep his appointment with God. And if they were insistent on crossing the Red Sea, why not cross it where it is narrowest, the Gulf of Suez. According to the Old Testament book, Exodus, there were 600,000 making this journey. One would expect that such a large number, with their goods and chattels, flocks and herds, would have left archaeological evidence behind in the aridity of the desert, in the form of temporary settlements, but there is nothing.

We then have Moses receiving the Ten Commandments from God, over a period of 40 days, at the top of Mount Sinai, God managing to carve them on stone tablets, using his finger. Moses was reputed to be over 80 years old when he climbed the Mount, which is twice the height of Snowdon.

He was not the only ancient to receive the word of God at a great height, presumably in order to be closer to Heaven. The Mesopotamians received their version of the commandments at the top of a man-made mound, a slave-built ziggurat.

The Torah has Moses living to the ripe old age of 120 years.  That’s nothing compared to Noah, who lived 600 years according to Genesis. Make what you can of that.

When the Hebrews first emerged from the desert and looked upon the promised land, they were not the first to inhabit it. According to the history that can be pieced together from inscriptions on Egyptian and Assyrian stele, the territory that became known as Palestine had been populated for centuries by the Amorites, an alliance of tribes from the Arabian desert. They were overrun, about 1800 BCE, by the Hyksos from further north. In turn they were displaced by an Egyptian invasion and, shortly before the time of Christ, the Romans expanded into Palestine.

Confronted by the walls of Jericho, shouting and blowing shofars would not have been enough for the stones to come atumberlin’ down (in the words of the well-known spiritual). The archaeological evidence is that fuel was stacked against the walls and the intense heat of a fire weakened the mortar sufficiently for the stones to be pulled down. Or there may have been a fortuitous earthquake. Once entered, in true biblical style, the city was sacked, its entire population slaughtered.

These Israelites, or Hebrews, like the other tribes of the desert, were blood-thirsty and brutal. They were all looked upon as barbarians by the contemporary civilised ancient Greeks and Romans.

Human sacrifice was not alien to the Jews, even after receiving the revelations of God as handed down to them by Moses. Chapter 22 of Genesis details the story of Abraham being required by his god to prove his loyalty by sacrificing his only begotten son, Isaac.  Only after the boy was bound and laid on top of wood intended for the funeral pyre and with the knife raised for the kill, did God relent and tell Abraham to let his son live.

This jealous, murderous god contrasts sharply with the beneficent god reflected in the New Testament’s Sermon on the Mount.

The Old Testament books repeatedly recount God’s gory battle plans as handed to his “Chosen people”. Neither women nor children were to be spared. The Philistines, in particular, were often warring with the Jews and when defeated, their menfolk might be mutilated. By the thousand their uncircumcised penises were cut off and piled up, on the order of their God.

Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, and the euphemistically named Israeli Defence Force (IDF)continue the ancient tradition of never turning the other cheek. It is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. A single killed Jew warrants killing ten or more Palestinians in retaliation.

On 9^th April 1948, 110 Palestinians were killed in the village of Deir Yassan, near Jerusalem. The killers were Zionist paramilitaries and this was an early move in the campaign, which continues to this day, to clear territory of Palestinians so that Jewish settlers can move in. The Deir Yassan massacre was a relatively minor feature of the Nakba, the name for the genocide against the Palestinian inhabitants of territory now claimed by Israel. In the two years following the foundation of the Israeli state in 1947, 250,000 to 300,000 Palestinians were either killed or fled threats and persecution to neighbouring countries and they remain refugees to this day. In earlier blogs and in letters to the Labour Party I have likened this land-grabbing to the Nazis’ creation of Lebensraum for ethnic Germans by the Wehrmacht’s policy of killing or deporting the native populations of occupied eastern European countries during WW2. That comparison spelled doom for my membership of the Labour Party, because it constitutes anti-Semitism as defined by Kier Starmer’s witch-hunting disciplinary machine.

In 1967 there was a brief war between Israel and its neighbouring Arab states. Aided by billions of dollars of United States’ weaponry, Israel’s victory was decisive, taking territory from Egypt, Jordan and Syria.

The effect was that Israel absorbed a further million Palestinians, 100,000 of whom soon fled abroad, worsening the refugee crisis. The acquisition of Sinai eventually proved to be a troublesome embarrassment for Israel and it was returned to Egypt. The Gaza Strip was given over to its Palestinian population in 2005, but Israel maintains an iron grip on Gaza’s borders and it is little more than a cramped ghetto or concentration camp for its population of 2 million.

In 1982 the Israelis invaded southern Lebanon and killed some 20,000 people, most of them displaced Palestinians. Noam Chomsky, the Jewish American philosopher, described this as unprovoked barbarism, a stern criticism of Israeli government policy which would today be enough to bring a Labour Party member to the attention of the ever- watchful witch-hunters of Head Office.

In 1996 the IDF attacked a United Nations (UN) compound at Qana in southern Lebanon, where many Palestinian refugees were known to be sheltering. 102 refugees were killed, including women and children. Israel claimed to have been aiming their shells at a nearby Hizbollah base, a claim immediately discredited by observers at the UN base.
apartheid, an institutionalised system of strict racial segregation, existed in South Africa for over 40 years. The world now has another apartheid state, Israel.

Passed by the Knesset in 2010, the “Basic Law of the state of Israel” defines Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people, the historical homeland of the Jewish people in which it realises its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination exclusive to the Jewish people”.

This racist “Basic Law” ignores several facts. Over 80 per cent of the population within the internationally recognised borders of Israel are Sunni Muslims. There is a small community of Shia Muslims. The population includes Arab and Armenian Christians and Druze.

The “historical homeland of the Jewish people happens also to be the historical homeland of the Bedouin Arabs, who have lived in the Negev Desert of southern Israel, according to the historical and archaeological records, for around 8,000 years.

This vicious bunkum of the Basic Law echoes the racist claim of the Nazis that the Third Reich (Germany and all the territories won by war) was the historical homeland of the Aryan race and exclusive to the Aryan race. That, too, was sheer baloney, but it led to the persecution, deportation and slaughter of millions of Jews and Slavs and other ethnic groups.

Why do I keep referencing the Nazis? Some will consider it egregiously distasteful. I do so because, particularly in light of the Holocaust, the parallels between the policies of the Nazis and the Israeli government are bitterly ironic, stark and shocking.

The Basic Law can only be described as racist. Successive Israeli governments have made no secret of their wish to wipe out or drive out all non-Jews from the territories they claim. At best this policy can be described as colonialism.  At worst it is genocidal.

 

Itamar Ben-Gvir is a minister in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government. During June 2023 he gave a speech to settlers in one of the many illegal outposts in occupied territory. He called on the IDF to kill thousands of Palestinian “terrorists” in order to “fulfil our great mission” of colonising the entire territory of Israel/ Palestine.

In previous speeches, Ben-Gvir has spoken of “crushing the Palestinians one by one.”

The pedlars of the Jewish nation-state farrago are surely aware that the Jews were not the first and only inhabitants of Palestine/Israel, but the ancient texts of Judaism, their dubiety notwithstanding, provide them with their cover-story. The Palestinians are no better served by their adherence to Islam. Neither side is led by honest and democratic politicians.

So, what of the future?

Persecution leads to revenge attacks followed by retaliation. The idea of two sovereign states within one country is dead. Such a partition was proposed in 1993 by the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but Israel has since grabbed and occupied most of the territory that might have provided a Palestinian state with a country.

 

When Israel was recognised as an independent state by the UN in 1947, Jews comprised one-third of the population and occupied 5 per cent of the land, but were allocated 42 per cent of the land by the UN. Of the Arab population of one million in 1947 80 per cent fled or were expelled by 1948. 156,000 remained.

As I write this blog, The IDF has taken soldiers, aircraft, drones and armoured bulldozers into Jenin, a town in the west Bank, which remains occupied over 50 years since the 1967 Yom Kippur war. This heavy-handed operation is to remove the “terrorists” from Jenin’s densely crowded refugee camp.  As usual, the IDF’s precision targeting claims to avoid innocent civilians, but inevitably some get caught in what the IDF terms “the cross-fire”. Donald Rumsfelt, callously commenting on such collateral damage in the Iraq war, said, “stuff happens.”  The tally for Jenin, with hostilities having calmed down, is 12 Palestinians dead and scores injured, while Israel’s body-count is one dead soldier. The Jenin refugees have been subjected to Israel’s expertise in collective punishment, another Nazi practice. The British-made armoured JCB bulldozer is specially adapted by the IDF to maximise the damage it can cause.  Driven down a narrow Jenin Street it demolishes house-fronts as it goes along. It Scrapes up the road surface, destroying water and sewage pipes. It knocks down the poles carrying power lines. It crushes any parked vehicles. It may then turn on the family home of an alleged “terrorist”, flattening it completely.

Ideally, as far as the IDF is concerned, an area will be rendered uninhabitable for long enough to allow another settler enclave to be established where Palestinians recently lived.

 

Especially since the 2001 twin towers attack, it is sufficient to label the IDF’s targets as terrorists to gain absolution from any blame for attacking Palestinians, their houses, olive groves, schools and infrastructure.

Gangs of armed Israeli settlers, who behave like the Nazi SA or Brownshirts, attack Palestinians and their property with impunity, the IDF protecting the settlers from counter-attack.  

Successive Israeli governments have continued to sit on the powder keg of festering Palestinian resentment within and the hostility of neighbouring states without. Although condemned by numerous UN resolutions, Israel gets away with its continuing occupation of other states’ territory because it is always protected by the USA, with a supine British government pusillanimously pleading that Israel has the right to defend itself against “terrorists”, persistently dodging the

question whether Israel’s belligerence was proportionate. The Labour Opposition follows the same course.

Can there be an end to this continual cycle of violence? Persecution leads to revenge attacks and that results in retaliation.

The 1993 Oslo accords produced a two-state solution proposed by the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation organisation. Such a partition would now be impossible. Israel has grabbed and occupied most of the land which would have provided a territory for the state of Palestine.

Successive Israeli governments have destroyed the possibility of establishing two states in one country.

Just as the Balkans was a cockpit of potential war in 1914, so is Israel and its neighbours today.

And yet their peaceful common cause should be, in the face of climate change, something as mundane yet life-saving as ensuring a long-term water supply

 

 

Netanyahu does not have everything his own way. His right-wing coalition has been trying to get political control of the judiciary, as reminiscent of many another autocracy, past and present. But tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrate each week in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv against his plan, in which he has a close personal interest, wanting to get himself off the hook on a corruption charge.