A Palestinian woman confronts Israeli Defence Force personnel (who are permanently in full riot gear and armed) in occupied East Jerusalem, where they have no right to be.

 

The same god, but two  separate homes for obscurantists: the Abrahamic twins, Judaism and Islam, with their complements of bigots ever at each other’s throats.

Abraham, to the extent that he is historical, rather than mythological, was ostensibly a descendant of Adam and Eve. The Israelites, one of many nomadic Bronze Age tribes had not yet come to Israel and so it matters not that Abraham was not born in Israel, but in Ur, in Chaldea, in present-day Iraq.

 Zionists and American Evangelicals (a motley crew of flat-earthers, young-earthers, creationists, anti-abortionists and anti-vaxxers) consider that Palestine  ─ for which they read Israel  ─ was given to the Jews by god and so the Palestinians have no right to live there, unless by the largesse of the Israeli government. These American Evangelicals, WASPs, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, the backbone of Trump’s support, back in the 1920s to 1950s, were viciously racist  and would not countenance Jews or black people entering their exclusive country clubs. After all, it was the Jews who crucified Jesus. Well, no, it was the Romans, but why let facts get in the way of beliefs?

I am concerned not only about dead Jews, victims of countless pogroms and the Holocaust, but also living Jews. The Israeli government is sowing the wind and the people of Israel may inherit the Whirlwind.

In Israel we see the devilish USA stirring the murderous mix with a  long-handled spoon. Washington sends billions of dollars each year to Tel Aviv for the purchase of armaments, to underwrite existing illegal Jewish settlements and expansion into new settlements.  The Jews are led by bigoted power-hungry, rightwing racists.

The Palestinians of the Occupied West Bank are led by Abbas; too old, too inept and too corrupt and the Palestinians of Gaza live under the dictatorship of Hamas, not-too-bright, violent  Islamists.

From birth, Jewish and Palestinian children are raised in an atmosphere of mutual hatred and are drilled in warfare.

The 2021 round of killing ─ in which, as usual, far more Palestinians than Jews were killed and injured ─ was kicked off by fascist-minded Jewish settlers demanding the right to kick out Palestinians from yet another part of Jerusalem.  This drew international criticism, but Israel considers itself to be above all international law and has learned that the UN and foreign governments can be ignored with impunity.

Zionism has always been a bigoted predatory movement seeking eventually to force out all Palestinians from what Zionists consider to be the ancient land of Israel. Given to the Jews by God, it is considered irrelevant that there were non-Jews on the territory of Palestine before the first Jews arrived and of no consequence that people moved into the territory after it had been vacated by the Jews on their expulsion by the Romans 2000 years ago. In this territory, between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan, various tribes of nomads lived for thousands of years.

When Joshua arrived at the promised land of milk and honey, some 1,400 years BC, he had to ‘fit the battle of Jericho’, because he found the way blocked by the walled city. In other words, when the Israelites arrived, there were already occupants of the land. God had thoughtlessly not reserved the promised land as a vacant lot.  Joshua blew his mythological trumpets, but the hard archaeological evidence is that the ancient mud-brick walls were burnt down or undermined by earthquake.

Zionists have never made any secret of their belief that the whole of Palestine has been the consecrated god-given ground of the Jews for thousands of years and that there can be no permanent recognition of the right of other people to live there, sharing the land. The policy has always been to shoulder out the Palestinians, build, build, build and thus establish facts on the ground that cannot be gainsaid by anybody.

By killing people, by demolition of homes, by bulldozing olive groves, by cutting off water supplies, by building a massive wall, by means of apartheid policies, which deny citizenship to Palestinians. the armed settlers and Israeli military  ─ the attack-dogs of the Zionist government  ─ will continue their relentless colonisation of the whole of ancient Palestine.

It would be wrong to claim the mere existence of Israel is a racist endeavour, but the means adopted by successive Israeli governments in pursuing the Zionist aim of enlarging and consolidating Israel are racist.