“I do not support the existence of the apartheid state of Israel. I fundamentally oppose the racist concept of Zionism. I support a single, unitary, secular, and democratic state in all of Palestine, including all of the land of the current apartheid state and all its inhabitants.” – Craig Murray – historian, author, former British diplomat – quote from X (Twitter), 2023/12/24

Like millions of other people waking up around the world, I agree with Craig Murray. I’ve agreed with this policy for a long time. The reasons are many, but here I want to stress that the international community is obligated to stop the atrocities in Palestine by any means necessary, but governments around the world have failed to live up to their obligations, and many are indeed complicit in the crimes.

There was a general international consensus in the 20th century, evident in the United Nations Charter and its subsequent resolutions, that many institutions and legalized traditions of the past should now be regarded as crimes against humanity. New international norms had been established and states had to live up to the new moral and legal standards. It would no longer be possible for states (such as Germany in the 1930s) to carry out atrocities just because they had been made legal by domestic legislation.

Slavery had been abolished by the end of the 19th century. After WWII, internment camps and forced labor had also been recognized as barbaric crimes against humanity. By the latter half of the century, it was well understood that the bombing of cities during WWII had been a horrific crime, even though the perpetrators were loath to say so out loud. Nonetheless, it became sort of taboo for a few decades. US military planners conceived of conducting a massive nuclear attack on Soviet cities, thinking they could win a nuclear war, but the taboo stuck at the executive level. No head of state dared to commit such a crime against humanity. Yet even though large cities were taboo targets, Korean, Vietnamese, and Cambodian villages were considered justifiable targets between 1950 and 1972. In the 1990s, the US and NATO justified the bombing of cities (Belgrade in 1999, Baghdad in 1991 and 2003) because they were able to bomb with more precision and avoid the widespread damage that occurred in Tokyo and Dresden during WWII.

Settler colonialism was on the way out after WWI. The colonized people of Asia and Africa had been drafted into Europe’s war, and after that, their demand for freedom grew too strong to ignore.

Also passé by the early 20th century was the removal and killing of indigenous people to open up living space for foreign invaders. Destruction of language, culture and historical consciousness was also recognized as cultural genocide. Now that the game of colonialism had been played out and the victors were established on conquered lands, it was safe to declare that colonialism was a dreadful chapter of the past.

Because of this progress, when the Nazis adopted slave labor, internment camps, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism, they shocked the conscience of the world. The Nazis cried hypocrisy and claimed they were doing only what other colonizers and conquerors had done before, which was true. Imperial Japan made the same excuse. However, the point was that they were attempting to do something that the rest of humanity no longer found acceptable. Another factor was simply that it shocked the Western conscience because it was happening to “people who look like us” rather than to Africans, Asians, and other indigenous people in the colonies. But humanity had matured just a little. Nazi crimes were so appalling because they were so retrograde. As many historians have noted, Germany and Japan got into the empire game too late.

There was always an awareness that the progress wasn’t real, that it was fragile and really hadn’t taken hold. Humanity could easily fail to fulfill promises or revert to its primitive stage. Dominic Losurdo wrote about how the failure of progress was seen in the late 19th century by a German writer who influenced Nazism:

Visiting the United States in the late 19th century, when the racial state was more robust than ever and the regime of white supremacy rampant in the South, Friedrich Ratzel, the first theoretician of the Lebensraum cherished by Nazism, drew attention to the complete failure of the project of constructing a society based on the principle of racial equality. Where was the emancipation of the blacks? Subject to lynching and interminable torture staged as a mass spectacle for applauding crowds, the fate of ex-slaves was perhaps even worse than in the past. On closer inspection, the situation created in the North American republic “avoids the form of slavery, but retains the essence of subordination, of social hierarchy on a racial basis”; it continued to recognize the principle of “racial aristocracy”. The conclusion [to Ratzel] was obvious: “experience teaches us to recognize racial differences”; they had proved much more enduring than the “abolition of slavery, which will one day seem a mere episode and abortive endeavor”. A “reversal” had occurred vis-à-vis the fond illusions of abolitionists and fanatics for the idea of equality. The impact of all this would be felt far beyond the United States: “We are only just beginning to see the results this reversal will produce in Europe even more than in Asia.” This was a prediction (and wish) of deadly lucidity. The racial state became a trend with the Third Reich (but also, to different degrees and in different ways, with the Empire of the Rising Sun and Mussolini’s empire). – Dominic Losurdo, War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century, Chapter Six (Verso Books, 2015), citing Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika unter besonderer Berücksichtung der natürlichen Bedingungen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse (Munich: Oldenburg, 1893), 179-182, 283.

This is why the creation of Israel right after WWII is such a curious anomaly, and should have been seen as an indication of European civilization backsliding to its former ways. Zionism was a colonial project of some European Jews and European Christians, led by the United Kingdom’s need to close down its colony in Palestine. Zionists were the perfect group with which to set up a new colonial project that didn’t look like a colonial project. Jews were an oppressed indigenous population in Europe, recent victims of the Holocaust, but they were also white Europeans who had the cultural capital to know how to set up and manage a liberal democracy in a former British colony outside of Europe. This ambiguity allowed the project to be perceived as just compensation for the crimes of European anti-Semitism.

However, the hypocrisy and contradictions were evident at the time. In the 1940s, the Zionist idea was recognized by many Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals as a horrendous mistake in the making—the type of settler colonial project that the conscience of humanity should no longer allow. Using the Holocaust as an excuse for it made no sense. If the argument was that Jews needed their own state, why not forget the superstition about God having ordained the land for Jews and make Germany (and perhaps other collaborating nations) hand over some of their territory as reparations? Nonetheless, against all logic, the Zionist project happened, and here we are seventy-five years later in a position in which the US and its NATO allies must support Israel no matter how egregious its crimes against humanity become—all because it has become too important as the unsinkable battleship in the Middle East, the essential projection of power there. The US doesn’t really care about the ordinary aspirations and concerns of Israeli citizens. It doesn’t really care about Israel’s ultimate fate. It has been sponsoring the most radical warmongers in recent decades, and it is Israelis who will ultimately suffer for it and lose their country. Shahid Bolsen, a public relations strategist and legal consultant for NGOs, human rights groups, and politicians (bio here), described the common misunderstanding about the United States being Israel’s greatest friend:

In the Muslim and the Arab world, we sort of have been taking it as a truism for years that the United States basically serves Israel, that America is controlled by Zionists, and that the US government will do anything, no matter how much it costs, to save and protect Israel. I think there are a lot of Israelis who probably think that way, too, but an objective, rational assessment of the situation would paint a very different picture. I think Israelis need to recognize, if they don’t already, that the United States is not your savior. It’s your worst enemy. The US, whether you know it or not, and whether Muslims understand it or not, is actually treating Israel the same way that they treat everyone else—with complete contempt. They are supporting Benjamin Netanyahu who is the most unpopular, the most despised, the most corrupt, the most incompetent, the most psychopathic, delusional, and despotic ruler that Israel has ever had. He’s responsible for both prolonging and worsening the conflict with the Palestinians. Netanyahu has made a career of diverting attention away from the internal domestic concerns that actually matter the most to Israeli citizens by endlessly talking about security and the supposed threat that Israel faces. Of course, the domestic problems in Israel just get worse, and the conflict and the security situation actually just get worse, and America loves it. They don’t care about Israel’s domestic issues. They don’t care about the socioeconomic concerns that Israelis have—the high cost of living, the disparity between rich and poor. They don’t care about corruption in Israeli society and so on. These are the issues that matter the most to Israeli citizens and voters, but as far as America is concerned, the only thing that matters is continuing the conflict. That’s all they care about. They don’t care about the welfare and the stability of Israel, the safety of Israeli citizens. Israeli citizens want to treat Israel like an actual country, and they expected it to behave like an actual country, and they think that their lives and their concerns should matter like they would in an actual country. But to the United States, Israel is a policy instrument, so the Israeli population doesn’t matter to them, and what matters to the Israeli population doesn’t matter to them. The relationship with the United States has been incredibly detrimental to Israel, despite what everyone thinks. It has prevented Israel from becoming a normal society. Part of that is driven by the by diaspora Jews in the US who, like most diaspora communities, are generally far more radical and ideological than their people back home.

In recent months, we have heard Israeli officials speaking exactly like Nazis of the 1930s. They now say that they will have to adopt for Gaza the tactics that were used in Dresden and Hiroshima. They can justify keeping the people of an occupied territory in an open-air prison, denying them human rights and essential means of survival, assaulting the civilian population militarily with a massive level of disproportion to the attacks suffered by Israel. Israel ignores the obligations of international law to end a state of occupation that would restore political autonomy and end violations of human rights. The Israeli regime has behaved so horrifically that it has de-legitimized its right to exist. If it were not a favored nation of the United States, the United Nations would have ensured the end of the regime long ago.

Terminating the Zionist project and the Israeli regime is not the equivalent of “erasing Israel from the map” or calling for revenge against Jewish citizens of Israel. “From the river to the sea” means one secular nation where all citizens live with equal rights. It means the return of property seized since 1948, the purge of Zionist fascists from government, and a Nuremburg 2 to prosecute the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity that have been taking place both recently and since 1948. It means a truth-and-reconciliation project so that Israelis can begin to do what Germans have been doing since 1945: atoning for the guilt of their failed national project and building something better. The most difficult question is what is to be done with the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file extremists who supported the genocidal project? What force is there in the world that could conduct tribunals and oversee a transitional government and mass re-education project? The UN Security Council could take action, but three of its members would have to be indicted by the tribunal’s prosecutors. They are parties to the crimes.

An essential aspect of the international order that many overlook is the fact that regimes come and go but nations endure. After conflicts, sometimes nations cede territory, or civil wars and independence movements lead to re-drawing the map. Despite what many believe, national boundaries are not sacrosanct. History since 1945 includes a long list of shifting boundaries and redrawn maps. Yet in most cases of social transformation, nations and their boundaries remain intact. Cuba, Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Africa all have the same boundaries they had before revolution, occupation, and the overthrow of the apartheid system. The same will be true of Israel when its apartheid system collapses. Whether it keeps its name does not matter. Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo after the Mobuto regime ended. The nation state could be reconstituted under a new basic law or constitution once the present criminal regime is gone.

And if anyone thinks I am exaggerating, one need only look at the depraved mass psychosis that has taken hold in Israel. Even though the majority of the population may not be afflicted, enough of the population is deranged and influential enough to ring alarm bells in the family of nations that has sworn to prevent genocide and intervene when necessary. As David Sheen stressed in a lecture in May 2022, the “domination” and “elimination” camps that used to be fringe extremists, are now mainstream (read the extract from his lecture in the Appendix).

It is the same psychosis that was seen in Germany in the 1930s, Indonesia in the 1960s, and Rwanda in the 1990s. We hear deranged screams for ethnic cleansing, that Palestinian children are not innocent because “they will grow up to harm us.” We hear calls for the “final solution” of elimination or expulsion. Their existential fears—arising from the adherence to the idea of a Jewish state when they can see that it is doomed—have extinguished some essential flame in their souls. There is something vacant and gone in the eyes of the extremists. These are the warning signs that the international community was supposed to be alert for to stop a genocide in the making. Supposedly. The calls for action on the streets of cities all over the world have been unprecedented, but in contrast, there is the loud, appalling silence of the governments who proclaimed so fiercely in recent years about the sanctity of the “rules-based international order.”

What if I tell you that in 1945, the Nazi government had to deal with a certain level of Jewish resistance coming from a European urban ghetto inhabited by two million Jews whom the Germans had confined there. What if I tell you that the Nazis’ solution was to order Jews in the northern half of the ghetto to go to the southern half within twenty-four hours, or face being killed. One can easily guess what the plan was for the southern half once the northern half had been “pacified.” In fact, everyone knows that the Nazi government carried out history’s worst ethnic cleansing. When you imagine the Nazis doing what is now being done in Gaza, you readily understand the obvious atrocity, and you tell yourself what a good thing it was that the Nazi regime was defeated. So just remember that Germany still exists. It was not erased from the map, but the genocidal regime was terminated, and all sane people think that was a good thing.

See also…

Stephan Moore, “The Spectacular Failure of the Zionist Project,” Consortium News, January 8, 2024.

“A People Without a Land,” Journeyman Pictures, 2015, 58 minutes (on YouTube also).

“Gabor Maté on Palestine, » Russell Brand Podcast, 2021/05/28.

“Dr. Norman Finkelstein on Israel-Hamas War,” Fox 11, Los Angeles, 2023/11/23

Appendix

David Sheen, Kahanistan, Arlington, Virginia, 2022/05/11 (Extracts. The full lecture is 1 hour 6 minutes). Watch the full video to learn what the title means. The transcript has been edited slightly for the sake of clarity.

0:00:15~

The worst mistake we can make is to think that everything in Israel is hunky-dory, but it’s almost equally ridiculous to say there’s a good Israel and there’s a bad Israel. The soul of Israel could survive if Benjamin Netanyahu were pushed out of power. That’s the bad Israel, but Yair Lapid, the gelled-hair carbon copy of him, is the good Israel. If only we could replace Netanyahu with Lapid, then everything would be okay. Both of these are ridiculous concepts.

To begin with, these men served together in the exact same government a decade ago. More to the point, there are dozens of parties running for the Knesset, for the Israeli parliament, and a dozen parties get into the Knesset, so let’s make it a little simpler for folks to get a sense of what’s really going on.

The way that we can understand Jewish political thought is by asking how folks feel about the Torah, the Jewish bible, the Hebrew sacred texts. And the questions we ask are: is the Torah holy? And is the Torah written by Jehovah, by Yahweh, by God, just? Is it legitimate? Is it correct when it says that this god gave the land of Israel (Palestine) to the Jewish people as a piece of property?

What we find is that there are multiple positions. In the last 150 years, we see a whole spectrum of views in the Jewish community. And the first one we’ll start with is the traditional orthodoxy. We call it the supremacist camp, and they would say yes to both of these questions. Yes, the Torah is holy. Yes, it’s written by God, and yes, it is just, it is correct when it says that God gave the chosen people this land. It is for them.

The next camp we can call the reformist camp. They would say yes and no. Yes, the Torah is holy. These texts are holy but no, it is not just when it says that we are chosen amongst others and that this land is only for us. No, we need to amend it, and we need to correct it, and we need to change it, and we need to bring the Torah texts in line with our modern-day values. That’s the reformist camp.

Then there’s the opportunist camp. This is the traditional nationalist or the Zionist camp, what we would call secular Zionism. They would say the opposite. They would say no and yes. No, the Torah is not holy, of course not. It was written by people and edited by other people in different periods of time, and it is literature. The British have Shakespeare, and we’ve got the Torah, but yes, it is just when it says that this land belongs to the Jewish people. So no, there is no God, but yes, God gave us the land. That’s why I call them the opportunist camp.

The next camp I would call the humanist camp or the socialist camp, and they would say no and no to those questions. No, the Torah is not holy. It’s written by people. It doesn’t have any extra added value to it, and no, it is not just. It is not right that the Jewish people are chosen more than any other or that they have more rights to this land than anyone else. So those are the four camps. We can take all the political parties in the Knesset and divide them into these camps. We could analyze the spectrum by looking at how they view the Torah, the holy texts. But we could also use the same spectrum to, in a different manner, ask how they see the indigenous people of Palestine. How do they see the others, the non-Jews that they live amongst?

We would say that there’s the humanist camp, what we call the integration camp. They want a one-state democracy, one state from the river to the sea where everyone has equal rights.

Then there’s the separation camp. They want two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state, for Palestine to be partitioned.

Then there’s the domination camp. They want an apartheid state, one state from the river to the sea with Jews having more rights than non-Jews.

And then there’s the elimination camp, and they want that one state from the river to the sea to be ethnically cleansed of non-Jews.

With another framework besides these we can say there’s also the typical political labels that we are accustomed to here in North America. We could say there is the socialist camp, the liberal camp, the nationalist camp, and the theocratic camp … [In] the Israeli Knesset the national pride project, the nationalist camp, is the biggest camp by far. It’s the largest camp, the largest voting bloc in the Knesset. We can, maybe for argument’s sake, divide it into labor and revisionist, or left and right, but it’s the same nationalist camp that supports one apartheid state, maybe one is prouder of it and the other. One’s a little bit more embarrassed about it and tries to cover it up, but it’s the same nationalist camp.

Now we look at all the elections for the Israeli Knesset in the last two decades, from 2000 to 2020. In those eight elections, if you look at how the parties performed in those elections, you can’t make heads or tails of it. It seems like the fortunes of the parties rise and fall, and you can’t really make out any system or any pattern here.

I would argue that if you take those political parties and then funnel them into the political camps, the four schema that I just described, then all of a sudden, you find that there’s incredible consistency, that there are almost no changes from election to election. The Israeli electorate continues to perform in the same way, or to vote in the same way, consistently. The domination camp, the apartheid camp, is the largest camp by far. We’re talking 60 plus percent of the vote, and the second largest camp is the elimination camp with about 20 percent of the electorate. The domination camp is in the driver’s seat, and the elimination camp is in the sidecar, the shotgun position. You can see this consistently again and again. This is the Israeli political spectrum time and time again for the last 20 years. When we map it onto the parliament, where there are 120 seats, this is what it looks like. From left to right, again and again, vote after vote, year after year, we see the same structure.

Now we bring it up to the present and here we are. This is the current parliament [2022/05]. It’s sitting in Israel right now. Now notice when I go back 20 years, it’s almost identical. It’s literally almost the same. Once you have a Knesset, you have to form a government. You have to have a majority of seats to put a prime minister in power, and what we see is that consistently it’s the domination camp or one of the largest parties in the domination camp that is in the driver’s seat, coupled with some of the elimination camp parties. This is what the governments look like again and again, whether it’s the right domination or the left domination, but consistently it’s the same pattern…

1:01:15~

… I’ll say just one thing to bring you up to date, to help you understand how far gone we really are in this country. It’s not just that you can see a street named after Kahana. It’s not just that you can mail letters with a stamp of Kahana. It’s not only the right. It’s mainstream. It’s the middle. It’s the center. It’s all the Israeli news outlets and media sites that give him a platform, that give the Kahanists open mics. Statistically, maybe the prime minister gets more airtime, but after that it’s the Kahana Ben Gvir who gets the most invitations to come speak on the panels. He’s the one who gets the platform that’s the largest of all the Israeli politicians, if you can imagine that. He’s the most popular. And it’s not only Likud. It’s Labor as well, I’m sad to say.

A decade ago, this is again in the heart of Tel Aviv, at Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, the Kahanas set up a display and they thought they would have a referendum. In this referendum they were asking passersby by to vote: Do you believe that Kahana was right, or do you believe that Rabin was right? Is it right to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, or is it right to make peace with them, with the problematic nature of the Oslo accords? I don’t think the question was settled at Tel Aviv Central Station, but it was later settled by Israel’s president in recent months because, after all, Rabin was the head of the Labor Party, or the left-wing nationalists. You would think that the current Israeli president, Isaac Herzog—who himself was the head of the Labor Party, who was allegedly the head of the opposition to Netanyahu for years—would quite clearly choose Rabin’s path as the one that should be followed. But since Herzog was elected Israeli president in recent months, after a quarter century of the Israeli government holding a memorial service every year on the anniversary of Rabin’s death at the site where he was assassinated in front of Tel Aviv city hall, they stopped this service this year. Instead, Herzog, as opposition leader, backed every move Netanyahu made over the last decade. Now that he’s prime minister, they actually no longer do those memorial services to Rabin in the square named after him. Instead, Herzog goes down to Khalil. He goes down to Hebron, to the site of the massacre, and he lights candles with the Kahanas community there. I’m not saying that in a flippant way. Here is Herzog himself with this man, this rabbi. Who is this rabbi that he’s so proudly aligning himself with? None other than Elias, the very rabbi that initiated the whole process of Rabin’s assassination when he sent a letter to hundreds of Israeli rabbis asking them, “Is Rabin deserving of death? Maybe we need to discuss this. Maybe we need to mete out a death sentence to Rabin. Discuss, debate.” He launched that process. Decades ago, he was considered far right, in the fringe. Today he’s celebrated by Israel’s Labor left-wing president. This is the reality that we’re living in. This is why I say that these are no longer separate entities. Israel has now become Kahanistan.