Palestine: The Horror of Israel (#1)
As of now, according to official data alone, over 58,000 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip. Unfortunately, among the left, one can still encounter incorrect or overly simplistic opinions regarding the events in Palestine. Sometimes this reaches absolute barbarism—support for the killing of civilians on the grounds that it is religious and therefore harms the working class and the class struggle. This topic is quite extensive and complex, so we have divided the discussion into two parts. In this article, we will analyze the history of Israel's existence and the idea of Zionism from a Marxist perspective.
The migration of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Hundreds of thousands of non-Christian poor traveled through Western European countries to be transported to other continents. Both instances of petty crime and the transformation of city districts into ghettos, as well as media exaggerations, contributed to the rise of antisemitism. Enter Theodor Herzl with his project of relocating Jews to Palestine.
Why "relocation" and not "return"? The atheist Ben-Gurion liked to justify his imperialist actions using the Bible. As Israeli psychologist Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi wrote in 1982 in his article Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel : "Most Israelis today, as a result of the Israeli education system, see the Bible as a source of reliable historical and secular-political information." Yet Ben-Gurion repeatedly used it as a method to justify mass killings during the 1948 war. Ze'ev Herzog, in his work "Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho," writes: "After 70 years of intensive excavations (which began even during the British Mandate of Palestine) in Israel, archaeologists have found that the Israelites were not in Egypt, did not wander in the desert (which, at that time, belonged to Egypt anyway), did not conquer the land of Canaan, and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel." He adds: "The united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described in the Bible as a regional superpower, was at best a small tribal kingdom." Even according to Biblical texts, Israel did not possess Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron, only Samaria and the surrounding regions.
Most immigrants to Israel settled on the Mediterranean coast, a region that was never the historical homeland of the Jews.
Between 135 CE and the 1850s, there were 30 Jewish pilgrimages, compared to 3,500 Christian pilgrimages, which directly contradicts the Declaration of Independence, which claims that Jews never ceased to dream of returning to the land of Israel after their exile by the Roman Empire. Professor of Jewish History Israel Yuval writes that the Romans typically took captives but did not exile anyone from their lands. "According to Josephus, whose figures are likely exaggerated, in 70 CE, 1.1 million people were killed in the lands of Israel and 97,000 were taken captive, many of whom died from hunger, fights with animals... But otherwise, the Jews were left in place. Over the first century of the first millennium, they gradually emigrated from those lands of their own volition."
It is also worth mentioning that Israel collaborated... with the Nazis of the Reich. Surprisingly, antisemitism and Zionism shared similar goals—to remove Jews from Europe. Before the start of mass racial persecutions, the German government helped Jews leave the country and go to Israel. During the beginning of the Holocaust, David Ben-Gurion said that he "would have preferred the death of half the Jewish children in Germany if he knew the other half would emigrate to Palestine."
Since the existence of the Zionist project and the increasing transfer of settlers to the lands of Palestine, Zionists have faced the question: what to do with the Arab population? The Zionist state used various methods of repression against the Arab population. From buying up land to forcibly expelling them from their homes (with subsequent settlement by Jewish colonists), not to mention Israel getting rid of Arabs in the territory through outright murder as the far-right gained more influence. In the present day, Israel also occupies or demolishes sources of fresh water, simply depriving Palestinians of the ability to quench their thirst. In Israeli society, Arabs are at the very bottom, which, however, is quite typical for a colonial state. As long as this Zionist imperialist order exists, repression against the Arab population will continue. It is important to remember that Palestine has always belonged to the Arabs, and they must have the right to return to their homes.
Throughout its entire existence, Israel has been murderous not only for Arabs but also for Jews themselves. For every leftist, it should become obvious that ending any oppression of the Arab population is paramount (which, by the way, was also asserted by the diverse communist party Matzpen, consisting of Arabs and Jews). At the end of this article, I want to quote an extremely accurate phrase from the book "A People's History of Israel," which illustrates the entire foundation of the Israeli state: "It should come as no surprise that Zionism borrowed much from European antisemitism. Both movements arose in the same place, in the same era, and pursued the same goal—to rid civilized Europe of the Jews."
In Solidarity,
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