JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: THE HOLOCAUST WAS A EUROPEAN EVENT YET PEOPLE IN ANOTHER CONTINENT AND HAVING NOTHING TO DO WITH IT HAVE PAID THE GREATEST PRICE FOR GERMANY’S CRIMES – TERROR AND OPPRESSION FOR OVER SEVENTY YEARS – THE WEST HIDES ITS EYES AND IGNORES ALL OF ITS PRINCIPLES ABOUT HUMAN AND DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS – THE SIX DAY WAR AND GENERAL DAYAN’S HELLISH ADVICE – TRYING TO BLOT OUT THE PAST OF A PEOPLE – ALBERT EINSTEIN’S WISE ADVICE TO EUROPEAN JEWS WHO WANTED TO SETTLE IN PALESTINE WAS IGNORED BY THOSE EAGER TO TRY RE-CREATING ANCIENT ISRAEL WITH NEW PEOPLE – AN EFFORT SUPPORTED BY AMERICA BOTH AS PART OF ITS GLOBAL EMPIRE AND AS A WAY TO AVOID HUGE NUMBERS OF JEWISH REFUGEES ITSELF – THE BLOODY NEOCON WARS UNDERTAKEN BY WASHINGTON ON ISRAEL’S BEHALF – THE SURPRISING IDENTITY OF THE PALESTINIANS – GAZA AS ONE OF THE GREATEST SHAMES OF THE ADVANCED WORLD – HAD EINSTEIN’S WORDS BEEN FOLLOWED

John Chuckman


COMMENT – THE ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS – FURTHER WORDS ON THE NATURE AND ORIGIN OF MODERN ISRAEL


People easily forget or ignore the fact that the Holocaust was a European event, essentially a bloody effort by one group of Germans to eliminate another group of Germans, the Ashkenazim, whose religion is Judaism and whose language is Yiddish, a dialect of German.

A truly terrifying event, one I studied at some length in the past and one that vividly demonstrates just how savage human beings can be. Murderous chimpanzees are not our nearest evolutionary relatives, but we mimic some of their behavior closely.

But who is it that ended up paying much of the cost for that massive crime in Europe?

The Palestinians, people who live on a different continent, speak a different language, have different religions – people often are not aware that there are many Christian Palestinians – and had nothing to do with Germany’s crimes.

Their treatment has been a monumental injustice, an injustice ignored by all the powerful states of Europe and North America. Over seventy years of conquest and oppression. Even an attempt to wipe out their identity with the refrain, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian.” Plus a massive set of name changes for ancient villages and towns and changes even to the names of foods, such as “Israeli cous cous.” Palestinian Jaffa oranges became Israeli Jaffa oranges.

It has been slow-motion terror for all that time. Despair and hopelessness deliberately applied to millions of people. How can anyone feel good about that? Israel’s behavior towards them is, and has been, appalling. Just as is the acceptance of it by “the West,” countries who regard themselves as enlightened and ceaselessly talk about human and democratic rights.

After General Dayan’s victory in the Six Day War – a war known by experts to have been deliberately planned to achieve the ideal of Greater Israel, Israel with its American support and weapons knowing full well it could defeat disorganized Arab armies – he said that it would be necessary to make the Palestinians miserable so they would want to pick up and leave. And that hellish advice has pretty much informed Israeli policy for over half a century.

But the Palestinians have not left, despite ceaseless abuse – blockades, check-points, property theft, and shootings. The Palestinians endure. They are the true “facts on the ground,” an expression used from time to time by arrogant Israeli politicians as they illegally seized yet another slice of land in the West Bank.

Albert Einstein advocated that Jews who wanted to leave Europe should migrate to Palestine with all its ancient associations with Judaism, but he said they should live peacefully with the inhabitants, forming no army and no exclusive state. His words were ignored in the mad rush to recreate ancient Israel with a different people, a largely European people.

Such an approach was destined from the beginning to create a great deal of human misery, and that is just what it has done. People who look at and admire Israel’s successes deliberately avoid gazing on its many horrors. Perhaps the most searing example is Gaza, a place that resembles nothing so much as a gigantic prison camp surrounded by fences and automated machine gun towers, and it is even tightly controlled on the sea by Israeli gunboats ready to shoot fishermen straying beyond very restrictive limits.

It is a squalid, unhealthy place because Israel doesn’t even permit the materials necessary to repair the heavy damage of so many Israeli attacks and bombings to be imported. It is home to about a million and a half people. Desperate people who can go nowhere without Israeli permission, permission frequently denied. American and European officials visiting Israel virtually always avoid it. They hide their eyes from the shame. It is perhaps the greatest shame we have in the advanced world. Literally, a perpetual large-scale crime against humanity.

The great irony on top of all the other injustices is that it is most likely that the Palestinians are the actual descendants of the Bible’s Hebrew people. The Romans were well known for not expelling the tax-paying farmers and tradesmen residing in their conquered territories, and there is no record of such an expulsion by those meticulous record-keepers. Two millennia of history in a volatile region have changed the religion and language of the original inhabitants.

Had Einstein’s wise words been followed, we would have no crisis in the Middle East. We would not have had all the many wars, the so-called Neocon Wars really representing Washington’s bloodbath efforts to re-create the Middle East for Israel’s comfort. Just as with all Washington’s many colonial wars since WWII, they have been huge failures, a very costly failure in terms of innocent blood and well-run and advancing societies such as Libya or Syria.

Had Einstein’s wise words been followed, we would have had peace.