The Moral Bankruptcy of Israel’s anti-Zionist Detractors

Long time no fisk. I turn to a new (newly-formulated; the arguments are as old as the Jewish people) article by Kathleen Christison, a “former CIA analyst” (good thing it’s “former”, otherwise the flag of the Caliphate would be flying on the Capitol right now), from September 12, 2006, for CounterPunch, a far-left site that greets you with the cover of a book called, “The Case Against Israel”, by Michael Neumann, the first thing you visit it (a case against a particular state… different formulation from, but same meaning as, the words of Ahmadinejad).

Address of the original article:
www.counterpunch.org/christison09122006.html

Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?

No, it is only the most deluded who can expect a state whose civilians have to endure suicide bombers and rocket fire to just sit there doing nothing (or go to the negotiations table, which, with such enemies as Israel has, amounts to the same thing).

Can it be that the deluded are still deluded?

It seems so. If, five years after 9/11, people still think America is to blame for that event, then some people are indeed beyond hope.

Can it truly still be that Israel’s bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?

Zionism, as a modern (and not necessarily religious) movement, came from the bad experiences of Jews under non-Jewish rule, and the realization that they needed a state of their own to be free of those experiences. Name me a viable state for the Jewish people (and that means, not a frozen hell-hole like Birobidjan) that could be had without displacing an existing people (which, by the way, we took care as much as possible not to do). If you’re still on that high horse, Mrs. Christison, please take the first plane you can off America, because you’re displacing Native Americans.

Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism […]

Actually, it did seem for some years, in the 1990’s, that Zionism was coming to an end. Those were the years when Israelis believed lasting peace was finally forthcoming, and therefore were ready to shed the Jewishness of the state. But the Muslim enemies surrounding Israel did not let that happen. They forced us to come back to accepting the fact that the Jewish people has a special lot in the history of the world. Complaints? To the One in control, please.

[…] and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?

Israel has never been “the exclusivist state of Jews”. Yes, it’s a state for Jews, but non-Jews are equal citizens of Israel, as far as even its parliament. (The only venues where non-Jews are at a disadvantage are where military secrets are concerned. That is a reasonable limitation, except to anti-Semites like those of CounterPunch.) Israel’s very Declaration of Independence states equality for all citizens regardless of religion, sex or race. The only thing that isn’t acceptable is for there to be enacted laws against Jews, because that would be bringing us to the same situation as before Zionism, in the Diaspora.

Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, […]

We Jews, after 2,000 years of the Diaspora, truly believe we’re entitled to a state of our own where we can’t be discriminated against, and where we can defend ourselves (which we couldn’t do in 1933–45). You can call that “racism”, but that says only about you, not about the state of Israel.

Israel’s destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology.

Imagine you lived on the USA–Canada border and one day you got rockets fired at you from the north. Your reaction? If you say, “I’d negotiate”, then you’re not worthy of the free civilization you live in, you craven appeaser; if you say, “I’d react forcefully to make them stop”, you’re a hypocrite.

Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people’s rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior […]

The exclusivity and superiority of one people’s, any people’s, right to live without the threat of suicide bombers and rocket fire is indeed something we plead guilty for. Yes, Mrs. Christison, I can see you’d respect us only if we laid down our necks to the sword like sheep. It’s very clear. Just don’t tell me you’re not anti-Semitic, because you’re not fooling me.

[…] and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.

Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space—not merely of the space within Israel’s 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself.

Aha. And I guess I shouldn’t mention the fact that we accepted a reduced territory, sharing the land with the Arabs, as far back as 1947, and had to go to war only because they wouldn’t accept it. No, I shouldn’t mention that, because it would topple your house of cards.

But let us grant, just for the sake of argument, that we Jews have designs of territorial expansion. It would be truthful to acknowledge that the Muslims have such also. Do you want to see the difference between those designs? Look:

Map showing the borders of the Promised Land. From Wikipedia.

At the very “worst” case, Jewish expansionism still has designs only on a not so large portion of the east coast of the Mediterranean. While the Islamic plan of expansion…

Map of the whole world. From Wikipedia.

…has its sights on the whole world! From the totally pragmatic point of view, choosing the lesser of two evils, I think the choice between the two is a no-brainer, isn’t it? But then again, anti-Semitism is a no-brainer, in that it requires the lack of a brain.

Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, […]

Well, if you think it’s really acceptable for any nation to live under physical and demographic threat, not sovereign, insecure, lacking a military to defend themselves, and so on, then who am I to argue with you? Had it depended on people like you alone, much of the world would now be singing “Deutschland über alles”.

[…] and totally subservient.

That is a total lie. The Jews have never wanted to rule over another people or make them pay tribute—unlike other nations of the age, such as the Romans, or later the Arabs in the 7th century. All we want is security for ourselves.

This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel’s supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery.

No, for the sole reason that Hizbullah was engaging in acts of war, or preparation toward them, against Israel.

Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.

Zionism cannot abide by ideology that wishes to get Jews back to their state of Diaspora defenselessness. Why is that so hard to understand? Or, if understood, why does it seem so unreasonable? We Jews are only the nation in the world asked to turn the other cheek.

In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, […]

No, we attempted by extremely controlled strikes to destroy a terrorist organization raining rockets on our country.

[…] to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, […]

If this isn’t willful ignorance then I don’t know what is. We have absolutely no interest in subjugating Lebanon. We have every interest in stopping it being a haven for terrorist organizations.

Cluster bombs, of which Israel’s U.S. provider is the world’s leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes.

Not what you’d get from the media (Reuters and the rest), but cluster bombs are within the bounds of international law and consideration for civilian lives. Which cannot be said for Hizbullah’s ball-bearings in their rockets, not to mention their use of civilians as human shields.

Poor Mrs. Christison, I’m mercilessly bulldozing her anti-Semitic house of cards. Evil Zionist!

Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing.

So Hizbullah is engaging in ethnic cleansing? Thanks, Kathie!

Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages,

Villages in Hizbullahland, with rocket launchers inside them, targeted. Cry me a river.

This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe […]

Why don’t you just go and say openly you think 9/11 was an inside job by the US government, Mrs. Christison? Oh, maybe you don’t believe that, but saying the last Lebanon War wasn’t against Hizbullah or terrorism, but for “Zionist expansionism”, comes very close to that in conspiracist nuttiness.

[…] (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel).

“Hizbullah having any connection to terrorism?! What, are you crazy?! No, I don’t care what your eyes tell you, that’s not good enough!”

This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood.

For the reasonable certainty that the north of Israel could live in peace, undisturbed by rocket fire. Oh, the impudence!

It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel’s will.

All right, then if Mexico were to harbor Al Quaeda terrorists, then according to Mrs. Christison the USA shouldn’t do a thing about it.

Did I already say I was glad she’s a former CIA analyst?

The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state.

The Arabs of 1948 were told to flee by their leaders. There were many who chose to stay instead, and some of those are members of the Israeli parliament.

You can’t have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish.

Ignoring, for the moment, the author’s intention to portray Israel as a racist state, that statement is, strictly speaking, true; but not just for the Jews, but for any state which has to maintain a culture-dependent system. It is equally true as Christison’s statement to say, “You can’t have a democratic state if most of your people are anti-democracy”. Which is indeed the reality that European states are facing, and they will not be secure until they engage in the very “racist” policy of ensuring that all immigrants either leave their anti-democratic ideology or be deported. But for the Leftists, dhimmitude is preferable to being a “racist”.

Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, […]

As in 1947, so in 1993, we were willing to give up all that land for the sake of peace. But then, as in 1947, so in 2000, the enemy violently turned it down. The inconvenient fact is that it’s the “Palestinians” (the Muslims, to be more accurate) who want all the land, including Tel-Aviv and Haifa.

In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island,

Everybody is crammed in this tiny plot of land. The question is what you do with your small resources: we Zionists built a land and brought the desert to bloom, while our enemies use their lands as bases for rocket launchers and suicide terrorist training camps, bringing desolation upon everything given to them.

Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.

I think we should talk about the value of the Palestinian’s lives in their own scheme of things first. That their mothers raise their children to be suicide bombers does not speak well of it. You know what Golda Meir said: there will be peace when they love their children more than they hate the Jews.

Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006).

Make that “Israeli quisling Ilan Pappe”, who urged British academics to boycott his own university. That he was not executed for treason afterward, but only shunned by his colleagues, speaks volumes against CounterPunch’s lies about Zionism being a fascistic ideology.

Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, […]

A few inconvenient facts: 1.1 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank in 1967, 3.5 million Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank in 2002 (source). Yes, ethnic cleansing of the most thoroughgoing kind…

[…] Pappe says “the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts.”

It is indeed a tragedy that foiled attempts of suicide bombing are so common that they have to be displayed in microscopic fonts.

And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity?

The only horror I see is you CounterPunchies, along with Walt and Mearsheimer, and most of the Left, readying the world for an acceptance of a second holocaust (G-d forbid) as just reparations for past misdeeds.

Since Israel’s crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness.

Rather it was the moral nudity of the mainstream media of the West, especially Reuters, that was exposed for all to see. The truth according to Photoshop and Green Helmet choreography.

Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006) condemned Israel’s “long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism” and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies “in violation of all purported enlightenment values.”

Mercy to the cruel (which always leads to cruelty to the merciful) is not an Enlightenment value. Mercy to those who raise their children upon the aggressive, world-dominating precepts of the Koran is not a Western value. You have indeed learned nothing five years after 9/11.

Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. […]

The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon.

Yes, and I guess it’s racist to say anything about Islam as well. Being against a religion is “racism”, but being against the existence of the Jewish state, and only the Jewish state, isn’t. Lefty logic.

This has always been Israel’s natural order of things: in Israel’s world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.

Zionism does not involve imposition of Jewish values over the whole world—that’s what Islam is about. But this notion of cultural superiority is valid, or else would Mrs. Christison be ready to live in a culture that would stone her for showing too much ankle? Incidentally, even among those who truly believe this nonsense that all cultures are valid, the one exception is Western culture.

In the wake of Israel’s failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel’s implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited.

Sorry, but they’ve had that sense since even before the state of Israel was founded. The killing of Jews by Arabs in British Palestine in 1929 and 1938 are just a few samples.

[…] the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the “civilized” West and a backward, enraged East […]

Another sign of the Left’s intellectual degeneracy is its still clinging to old historical divisions. “East vs. West”? No. Indians and Thais have long abandoned their old grievances with the colonialists. It’s only the Muslims who still trumpet those, even back to the Crusades. Hindus in Britain are fine citizens of their country; Muslims in Britain are potential terrorists. It’s “Islam vs. non-Islam”. But CounterPunch can’t thrive upon such a thesis.

As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations “that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States.”

Those oppressed populations are now fighting back.

“Oppression” for Muslims doesn’t have the same meaning as it does for the West. For Muslims, it means “the state of parts of the world not being under Islamic law”. Keep that in mind every time you hear Muslims whining about oppression.

Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel’s method of operating, must change.

Translation: “Roll over and die, just like you did 60 years ago”.

More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions.

Yes, everyone predicts… the final say is G-d’s. Let there be no delusions about that.

This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea.

Oh, no? And this you know how, Mrs. Christison?

Israel will not be defeated militarily.

It will be (G-d forbid) if it listens too much to the instructions of the likes of you as to how it must fight its wars.

But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.

Yes, and that’ll bring to the end of the Islamic bomb attacks in Thailand. Not.

Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is “a catastrophe” both for Israel and for the United States […]

Actually, support throughout the Arab (make that, more accurately, Muslim) world for terrorism is nothing new. It’s a wane in that support that would be surprising.

[…] because it means resistance to their imperial designs.

No, because it means boldness on the Muslims’ part in carrying their imperial designs.

Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, […]

And quisling. You forgot that.

[…] sees Hizbullah’s victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are “at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism,” while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon.

Black is white, white is black. Fair is foul, foul is fair. See Isaiah 5:20 for a first opinion. Israel and the US deal destruction and death only when necessary, while Muslims, wherever they settle, deal destruction and death as their very modus operandi, for gaining territorial or political concessions from their non-Muslim neighbors or hosts.

Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, “an historic event” and a “dead entity.”

Such Jews have always been throughout our history. At the best case, they came home in time. At worst, they realized their folly only a moment before their own violent end, at the hands of those they had supported against their brothers.

Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, […]

There has never been any “myth of invincibility”, least of all among us Israelis ourselves. We know full well that we can’t afford to lose even once.

[…] going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism’s inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state.

Uh, Kathie… that already happened, in 1993. The Oslo Accords, remember? And all through the 1990’s. Until, in October 2000, the “Palestinians” decided that the gold (all of the West Bank and Gaza, under Barak’s proposal) wasn’t enough, and went for platinum (Tel-Aviv and Haifa too) instead, having been emboldened by the recent retreat of the IDF from Lebanon. Appeasing an aggressor only makes him hungry for more concessions.

Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian–Israeli conflict, Galloway—along with many others—sees only “war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders’ intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads.”

You’re free to absolutely disregard the decades-long, nay, centuries-long, intransigence of the Muslims. Just don’t tell me you’re reality-based people, because you aren’t fooling me.

This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism’s most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.

That the second possibility looks increasingly more likely is not because Israel and the USA have not pursued the first (they have), but because the Muslims want nothing less than their laws imposed on the whole world. Look at that map above again—that’s what they want, nothing less. Sacrificing Israel, like Czechoslovakia in 1938, won’t keep the Islamic wolf off your door. Sorry, inconvenient truth.

Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon […]

If a terrorist organization is an integral part of Lebanon, then Lebanon deserves to be treated no better than Iran (oh, I forgot, you CounterPunchies are sympathetic to Iran too). The truth is, Hizbullah is not an integral part of Lebanon, it’s an Iranian import, by Khomeini’s decree, and there’s nothing more that most of the Lebanese, especially the Christians there, would like than for Hizbullah to be zapped out of their country forever.

[…] the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights. (Emphasis original —ZY)

Requiring Islam to reform into a decent religion is out of the question, of course. All out of the question for the CounterPunchies except what has already been tried and found to fail. Like Communism, and like negotiations with an aggressor that has designs on the whole world. Doing the same thing and expecting different results: the definition of insanity.

We have reached a moral crossroads.

Indeed we have. Five years after 9/11, all people of the free world are given the choice whether to stand with the free world against shariah or with shariah against the free world. Those are the only options.

In the “new Middle East” defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure.

In the Caliphate for which Muslims worldwide strive, only Muslims may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. That is the truth.

But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.

An oppressive worldwide Islamic theocracy is unacceptable and contrary to all justice. Western civilization must ultimately prevail.

Here ends the fisking of Kathleen Christison’s article. It was long, and I’m not planning on doing such a thing for quite a time, because it’s nearly a total waste of time. Nearly but not totally, because it shows that the Left–Islam alliance is based upon a foundation of utter delusion, and that it’s as easy as pie to refute. But not to change people’s minds to the truth, alas, which is G-d’s domain.