The [Zionist] Jewish State
The Children of Amalek, Ch. 5
Knowledge of the history of modern Israel is understandably not something that is very common, in the U.S. particularly. Americans aren’t given much information about Israel in school. I know I don’t remember reading about anything related to Israel in grade school. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned independently. Furthermore, America has been under the influence of increasingly powerful propaganda on behalf of Israel since the beginning of the 20th century. Having an attitude toward Israel that much of the country has toward China and Russia, for example, would be demonized as anti-Semitic by much of the corporate media and the Establishment wings of both political parties. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most powerful lobbies in the U.S., and certainly the most powerful lobby connected to a foreign government—and it is a foreign lobby that doesn’t register as a foreign agent. Recently the U.S. house voted on a motion that declared “anti-Zionism” is “anti-Semitism.” It passed in the house 311-14. That kind of ideological consensus between the two parties is rare, and it is largely due to the effectiveness of the Israel lobby, which includes AIPAC.
Before AIPAC was AIPAC, it was the “American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs.” The keyword being “Zionist.” AIPAC has a very rich history of trying to influence American politics on behalf of Zionist Israel. For example, in 2010 in a legal brief by the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy, a case was submitted for AIPAC’s registration as a foreign agent:
AIPAC is a spinoff of an organization already ordered by the DOJ to register as an Israeli foreign agent. In November of 1962 the American Zionist Council was ordered by the Attorney General to begin filing disclosures as an Israeli foreign agent under the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act. http://www.IRmep.org/1962Order.pdf Six weeks later, former AZC employees incorporated the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, DC, taking over the AZC's lobbying activities. http://www.IRmep.org/AIPAC.pdf AIPAC did not register as a foreign agent.
AIPAC's founder Isaiah L. Kenen was the chief information officer for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York and for a time duly registered in that role. http://www.IRmep.org/Kenen.pdf The Justice Department ordered Kenen to personally re-register after he formally left the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to head up private lobbying and publicity for the Israeli government at the nonprofit American Zionist Council. Kenen never complied with the order. http://www.IRmep.org/order.pdf
Espionage related FBI investigations in 1984 and 2005 reveal AIPAC's ongoing stealth foreign agency activities. Declassified FBI files released on the Internet last week reveal that in 1984 AIPAC and the Israeli Ministry of Economics were investigated for jointly obtaining and circulating classified US economic data to obtain favorable trade benefits for Israel. http://www.irmep.org/ila/economy In 2005 Pentagon Colonel Lawrence Franklin pled guilty and two AIPAC employees were indicted for obtaining and circulating classified US national defense information to Israeli government officials allegedly in the interest of fomenting US action against Iran.
AIPAC's executive committee consists of the original member organizations of the AZC in addition to newer members. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group of AIPAC's executive committee, is housed in the same New York office as the World Zionist Organization – American Section, a registered foreign agent that is heavily involved in illegal settlement expansion according to Israeli prosecutor Thalia Sasson.
AIPAC has been trying to get U.S. politicians to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism for a while now. Understandably — it is a Zionist organization and associating an ideological opposition to Zionism with something widely socially taboo like racism, let alone a form of racism that is associated with Nazism, is politically potent. Five years before this bipartisan bill was passed secretary of state Mike Pompeo, under the Trump administration, spoke at an AIPAC conference where he pledged to DNC and RNC Zionist donors that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”
The stupidity of that though was pointed out even by Representative Jerry Nadler, whose constituency happens to include many Orthodox Jews belonging to Jewish communities that are essentially anti-Zionist. Political slander though is not supposed to be rational; when wielded by powerful actors it is a weapon used to try to harm a person’s reputation and act as a deterrent to others. Calling people racist for disparaging the ideology of Zionism or the state of Israel is simply slander. The definition of anti-Semitism now promoted by many of the most powerful Zionist organizations is slanderous. While people can disparage Zionism or the state of Israel in a racist manner, their racism stems not from their disparagement of Zionism or the state of Israel, but any bigotry they hold toward people because of their conceived race.
These days, much of the antagonism towards Zionism and Israel has nothing to do with racial bigotry. And that antagonism is often reasonable given that Zionism—as characterized by the history of the the creation of the ideology and the most powerful people and groups that call themselves Zionist — promotes the idea that:
Palestine should be governed by a Jewish nationalist state, Israel, that gives special rights to Jews
It was justified for Zionists to bar Palestinians from returning to their homes after fleeing violence or that Palestinians have no right to return to their homes or that Palestinians have no right to any form of reparations for that injustice
Israel is justified, while it invades Gaza, to restrict food and medical supplies from reaching the immediate descendants of that population to maintain its conceived security
Israel currently gives special rights to Jewish citizens. It is explicitly written in its Nation State Laws:
1 — Basic principles
A. The land of Israel is the historical homeland of the Jewish people, in which the State of Israel was established.
B. The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.
C. The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.
Likewise it gives other privileges to Jews, particularly privileges related to property; from a report by Human Rights Watch:
The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”
It also gives the right to Jews, globally, to immigrate to Israel — the “law of return”, which it does not give to, for example, the survivors among hundreds of thousands of people who were violently terrorized out of their homes in 1948 during what is called the Nakba (the population cleansing visually represented in the population bar chart in the previous chapter) and millions of their immediate descendants. From the “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe:
ON A COLD WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish officers, put the final touches on a plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of Palestinians from vast areas of the country. The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centers; setting fire to homes, properties, and goods; expelling residents; demolishing homes; and, finally, planting mines in the rubble to prevent the expelled inhabitants from returning. Each unit was issued its own list of villages and neighborhoods to target in keeping with the master plan. Code-named Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), this was the fourth and final version of vaguer plans outlining the fate that was in store for the native population of Palestine. The previous three plans had articulated only obscurely how the Zionist leadership intended to deal with the presence of so many Palestinians on the land the Jewish national movement wanted for itself. This fourth and last blueprint spelled it out clearly and unambiguously: the Palestinians had to go.
The plan, which covered both the rural and urban areas of Palestine, was the inevitable result both of Zionism’s ideological drive for an exclusively Jewish presence in Palestine and a response to developments on the ground following the British decision in February 1947 to end its Mandate over the country and turn the problem over to the United Nations. Clashes with local Palestinian militias, especially after the UN partition resolution of November 1947, provided the perfect context and pretext for implementing the ideological vision of an ethnically cleansed Palestine.
Once the plan was finalized, it took six months to complete the mission. When it was over, more than half of Palestine’s native population, over 750,000 people, had been uprooted, 531 villages had been destroyed, and 11 urban neighborhoods had been emptied of their inhabitants. The plan decided upon on 10 March 1948, and above all its systematic implementation in the following months, was a clear case of what is now known as an ethnic cleansing operation.
The law of return for Jews includes both converts to Judaism and children / grandchildren of parents / grandparents who are / were Jews. Which means that a “Jew” who doesn’t have any significant pious appreciation of the Tanakh, for example, has a right to “return” to Israel while the people who were forced from their homes by militant Zionists 75 years ago or their children or grandchildren do not. According to Israeli law, American Jews born in Brooklyn like billionaire Jerry Seinfeld have a greater right to live in Israel than the refugees in the West Bank who were violently forced from their homes.
Modern Judaism, unlike any other major religion, has a relatively popular pseudo-racialist ideology that establishes membership not only by fealty to an ideology or tribe, but also by a mythological genealogy (which is itself further ideology). There are some Jews who are obsessed with trying to demonstrate a racial unity among Jews, even when anyone can convert, regardless of their biological ancestry. Because anyone can convert, and people did and do continue to convert, there can logically be no racial unity to Judaism. Jews are therefore not a race. We cannot convert to a race. It’s quite simple. I cannot become Ashkenazi or Han by choice or ritual; I can become Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist. Biological ancestry is a fixed state for any individual, but religious identity is not.
The idea of Jews as a race and not a religious tribe became very prominent around the time of modern Zionism in the late 19th century. During that time, racial tribalist ideologies in general were booming; and some Jews, especially impious Jews who no longer believed the supernaturalist myths of their religious forebears, embraced a naturalist myth of a Jewish race. And given the racialist mythology that exists in the foundational stories of the Tanakh, like Abraham and his “seed”, it should not be a surprise. Racialist mythology is a foundational element of the religion of Judaism, even though Jews are not a race. Other than my earlier references to the inheritance of Israel that was racial in character, the Tanakh contains passages that explicitly rebuke members of the tribe for having wives and children outside the mythical race:
After these things had been done, the officials approached me and said, “The people of Israel and the priests and the Levites have not separated themselves from the peoples of the lands with their abominations, from the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Per′izzites, the Jeb′usites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Egyptians, and the Amorites. For they have taken some of their daughters to be wives for themselves and for their sons; so that the holy race has mixed itself with the peoples of the lands. And in this faithlessness the hand of the officials and chief men has been foremost.” Ezra 9:1-2
And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken thy commandments, which thou didst command by thy servants the prophets, saying, “The land which you are entering, to take possession of it, is a land unclean with the pollutions of the peoples of the lands, with their abominations which have filled it from end to end with their uncleanness. Therefore give not your daughters to their sons, neither take their daughters for your sons, and never seek their peace or prosperity, that you may be strong, and eat the good of the land, and leave it for an inheritance to your children for ever.” Ezra 9:10-13
Zionism, and by Zionism I only mean modern Zionism, and the state of Israel were established substantially by impious Jewish mytho-racial tribalists who wanted dominion over territory—what they called the “Jewish State”. Theoretically “Zionism” can be traced back before the self-identified “Zionists” of the late 19th century popularized the term all the way back to the mythologies of the Tanakh where Yahweh promises Abraham the land of Canaan (Palestine). “Zion” is another term for Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is in the land of Canaan. Furthermore, the Jewish longing to “return to Zion” can also be found in the Tanakh.
By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors
required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy! -Psalm 137
Indeed, even the modern impious Zionists themselves referred to the Tanakh, recognizing the poetic appeal to a state in Palestine. The founding modern Zionists generally didn’t believe Yahweh existed, but they wanted the land Jews were commanded to conquer by him in the mythological pseudo-history of the Torah (the first five books of the Tanakh). Theodore Herzl stated:
Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvellous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them an extra-territorial status such as is well-known to the law of nations. We should form a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfilment of this duty with our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the solution of the Jewish Question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.
The “Jewish Question” could be solved, in Herzl’s mind, if Jews were given Palestine to colonize to create a bulwark against the “barbarians” of Asia. The people already living there, the vast majority not Jews, were insufficiently civilized according to Herzl. And while past Jewish suffering was at the forefront of Herzl’s mind, he wasn’t particularly concerned about the future suffering that a Jewish colonizing enterprise could (and did) bring to non-Jewish Palestinians. But the Jewish state that Herzl longed for was not a theocratic state, it was an imaginary ethno-state, one ruled by magnanimous Cosmopolitan European Jews who worked on the sabbath, ate lobster, and had little in common with their pious brethren other than a mythological common descent — the “Faith of our Fathers.”
But not his own faith. At least, other than his faith in that mythological common descent. In a letter, Herzl wrote:
I am in favor of absolute freedom of conscience. Everyone should believe in, or not believe in, whatever he wants.
I know very well what gratitude Judaism owes to orthodoxy, because the latter, with its steadfastness, has contributed much to the preservation of Judaism. But allow me to hope that in our State, when we achieve it, there will not be any falling out on matters of faith among us Jews. Everyone should serve God in his own way. Within himself, he should be as free as he wishes and as he is able to be.
Sounds like what we might read from someone who has been imbibing the writings of Voltaire and Montesquieu, not the Tanakh. It was only due to relatively recent political changes external to Jewish communities that Jews were emancipated from Rabbinical authority to the point where people who espoused heretical ideas like that were not ostracized or punished by other Jews. For example, the excommunication of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in 1656 by the Jewish community in Amsterdam isn’t strange, given that his pantheistic conception of “God” was so radically incompatible and conceptually hostile to Yahweh and the Tanakh:
The Senhores of the ma’amad [the congregation’s lay governing board] having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, have endeavored by various means and promises to turn him from his evil ways. However, having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practiced and taught and about his monstrous deeds, and having for this numerous trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness to this effect in the presence of the said Espinoza, they became convinced of the truth of this matter. After all of this has been investigated in the presence of the honorable hakhamim [“wise men,” or rabbis], they have decided, with the [rabbis’] consent, that the said Espinoza should be excommunicated and expelled from the people of Israel. By decree of the angels and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of the entire holy congregation, and in front of these holy scrolls with the 613 precepts which are written therein; cursing him with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho and with the curse which Elisha cursed the boys and with all the castigations which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but the anger of the Lord and his jealousy shall smoke against that man, and all the curses that are written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name from under heaven. And the Lord shall separate him unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel, according to all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law. But you that cleave unto the Lord your God are alive every one of you this day.
It's also not strange that Herzl, who had tasted a freedom to “believe whatever he wants”, didn’t want a theocracy for the state he dreamt. He didn’t want the kind of people running the government who “cursed” Spinoza for teaching that “God” isn’t Yahweh. In his Jewish state, Herzl explicitly writes that he wanted the theocrats out of government:
We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.
Decades later, by the time the state of Israel had been formed and Herzl was no longer alive, such a scenario didn’t play out exactly as he had hoped. The “priests” acquired significant political influence in the state, along with Jews who simply embraced the Torah. Furthermore, the majority of the adult civilian population would be soldiers. Creating a “Jewish State” without most of Judaism proved to be more complicated in reality.
From the foundation of modern Israel, the mythology of the Tanakh, especially the mythology of books like Joshua, inspired the leaders and followers of Zionism. Ben Gurion, a Zionist military strategist who lead the planning of the racial cleansing of Palestine and who was the first prime minister of Israel, regularly held a Tanakh study group. The book of Joshua was one of his favorite books, and saw the genocide of Canaan (Palestine) depicted in it as a model for what Zionists were to do in 1948. The Nakba was a modern reenactment of Jewish mythology. From a speech by Ben Gurion to the Bulletin of the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society shortly after the Nakba:
None of the commentators of the Bible—Jewish or non-Jewish—in the Middle Ages or today—could have been able to interpret the chapters of Joshua as the IDF did last year.