The war against the Palestinians arises from the merging of the Zionist view of Jewish exceptionalism with the view in the United States of American exceptionalism, which have focused their common root ambitions for domination and possession as a hostility to Islam, and this is the leading crusade in the “clash of civilizations,” proclaimed by just-deceased Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, which is the war against the world’s poor and dark-skinned people, the war of conquest carried out to enforce a rule of worldwide apartheid by a culturally Euro-American, racially white, highly industrialized capitalist elite.
The Zionist view of Jewish exceptionalism is critically examined, and demolished, in the book Overcoming Zionism, by Joel Kovel. This mind-set boils down to ‘any victimization of Jews we Zionists can remember, historically, justifies all our aggression, persecution and even genocide of Palestinians; we are, and will always be, the exceptional victims of world history and so are forever blameless; to disagree is to be one with our historical persecutors.’ The Jewish religion is quite incidental to the actual intent of the exceptionalism; Zionism is a criminal conspiracy drawing participants through a Jewishness filter, in the same way the Mafia exploits Sicilian heritage to filter its recruitment and promotion.
The operation of Zionist exceptionalism in Palestine mirrors that of the white Christian exceptionalism Jews had suffered under for centuries, and which was described in the book The Destruction Of The European Jews, by Raul Hilberg. I (MG, Jr.) was made aware of the insights of the Kovel and Hildberg books by Professor Emeritus (of physics) George Salzman. The three stages of development of racial-religious labeled exceptionalism are: conversion, expulsion and extermination. Hilberg summarizes “the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.”
The arc for European Jews between the years 400 and 1940 was first to be pressured to convert to Christianity or face employment discrimination, then from the 13th to the 16th century Jews resisting conversion were expelled from many countries, and finally the Nazis devised industrialized extermination. The arc for Palestinians seems to be compressed to a time scale measured in decades rather than centuries. Conversion was never an option, and many forms of exclusion were enforced from the first days of the State of Israel (which, couldn’t we see as just the earliest Zionist-occupied section of Palestine?). Wars of territorial conquest since 1967, and the continuing invasion of “unoccupied” territory by “settlers” and their protective cavalry, the IDF — or land rushes into Indian Reservations, as we knew them in the U.S. — bend the arc from exclusion to extermination. In the logic of Zionist exceptionalism, there is nowhere within the limits of their territorial vision where Palestinians have “a right to exist.” What other kind of mentality could inflict modern aerial bombardment of essentially unarmed, corralled masses of people? Our world remains at Guernica, the Stukas and Heinkels are now F-16s and Lavi jets.
If the world does not rise up in unison to halt this slaughter in Palestine, and the relentless and hypocritical land theft motivating it, who could then blame the descendants of the victims — for there will be children who survive to remember — if they are well satisfied with the collapse of our own society in the future, and in fact help in its destruction through some great catastrophe, which we may be too arrogant and self-assured to envision now just like the self-satisfied elites of the 1930s. Time and the pressure of increased impoundment always breach dams, and resolve unnatural imbalances by a leveling flood. Time and the unrelieved resentments of increasing world poverty will ultimately breach our separation walls of control and drown our luxuriant indifference under a leveling tsunami. This is not a biblical type of prediction, just a matter of logic. If we, in the nations with the power to discipline the Israeli Zionists — most especially the United States, do not act soon and consistently thereafter for self-evident justice, we will pump up oppositional energies to our national progress. If we continue to act like conquerors apart from the rest of humanity, whom we view in purely utilitarian terms — as slaves — we must inevitably drown under a Red Sea of our own making.
Mere appeals in internet publications can do little, but in our capitalist, hierarchical world, each person can act to a degree commensurate with their level of political and financial power. And, the best application of that agitation is to influence those above you to take action commensurate with their power. Yes, this is the opposite of doing what is good for your career by doing what is necessary to advance the careers of your bosses. I leave to you the delicacy of striking a balance between your particular career and your brotherly and sisterly duty to humanity; but I will irritate you as I can, to choose the more rebellious path, because ultimately career is a personal war against humanity and a defilement of self-respect, which is exchanged for lucre and an illusion of power. Rebel against exceptions to your sympathies. Rebel against indifference to suffering.
There are many, many injustices and tragedies underway in our world, which cry out for immediate attention, and no one can really rank them as to deserving more or less help. Nevertheless, many currents of history have been distilled into what we see today as the war against the Palestinians, and it is keenly observed throughout the world. For this reason, we could say that the fate of the Palestinians is the measure of the world’s conscience, and will mark our level of civilization in the pages of time.
Manuel Garcia, Jr. can be reached at mango@idiom.com.
George Salzman can be reached at george.salzman@umb.edu.
Tags: George Salzman, Guernica, Israeli war, Joel Kovel, Palestinians, Raul Hilberg
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