I have a strong craving for warm bread and green fragrant freshly pressed olive oil at the minute. As I am dipping my bread in the oil (shop bought extra virgin olive oil sold in a glass bottle from mixed sources and produced two years ago…SIGH), I think of the Palestinians in Gaza who didn’t get to pick their olives this October or last October. That is the least of their problems of course, when it could have been headline worthy in unoccupied normal circumstances.
As I say on my homepage, my purpose is to familiarise and educate the reader about the Arab East and there is no way I can start my writings on anything but Palestine at this time.
Whether you believe that Palestinian Freedom is synonymous to Jewish annihilation, or that Palestinian Freedom requires the dismantling of Fizrael as it stands or you don’t know what you believe, then keep reading as I might help you learn or question a thing or two on this. If you don’t care about what’s happening in Palestine because you think it has nothing to do with you then definitely stick around because you have a lot to learn.
My eyes are burning a bit as I had a good cry this morning. I felt utterly deflated after an emotional discussion on Palestine at my book club last night. Some of my mates who are in no way Pro-Fizrael or Anti-Palestine say it’s a complicated matter of geopolitics. I, on the other hand, believe it is a lot simpler than that. Let me tell you why…in 4000 words! : )
I am going to have to go back about 1445 years but only to highlight one important thing. Please keep in mind, I am Arab and a Muslim and I am describing things in layman’s terms by which some religious folk might be offended. Please take a chill pill now if you are that way inclined. Also, I am no expert in the fields of history, religion, or politics; my writings purely reflect my opinion based on what I have lived, witnessed, read or listened to. So, if you are an expert on something I write about and disagree with me, please educate me but try your best not to be condescending. (That doesn’t mean I can’t be condescending in my writing – you know, double standards and all).
In the year 610AD, Islam was revealed to 40-year-old Mohammad (talk about a 40th birthday gift!) by the angel Gabriel as an updated version of the teachings of Jesus and Moses before him. We, Muslims, believe in the three holy scriptures/books that govern the three monotheistic religions in the World (The Quran being the latest and final edition, The Bible and The Tourat). Hence, we believe in the three prophets who were chosen to reveal these teachings, Mohammad, Jesus (Issa) and Moses (Musa) and we also believe in the religions that were formed by these teachings; Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Now, this is where it gets twitchy for a lot of folk, God (Allah) decided that because his revelations prior to Mohammad weren’t recorded in real time and have thus been modified as they transcended generations, to the point where some of the teachings have gone off course and have caused a lot of grievances among humans, Islam would be revealed and recorded in real-time and preserved from human modification- hence it is THE EDITION that is best to adopt. However, Christians and Jews who choose not to adopt Islam, are not to be condemned or persecuted because first and foremost, they are people of The Book- just older editions!
And yes I refer to God as he because why not blame the men?!…who else would design women to go through periods, pregnancies and top it up with menopause?!.. but that’s a story for another day.
I am telling you this because I want to establish the fact that Islam is not anti-Judaism or anti-Christianity; a narrative that Western and Fizraeli propaganda would like us to believe. It is in fact a centric part of Islam to believe in Christianity and Judaism because they are all part of the one divine message from the one God.
Of course, just as there are lunatics carrying the banner of every religion, there are Muslim lunatics who think non-Muslims are infidels!
This leads to another fact I want to stress- by the year 620AD, Arabia (The Levant and the Arabian Peninsula) had a mix of indigenous Pagans, Jews, Christians and Muslims all at once and still does to this day; we could be missing the Pagans though. There were times of war and peace amongst them but no one had genocidal intentions towards the other. I am sure Arabia was racially mixed back then but its inhabitant shared the land with lots of intermarriages and splits in families across religions. They started off as Pagans, then some adopted Abrahamic beliefs (the idea of one God), a lot of these then became Jewish and became the flock of Moses, then Christianity came and some converted to it and finally a lot switched over to Islam. Without any one religion converting the entire flock of its predecessor. Naturally, with Islam being the last religion to be revealed in Arabia, by the 8th century the Muslims formed the majority of its inhabitants. But typical of humans, each religious group wasn’t happy with a new edition/religion taking away some of its flock and claiming to be the latest enlightenment sent from God. Hence, The Jews never acknowledged Jesus Christ and Christianity and went as far as killing the man, the Christians weren’t mad about Islam and the Muslims don’t believe in anything after Islam that claimed to be revealed by God like Baha’ism. And that’s why religion is at the heart of many conflicts around the World. Religion has a lot to answer for!
To this day, the cradle of the three monotheistic religions- Arabia – has one umbrella culture with numerous religious and localised traditions under it. So as an Arab Muslim today, I would have a lot more in common with an Arab Christian than I have with a Malai Muslim. At the same time, I am more Muslim by tradition than I am Christian, yet I share more with my Jordanian Christian friends than I share with my Lebanese Muslim friends. Do you follow?
I say I am sure Arabia was racially mixed back then because I haven’t researched that topic but how could they have been one race given their location? Arabia has always been the link between Asia, Europe and Africa, where intense dark chocolate brown met see-through white and every shade in between, we are the 50 shades of brown!
Fast forward to the 19th century, the Arabs (with all their religions and shades of brown) continued living in Arabia with no political boarders or nationalities as we understand them today. The inhabitants affiliated with Tribes, clans, urban centres or topographically distinct areas or a combination of some or all the above. So for example, there were the Damascans (from Damascus), Ahil AL Hijazi ( From Al Hijaz – Todays western coast of Saudi Arabia), The Hawarneh ( the people from Horan- the fertile plain in the southern part of today’s Syria and the Northern part of today’s Jordan), Bani Hassan ( the nomad Bedouin tribe), Ahil Najd ( people from Najd) and so on. Palestine was the area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean (From the river to the sea), a name that was there since Phoenician times (roughly 3500 years ago, i.e. before Judaism was revealed). Over the centuries, the people who inhabited Palestine, identified as Arabs and Palestinians, simultaneously they identified as Jerusalemites, or Jaffans or Nagev Bedu…etc. In addition to the Arabs, there were the numerous minorities who came and settled in the region over the centuries and continue to do so like the Christian Armenians, Muslim Circassians, Muslim Chechens, Muslim Kurds, Jewish Iberians, Jewish Maghrebis (North Africans), Muslim Persians and Baha’i Persians among others. They have assimilated into Arab societies but retained their own traditions and enriched the Arab culture through marriage, trade, and neighbourly relations. Arab societies are truly a melting pot.
With this background in mind, the fact is when we think of Jews we don’t think of them as A Race nor as A People and definitely not as Gods Chosen People. We think of them as people who practice Judaism or are born into Judaism. They are the original flock of Moses and everyone else who adopted Judaism after that; from Egyptians to Arabs to Persians to Europeans to Africans…etc. Same thing goes for Christians and Muslims. I am an Arab and a Jordanian before I am Muslim, the Syrian Christian is an Arab and a Syrian before they are Christian, the Yemeni Jew is an Arab and a Yemeni before they are Jewish. Our first identity is not our religion. The Catholic Irish are Irish before they are Catholic. Hence, the idea of Jews having A country all for themselves because they practice one religion only seems farcical to us. Wouldn’t you laugh if the Christians of the world said we want to have our own country?
So the entire basis of the Fizraeli State is baseless to us because no flock of any religion has ever had A country of their own because that’s not what religion is about.
The notion of having a Jewish homeland was in the mind of some fanatic Jews since well before the 19th century but the final push that gave birth to the Jewish State of Fizrael would not have happened without the coaxing, meddling, inducing and cuddling of the colonial powers of the 19th century- Britain and France to be exact. They thought it was a great solution to their European Jewish Problem; a term invented by the British in the 1700s, surprise surprise! A problem that they conceptualised and believed and spread. I keep asking myself, what did the Christian Europeans have against their Jewish peers?
I did a bit of reading on this and it seems that a lot of it, certainly from the Middle Ages onwards, boils down to racism and greed hiding behind religion as usual.
Biden said “if there was no Fizrael, we would have invented it”. I say “if there was no religion, they would have invented it”.
As I understand it, it started off as religious discrimination and ended as racial antisemitism. Throughout the Middle Ages, The Catholic Church was the most powerful institution in Europe. The Church didn’t like Jews (they must have been holding a grudge since the Jews never acknowledged Jesus Christ and then killed him), so it ostracized them from most professions pushing them into marginal occupations that were considered inferior back then like money lending, rent and tax collection. Naturally, as the money lenders made more and more money, the debtors disliked them more and more. The greedy Church and its elite wanted a cut of that wealth, so they increased taxes, the average punter got squeezed, the lenders passed down some of these tax increases, the average punter got squeezed again and the hatred towards Jewish lenders intensified. The term The Greedy Jew came about and the vicious cycle kept going. For centuries, Europe’s Christians alienated Europe’s Jews from their own indigenous societies and discriminated against them and expelled them, too many times to list, way before Hitler’s Holocaust.
It only makes sense to me that the European Jews grew closer and closer together becoming more insular and protective of their common traditions and the one thing they had in common, their religion. Jewishness became their identity; they became Jewish before they were Italian or German or Polish. You can see how that can happen, right?
As a slice of these Jews got richer and richer, they eventually controlled more corporations, companies, banks and real estate across Europe. They were relatively more educated as a group and looked after each other. For instance, the Jews forming 1% of the German population in 1914 held disproportionate power over German economics- 25% of the “big linkers” in the German corporate network were Jewish. And with that kind of money, came power and leverage and that only bred manipulation and corruption. The Begrudgery against Jews grew and grew until the Final Solution was invented by Hitler. No wonder it was so easy to hijack that collective sense of rejection and give endless fuel to Zionism.
Do you know that the emancipation of the Jews of Europe was a heavily debated topic in Europe from the 1700s up until WWII. Some calling for their complete emancipation through re-integration and education, others opposing it because they believed Jewishness contradicted with secularism which is centric to political emancipation, others believed Judaism and oppressive capitalism go hand in hand and therefore Judaism should be abolished, others offered resettlement of Jews or deportation, and some even proposed to condemn inter-marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Eventually, the Jews themselves took part of this discussion and came up with modern Zionism. It must have been an awful time to be Jewish in Europe; just like it’s an awful time to be Muslim in Europe nowadays- albeit for different reasons.
As far back as the 1490s, Sephardic Jews (Iberian Jews) immigrated to Palestine and settled there; they integrated into the Palestinian society and lived peacefully. The Muslim Ottoman Empire granted them safety on its territories after they were exiled from Spain (I must note here that Iberian Jews lived happily in their homelands under the Muslim Rule in Andalusia, it was only when the Catholic Spanish Inquisition took over that they were expelled along with the Muslims too).
In Palestine, the Jewish settlers of the 19th century were supported by numerous influential European Sephardic Jews like Sir Moses Montefiore (A British Financier born to Sephardic Jews in Italy and a brother-in-law of the Rothschilds). He donated large sums of money to improve his brethren circumstances in Palestine, built Jewish settlements and synagogues and advanced education, agriculture, industry and health among them. Benjamin Disraeli is another Sephardic Jew (born Jewish baptised Protestant- twice British Prime Minister) who believed in restoring the Jews to their homeland as he defined it. He sought power in Britain to lobby for the return of the Jews to Palestine. He believed that {…the country was admirably suited for them—the financiers all over Europe might help—the Porte (Constantinople) is weak—the Turks/holders of property could be bought out—this, he said, was the object of his life…}. The Rothschilds who are Ashkenazi Jews funded a lot of Jewish settlements in Palestine. To this day, they continue to fund mega projects in Fizrael. They built the Knesset (The Parliament buildings) and The Supreme Court. All these guys believed in the” restoration of the Jews” to “the Promised Land”, to Palestine. They had Zionist tendencies before the word was invented.
Let’s not forget the Protestant British who played a major role in this since the late1600s. So the Catholic Church ostracised and alienated the European Jews, then a bunch of Protestants made up for it. Obviously not for the sake of being nice and helpful, we all know the ruling British Elite do nothing for free! They had an ulterior motive. Have you heard of Christian Zionism?
In a nutshell, Christian Zionists are largely Evangelical Protestants who believe that The Gathering of Israel is a pre-requisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The Gathering of Israel is interpreted as the establishment of Jewish Sovereignty in the Levant (the Levant is todays Palestine, Jordan, parts of both Lebanon and Syria combined). Their support for Fizrael stems from their desire to fulfil a Biblical prophecy and score a lot of brownie points to secure a spot in heaven! They did their best to influence British politics from as early as the 1600s!! every favourable action towards the Jewish settlers was seen as a step closer to the re- gathering of Israel which would hasten The Second Coming and thus The Final Judgment. I mean who wants to hasten the final judgement? You have got to be cuckoo!
British Israelists went as far as arguing that the Anglo Saxons of Britain were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel and thus kindred to the Jews! (we say in Arabic, the worst of evil is what makes you laugh!). Sadly, Christian Zionists weren’t only British, some were European, and a lot ended up settling in North America producing the likes of Biden and Co. For those who are Irish, you might be interested in reading about British Israelism and how it links Ulster to Israel and Russia to Satan!
Modern Zionism started off in the form of Lovers of Zion societies founded in Eastern Europe in the 1880s; supposedly nonpolitical with the objective of actively promoting immigration of European Jews to Ottoman Palestine (the Biblical Land of Israel) and advancing Jewish settlement there, particularly agricultural. The Society for the Support of Jewish Farmers in Syria and Palestine was registered as a charity in Russia in 1890 to legalise the work of the Lovers of Zion. In 1897 these “nonpolitical” societies came together and formally established political Zionism with Theodor Herzl as its official founder.
Mr Herzl was disillusioned by the Dreyfus Affair, such antisemitism in the first country to emancipate its Jews (France) assured him that antisemitism is so deeply ingrained in European Society that the only way for the European Jews to live free is to escape it.
Do you see the irony?… the fact that a French Jewish artillery officer was denied a fair trial because he was simply Jewish cemented the idea of a new homeland in Herzl’s mind. A Tsunami of immigration and terror that ended in the establishment -by force- of a state for European Jewish settlers that practiced the same oppressive and racist policies they ran away from against the indigenous people whom lands they took over!…its mad isn’t it?…classic case of the oppressed becoming the oppressor right there at the heart of Zionism!
Initially, Herzl thought he can buy the Ottoman Emperor at the time in return for the lands of Palestine. That was quickly shot down, and so the East vs West modern conflict over Palestine began. The Zionists turned to the colonial powers for help. Sure both Philo- Semites and Anti-Semites supported the idea for different reasons as I touched on earlier and the oiling of the Zionist machine started with lots of powerful and rich people to finance it and lobby for it.
Bit by bit for 50 years, the Zionists plotted, calculated and implemented every move with the objective of establishing a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine for Jews only which they finally managed to accomplish in 1948.
A lot happened in those 50 years (1897-1948)- enough for a conference or two or ten; mostly groundwork by the Zionists and the colonial powers but the years between 1941 (the start of the Holocaust) and 1948 (the establishment of the State of Fizrael) were the most horrifying for both European Jews and Arab Palestinians. What I find extremely sad and rather evil is that those who escaped or survived the Holocaust and chose to seek refuge in Palestine had zero chance to process the trauma they had just been through. Their suffering, pain, loss, anguish and hope were hijacked by Zionists and twisted into hate against the Arabs. Not all of them of course but enough of them to build the three Zionist militias: The Haganah, The Irgun and the Lehi- all three joined forces in May of 1948 to establish the Fizraeli Defence Forces- IDF. By the way, these militias were labelled as terrorists’ groups by the Mandatory powers of Britain and France (1917-1948), go figure!
They undertook one criminal campaign after the next to terrorise, displace and kill Palestinians and eliminate any Western official or establishment hinting sympathy with the Arabs, from assassinating anti-Zionist jews, bombing Palestinian targets, assassinating Lord Walter Guinness ( The Anglo-Irish Minister of State in the Middle East), sending letter bombs to British officials and the Truman White House, bombing the British Administrative Headquarters based at King David Hotel in Jerusalem, bombing the British Embassy in Rome, bombing The Colonial Office in London, bombing the Samiramis hotel in Jerusalem, The Sergeants Affair, the massacres of Balad al-Sheikh, Deir Yassin, Saliha, Lydda, Sa’sa and Tantura, to assassinating the United Nations mediator Bernadotte ( who by the way saved a lot of Jews from the camps during WWII) and many other countless acts of terror. Anyone and anything who came in the way of their goal was fair game. Zionist terrorism was critical to the birth of Fizrael and still is to its survival.
So for four centuries, religious fanatics, megalomaniacs and psychopaths morphed this ethno nationalist ideology, Zionism, and rooted it in religion knowing that it’s the best tool for political legitimacy and control of the collective conscious of a group of oppressed people. FYI, Theordore Herzl and his comrades were atheists, yet they brainwashed hundreds of thousands of their own Brethren and convinced them that Palestine is Promised to them by God and only to them and that they should fulfil their holy duty by immigrating to Palestine and taking what is rightfully theirs even if by force. Ask yourself can Zionists provide evidence that Palestine is rightfully theirs without using religion?
So, is it a complicated matter of geopolitics? The history of European Jews might be complicated. The history of the Arab people might be complicated. The interests of the colonial and superpowers are geopolitical but what happened to Palestine and The Palestinians is not complicated. It is pure and simple – terrorising settler colonialism.
Palestinians have the right to return to whichever part of Palestine they come from, whether it’s the part occupied by Fizrael and declared as Fizraeli state or the part occupied by Fizrael and declared as Occupied Territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem). Both occupied and displaced Palestinians must be emancipated into the civil society that exists in todays “Fizrael”. They have every right to belong to a democratic nation on their own land that extends from the River to the Sea. The One-State solution is, in my humble opinion as a nobody, the only solution. The bad news is Fizrael will never entertain this option. They never wanted the two-state solution nevermind the one-state solution.
Its either a Democracy on the land of Palestine or a Jewish State. The two are incompatible. A democratic “Fizrael” cannot be a Jewish State because to be democratic all citizens of all faiths should be treated equally. And a Jewish state cannot be democratic because by definition, it’s discarding its Muslim and Christian citizens. It makes me laugh when I read over and over again in western media how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East!…they really are blind sheep, no one stopped and thought about it.
If one democratic state is established, the number of Palestinian Muslims will quickly exceed that of Jews and they would ultimately control the majority in government which no Zionist will entertain. This is the real reason Fizrael will never entertain a one-state solution and why the West keeps dangling the two-state solution carrot in front of the World pretending that it is a viable solution. It isn’t and I will discuss why another time.
Why do I say the Palestinian Muslims will become a majority ( I think they probably already are)? because the majority of Palestinians in Palestine live to breed. Since the Nakba, breeding has become a survival tool. I will never forget a lady from Gaza sitting in our “good room” in Jordan and casually saying “we have to have many kids because half of them will end up being killed”. She said it as a matter of fact.
One of my book clubbers said there could be two simultaneous truths here, Jews who are born in Fizrael feel its home just as much as the Palestinians do and they will naturally fear for their lives if the Palestinians return to their homes. I say: this is the same excuse the White South Africans chanted but was there a wave of ethnic cleansing against White South Africans after the fall of Apartheid? No, there wasn’t.
I have been to Palestine and aside from the immediate sense of danger I felt seeing teenage Fizraeli soldiers carrying machine guns that weight more than they did, I felt really bitter (and I am of Jordanian descent!). Bitter to have grown up one hour away from the Mediterranean without it being part of my memories, bitter to have missed out on wandering the souks of Jerusalem or attending a friend’s wedding at the Church of The Holy Sepulchre or going to prayers at The Aqsa Mosque (and I don’t even pray) or seeing Jordan from the Palestinian Dead Sea shores or crossing to Egypt overland. Fizrael is like a thorn stuck in the throat of the Middle East. 99% of Middle Easterners (keep the ruling elite aside), would love to spit it out, crush it and flush it down the sewers. We abhor Fizrael and Zionism, but we have nothing against being a Jew; that’s why we always differentiate between Judaism and Zionism; they are not the same.
I have started calling that state Fizrael in my social media posts; in an attempt to trick the censorship algorithms. However, I decided to add it to my dictionary as I like it. I think of Fizzy Champagne that loses its Fizz after a while and becomes boring, stale and flat….in other words; IRRELEVANT. And irrelevant may it become, AMEN!