Unity or Annihilation – The Real Choice For The Palestinians
ed the compromise necessary from his side for peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. The problem was that Arafat did not have a partner for peace on the Israeli side. The most successful terrorist leader of modern times, Menachem Begin, was in power in the Zionist state; and he was stuffing the occupied West Bank with settlers to make it impossible for any future Israeli government to withdraw for peace. And that was a manifestation of an underlying truth – that Zionism was not and is not interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslms everywhere could accept. (The essence of Zionism’s philosophy of doom was once put into words by its one-eyed warlord, General Moshe Dayan. “It’s them or us”, he said).
Let us now fast-forward to the present day.
Zionism’s own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestineproblem now leaves nothing to the imagination. Israel‘s leaders still believe that by means of brute force and reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty, they can destroy Hamas and break the will of the Palestinians to continue the struggle for their rights. The assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries.
In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is theproduct of minds which are deluded close to the point of clinical madness. Some say that nuclear-armed Israel is on its way to becoming a fascist state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum.
The question that’s almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the Zionists do when it becomes apparent even to them that they can’t destroy Palestinian nationalism with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds?
My guess is that they, the Zionists, will go for a final round of ethnic cleansing- to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, could very well be Zionism’s final solution to the Palestineproblem.If that happens, the West Bank will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust.
That’s what I mean by “Annihilation” as in the headline over this article.
I know that my Gentile fear on this account is shared by some eminent Jewish critics of Zionism and, for example, I’ll name two of those I am privileged to have as dear friends and allies in common cause, it being to tell in the truth of history.
Professor Ilan Pappeis Israel’s leading “new” or “revisionist” (honest) historian. His latest book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan has described Israel’s policies for oppressing and suppressing the Palestinians as “genocide in slow motion.” In conversation with me, and on public platforms he has shared with me, he has also stated that it’s by no means impossible that what I describe as a Zionist holocaust could happen.
Dr. Hajo G. Meyeris an Auschwitz survivor. His latest book is The End of Judaism; An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. In it Hajo expresses his dismay at what he sees as the “moral collapse of contemporary Israeli society and the worldwide Jewish community as a whole.” He compares Israel’s current policies with the early stages of the Nazi persecution of Germany’s Jews. He stresses that he is not seeking to draw a parallel between Israel’s current policies and the Nazis’ “endgame” – the slaughter of six million European Jews (and also the mass murder of perhaps as many as six million non-Jews). He is merely trying to point out, he says, “the slippery slope” that eventually led to this catastrophe, and the necessity of “forseeing the possible consequences” of a policy that oppresses and marginalizes the Palestinians in their own homeland.
As things are today, and unless they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion (by manifestations of real democracy in action), I think it is unrealistic to expect the governments of the major powers either to use the leverage they do have to call and hold the Zionist state to account for its past crimes, or to intervene to prevent the crimes it might very well commit in a foreseeable future.
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