Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Cracks in Zionism

by Charley Reese

One of the myths created by the Israeli lobby is that Jews around the world are unanimous in their support of Israel, regardless of what it does. That's not true and never has been true.

Modern political Zionism, whose ideology demands a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, was invented by an Austrian journalist and for decades struggled desperately. It wasn't God who created the modern state of Israel. It was British colonialism, the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Zionists.

Only about a third of the world's Jews choose to live in Israel, despite nearly a century of efforts to persuade Jews to immigrate. There were many early Jewish critics of Zionism, and there still are, despite modern Zionists adopting fascist tactics to silence debate.

Avigail Abarbanel, a native-born Israeli Jew who lived there 27 years before emigrating, has even harsher words:

"Palestinian citizens of Israel live under an arbitrary and brutal police state. Their dealings with Israeli bureaucracy are not just frustrating but can be outright dangerous.

"The Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live under a Pinochet-like regime. They can and do disappear in the middle of the night. They are blindfolded, cuffed, beaten, humiliated, taken to unknown locations with no information given to them or their families, tortured physically and psychologically and incarcerated indefinitely, often without charges and regardless of whether they are guilty of anything.

"Israel is not a nice country. It is a powerful police state founded on pathological paranoia with only a veneer of civility, carefully crafted and maintained for the consumption of those who still believe in the myth of Israeli democracy."

Complete Article

3 comments:

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Anonymous said...

The second thing wrong with this piece is the claim that Zionism was invented by an Austrian journalist.

Surely the author refers to Herzl. Herzl was of Hungarian birth and was foremost a Jew since neither nation offered citizenship to Jews until just before his birth.

Furthermoire, Modern Zionism , to diffrentiate between Tradional Zionsism which is almost 2000 years old, was developed directly from the 19th Cerntury Jewish philosopher and author of German locale, Moses Hess.

Herzl merely picked up on an existing trend.

If the author makes these elementary mistakes one wonders what worth his articles even hold at all!

Anonymous said...

I especially love the quote by an unknown Israeli. Who cares what an unkown person's unqualified opinion is? I have a shoeshine boy who says "Palestinians" sleep with camels, so what? It means as much as yourr ridiculous quote.