Lebanon and Palestine

Many readers wonder why I defend the Palestinian cause after all that the Palestinians did to Lebanon between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

My answer is: Humanistic integrity and intellectual honesty. The Palestinian tragedy and the creation of Israel are the single worst calamity of the 20th century. Yes, the Germans committed the Holocaust (maybe 15 years of suffering, from 1930-1945), and yes, the Turks committed the genocide of the Armenians (also another 10-20 years between 1905 and 1925; correct me if I am wrong). And yes, the Kurds were denied their country in 1920, and yes, so much inhumanity has been visited by humans upon other humans .... But the Palestinian suffering - the Nakba - is beyond imagination, for it has been going on for 100 years in plain sight of the international community which did - and still does - nothing to stop the unfolding genocide and catastrophe. Mistakes were committed by everyone, and the mistakes of the Palestinians cannot be used as a pretext to deny them their humanity and their country.

What the American colony of Israel is doing is not novel. White English America did it with the native Amerindians, and now English America is doing it again with the Palestinians: Instead of one wholesale instantaneous genocide that history might remember for centuries, they are slowly, very slowly, one Palestinian at a time, one home demolition at a time, one assassination at a time, one teenager at a time, one confiscated hill at a time, one denied construction permit at a time, one olive orchard at a time ...  slowly eroding the links between a people and its land... with the illusion that the world will not notice. Of course, labeling the Palestinians as terrorists helps because in our subconscious, fed as it is by the dominant media, the word terrorist has come to mean disposable, worthy of killing.

It is unbearable for me to imagine what it is like to see your own country invaded by foreigners from 5,000 miles away, who proceed to chase you out of your homes, villages and cities, herd you into refugee camps, massacre tens of thousands of your people with weapons and know-how imported from Nazi Germany, erase 500 of your villages and towns from the map and replace them with foreign-sounding names. 

And to add insult to injury, they continue to deny your history and your humanity by falsfying it and propagating the Zionist lies that you were never in Palestine, that Palestine was an empty wildnerness when the invaders arrived, that you are squatters from other Arab countries when the fact is that the Israeli invaders are themselves the foreign squatters, that the invaders were poor wretched refugees from Nazi Europe, and that your efforts at fighting back are acts of terrorism when a Jewish-Nazi regime controls every minute detail of your life in order to draw every last breath of resistance remaining in you and force you to abandon the fight and leave the country to them. AND, the world believes their lies and treats you like vermin because you are fighting back.

There is nothing sacrosanct about any specific group of humans. We are either all sacrosanct or no one is. Anyone can make claims of superiority over others, on fucked-up grounds fantasized during the Bronze Age: Chosen people (Jews), last prophecy on earth (Islam), Son of God, the true message, the true religion, messiahs, mehdis, prophets... but that does not make any of this religious bullshit true, this fiction written by ignorant nomadic tribes in the Arabian desert some thousands of years ago, nor does it give any group license to mistreat and abuse another group. The Palestinians hold the exact same human dignity and are capabe of the same suffering as any other group of humans, including fanatic American Jewish settlers, and given the miserable conditions under which the Israelis make them live, the Palestinians deserve the support of anyone with an ounce of decency, integrity and intellectual honesty.

The cowardly Jews of Europe were led to the slaughter like cattle. They did not fight back. That is why they were never accused of being terrorists. And now they have the luxury of accusing the Palestinians of being terrorists because they never stopped fighting back for the past 100 years.

If the native indigenous Palestinians are terrorists because they are fighting foreign colonizers,

then,

The native indigenous Lebanese were terrorists for fighting 30 years of Palestinian-Syrian occupation. 

The not-so-native American colonists were terrorists for fighting the English.

The native indigenous South African blacks of the African National Congress (ANC) were terrorists .

The native indigenous Algerians of the Front de Libération Nationale were terrorists.

The native indigenous French Résistance were a bunch of terrorists fighting the German occupation.

The native indigenous Amerindians in north America were terrorists and savages.

The native indigenous Amerindians across Latin and South America who are still fighting white Spanish rule today are terrorists.  

The exception to all the above being the wimpy native indigenous Jews of Germany and Europe who did not fight their extermination. Instead, they migrated their incompetence, alienation and hatred from their own native Europe to a less sophisticated Palestine where they implemented the same extermination methods used against them by overpowering European armies. The Jews of Europe and America, with their wealth and knowhow, took advantage of a peaceful, mostly rural, unsophisticated Palestinian population and raped it and plundered it to establish a Western (British-American) colony near the nascent oil fields of the Arabian desert. This is in line with what the British did across the globe: They raped India, they raped China, they raped Palestine, they raped every country and continent they set their feet on, and left behind them torn nations in constant turmoil. Why would the British do differently in Palestine what they did elsewhere? Then the dumb Americans took over.

The story of Anne Frank, the young German girl who spent 2 years holed up in an attic in Amsterdam out of fear of the Germans, is very sad especially that she was eventually deported and killed in a concentration camp. But her ordeal has been elevated by propaganda to the summum of suffering, an exclusive suffering, such that the millions of people who heard her story think that nothing of the sort can happen to other young girls. Yet, her ordeal is nowhere near the suffering of millions of young girls her age in our time. Yes right now, there are literally millions of Anne Franks living horrendous lives across the world. In Palestine itself, imagine the thousands of refugee girls holed up for generations in miserable refugee camps in their own country of Palestine dying every day by hypermilitarized Israeli criminal butchers disguised as a legitimate army fighting terrorists. Anne Frank's ordeal pales in comparison.

In the early 1900s, Lebanon and Palestine were sister nations slowly emerging from under Turkish Ottoman occupation. In many ways the two countries were similar: Cities and towns with all the accoutrements of urban life (banks, hotels, courts of justice, newspapers, museums, an urban elite, etc.), and villages with olive groves, grape vines, and mediterranean climate and traditions. Many Lebanese went to work in Palestine and many Palestinians came to work in Lebanon. Under the Ottomans, there were no borders: It was all part of one huge empire. When WWI ended, nations became countries with borders. The French and the English obtained a mandate from the League of Nations (forerunner of the UN) to lead these new countries into creating institutions.

In Lebanon, the French succeeded in establishing a functioning country between 1920 and 1943, then after the French left, until the late 1960s when the heartache created by the British crooks in Palestine overwhelmed the Lebanese state which welcomed hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees fleeing British-enabled Jewish barbarity and atrocities in Palestine.

In Palestine, the British crooks promised a state to the native Palestinians WHILE at the same time giving the same Palestinian land to European Jewish colonizers (this was thirty years before the Holocaust, so no poor victims escaping Nazi Germany yet) as payback for Jewish bankers funding the British war effort. British deception and imposture are at the heart of the tragedy of Palestine and its repercussions on Lebanon.

 

Israeli raid on Jenin: Continued aggression on Palestinian refugee camp

Modified from a guest opinion appearing July 16, 2023 in the Asheville Citizen Times, North Carolina. It shows that average Americans with little knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but brainwashed by the Zionist-submissive American media, are finally understanding what the conflict is about.

Haunted by images of July 3 Israeli attack on Palestinian Jenin refugee camp

Where were you on July 3 when Israel raided the Jenin refugee camp? I know where I was ― on the West Bank in Bethlehem, 60 miles south of Jenin, which is at the northern tip of the West Bank. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the area, the West Bank is a Palestinian Arab section walled off by the Israeli government. When I say walled off, I mean there is a wall several stories high built by Israel with the intent of keeping the Palestinians on the other side. It is a harsh looking, intimidating wall with barbed wire and entry points staffed by armed Israeli military personnel.

On the Palestinian side of the wall, there is painted artistic graffiti asking for peace and reconciliation. Israel has nuclear capacity and an extremely well equipped army. This is an army that defeated a half dozen neighboring Arab countries in six days in 1967. At that time Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan, and the Gaza Strip and the Sinai from Egypt. The Palestinians do not have a standing army, navy or air force. The Palestinians have no heavy weaponry. It is unclear why Israel finds it necessary to invade a refugee camp. It is true that the Jenin refugee camp is known for its militancy but militancy in the face of occupation is not uncommon. The Hebrew people had a similar reaction to the Roman occupation some 2,000 years ago.

We were in a restaurant in Bethlehem when the news of the invasion broke. A Palestinian news network provided the coverage on TV. They did not shy away from showing the carnage. I will be haunted for a long time by a picture of a woman lying face down between two parked cars. I assume she was dead. So why must we ponder a conflict between people that results in death?

This can be traced back to the Zionist movement that began in Europe as a colonial enterprise based on Jewish nationalism that was trying to imitate the other European colonial nationalisms and their empires during the 19th century. The Zionists first considered Uganda and Argentina as places where the Jewish people could establish a colonial empire. Then by the time of World War I when the Ottoman Empire collapsed, Britain had borrowed lots of money from Jewish bankers to fund its war effort. So when Britain was given a mandate by the League of Nations to help the Palestinians build a state over their land (just like the French were given a mandate over neighboring Lebanon), Britain violated the mandate and betrayed the indigenous Palestinians. It awarded the European Zionists a license (Balfour Declaration) to build a colonial empire in Palestine, on the same land where the Palestinians were supposed to build their state with help from Britain. Granted that the ancestors of the Jews, the Hebrews, once existed in Palestine, but that was 2,000 years earlier. The Zionists had no fundamental rights to Palestine which was therefore sold by Britain to wealthy European Jews who wanted an empire.

Hitler’s persecution of the Jews during World War II transformed the Zionist colonial enterprise into a desire for a Jewish homeland to accommodate the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust whom neither Britain nor the United States wanted. So the European Jews took it upon themselves to displace the Palestinian people and steal their land. Let’s be clear, Judaism defines a religion. It does not define a nation. There are Arab Jews, Persian Jews, Indian Jews, African Jews, American Jews, and European Jews. All these people share a religion, but they have very different cultures. There is no such thing as a Jewish people, just as there is no such thing as a Christian people, a Hindu people, or a Muslim people.

We need to abandon the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a Muslim-Jewish conflict, for it is not. It is not a Jewish-Arab conflict as many indigenous people who embrace Judaism as a religion and/or culture, will also embrace their Arabic ancestry. These perceptions cloud what is really taking place ― an indigenous population is resistant to being controlled by people who are not indigenous to the area. The situation is not too different from what the Native Americans faced when Europeans decided to settle the Western Hemisphere. With the exception of a few indigenous Palestinians who accepted occupation by the invading foreign Jewish population in 1948, the indigenous people of Palestine do not have citizenship. They have no voter rights. While the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, populated by Jews from foreign countries, primarily the United States, have a voice in the affairs of the Israeli government, the surrounding indigenous Palestinian population does not. The indigenous Palestinians are an occupied population. When an indigenous population is occupied by a non-indigenous population, resistance and radicalization become a natural occurrence. That same condition existed in the pre-Constitution days of the United States, which resulted in our founding fathers declaring independence from British rule. That intent was made clear in the Declaration of Independence.

The present day conflict between the Israeli government and the Palestinian people is not a religious conflict nor is it a conflict in culture. It is a conflict that arises from the occupation of an indigenous population by an non-indigenous population. The Hebrew people resisted Rome and the Palestinians are resisting a government of non-indigenous people. It is that simple.

 

 

The Second Nakba Has Begun

The fundamentalist Jewish government of the British-American colony of Israel, equipped with billions of dollars worth of weapons, has begun its second ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

In the 1930s and 1940s, illegal Jewish squatter hordes, trained by their tormentors the German Nazis in Europe, invaded Palestine. They demolished entire villages, killed tens of thousands of native indigenous Palestinians, evicted tens of thousands out of their ancestral homes, villages and cities, and attempted to wipe out an ancient millennial culture. By 1948, these foreign invaders, backed by colonial Britain, convinced a colluding United Nations to dismember Palestine into two entities: A Jewish one on whatever areas they had plundered and ethnically cleansed, and a Palestinian one over what was still left intact. 

The idea of a British colony in the Near East was initiated in the early 20th century with the greedy desire of the vulgar and racist "British empire" to be near the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula. But Britain had ceased to be a "power" by the mid-1940s, and America took over as the chief sponsor of this greatest tragedy of the 20th century: The murder of a third of the indigenous Palestinian population, the eviction of another third into refugee camps and their replacement by illegal invading European colonists, and the submission of the remaining third to a regime of hypermilitarized terror as second class citizens of the new colony of Israel. Those westerners who today believe in the Great Replacement theory, whereby migrants from the global south seek to replace the white population of the global north, should carefully ponder whether the creation of the barbaric state of Israel was itself a western conspiracy of replacement of the indigenous Palestinian people by white European migrants.

Naturally, the Palestinian owners of the land rejected the dismemberment of their country and the absorption of these illegal riff-raff Russian, German, Polish, Moldavian and other Eastern European squatters who were arriving on boats not unlike those we see today crossing the Mediterranean in the opposite direction. By trickery and theft, by violence and terror, with insidious disinformation campaigns they had learned from the Germans, and with the treacherous backing of the hypocrite British, they forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their villages and cities, stole their properties and homes, renamed the villages and the streets, just as any invading foreign occupier would do. The displaced Palestinians found "temporary" shelter inside refugee camps both inside Palestine as well as outside in the surrounding countries of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, as the international community promised them to ensure their return in short order.

That was the first Nakba - catastrophe - for the native indigenous Palestinian people. Millions of Palestinians continue to languish today in refugee camps waiting to return to their native country. While the host countries did their best to assist and provide temporary shelter, they could not absorb these large numbers of refugees, nor were these refugees interested in assimilating into their host societies. Why should they? They have a country called Palestine and they have no interest in simply giving up on their land, villages and cities to the benefit of European colonists.

As we speak, the British-American colony of Israel is controlled by a racist, ultra-religious Jewish theocratic government, not unlike those regimes one finds in Iran and Saudi Arabia where dissent is met with brutality. There is no difference really between these states, except that Israel is a Jewish theocracy, Saudi Arabia is a Sunni Muslim theocracy, and Iran is a Shiite Muslim theocracy.

The Jewish supremacist government of the British-American colony of Israel has clearly and repeatedly stated its intention to ethnically cleanse the remaining third of Palestine (on the western side the Jordan river) that has managed to resist the Jewish invaders, and has now embarked on executing this plan. For decades, it has demolished homes, deported people, assassinated leaders, denied Palestinians the right to build new homes while encouraging foreign Jewish squatters to build new settlements on the ashes of demolished Palestinian villages and homes. The trajectory was clear over the past few decades.

But now the final strike is under way: Since the advent of the fundamentalist Netanyahu government, the pace of aggressive and murderous measures has picked up speed and intensity, joined by the brutality of the Jewish foreign terrorists who have settled in the still semi-free parts of Palestine. The Jewish forces of the government have been conducting daily raids against Palestinian refugee camps in the free parts of Palestine. These camps shelter Palestinian refugees whose homes and villages had already been destroyed in 1948, and now they are again the target of another expulsion and ethnic cleansing that aims to achieve a purely Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river. How can any civilized human being today accept this wanton brutality against basic human decency?

The aberration of the creation of Israel is based on this paroxysm of racist colonial ideology: To come in from outside, take someone's else land, chase the natives out, and establish your own "pure" state in their place?

By what measure of morality is the world allowing this monumental crime to be perpetrated again against the same people by the same brutal colonial aggressor? The Palestinians of the Jenin refugee camp today under attack by the Jewish army were themselves and their families uprooted from their villages and cities in historic Palestine back between the 1940s and the 1960s; now they are being uprooted again by their executioners. It's the story of a rapist (Israel) who rapes his victim (Palestine) a first time (1930s-1940s), is granted half the victim's house (the 1947 partition of Palestine), violently takes possession of more rooms in his victim's house (occupation, 1967, 1973) and continues the rapes.  As the victim rises to defend herself (liberation movements), the rapist (Israel) accuses his victim (Palestine) of provoking (terrorism) him, and uses this as a justification to continue the rape.

In the 1950s, the French colonists of Algeria referred to the Algerian resistance as "terrorists". By 1961, when the French were kicked out of Algeria by the Algerian resistance, these "terrorists" became the heroes of Algerian freedom and independence. The French colonists used to say that the native Algerians should stay in the desert and assimilate into neighboring "North African Arab" countries, and leave their country to the French. They are all "North African Arabs" after all.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the French and American colonial powers referred to the Vietnamese resistance as "terrorists". By 1975 when the last American invader fled Vietnam, the Vietnamese resistance became the new free government of Vietnam. The colonial French and American powers hoped that the Vietnamese resistance would vanish in the jungle and assimilate into the neighboring "Asian" societies of Laos and Cambodia. They are all "Asian" after all.

Today and for the past several decades, the Jewish colonists refer to the Palestinian resistance as "terrorists", and use that pretext to continue its violent and brutal repression of the Palestinian resistance to the occupation. The Jewish colonists argue that since that Palestinians are "Arabs", they should forget about Palestine and assimilate into the neighboring "Arab" societies of Syrian, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt. They are all "Arab" after all.

Apparently, the Jewish invaders forget that they themselves could have stayed in their own "European" countries of origin - today apparently the best places to live on earth -  and assimilate as "Europeans" into any country in the European continent. They are all "Europeans" after all. 

The second Nakba has begun in Palestine. The foreign colonial Jewish forces are going to solve the Palestinian problem once and for all: Ethnically cleanse the West Bank of the remaining native indigenous Palestinian population by massacring and evicting them into Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. It worked in the 1940s, there is no reason why it shouldn't work again this time. The Jewish invaders can then declare their supremacist, racist, purely Jewish State, as apparently God ordered in the Old Testament. How different is this thinking from fundamentalist Islamist thinking? They both claim to hold the truth from their holy books, scribbled in the Bronze Age by bearded smelly old men in the deserts of Arabia. 

Should any sane, reasonable, rational human being in this 21st century accept that these monstrous beliefs be used as justification to assassinate, eliminate, subdue and terrorize other people? Will the world finally say no to naked aggression and the violent uprooting of a native indigenous people from its land so that another, foreign, people take it over?