[Below is the English translation of Michel Collon's comments in the above video on his 2010 release of his book “Israel: Let’s Talk About It”.]
As I prepared to write the book “Israel: Let’s talk about it”, I asked two of my assistants to go in the streets of Brussels and randomly ask people what did they know about the history of Israel’s situation. The responses were catastrophic. There is in fact ignorance by the public, and I think that this ignorance is not due to chance. It’s been 60 years that the European media, that style themselves the best in the world, provide information to the public, and yet we realize that the public doesn’t know the basics. I think this is due to an Israeli operation of propaganda that is conveyed by the media and which I have condensed into what I call the ten big lies of the media that provide a justification for Israel.
The first media lie is that we are told that Israel was created as a reaction to the genocide against the Jews during the 1940-1945 timeframe. This is absolutely false. The creation of Israel was in fact a colonial enterprise that is much older and which was decided at the Basel Congress in 1897. The Jewish Nationalist Movement decided to colonize Palestine. At the time the word “colonialism” was commonly used. There was no shame in it. The Jewish Nationalist Movement called on the colonial powers of the time when it realized that [the Jews of Europe] needed protection. The Turkish Empire wasn’t interested, but the British Empire was very much interested because it wanted to implant settlers in the heart of the Arab world, midway between east and west. The British also wanted to weaken Egypt which was a power that concerned them, since they wanted to control the Suez Canal which is the route to their very profitable colonies in India. Then, the United States which was interested in the oil – it wanted to make money from oil - took over from the British. So, this colonial creation of Israel does not go back to the 1940-1945 time frame. It goes back much earlier. It’s very much a colonial project. We should remember that at the time, the European colonial powers had divvied up Africa as if it were a vulgar piece of pie. There was a conference in Berlin in 1885 with England, France, Portugal, Belgium, and Germany that divided Africa as if it were a vulgar piece of pie. Obviously, not one African was invited. This was clearly during the colonial period. It must be emphatically said: Israel is a colonial project.
The second big lie that is a justification for Israel goes like this, “Yes, but the Jews are in fact returning to the land from which they were evicted by the Roman Empire in 70 AD”. This too is a total myth. In the book, I have interviewed the historian Shlomo Sand who himself interviewed Israeli historians and archaeologists. They all say, no, there was no exodus and therefore there is no return. In a nutshell, the populations stayed where they were, they did not leave. Of course, there were invasions, migrations, mixings and so on, but overall, the populations did not move. This leads us to two comical consequences: The first is that, basically, the descendants of the Jews of the time of Jesus Christ are the Palestinians who live in Palestine today, now. The second consequence is that, if indeed, no people left Palestine, who then are these people who tell us they are returning? The fact is that they are converts, Eastern Europeans, Western Europeans, North Africans who did convert to the Jewish religion at different times for various reasons, and as Shlomo Sand says, the Jewish people simply doesn’t exist. There’s no common history, there’s no common language, there’s no common culture; there’s only a common religion. But a religion is not a people. No one talks of a Christian people, or of a Muslim people, and therefore there’s no Jewish people.
The third big lie is the idea that, OK, it doesn’t matter if they settled there in Palestine to colonize it. They tell us it was a desert, a land without people, and so it was empty. This too is a huge lie. The reality is that the witnesses of the time, in the early 19th century, tell us that Palestine is an ocean of wheat. There was farming and exports, in particular to France, [olive] oil, soap, the famous Jaffa oranges. And in fact, when British settlers, then Jewish settlers, decided to settle in Palestine beginning in 1920, the Palestinian villagers refused to give up their lands, and mounted revolts, general strikes, held demonstrations with many deaths, and formed a guerilla movement in Palestine. In other words, Palestine was everything except a desert. And all of this [thriving Palestine] was crushed by an extremely violent repression, first by the British occupier, then later on by the Zionists.
Then we are told, yes it’s true, there were Palestinians, but they left [their country] by themselves. This too is false. I myself believed this for a long time, and everyone believed it too. It became Israel’s great official version of the facts until those who became known as the “New Israeli Historians” like Benny Morris who is interviewed in the book, [Ilan] Pappé and others who say, no, the Palestinians were evicted by violence, by terror, by a systematic campaign of terror in order to expel them from the country, to empty the land of its indigenous inhabitants. To say that the Palestinians left by themselves remains a total lie.
Let’s say that the preceding lies make up the 'historic' narrative of the creation of Israel, it's everything that is kept from us, which is very very important to understand. But then there is everything we are told about the 'present' period, namely that Israel is anyway the only democracy in the Middle East, and that we therefore must defend it, that it is a state grounded in the “rule of law”.
To begin with, it is not a state grounded in the rule of law. It’s the only country in the world where the constitution does not set boundaries to the territory. In all countries of the world, there is a constitution that says that the territory begins here and ends there, and that is our country. In Israel this is not the case, because it is precisely an expansionist project that has no boundaries, and moreover, its constitution is absolutely racist because it says that Israel is a state for the Jews, which means that everyone else becomes an underclass of citizens, sub humans. This constitution is the negation of democracy. Israel is by no means a democracy, to which I’d like to add that Israel is colonialism itself, the theft of land, the ethnic cleansing, cannot be considered a democracy.
Naturally, we’re told that there is a parliament, the media, university professors who criticize, etc. It’s true, but since it is a state founded on land theft, it is a democracy shared by the thieves whose objective is to find out how they can continue stealing land. That is never a democracy. It’s colonialism. It’s always a dictatorship.
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