Why American Taxpayers are Jointly Responsible for the Holocaust of the Palestinians

What happened to the Palestinians is tragic. Unfortunately the United States played a major role in the tragedy. Who is ultimately responsible for the Holocaust of the Palestinians? For anyone who would like to investigate this subject more thoroughly, I highly recommend The Great War for Civilisation by Robert Fisk, the British journalist who interviewed Osama bin Laden twice (the only western journalist to have done so). I will only address the main points here; for readers who want to delve the complicated history of the Middle East more profoundly, Fisk's book is a "must read," and a good one.

Zionism

When I use the terms "Zionism" and "Zionists," please understand that I mean nothing derogatory. There is nothing wrong with Jews wanting a place where they can live in peace and security. However, the Palestinians have every right to live in peace and security too. The dream of Zionism is not "wrong," but its implementation has gone horribly wrong, beginning with the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant Palestinians in the wake of the war of 1948. This brutal act has led to an avalanche of calamities, not only for the Palestinians, but also for the region, and for the world. Confronting and correcting the great and terrible imbalances caused by Israeli Jews seizing their homeland at the expense of Palestinians is something the world simply must address, and redress.

Am I saying the Jews should not have a homeland in present-day Israel/Palestine? No, such things are for the people of the region to decide, not me. One severe problem for the region has been the interference of westerners with incoherent plans for divvying up land they have never seen, much less invested with their sweat, blood and tears. But I believe there is a path to peace, and that path begins with a simple first step in the right direction: the establishment of justice—equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for Jews and Palestinians alike, without exemptions or preconditions.

The Roots of Modern Zionism

Well before the eruptions of two world wars and the Holocaust, anti-Semitism in Europe and other parts of the world was on the rise. Quite reasonably, the Jews who came to be known as Zionists began to think it would be wise for the Jews to find a place where they could live in peace and security together. At the time, the vast majority of Jews had been in the Diaspora for almost 2,000 years, and only a small number lived in Palestine.

The father of Zionism was Theodor Herzl, an Austrian-Hungarian journalist who covered the Dreyfus Affair, a notorious farce in which a Jewish officer in the French army was falsely accused of spying for Germany. Herzl watched crowds screaming "Death to the Jews!" in fascination and horror, and he came to the conclusion that that Jews of Europe were fighting a losing battle against anti-Semitism. He would soon be proven correct by the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, by extensive pogroms against the Jews in Russia, and by rabid anti-Semitism elsewhere. But I believe Herzl made an incorrect assumption, which I will explain after quoting him . . .

In his pivotal book Der Judenstaat ("The State of the Jews") he wrote: "The Jewish question persists wherever Jews live in appreciable numbers. Wherever it does not exist, it is brought in together with Jewish immigrants. We are naturally drawn into those places where we are not persecuted, and our appearance there gives rise to persecution. This is the case, and will inevitably be so, everywhere, even in highly civilised countries—see, for instance, France—so long as the Jewish question is not solved on the political level. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England; they have already introduced it into America.

Please note the words I italicized above. Herzl's words would prove to be prophetic, because when the Jews eventually made the decision to descend on Palestine in large numbers, they once again created exactly the problem Herzl had seen and understood so clearly. But there was another solution: the Jews could have emigrated to the United States and "spread out" so that they were not perceived to be changing the underlying fabric of society and culture. What Herzl failed to see clearly was that the American ideal of equal rights for all human beings would, given time, solve the "Jewish question," as long as they were not all concentrated in a small geographic area, and did not try to overly influence the larger population. Political and economic machinations "behind the scenes" have invariably backfired on the Jews in the long run. The best solution for the Jews, in my opinion, would be transparency. They should determine how best to live in a free society, understanding that most Americans, for example, really don't care about their cultural, religious and philosophical differences from the mainstream, or how they dress, and what they choose to eat, etc. Where have the Jews been safer, more secure, or more prosperous, than in the United States?

Herzl was perceptive. He was correct in some of his conclusions. But he was hardly a prophet, since anti-Semitism has been historically on a decline in the United States, along with other forms of racism, because of our American creed of equal rights for all human beings, and our rule of law. Fear and lack of foresight drove the Zionists to create the same situation they needed to avoid. Only an atmosphere of equal rights, fair laws and fair courts will allow the Jews to live in peace with their neighbors. Today they must decide if they will "clear the air" in present-day Israel and Palestine, or seek the pure air of truly free societies. 

As we will see, Zionism was, largely, the reaction to European ultra-nationalism by Jewish ultra-nationalism. But the Jews did not have land for a Jewish state, and the process of finding and claiming the land required for an independent Jewish state would lead the Zionists down the path to a Holocaust of their own creation. Unfortunately, they would soon be aided and abetted by the gullible American taxpayer.

Idealistic Zionism

In 1896, with the publication of the English translation of Der Judenstaat, Herzl became the leading spokesman for Zionism. I believe Herzl was largely correct in his apprehension of the climate of the Europe of his day. Europe was convulsed in the deep throes of ultra-nationalism, which would lead to two devastating world wars. World War II would leave, it has been estimated, up to 70 million people dead. The Jews were a people without a nation, and Europe was about to make nationalism its newest and perhaps strangest religion to date, full of dreams of racial superiority and divine fiats. But I believe Herzl was wrong when he assumed there was nowhere in the world where Jews could live in peace and security unless they established their own homeland. For across the Atlantic ocean, the people of the United States had the perfect creed for the Jews: equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for all human beings. Of course they had not lived up to their perfect creed perfectly, and still haven't, to this day. But it was, and is, by far the best thing going, in the realm of human rights.

The tragedy of Zionism is that it soon became a form of ultra-nationalism, as fierce and brutal as any other. What the Nazis would soon do to the Jews, the Israeli Jews would soon thereafter do to the Palestinians. And so today Jews all over the world are again endangered, this time because of the fierce ultra-nationalism of the Israeli Jews, which not only destabilizes the Middle East, but threatens to destabilize the world. How very strange, when the Jews, of all people, should have been the strongest proponents of equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for everyone.

The great mistake Herzl made was assuming there was no solution to the problems of European nationalism and anti-Semitism, other than for the Jews to resort to the same nationalism that so endangered them. The solution did exist: in the American creed. The safest place on earth for the Jews was not Palestine,  but America. (And it seems Divine Providence might agree, because in 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that the Jews must convert to Christianity or leave Spain forever, they simultaneously funded the first voyage of Columbus, which would lead to the revelation of a new homeland where millions of Jews would be able to live in peace and security.)

Albert Einstein called nationalism the "infantile disease of mankind." Nationalism causes human beings to assign themselves labels (German, Jew), then go to great extremes to advance the cause of one people over another. This was the disease of Europe that led, ultimately, to two world wars and the Holocaust. England had its imperial empire, and assumed somehow that Englishmen had the "right" to conquer and rule the people of India, Australia, Africa and Palestine. The Germans saw the English empire and were envious. Where, oh where, were the people they could conquer and rule? Russia and Japan also had bizarre imperial dreams. Where, oh where on God's green earth, were the people they could conquer and rule?

Dreams of racial superiority and "manifest destiny" were the seeds of the destruction of millions of lives, many of them the lives of innocent women and children, who were caught in the crosshairs of empires gone mad. Now, it seems, the Jews must have their empire, and all too soon innocent Palestinian women and children would be caught in their crosshairs.

Americans have only to examine their creed to understand the terrible dilemma posed by ultra-nationalism. We believe that all human beings are equal, that they all have the same self-evident rights. But what about the rights of a little boy in India, or a little girl in Palestine, not to be conquered and ruled by foreigners? Do we believe in our creed enough to stand for their rights? To date, the answer has unfortunately been, "No."

The English had somehow came to the conclusion that because they were them, they had the "right" to conquer and rule that little boy in India, that little girl in Palestine. The Germans had come to the conclusion that because they were them, they had the "right" to find someone, anyone, to conquer and rule, so that their empire could be as "illustrious" as the British Empire, on which the sun famously never set.

The Jews, a people without a nation, were about to make the same mistake. They were about to set out to conquer and rule that little girl in Palestine, who had never done a thing to harm them. 

Did the Jews have the "right" to conquer and rule the Palestinians? If the Nazis were wrong, as we all know they were, to do what they did to the Jews during the Holocaust, isn't it clear that the Jews were just as wrong to do the same things to the Palestinians? What Zionism did, in the end, was to fight fire with fire. Unfortunately innocent women and children were to be trapped in the resulting inferno. But there was always another solution: the American solution. Unfortunately the United States, in her zeal to help the Jews, would soon betray her own ideals in the Middle East, even as she increasingly lived up to them at home.

Practical Zionism

At the first Zionist Congress, held at Basel, Switzerland in 1897, Herzl was elected the president of what would become the World Zionist Organization. Soon thereafter he began to reach out diplomatically to various world leaders, more or less "floating" his idea of a Jewish homeland, and looking for someone to bite. I don't mean this in a derogatory way. Herzl was simply trying to turn his dream into a practical reality. But I believe there was only practical solution that would not have led to violence, and that was for the Zionists to have avoided the root cause of anti-Semitism that Herzl himself had seen so clearly: the tendency of Jews to find safe havens, then congregate in concentrations of too-large numbers, thus frightening and irritating the locals. The practical solution would have been to find a very large safe haven and "spread out." I believe the only practical safe haven for the Jews at the time was the United States. Perhaps the US remains the only safe haven big enough and free enough for the Jews to occupy in large numbers, in peace and security. But the impracticality of Zionism as it was implemented may now be endangering the safety and security of even American Jews. Why? Because now growing numbers of Americans feel that our tax dollars and even the lives of our soldiers (our own children!) have been manipulated and used to the benefit of Israeli Jews, with catastrophic results for our own security and prosperity? Why should Americans die, live in fear of their lives, and go broke while paying for the Holocaust of the Palestinians, when the only people who benefit are the ones who decided to conquer and rule that little Palestinian girl? As much as I admire the accomplishments of the Jews as a people, I have no admiration for men who conquer and rule little girls, and I wonder why so many of my Jewish friends demand that I support Israel and never question her. I am not an anti-Semite, but if I feel this way, what about other locals who become easily frightened and irritated when the fabric of their society and culture are threatened by what they see as outside forces?

I believe American Jews will have to ask themselves if it is wise for them to profit from American ideals at home, while seeming intent to undermine them abroad. Just because other Americans have been trusting, perhaps wildly over-trusting, of Israel for so long, does not mean that they can afford to remain in "support Israel at all costs" mode. Have many American Jews tried to sit on both sides of the fence, enjoying the many blessings of equal human rights at home, while deluging other Americans with all sorts of propaganda insisting that the human rights of Muslims take a back seat abroad? This is, increasingly, the way it seems to many Americans. What has the cost been to Americans in lives lost at 9-11, and in two fruitless wars? What has the cost been to the economy, reputation and legacy of the United States?

I find Zionism, as it has been implemented, highly impractical. It seems to me that now even American Jews may face ever-increasing waves of anti-Semitism, unless they quickly "get off the fence" and stand for America's ideals and its creed of equal rights for all human beings. That little Palestinian girl is a human being. If you force me to choose between her and the men who took everything she and her family had, which is so little in comparison to what we have, and to what the Israeli Jews have, which side do you think I might choose? I am a publisher of Holocaust poetry, not an anti-Semite, but I simply do not believe that men should conquer and rule little girls because they happen to be of another race or religious persuasion.

I believe with all my heart, mind, soul and spirit that I must protect that little Palestinian girl, and her mother. Let men full of dreams of conquest blow themselves to smithereens if they must, but they should never have trapped women and children in their crosshairs, then pulled the trigger.

Impractical Zionism

There was a high degree of impracticality involved in early Zionism, because Palestine was already inhabited by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, most of them peaceable farmers who had lived there for many centuries. They had no intention of leaving. Nor did they have any place to go. To this day, they still don't. The consequence was the Zionists ended up conquering and ruling my little Palestinian girl.

In effect, Herzl had created a Jewish state with its own congress (the WZO) before he had a place to put it. In his diary he wrote:

Were I to sum up the Basle Congress in a word — which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly — it would be this: At Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today l would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.

Almost exactly fifty years later, in 1948, Herzl's Jewish state did become a reality, and all hell broke out.

Yes, today all the world perceives that Herzl did establish a Jewish state. But please note his comment about not pronouncing his intentions publically. This would become a hallmark of the leaders of Zionism. Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir would be forced to say one thing in public, but quite another thing in private. Why? Because it's difficult to persuade the world to support the establishment of your dream homeland, if it means the destruction of someone else's homeland and dreams.

The practical reality of Zionism is this: the Jews had no logical right to displace the Palestinians, and the Palestinians had no intention of being displaced. In order to displace my little Palestinian girl, and take her family's land and water for their Jewish state, the Zionists would need powerful allies. Their main allies would be imperial British and American politicians, abetted by the gullible American taxpayer, who would quickly ante up billions of dollars so that Israeli Jews could have free land and water at my little girl's expense.

The early Zionists were fully aware (how could they not be?) of the practical problems a Jewish homeland in Palestine presented, and so they briefly considered other parts of the globe. Locations discussed included largely uninhabited areas of Uganda and South America. But in the end, of course, Palestine was selected, as Palestine was the Biblical promised land, although the Jews had not lived there in large numbers for nearly 2,000 years. The selection of Palestine for a Jewish homeland created an immediate problem, because if millions of Jews were going to move into any fairly small territory in high concentrations, one of three things had to be the case:

it had to be uninhabited

OR

if there were inhabitants, they would have to welcome the Jews

OR

the inhabitants would have to be displaced and/or subdued.

The Zionists quickly understood that they would have to follow the latter course, while appearing to be willing to co-exist with the Palestinians. The Zionist leaders, in effect, resorted to a cheap parlor trick, to misdirection. They knew the Palestinians and surrounding Arab nations would not accept large numbers of Jews willingly, and never would, because this had been clearly announced by leading Arabs. Hence, the policy of Zionists like David Ben-Gurion was to tell the world one thing, particularly the gullible American taxpayer, while doing something entirely different. The public plan was co-existence. The private plan was ethnic cleansing, the sooner the better.

The Ethnic Cleansing of 1948

Americans have been, to put it bluntly, brainwashed to believe the Palestinians were and are somehow "wrong" not to accept the Jews with open arms. But the Palestinians only did what anyone would have done in their place. Suppose someone suggested that three million Jews (or Arabs, Chinese or Kenyans) were going to relocate to your state en-masse, take it over, establish their preferred form of government, and "acquire" your land, house and property in the process, with no intention of paying for it? Would you welcome them with open arms? No, of course not. Nations allow small numbers of people to immigrate. But no nation allows another people to immigrate in such large numbers that they take over. When the Palestinians and Arabs of neighboring states understood that the Jews intended to take over Palestine, they did what anyone else would have said, including Americans. They said, No!

The Palestinians were a nation of peaceable farmers. They had lived under the aegis of larger empires, such as the Ottomans and the British, so they had not been fully autonomous. But they had every right to self-determination. However, in the aftermath of World War II, the Western nations, led primarily by Britain and the United States, did not give the Palestinians the right of self-determination. Instead, British and American politicians worked "behind the scenes" to cede much of Palestine to Jews who had not lived there in large numbers for almost 2,000 years. In effect, people who had never set foot on Palestine chose to give it away. They had no right to do this. The Zionists were unable to persuade the Palestinians to accept their presence in large numbers, so the Zionists went "over their heads" and appealed to powerful westerners who were still engaged in the last dying throes of imperialism.

Once the Zionists had a toehold in Palestine, they knew that violence would erupt, and that war was inevitable. So Golda Meir traveled to the United States and raised 50 million dollars from American Jews, so that the land, home and property of my little Palestinian girl and her family could be taken by force, after which they could be swept from their own land like insects. This was Zionism as it was implemented in 1948. The Jews became an invading army of unwelcome foreigners. The Palestinians had no army of their own, and had to rely on the disorganized, bickering armies of their Arab neighbors to defend them.

The Jews had more money: American money. They had more powerful friends in high places: American friends. They were better organized. Many of them had fought against the Nazis and were better trained. They won the war of 1948. It was hardly a "miracle." Then the Zionists did what they had planned to do for many years: they swept hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians who were non-combatants from their own land. They treated my little Palestinian girl like an insect.

And to this day her family is dispossessed, homeless, and lives the most marginal of existences. In the meantime, the Israeli Jews have grown prosperous, living on land they have never paid for, and diverting water from thirsty Palestinians to their swimming pools, while not allowing my little Palestinian girl's family to even dig a new well, or to deepen their existing wells. Perhaps because what they did is such a horror, the Israeli Jews have grown increasingly cold and brutal toward my little Palestinian girl, just as the Nazis once grew cold and brutal toward little Jewish girls during the Holocaust.

I invite anyone to research and study these matters, as I have. Many Israeli archives have been made matters of public record recently, and now even Jewish historians, journalists and human rights activists freely admit what actually happened to the Palestinians. No, there is nothing inherently wrong with the Zionist dream of a Jewish homeland, if that homeland can be established on the pillars of equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for all human beings. But this is simply not the case. In order to wrest the Jewish state of Israel from the Palestinians, the Zionists chose a simple path, not to peace, but to destruction. They chose the methods of Hitler, who claimed "living space" as the divine right of the Aryan superman, at the expense of his neighbors, who included multitudes of innocent women and children.

If you do not believe me, study these matters for yourself. But here is all the evidence I believe anyone needs to know. Before 1948 the Palestinians owned well over 90% of the land of Palestine. Within a few months they owned only a tiny sliver of the land of present-day Israel. The land was taken from innocent non-combatants, and to this day it has not been returned or paid for. There is a word for taking someone else's property without their permission and without paying a fair price for it: theft.

In short, the Israeli Jews stole the land, home, farm, property and water rights of my little Palestinian girl and her family, and of tens of thousands of other little Palestinian girls and their families, leaving them dispossessed, homeless and unable to provide for themselves. Then the Israeli Jews sent you and me, the American taxpayer, enormous bills. so that we would pick up the tab for the Holocaust they created. American Jews began to deluge us with oceans of propaganda, telling us that the Palestinians and the surrounding Arabs states were "anti-Semites" and "terrorists," when future prime ministers of Israel like David Ben-Gurion, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon were terrorists on a far larger, more systematic scale than any Palestinian. These men killed their ten thousands and dispossessed and displaced hundred of thousands, who have now grown to millions.

And all the while they laughed to the bank at the expense of the gullible American taxpayer, who is now responsible for funding and supporting a Holocaust, and for the multitudes of lives lost in two fruitless wars that would never have been required if only the Israeli Jews had, at any time, chosen to tell the truth, to establish justice for the Palestinians, and to pay them the debt they have owed them for sixty years now, and counting.

But there is a simple path to peace, and that path begins with one simple first step in the right direction: the establishment of justice—equal rights, fair laws and fair courts for Jews and Palestinians alike, without exemptions or preconditions. I do not believe the Israeli Jews will take this simple first step willingly. And it seems American politicians are unable to summon the courage to propose such a thing. So I believe we must present a petition to the UN which calls for these things, and these things only, so that all the world can see if the United States and Israel are truly democracies, or merely raging hypocrites.

I believe the United States will not vote against its greatest ideals and its own creed. This will be one UN resolution the United States must not and will not veto. And so the onus will fall on Israel, to do what must be done. If Israel complies with this UN resolution, my little Palestinian girl and her family will be protected and will have the opportunity to rebuild their shattered homes and lives. If Israel does not comply, then Israel will be isolated from the world community and American Jews will have to get off the fence. Will they side with Israel and abandon the ideals of equal rights, fair laws and fair courts, or will they counsel their kin to do what is right, or suffer the consequences?

In the end, I believe Israel will do what is right, and that both Jews and Palestinians will find a just peace, together, whether as citizens of a single democratic state, or of two independent states.

But I believe there is the danger of a devastating plague in Gaza, and if this plague is not averted, and occurs while the Palestinians are the wards of a Jewish state, Jews all over the world may be endangered once again, even American Jews. So there is no time to waste. We have everything to gain, and a world to lose.

Mike Burch
Editor, The HyperTexts
www.thehypertexts.com
March 1, 2009