By Raul Antonio Capote on January 18, 2024 from Havana
photo: AFP
The recent events in the Gaza Strip have laid bare, as never before, the essence of Zionism and the complicity of the West and the US with the Israeli regime.
With total impunity, the Zionist military forces have acted against the civilian population. They stop at nothing.
Women, the elderly and children are buried under the rubble of their homes, schools and hospitals, thanks to the weapons delivered by Washington.
Anyone who raises their voice to denounce the crimes is immediately branded as an anti-Semite, or of trying to reenact the Jewish holocaust, a tragic event carried out by a regime that claimed the necessary “living space” for a race that considered itself superior and chosen.
To label as anti-Semitism those governments, institutions or personalities in the world who condemn the Israeli massacre in Gaza, is a nonsense devoid of any scientific, historical and ethical perspective.
The Israeli regime could rightly be accused of anti-Semitism, as a result of the murder, persecution and dispossession of the Arabs and other peoples that inhabit the multi-ethnic region, where the great family of Shem’s descendants coexists.
Modern Zionism emerged at the end of the 19th century in Europe. Its main creator was the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl, who convened the first Zionist congress in the city of Basel, Switzerland, in 1897.
It is an ideology born of the contradictions and internal nationalist tensions in Eastern and Central Europe in the 19th century. It was not born in the Middle East, among the communities that lived there and coexisted without problems; it is the putative daughter of Western colonialist doctrines.
The causes of its emergence are extremely complex. The influence of religious prejudices, of elements of the cultural heritage of Europe, even the complex mythical and racist motivations that led to the persecution of the Jews, had an important weight.
It is necessary to emphasize that this ideology is not defended by all Jews, nor do all Zionists practice Judaism; not all Jews are Israelis either, they live in many parts of the world, they are Americans, Poles, Russians, Spaniards, etc.
A land without a people for a people without a land?
This was the slogan of the Zionist movement: A land without people for a people without land, something that was absolutely based on a false premise.
The first Zionist colonies were established on the coastal plain north of Jaffa, Palestine, in the 1880s. The land had been acquired by Baron Edmond Rothschild, financier and promoter of the colonialist project.
The Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, committed Britain to the Zionist project by announcing its support for the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in the region of Palestine.
They never took into account the opinion of the inhabitants of the region, nor even, as the text stated, did the idea of consulting them cross their minds.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, at the end of World War I, the British Army entered Jerusalem, and Palestine came under military control.
A census carried out in 1921 showed a population of 762,000 inhabitants in Palestine, 76.9% Muslim, 11.6% Christian, 10.6% Jewish and 0.9% of other denominations. It is important to note that only 2.4% of the total area of the country was in Jewish hands.
In May 1936 a great Palestinian insurrection took place, which lasted for three years, until May 1939, when the British Government published the acceptance of part of the Arab claims, in the so-called White Paper, in which they proposed the celebration, within a maximum period of ten years, of a referendum on the self-determination of Palestine.
The Zionists reacted violently. The director of the Jewish National Fund, Josef Weitz, expressed: “Perhaps with the sole exception of Bethlehem, Nazareth and the old city of Jerusalem, we should not leave a single settlement, not a single tribe”.
On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the resolution to create two states in Palestine, one Arab and one Jewish. The document granted 57% of the territory to the future Jewish State and 43% to the Arab State. As expected, the Arab countries rejected the disparity of the project.
Thus, in December 1947, the planned and systematic mass eviction of the indigenous population from their homes and lands began. By March 1948, the Israeli leadership launched Plan Dalet, which provided for the destruction of villages and the carrying out of operations to exterminate any resistance.
When Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, proclaimed the State of Israel in May 1948, more than 300,000 Palestinians had already been evicted from their homes.
On the very day of the Declaration of Independence, the first Arab-Israeli war began, which lasted from May 15, 1948 until January 6, 1949, when the United Nations imposed a truce.
Thus came to an end the so-called “war of independence” of the State of Israel.
During the 1948 conflict, Israel not only managed to keep the territories granted to it by the United Nations, but even increased them. Zionist forces then expelled more than 800,000 Palestinians and expropriated their homes and lands.
It was the Palestinian Naqba, the disaster, the dismemberment of the community, the mass exodus of its members.
The Israeli state lost some of its allies after the 1967 conflict, when it invaded and occupied East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, but maintained the unconditional financial, political and military support of the United States and Europe.
There are no religious, ethnic, historical or geographical reasons to justify what has happened during all these years. The Zionist occupation of Palestine is an action as barbaric as Nazism, which exterminated millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Magyars, Russians and other peoples of the Old Continent.
The massacre in Gaza has been going on for more than 100 days, and the number of dead has reached 24,000.
Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu celebrated the Israeli actions with a haughty and defiant speech, in which he promised to continue the fighting until the final victory, “No one will stop us”, he said.
The similarity of his “prophecy” takes us back in time to the final months of World War II, when the leader of a racist and genocidal ideology and system, guilty of the murder of millions of people, many of them Jews, promised to fight until the “final triumph”. Zionists and their accomplices should remember how that story ended.
Sources: Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, History of Jerusalem, A History of God, and Bible Unearthed.
Ben Ami, S. and Medin, Z. (1991): Historia del Estado de Israel, Madrid, Rialp.
Culla, J. B. (2005): Breve historia del sionismo. Madrid, Alianza.
Jacobin Magazine, Latin America.
Source: Cuba en Resumen