Why Israel Can Get Lost
Get lost – idiom originally from the Yiddish ver farvalgert, meaning “to go” or “move away”, 1947 or earlier, used in contempt or exasperation with somebody’s presence or communication.
Being one who swims against the current in a geopolitical and ideological sense I’ve found myself swimming alongside some unusual and sometimes, frankly, disgusting schools of fish (see what I did there?). One of these distasteful varieties are in need of a good probing. They’re usually found squawking “If you don’t like Islam, then support Israel”, leading me to wonder whether the common sense of “the enemy of my enemy is not my friend” is really that common after all.
Instead of building a case piece by piece and then expecting you to figure out my stance on Israel, I’m going to put my conclusion first so you can judge the various threads for yourself.
It appears to me the Israeli establishment and it’s citizenry think we all owe them something, forever, and that they should be able to go and do whatever they please with the backing of the entire Western world as an insurance policy for the inevitable moment somebody decides to kill them. The world is a cruel place when you have nowhere to live but everybody else does, and committing wholesale genocide to make room for yourself is a tough job. Just ask the United States – they had to do that all by themselves, and still do to this day. Being a diaspora converging en mass on a piece of land already occupied by people who look nothing like you is an uphill assault. I just don’t see why the rest of us have to be involved. And don’t give me that crap about The Holocaust – the Jewish community has been whinging about “we need help with this and that” for well over 100 years.
The Nation State of Israel came to be after the chaos of deciding which parts of the defunct Ottoman Empire should be a part of which nation and where all the squiggly lines should go. The United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, in 1917, declared to the Jews of Britain and the world that they have a home in the newly formed Palestine, providing the religious communities already living there weren’t adversely affected. Initially there weren’t many takers – unsurprisingly, considering nobody wanted them there – triggering 100 years of promotional campaigns, including the recruitment Christian preachers to spread the word. One surprising source of support for the Zionist cause came from Nazi Germany with The Transfer Agreement (1933) where German Jews could cash in their properties and assets in Germany, get a free pass to Palestine, then withdraw their assets in the form of German export goods. Strange behaviour for a country that hated Jews, right? Maybe it’s time to watch The Greatest Story Never Told and Hellstorm.
After 31 years of settlement and increased tensions, the International Community partitioned Palestine into an Arab homeland and a Jewish homeland in 1948. The Zionist settlers have ever-since been buying and occupying Palestinian territory, bit by bit.
If you wanted to build an empire that is self-sustaining and capable of dominating a whole region or the world, your first pick would be Israel/Palestine and the surrounding area. Israel is blessed with a variety of mineral resources, due to last it 100s of years, as well as crude oil and natural gas. Palestine has more of the same, while neighbouring Lebanon has plenty of minerals and ore. It’s a nice, rich, central location; you have to be pulling my leg when you tell me Zionism is all about Jerusalem being the Jewish spiritual home. Of all holy cities they could have picked, it also happens to be holy to 3 or 4 other faiths. The rhetoric defending the question of why Jews get to be the ones controlling the area has a definite stench of Jewish Supremacy about it as they claim to make it safe and accessible to all faiths. The implied wisdom of that is “if it were left to those savages, it’d be too dangerous to visit.”
Given the nation state’s continued settlement of Palestine and the “mysterious” destabilization of neighbouring countries, presumably for a Greater Israel, it comes with absolutely no shock to me groups like Hamas exist. Pamela Geller and other pro-Israel/anti-Islam pundits sully the debate on Islam by squawking on about Hamas for quoting Hassan al-Banna in the opening of their Charter (“Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.”) Not only are these people detracting from our argument by quoting a cleric even most Muslims never heard of, they’re also begging us to get or stay involved in a regional power struggle most average people wouldn’t otherwise give a shit about.
Despite most day to day people not giving a shit, Israel enjoys popular support on the International stage and seems immune from anything the United Nations says about them.It receives billions annually in aid for it’s defense budget, with the United States being the top contributor (at $3 billion annually) – this for a nation of a mere 8 million people which enjoys a GDP of $36,051.15. For comparison, France’s population is 66 million and covers 25 times the area Israel does, but their GDP only just comes out on top at $42,503.30, despite being above the EU average. They look very comfortable over there in their Jew-only state, sitting pretty on a booming economy and their Western friends footing the security bill – according to former JDF Commander-in-Chief Gabi Ashkenazi. I’d make a joke about how that’s entirely appropriate, but you can’t even do that now without invoking PTSD flashbacks of The Shoah.
Fuck that.
Their intelligence network conducts terrorist attacks to draw us into their conflict, ask us for more money to defend against the blowback, and their children sign mortar shells with well wishes for the Arabs they’ll blow to bits; and now they complain when we boycott them in the West and Hamas says some mean things about them.
Fuck.
That.
Shit.