WORLD WORLDWIDE FRANCE News Journal Update - (en) France, OCL: Against Zionism, against anti-Semitism. For Humanity! -Claudio Albertani (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

"Our comrade Claudio Albertani, author of numerous articles on the
situation in Mexico in Courant Alternatif as well as the book When was
Mexico screwed? sends us this text "against Zionism and anti-Semitism"
which forcefully and concisely recalls facts that are often unknown or
distorted and which shows that on the other side of the Atlantic there
are also dissident voices from the mainstream media. in the service of
Zionism against the Palestinian resistance.
"Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools"
Auguste Bebel
A few days ago[in Mexico City], during a demonstration in front of the
Israeli embassy, an individual shouted anti-Semitic slogans. He was a
provocateur who was quickly isolated. But the issue is sensitive because
the Zionist state exploits the undeniable rise in anti-Semitism after
the invasion of Gaza to justify its crimes. This story is legitimized by
a historical fact: the Jews were victims of one of the greatest
massacres in history, the Holocaust (Shoah in Hebrew), perpetrated by
the Nazis during the Second World War. This would justify survivors
taking refuge in Palestine, a region that would belong to them for
historical and theological reasons.
This is where the problem lies because Israel's problem is twofold: not
only is its current government not presentable, but its historical
legitimacy is also questionable. According to Netanyahu, the
Palestinians are a bunch of uneventful people who persecute the Jews
like the Nazis did. Under these conditions, Israel would have no choice
but to defend itself, if necessary with disproportionate force. And, of
course, anyone who opposed it would be anti-Semitic or, to be more
precise, anti-Jewish.

It turns out, however, that there are many Jews among the anti-Zionists.
In Israel itself, the new school of historians has dismantled the
founding myths of Zionism. One of them is the so-called diaspora, the
supposed exile of the Jews after the destruction of the second temple in
Jerusalem (70 AD), when they were said to have been scattered throughout
the Mediterranean. In How the Jewish People Was Invented (Fayard, 2008)
and How the Land of Israel Was Invented (Flammarion, 2012), Shlomo Sand,
from Tel Aviv University, demonstrates that this dispersion never took
place and that the Romans never expelled them.
Supporting documents, the Israeli historian proves that the Jewish
communities which existed and still exist in many regions of the world
are the product of the different waves of conversion which took place
from the 4th century of the Christian era, and not migratory flows from
Palestine. Of course, there were and are Jews scattered all over the
world; sure, they were victims of anti-Semitism, which is a terrible
stain on human history, but claiming that the Jewish people have
ancestral rights to Palestine is as absurd as claiming that Buddhists
have ancestral rights to the land of Siddhartha Gautama.

On the other hand, two archaeologists, Israel Finkelstein, also from Tel
Aviv University, and Neil Asher Silberman, from Belgium, questioning the
reliability of the Bible, have shown that it is an account fascinating
literary, but in no way from a credible historical source. After decades
of excavations in Israel, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, the two scientists
discovered that there is no evidence of the existence of the patriarchs,
nor of the flight of Jews from Egypt, nor of the conquest of Canaan. It
is even less proven that David and Solomon reigned over a vast empire
(The Bible Unveiled, Gallimard reissue, 2004).

As for the history of Zionism, an American historian of Jewish origin,
Lenni Brenner (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983), showed that,
in the 1920s and 1930s, the main leaders of the Jewish Agency even
negotiated with Hitler and Mussolini to achieve their goals. And it is
always worth remembering that the first followers of terrorism in
Palestine were members of Jewish paramilitary groups, the precursors of
today's Israel Defense Forces. It must be recognized, however, that only
a minority of Jews scattered around the world were Zionists. Brenner
discusses the experience of the General Union of Jewish Workers of
Lithuania, Poland and Russia, known as the Bund[1], which at the
beginning of the last century opposed emigration to Palestine and called
for the fight against anti-Semitism and for socialism in the countries
of origin. More recently, Matzpen, a small anti-Zionist and
anti-Stalinist communist party made up of Palestinian and Jewish
workers, fought against the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel.

Was there ever a left-wing Zionism? The humanist and utopian spirit of
Martin Buber, for example, and others who aspired to create libertarian
socialism in Palestine is undeniable. Against the Zionist slogan "A land
without people for a people without land", Buber thought of a land for
two peoples and he criticized the colonial policy of the Zionist
leaders. In 1947, on the eve of partition, he emphasized that the
solution was not to build two states, but a common binational
socio-political entity. He was right.

However, Buber's position has always been in the minority, even within
the so-called Zionist left. It was under the leadership of Mapai, the
Labor Party, that the Jewish state was proclaimed in 1948. Tens of
thousands of Palestinians were then massacred, while between 700,000 and
800,000 of them were forced to flee their homes. This is what we call in
the Arab world the Nabka[2], or "catastrophe", which is very well
explained by the Palestinian Edward Saïd in The Palestine Question
(Actes-Sud, 2010), but also by the Jewish Ilan Pappé in The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine (Fayard, 2008). An ethnic cleansing, specifies
Pappé, which still continues today. A few days ago, Avi Dichter, a
member of the Israeli government's security cabinet, bluntly declared
that the Jewish state - the same state that denied Nabka for
seventy-five years - had now launched Nabka 2023. Indeed, 80% of Gaza's
population (2.26 million inhabitants) have already been forced to flee
their homes in the worst humanitarian catastrophe since 1948.

Yet, as journalist Gideon Levy has written, it is impossible to keep 2
million people in prison without paying a cruel price. This prison must
be dismantled now and, as improbable as it may seem, in the long term,
only the reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians that the "utopian"
Buber advocated can change the destiny of the two peoples. In 2009, the
US CIA predicted Israel's collapse within 20 years, and today the
Pentagon says the Jewish state could suffer a strategic defeat in its
war on Gaza. The countdown has begun.

by Claudio Albertani
December 2023

Notes
[1]Read No, we are not a chosen people - The doctrine of the Polish Bund
in the texts, Acratie editions, 2016.

[2]Read The Nakba will never be legitimate, Pierre Stambul, Sarah Katz,
Acratie editions, 2018

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4012
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