From Toe Hold to Freehold: Zionist Occupation Strategies

Photo courtesy of Atlantic Council

When US President Donald Trump arrogantly suggested that the neighbouring Arab States should absorb the Gaza population as a solution to Israel’s decimation of Gaza, he announced what discerning persons the world over had already perceived – the earliest Zionist Israeli arrivals, courtesy Lord Balfour, had come to take it all.

From a toe hold then to a freehold today, Israel has turned international law, UN mechanisms for a safer world and street ethics on its head. It demolishes Palestinian homes and occupies their lands, detains and kills as it pleases and then along with its allies, accuses those who object of anti-Semitism.

Terror reinvented

The multiple, horrific acts of humiliation and cold blooded murder of children, women and men, wallowing in the Gaza dust for scraps of food, have played and replayed before a stunned world today and predictably tomorrow. Beyond Palestine, picking and choosing independent sovereign nations to bomb and assassinate at will, Israel warns its neighbours and others to keep off while it perfects the art of genocide on dying humans half buried in the rubble.

There is no need for covert crime as Israel goes about its deadly mission of “all of Palestine, for Israel only”. Big brother US ensures her impunity through a fine-tuned scheme of rewards and punishments while British and EU leaders, cringing before President Trump, expertly reconcile their vacant, performative expressions of public concern with a resolute defence of these same atrocities at global assemblies.

The UN has been thrashed toothless. The whole world knows that peace keeping forces are an option only when they have the US nod. Unable to keep its original mandate of a warless world, the UN is clearly troubled with its current identity crisis.

But the complicity is also of most Middle East states. The posh life with posh airlines, posh hotels, posh sports stadiums, posh golf courses and posh desert safaris, raised out of the harsh desert dunes, cannot be allowed to end up in rubble. US proxy bases, ominously scattered among the nations of the region and a nuanced diplomatic vocabulary, crafted to sound as if the mayhem will be stopped any moment, keep Israeli missiles at bay.

Accountability in hiding

Europe is historically and morally obliged to stop the genocide and ensure an end to the occupation. It cannot any longer hide from its own sordid history in which Jews were mocked as Christ killers and tormented and torn apart for centuries. Hitler was demonic but the seeds of his final solution were sown at the endless anti-Jewish pogroms in the cultured cities of Europe. Like many Europeans he had been formed in an ultra-vicious, anti-Semitism. Even Martin Luther, the German monk who advocated the momentous 16th CE Christian Reformation, was a Jew hater, urging that Jewish houses be burnt and their occupants driven from the cities.

This first part of an atrocious historical crime shifted to the second when the British cunning carved out Palestine for the ship loads of European Jewish refugees fleeing the holocaust, clearly unwelcome in Britain and North America.

In Palestine, among multi-cultural communities who knew how to live together (Arab Muslims and Christians, Jews, Druze and Bedouins), the first Jewish refugees were received as displaced strangers in the spirit of the golden rule.

Europe today treats the rest of the world as if it was guilty of Europe’s repugnant anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust. European hypocrisy clamps down on voices from within and beyond that demand an end to Israel’s illegal occupation and genocide of Palestinians, accusing them of being anti-Semitic despite anti-Semitism still being most prevalent in the West and in spite of the rise of the historically and worrying anti-Semitic far right in the continent.

As the cradle of the chain of brutal events that have led to the Gaza genocide today to take on the role of global guardians of Jewish historical sensitivities with cupboards full of anti-Semitic skeletons is the height of European duplicity.

The call of conscience

Short of regime change and saner governance in both the US and Israel, Israel and its allies will not relent. They will do everything within their power to kill and expel the resilient people of Gaza from their homes.

But the mistake we make is to look to the perpetrators of crime for remedies. There is a better, time tested way of ensuring justice and freedom for Palestine. Brazilian President Lula got it absolutely right when he recently declared with great dignity that President Trump is not the emperor of the world. The more real world leaders stand up to such types and US and Israeli citizens resist their dictatorial ways, the better for Palestine and the world.

There are some initiatives that the rest of civilised humanity can and must take. One is to urge their governments to sever diplomatic ties with Israel. This will end a façade that cannot continue any longer. Israel cannot have a presence on par with governments who value life while it starves and slaughters the innocents. Such an overdue move will also check the inroads to build Zionist communities around Chabad houses in several parts of the world, including our own Sri Lanka.

Another is for sports, aesthetic, academic, tourist, religious and trade bodies to ban the participation of Israel from their respective spheres and activities forthright. This worked with apartheid South Africa and it must work with genocidal Zionism. To play football or hold concerts with Israeli participation when genocide rages from where they come would be immoral by any standards.

Since the boycott is part of the Boycott, De-investment, Sanctions mandate against Israel, this persistent movement must receive a more dramatic escalation at the global level.

Of course there will be harsh and costly repercussions. But as people in solidarity for a free world repeatedly learn, conscience is all that is left when flesh and blood stand up to terror unlimited.

With peace and blessings to all.