Common Grounds


Our Wednesday News Analysis | Israel's state-building project is unravelling - from within

May 31, 2023

Israel’s undoing will not be an attack from Arab states or international sanctions. Rather, its leaders have created a monster they can no longer tame

 

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-state-building-project-unravelling-within

 

By Jonathan Cook
Published May 17, 2023

 

As Israel celebrates its 75th anniversary, the state-building project it cemented into place in 1948 by expelling 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland is showing the first signs of unravelling. 

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Editor’s note | If Israel continues shooting itself in both feet, soon there won’t be any feet left. 

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The surprise is that Israel’s woes spring not, as generations of its leaders feared, from outside forces - a combined attack from Arab states or pressure from the international community - but from Israel’s own internal contradictions.

 

Israeli leaders created the very problems they all too obviously lack the tools to now solve. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bombardment of Gaza in recent days, killing dozens of Palestinians, should be understood in that light. It is one more indication of Israel's internal crisis.

 

Once again, the Palestinians are being used in a frantic bid to shore up an increasingly fragile "Jewish" unity...

 

Read more: Israel's state-building project is unravelling - from within

 

YOU’RE EITHER PRO-ISRAEL OR PRO-PALESTINE. YOU CAN’T BE BOTH

 

A Palestinian boy looks at an Israeli border police officer at Qalandiya checkpoint, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, May 2011. Photo: Mohamad Torokman/Reuters


If you care about Palestine, what are the limits of that care? Does working with sympathetic Zionists who support some but not all Palestinian rights fall within those limits, or should collaboration with Zionism, however soft it might seem, be 100% taboo? I suspect this question doesn’t often occur to Palestinians and their supporters – but it was a question forced on me earlier this month. 

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Editor’s Note |

I beg to differ.

 

If we could go back to the original definition of ‘Zionism,’ crystallized in the Sacred Texts, Jews and Palestinians could be both pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.

 

Biblically, Zionism means “return to God.”

 

Jerusalem is less the 'City of David' and more the 'City of God.’

 

God welcomes all humanity —

not just one people and one state but all people and all nations — to the New Jerusalem, the New Israel for all.

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On 11 May, I was due to talk about my new book, One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel, at a webinar organized by the Balfour Project. I would be in conversation with the British-Iraqi rapper, Lowkey...

 

Read more: You’re Either Pro-Israel or Pro-Palestine. You Can’t Be Both

 

 

ZIONIST MYTHS: ISRAELI INVENTION OF ARTIFICIAL REALITY

 

1975 protest at UBC in Vancouver against the visit of then-Israeli army general Moshe Dayan. (Photo: Supplied)


Source: Palestine Chronicle
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/zionist-myths-israeli-invention-of-artificial-reality/

 

By Jamal Kanj
Published May 25, 2023

 

Seventy-five years following the Nakba, I stand as the son of two “invisible” Palestinian parents who were “spirited” from their homes to make “room” for European Khazar converts.

 

Israel is most probably the only “nation” in the post-colonial era, where claiming sovereignty over a territory was determined by a foreign-born minority population. Under the tutelage of British colonists, Zionist paramilitary groups waged a terror campaign and ethnically cleansed more than 800,000 Palestinians (according to UN data) from their homes, seized their land, and razed from existence over 500 towns and villages.

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Editor’s Note | 

What does the New Testament (the Christian Bible) say about 'One People, One Land, One God,' the holy trinity of Zionism?

 

The New Testament proclaims the Good News to ALL people, not just one people; to ALL the nations, not just one state; indeed, glorifying the one 'I Am' with many names, including but not limited to, Eloah, in Hebrew and its sound-alike, Allah, in Arabic.

 

The New Testament 1) frees the Jews from their ancestral fixation; 2) disclaims Israel's preoccupation to conquer a Land no longer promised; and 3) rejects the Israeli edict: "What is mine is mine, what is yours is mine also."

 

The New Testament holds Political-Pagan Zionism in contempt, the Israeli obsession for possession, grabbing all the land and driving out the indigenous Palestinians.

 

The New Testament affirms that many Palestinians originate from the ancient Israelites and that many present-day Israelis descend from pagan converts to Judaism with no genetic link to the ancient Israelites.

 

The New Testament unambiguously commands Christians to be Christian.

 

van Kempen, Abraham A. Christian Zionism ... Enraptured Around a Golden Calf - 2nd Edition: Evangelicals Rediscovering New Testament Revelations (p. 173). Fast Pencil Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

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For more than half a century before 1948, political Zionism constructed distorted narratives by weaving together myths, legends, and fables to craft a specious history atop the ruins of Palestinian homes. The Zionist project usurped the age-old natives’ cultural identity, employed its hasbara to fabricate false geography, and truncated mythological history...

 

Read more: Zionist Myths: Israeli Invention of Artificial Reality