Alan Hart

The short answer is nobody (except perhaps Zionism itself).

That’s a conclusion. Now let’s see how we get to it.

The more Zionism’s version of the history of the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine comes to be seen for the propaganda nonsense it is, the more supporters of Israel right or wrong are being mobilised – see below – to tell the world that Israel’s Jews really are in danger of being driven into the sea or nuked by Iran, if not today, tomorrow. The beauty of this assertion from Zionism’s perspective is that, feeding off the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, it justifies anything and everything Israel does, war crimes and all, to consolidate its hold on those parts of the occupied West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem it intends to keep for all time, and go oppressing the Palestinians and denying them an acceptable minimum of justice.

Soon after he arrived in London in November 2007 to take up his appointment as Israel’s ambassador, Ron Prosor unveiled an Israeli Foreign Ministry plan to beef-up its propaganda offensive. He said that he and all of his staff would be getting out of their offices and into television and radio studios up and down the UK. And he called on Jews everywhere to become engaged in the process of pressing Israel’s line on the media by all available means. Prosor’s declaration of intent amounted to an admission that critics of Israel’s policies (including a growing number of eminent Israeli and other Jews) are beginning to make some waves, and that unless further great effort was made by its unquestioning supporters, Israel would be in danger of becoming widely perceived as the real obstacle to peace. (Which, of course, it is).

The extent to which this mobilisation is producing concrete results was on display over the weekend of 9/10 March in Have Your Say, the BBC’s global call-in programme. The question put forward by presenter Jonathan Charles for discussion was – What can be done to break the deadlock in the Middle East and put the peace process back on track? This particular Have Your Say programme was quite unlike all previous editions devoted to the Israel/Palestine conflict. How so?

In all previous editions, the majority of callers were (perhaps I should say seemed to be if memory serves me correctly) critical of Israel to one degree or another. Hardly surprising given that there are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world and only between 13 and 17 million Jews. But in the programme broadcast over 9/10 March, the majority of callers – I mean those invited to express an opinion on-air – were supporters of Israel right or wrong. For listeners who know little or nothing worth knowing about the making and sustaining of the conflict, the main impressions conveyed by the programme were that Hamas not Israel is to blame for the fact that the peace process is going nowhere, and that Hamas and others (Hizbollah and Iran were most frequently mentioned) want to destroy Israel. Presenter Charles mentioned that before going on-air, the programme received “many thousands” of e-mails. I think it’s more than reasonable to assume that the majority of the e-mails on this occasion were the product of a highly organised Zionist lobby campaign, designed to influence the balance of opinion to be called by the BBC for the programme. Informed and honest debate was not well served and, no doubt, Ambassador Prosor and his foreign ministry colleagues would have been more than happy with the show.

During the programme a Palestinian from Gaza got as far as saying, “Whois going to destroy Israel?” He obviously believed that the assertion that nuclear-armed Israel could be destroyed by any combination of non-nuclear Arab force was nothing more than Zionist propaganda nonsense. Presenter Charles didn’t want to open that can of worms. But I will.

The truth of the past 60 years can be summarised as follows. From its unilateral declaration of independence in 1948 to the present, Israel‘s existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force.Zionism’s assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed its monster child to get away where it mattered most – in America and Western Europe – with having itsaggression perceived as self-defense.As I document in detail in my two-volume book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the front line Arab states, despite some empty and stupid rhetoric to the contrary, never had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine. They knew that was a mission impossible. And that is even more their conviction today.

What of the future?

There can be no doubt that Hamas and Hizbollah could do some serious damage to Israel, but only to a point at which Israel would respond with maximum force to destroy the military capabilities of both movements

Some commentators made much of Israel’s failure to defeat Hamas in the warrens of its home ground in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006, but that was a failure of strategic military thinking not military capability. If instead of trying to do the job mainly by air Israel’s generals had launched a major ground offensive with the objective of rolling up Lebanon to the LitaniRiver, it would have been a very different story. Sure the IDF would have taken heavy casualties, but it could have destroyed Hizbollah as a fighting force and prevented the return of armed hostiles to Lebanon south of the Litani. The point is that what Israel did not do in southern Lebanon in 2006, it could do at any time of its choosing in the future.

The assertion that Hizbollah and Hamas do or could pose a threat to Israel’s existence is plain silly.

So, given that the Arab regimes are not going to war with Israel, what about a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to Israel’s existence?

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Iran has nuclear weapons a few years from now. Would it then launch a nuclear strike to wipe Israel off the map? How one answers that question depends on whether or not one thinks that any leadership in Iran would be mad enough to invite nuclear retaliation. I don’t think any Iranian leadership would be that stupid. I also believe that if there are some in the present leadership who do want Iran to have nuclear weapons, they want them for only one purpose – deterrence, to deter Israel from attacking Iran.

But I also think it’s most unlikely that Iran will actually develop nuclear weapons. Its leaders know that if they got to within one or two years of doing so, Israel, with or without America’s blessing, would take them (Iran’s nuclear facilities) out, and would do with with a nuclear strike if its generals believed they could not do the job with conventional weapons.

The assertion that Iran does pose or could pose a threat to Israel’s existence is also plain silly.

Only Jews (and not all of them) believe that Israel’s enemies have, or one day will have, both the desire and the capability to destroy the Zionist state; and they believe it only because they’ve been conditionedby Zionism to so believe. A large part of the problem, or so it seems to me, is that many Jews, Israelis and others, needto believe tha
t Israel’s very existence is threatened by its enemies. And this need exists because it saves Jews from having to ask themselves uncomfortable and painful questions about the nature of the Zionist state and its criminal behaviour.

The irony, perhaps the greatest irony in all of human history to date, is thatthe only real threat to Israel’s existence is the demographic time-bomb created by Zionism’s conquest and colonisation of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 1967.

Sharon’s decision to end Israel’s occupation of the Gaza Strip had nothing whatever to do with advancing a peace process. In his advancing years Prime Minister Sharonhad come to grips with one aspect of reality, it being that Israel would have three options if it stayed in occupation of the Gaza Strip and all of the West Bank.

OPTION 1 was formally annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and, to enable Israel to go on claiming that it was a democracy, to grant all of its citizens equal rights. The problem with this was that it would bring about the end of the Jewish state by political means because, in due course, the Arab citizens of Greater Israel would outnumber and outvote its Jewish citizens.

OPTION 2 was formally annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but denying Greater Israel’s Arab citizens (the majority in-the-making) equal rights. In this scenario Greater Israel would have to treat its Arab citizens even worse than the black majority in South Africa was treated by its apartheid regime. And that would not be acceptable to most Jews of the world and, perhaps, at least half the Jews of Israel. It would also present the international community with no choice, at some point, but to declare Greater Israel a pariah state and impose sanctions on it.

OPTION 3 was to resort to another and final round of ethnic cleansing – provoking an all-out confrontation with the Palestinians to give the IDF and the armed settlers the pretext for driving the Palestinians out of the occupied territories and into Eygpt, Jordan or wherever, all in the name of self-defence, of course. If the Palestinians refused to flee, there would be a bloodbath. A Zionist holocaust.

It was in the light of those options that Sharon decided to withdraw from the Gaza Strip as a first step to defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation.

The second step, which Sharon had thought through before he was taken out by a stroke, was to be a withdrawal from up to 40% of the West Bank, to create the space for three or four bantustans which the Palestinians could call a state if they wished. Sharonw as not remotely concerned that such a solution would fail to provide the Palestinians with an acceptable minimum of justice and would be rejected by them. It was to be a take-it or leave-it offer, and if the Palestinians refused it, there was always OPTION 3. Sharon’s only concern was defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation. He was aware that some Israelis (and probably all of America’s Christian fundamentalists) would call him a traitor; but he was at peace with himself in the knowledge that what he was proposing would be true to Zionism’s mission – taking for keeps the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it.

The job of telling Israelis the truth about why there had to be some withdrawals from the West Bank was eventually taken on by Sharon’s successor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In November 2007, in an interview with Ha’aretz, he said that if Israel didn’t agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state (on bits and pieces of the West Bank), Israel would face “a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights”, and as soon as that happened“the state of Israel is finished.”

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