
At last somebody has said it in the most explicit way possible. The somebody also said: “The problem is Zionism and the solution is dismantling the Zionist framework and instituting a secular democracy that does not discriminate between Israelis and Palestinians.”
The somebody was Miko Peled, a Jewish peace activist who was born in Israel and lives in America.
He is the son of an Israeli war hero, Matti Peled, who was a young officer in the war of 1948 and a general in the war of 1967. After that war, General Peled signalled his own commitment to truth by rubbishing Zionism’s version of events. He did so with the statement that there was not a threat to Israel’s existence and that it was a war of Israeli choice (i.e. aggression not self-defense). General Peled was also one of a number of prominent Jews who called soon after the 1967 war for the immediate establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In his latest article from which my headline for this piece was extracted, Miko says that the two-state solution was clearly viable 40 years ago, but today…? He writes (my emphasis added):
“Now the West Bank is riddled with towns and malls and highways built on Palestinian land for Jews only and Israeli cabinet members openly discuss population transfers, or rather transfer of its non-Jewish population. The level of oppression and the intensity of the violence against Palestinians has reached new heights… Discussing the two-state solution now under these conditions shows an acute inability to accept reality… There is an illusion that a liberal, forward thinking government can rise in Israel and then everything will be just as liberal Zionists wish it to be. They will pick up where Rabin and Arafat left off and we will have the pie in sky Jewish democracy liberal Jews want so much to see in Israel. This illusion is shared by American Jews, liberal Zionists in Israel and around the world and in the West where guilt of two millennia of persecuting Jews still haunts the conscience of many. If only there were better leaders and if only this and if only that… But alas, reality continues to slap everyone in the face: Zionism and peace are incompatible. I will say it again, Zionism and peace are incompatible.”
Miko adds that serious study of the history of modern Israel shows that “the emergence of Netanyahu and Lieberman was perfectly predictable.”
I agree and offer this summary explanation of why.
Zionism is not only Jewish nationalism which created a state in the Arab heartland mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing. It is also a pathological mindset. In the deluded Zionist mind the world was always anti-Jew and always will be. It follows that Holocaust II (shorthand for another great turning against Jews) is inevitable. It follows that there can be no limits to what Zionism will do in order to preserve nuclear-armed Greater Israel as a refuge of last resort for all Jews everywhere when the world turns against them.
When I was reflecting on Miko’s main point, that Zionism and peace are incompatible, I found myself wondering why really it is that American presidents will not use the leverage they have to try to call the Zionist state to account for its crimes when doing so would clearly be in America’s own best interests.
I’m beginning to think that the awesome influence of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress is not the complete answer. And the question I am asking myself is this: Could it be that all American presidents know there is nothing nuclear-armed Israeli leaders would not do if they were seriously pressed to make peace on terms which they believed in their own deluded minds would put Israel’s security at risk? Always in my own mind is what Prime Minister Golda Meir said to me in a BBC Panorama interview and from which I quote in my book – in a doomsday situation Israel “would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it.”
If it is the case that American presidents are frightened of provoking Israel, the conclusion would have to be that the Zionist state is a monster beyond control and that all efforts for peace are doomed to failure.
Is the situation really as bad as that?
My own answer is yes. But there are some observers who think that after the mid-term elections in America there might be one more opportunity for President Obama to bring enough Israelis to their senses in order to give peace its very last chance.
This new hope has been inspired, apparently, by reports of a forthcoming Palestinian (and presumably wider Arab) initiative to have the Security Council recognize Palestinian independence within the 1967 borders.
In Ha’aretz on 20 October, Aluf Benn wrote this:
“Israel’s diplomacy has reached a turning point. Instead of dealing with the failed direct talks, from this point Israel will be orchestrating a diplomatic holding action against the Palestinian initiative to have the UN Security Council recognize Palestinian independence within the 1967 borders. Such a decision would deem Israel an invader and occupier, paving the way for measures against Israel. Obama could scuttle the process by casting an American veto. Would he do it? And at what price?
“Barak is warning Netanyahu that Obama is determined to establish a Palestinian state, even if it requires political risks. The president doesn’t have to come out publicly against Israel, but can simply stand on the sidelines when the Security Council recognizes Palestine. The international movement to boycott Israel will gain massive encouragement when Europe, China and India turn their backs on Israel and erode the last remnants of its legitimacy. Gradually the Israeli public will also feel the diplomatic and economic stranglehold.
“It’s not certain that this will happen.”
We shall see.
If you liked this post, then...
- Share it with others using this button:
- Comment on it using the form below.
- Subscribe to my blog via email or RSS to get "new post" alerts.
- Follow me on Twitter (@alanauthor).
[...] http://www.alanhart.net/zionism-and-peace-are-incompatible/#more-1298 [...]
"If it is the case that American presidents are frightened of provoking Israel, the conclusion would have to be that the Zionist state is a monster beyond control and that all efforts for peace are doomed to failure."
That's why JFK was killed. JFK didn't want the world to be, one day, in this context before the zionist monster. The Zionist state already took the world as hostage. Now, what can we do ? That's the question. How can we deal with the nuclear armed zionists ?
Indeed. Zionism is antinomic with Peace.
We must try to solve this problem by means of justice only without any violent action. Otherwise the cycle would continue.
The following e-mail (with my emphasis added) was sent to me by Mike Sievers through my contact page.
I thought my response might be valuable to all readers who have not read my book.
Hello Mike,
I think the most important of your questions for me to address is the first.
The Arabs did NOT start the 1967 war. One can say, and I do say, that Nasser was stupid enough to give Israel's hawks a pretext - actually Dayan and co set a trap for Nasser and he walked into it with eyes more than half open - but that doesn't change the fact that it was a war of Israeli choice and aggression, not self-defense.
My prime sources in support of the fact that the Arabs did not start the war are Israeli leaders. I quote them in AMERICA TAKES SIDES, WAR WITH NASSER ACT II AND THE CREATION OF GREATER ISRAEL. This is Chapter 1 of Volume Three of the American edition (www.claritypress.com) of my book ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS, sub-titled CONFLICT WITHOUT END?
I presume (by all means correct me if I am wrong) that you will not wish to read my book; but having asserted that the Arabs started the war, you might wish to consider the following passage from book which explains why you are wrong.
If the statement that the Arabs were not intending to attack Israel and that the existence of the Jewish state was not in danger was only that of a goy, it could be dismissed by Zionists as anti-Semitic conjecture. In fact the truth the statement represents was admitted by some of the key Israeli players – after the war, of course. Before we look at what actually happened in 1967 and why, here is a short summary of some pertinent, post-war Israeli confessions.
In an interview published in Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin said this: “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.”
On 14 April 1971, a report in the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar contained the following statement by Mordecai Bentov, a member of the wartime national government. “The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated a posteriori to justify the annexation of new Arab territory.”
On 4 April 1972, General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin’s predecessor as chief of staff, was quoted in Ma’ariv as follows: “We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six-Days war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”
In the same Israeli newspaper on the same day, General Ezer Weizman, Chief of Operations during the war and a nephew of Chaim Weizman, was quoted as saying: “There was never any danger of annihilation. This hypothesis has never been considered in any serious meeting.”
In the spring of 1972, General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel’s General Staff, addressed a political literary club in Tel Aviv. He said: “The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war.”1
In a radio debate Peled said: “Israel was never in real danger and there was no evidence that Egypt had any intention of attacking Israel.” He added that “Israeli intelligence knew that Egypt was not prepared for war.”
In the same programme Chaim Herzog (former DMI, future Israeli Ambassador to the UN and President of his state) said: “There was no danger of annihilation. Neither Israeli headquarters nor the Pentagon – as the memoirs of President Johnson proved – believed in this danger.”
On 3 June 1972 Peled was even more explicit in an article of his own for Le Monde. He wrote: “All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, have never been considered in our calculations. While we proceeded towards the full mobilisation of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our ‘defence’ against the Egyptian threat. This force was to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel’s existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army.”
The preference of some generals for truth-telling after the event provoked something of a debate in Israel, but it was short-lived. If some Israeli journalists had had their way, the generals would have kept their mouths shut. Weizmann was one of those approached with the suggestion that he and others who wanted to speak out should “not exercise their inalienable right to free speech lest they prejudice world opinion and the Jewish diaspora against Israel.”2
It is not surprising that debate in Israel was shut down before it led to some serious soul-searching about the nature of the state and whether it should continue to live by the lie as well as the sword; but it is more than remarkable, I think, that the mainstream Western media continues to prefer the convenience of the Zionist myth to the reality of what happened in 1967 and why. When reporters and commentators have need today to make reference to the Six Days War, they still tell it like the Zionists said it was in 1967 rather than how it really was. Obviously there are still limits to how far the mainstream media is prepared to go in challenging the Zionist account of history, but it could also be that lazy journalism is a factor in the equation.
For those journalists, lazy or not, who might still have doubts about who started the Six Days War, here’s a quote from what Prime Minister Begin said in an unguarded, public moment in 1982. “In June 1967 we had a choice. The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us, We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
Alan
[...] The somebody was Miko Peled, a Jewish peace activist who was born in Israel and lives in America. http://www.alanhart.net/zionism-and-peace-are-incompatible/ Caterpillar has stopped selling bulldozers to Israel… for now – The Israeli press is [...]
It would help if you would quote the whole relevant passage of what Golda Meir said before your question to her where you seem to rephrase it, which she then agreed with, there doesn't seem to be a complete version online, and it's just a truncated quote or paraphrase as is.