Zionism’s Original Sin

Peloni:  It is impossible to reconcile the distinctions drawn between Smotrich’s advocacy to recognize Gaza as Jewish land and those who would see it ceded to the Gazan psychopaths who supported, elected and by the thousands joined Hamas in fulfilling its blood lust and debauchery on October 7 in the Kibutzim of the Gaza envelop.  Abandoning this land to our enemies under any condition or negotiation designates a permanent penalty upon the Jewish people and simultaneously provides a trophy for those who would see the land of Israel soaked in Jewish blood, fulfilling the endless fantasies of those pernicious reprobates singing ‘from the river to the sea’.  Gaza is the land of the Jewish people, not some ransoming chit to be bargained away.  It is to Netanyahu’s eternal shame that he would fail to act in preventing Gaza from being ripped from the Jewish people a second time, the first being his long delayed silence while the Expulsion of 2005 became all but accepted.  It is incomprehensible that the surrender of Gaza should be supported by any political party, to any people, at any time.  For Likud to take such a position in surrendering these Jewish lands a second time to the very psychopaths who made October 7 possible, and who participating in the vile revelries of that great slaughter, should be understood to be as inexplicable as it is unacceptable.  On Yom HaShoah, in the silent moments honoring the memory of the Holocaust and past heroes, the current undertaking to betray the Zionist claim to our ancestral lands, which includes Gaza, screams for a reconsideration.  Min. Smotrich is to be congratulated for sounding this clarion call to make Gaza Jewish again.

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Photo by Benjamin Istanbuli on Unsplash

I just read online a lengthy but splendid, historical-legal argument by Karen Stahl-Don establishing the State of Israel in international law as the legal and legitimate sovereign in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, a.k.a. “from the river to sea,” and this year’s Independence Day would be remembered as the best ever if the government had told this to the world, but it never has. And I wonder why not?

The community of Sa Nur in the Shomron, destroyed by the alleged Oslo peace processors, has now been brought back to life, with returnees and I assume new members. And there was Minister Betzalel Smotrich at the rebirth ceremony also calling for the return of Jewish settlement in Gaza, that strip of 25-mile beachfront property which could serve as a solution to the latest violence against Israel by the Muslim goy there, a zone originally meant to be a temporary refuge for war refugees that turned into a permanent, massive terror base for homicidal aggression against the adjacent Jewish communities.

But, oddly, official Israel in its own self-defense under assault by these genocidal Islamic crusaders has never once defended itself by telling the world that the violence directed at Israelis by the gentiles in that Strip, Judea and Samaria is perpetrated on land that is legally in international law Israeli land, and Israel has the right to call for the transfer of these homicidal Jew-hating maniacs out of Eretz Yisrael and resettled wherever the world’s 192 bleeding heart, pro-“Palestinian” countries will have them.

Israel National News reported on Minister Smotrich’s desire in his speech to claim Gaza as a place where Israeli Jews have the right to live again, but the anonymous journalist then added that “Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly insisted this is not going to happen.” In this behavior, he exposed himself as not the bold, proud New Jew, right-wing Zionist refusing to accept passively gentile persecution any more, when this refusal to claim Gaza is just that. It is motivated by the secular Zionist fantasy of proving to the world we Jews are not imperialists ravenous to steal even more Palestinian land then we have already. Israel has no claims on this real estate in the mind of Prime Minister Binyamin ben-Bentzion Netanyahu.

Ask your average, secular Israeli why has Israel never annexed Judea and Samaria and he will answer, “But then we would have to give the Palestinians citizenship and the right to vote in the Knesset or be tarred as a culture of apartheid” — when Israeli Jews are arguably the most racially, genetically-mixed citizenry on earth.

But another, more realpolitik explanation for never claiming legitimate ownership is security: maintaining the status quo since 1967 allows Israel to treat the locals more harshly, under a species of martial law.

Another motivation might also be rooted in the inarticulate and fallacious assumption of the Zionist movement, that one of the causes of antisemitism is calling ourselves the Chosen People. Indeed, many in the hard-core Zionist Left believed antisemitism was the result of the Jewish religion itself, which isolated the Jews inside other nations that made for friction, and like all religions was, in any case, a superstitious narcotic. The secular Zionists believed it was possible to have peace with the Arabs when we jettison our timeless, religious identity and become a normal people. I once saw Shimon Peres interviewed on PBS say, “The purpose of Zionism is the normalization of the Jewish people.”

I am reminded of my first experience of Israel at age 19 two years before the Six-Day War, Israel’s 17th year, and not having been exposed to a Zionist upbringing beyond reading and thoroughly enjoying Leon Uris’s bestseller “Exodus,” so in my first days and weeks in the country, falling in with the elite Ashkenazic Mapai soldiers my age, I was amazed to discover that many did not identity as Jews at all. In their modern Hebrew, a Jew was a religious person, and since they were not religious, they saw themselves as Israelis.

In fact, the late leftist Shulamith Aloni was one of small group who of shallow intellectuals established an association to pressure the Ministry of the Interior to edit the information on them in the matter of their national identity. They wanted “Jewish” removed and replaced by “Israeli.” That was the name of their group: “I am an Israeli.”

It was thus no surprise to learn, years later, that when IDF soldiers in the Six-Day War overran the Temple Mount, climbed to the roof of the Dome of the Rock and hoisted an Israeli flag, socialist Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and soul brother of Aloni ordered it taken down, explaining that the Temple Mount had no religious significance to Israelis, only historic; and in any case, “Who needs this Vatican?”

This is one more ingredient in the secular Zionist character of the prime minister who has stated, if the anonymous A7 journalist is accurate, “multiple times that he does not intend for Israel to resettle in Gaza with Jewish Israelis.”

Notice he did not say “to resettle in Gaza with Israelis,” but “Jewish Israelis” for he knows that the first to do that would be “religious Zionists,” when that couplet is virtually oxymoronic since the original Zionists were overwhelmingly not religious but content to see the Jewish religion destined for the dust bin of history. Ben Gurion famously in the first days of the State allowed, after being begged by rabbis, to grant an exception from army service for several hundred Haredi boys to study Torah, and he did so for immediate political gain but also in the belief that the following year, there would be fewer such boys, and every year thereafter the number would decrease because religion was on the way out.

Today’s Israeli prime minister calls himself in his autobiography a secular person and that is his principal character flaw as the leader of this state. His emotional response to Oct. 7 has been embarrassingly tepid, not militarily, but verbally. On occasion he has called the Muslim Brothers that day “monsters” but he also early on foresaw a better future for the people in the Gaza Strip once Hamas rule has ended.

This is in a class with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff who believe that the way to treat the people in Gaza after the fighting ends is to build for them a brand-new community, 100,000 new homes with the latest conveniences; neighborhoods with brand-new schools for children with playgrounds for them to play in public parks; full employment for hundreds of thousands of allegedly “innocent Palestinian civilians” who had nothing to do with those terrible Hamas people — except enthusiastically vote into power as their government in 2006.

This is no way to respond to those “merciless” Muslim “savages” which was the vocabulary of Thomas Jefferson, principal author of the American Declaration of Independence, his way of describing the Indians during the American Revolution egged on by the Crown to slaughter American families on the frontier. One serious historian claims that more frontier families during the War were butchered by Indians than rebel soldiers killed by British and Hessian soldiers.

Israel’s prime minister might have raged after Oct. 7 and claimed Gaza as legally in international law belonging to the State of Israel that wants these sadistic barbarians of the Muslim faith to get off Jewish land that they have used, probably every year of Israel’s 78, to launch terrorist murderers into Israel, Oct. 7 now only the most spectacular of their horrors.

The prime minister might also have stood up to President Trump for demanding Israel participate in providing the people there with humanitarian aid. That Israel submitted to this antisemitic demand was outrageous, the behavior of the cringing Diaspora Jew, the early target of scorn by the Zionists. When in history has a victim people defending itself against an aggressor been “morally” obligated to care for the humanitarian needs of the enemy aggressor’s non-combatants who brought them to power?

Trump, Kushner and Witkoff — Donald’s dejudaized golfing partner in the pastime preferred by white Anglo-Saxon gentlemen — dreamed out loud their “visions” for creating a brand-new Gaza Strip to their taste, when the prime minister should have politely and pleasantly, even jocularly, reminded all three that Gaza is Israeli territory, earth baked in the blood of thousands of Israeli dead and wounded soldiers, and Israel will decide its future, which is not building an “Israeli Riviera” with gambling casinos and night clubs featuring half-naked showgirls a la Las Vegas and Donald’ Trump’s Atlantic City.

In sum, it is right for MK Betzalel Smotrich to call for Jews to resurrect Gaza, when it should be not only him but the prime minister and the president demanding respect for Israel’s right in international gentile law to this sliver of land, and Israel’s right to evict this mob of impossibly cruel, vicious, merciless, antisemitic savages, enemies of the humane and civilized Jewish and other people.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.

Peloni:  Here is the link to Karen Stahl-Don’s full article on the topic of THE BRITISH MANDATE: DEFINING THE LEGALITY OF JEWISH SOVEREIGNTY OVER JUDEA AND SAMARIA UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW

I highly recommend reading the longer version.