Sunday, 12 May, 2024 — DotCommie
Is the slaughter in Gaza a step too far for the settler state?
William Bowles
How to explain the (apparent) indifference of the populations of the West to the slaughter of Palestinians by USIsrael, aided and abetted by the European satrapies (satrap: a pejorative term that refers to any subordinate or local ruler, with embarrassing connotations of corruption)?
Students, exempt as they are from the burden of earning a living, are free to express themselves in a way the general population are not, well up to a point, the point being where the outrage of the slaughter of innocent Palestinians by Zionist imperialism, starts to impinge on the consciousness of the population. Response? Stamp it out, pronto. Thus the full force of the security state is brought to bear with, I suspect, thousands of young people being stamped on by the jackbooted forces of ‘law and order’, beaten and thrown in jail. Demonise them with accusations of antisemitism.
It’s as if the blame Europeans allegedly feel for the persecution of the Jews has been transferred to the Palestinians. In reality, it’s the very real racism toward Arabs, itself centuries old; the stereotype of the swarthy, hook-nosed Arab, with its sexualised undertones, popularised in so much, especially in English and French, fiction (Biggles and Tin-Tin come to mind, both aimed at children), and note how this parallels the caricature of the Jew, that has formed the basis for this indifferent racism and explains why, the propaganda of the ruling classes have been so effective in inoculating us to the unbelievably horrific slaughter of so many thousands of civilian Palestinian men, women and children, let alone the documented harvesting of organs from the corpses by organised Israeli gangs and the violent theft of Palestinian land.
The term anti-semitism has now been transformed into the image that fits the description pioneered by Joseph Goebbels, back in 1930s Nazi Germany and how ironic is that!
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instinct, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology. – Joseph Goebbels
And this observation is borne out when looking at how the corporate and state media cover the issue of ‘antisemitism’. The ‘man in the street’ however, is rarely asked for his opinion on whether the protests over the Zionist slaughter are antisemitic. Instead, it’s either Zionist Jews, Israelis or a mouthpiece of the state whose views are sought and the word is antisemitism, repeated, as Goebbels says, a thousand times. The ‘man in the street’ is the target. But is it working?
Without brute force to back it up, propaganda has its limits. Yes, the Goebbels quote:
A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth
Has been executed by the Empire. But the very fact that the corporate/state media has resorted to mass censorship and the threat of legal action over opposition to the Palestinian holocaust, points to the potential for a very different outcome to this particular struggle.
A bit of personal history here, is I think, relevant to this debate around the word antisemitism. My mother, Vera, named she told me, after a Bolshevik comrade of Lenin, Vera Zazulich, with whom she went into exile in Switzerland, was the daughter of Etty (Ethel) Barofsky (nee Appleson), my grandmother, who was born I think in a shtel near Vilnius, Lithuania in 1882, or thereabouts, which then was in The Pale, part of the Russian Empire, that vast swathe of land that included great chunks of Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia, the only areas that Jews were allowed to live in permanently.
According to my mother, Etty and her future husband Rafael or Rifel as he was known, were both radicals and members of what was later to become the Bolshevik Party of Russia. It was the time of the Black Hundreds, a Pogrom ordered by the Tsar to exterminate thousands of Jews. Apparently, Etty and Rifel were forced to leave Russia because of their opposition to the Pogroms and in 1901, they both landed in Hull, Yorkshire, with Etty already pregnant, with the oldest of my mother’s brothers and sisters, Isaac and they were married in Bradford a little later that year. The Barofskys (who Anglicised their name to Barry) eventually settled in a Jewish Ghetto in Leeds. My mother, one of eight children, three boys and five girls, was born on 17 June, 1910.
I was born on 23 July, 1945, I grew up in the aftermath of WWII. As a child, my mother told me about the concentration camps and the Soviet Union’s ‘Great Patriotic War’ as WWII was called there and the 25 million people who died. I knew also that my mother’s family in the Soviet Union had been almost totally annihilated by the Nazis, I think she discovered one uncle who had survived, a professor at Kiev University on a visit there in the 1980s. My parents were both atheists and Communists and by around the age 6 or 7, I knew I was also an atheist (I was a precocious child), thus for my mother to tell me I was Jewish, was somewhat confusing. Thus my connection to being Jewish was almost entirely emotional, political and cultural, firstly, through my mother telling me I was Jewish and secondly the events of the Great Patriotic War and its impact on my maternal family (the notion of who is a Jew is passed down through the mother). In many ways, I felt a closer connection to Russia and again it was an emotional-political connection and the horrors Russians and Jews (amongst other, persecuted minorities) suffered at the hands of the Nazis.
I don’t believe there is a Jewish race, as far as I am concerned, there is only one race, the human race and genetics tells us that this is so. Given that I didn’t believe in God (or a god), I had no connection to Judaism. That left cultural-emotional connections, especially to my Russian family and to class through the politics of both sides of my family. As far as I was concerned, I was first and foremost, a Londoner, not even feeling that I was especially British and I didn’t feel particularly English either. I say all this because I’m trying to establish my connection to antisemitism as being exclusively directed at Jews.
First, there is the stereotype of the Jew. Most people who identify themselves as Jewish in Europe, are genetically, mostly white, Europeans. The Nazis identified them by location, name, profession or trade and religion. The stereotype of the Jew was central to Nazi propaganda and concocted fantasies of Jews drinking the blood of babies and so forth or being capitalist bankers.
When I had my DNA analysed, it was 47% Southwest England, and a couple of percent Irish (my dad’s side); a bit of North Africa and 49% ‘Ashkenazi’ Jew (my mother’s side). According to all that I’ve read about the Ashkenazi, they stem from 350 Jews, who were already mostly European, who settled in Germany in the 17th century. They probably came from the Levant. Other Jews in Europe stem from Spain, the Sephardim like my Uncle Joe (Juan), who looked like a North African (as a child, I asked him if he was an African, he got quite upset)! Furthermore, it was their religion, Judaism that identified them as Jews, not their alleged race. To this we have to add how Jews were forced into specific trades and professions by the European ruling classes that set them apart.
This created the context for the invention of Zionism, a secular ideology that identified directly with European imperialist, racist ideology and the alleged superiority of the white ‘race’ and specifically with British imperialism. The new ‘state’ of Israel inherited, lock, stock and barrel, the racist colonial laws of the British, used to repress Palestinian resistance to British occupation.
The intimate relationship between Zionist ideology and British imperialism is well documented, not only by Zionism’s relationship exposed by the 1917 Balfour Declaration but the connection between Zionism and the British Mandate that gave Britain total control over Palestine. When Israel was founded in 1948, it inherited a raft of repressive laws, still in operation today, including the prisons built by the British.
Another tactic Britain used was to force Palestinian civilians to accompany them on patrols. They were made to sit, unprotected, at the front of military convoys while driving through areas with high rebel activity and even to drive over mines to blow them up before British troops proceeded.
This tactic had come from British rule in India and was known as “minesweeping”. Many Palestinians were killed or seriously injured this way.
Britain effectively used Palestinian civilians as human shields, which Israeli forces have been filmed doing repeatedly in both the West Bank and in Gaza for years.
– ‘Israel’s Brutality Draws on British Rule’, Consortium News
Quite clearly, Israel is a settler, colonial state, a literal continuation of British rule, established at a time when its Zionist leadership had the sympathies of the countries of Europe and the USA, following WWII (the Soviet Union was the first country to recognise Israel) and has used this prop ever since to justify its theft of the land of Palestine and the murder and eviction of its population.
But this new generation of young people doesn’t have the same connection to the past and perhaps this explains why so many young people are immune to the propaganda onslaught? And it’s also the sheer bestiality of the Israeli slaughter of innocents, which in spite of the censorship and the lies, has been difficult to hide even with the deliberate targeting of journalists by the IDF with more than 140 killed. My optimistic side says that this could be a turning point in this David and Goliath struggle, let’s hope so. I know my ancestors are on my side and I listen to my ancestors.
Investigating Imperialism 