How to Criticise Zionism

[ehnyah]

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n16/letters.html

From Jacqueline Rose

Anthony Julius (Letters, 21 July) objects to the link between Messianism and Israeli identity that I suggest in The Question of Zion, as well as to the idea that Israel may be bent on a path of self-destruction, a fear which has been expressed inside Israel by writers such as David Grossman, and by the former head of Shin Bet, Yaakov Perry. As regards Messianism, the issue is how far Israeli society as a whole has been complicit with the settlers and their ideology. In their recent book, Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel, Idith Zertal and Akiva Elder describe how every Israeli government, every branch of the legal establishment and of the Israeli army have helped the settlement enterprise to flourish. In 1982, a group from Gush Emunim, the settlers? movement, plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in messianic counterpoint to the felt desecration represented by the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 which handed part of the Sinai back to Egypt. Judge Finkelman described Yeshua Ben-Shushan, the brains behind the plot, as a Jewish hero. No one would suggest that Messianism is characteristic of the whole of Israeli society, but this complicity with the settlers is something for which the whole nation, in the violence of the evacuation from Gaza, is now paying the price.

Julius is a distinguished lawyer. It is therefore surprising that, in his history of the conflict which makes up the substantial part of his letter, he does not feel the need to acknowledge, let alone address, the arguments of the new historians ? Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Nur Musalha and Benny Morris ? whose work of the past two decades has decisively challenged every single detail of the narrative he proposes.

Finally, why does Julius give a figure only for the Israeli war dead of 1948? The Palestinian dead are unmentioned, the refugees unnumbered (?many Palestinians left ? some willingly, many not?). The omission makes clear who really counts in this conflict, a fact which is itself playing a huge and tragic part in its continuation.

Julius?s letter is another demonstration of the difficulty those who rush to the defence of Israel have in seeing it as a powerful state capable of aggression towards another people. It will be impossible to resolve this conflict and secure the better future for Israel and the Palestinians which Julius and I both wish for as long as Jewish people continue, against all historical evidence, to view themselves always as victims.

Jacqueline Rose
Queen Mary, University of London

From Pablo Mukherjee

Anthony Julius asserts that Zionists fought for a single binational state between 1881 and 1948, when their idealist vision foundered in the face of Arab hostility. Although the single state ideal was put forward in Herzl?s The Jewish State (1896) and Altneuland (1902), it was displaced by the ?practical Zionism? of Weizmann, the ultra-nationalism of Jabotinsky and the ?pragmatic Zionism? of Ben-Gurion. All of them advocated, to varying degrees, the economic, cultural and political disempowerment of the Arab majority in Palestine. To no one?s surprise (least of all the Zionists?), the Arabs were hostile to this offer of ?shared? polity.

Julius says that there was room in Palestine for both peoples, and that the Arabs rejected statehood in 1937 and 1947. The Arab rejection was not simply about land-sharing. The 1937 rebellion followed a dramatic increase in illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine, a steady increase in Jewish ownership of land, the Peel commission?s proposals for ?partition? and the ?transfer? of Arab majorities, and was also influenced by regional anti-imperialist feeling. The 1947 rejection of UN Resolution 181 was based on the sound logic that a Jewish minority of 37 per cent was not entitled to 55 per cent of the land, of which they owned about 7 per cent.

Julius makes much of Palestinian Arab anti-semitism but nothing of the equally virulent and entrenched Zionist racism towards Arabs. As early as the 1880s, the Zionist settlers Yosef Vitkin and Chaim Hissin referred to Arabs as ?submissive servants? and ?degenerates?. This attitude survives, and has become respectable in the current climate of Islamophobia.

Finally, Julius blames Israel?s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza on the Six-Day War, which he says was instigated by Egyptian hostilities in the Gulf of Aqaba and Sinai. In fact, the Six-Day War was precipitated by the Samu raid carried out by Israel against Jordan on 13 November 1966, and by Israeli escalation on the Syrian front. Moshe Dayan told the journalist Rami Tal in 1976 that more than 80 per cent of the clashes that led to the war were started by his army. The ?peace offerings? made by the Israeli cabinet on 19 June did not include an offer to withdraw from Gaza. There are no records of Israel telling any Arab states in 1967, directly or indirectly, that it would make a conditional withdrawal.

Pablo Mukherjee
Oxford

From Virginia Tilley

Two UN subcommittees on the question of Palestine were established in 1947. The first, UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine), dominated by Western and European powers and established explicitly to consider partition, generated the report that became Resolution 181. The second subcommittee, established to consider ?alternatives to partition?, was composed mostly of Arab or Muslim states: Afghanistan, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. Its carefully documented and legally rigorous final report concluded that the only legal and just solution in Palestine was a binational state. It held that while a ?national home for the Jewish people? was admissible under the terms of the British Mandate, a Jewish state was not, because it would violate the political rights of the indigenous population which the Mandate was also charged to protect. The subcommittee called instead for a unitary democratic state in which minority rights (clearly understood here as those of the Jewish community) would be secured by constitutional guarantees.

The subcommittee concluded that ?it is a matter for regret? that UNSCOP ?should have evolved a scheme which would, in fact, destroy whatever prospects still exist of friendly co-operation between the two communities and lead to most tragic consequences.? Instead, it argued presciently, a Jewish state that came into being ?against the bitter opposition of the Arabs of Palestine and of the inhabitants of the adjoining countries? would only ?jeopardise peace and international security throughout the Middle East?.

Virginia Tilley
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York State
Madagascar

From Tony French

In his review of Christopher Browning?s The Origins of the Final Solution, John Connelly says that in early 1941 the Nazis were still, ?in all seriousness?, intending to get rid of Europe?s Jews by shipping them to Madagascar (LRB, 7 July). How could it have been practicable to send masses of people from Eastern Europe to Madagascar while Britain still held the Suez Canal ? not to mention Aden, the Sudan, Kenya and Tanganyika? The notion is so bizarre that I have often wondered whether ?Madagascar? was not another Nazi euphemism.

Tony French
Heidelberg, Victoria

[ehnyah]

[Series] What the Zionists Have Done to Jewish Arabs
Written By David Shasha

The Real Sephardic Holocaust: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims

Documentary Review: ?The Ringworm Children? (2004)

What if I were to tell you that the Arab government of Morocco in the 1950s forced 100,000 Jewish children to be rounded up and taken to a medical facility where they were given radiation treatments of 350 RAD for the ostensible treatment of ringworm?

What would you do?

What would the outcry be in the Jewish community?

Would there be a feeding frenzy in the Jewish media and in the general media such as the New York Times which continues to feed the Jewish beast of the Holocaust on a regular basis?

What would be said about Arabs and their incipient Anti-Semitism?

To put this in some current perspective, we have recently learned that a new committee has been formed to link the 1941 riots in Baghdad known in Arabic as the FARHUD to the Nazi Holocaust. Steps are now underway to take an isolated if tragic event in Arab Jewish history where the total number of Jewish deaths was no more than 300 if that much and turn that event into a HOLOCAUST. This committee is bent on taking the FARHUD and making it a mandatory part of the Holocaust curriculum in the US. It is clear that the concern with demonizing the Arabs has become a malignant obsession for Arab Jews who wish to curry favor with the Ashkenazi establishment and serve the Israeli HASBARAH campaign that is such a crucial part of Jewish self-knowledge at present.

How quickly do you think would word spread in the media of the near-homicidal treatment of 100,000 Jewish children by their Arab hosts?

Would such a revelation make the FRONT PAGE of every newspaper in the US and Europe ? and ISRAEL?

You bet.

So why have we not heard about these 100,000 Jewish victims of radiation treatment?

The problem is that the radiation treatments were not administered by the Moroccans or any other ARAB government ? these lethal treatments were administered by the ISRAELI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH!

?The Ringworm Children? is a brutal testament to the continued ASHKENAZI RACISM that has made the sojourn of the Sephardim in Israel one of the most shameful episodes in the history of our people.

The story is simple if brutal: Many of the Ashkenazi Zionist officials were conflicted about immigration of Jews from the Arab world ? particularly those from North Africa. Upon arrival to the newly created State in the 1950s, Sephardic Jews were subjected to various forms of official and social discrimination. They were sent to ma?abarot, transit camps for immigrants that became part of the ongoing debilitation of what were then called Benei Edot ha-Mizrah ? the Oriental communities. To my knowledge the largest public scandal ? outside of the institutionalized racism of the Zionist founders ? involving the Sephardic immigrants was the famous case of the YEMENITE BABIES ? a scandal that involved the kidnapping of Yemenite children by the medical authorities that provided the children for sale to Ashkenazi parents in Israel and Europe while their parents would be given death certificates and no corpses to bury. The scandal of the YEMENITE BABIES has been subject to years of hearings and committees but the real truth remains to be publicly uncovered.

The recent revelations of the GAZEZET scandal make the YEMENITE BABIES issue pale in comparison. GAZEZET is the Hebrew term for ringworm.

Dr. Chaim Sheba, the first Surgeon General of Israel and an avowed racist who believed in the principles of using Eugenics as a social tool, was loath to accept the immigration from North Africa. Sheba demanded as a health official that any immigrants with family members who had health problems be barred from moving to Israel. And when the first immigrants came from Morocco, he demanded that they be treated for ringworm.

As this scandal revolves around ringworm, a now easily treatable skin disease that is not very well known today, I quote from the American Cancer Society?s assessment of the disease?s threat in the period under question:
The only established environmental risk factor for brain tumors is radiation. Before the risks of radiation were recognized, children with ringworm of the scalp (a fungal infection) often received low-dose radiation therapy, which substantially increased their risk of brain tumors in later life.
As the experts make clear in the film, ringworm was a common childhood ailment along the lines of lice. The ringworm was caused by a communicable fungus that created irritations of the scalp. Old world treatments included unguents and vinegar. The disease though communicable was not fatal and would eventually go away of its own accord.

Radiation treatments were sadly more dangerous than the disease itself.

Dr. Sheba, according to his writings, became obsessed with this ringworm issue in regard to the North African immigrants. In his role as a public health minister he demanded that all North African children be sent to health centers to receive RADIATION THERAPY.

As the film points out, the regimen of forced radiation based on eugenics was on the wane in the US after the revelations of Nazi experiments in the Concentration Camps and the vast scientific evidence from Japan after the nuclear devastation in 1945. The scientific community by 1952 was well aware of the dangers of radiation and the short and long-term impact of this type of treatment on individuals ? especially children. Dozens of lawsuits were being settled in the US courts with compensatory damages being awarded to the victims of these cruel experiments.

This did not deter Dr. Chaim Sheba ? the Josef Mengele of Israel.

He went to the US on a fundraising mission to get radiation machines ? X-Ray machines from a company named Picker that continues to do business in Israel ? and the funds to administer a mass program of radiation of these Sephardic children.

According to the relevant documentation the 1948-1955 budget of the radiation program was 300,000,000 Israeli Pounds. The entire budget of the Israeli Health Ministry for the same period was 60,000,000 Pounds ? the 300,000,000 figure was more than the ENTIRE BUDGET for the same period.

Where did all the money come from to administer this evil project?

The film sets out the tantalizing but unsubstantiated idea that the Israeli government took money from the US government which was interested in continuing its medical research through experimentation, but could not legally do so. Israel, a poor and fragile young country, would be a perfect place to conduct these experiments. This sense of experimentation fit in well with the Ashkenazi Zionist establishment?s racist policies and attitudes towards Sephardim. Sheba merely acted on the racist value system of the Ashkenazi establishment in setting out his eugenics program to deal with the GAZEZET.

In ?The Ringworm Children? we see how Sheba was able to conduct his evil machinations. With the obvious complicity of the medical community, health professionals and political figures, Sheba forced over 100,000 Sephardic children into various medical centers throughout the country to undergo radiation treatments that were in the range of 350 RAD per application ? and many of the victims were given repeated applications. According to the eyewitness testimony presented by victims in the film, no precautionary measures were undertaken ? no screens or special clothing to protect the children. This policy included having no health professional in the room while the radiation was being administered ? as those workers knew the dangers of such massive doses of radiation ? in the realm of HIROSHIMA-like numbers. Parents of the children were told that their children were being taken on a day trip ? and were charged for the trip!

Hundreds of doctors and nurses conducted these treatments under the auspices of the Israel National Socialized Health system and yet the records of these treatments have disappeared and according to the film remain unavailable to the victims ? many of whom continue to suffer with brain tumors, cancers, epilepsy, sterility, cerebral palsy and other nefarious and debilitating diseases.

In 1994, a committee was formed to bring this issue to the attention of the Israeli government and legal apparatus. A swirl of lawsuits and actions were undertaken with a stonewalling on the part of the Israeli establishment. Experts presented by the government were connected to the Health Establishment including Professor Baruch Modan who seemed to have held the files of many of the victims. Modan died of a heart attack while the campaign was going on ? he appears in the film before his death and at a town hall meeting provides the victims with no substantial information on his knowledge and the mass of materials that he had in his possession from the early 1960s. The film implies that Modan may well have had knowledge of secret dealings between the US and Israeli governments.

There is little question that the dangers of radiation therapy were known at the time of the Sheba applications. In 1952 the International Atomic Commission had presented guidelines for the application of radiation treatment which recommended a one-time dosage of no more than .3 RAD while Sheba had ordered dosages ? sometimes multiple ? of 350 RAD!

Sheba is a criminal of Mengele-like proportions ? of this there is no doubt. All those who participated in the execution of the program were also guilty of serious malfeasance. Those who have continued to cover this up for the government and legal institutions of Israel ? many of them are actually interviewed in the film ? are also indirectly responsible for crimes against the Sephardic victims of this barbarity on the part of the Ashkenazi Zionists.

There are a number of issues that emerge from the film:

· There is the foundational and perpetual anti-Sephardi racism that permeates the Ashkenazi community ? in the West and in Israel. Such racism has allowed the plight of the GAZEZET victims to fester with no public outcry or even a mention in the American media.
· The criminal sense of racial superiority that enabled this to happen is a basic part of the Zionist phenomenon. If this is what Ashkenazim do to their fellow JEWS, what won?t they scruple to do to NON-JEWS?
· What of justice for the victims? There is the issue of full disclosure of the medical files that might save the lives of those who have been lucky enough to survive this cruelty. And then there is the issue of full adjudication of claims and compensation for the victims and their families.
· How is it possible that a prestigious hospital complex is named after Chaim Sheba? Should not a public campaign to remove his name from the hospital be created?
· And finally, what of the children and grandchildren of the victims who are now dealing with a truly genetic catastrophe of the highest proportion. Ironically, by asserting that Sephardim were a (eu)gene(t)ic danger to the Ashkenazim of Israel when they were nothing of the sort, the racist Sheba did in fact create genetic health issues for many generations of Sephardic Jews in Israel.

As any politically-aware Sephardi knows, the criterion for assessing Ashkenazi culpability in all matters of malfeasance is extremely high ? so high that many of the victims are shown in the film as being completely amazed by the standards that were demanded of the victims to prove their claims. Such is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of the standards that have been set for claimants of Nazi abuse. We can recall no setting of any STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS for Holocaust claims while such limitations are placed on the GAZEZET victims.

Ashkenazim do not hold themselves to the same standards when they are accused of being the perpetrators of criminal activity as they do for those who they claim have committed crimes against them!

So while we sit here watching the FARHUD committee of foolhardy and naive Sephardic Jews who are more Ashkenazi than Sephardi, the matter of the GAZEZET remains a closed book to the American Jews and a nightmare for those Sephardim in Israel who must feel that no one cares about them at all As they watch the repeated claims of the Holocaust survivors fill the pages of the US and European media and the ongoing schnorring and infighting between Jewish groups to get the HOLO-CASH from Germany, Switzerland and the rest, these poor and sick Sephardim have no one of influence to help them make their case.

Since ?The Ringworm Children? was aired by Israel?s Channel 10 in August 2004 not one single article has come out in the US media ? the articles by Aryeh Dayan in Haaretz and the controversial Barry Chamish review, both of which were included in our Sephardic Heritage Update, were printed in Israeli publications ? the SHU being the only Sephardic journal in the WORLD that continues to advocate on behalf of Sephardic rights and justice for the Sephardim. The film is now being screened in the US by LINK TV, a small and relatively obscure non-profit San Francisco-based group of radical hippie-types who are concerned with social justice for Third World peoples. The station is not carried by any US cable systems and no announcement of the screenings has been made in any US media outlet.

The question you the reader must ask yourself is,

WHY IS SUCH A STATE OF AFFAIRS ACCEPTABLE TO YOU?

[ehnyah]

· How long must we accept the depredations and the brutal racism of the ASHKENAZIM that is reflected by the official organs of the Jewish world - and reinforced by the common accusation from Ashkenazim that such RACISM DOES NOT EVEN EXIST.
· How long must I be told by Ashkenazim and Uncle Tom Sephardim that I am myself a racist and that I am creating unneeded divisiveness in a Jewish community looking for POSITIVE ways to create a healthy and vibrant society?
· How many cancellations have I received on my newsletter e-mail list from ASHKENAZI RACISTS who have blithely and with great pretense and arrogance served to demonize me for my writings and my social activism?
· How much have I personally and professionally been threatened - by friends and enemies alike ? and called upon to - as they tell me " LAY OFF THE ZIONISM"

I am here to say that after we all take the time to understand and internalize the full scope of what happened to the GAZEZET victims " all 100,000 of them " we will all be able to more clearly see ASHKENAZI RACISM for what it is and be free to do something about it.

Ashkenazim have wisely formed a unified front to protect their communal interests. We see advocacy groups popping up each and every day to deal with issues that trouble that community. But when dealing with JUSTICE FOR SEPHARDIM we have ZERO ? NOTHING to help our own people.

?The Ringworm Children? is a film that is brilliantly executed and fully realized. It is a masterpiece of social activism that tells a story that is at the very existential and political core of the Zionist project and the massive wrongs and injustices that it has wrought against people of Middle Eastern extraction.

As Sephardim we must get our heads out of the proverbial sand and DO SOMETHING to protect our brothers and our communal interests.

We must stop demonizing our real leaders and activists and finally accept that we need to respond in a forceful way to the Ashkenazim who have done all this to us.

David Shasha
Center for Sephardic Heritage
Brooklyn, New York

http://zennobia.blogspot.com/2005/04/series-what-zionists-have-done-to.html

What The Zionists Have Done to Jewish Arabs PART II

http://zennobia.blogspot.com/2005/08/series-what-zionists-have-done-to.html

-----------------------
[some mossad background from an Iraqi Jew]

The Jews of Iraq - "Jews killed Jews"
By Naeim Giladi

"I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews; and that, to buy time to confiscate ever more Arab lands, Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors. I write about what the first prime minister of Israel called "cruel Zionism." I write about it because I was part of it."

The Link interviewed Naeim Giladi, a Jew from Iraq, for three hours on March 16, 1998, two days prior to his 69th birthday. For nearly two other delightful hours, we were treated to a multi-course Arabic meal prepared by his wife Rachael, who is also Iraqi. "It's our Arab culture," he said proudly.

In our previous Link, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe looked at the hundreds of thousands of indigenous Palestinians whose lives were uprooted to make room for foreigners who would come to populate confiscated land. Most were Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. But over half a million other Jews came from Islamic lands. Zionist propagandists claim that Israel "rescued" these Jews from their anti-Jewish, Muslim neighbors. One of those "rescued" Jews-Naeim Giladi-knows otherwise.

In his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews ( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0964237903/qid=1035411207/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-3601589-3094522?v=glance&n=507846), Giladi discusses the crimes committed by Zionists in their frenzy to import raw Jewish labor. Newly-vacated farmlands had to be plowed to provide food for the immigrants and the military ranks had to be filled with conscripts to defend the stolen lands. Mr. Giladi couldn't get his book published in Israel, and even in the U.S. he discovered he could do so only if he used his own money.

The Giladis, now U.S. citizens, live in New York City. By choice, they no longer hold Israeli citizenship. "I am Iraqi," he told us, "born in Iraq, my culture still Iraqi Arabic, my religion Jewish, my citizenship American."

John F. Mahoney
Executive Director, AMEU

MORE

http://www.bintjbeil.com/E/occupation/ameu_iraqjews.html