Palestine’s Apocalypse Now

The photo above was taken in Jerusalem, Ottoman Palestine, in 1897.

When this photo was taken, the population of Palestine was at most 8% Jewish.

Even this 8% misrepresents the centuries-old demographic makeup of Palestine.

Since 1881, Zionists (mostly from Europe, with a few from Yemen) had already begun an attempt to launch a “return” to a region they had not inhabited for almost 2,000 years.

This “cult of return” to God’s “Promised Land” is known as the “First Aliyah” among many Jewish Zionists.

Before the “First Aliyah”, i.e. in about 1880, the Jewish population of Palestine was probably around 3%.

In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world’s Jews lived somewhere other than Palestine.

Not as exiles, not as war refugees, but as a religious minority incorporated into communities, nations and polities almost everywhere in the world.

Jews spoke a myriad of languages, and integrated many of the foodways, folkways, and musical traditions of the places they came to inhabit.

Whether Ashkenazi from Russia or Sephardic Paradesi of India,  a couple of things can be said with certainty about the vast majority of Jews throughout the world by the late 19th century:

1)  Jews were extremely dispersed and culturally diverse

2)  Jews were centuries-removed from the Eastern Mediterranean place and culture of their religious texts

One might as well expect a modern Samoan to claim a “right of return” to Taiwan!

Zionism is primarily a European settler-colonialist land grab, underpinned with religious ideology by Jewish supremacists.

Yet this issue has been so heavily propagandized, for so long, that to even question the right of Israel to exist is seen by many as extremist.

The only difference between ethnic-cleansing, land theft, barbarous genocide and a legitimate nation state is TIME and the CURATION OF PUBLIC MEMORY.

By all measures of natural justice, the USA itself has no “right” to exist.

Like Israel, the USA only exists as a de facto entity due to ethnic-cleansing, land theft, and yes, barbarous genocide.

But the USA completed most of its internal colonialist violence shortly before WWI, so public memory has been carefully curated for over a century now.

The expression “Manifest Destiny” carries the weight of untold, almost unspeakable violence and trans-generational suffering within its short six syllables.

But now, “Manifest Destiny” has become just a couple of words to place in a library, or lip service dropped casually into a high school history textbook.

No need for Americans to mention or learn about the screams of Pequot children being burned alive by Puritan zealots in Massachusetts, or Lakota women being blasted with US Army field artillery as they crouched weeping with fear in a ravine in South Dakota.

That was AGES* ago.

Pure “woke” nonsense to mention it.

Thank you for your service!

The Zionist project in Palestine only began to gather real momentum after WWI, switching gears into its most vicious phase shortly after WWII.

100 Years of Foreign Jewish Immigration to Palestine

In the decades when other colonial powers were beginning to disengage from various regions worldwide, Israel stands almost alone as the last blatantly ethno-supremacist settler-colonialist project in the western world.

Western powers have encouraged and supported this particular project for a number of reasons, none of which are moral or just.

If the consequences were not so brutal, the claims of being “indigenous to Palestine” made by Jewish supporters of Israel living in The West would be simply laughable.

The English Puritan Oliver Cromwell cruelly transported many Irish from their homeland to colonies in the Americas during the 1600s.

After 375 years in America, do the descendants of those Irish people – living for centuries as Americans, from Boston to Los Angeles – do these modern Americans have a “right of return” to Ireland?

Of course not.  They are no longer Gaelic in any meaningful sense.  And the predominantly Gaelic world their ancestors left no longer exists.  Ireland moved on in their absence, and became something else.

The same is true – perhaps even more so – for Jewish people scattered all over the world for over 2,000 years.

They are no longer Judeans in any meaningful sense.  And the world their ancestors left no longer exists.  Palestine moved on in their absence, and became something else.

Israel and Zionism is trying to reconstitute something long dead with the blood of the living.

It’s racist, Jewish ethno-supremacy, based in the exact same thinking which gave rise to “white” supremacy in America, and to “Aryan” supremacy in Germany.

And to those who say that the world’s Jews need a safe home?  You’ve already had a couple of safe homes for centuries.  They’re called the UK and USA.  And neither place requires the murder of 18,000 children in the same number of months to keep Jews safe.

It would be interesting to know how many among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish supporters of Israel currently living in New York City would be willing to remove themselves to a blockaded and fenced enclave on Staten Island, to allow for the return of the Iroquois and Lenape diaspora to their rightful homelands in eastern New York State?

Let’s see what happens when the “First Lenape Aliyah” to Manahatta begins…

*The Massacre at Wounded Knee took place during the lifetime of this writer’s great-grandparents.  An equivalent massacre has taken place EVERY DAY for over 600 days now in Palestine.