By Steve Halpern
Recently I listened to a talk by Naomi Klein that took place at Swarthmore College in April of this year. You can listen to this talk at the following YouTube link. Klein’s talk, in my opinion, was a powerful, effective, and eloquent argument. It took apart all the rationalizations the Israeli government has used to justify the current genocide against Palestinians.
Klein’s method was to introduce listeners to two stories. One story consisted of the core rationalizations used by the Israeli government to defend itself. This is the story is also promoted by the United States government, as well as the mainstream news media. The other story unmasks the true history of the world. This story breaks apart the Zionist narrative used to justify the current genocide.
Clearly Naomi Klein left no room for doubt, giving the evidence of how the Israeli government’s repression of Palestinians has always been indefensible. The goal of this blog is to summarize Klein’s two-story narrative and to show why I believe more needs to be said about the 76-year-old Israeli repression against Palestinians.
The story used to defend Israeli repression of Palestinians
This story starts with the anti-Semitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. Then there was the Nazi organized Holocaust where Nazis murdered six million Jews, about one-third of all the Jews who lived in the world.
The defenders of Israel argue that these events were unique in history. To even question that argument, they believe, is anti-Semitic.
Today there are many governments as well as people in the world who have charged the Israeli government with genocide. For the Israeli government this charge is impossible. They argue that the Jewish people of Israel are the victims of genocide. Therefore, from their point of view, to charge Israel with genocide is anti-Semitic.
However, today much of the world is horrified by the Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. The Zionists answer this sentiment with the following argument. The imperialist domination of the world by the governments of Europe, the United States, and Japan were also horrendous. So, from the Israeli point of view, to criticize Israel for what other nations have been doing for a long time is also anti-Semitic.
Along these lines, the Zionist or Israeli point of view is that anti-Semitism is a part of the human condition. Because of that supposed reality, there is no way to integrate Jewish people into the world. That is why they believe Jewish people need a homeland, with a sophisticated military, that defends the Jewish homeland and the right of Jews to exist.
We might keep in mind that most Jews in the world live outside of Israel. From the Zionist perspective, Jews who live outside of Israel are, in effect, stupid. Because the Zionists believe that anti-Semitism is a human condition, from their perspective, it will never go away. Therefore, from the Zionist perspective, those who live outside of Israel will, sooner or later, be exposed to the same anti-Semitism as Jewish people experienced in the Nazi death camps.
In this context, the Israeli government argues that the repression of Palestinians is justified. The Palestinian demand for equal rights and the right of return to their homes in Israel would alter the very core of what the state of Israel was designed to do. Those demands would make Israel a Palestinian-Jewish state. Even the demand for a two-state solution to Israel would threaten the Zionist core values. A two-state solution would give sovereignty to Palestinians who have been brutally repressed for 76 years.
So, for the Israeli government, the October 7 Hamas organized raid that murdered about 1,200 people was ultimately about an international campaign to murder all Jews in the world.
This is the basic narrative that Israel has given to support the current genocide against Palestinians.
The history of the world that we don’t learn in school
Naomi Klein began this section of her talk with a quote by W.E.B. DuBois who argued that the Nazi organized horror experienced by Jewish people was nothing new. Colonized people in Africa, Asia, and the Americas experienced those same kinds of holocausts for centuries. The only unique character of the Nazi organized holocaust was that it was happening in Europe.
Klein then looked at a series of holocausts that took place all over the world. In the genocide against Native Americans, about 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas was wiped out. Then, there was the depopulation of the continent of Africa where millions of African people experienced unimaginable horrors in the slave trade.
Naomi Klein dedicated her recent book to Mike Davis who wrote the book Late Victorian Holocausts. In this book, Davis documented how tens of millions of people in India, China, and Brazil literally starved to death. This starvation took place while the British government had the resources to alleviate the horror but preferred to use those resources to enrich the affluent.
Naomi Klein spent some time talking about the 1904-1908 German organized genocide against the Herero and Nama people in what used to be German South West Africa. Today that nation is called Namibia. In that genocide, German military forces forced the people of that region into concentration camps and murdered hundreds of thousands.
The German military also organized a systematic study of the skulls of the people who died in this holocaust. The Germans wore brown shirts because it blended in with the Namibian environment.
The people who studied those skulls worked with the Nazis to organize the study of victims of the Nazi organized holocaust against Jews. The Nazis also wore brown shirts.
Today, Yad Vashem is the Holocaust Museum in Israel. There is a similar Holocaust Museum in the United States. Thousands of people visit these museums every year.
Naomi Klein visited the Holocaust Museum in Namibia. This consists of an addition to a private home of someone who wants people to memorialize the German organized holocaust in Namibia. This museum, unlike the Holocaust museums in Israel and the United States is not funded by the government and has been threatened with closure due to lack of funds.
Adolf Hitler openly talked about how he admired the Jim Crow laws of the United States that denied Black people citizenship rights in this country. Hitler also admired the U.S. government organized genocide against Native Americans in their drive to take control of the western part of this country. Hitler envisioned a German expansion into Eastern Europe where the German armed forces would dominate the people of that region. That expansion would be patterned after the United States government’s genocide against Native Americans in western part of this country.
So, when we look at the history of the world from this perspective, the Zionist perspective becomes not only nonsensical, but also criminal. Israel hasn’t been protecting Jews from anti-Semitism. In fact, the 76-year history of Israel has continued the repression of oppressed people all over the world. Israel has made alliances with some of the most repressive nations in the world. This includes selling arms to the nation of Argentina, where the government has openly instituted anti-Semitic policies.
Why do the imperialist powers support Israel?
Clearly Naomi Klein makes a convincing argument that tears apart the Zionist narrative. However, in my opinion there is something missing from her analysis.
Today Israel has the fourth most powerful military force in the world. This could not have been possible without the support of outside powers. These powers include Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and the Soviet Union. So, for me, a legitimate question to be asked is, why have these nations given so much aid to Israel, a nation with a population of about seven million Jews?
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a leader of the Russian Revolution. During the time of the revolution, Lenin wrote a pamphlet titled Imperialism the highest stage of capitalism. In Lenin’s opinion, the imperialist nations of the world are routinely driven to dominate the entire planet. The question that I would like to explore is: Why have capitalist nations strive to dominate the economies of the world?
Before we go into that question, I should say that the Russian Revolution was betrayed by Joseph Stalin and his supporters. Stalin organized to murder most of the central leaders of the Russian Revolution. He then made a pact with the Nazis where he gave Germany political, economic, and military support. This was before the German invasion and the Soviet defeat of the Nazi forces. We should keep this in mind when we think about Stalin’s support of Israel with substantial military hardware.
Capitalism’s need to continually grow
For capitalism the drive for worldwide domination comes from the system’s absolute need to grow. Without growth, there can be no profits. Without profits the system ceases to function.
We see this in the fantastic growth we have seen in the United States since the revolution that created this country in the 18th century. The settlers who lived in the British thirteen colonies could not have imagined the world we are living in. Today, most workers have a place to live with indoor electricity and plumbing. Most workers have cell phones and automobiles. Most workers have also travelled on jet aircraft to various places in the world. All of this happened because of the capitalist drive for continual growth, as well as the advances won by the labor, women’s, and civil rights movements.
So, when Presidential candidates talk about how well the economy is doing, they are talking about how well the stock market is doing. The news media falls in line and has entire sections of their reporting dedicated to business and the fluctuations in the stock market. Yet only about ten percent of the population own ninety percent of the stock market.
Then, there are the stories that the government and the press are usually indifferent to. Tens of millions of factory jobs were eliminated in this country. Those jobs were usually replaced with lower paying jobs with fewer benefits. In the United States about 44 million people do not have enough food to eat.
About eighty percent of the world’s population lives on about ten dollars per day or less. The United Nations estimates that 30,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases. All of this at a time when stock market prices have been skyrocketing.
In order for the capitalist system to work, there needs to be relative political stability. One of the most unstable areas of the world in recent years has been the Middle East.
A recent history of the Middle East
Israel is only one of the brutal governments in the Middle East. Before 1979, the United States supported several dictatorships in this region. These included the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Anwar El-Sadat and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Today all those dictatorships are no more. As a result, this region is more unstable than it ever was. The masses of people who live in the Middle East are in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
The only reliable ally for imperialist interests is Israel. Then on October 7, the world found out that even with its massive military force, Israel was unable to defend itself against an attack that took the lives of about 1,200 people.
Much has been written about what happened on that Hamas organized raid. One thing that is rarely mentioned is how the Israeli government has been giving support to Hamas since its founding in 1987. Why did the Israeli government support Hamas in the past?
Hamas has some power in the Israeli occupied Gaza Strip. Clearly the people of Gaza have many legitimate grievances. Before October 7, most of the residents of Gaza didn’t have jobs, or sufficient food to eat, or clean water, or the right to travel. While Israel occupied Gaza, they didn’t allow the residents of this area to vote in Israeli elections.
Hisham Awartani was born and raised in the Israeli occupied West Bank. He is attending college in this country. While Awartani was walking on a street in Burlington, Vermont wearing a Keffiyeh, a stranger shot him. Because of that wound, Awartani is now unable to walk.
The New York Times published a column by Awartani where he explained that his being shot isn’t a new experience for Palestinians. This is what he had to say.
“Death and dehumanization are status quo for Palestinians. We grow used to being funneled through check points and strip-searched, assault rifles trained on us all the while.”
Clearly the Israeli government didn’t want Jewish teenagers in the Israeli Defense Force to police the Gaza Strip. So, Israel relied on Hamas to do that job. This meant that Hamas had a clear contradiction. While their propaganda called for Palestinian liberation, they also acted as a repressive force in Gaza. This explains why they haven’t allowed elections since 2005. This also explains why they engaged in the terrorist act of October 7.
In South Africa the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela never worked as a police force for the apartheid regime. When the ANC called on the masses of South Africans to protest, they had massive support. When they finally ran for elections, the ANC won overwhelmingly. Clearly there are differences between the reality of apartheid South Africa and the occupied territories. However, I believe there are lessons to be learned from the ANC struggle against apartheid.
In any case, immediately after October 7, the United States government increased aid to Israel from $3.8 billion to $14 billion. They immediately sent warships into the region. The United States armed forces then bombed Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Millions of people from around the world have protested the Israeli organized genocide. Recently university students from around the country erected tent cities on their campuses protesting the genocide.
In many cases, university administrators, worked with government officials, and corporate officers to order the police to arrest the protesters and tear down these peaceful tent city protests.
The reason why university administrators asked the police to violate these students First Amendment rights is clear. The government doesn’t want to engage in a rational debate about why they support war and genocide. So, they use vicious force to suppress those who protest their criminal actions.
Where do we go from here?
When we understand that the U.S. support for the Israeli organized genocide is not, from their perspective, a mistake, but the essence of who they are, our course of action becomes clear.
The one weakness of any capitalist regime is the determined mass action by the majority of the population. According to recent polls, about 70 to 80 percent of the population in this country favors the Ceasefire Now demand. The U.S. government that claims to support “democracy” has shown that it is indifferent to the opinions of people in this country.
In the movement that protested the war against Vietnam, there were democratic discussions where the movement decided that the priority would be to organize large, legal demonstrations that demanded total, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal of Southeast Asia. That demand was summarized in the two words “Out Now.” The history of that movement was written by Fred Halstead in his excellent book titled Out Now!—A participant’s account of the movement in the U.S. against the Vietnam war.
Clearly, I support all actions that are protesting the genocide. However, I believe it is clear that most working people are not going to halt their day to day lives and become a part of the tent cities on university campuses.
However, the movement against the war in Vietnam teaches us that everyday workers are open to learning about the realities of war and genocide in teach-ins, educationals, and forums. Workers can be won to the idea of participating in legal demonstrations where they can bring their children, so those children can learn important lessons of the unvarnished reality in this country.
In my opinion, this is the perspective that can be most effective in bringing pressure to the United States government to stop funding Israeli organized genocide.
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