The Real Reason the Gaza Blockade Banned Toys
Israel says its blockade of Gaza is for security, that its purpose is to protect the safety and well-being of ordinary Jewish Israelis by preventing weapons from being imported to Gaza. But the fact that the blockade, until recently at least (it is changing as I write as Israel tries to deflect the world's outrage), banned items like foodstuffs and toys demonstrates that it had (and has) a very different purpose.
The real purpose of the blockade, the real purpose of banning toys and other such non-weapon items, is to make life as miserable as possible for Palestinians in order to make them leave all of Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Israel itself) and never even dream of returning to their homes and villages where they were born inside of Israel. Banning toys for children in Gaza really does make something more secure, namely Zionist ethnic cleansing and the Jewish state based upon it. What the blockade makes more secure ought not even to exist!
The real purpose of everything that the Israeli government does--not just the Gaza blockade, but also the "separation wall," the Occupation, the "settlements," and military attacks on people in Gaza and Lebanon--is indeed "security." But what does "security" really mean to Israeli leaders? It does not mean the safety and well-being of ordinary Israeli Jews, even though Israeli leaders want people to think that is its meaning. No! By "security," Israel's leaders mean security of the Zionist project of ethnic cleansing: the removal of most of the non-Jews from what is now Israel in 1948, and the denial of their right of return forever. "Security" means making the Palestinians give up their effort to abolish the ethnic cleansing and to abolish the Jewish state that defines itself as a state sufficiently cleansed of non-Jews that it has at least an 80% Jewish population. For Israel's Zionist leaders, "security" means the security of Zionism, i.e. ethnic cleansing.
In fact, the security of Zionism, the blockade's real purpose, causes terrible insecurity for ordinary Israeli Jews. It causes Jews to be the object of hatred by all of the people in the world who hate ethnic cleansing and who believe the Israeli government's claim that it acts in the name of "the Jewish people." It causes Israeli Jews to be the victims of increasingly brutal economic inequality inside Israel, driven by the Israeli ruling class of billionaires and generals and politicians who are only able to get away with this attack on Israeli Jews by ensuring that they fear Arabs and Muslims more than their Jewish ruling class. Creating this fear is precisely the purpose of Israeli leaders in carrying out the ethnic cleansing that makes Jews an object of hatred in the first place.
posted by John Spritzler @ 12:41 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
this is just a bit over the top, no?
first off, the vast majority of living palestinians refugees were not born in israel. they have no more claim to go back there than the vast majority of the over 100 million refugees since WWII (including close to a million Jewish refugees from Arab lands) who had to flee for one reason or another.
second, even if we accept that israel wanted to make things uncomfortable for the gazans, couldn't you read that as an effort to say to them, "you elected a genocidal party to office who will stop at nothing - including sacrificing your own welfare in pursuit of that goal - and you need to get rid of it."
it's not at all clear to me why israel has to guarantee the well-being of a toxic population. (unless of course, you want to treat them as infants who are not responsible for their choices... but then, what democratic nation shd not be held responsible for its choices?)
you can complain that it's not nice to do this (neither is it nice to elect genocidal maniacs), but when you go over the top and accuse israel of wanting ethnically cleanse the area, you ignore the history of how Israelis have treated their large Arab population (20%) better than other Arab countries have treated their Jews, their Palestinian refugees, even their own commoner population.
indeed you reverse both history and the present. the people who want to ethnically cleanse the area are the palestinians. they say so; the do so. but of course you probably think suicide terror is "resistance" and blocking non-essentials is "ethnic cleansing."
as for your final thoughts on how israeli moves harm israel by making it hated in the world - that's choice: you contribute to the very thing you claim to deplore. crocodile tears? should israel commit suicide in order to gain your sympathy?
alas that supposedly intelligent people could become so confused.
i recommend you spend some time at www.palwatch.org and see what the palestinians say to each other about the jews. (or is that just too much disconfirmation?)
(i'll be interested to see if you allow this comment)
Mr. rlandes,
First off, yes, the children of Palestinians who fled from their homes inside what is now Israel do indeed have a right under international law to return to their homes and villages inside Israel; check this out yourself if you don't believe me.
Second, your "logic" regarding Hamas and their _wrongful_ (yes, wrongful!) use of suicide bombers and the rockets aimed at Jewish non-combatant civilians is itself wrong. The fact that some Palestinians wrongly target violence against Israeli Jewish non-combatants is no excuse for the immoral ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. It is no more an excuse than was the Nat Turner slave rebellion in 1831 in our country that wrongly killed 40 innocent white children an excuse that justified slavery. No injustice is excused by the wrong things its victims may do in their effort to stop it. [Continued in next comment]
You deny that Zionism is based on ethnic cleansing, but your are flat out wrong there.
Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, page 48 of the hardcover edition, provides the following quotation from a speech by David Ben-Gurion (later Israel's first prime minister) given on December 3, 1947in front of senior members of his Mapai party (the Eretz Israel Workers Party), in which he said (referring to the UN partition resolution): "There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all of its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty...Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state."
Before Israel declared itself an independent state in 1948 only 38% of its population was Jewish.
Zionist militias in 1947-9 violently expelled 75% of the non-Jews (Palestinians) from the 78% of Palestine that is now called Israel.
Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who has written extensively on the period based on the archival evidence, and who is a Zionist, in a famous interview with Ha’aretz newspaper, discusses how David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, deliberately "transferred" the Arab population out of Israel's new borders:
BM: "Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist."
Ha'aretz: "I don't hear you condemning him."
BM: "Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here." [Continued in next comment]
This uprooting of the Palestinians is a crime against humanity under international law.
Forcible expulsion of people from their country because they are the wrong ethnicity is ethnic cleansing.
You are also wrong in believing that Jews must commit ethnic cleansing to be safe in the world because, supposedly, all Gentiles are anti-Semitic, latently if not overtly and therefore Jews need a Jewish state that is guaranteed to have a population that is at least 80% Jewish. For details on this, go to http://spritzlerj.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-jewish-elites-use-anti-gentilism-to.html .
Your refereence to the people of Gaza as a "toxic" population is racist and disgusting! Shame on you!
Your defense of Israeli discrimination against its 20% of citizens who are not Jewish, on the grounds that they are supposedly better off than non-Jews living in other countries shows that you never learned from your mother that TWO WRONGS DON'T MAKE A RIGHT.
Lastly, Zionism is an attack on Jews, not just non-Jews. Details on this are at http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/class_conflict_in_israel.htm and http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/evidence_that_israeli.htm and http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/War/Zionist%20Leaders.htm .
John Spritzler
John,
Your obsession with Jews falls perfectly in line with with the new trend of hateful, negative super-liberals. I can only hope that one day you make a return to the real world.
Dear "anonymous",
You refer to my "obsession with Jews." What obsession? I live in Massachusetts where there are a fair number of Jews, and I have not written anything about them. The only thing I have written about ordinary Israeli Jews is that they are harmed by Zionism. I have written about how ordinary European Jews during, and right after, the Holocaust were betrayed by Zionist leaders. You may have noticed that I write a lot about what is wrong with the United States government. Do you characterize that as "an obsession with Americans"?
--John Spritzler
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