Photo courtesy of CNN
“At first the camel sticks one leg in the tent, and eventually it slips into it. That must be our policy.” Chaim Weizman
After 75 years of the founding of Israel, Weizman’s camel is well and truly inside the tent and in the process of chasing out its original occupants. US Republican candidate Nikki Haley let the cat out of the bag on behalf of the White House when she said that Gazans should leave Gaza and go to pro-Hamas countries like Qatar, Turkey and Iran. Before her, the former Israeli Ambassador to UN, Danny Danon, argued that voluntary emigration was the only option for Gazans to escape starvation, bloodshed and death at the hands of the US-backed Israeli military. And a far right member in Israeli Knesset said the other day that once the Palestinians leave Gaza, Israelis would build their homes and repopulate that territory. There is information that Israeli ministers are in touch with the government of Congo to repatriate Palestinian Gazans. Does anyone need any more evidence to understand the ultimate objective of the US-Israeli war in Palestine? Gaza would soon be absorbed into Eretz or Greater Israel. Once that is accomplished the next step would be to increase Israeli settlements in West Bank, create more tension to provoke violent responses from Palestinians and use that as pretext to repeat the Gaza episode.
The master plan for erasing Palestine from the world map and make it part of a contiguous territory governed by Eretz Israel was drawn up already by the fathers of Zionism Theodore Herzel, Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizman. That was why they welcomed the confusingly worded Balfour Declaration of 1917, purporting to establish “a national home for the Jewish people” while “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. The Jewish intellectual Arthur Koestler described that declaration as “one of the most improbable documents of all time” in which “one nation promised to a second nation the country of a third”. However, what the Jews could not get from Ottoman rulers, the British awarded them in Palestine partly to exonerate themselves from centuries of guilt of anti-semitism and persecution of Jews leading to the Holocaust and partly to checkmate the re-emergence of any Islamic or Arab power in the Middle East.
It was the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill who created the myth about Palestine as “a land without people for a people without a land”. Palestine was not a land without people although European Jews were people without a land to call home. Prior to 1948, they were like an inverted triangle without a solid base and living scattered all over Europe and other cities in ghettoes, a term originally used to describe Jewish quarters in European cities starting with Venice in 1516. After the Holocaust, however, a total of 20 countries including the Kimberley region in Western Australia were considered by the British to settle Europe’s Jewish migrants. But Palestine, a mandated territory carved out of the Ottoman Empire and given to Britain under the Sykes-Piscot agreement fitted the imperial objectives of Britain to satisfy Zionist aspirations and prevent any chance of an Islamic or Arab power raising its head again in the Middle East. Thus, the Jewish camel was allowed to stick one leg into the Arab tent and after 75 years, that camel is on the verge of chasing out its original occupants. The US is funding, arming and justifying Israel’s invasion of Gaza and asking Palestinians to quit their 4,000 year old home. Nikki Haley’s call for emigration and Joe Biden’s silent endorsement of that call show that Zionists are in control of the White House whether its occupants are Democrats or Republicans.
What is more horrifying to watch in this tragedy than the death and destruction in Gaza is the abject incompetence of the Muslim world, particularly its Arab sector, to counter Israeli genocide in Gaza. That incompetence has a long history and cannot be condensed in a sentence or two. However, at least after the Nakba in 1948 Arab rulers must have realized that British imperialism had deliberately planted an enemy on their doorstep who would be militarily equipped and financially supported to look after the interests of imperialism. The transfer of the seat of imperialism from Britian to US after WWII has not changed that equation. The discovery of petroleum (most of which is found beneath the Arabian desert) and its stranglehold on West’s industrial economies only resolved US to empower Israel to safeguard Western interests in the Middle East. But there is also another and even more crucial a factor – the financial power of Zionists that compels US to take care of Israel.
Anti-semitic persecution of Jews or “Christ killers” as they were called in Christian Europe forced that community to live in ghettoes and prevented its members from participating in ordinary economic and business dealings with Christians. But there was one area remained as exception and that was, as the famous economic historian R. H. Tawney put it, “The Damnable Sin of Usury”, which was left to the persecuted community to indulge in. Shakespeare gave a poetic touch to this Christian prohibition in his Hamlet: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. What the Bible prohibited and Christians rejected Jews picked up and emerged as the greatest promoters and beneficiaries of finance capitalism. Presently, it is this power of Zionist finance that plays a deterministic role not only in the political and economic destiny of US and other European countries but also in international relations. Zionist Israel is exploiting this factor to its maximum advantage.
Arab countries are no match to this power even though petroleum gave them some leverage to make an impact on world affairs. But with all the financial wealth they amassed from petroleum products since 1970s they neither bothered to build up their own firepower to challenge Israel nor did they develop the diplomatic clout to sway international opinion in favour of their causes. Palestine is the victim of this negligence. The Arab monarchs, emirs, sultans and presidents are all dictators who are more worried of protecting their own powerbase than the fate of Palestine. This acts to the advantage of US and Israel. It is this political weakness in the Arab world that is exploited by US to advance its hegemonic interests in the region. The Abraham Accords signed in 2020 between Israel and UAE including Bahrain and Morocco was entirely due to the machination of US that wants the Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel. Behind this accord was the discovery of oil along the coasts of Lebanon, Israel and Gaza and the US plan to start a massive oil development project joined by Saudi Arabia and Israel. It is to take full advantage of this project that Israel now hopes to clear Gaza of Palestinians. The fact that the White House has not openly dismissed this solution and rejected what Nikki Haley and other Zionists are saying is significant as a sign of endorsing Israeli plan about post-war Gaza. Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthis and other resistant groups have therefore no other alternative but to extend their struggle to engulf the region. Arab rulers are sitting on a volcano.