Israeli historian Ilan Pappe’s book Ten Myths About Israel relates how the diaries of the early Zionists are full of anecdotes about how the migrant settlers were well received by the Palestinians, offering them shelter and teaching them how to cultivate the land.
(“Only, when it became clear that the settlers had not come to live alongside the native population, but in place of it, did the Palestinian resistance begin.”)
But, as his The Idea of Israel tells us, the Jewish settlers were antagonistic and condescending towards the native Palestinians from the start. Reports back to Europe about the Palestinians were all about the Palestinians’ unpleasantness and weirdness. “[The] Arabs assaulted us” was the phrase used to describe Palestinian boys’ simple act of helping the arriving settlers into small boats, their shouting because of high waves, their asking for tips as a means of survival. Leading figures of the Zionist Jewish migration wrote in their diaries about their disgust in finding houses occupied by Arabs and being appalled at the sight of so many Arab men, women and children.
The racist condescension is unmistakable. In fact, the constant odour of racism underlying the state of Israel displayed itself even among the migrant Jews themselves. Avi Shlaim’s Three Worlds – Memoirs of an Arab-Jew relates how non-European Iraqi Jewish immigrants to Israel were sprayed with DDT pesticides upon arrival at the airport in the early 1950s to disinfect them as if they were animals.
It is revealing how such racism was also there from the start in the writings of Theodor Herzl, regarded as the founder of Zionism in Europe. Rashid Khalidi’s, Hundred Years’ War on Palestine describes how Herzl wrote that the Jewish state would “form a part of a wall of defence for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilisation against barbarism”.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu himself has a penchant for positing Israel as being at the forefront of the battle between civilisation (read Western) and barbarism.
But who really is the barbarian when starvation is weaponised against civilians and children in Gaza? Clearly, the plot has not changed.
- Sign up for Aliran's free daily email updates or weekly newsletters or both
- Make a one-off donation to Persatuan Aliran Kesedaran Negara (ALIRAN), CIMB a/c 8004240948
- Make a regular pledge or periodic auto-donation to Aliran
- Become an Aliran member
That running thread of racism continues today in Israel through apartheid, a tremendous ignominy that Israel bears in addition to everything else. In July 2024, apart from ruling that Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land is illegal, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is based on “systematic discrimination, segregation and apartheid.”
In February 2022, Amnesty International concluded that “the State of Israel considers and treats Palestinians as an inferior non-Jewish racial group“.
Which Israel?
An irony, if not deceit, of Zionism is how, even though it is a secular nationalist ideology, it found utility in the Bible. Ten Myths About Israel describes how the Bible provided “the myth for our right over the land”.
The choice of the name Israel was not by accident. It allowed the dominant nationalist narrative to claim that Israel is the same land that was promised by God to Abraham in the Bible. God was thus on the side of the state of Israel.
Yet, it was Mahatma Gandhi who wrote that the “Palestine of the Biblical conception is not a geographical tract”. Writing in 1938, Gandhi expressed all his sympathies with the Jews who had been persecuted for centuries. But he also added, “My sympathy does not blind me to the requirements of justice…. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs.”
In a sense, we can see that the concept of the state of Israel has to strain to justify itself. It has thus been described as a marketing project. It has also been described as a state created out of a superstition.
We can see how atheist Zionists use a particular God argument that they themselves do not believe in. Worse, they impose it on others who do not believe in their God argument either. This effectively makes it a superstition that thus has to be marketed.
The imposition of the superstition has been at the expense of hundreds of thousands of native Palestinians who were forcefully displaced or killed during the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe). It is a Nakba that has not ended and in 2025 continues to unfold in Gaza and in other occupied Palestinian territories.
In any case, promise by God or not, there can be no justification for the prolonged, continued, disproportionate carnage and starvation inflicted by Israel’s armed forces on an entire population in Gaza. If we believe in God, then surely, everyone is a creation of God, and we cannot just go on killing them.
The Zionist entity of Israel cannot be regarded as the encapsulation or representation of Jews and their tradition. It is a tradition which author and activist Naomi Klein, herself Jewish, has pointed out as one that implores its members to “act mercifully to the widow and the orphan…tend to the sick…do justice and love mercy”.
She has spoken of Zionism as “a deeply immoral path…now…justifying the shredding of core commandments: thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not covet.”
Consider the above against Israel’s total blockade (since 2 March 2025) of all food, medicines and supplies into Gaza. The wilful starvation, malnutrition and deprivation of an entire population including children is abhorrent (and illegal) by any measure.
Surely, none of this represents the lofty ideals of the Jewish tradition. Again, who really are the barbarians?
This cannot be right
The word Holocaust is derived from the Hebrew word ólah “meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God.” The word was chosen because it was the ultimate manifestation of what the Nazis did to Jews in the (Nazi)* holocaust – “the bodies of the victims were consumed whole in crematoria and open fires.”
Consumed…whole…in open fires – we surely cannot avoid seeing the similarity with what is being committed now, 80 years later, by the state of Israel against Palestinians in Gaza. Many of us would have seen by now video clips of Gazans being burnt alive by fires created by American and other Western weapons. Those weapons have been put, with no constraint, into the hands of Israeli forces to be used freely on the population of Gaza.
The Nazi consumption of whole Jewish bodies was carried out away from the public eye in extermination camps because, somewhat unbelievably, the Nazis had some sense that what they were doing was wrong and should be hidden.
Even more unbelievable is that Israel, the supposed state inheritor of Jewish victimhood, now kills, maims, orphans and burns children and civilians en masse openly with little or no compunction nor desire to hide what they are doing.
There is something highly depraved and vacant in such conduct – made worse by some Israeli soldiers’ obsession with parading themselves in women’s underwear taken from the homes they have destroyed.
One has to believe that no one is beyond redemption. And that such badly deformed minds are the result of ideological indoctrination that seeps into educational and all aspects of life in Israel. Still, it is important for us to understand where the oppression is and where the justice is that needs to be supported, which is why we have to support the struggle of the Palestinians.
Finally, by now it is obvious that the Israel-Palestine ‘conflict’ is not one based on religious or communal lines. This is especially relevant to us in Malaysia. Our own history of communal politics has trained us to see things through ethnic and religious lenses. The struggle of the Palestinians against their historical injustice needs our support no matter what our ethnic or religious background. In fact, cross-communal solidarity by all of us with the Palestinian cause is one way for us to exercise solidarity among ourselves.
* As referenced in part 1 of this series of articles, ‘holocausts’ have been inflicted on peoples around the world other than the Jews. But usually, when the term is used, it refers only to the holocaust experienced by the Jews of Europe at the hands of the Nazis. But we should not forget other people’s holocausts through wars and imperial history. Thus, as in Norman Finkelstein’s The Holocaust Industry, it is useful to utilise the term ‘Nazi holocaust’ when referring to the actual historical event experienced by the Jews under the Nazis.
This is the last piece in a series of four articles. Look up the other three articles here.
- Tegakkan maruah serta kualiti kehidupan rakyat
- Galakkan pembangunan saksama, lestari serta tangani krisis alam sekitar
- Raikan kerencaman dan keterangkuman
- Selamatkan demokrasi dan angkatkan keluhuran undang-undang
- Lawan rasuah dan kronisme
