Zionism, Antisemitism and Islamophobia – the feeding of all our demons

I argued in January of this year that all the ingredients for a 3rd Intifada had been brewed in Israel after Netanyahu had formed political alliances with fringe radical Zionists who wanted to over rule their Supreme Court so that Settlers seizing land illegally in the West Bank could continue doing so.

This political decision alongside the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians people, alongside new egregious rules on Palestinian prisoners alongside a US inspired foreign policy that saw Israel signing new friendship agreements with other Muslim countries all conspired to erupt on October 7th.

I’m not justifying violence by Hamas, I’m explaining why it happened.

As this total failure of Zionist foreign policy risks erupting throughout the region, it has unleashed the old hatreds of Antisemitism and Islamophobia.

I am not someone who wants the State of Israel wiped from the face of the earth! I despise Israel’s brutal occupation of the Palestinian people, the outrageous 17 year blockade of Gaza and the ongoing theft of land in the West Bank, but I see Israel as a global responsibility and obligation after the obscenity of the Holocaust.

I stand with the Palestinian people AND the Israeli people!

The idea that Jews around the world are now under attack for their State’s deplorable war crimes and group punishments is as irrational as attacking Russians for Putin violence.

Muslims are not our enemy, Jews are not our enemy, Russians aren’t our enemy.

Authoritarian Muslim Regimes propped up by America’s Military Industrial Complex abusing their own faith to exert control over their own people are the enemy!

The far right Zionist Government in Israel is the enemy!

Putin is the enemy!

The leaderships should be highly criticised but we should have compassion for the people who are being abused by those leaders.

The unfolding tragedy and trauma Palestinians and Israeli’s are currently suffering should make all people of conscience grieve and weep.

The barbarity and violence both sides of these hatefully furious neighbours  are prepared to make the other suffer is truly heartbreaking to every sense of civilisation.

I believe this latest spasm of horror in the long history of obscenities both sides are prepared to treat the other has led to a parched desert of hatred that enables the kind of cruelty porn we are globally witnessing now.

This can’t in any sense of being be considered proportional for the now revised death toll of 1200 Israeli’s on October 7th…

…Israel has killed in one month the number of civilians Russia has killed in almost 2 years of war with the Ukraine!

65% of those Palestinians are women and children.

The violent social mutations that trauma will induce in the next generation is simply a dark desire for revenge.

Violence begets violence.

We need an immediate ‘ceasefire’ not a humanitarian pause.

What the Christ is a ‘humanitarian pause’?

You know war crimes are being committed. You will ‘pause’ those war crimes, and then go right back to committing more war crimes?

How is that a humanitarian pause?

Pausing between war crimes?

How the fuck is that humanitarian?

There must be an immediate ceasefire.

Immediate release of all hostages.

Immediate aid and rebuilding of Gaza.

Immediate stationing of international UN peace keepers to seperate the two.

Immediate plans for a 12 month blueprint for elections and a two state solution.

Immediate long term investment into Gaza and West Bank.

Beyond the immediate, there has to be space for both of these furiously angry neighbours to bond and find common ground in this parched desert of hate.

Peace Academy’s are a genuine attempt to foster these social oasis.

If NZ wants to champion peace, we need to support the NZ Peace Academy concept with grants to help organise and bring Israelis and Palestinians together to find that common ground.

I believe active engagement in peace this is the only way forward because what very few Western Commentators ever like acknowledging is just how counter productive the blowback is from the brutality Israel mets out.

The most tormented irony in this latest regurgitation of sadism between Hamas and Israel is of course Israel helped enable Hamas into the force it is now!

BLOWBACK: HOW ISRAEL WENT FROM HELPING CREATE HAMAS TO BOMBING IT

Did you also know that Hamas — which is an Arabic acronym for “Islamic Resistance Movement” — would probably not exist today were it not for the Jewish state? That the Israelis helped turn a bunch of fringe Palestinian Islamists in the late 1970s into one of the world’s most notorious militant groups? That Hamas is blowback?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. Listen to former Israeli officials such as Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s. Segev later told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as “a creature of Israel.”)

“The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques.”

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. “I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,” he wrote.

They didn’t listen to him. And Hamas, as I explain in the fifth installment of my short film series for The Intercept on blowback, was the result. To be clear: First, the Israelis helped build up a militant strain of Palestinian political Islam, in the form of Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood precursors; then, the Israelis switched tack and tried to bomb, besiege, and blockade it out of existence.

In the past decade alone, Israel has gone to war with Hamas three times — in 2009, 2012, and 2014 — killing around 2,500 Palestinian civilians in Gaza in the process. Meanwhile, Hamas has killed far more Israeli civilians than any secular Palestinian militant group. This is the human cost of blowback.

…Israeli tactics to fund the most radical and extremist groups to topple enemies is a game the Americans played with Al Qaeda and saw resources going to Osama Bin Laden to play the exact same role with the blowback of 9/11.

The problem with the brutal use of tactics like this is that it generates unforeseen blowback.

Hamas is one such unforeseen blowback.

Peace is our only option because the War Gods are interested only in the profit of blood loss, not the prevention of it.

These were the share prices of the war lords as violence exploded in the Middle East.

To paraphrase Gil Scott Heron, ‘they got folk out there working for war, we have to go to work for peace’…

Back when Eisenhower was the President
Golf courses was where most of
His time was spent
So I never really listened to
What the President said
Because in general I believed that
The General was politically dead
But he always seemed to know when the
Muscles were about to be flexed
Because I remember him saying something
Mumbling something about a
Military Industrial Complex
Americans no longer fight to
Keep their shores safe
Just to keep the jobs going
In the arms making workplace
Then they pretend to be gripped by
Some sort of political reflex
But all they’re doing is paying dues
To the Military Industrial Complex
The Military and the Monetary
The Military and the Monetary
The Military and the Monetary
The Military and the Monetary
Get together whenever they
Think it’s necessary
They turn our brothers and
Sisters into mercenaries
They are turning the planet into a cemetery
The Military and the Monetary
Use the media as intermediaries
They are determined to keep
The citizens secondary
They make so many decisions
That are arbitrary

We’ve got to work for Peace
Peace ain’t coming this way
If we only work for Peace
If everyone believed in Peace the
Way they say they do we’d have Peace
The only thing wrong with Peace
Is that you can’t make no money from it

We have to work for peace.

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