Palestine's Apocalypse Now

The photo above was taken in Jerusalem, Ottoman Palestine, in 1897.

When this photo was taken, the population of Palestine was at most 8% Jewish.

Even this 8% misrepresents the centuries-old demographic makeup of Palestine.

Since 1881, Zionists (mostly from Europe, along with a few Yemeni Jews) had already begun an attempt to launch a "return" to a region they had not inhabited for almost 2,000 years.

This "cult of return" to God's "Promised Land" is known as the "First Aliyah" among many Jewish Zionists.

Before the "First Aliyah", i.e. in about 1880, the Jewish population of Palestine was probably around 3%, or less.

Image: Ottoman-era Jerusalem

In the late 19th century, 99.7% of the world's Jews lived somewhere other than Palestine.

Not as exiles, not as war refugees, but as a religious minority incorporated into communities, nations and polities almost everywhere in the world.

Jews spoke a myriad of languages, and integrated many of the foodways, folkways, and musical traditions of the places they came to inhabit.

From the Ashkenazim of Poland/Ukraine/Russia to the Sephardic Paradesi of India, a couple of things can be said with certainty about the vast majority of Jews throughout the world by the late 19th century:

1)  Jews were extremely dispersed and culturally diverse

2)  Jews were centuries-removed from the Eastern Mediterranean place and culture of their religious texts

One might as well expect a modern Samoan to claim a "right of return" to Taiwan!

The Flight of the Earls from Gaelic Ireland in 1607 led to the dispersal of Gaels throughout Europe and the Americas, often in military service to the Catholic monarchs of Spain and France. This is why some of the founding fathers of South American countries like Chile and Peru carry Irish surnames like O'Higgins. This is also why France has famous distilling companies with names like Hennessy.

Do the Spanish-speaking O'Higgins and French-speaking Hennessy descendants have a "right of return" to Derry and Antrim?

Would they be justified in claiming the imprimatur of their Catholic Christian God, as they violently dispossess the current inhabitants of Northern Ireland?

Nonsense.

Likewise, Zionism is primarily a European settler-colonialist land grab, underpinned with religious ideology by Jewish supremacists.

Yet this issue has been so heavily propagandized, for so long, that to even question the right of Israel to exist is seen by many as extremist.

Perhaps the Israel question should be framed differently, in a way which could equally apply to billionaires.

The question is not "Do billionaires have the right to exist?". Because they already exist, the real question is "Should billionaires exist?".

One is a question inviting violence as a solution, the other question invites us to change society in a more fundamental way moving forward.

There is zero chance of moving forward unless we refuse outright to accept false history and false narratives fed to us by ideologues and billionaires alike.

The only difference between ethnic-cleansing, land theft, barbarous genocide and a "legitimate" nation state is TIME and the CURATION OF PUBLIC MEMORY.

By all measures of natural justice, the USA itself has no "right" to exist.

Like Israel, the USA only exists as a de facto entity due to ethnic-cleansing, land theft, and yes, barbarous genocide.

"Should" the USA continue to exist in its current incarnation, where money purchases legislation and foreign policy?

Hell no.

But the USA completed most of its internal colonialist violence shortly before WWI, so public memory has been carefully curated for over a century now.

The expression "Manifest Destiny" carries the weight of untold, almost unspeakable violence and trans-generational suffering within its short six syllables.

But now, "Manifest Destiny" has become just a couple of words to place in a library, or lip service dropped casually into a high school history textbook.

No need for Americans to mention or learn about the screams of Pequot children being burned alive by Puritan zealots in Massachusetts, or Lakota women being blasted with US Army field artillery as they crouched weeping with fear in a ravine in South Dakota.

"But that was AGES* ago!"

"It's pure 'woke' nonsense to mention it."

"Thank you for your service!"

*****

The Zionist project in Palestine only began to gather real momentum after WWI, switching gears into its most vicious phase shortly after WWII, with the unilateral declaration of an Israeli state on 14 May 1948.

Three-quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from their homes and villages, laying the most direct foundation for the subsequent decades of Jewish Supremacist apartheid and violence.

In the decades when other colonial powers were beginning to disengage (at least nominally) from various regions worldwide, Israel stands almost alone as the last blatantly ethno-supremacist settler-colonialist project in the western world.

Western powers have encouraged and supported this particular project for a number of reasons, none of which are moral or just.

If the consequences were not so brutal, the claims of being "indigenous to Palestine" made by Jewish supporters of Israel living in The West would be simply laughable.

We already mentioned the Flight of the Earls from Ireland in 1607, in the direct aftermath of the English Crown's vicious scorched-earth tactics against the Irish.

But it didn't stop there. Irish displacement, exile, ethnic-cleansing, and "othering" as sub-human subjects continued.

The English Puritan Oliver Cromwell cruelly transported many Irish from their homeland to colonies in the Americas during the mid-1600s.

After 375 years in America, do the descendants of those Irish people - living for centuries as "Americans", from Boston to Los Angeles - do these modern Americans have a "right of return" to Ireland?

Of course not. They are no longer Gaelic in any meaningful sense. And the predominantly Gaelic world their ancestors left no longer exists. Ireland moved on in their absence, and became something else.

The same is true - perhaps even more so - for Jewish people scattered all over the world for over 2,000 years.

They are no longer Judeans in any meaningful sense. And the world their ancestors left no longer exists. Palestine moved on in their absence, and became something else.

Israel and Zionism is trying to reconstitute something long dead with the blood of the living.

It's racist, Jewish ethno-supremacy, based in the exact same thinking which gave rise to "white" supremacy in America, and to "Aryan" supremacy in Germany.

And to those who say that the world's Jews need a safe home? You've already had a couple of safe homes for centuries. They're called the UK and USA. And neither place requires the murder of 20,000 children in just 20 months to “keep Jews safe”.

It would be interesting to know how many among the hundreds of thousands of Jewish supporters of Israel currently living in New York City would be willing to remove themselves to a blockaded and fenced enclave on Staten Island, to allow for the return of the Iroquois and Lenape diaspora to their rightful homelands in eastern New York State?

Let's see what happens when the "First Lenape Aliyah" to Manahatta begins...

*The Massacre at Wounded Knee took place during the lifetime of this writer's great-grandparents.  An equivalent or worse massacre has taken place EVERY DAY for over 600 days now in Palestine.