I am not composing this farewell message to the Year 2024 out of spite. I carry feelings of hurt, jealousy and the desire to lash out, as it has been a year of genocide. A genocide, something we thought was buried in the heap of ashes of history in Europe 80 years ago and in Rwanda and Bosnia 30 years ago, raised its ugly head in 2024 yet again. What makes it even more hurtful is the fact that its perpetrators, this time, are the people of its first victims. What is even more upsetting than that, is that we could have known the recent genocide that is happening would occur.
Humanity’s shameful legacy of “destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” began with Jewish people as its first victims in Europe, and ironically, Israelis have become the sole perpetrators of the last genocide in Palestine. We should not blame all Jewish people for this crime against humanity – neither Judaism nor its sincere faithful are the slaughterers of tens of thousands of Palestinians. But Zionism and its adherents in Israel, the United States and Europe were (and still are) at the helm of this deplorable atrocity.
Simply check out those internet sites dedicated to “Torah Judaism,” which refers to schools of thought in Judaism that are perceived to be most adherent to the Torah and other commandments. Orthodox Jewish groups often use the term to refer to their own system of beliefs. They are anti-Zionists; they do not serve in the Israeli army. They believe that the only enemies of the Jews are Zionism and Israel. This is not a joke: there really are religious Jews all over the world who work and pray for Zionism and Israel to disappear as soon as possible. They consider Zionism “a perverted ideology” and Israel “as an irreligious state.” You have to see Rabbi Cohen’s short history lessons on their social media sites.
Accordingly, Zionists are liars, thieves and frauds; they distort, desecrate and pervert traditional Jewish teachings. Judaism, like all religions, is the opposite of nationalism. However, the Zionism that began running rampant in the 1860s in Europe was not a religious but a nationalist ideology. The pioneering work on creating a “Jewish homeland in Jerusalem” was written in 1860 by Moses Hess, a German philosopher, and early communist whose theories led to disagreements with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, under the title of “Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question.”
The homeland the “Communist Rabbi” proposed was a socialist country that would redeem Jews through agriculture. The idea of migrating all Jews out of Europe was so popular among the adherents of Zionism that one of its leaders, Theodor Herzl, appealed to the Ottoman state for a Jewish country. It was not exactly the idea of redemption through the land but the ample opportunity of real-estate deals in his mind. Herzl came to Istanbul in 1896 with a deal he thought the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II couldn't turn down. The Ottoman state was then under an accumulated debt burden; Herzl offered to pay $2.2 billion in today's currency for the Ottoman Sultan to issue a charter for Jews to colonize Palestine. Herzl, through his interlocutors with the Ottoman Sultan, Philip de Newlinski and Arminius Vambery, exclaimed that without the help of Zionists, the Ottoman economy would not stand a chance of recovery, but the Sultan refused the offer outright.
However, the story didn’t end there. Many non-Jews and even anti-Semites supported the idea of European Jews' migration to a place as a means of ridding what Europe called its “Jewish problem.” If they wanted to go to their Biblical homes and the Ottomans were not acceding, no problem: the Great Powers of Europe would dismember the Ottoman Empire and open the land for them.
Those Biblical times had passed a long, long time ago, like 3,000 years ago, and now those lands have been inhabited by several people. Yet the hospitable owners of these lands, the Christians, Muslims and Jews, who had migrated to the Holy Lands themselves, not as part of a massive migration, in a word, the Palestinians, opened their homes and villages to these new neighbors. However, there was a minor problem: the newcomers wanted the land, not the people on it.
As Chaim Weizmann wrote in 1914 in one of his letters: “There is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exist the Jewish people, and it has no country. What else is necessary than to fit the gem into the ring to unite these people with this country? The owners of the country must, therefore, be persuaded and convinced that this marriage is advantageous, not only for the (Jewish) people and for the country, but also for themselves.”
The Zionists called this migration “a marriage;" they wanted the land for themselves. They were not interested in coexisting with the locals. The existence of the Palestinian population and identity, therefore, needed to be removed from the map and from historical memories. In this “marriage,” the Zionists only wanted the dowry and not the bride.
The Zionist hordes were so ruthless that they descended on the land like a catastrophe. The local Arabs, Christians and non-Zionist Jews, called the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through their violent displacement and dispossession of land, property and belongings the Nakba (“the catastrophe”).
From day one, the Zionists wanted to destroy Palestinian society, and they suppressed their culture, identity, political rights and national aspirations. Thus, the concept of Jewish nationality transformed into Jewish superiority and, later, to Jewish supremacy.
Israel has become the dominant military force in the region. If we read our history books, not those by the Hesses and Herzles, but the recent ones, like the stories of 43 Israeli massacres since 1967, we would have known that Zionists learned everything the racist Nazis had done to the Jews in the first genocide. If we read, for instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, "The Message," we’d know that Americans and Europeans' favorite democracy in the Arabian desert was actually fascist killing fields:
“Having vanquished its Arab foes and established itself as a state, Israel began the process of securing as much land as possible for its new state while keeping as many Palestinians as possible beyond that state’s borders. This ethnocratic approach to state-building had deep roots in Zionism, which held that majority status within a strong Jewish state was the only true bulwark against antisemitism. Implanting this majority presented an obvious problem – the Palestinians. There is only one thing the Zionists want... for that is the way by which the Jews would gradually become the majority, and then a Jewish Government would follow automatically, and the future of the Arab minority would depend on the goodwill of the Jews.”
As we say, an example is better than a hundred precepts. Since Oct. 7, 2023, we have lived 450 hateful days, and we learned that Israel is no longer part of the modern family of nations. Like the perpetrators of the Nazi, Rwanda and Bosnia genocides, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his collaborators, domestic and international, will have their own day of reckoning.
Until then, the Zionists’ Israel will continue to live in infamy.
