The origin of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” Dec. 29, 2023)

“Europeans have never been opposed to genocide. Genocide only became an issue when it was brought home to Europe with the Jewish Holocaust.” — Aime Casaire.

“When the holocaust returned in the 21st century, it came denouncing antisemitism and wearing a Star of David.” — Caitlin Johnstone

The plain truth is that Jews and Palestinians were not always at war. Neither were Jews and Arabs. For centuries European Jews were persecuted and prosecuted all over Europe. They found refuse across the world including the Arab or Islamic world. For hundreds of years, Jewish people lived side by side with Palestinians, Muslims and Christians in the land we know today as Palestine or Israel.

To a large extent it was white supremacist Europeans who had problems with European Jews. It is worthy of note that up until the last century, Jews, Irish, Italians and Africans were viewed with hatred and disdain. In many parts of Europe and the United States, it was common to see signs that read “No Jews, Irish, Italians, niggers or dogs allowed”. As time went on, the “whiteness” of the Europeans allowed them to pass. Non-white people are still ostracised and hated. 

The difficulties and crisis in Jewish/Palestinian/Arab relations have their origin in the 1890s with the birth of the Zionist movement led by Theodor Heryl. The Zionist, many of whom were not religious were determined to establish a Jewish home in Palestine based on the biblical promise of a Jewish homeland in Israel. And from that day on Arab/Jewish relations were poisoned. Some say deliberately so.

The Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone has argued that “The greatest trick white antisemites ever pulled was getting Jews to leave western society in droves and move to a faraway country to spend their lives beating up Muslims.”

The Algerian writer Amir Nour supports Johnstone’s views: “There are three more essential reasons to consider seriously, as they might better explain not only the quasi-reflexive West’s support for Israel, but also its contemptuous disregard for the Palestinian people and casual callous disdain for international law and obligations. And as always, history is the best and wisest of guides. Those reasons are to be found in the much alive — albeit socially and psychologically repressed — white supremacy and racial prejudice toward non-white others; the deep-seated antisemitism in the societal mindset and behaviour of a non-negligible portion of the European peoples; and the powerful influence of the Christian-Zionists.”

You don’t believe Johnstone and Nour! Listen to the British politician Arthur Balfour after whom Balfour Declaration was named.

“The Zionist movement would mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. The weak point of our position of course is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. We do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country … the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in November 1917 announcing its support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. At the time, Jews represented a tiny minority in Palestine. The British colonialists took control of Palestine after the collapse of the Ottoman empire Following World War 1

According to Balfour, a notorious white supremacist, Jewish people created “age-long miseries for western civilisation”. Jews represented a body that was for too long regarded as “alien and even hostile”, But which western civilisation was “equally unable to expel”. Now you see why Caitlin Johnstone called it the greatest trick ever pulled by European antisemites!?

Deep in the psyche, the white European elite sought a final solution to the Jewish problem and offered tacit support to the Nazi final solution. But for Hitler’s excessive atrocities against other “civilised” white people in the Czech Republic, Poland, Austria, France and England, the ruling classes of the world would have been comfortable with the brutality meted out to Jews, communists, trade unionists, and Gypsies.

Armed with the slogan “Never Forget. Never Again.”, Zionist Jews, whose economic and political power has grown tremendously over the last century, have stoked white shame. It is this guilt which accounts for the instinctive support of Europeans and their American siblings for Israel. Added to this is the strategic military and political role of Israel as an imperial outpost in West Asia.

No genocidal killings, ethnic cleansing, war crimes or violation of international law face Israel’s American and European backers. As the independent American journalist Patrick Lawrence observed, “Israel, the U.S. and the rest of the West cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the grave, grave error of al–Nakba in 1948, when began the forcible removal of Palestinians from their land. Nobody in power has the creativity, imagination, or confidence to confront the present as the consequence of this error and begin acting to correct it.”

George Orwell was right. In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former senator and Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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