Numerous official Israeli policies and Acts of the Knesset segregate and separate Jews from Palestinians, whether it is in Gaza, the West Bank or within-Green-Line Israel, but there is a seemingly wilful ignorance of the facts on the ground that blurs the vision of people that dont recognize the fact of legal ethnic separation in Israel or Occupied Palestine. I use the word ignorance here not just to describe people who carefully self-censor what they read to limit what learn about, but also to describe those who IGNORE the obvious - that racism is the nature of Nationalist Zionism, which is the NOT ONLY the ideology of promoting a Jewish majority homeland in Palestine, but is the ideology of promoting a Jewish State where laws segregate and separate Jews from Palestinians, where non-Jewish Arabs suffer extreme persecution, as do Jewish Arabs, that is Palestinian Mizrachi or Sephardi Jews who also are severely persecuted in Israeli society if they are observed speaking Arabic with their grandparents, whose native tongue is Arabic, or if they attempt to preserve the Mizrachi or Sephardi Arabic Jewish cultures and writings. The occupation and continuing ethnic-cleansing of Palestine is not just connected to the racist facts observable on the ground, but is also connected to the mentality of Zionist ideology. One can almost feel sympathy when observing the painful process of Jews who start to tackle the mythology that they dearly want to believe to be true about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, when the contradictions begin to focus. Zionist wilful “ignorance” is not about what they dont know, but about what they choose to ignore. Zionists today know about the Nakba (the 1948 catastrophe that ethnically cleansed the majority of the non-Jewish Arabic Hour-speaking population of Palestine), but Zionists either don’t assign a moral value to what they actually know, or they assign a positive moral value to what any unbiased observer would consider immoral. Consider what Israels first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937: With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I dont see anything immoral in it. [Righteous Victims, Benny Morris, Knopf, 1999]. Buddhism and Daoism, like all true Religions based on universal spirituality, consider “ignorance” to be essentially “ignorance of the interconnectedness that all sentient beings have with the ground of unified consciousness; that is, ignorance is a false belief in separation from the ground of unified consciousness that underlies all manifested universes. Such ignorance is the basis of evil which Buddhism analyses as the “three afflictions or destructive emotions” which are “ignorance, attachment and aversion”. When classified as five poisons, either pride or avarice (greed) and jealousy are added to make the five: “attachment, aversion, ignorance, avarice, jealousy”. While pride and avarice are just combinations of ignorance and attachment, jealousy is a combination of attachment and aggression, and aggression arises from irrational dread, which is also a product of aversion (hatred), which in turn arises from the false belief in essential separation from the ground of unified consciousness. Actually these “Buddhist” prescriptions concerning ignorance, attachment and aversion precede Buddhism. They go back to Patanjalis Book of Yoga Sutras and way before that they are at the core of all varieties of universal religion. Judaism, Christianity and Islam have always had core beliefs based on universal spirituality, however there are many cults posing as Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity or Islam that are based on the destructive emotions. The antidotes to the three evils (ignorance, attachment and aversion) are are “meditative insight, detached compassion and non-grasping love”. Jewish Israelis believe they act on ethical principles, even as they engage in a brutal conflict and inhuman oppression, yet they are no more innately a genocidal people than anyone else. It is the process of knowing and not knowing at the same time that blocks people from seeing or feeling immoral actions they perpetrate. The evil acts perpetrated are a result of having imbued Zionist ideology, which at the core is ignorance of the universal love that sustains the existence of both Jews and Palestinians. Zionist ideology at its core fosters greed for the land and resources of the native people, and Zionist ideology at its core, even in the face of biblical injunctions accepted by Judaism to love ones neighbors, to love mercy and to act with compassion, breeds irrational hatred based on different ethnicity or religion, or in the case of African refugees, race. In his book States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering Stanley Cohen labels this process of knowing and now knowing at the same time that one is acting immorally with the simple word “denial”. Jewish extremists can be observed saying things like, “Yes, I’m a racist. I don’t want Arabs in my country, but you wont hear such words from the average Zionist. Such words are the in-your-face version of Zionist ideology that the average Zionist does not admit. We are not discussing spiritual Zionism which does not support a “Jewish State”, but totally non-biblical, non-spiritual, nationalist Zionism that argues that Israel is a state for the Jews, only for the Jews, and therefore necessarily excludes by law the right of anyone who is not a Jew to have equal protection by the law. In 1895, Herzl, the founder of nationalist Zionism, wrote in his diary: We must expropriate gently the private property on the state assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discretely and circumspectly. Let the owners of the immoveable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back. (America And The Founding Of Israel, John W. Mulhall, 1995, p. 49, Righteous Victims, Benny Morris, 2001, p. 21-22). Other Zionist leaders display the same mentality. Moshe Sharett, the first Israeli foreign minister, wrote in 1914: We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from people inhabiting it, that governs it by the virtue of its language and savage culture ..... Recently there has been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about the mutual misunderstanding between us and the Arabs, about common interests [and] about the possibility of unity and peace between two fraternal peoples. ..... [But] we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such illusive hopes ..... for if we cease to look upon our land, the Land of Israel, as ours alone and we allow a partner into our estate- all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise. (Righteous Victims, p. 91). By the time Israeli children reach high school they are convinced that it would be so much better if the Palestinians just were not there. So they read in the writings of Israels founders, such as Israels first Prime Minister Ben-Gurion who wrote in his diary in 1937 that With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I dont see anything immoral in it...” (Righteous Victims, p. 144). On September 26, 1948, he proposed to the Israeli provisional government that Israel should attack the West Bank. Again, he had reiterated how a war could be used as an instrument to transfer population, and he used Lyddas and Ramlas occupation and the subsequent expulsion of their population as a precedent: I assume that most of the Arabs of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron would flee, like the [Palestinian] Arabs of Lydda, Jaffa, Tiberias, and Safad, and we will control the whole breadth of the country up to the Jordan. In another entry he writes: It is not impossible . . . that we will be able to conquer the way to the Negev, Eilat, and the Dead Sea, and to secure the Negev for ourselves; also to broaden the corridor to Jerusalem, from north to south; to liberate the rest of Jerusalem and to take the Old City; to seize all of central and western Galilee and to expand the borders of the state in all directions (The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by Simha Flapan, 1987, p. 48 & 1949, The First Israelis, Tom Segev, 1998, p. 14). Shlomo Lavi, one of the influential leaders of the Mapai party, and a Member of the Knesset, said that the “transfer of the Arabs out of the country in my eyes is one of the mos(t) just, moral and correct that can be done.” Stanley Cohens monumental book States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering talks about how societies look at their own collective historical taboos and the experience of their own collective amnesia in relation to atrocities and suffering. This book could be a starting of the process of curing the ideological affliction of Zionists if they would only read it. There is nothing that exists in Israel right now on the ground that cannot be dismantled and changed to make it an inclusive society. By changing the ideology of the regime, everything else is easily changeable. This is needed to stop the atrocities and suffering.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 05:24:44 +0000
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