It has always been a disturbing mystery that the Israeli state, born in no small measure as a result of the stomach-turning attempts by Hitler's Nazis to exterminate the Jewish people, should have been so prepared in its turn to persecute the people of Palestine from whose lands modern Israel was carved. For the last 65 years, Zionists have pursued a calculated policy to drive Palestinians from their own borders and since 1967 have implemented via their illegal settlement program a campaign to pauperize the inhabitants of the West Bank. Zionists have also locked up the people of Gaza in a ghetto where just over four years ago, they were prepared to launch a massive military bombardment, hideously reminiscent of Nazi actions against the Jewish Warsaw ghetto in 1943. Zionists and their sympathizers will of course protest such comparisons. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that what has been done to the Palestinian people since even before 1948 represents a crime against humanity. The Palestinians' transgression has been to resist the loss of their land. They have rightly been haunted by the fear of “Eretz" (Greater) Israel, the biblical “Promised Land” which depending on rabbinical interpretation of Jewish scriptures runs from the East bank of the Nile, embraces Jerusalem and the West Bank and reaches up into Syria. The dogged Zionist pursuit of a Greater Israel has so far brought misery and homelessness to millions of Palestinians and the world ought to be able to appreciate this horrific reality. Yet thanks to unwavering US support, indifference in the chancelleries of Europe and the adroit action of the Israelis in presenting themselves as the vulnerable underdog in the Middle East, incredibly, the Palestinians have been cast as the aggressors. No finer example of the pernicious manipulation of world opinion could be found than the reaction of Israel and its faithful ally Washington to a statement by Turkish premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a UN meeting last week in Vienna. Speaking of bigoted intolerance generally, Erdogan said: "As with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it is inevitable that Islamophobia be considered a crime against humanity." The new US Secretary of State, John Kerry, who was on a visit to Turkey, described the remark as “objectionable.” Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu said the Turkish leader's words were “a dark and mendacious statement the likes of which we thought had passed from the world.” Really? A political creed, shored up by religious interpretation, that hardly conceals its intention to seize the land of the Palestinians in defiance of international law, let alone common humanity, and then subjects the rightful owners of that land to servility and oppression - this is not a crime against humanity? Just as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are manifestations of hatred against Jews and Muslims, so Zionism demonstrates a contempt and almost certainly a hatred for the Palestinians, if not indeed for anyone who is not a Zionist or a supporter of Zionist ambitions. Netanyahu was right about one thing when he condemned Erdogan. The Turkish leader's statement was “dark”, because it captures precisely the inexorable nature of Zionist expansionism. The seizure of other people's land in contravention of international law, the construction of illegal fortress-like settlements that divide up Palestine and the imposition of harsh military rule and economic sanctions on the luckless population are indeed very “dark”. And for Netanyahu and Kerry to pretend that this is in anyway justifiable is the biggest lie of all.
