It reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about. Many South Africans are beginning to recognise the parallels to what we went through . Desmond Tutu
We now have a law that confirms the Arab population as second-class citizens. It therefore is a very clear form of apartheid. I don’t think the Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others. This new law does exactly that. That is why I am ashamed of being an Israeli today. Daniel Barenboim
The
founder of Zionism at the end of the 19th century, Theodor Herzl, was
an admirer of the British Empire and wrote to Cecil Rhodes, founder
of the white settler colony named after him, He said, “You are being invited
to help make history. It does not involve Africa but a piece of Asia
Minor, not Englishmen but Jews … I turn to you … because it is
something colonial ..”
Chaim
Weizmann, who suceeded Herzl added that “Should Palestine fall within the
British sphere of influence and should they encourage Jewish
settlement … we could develop the country, bring back civilisation
and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”
You
don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist. Prayers at the US Embassy,
on the day Trump moved it to Jerusalem, were delivered by Robert
Jeffries, a Dallas megachurch pastor who said Hitler was sent by God
to drive the Jews to their ancestral land.
The
Jewish opponents of Zionism could be found at the same time as Herzl
in the Jewish Bund, founded in 1897 in Poland and Russia. They
stressed the principles of, socialism, secularism and doyikayt or
“localness.”
Doyikayt
was encapsulated in the Bund slogan: “There, where we live, that is
our country.” One of their early leaders, Viktor Adler, declared
“Bundists wish to shatter the existing economic frameworks and show
the Jewish masses how a new society can be built not by escape, but
by struggle. We link the essence of the Jewish masses’ life to that
of humankind.
Here
are past and present advocates who have linked their lives to
humankind. Perhaps we will now be able to hear their voices more
clearly.
Albert
Einstein; “The (Israeli) state idea is not according to my heart. I
cannot understand why it is needed … I believe it is bad.”
Sigmund
Freud: “I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our
people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I
can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which
transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby
offending the feelings of the natives.”
Erich Fromm,
social psychologist: “The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel
cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly
claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years
ago, this world would be a madhouse.”
Primo
Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz: “Everyone has their Jews and for the
Israelis they are the Palestinians”.
Marek Edelman, one
of the leaders of the1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising compared the
Palestine resistance to ZOB, the Jewish fighters in Warsaw.
Hannah
Arendt, political scientist: “The trouble is that Zionism has often
thought and said that the evil of antisemitism was necessary for the
good of the Jewish people.”
Martin
Buber, Israeli philosopher: “How great was our responsibility to
those miserable Arab refugees in whose towns we have settled Jews who
were brought here from afar; whose homes we have inherited, whose
fields we now sow and harvest; the fruits of whose gardens, orchards
and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we put up houses of
education, charity and prayer. . ”
Isaac
Asimov, novelist: “I find myself in the odd position of not being a
Zionist ... I think it is wrong for anyone to feel that there is
anything special about any one heritage of whatever kind.”
Harold
Pinter. On Israel’s 60th anniversary said, “We cannot celebrate
the birthday of a state founded on terrorism, massacres and the
dispossession of another people from their land."
Uri
Avnery, ex-Israeli army officer: “What will be seared into the
consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a
blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and
not prepared to abide by any moral restraints.”
Daniel
Barenboim, Israeli pianist and conductor: “I don’t think the
Jewish people survived for 20 centuries, mostly through persecution
and enduring endless cruelties, in order to now become the
oppressors, inflicting cruelty on others.”
Lenni
Brenner, writer and civil rights activist: “The Zionist leaders
were uninterested in Fascism itself. As Jewish separatists they only
asked one question, the cynical classic: 'So? Is it good for the
Jews?'”
Richard
Cohen, US columnist: “The greatest mistake Israel could make at the
moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake … the idea of
creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and
some Christians) has produced a century of warfare.”
Henry
Siegman, Rabbi and director of the U.S./Middle East Project: “Israel
has crossed the threshold from ‘the only democracy in the Middle
East’ to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.”
Prof
Norman Finkelstein: “Every single member of my family on both sides
was exterminated. Both of my parents were in the Warsaw Ghetto
Uprising. And it is precisely and exactly because of the lessons my
parents taught me and my two siblings that I will not be silent when
Israel commits its crimes.’
Richard
Falk, former UN special rapporteur on human rights, called Israeli
policies in the Occupied Territories “a crime against humanity.”
Falk also has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to
the Nazi treatment of the Jews.
Alexei
Sayle: “Israel is the Jimmy Saville of nation states.”
Miriam
Margolyes: “My support for the Palestinian cause is fiercer because
I am Jewish.’
Noam
Chomsky, “The last paradox is that the tale of Palestine from the
beginning until today is a simple story of colonialism and
dispossession, yet the world treats it as a multifaceted and complex
story—hard to understand and even harder to solve.”
Michael Rosen on the children of Gaza
Don't mention the children.
Don't name the dead children.
The people must not know the names
of the dead children.
The names of the children must be hidden.
The children must be nameless.
The children must leave this world...
having no names.
No one must know the names of
the dead children.
No one must say the names of the
dead children.
No one must even think that the children
have names.
People must understand that it would be dangerous
to know the names of the children.
The people must be protected from
knowing the names of the children.
The names of the children could spread
like wildfire.
The people would not be safe if they knew
the names of the children.
Don’t name the dead children.
Don’t remember the dead children.
Don’t think of the dead children.
Don’t say: ‘dead children’.
