This was an official statement by a military commander who held the highest military posts in the Zionist army, the institution around which the very idea of the state revolves, and so we found in that statement, once deconstructed, a key to understanding many things, as well as a great many contradictions and problems:
“Hamas does not recognise our right”… Fine; who are you? What is this right? On what basis does it rest? What is the “Jewish state” you want? What is the real purpose of its existence? What is the “Land of Israel”? Why should the land of historic Palestine, of all the countries in the world, be the Land of Israel? And accordingly: why did Israel lose its identity and its historical logic after 7 October?
Many questions, and scenes scattered here and there, and perhaps it is time to trace them.
Why Are We Here?
When the fathers of the Zionist movement thought of establishing a state to gather the world’s Jews, their first aim was to “solve” the Jewish question in Europe, that is, to find a clear and lasting solution to the persecution of Jews in Europe since the Middle Ages, especially since life in Europe during the Dark Ages revolved around the Christian religion and its capacity to govern the state. As the church became immersed in culture and power, the Jews became a disreputable minority that could be attacked at any time, and here an important question arises: why were Jews persecuted in the past?
Well, in the early founding stage of European Christianity, a debate arose over whether Christians were expected to observe Jewish customs. With Jews spread throughout the state and initially outnumbering others, church leaders at the time decided to follow only some Jewish customs, allowing Christians to keep their religion without hostility towards the Jews.
But the Christians were not content with this alliance, especially after the Apostle Paul carried out extensive missionary work among non-Jewish populations, in what some called “the first Gentile revolution”. With the spread of Christian ideas about the doctrine of crucifixion and redemption, for reasons related to church conflicts, and the belief of many that Judas betrayed Christ in order to hand him over to the members of the “Supreme Council of the Jews” for thirty pieces of silver, bitterness towards the Jewish people began to take a different form.
With the spread of Christianity in its modern ecclesiastical form, and the lack of understanding with ancient Jewish customs, the belief emerged that “Judaism” is exclusionary by nature, especially after Jews clung to their own way of life even in the simplest matters such as dress. The traditional garb, with long beards, locks of hair hanging over the ears and the Star of David adorning the elbow, remained a “Jewish practice” specific to one group, which made the Jewish minority easy to spot and made it easy for the general population to persecute those different from them. From that point, “everything Jewish became suspect”, especially after Christianity separated itself from Jewish customs out of bitterness and resentment, a resentment that lit the spark of opposition to rabbinic customs, and later antisemitism.
Here comes the role of Jewish customs themselves, which entrenched that racism and did not try to repel it, as Jews set themselves apart as a superior race, preferring to live in their own “ghettos”, and so hostility towards this group became a clear policy of states and churches. When epidemics swept Europe in the fourteenth century, humanity was at its most fragile and everyone was looking for a logical reason why these strange diseases had such enormous destructive power, the Jews became the easiest scapegoat, as the religious differences between Jews and Christians laid a foundation for hatred and ultimately fed accusations that the Jews were the main cause of those epidemics.
In October 1347 came the spark that ignited what is called “antisemitism”, when some merchant ships reached the coast of Sicily carrying something very strange: men and women with black swellings the size of eggs, oozing blood and pus from the armpits and groin, followed by high fever and the spitting of blood, in what would later be called the “Black Death”. This epidemic was so virulent that it spread rapidly from person to person; by the mid-1350s, the plague had killed one in every three people from India to Iceland. With the despair that gripped everyone, and no logical explanation for the disease, an idea emerged in southern France and Spain that the Jews were responsible for spreading the epidemic. But how?
Follow the Money
At that time, the number of Jews in Europe was estimated at about 2.5 million, a third of them living in southern France and Spain. As religious and economic disputes between Christians and Jews began, rabbis and the wealthy in Jewish communities began calling for a strange practice called “Kabbalah”, a series of spiritual and philosophical beliefs and explanations interpreting life, the universe and the divine, and explaining the relationship with the unchanging, eternal and everlasting “God”. These practices were carried out on the basis of a financial alliance between rabbinic families and the commercial and banking elite, founding a huge empire that controlled many financial transactions, and giving rise to populist myths that have continued to grow to this day, to the point that some still imagine that Jews control the world through money.
Since these practices were highly secretive, the belief emerged that they grew out of “black Jewish magic”, and because this mystical movement began to appear at the time of the plague, Christians believed that the Jews had poisoned the wells with this black magic. As a result, Jews were tortured, and riots against them began across Europe.
Wealthy people indebted to Jews helped spread this climate by opening the doors to “the killers of Jews”, until the moment when the Jews of the fortress of Esslingen, east of the German city of Stuttgart, committed mass suicide to escape the tragedy, locking themselves inside their own house of worship and setting it on fire. In the city of Strasbourg, 900 of 1,884 Jews were burned after being stripped of their clothes.
The massacre continued across Europe and was fuelled as a way of breaking the back of Jewish capitalism, which led Casimir III, King of Poland, to invite Europe’s Jews to migrate east to his country. Jewish migration to Poland continued until the end of the sixteenth century, and in 1648 things began to change little by little with the spread of Martin Luther’s revolutionary ideas about the truth of the church, creating a general climate that fed the class hatred of peasants against Christian and Jewish landowners, so that the Jews lost most of their property in Poland and Ukraine and lived in abject poverty.
In the 1790s, Poland was partitioned, and 75% of Eastern Europe’s Jews came under the rule of the tsarist Romanov empire. Because of the intense antisemitism of the Orthodox Church, neither the tsarist government nor the Jewish rabbinic leadership was able to reach an interim settlement to stop growing Jewish poverty. Finally came the Nazi invasion of Europe, beginning the last of the massacres against Jews in Europe, the Holocaust, in which more than 3.3 million Jews were killed in Poland alone in Nazi concentration camps and gas chambers.
European in Inclination and Identity
Accordingly, the Jews were indeed subjected to grave massacres whose bloodiness and racism exceeded imagination, which must be confronted by talking about them and understanding their causes and motives, and also so that we remind the world that these massacres took place in Europe alone, specifically in the countries that now stand with all their equipment, weapons and money to fund a genocide against the Palestinian people.
Yes; when Europe stood behind the killing of millions of Jews, millions of Protestant Christians and hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Spanish Inquisition, the Middle East and the lands under the Abbasid caliphate, and later the Ottomans, were a just homeland where Jews lived side by side with Muslims, Christians and various other communities without the slightest problem, according to the well-known principle of ahl al-dhimma (protected peoples).
Political writer Abdel Aziz Said argued this when he said that the concept of ahl al-dhimma allowed other cultures to flourish and allowed Jews to practise their own rites and manage their internal affairs. Although they were subject to certain restrictions not imposed on Muslims, such as paying the jizya and being barred from carrying arms, under Islamic rule they rarely faced martyrdom, exile or killing, or being forced to leave their homes, and they enjoyed complete freedom to choose where to live and what work to do.
According to American Jewish historian Mark Cohen, the Jewish people found solace under Turkish or Abbasid rule during the Middle Ages, living in tolerance and integration, and thanks to this social integration Jews made great progress in various fields, including mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, chemistry and philology, with some even reaching political power under Islamic rule; for example, Jews were responsible for certain parts of maritime trade and the slave trade in Baghdad.
How Small the State Is
These differences lead us naturally to consider the idea of establishing the State of Israel on the land of historic Palestine in particular. Leaving aside the conflicts between the great imperialist powers at the time and how much they gained from it, we can analyse the scene as follows:
For the masters of colonialism, Jews were living a hard life in Europe and a good life in the Middle East, so they should go to the Middle East, killing several birds with one stone, including getting rid of the Jewish crisis in Europe while letting them live in a spot that was already occupied. As for the Jew himself, the ordinary Jew who understands nothing of power and cares nothing for the policies of the great powers or the Zionist leaders’ ambitions of domination, the whole matter comes down to one word: “security”.
The idea of security was the main driver for the world’s Jews to establish a state where they could live without killing, displacement or destruction. Of course, the matter later developed into racist colonial aims, through which the Zionists tried to project what had happened to them in the past onto the people of Palestine, especially after this simple idea merged with the Zionist movement’s aims of imperialist expansion towards the Promised Land.
Religion was used as a cover to draw Jews to this particular spot of land, by reviving Jewish civilisation and strengthening ancient Jewish traditions that were frowned upon on the old continent. Zionism was also fed as a racist principle working to rebuild the Temple in place of Al-Aqsa Mosque, as the supreme goal of the world’s Jews, capable of uniting them once again; add to that the desire of the great powers, or traditional old colonialism, to maintain its presence in the Middle East, the source of oil, black gold.
So the search for security is what moves Jews from their original countries to a foreign land, and it is to this that we trace the idea of establishing the Jewish state. Well, now we must ask an important question: in our time, which part of the earth is safe for Jews, Palestine or Europe?
Europe, of course; no sensible person can live under constant threat, or carry on normal activities as an ordinary man to the sound of sirens, running to shelters every hour. Hence the idea of resistance as the first solution to confront Israel’s racist tyranny. Israel, as we have pointed out before and will continue to, is nothing but an apartheid entity built on inherited religion, and inherited religion does not count as a nationality uniting communities; so the components of statehood do not exist in this case, and the whole matter is left to the interactions of Zionist leaders with the Arab surroundings, to how secure Jews feel in that spot of land, and then to efforts to draw more Jews from around the world to historic Palestine.
On this basis too comes the importance of the 7 October battle and the varying responses that followed, whether from the axis of resistance or from Iran, because it dismantled the idea of a Zionist presence in Palestine from the outset and confirmed that there is no security for these Zionists on our land. If the Zionist leaders demonise the resistance before public opinion and claim before the world that Hamas wants to wipe Israel out entirely,
this means that every rocket the resistance fires feeds the sense of defeat among Jews in general, the sense that this land rejects them and that their economic and political interests are not safe from successive strikes. The fiercer the resistance is, and the more it proves day after day that it is at full military fitness, and even capable of initiating dangerous special operations such as the capture of soldiers announced a few days ago by the official spokesperson of the Al-Qassam Brigades, Abu Obeida, the more this will automatically increase Jewish emigration from Palestine and halt immigration into it from abroad, which is what was to be proven.
Gentlemen, political history does not move by the logic of “fast food”, and there is no such thing as “be, and it is”; liberating occupied land takes a long time, like any political or revolutionary work. So the question about the usefulness of the resistance, of 7 October, of the Iranian response, even if some consider it farcical, or of the special and defensive operations the resistance carries out on all fronts, must be answered by looking at history.
Hamas did not launch its military operation to liberate the entire land unconditionally; to think so is a major logical fallacy. Rather, the resistance acted to move the cause and to strip away the idea of a safe existence for Jews in Palestine, the basis on which the state was founded. And if we bet on its continuity, what history tells us in similar cases is that continuous resistance is resistance destined to succeed, without doubt.
Opinion articles do not reflect the views of Zawia3
