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Amalek, Sudetenland, and Palestine

By Premysl Janyr | March 12, 2024

The curtain opened. In front of a dismayed world, a staging of genocide is taking place under the supervision, assistance and protection of the world hegemon.

No water, no food, no medicine, no fuel, no electricity! We are fighting the human beast. The whole nation is responsible, no one is innocent. Burn completely, no hope left. Destroy Gaza now! Now! Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948. Wipe them out, their families, their mothers and their children. These animals are no longer allowed to live.

It is Amalek, calling the Leader – a nation that stood in the way of the Jews during their emigration from Egypt. Now go and slay Amalek; like a sledgehammer you will destroy everything that belongs to him. You will not spare him, but you will kill man and woman, young man and infant, bull and sheep, camel and donkey, Jehovah commands King Samuel (1S 15,3). You will wipe out the memory of Amalek under heaven, do not forget it! (Deuteronomy 25:19)

This is the framework in which Israel’s campaign against Gaza begins in October. If we leave aside the immediate consequences – dead, human suffering, destroyed earth, the long-term consequence will be a fundamental break in the paradigms and clichés of the Western world. In their smug self-righteousness, Netanyahu and the Zionist politicians do not realize what a Pandora’s box they have opened.

Genocide

To avoid misunderstandings: genocide, according to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such:

• killing members of such a group;
• causing grievous bodily harm or mental disorder to members of such group;
• the intentional placing of any group in such living conditions as to bring about its total or partial physical destruction;
• measures aimed at preventing the birth of children in such a group;
• forcibly transferring children from one group to another.

The International Court of Justice must review the evidence and hear the parties and witnesses before rendering and reasoning judgment. A non-participating observer does not have to wait. If he sees someone kill another, he doesn’t have to wait for an investigation, an accusation, an indictment, a retrial, witnesses, evidence, and a verdict to know that he is committing a crime.

At the same time, it must be remembered that the Convention was adopted in December 1948. Earlier cases may fulfill its factual essence, but – unlike the current one – they cannot be retroactively judged on its basis.

The term genocide is already terrifying because of its weight, most people – incorrectly – understand it in the spirit of the Old Testament as the complete extermination of the entire target group. However, this was never achieved – that is why the formulation was completely or partially destroyed. A somewhat milder synonym is ethnic cleansing , more accurately describing the goal: removing the target group from the given territory. By persuasion, coercion, terror, banishment, killing, whatever.

Historical examples and comparisons are provided. The first genocide of Palestinians – Nakba in Arabic (النكبة, catastrophe, despair) – took place after the declaration of the State of Israel in May 1948. Three quarters of a million Arabs expelled, 532 Arab towns and villages razed to the ground, an estimated 15,000 dead – also thanks to arms supplied by Czechoslovakia – is the trauma from which Palestinian identity is derived. It differs from the current genocide primarily in that it took place covertly. Israel has so far tried to cover up its tracks and denied that it ever happened. It is only now that they suddenly claim it as a model worthy of repetition and exceding.

In many ways, the genocide in Gaza resembles the post-war genocide of the Sudeten Germans: the size of the target group (2.3 or 3.2 million respectively), the intensity (around 25,000 dead in three months), the justification (revenge for an armed attack against the state, or for its destruction and occupation), collective punishment affecting mainly the innocent, rhetoric (Gallant: human beast, Beneš: human monster ), great power cover (USA, USSR), hidden personal motivation of the leaders (Netayahu’s avoidance of trial and prison, Beneš’s post-war presidency) , the intention of the booty (Palestinian land and natural gas fields, German possessions), the strategy (killing as a means of forcing them to leave) and the mass support of the population.

One difference is in the design. In the Czech case, the killing was not an officially announced program, but to a large extent the honest handiwork of ordinary citizens, so to speak. Two years later, it became the subject of an investigation. In the case of Gaza, the official program is officially announced and is carried out by a professional army killing industrially by the hundreds with bombs from above; honest manual labor is left only to the West Bank settlers. Another difference is in the outcome: Czechoslovakia was more successful in that Stalin secured the additional approval of the Potsdam Conference and the killing could end.

Genocide, however, primarily evokes reminiscences of the Nazi genocide of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs. It differs from the current one in several ways, not only in the monstrous number of victims.

Above all, it was perpetrated covertly and in secret, even shyly, in front of its own population. German politicians did not publicly shout out their targets, German soldiers did not boast of photos of torture and murder in the media, small children did not joyfully sing ” we will kill them all” on German radio , and there is no evidence that the Leader himself gave the order for it. Being shot or gassed was – if such a word can be used – more humane than the slow death of those buried under the rubble, from injuries, diseases and the unavailability of medical care, from starvation. The strategy was also the opposite: initially the Jews were forced to emigrate by coercion and repression, physical liquidation came only when there was nowhere else to go. It was only on the eastern front that it was justified by the fight against terrorists (guerrillas) and acquired a character similar to Gaza.

Most of all, the events in Gaza are reminiscent of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943. Hundreds of thousands of Jews crowded into three square kilometers, in a hopeless situation, decided to fight desperately to the last man. They built a network of underground passages and bunkers, collected a meager arsenal of weapons, attacked police and SS units and forced them to retreat from the ghetto. A similarly brutal retaliation followed, artillery bombardment, flamethrowers, burning of houses block by block, flooding of underground passages, indiscriminate murder. Within a month, the ghetto was practically razed to the ground, 13,000 of its inhabitants perished and 50,000 of the survivors were deported to concentration camps.

The elimination of the inhabitants of Gaza by starvation may remind us of the Ukrainian Holodomor of 1932-33. However, it is wrongly labeled as genocide, there is a lack of definition of the target group and the intention of its destruction. Contrary to the Ukrainian narrative, it was not targeted against a specific ethnicity, and the motivation was not ethnic cleansing and looting, but the export of wheat despite a disastrous crop failure.

However, the most extensive genocide in history is the genocide of the indigenous population of both Americas. In South America in the 16th century is the spoils of gold and silver of Indian empires, in North America in the 19th century, territories of Indian tribes.

Gaza and Ukraine

If the war outcome of the Maidan putsch has already shaken many established clichés, after the massacres in Gaza there is practically nothing left of them.

Just a few months ago, the Russian annexation of Crimea and the Donbas republics was presented as the ultimate violation of international law, while the annexations – without referendums – of the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, were generously overlooked. Today, in the face of undisguised expansionism and the intended annexation of all of Palestine, Israel’s borders have become the most pressing issue in international politics.

Just a few months ago, the Russian bombing of civilian infrastructure was considered a war crime – regardless of the fact that they were mostly targets of military importance and regardless of the war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan. Compared to the interruption of water, food, medicine, and energy supplies to the world’s largest concentration camp, with the systematic bombing of housing estates, hospitals, schools, universities, mosques, power plants, waterworks, and bakeries, this seems like the grossest hypocrisy today.

Just a few months ago, the media was filled with reports of Russian attacks against the civilian population – regardless of the fact that the ratio of thousands of civilian dead to hundreds of thousands of military dead is an unprecedented low in the history of world warfare. They disappeared. President Herzog abolished the distinction between civilians and terrorists. Compared to three times more civilian casualties in four months than in two years of the Ukrainian war, with hundreds of women and children killed per alleged terrorist, it is better not to mention Russian crimes.

The topic of the Ukrainian war did not disappear from the media only because of the failed offensive and the inevitable defeat of the West. First of all, they have run out of topics to disavow Russia – any accusations of any crimes only underline their multiple validity for Israel. There is a war between two armies going on in Ukraine, which at least the Russian side is conducting with maximum consideration for the civilian population. There is no war in Gaza, but a military massacre of the civilian population.

A certain similarity can be seen at most in the characters of Zelensky and Netanyahu. Both have dragged their country into wars they cannot win and whose outcome threatens the very existence of their states. Both of them have already been written off as politicians, and prolonging the war at any cost for them means postponing not only the end of their careers, but above all the post-war reckoning.

A similarity can also be seen in the likely future fate of both countries given their unwavering irrational belief in ultimate victory. For both, common sense would see ending the fighting, opening diplomatic negotiations, coming to terms with the loss of some territory, and accepting new neighbors – New Russia and Palestine – as the last realistic chance before destruction. For both of them, such an idea is absolutely unacceptable, so they have no choice but to enjoy their pride until the bitter end.

Gaza and Western Democracy

Just a few months ago, the cliché of the struggle of our Western democracy against a foreign (Russian) dictatorship, the struggle of Good against Evil, was prevalent. If we descend from the heights of transcendent metaphysics back to earth, we find that the highest imaginable Evil is crimes of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. After several months of massacres, it is clear that their perpetrators are not strangers, but ourselves – whether Israel, which we rightfully count among ours, or the entire collective West, which actively supports or at least passively tolerates it. Even countries like the Czech Republic and Austria, which might be expected to show particular restraint in the matter of genocide, vote at the UN General Assembly – as the only EU members – to continue the genocide.

Just a few months ago, Israel was being touted as the only democracy in the Middle East—regardless of the fact that Western democracy itself had long since been emptied by oligarchy, totalitarian propaganda, censorship, and repression. If Ukrainian neo-Nazism could still be trivialized and silenced in the media, in the perspective of Israeli apartheid, the Nuremberg Laws, the denial of human rights and the right to life to the inferior non-Jewish population – Muslims as well as Christians – the content of the term Israeli democracy suddenly overlaps with Nazi ideology.

The West – this is Europe including its branches, the USA and Israel. Today it could be more aptly described as a caste of Israeli-American oligarchs who have colonized it for their own purposes. Unreserved support for Israeli genocide may appear to us as an incomprehensible anomaly in view of traditional European values ​​- the UN Charter and international law, peace and conflict prevention, resolution of disputes through action and not force, immutability of borders through violence, democracy, freedom, equality and human rights, social market economy , social security, elimination of poverty, human life as the highest value. It is as if in twenty years Europe has turned into the exact opposite of what shaped its identity at the end of the century and what citizens voted for in referenda.

Only in a longer-term perspective will we discover that the period of humanism in the second half of the 20th century was an anomaly, that it was only a temporary reaction to the trauma of two world wars. Since its birth in the 9th century, Europe has been the most aggressive, predatory and cruel civilization in history. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the Conquista, slavery, the East India Company, colonialism, pogroms, world wars, the Holocaust – these are not anomalies, they are a continuous European tradition. It was only from the 19th century that the European USA took over the initiative from it, and from the second half of the 20th century, the European Ashkenazis took over new territories and genocided their population.

Let’s also note that the conquests of previous empires were generally motivated by the expansion of the territory and its resources, including – or mainly – its inhabitants. After these, loyalty to the new ruler and tribute were required, but they were usually left with extensive autonomy. Violently subverting their social structures, religion, culture would be counterproductive – it would only reduce their economic contribution. Only the USA, Nazi Germany, Israel and (let’s not forget) Czechoslovakia are conquering exclusive Lebensraum for themselves , a living space , which, of course, must first be cleared of its current inhabitants .

For a Western reader, these remarks are probably heresy of the coarsest grain. Outside the circle of Western civilization – that is, in seven-eighths of the human world – this is the basic perspective in which the West is seen and judged. The genocide in Gaza and its Western support only confirms it. The continued clamor for democracy, human rights, rule-based order can only further discredit the West. Respect and authority are gained by countries that are able to stand up to it and whose tradition is not burdened by conquests, colonialism and subversion, especially Russia, China, Iran.

Thus, Gaza gave another powerful impulse to the ongoing process of global polarization. In perspective, one can expect accelerated consolidation of the rising Global South in the new structures of BRICS+, SCO, EAEU and further decline in the influence, isolation and disintegration of the West. Desperate efforts following the example of Zelensky and Netanyahu, which cannot be avoided at all costs, can easily turn into a global nuclear conflict in Ukraine, the Middle East or the South China Sea.

Gaza and Israel

I still remember the enthusiasm and admiration for Israel at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With the Lebanon War and the massacre of Palestinians in Sabra and Shatil in 1982, sympathy began to quickly disappear – Israel must be like a rabid dog, declared Moshe Dayan, and so he began to appear. I remember the statement of an Israeli politician at the time after some other scandal in the sense that there will be an uproar about it for a few weeks and then it will be forgotten again. I think that’s how Israeli politicians have imagined it to this day. For a society whose thinkers have contributed a great deal to the knowledge of the human psyche, one can only marvel at such a level of ignorance.

It doesn’t work that way. The scream subsides, but the mental image is burdened with another negative emotion. They accumulate over a long period of time, even if they do not outwardly manifest themselves in shouting. The initial sympathy gradually turns into its opposite – we have all experienced such a process many times. Extremely negative events, such as an ongoing genocide, eliminate the remnants of latent sympathy for good.

Regardless of the current berserk mode of bloody unity, it is going on under the surface in Israel as well. The previous wave of resistance against Netanyahu’s attempt to introduce a dictatorship sensitized a critical view of one’s own history and its meaning. The campaign in Gaza pulled out of the hole of oblivion the circumstances of the establishment of the state, including the hitherto carefully concealed Nakba, terror, massacres such as Tantura, Deir Yassin and others. The process of coming to terms with its own history is just beginning in Israel, but the question is whether it will have enough opportunity and time to do so, whether the fanatical Deuteronomists, who understand the Torah literally as Jehovah’s order to kill others, will not expel all critical citizens from the land before the inventory.

It is said that states are maintained by the political forces by which and from which they were created, stated Masaryk. With a genocide that has no parallels in modern history in terms of its obviousness and cruelty, Israel has burned all bridges behind it. The return of the rabid dog to the international community is hardly imaginable. All that remains is to run forward: completing the purge in Gaza, extending it to the West Bank, eliminating Hezbollah and occupying Lebanon, attacking Iran.

But Israel does not have the means to do so. Even in the campaign in Gaza, it is completely dependent on weapons, ammunition, financial, intelligence and, in the future, military assistance from the USA and its veto in the Security Council.

But even the control of the US by the Israeli lobby is not a sustainable state. There, too, criticism of America’s participation in Israeli massacres is gaining unprecedented strength, not least in the Jewish community itself and the state administration. Nor can the US afford to become a permanently isolated outcast of the world, as the latest UN vote suggests. So far, American politicians are dependent on electoral votes, and they are rapidly polarizing under the reality of Gaza.

Despite the fact that the US is not even in a position to effectively intervene militarily in a volatile region without causing an uncontrollable explosion. An attack on Iran, in which the myopic sees its own perpetrator, would immediately result in a devastating storm on Israel and on forty American bases and the navy, caught in a regional trap, and the disruption of the vital oil trade by closing the Strait of Hormuz. A full invasion of Iran is hindered by the lack of financial, military and human resources, the reaction of the American population, Iran’s alliance with Russia and China, and practically zero chance of final victory.

The US can only watch helplessly at the tenacious resistance of Hamas, the binding of a large part of the IDF in the north by Hezbollah, the Houthi sanctions against Israeli shipping and even the attack – quite possibly under a false flag – on a base in Jordan with three dead. The toothless retaliatory bombing of Shiite terrorists is PR for the public and voters, but apart from the further consolidation of the Arab Axis of Resistance and the intensification of demands for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq and Syria, it has no real effect.

The future of Israel cannot be predicted. The only thing that is certain is that it will not exist in its current form for a long time. Several possible directions of development can only be imagined very broadly.

The first is the escalation that is currently looming: Israel will deliberately continue to drive Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai, domestic pressure will force Egypt to armed border protection, Hezbollah to intensify attacks from the north, Israel to attack Lebanon and other actors, including USA, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and various Muslim militias, to actively participate in the wider and regional conflict. Israel’s chances of surviving it are more than doubtful. Unless the fighting escalates into a devastating World War III, what is left of Israel will certainly be far from what it is today.

Another is what is referred to as the two-state solution: Israel within the 1967 borders and a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with East Jerusalem as its capital. In addition to Israel’s radical rejection, which perhaps sufficient pressure from the world could eventually break, similar to South African apartheid in the 1980s, the biggest problem is the dense network of settlements built by the most fanatical Zionist extremists in the Palestinian territories. An attempt to subject them to Palestinian state jurisdiction would most likely lead to protracted civil war and Israeli-sponsored terrorism with the prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian war and again a latent escalation into a wider regional conflict.

The third option is Palestine/Israel from the river to the sea, i.e. the only state entity within the boundaries of the former British Mandate of Palestine. Paradoxically, the Palestinians and Benjamin Netanyahu subscribe to it, but with different ideas: Israel is Erez Israel, the only Jewish state gradually eliminating the share of its racially inferior fellow citizens. The Palestinian idea is a democratic state of equal citizens, where, of course, the Palestinian majority would have a decisive weight. If there is a real regional war, this is probably the most likely outcome.

The fourth possible variant is a gradual dampening of the current conflict without further major dramatic reversals, but not a return to  business as usual. The balance of power has irreversibly changed. Israel has lost both its nimbus of invincibility and the unconditional support of the West, which is also itself in a phase of decay. On the contrary, with its role as a common enemy, it consolidated the Islamic identity and self-confidence of Islam as, alongside the USA, China and Russia, another powerful pole in a multipolar world. Israel’s only chance of survival could be accommodation in the Islamic environment, but it has already burned all bridges for that.

Gaza and the Jews

Israel is a Jewish state.

If we were to take his self-declaration seriously, then the worst imaginable crimes against humanity up to genocide are committed by Jews. And if we were to follow the conclusions of its president, none of them is innocent.

I am afraid that many people already perceive it this way, not only in Islamic countries and in the Global South. As if Israel wanted to confirm all the centuries-old European anti-Jewish prejudices.

But it’s like all stereotypes: the differences within each group are greater than the differences between the groups. The most die-hard Zionists claim to be Jewish just as much as their staunchest opponents.

Jews are probably the most heterogeneous identity in the world. Those we meet in the West are generally Ashkenazi, culturally descended from Central Europeans who escaped Christianization by conversion to Judaism in the ninth century, much like the Iberian Sephardim, descended from those who escaped Islamization two hundred years earlier. The Jewish religion was chosen for the Turkic Khasars in the eighth century by King Bulan. The Jews – in the continuity of the ancient Hebrews – lived in part on the territory of Palestine even before the Ashkenazi invasion, in part merged with the Palestinian Arabs and in part lived in peace in the surrounding countries, mostly Islamic since the seventh century, from where they were forced to emigrate to Israel after 1948 as Mizrahim.

Over the centuries, however, they mixed with the local population and with Jews from other areas; the Central European Ashkenazis, for example, seamlessly follow the Eastern European Khazars. Seeing them as a biological race is misleading for several reasons. On the one hand, genetics has definitively disproved the idea of ​​race, and on the other hand, the derivation of biological origin in the horizons of millennia is a pure myth. Thousands of years ago, we each had one trillion ancestors. We are all multiple descendants of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, Muhammad, Confucius, Genghis Khan, the ancestor of Bohemia and Charlemagne. What unites Jews of various origins, languages ​​and cultures is the mystique of their own uniqueness, the mystique of belonging to Jehovah’s chosen nation. Including secular Ashkenazim.

But not all Ashkenazim are Zionists. Zionism is the concept of the Jewish people formulated in 1896 by Theodor Herzel, demanding their own state in Argentina or Palestine. In the following year, the first Zionist Congress was held – incidentally, at the same time as the founding of the Czech National Social Party and the Bund, the party of the Russian Jewish proletariat, three concepts that authoritatively determined the following century. The Zionist colonization of Palestine begins especially after the adoption of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, in which Britain supports the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine – as a European enclave to control the Suez Canal.

It was clear from the beginning that the territory could only be acquired at the expense of its existing inhabitants. All the initial declarations about the peaceful coexistence of two equal nations – from Herzel to Žabotinsky – were hypocrisy in a situation where one group forcibly occupies the territory of another. Of course the native Arabs, Jews and Christians had to defend their land and property, of course the European colonization of Palestine – like all others – could only be accomplished by power, money, violence, weapons and terror.

Brutality, however, is nothing remarkable about the Ashkenazi colonization of Palestine, European colonizations from the New World through Africa to the Far East were similarly brutal. Its anachronism is remarkable. The European colonial system peaks at the end of the 19th century and ends no later than the Second World War, when the colonization of Palestine is just beginning. In addition to the British interest in controlling the Suez Canal, the main motive for European support is helplessness over hundreds of thousands of Jews freed from concentration camps, in which feelings of complicity for their suffering are mixed with resentment for their repatriation. Sacrificing the Palestinians as compensation for the victims of European genocide pushes the problem aside, away from Europe.

The status of victims of eternal anti-Semitism, pogroms and the Holocaust, together with the trauma of European guilt, gives Israel and European Jews a de facto nimbus of exceptionalism – and impunity; it morally – and often legislatively – excludes any discussion and criticism a priori. Let us note its Ashkenazi origin: it is based on an exclusive European experience. There was no persecution of Jews (Gypsies, Gentiles, heretics, witches…) anywhere else, especially not in Islamic countries, nor elsewhere in Asia, America, or even in the European USA and Canada. And let’s add that the identity of the victim is always an aggressive identity.

Now the Ashkenazi Zionists are forcibly implanting their victim identity into the Islamic world, where Muslims, Jews and Christians have lived together in mutual respect and tolerance. With European arrogance, they also transfer their battle cry of eternal anti-Semitism to the Muslims who are resisting the occupation of their country, launch a hateful anti-Islamic campaign in the Christian West, and manipulate the US into military interventions against its Islamic rivals. It is a suicidal strategy: an alliance with Christian Europe, persecuting the Jews for millennia, against Islam, providing them with a safe home for millennia.

However, the genocide in Gaza is also shaking the European alliance and the protective walls of European historical myths and taboos. Never again holocaust! But which one, the one committed against the Jews, or the one committed by the Jews? The most powerful Ashkenazi weapon is losing its force after seventy years, on the contrary, a critical revision can be expected. In time, the criminalization of Holocaust denial will either have to be extended to genocide denial in general or be abandoned – after all, this is a question for historians and lawyers, not politicians.

Also, the impact of the second Ashkenazi weapon, anti-Semitism, suffered from inflationary use already before October 2023. However, it does not have much of a chance to convince that it is a worse crime than genocide. With Gaza, the question of what its users actually mean by Semitism becomes even more pressing. If he means robbery, terror, ethnic cleansing, mass murder and genocide, perhaps we are all anti-Semites.

Israel’s barbarism also re-examines the age-old problem of Jewish identity: what is it? Is it a biological race according to Torah, Halachah, Nuremberg Laws and Israeli Laws? Religion in the sense of Maimonides, Hasids, Haredim, Jews in Islamic countries and proselytes? Secular nationality according to Herzl, Weismann and the early Zionists? Cultural tradition – but which one, Saba Kadisha of Damascus, Moses Mendessohn of Germany, Ba’al Shem Tova of Poland? A caste superior to the rest of the world according to Ovad Yosef, Schlomo Aviner, Israel Ariel?

Since October, over half a million Jews who had somewhere to go have left Israel. This is almost as many as the number of Palestinians expelled during the Nakba of 1948. The outlook for others is all the more bleak because Israel has burned all the bridges behind it. There is nowhere left to go to.

March 12, 2024 Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism | 3 Comments