Barbed wire along the perimeter and water tanks with Hebrew markings clearly visible to those living either side of the WALL show some of the brutal signs of occupation in Palestine. An Israeli watchtower with soldiers looking directly into the Gaza enclave bristles with guns, while antennas stand ready to demarcate the relationship between the righteous and the unrighteous. The righteous are possessed of a religious fervour dating back millennia to Abraham, who instilled in his followers a disregard for collateral damage because they and they alone, were advised that ethnic cleansing was the way to achieve their ends… feint or foul means were equally justifiable in achieving fait accompli.
The ‘moral-high-ground’, traditionally presented in narratives as necessary to situate values in propaganda so to attract adherents to a material cause is age-old. . The Zionist manifesto (December 21, 1917) is an example of employing moral precepts to justify synthetic means over synthetic ends for the purpose of using the power of propaganda to manoeuvre itself into a position of moral superiority.
Kaukab al-Dayait (2005-2009) was one of the thousands of Palestinian children who could see the Wall from the wrong side and avoid going too close to it in response to a mother’s injunction to be alert to the dangers inherent in the roles between captive and captor. She was too young to understand why she and her entire community were expected to passively and submissively accept forfeiting their every right to know freedom of movement and thought to the occupiers. The occupiers had taken possession of the moral-high-ground in a very what’s-good-for-the-Jews way and that-was-that! The heist, the greatest theft of the 20th.century had been organized to a tee with the connivance of American support under President Harry Truman and his ilk.
Land acquisition by Zionists has become the accepted thing in Palestine. The synthetic moral-high-ground Zionism has achieved with the backing of its Western partners enables the strangulation of Palestine. The ever shrinking portions of land available to the Palestinians spell the death knell of an honourable people. The spectre of antiquarian folk methods is present in the rabid appeal to sacred writ and tribal instinct when ethnic cleansing is employed to serve the purposes of the Zionist State. There is always a pseudo-holy man lurking in the wings to bless the ‘survival of the fittest’ outcome.
Nothing can challenge the occupier’s righteous de jour fervour as it devours its victims and their living spaces. The synthetic moral high ground now occupied by a Jewish culture of victimhood is evermore prepossessing in its righteousness as it relentlessly kills and banishes the inhabitants of Palestine to make room for more settlers. The creation of a Jewish State vis-a-vis land theft leave little for the Palestinians to build on, or to hope for. The ever shrinking patches of dust and debris which the Palestinian People are left with look more and more as if they have arrived at a torturous impasse, leaving them knee-high in the debris of a once-upon-a-time olive tree heaven, now stolen from them. The Zionists have passed on the ‘sting’ of their historic victimhood to the Palestinians…their ghetto mentality secure in the possession of weapons of mass destruction has made them more inward-looking that ever. Through the portals dividing reality from oblivion, the occupiers have come with the intention of erasing every vestige of Palestinian culture they can…and they do so with impunity. Sadly, in destroying the spirit of the Palestinian People, they also destroy what was best in their own notion of culture.
Through the eyes of Palestinian children playing in the debris of a recently vibrant culture, the presence of encroaching Eretz Israel is an abomination… their ancestors lived in this very same area for thousands of years and cultivated the land to perfection. Having become the victims of the victim-culture of dispossessed Jews, they find themselves in the cross-hairs of the conceptual zealots who have dreamt the dream of returning to where their identity was formed aeons ago… ‘Israel’, the land in which the identity of the Jewish People had originally formed, constitutes a continuous component within the Jewish collective consciousness as conceptual idee fixe.
From watchtowers manned by trigger-happy Israeli soldiers, the Palestinian children are seen as vermin sullying the concepts underlying the Jewish value system and an affront to their self-consciousness as a historic group claiming sole possession of this land. The space on the ‘right’ side of the WALL now in possession of the ‘righteous’ Zionists, attests to the fact that the bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is secure by virtue of the ‘Jabotinsky iron-grip’ tenet of strength before all else. The righteous have no hesitation in imprisoning juvenile malefactors who dare to express their anger by throwing stones at their captors from within their walled-in detention encampment.
To the children playing within the shadows of the WALL, the dream of the “End of Days” in which a Jewish leader would emerge to gather Jews from all over the world, bring them to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple has no meaning. Traditional Jews prayed three times a day for the deliverance that would transform the world and transport them to Jerusalem. In the process of occupying another people’s country, the Old Testament sentinels manning the watchtowers had become the angels of death preying on the innocents below them playing in what was left of their country.
Jewish leaders within the Zionist program were actively involved in the politics of propaganda from its inception. History, in a sense, is the propaganda of the victors…with most people incapable of distinguishing between history and propaganda. Zionism, a movement for the establishment and protection of a Jewish nation in what is now Israel, was established as a political organization in 1897 under Theodor Herzl, and was later led by Claim Weizmann (1874-1952).
Weizmann, a chemist from Belarus, became a figurehead of Zionism in Great Britain. His scientific career began in 1904 at the University of Manchester and attracted attention among the British political elites with new war-related chemical techniques. Because he brought together political and diplomatic activities with the practical work of colonization in Palestine, his ‘synthetic Zionism’ was widely embraced in the movement’s ability to make Zionist interests compatible with Great Britain’s imperialist foreign policy.
The children on the wrong side of the WALL know only the squalid life that is Gaza and other walled-in enclosures. Their innocence is perceived as treachery if their playfulness takes them too close to the WALL where the insouciant occupiers in their watchtowers…who insist on being called anything but occupiers…guard their have-and-to-hold mythical ownership of Palestine with righteous zeal and callous indifference to the conditions they impose on the imprisoned many whose country they occupy. In preparing to understand the forces leading up to the establishment of a Zionist State in the heart of Palestine, we have to go back in time to discover who the people were who ran with the ‘baton’ orchestrating the drive for a homeland in Palestine.
So, as they are too numerous to name only a skeletal representation is possible here. Rabbi Yehudah Shlomo Alkalay (1798-1878) and Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer (1795-1874) were the first proponents of Zionism…a more modern utopian version of Zionism and based on a socialist perspective and framed in terms of moral necessity was developed by Moses Hess 1812-1875). Political Zionism came into its own with Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky advancing the premise of strength of position as a means to have and hold. With the arrival of Chaim Weizmann we observe the consolidation of Zionist covert power from top to bottom — Rothschild et alia — at a time when empires were being refashioned.
Life was sweet in Palestine in the 1930’s while empires were failing in one place and being fostered in another. The competition for resources, particularly oil, was evident in the fostering of alliances that were coming into being for the purpose of sharing in protective mechanisms that guaranteed continuity of supply. It was an age when covert agencies acquired strengths that enabled new priorities to exceed the limitations of diplomacy, while encouraging secret state powers to gain traction in matters of national interest while remaining safe from public scrutiny. With increasing secrecy, propaganda in relation to private interest investment discovered new ways of manipulating the public’s sense of insecurity to suit their own ends. As mercantile realpolitik banking institutions grew ever more powerful in the hands of private interest groups, capitalism itself became a manufacturer of public policy by virtue of its ability to manipulate synthetic realities. Bigness in banking, national defence investment, brashness and air-power were just a few of the dynamics influencing our understanding of the potential of technical-modernity from a capitalist perspective.
In Palestine there was little of what was deemed modern. There was even less awareness of the dangers of being overrun by modernity. Zionists who had been exposed to ‘The Great Game’…rivalry between the British Empire and Russia in the 19th century, astutely aligned themselves with the subtleties of geopolitical maneuvering to advance their own interests. By the 20th century, and in possession of European middle class savvy, they were wholly geared up make their pitch for Palestine. By the time Zionists got their numbers into America to form organizations like AIPAC, it was more than evident that they had become the tail that wagged the dog. American foreign policy was hijacked and Palestine was virtually made to disappear under the weight of Israel’s Zionist braggadocio. By 1948 Zionist propaganda had acquired a synthetic position within the USA political system to such a degree that even President Harry Truman had to bend with the winds of change.
And what else was in the synthetic moral bag was put on display when the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…supreme bag of synthetic moral wind…addressed a Joint Meeting of Congress in March, 2015…the most important legislative body in the world (?) and alleged impartial power broker and adjudicator of the Palestine/Israel conflict? It was at this point in time, when the congress of fools, falling over each other in ecstatic admiration of Bibi, revealed the paucity of the American dream cum nightmare…it was at this point that the Empire was seen to have no clothes and the visiting ‘jock’ was there to receive a transfusion of synthetic blood and his pound of flesh from those lining up to kiss his ass. The blood of murdered Palestine children was hardly dry before a congress of banal elitists voted to supply Israel with the further means to continue the slaughter of the innocents.
So it’s trite to say that ‘the more things change, they more they stay the same’, yet it’s a saying that keeps coming back to bite one on the ass. No doubt that the future will deliver up a new Stonehenge era, with Trump towers appearing in Bali, Port-au-Prince, Santo Domingo, The West Bank, Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and elsewhere and all with Israeli securities fences to keep the righteous out of harm’s way. Expect that these quasi-sacred edifices will receive the blessing of every bag of wind in need of a place to reflect on his or her most venal needs…but meanwhile, witness the synthetic moral code behind the established media and the public relation skills that gave us the swamp that cannot be drained.