tapitsbo » Mon Oct 19, 2015 7:51 pm wrote:I have trouble understanding the "last bastion of Western colonialism" thing. Living in a Western country where Harper's governement attempted to pass laws banning criticism of Israel, it feels as though the colonialism is the other way around (Western countries being subordinated to Israel, at least in the 20th Century). But that's a controversial argument - seems a lot simpler to just characterise Israel as an ethno-nationalist state ("fascist" if the term hadn't been worn out to meaninglessness).
It's not the last bastion of Western colonialism, and neither is it the seat of an empire. It's something new and different, a shape of things to come. In the past colonial era, France set up French colonies that were subservient to France, and England set up English colonies that remained dependent on, and subservient to, England, etc. Israel is not an independently viable state. It depends on a steady influx of capital and weapons and colonists and technology, among other things, but not on any single country. "The West" is not a country, and it's inaccurate and sloppy to refer to something called a "Western" empire. In any case, Israel's support network that maintains its existence is certainly not limited to "the West", however that's defined. Who set up the "Jewish state", and to whom/what does it remain subservient?
The first Jewish settlements in Palestine were established during the mid-19th century by Moses Montefiore, a Sephardic Orthodox Jewish financier whose family had emigrated from Italy in the early 18th century and had amassed a vast fortune in England. He was married to the sister-in-law of Mayer Anschel Rothschild, and was the Rothschild family's stockbroker and investment adviser. He achieved great prominence in British society, and was elected Sherif of London, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and was first knighted, then made a baron by Queen Victoria. Montefiore and Rothschild installed the first Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine in the mid-19th century, using their network of contacts to recruit and pay poor Russian Jews to travel there and populate the settlements. Additional money was collected from wealthy Jewish communities all over Europe, North America, and even the Middle East. Although Montefiore and Rothschild built housing, synagogues, hospitals, and other buildings, the Jewish colonists were expected to survive off the land. Life was hard, and the Russians, few of whom knew anything about farming were ordered to learn how to grow crops in Palestine, a very different environment from the one they were used to. They were helped by the nearby Palestinian farmers, who, feeling sorry for these lost strangers, taught them all about the soil and irrigation and native crops.
It wasn't long before the Jewish colonists began to receive paramilitary training, and a steady flow of weapons. After WWI, the British militarily occupied Palestine, and during the period between 1917 and 1947, they helped the Jewish colonies to expand, and to crush the native Palestinian resistance, and ensured that the well-trained Zionist forces outgunned and even outnumbered those of all the Arab countries combined. Then, in 1946-47, the Zionists turned those guns against their erstwhile British mentors, and after a number of terrorist bombings, the British finally withdrew from Palestine, and the State of Israel was officially declared, before it began to expand its borders and continue its ethnic cleansing in a process that continues to this day.
That's just the beginning, but the pattern was set: Israel was never independent, nor was it ever dependent on a singular "mother country" per se, but on an network of powerful Jewish businessmen, bankers and financiers, running their own networks of activists based in a number of countries, including but not limited to countries in Europe and North America. "Transnational capitalism", in other words, is and has been since the earliest times the "mother country" of the colony that came to be known as Israel.
tapitsbo wrote:Meanwhile Western colonialism seems to have morphed into transnational capitalism.
Ironically, Israel is often called a "throwback" to colonial times, an anachronism. In fact, it's the opposite: it's the shape of things to come. It is the future, if certain transnational capitalists have their way.
tapitsbo wrote:Especially with the constitutional changes defining Israel as a "Jewish State", it provides justification to people seeking segregated ethnic nationalist states everywhere.
As we've seen with the Levant (formerly Syria, which included Palestine, the present Syria, Lebanon and Transjordan), the former Yugoslavia, the former Czechoslovakia, the former Sudan, the former Ethiopia, the former India, and so many others, and much more recently with "ISIS"/Daesh, this is a necessary interim step.
But it's only an interim strategy. Its ultimate purpose is not to create segregated ethnic nationalist states, but to destroy existing nation-states by fragmenting them along ethnic or sectarian lines, and then further aggravating and exploiting even hairline cracks to fragment them still more, into progressively weaker and smaller tribal entities. This process is ongoing not only in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and eastern Europe, but its groundwork is possibly being prepared in Western Europe as we speak.
tapitsbo wrote:I acknowledged that Israel is an exception, but I'm saying that it isn't *just* an exception. Treating the country like an absolute nadir and scapegoat only will justify the last-ditch, desperate escalation it seems headed towards. Meanwhile much of the rest of the world is guilty of similar policies and repression. Criticism that is consistent is harder to write off as hypocritical.
Israel is indeed exceptional, in every way. It has no borders, and legally denies Israeli nationality, even for its own citizens. Its citizens' nationality is defined by the Israeli government in solely sectarian/ethnic terms: "Jew", "Arab", "Druze", etc., according to which privileges and rights are granted or withheld. And it routinely invents and enforces other legal monstrosities: if you are a legal native of the land under Israeli rule, and own property from which you were forcibly expelled into a refugee camp under Israeli rule next to your own property, you are defined as a "present absentee" and to have therefore abdicated your right to get it back. At the same time, if are a Jewish citizen of another country, Israel considers your nationality to be Jewish, grants you property rights, and expects and demands your primary loyalty to "the Jewish homeland". In previous decades, Zionist apologists routinely argued that individual Palestinians (whom they only referred to as "Arabs") had no right to own property in "the Jewish homeland", because "the Jews only have one state, but the Arabs have twenty-two."
A similar process is being imposed to degrade and eventually eradicate the concept of nation-state, (countries within fixed and legal geographic borders that are accountable to, and the homeland of, their own citizens), or even the concept of citizenship, using other ethnic/religion/sectarian categories. The still nascent but surprisingly well-funded and often mysteriously backed "Rise of the Right" and various racial and religious "nationalist" movements in a number of countries, including in Western Europe and even the US and Canada, can be understood in this context.
tapitsbo wrote:A question for the knowledgeable people here: what is the likelihood that Russia, which supposedly has a great relationship with Israel, won't assist in furthering the Yinon Plan just as the USA was enlisted into doing earlier in the century? I'd love to know more about what is likely to happen here.
Very small. The Yinon Plan is only one part of a much bigger plan. Russia, especially under its current government, is a country that understands better than most what is going on, what it has and will cost to humanity and the world, and along with a growing number of allies, is actively working to defeat and even reverse this process.