Reckoning With the Soviet Role in the Creation of Israel

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Reckoning With the Soviet Role in the Creation of Israel

[Source: jpost.com]


Since October 7th, global attention has largely shifted away from Ukraine toward the Middle East amid Israel’s ongoing slaughter of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.

At the same time, the world has seen unprecedented mass protests in support of the Palestinians and calls for a cease-fire by the international community. Historically, some of the most prominent participants in the Palestinian cause have been Marxist organizations and recent demonstrations were no exception. However, a long-ignored and regrettable chapter in the history of socialism itself can be found in the very formation of Israel, which desperately needs to be addressed.

Whenever there is a flare-up in the Israel-Palestine conflict, the circumstances that led to the former’s 75-year occupation are inevitably revisited. Alas, it would be a disservice for this colossal misstep to remain neglected, especially since it is often used to discredit the legacy of the Soviet Union, which admittedly both voted for the 1947 UN partition of Palestine and was the first state to officially recognize the Zionist entity three days after it declared independence the following year. So how could the USSR at one moment have supported Israel, and why? While it may be far from the minds of those protesting genocide and seem like a rarefied question, it is a topic that is more relevant now than ever before.

Lamentably, there is simply no getting around the historical fact that the Soviets played a key role in the establishment of Israel. Given the previous ardent opposition to Zionism by the Bolsheviks including Stalin himself, as well as Moscow’s reorientation toward the Arab League after its establishment in 1948, it is a brief episode that has long puzzled historians of every stripe.

Yet the purpose of this reexamination is not to absolve the USSR for its tragic miscalculation but to place it in context — specifically that of the national question — an area where questionable political decisions made by Moscow decades ago still have consequences today in conflicts from the Caucasus to Ukraine. Hopefully, by interrogating this period, the quality of discourse on nationhood will improve, particularly in a way that does not lend itself to an anti-communist left whose political success is built upon lies about the Soviet Union.

[Source: blackwells.co.uk]

[Source: blackwells.co.uk]

In theory, Marxism was antithetical to Zionism. In one of his earliest works, On the Jewish Question, Karl Marx argued for equal rights for German Jews and against the notion that the nature of their religion prevented integration or emancipation. (Despite his own Jewish lineage, this did not deter absurd accusations of anti-Semitism because of certain passages in the pamphlet.) However, there were some early socialist thinkers, such as Moses Hess, who opposed assimilation in favor of Jewish self-determination through the formation of a collectivist ethno-state in Palestine. While relatively obscure in his day, Hess’s fusion of socialist and Jewish nationalist ideas would become the syncretic precursor to the Labor Zionist tendency. From the beginning, there were politically confused attempts to wed Zionism with socialism.

Meanwhile, the founder of modern political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, claimed that his awakening was inspired by the notorious “Dreyfus Affair,” in which an officer of Jewish descent in the French military, Alfred Dreyfus, was wrongly court-martialed for treason in 1894, resulting in a nationwide scandal and political crisis. Even though riots by the French public led to an eventual exoneration, Herzl was unmoved by such a notable historical moment of comradeship between workers and a minority religious group. Instead, he saw it as proof that there could never be mutual tolerance between Jews and gentiles. For the Zionist leader, a rise in bigotry across Europe was the perfect occasion to promote the idea that the Jewish people could only be free from persecution under a self-governed state with the publication of Der Judenstaat in 1896.



ABOVE: From Left to Right: Moses Hess, Theodor Herzl, and Captain Alfred Dreyfus.


There was just one problem: The vast majority of Jews at the time were not committed to establishing an autonomous homeland of their own, much less in a place where they had little connection, as they represented less than 5% of the population in Palestine during the Late Ottoman period. In fact, the Zionists were mostly perceived as reactionaries seeking to prevent the diaspora from assimilating in Europe and around the world. Even when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, its reception was initially lukewarm and many prominent Jews publicly voiced their opposition to the statement, including British Cabinet Minister Edwin Montagu who described it as “a rallying ground for anti-semites in every country in the world” and a “mischievous political creed.” After all, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour himself was a noted racist who, during his previous tenure as Prime Minister, presided over the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act restricting Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe which had increased following a wave of pogroms in the Pale of Settlement.


ABOVE: (From Left) Arthur Balfour, Edwin Montagu.


In the Russian Empire, Jews had faced continuous scapegoating and violence since the assassination of Alexander II. While the reaction of proto-Zionists such as the physician Leon Pinsker was to advocate ethnic separatism, many Jews alternatively began to play a key role in a growing socialist movement which championed their rights. Despite facing heavy discrimination, European Jews largely rejected ethno-nationalism and desired equality within their countries of residence, knowing full well the only way to achieve true liberation was through revolutionary change. The majority also understood Judaism to be a religion and not a nationality. At that time, Zionism was recognized as a racist tool of British imperialism designed to gain a foothold in the Middle East in competition with France and Russia which had their own respective Maronite and Orthodox subjects. Or as Sir Ronald Storrs, the Military Governor of Jerusalem during the British Mandate, would put it, “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”

Christian Zionism had existed centuries before the Jewish nationalist movement and lobbied for their return to the Levant as a necessary pre-condition for the Second Coming. Academics trace the mythology to the Protestant Reformation with its revival of interest in the Old Testament and a biblical return of Jews to Zion. This ideology ultimately gained traction within the English political elite in the mid-19th century — most notably Lord Palmerston and his stepson-in-law Lord Shaftesbury — who promoted the idea of restoring the Jews to Palestine decades prior to the World Zionist Organization. Even half a century earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte had issued an imperial decree proclaiming Jews to be the “rightful heirs of Palestine” during the French campaign in Egypt and Syria. While the Revolution of 1789 brought about the first laws of Jewish freedom in Europe, the Corsican general exploited their status as a persecuted minority in order to advance French colonization of the Middle East, as the British would after World War I. As a matter of fact, Theodor Herzl would end up citing Napoleon as the first Zionist in an 1899 letter to Kaiser Wilhelm II. From the beginning, the origins of Zionism were non-Jewish.


Left: Sir Ronald Storrs / Right: Napoleon Bonaparte: The First Zionist

For that reason, Zionism had to deceptively be made to appear one and the same with Judaism itself. Thus, a mythical narrative was concocted that the land of what would become Israel was the divine birthright of all Jews since they had been driven out of Jerusalem by the Romans in the destruction of the Second Temple. Unfortunately, there was scant evidence of any ancestral linkage of Ashkenazi Jews to Palestine which undermined the entire basis of Israel as an ancient homeland to repatriate. In fact, recent genetic studies indicate that Ashkenazim today are not the descendants of the lost Hebrew tribes of circa 70 A.D. but rather traceable to European origin.

Then there is the more controversial theory popularized by Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe and Shlomo Sand in The Invention of the Jewish People that Ashkenazi ancestry originates in the Khazar Empire, a Turkic kingdom which converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. After its defeat by Kievan Rus, what remained of Khazaria would be wiped out in Mongol invasions by the Golden Horde, which would explain how much of the diaspora later fell under the rule of the Russian Empire. Regardless, it is quite clear that modern Jewry has little to do with the children of Israel in the Book of Exodus.


 

Even though his stated preference was the Holy Land, Theodor Herzl himself was actually an admitted atheist and did not personally care where the future Jewish state would be located. Neither apparently did the British — whose Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had first proposed the “Uganda Scheme” which set aside a portion of British East Africa as a potential colony — so long as it fit His Majesty’s geo-strategic interests. Perhaps this is what Israeli historian Ilan Pappé meant when he observed, “most Zionists don’t believe in God, but they do believe he promised them Palestine.”

Herzl’s initial plans had been for settlement in Argentina per Leon Pinsker’s suggestion in Auto-Emancipation, but both Patagonia and the East Africa protectorate proved to be unpopular because of their lack of historic significance to Jews. For religious Zionists, only a restoration of the Land of Israel would suffice. After failing to convince the Sultan Abdul Hamid to sell Ottoman Palestine in a 1901 visit to Constantinople, Herzl appealed to England whose need for a beachhead in the Middle East aligned with the Zionist goal of capturing Jerusalem. The Viennese political activist realized that, if a Jewish state were to ever come into existence, it would require the auspices of an imperial power.

At the same time, the Jewish nationalists were willing to collaborate with anyone in their platform, no matter how unsavory. While Herzl supposedly claimed the motivation for the Zionist movement was to provide sanctuary from pogroms in Eastern Europe, it did not stop him from traveling to Russia in 1903 to meet with Tsarist Interior Minister Vyacheslav von Plehve, whom many held chiefly responsible for the Kishinev massacre that same year.


Photo taken after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and massacre. [Source: timesofisrael.com]


In St. Petersburg, Herzl pleaded for Nicholas II to grant an exodus of Jews from Imperial Russia to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. In exchange for Russian pressure on the Turks to allow Zionist colonization, Herzl offered to help crack down on Jewish involvement in socialist activity — or, as he wrote in his diaries, “take the Jews away from the revolutionary parties.” From the beginning, the Zionists were willing to partner with the very worst Judeophobes in their settler colonialist project. Inextricably, Zionism was also inherently anti-communist, as author Lenni Brenner explained in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:

Leading up to his death in 1904, Herzl tried to persuade everyone—from the German Kaiser to Pope Pius X—that a Jewish state in the Promised Land would serve as “a rampart of Europe against Asia” and “anoutpost of civilization against barbarism.” In his diplomatic liaisons, the Austro-Hungarian Jewish nationalist placated various world leaders with promises in order to obtain their approval. To the Emperors of Germany and Russia, Herzl sold the idea as a win-win situation. On the one hand, it would enable both monarchs to solve their own respective Jewish questions by encouraging immigration to Palestine as well as dilute the revolutionary socialist groups in which Jews played a pivotal role. Although Herzl would die unexpectedly without having yet acquired enough political clout to see his vision through, he nonetheless laid the foundation for Israel to eventually be created.

By the time the infamous letter sent by Lord Balfour to Baron Rothschild was published in 1917, the First World War had reached a stalemate and an Allied defeat of the Ottoman Empire was uncertain. This did not stop the British government under Lloyd George, himself an evangelical Zionist, from making pledges of a Jewish national home in Palestine, even though it was still under Turkish rule. To make matters more complicated, a confidential war-time treaty had been signed among the United Kingdom, Tsarist Russia and France to carve up the Middle East in the event of an Allied victory.

It turned out this secretive accord completely contradicted formal negotiations between the British High Commissioner to Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, and the Sharif of Mecca which simultaneously vowed to reward an Arab Revolt against the Turks with an Arabian state. This double-dealing by the Triple Entente was only revealed after the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty when the Bolsheviks uncovered the documents and published the text of the Sykes-Picot Agreement in Pravda.

The Russian Revolution further reinforced the peculiar alliance between anti-Semites and Zionists who were united in their joint animosity toward communism and belief that Jews were aliens in Europe. Among those in the British establishment who held such views was none other than Winston Churchill who, while serving as Secretary of State for War and Air, authored an article entitled “Zionism Versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People.”

In his 1920 editorial for the Illustrated Sunday Herald, Churchill made the case that, not only was Zionism to be an outpost for British imperialism, but a way of counteracting the Soviets due to the exaggerated preponderance of Jews among the Bolsheviks. While not quite as warped as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Churchill’s racist outlook was not far off from the infamous Okhrana forgery. In distinguishing between “national Jews” in “bankers and industrialists” from the “schemes of the international Jews,” Churchill propagated the paradoxical right-wing trope of Jewry symbolizing both world communism and Wall Street banking with Zionism as a solution.


Winston Churchill, TGP AI


In The Iron Wall, Lenni Brenner writes:

“The Bolshevik Revolution, which occurred within days of the [Balfour] Declaration, was seen by most of the ruling class as a Jewish plot. Although in Britain itself official anti-Semitism never passed beyond immigration restrictions and social discrimination, the British government had no qualms in financing and arming the White Guard pogrom hordes in Russia, thus bearing fundamental responsibility for their slaughter of at least 30,000 Jews. Zionism was seen as another tool against Bolshevism.”

But first, Britain would have to overcome the obstacle of persuading Jews to support its project, as Zionism was still viewed as a twisted ideology by the majority of the diaspora. Lenni Brenner continues in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators:

Bolshevism specifically opposed Zionism as pro-British and as fundamentally anti-Arab. The local Zionist leadership was therefore forced to turn to the nationalists as possible allies. In the Ukraine that meant Symon Petliura’s Rada (Council), which, like the Zionists, recruited on strictly ethnic lines: no Russians, no Poles and no Jews.”

Indeed, the relationship between Tel Aviv and Kyiv today starts to make a lot more sense after one learns of the secret 1921 agreement between far-right Zionist activist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura, whose forces carried out anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War alongside the Tsarist White Movement. When Petliura was expelled to Galicia by the Soviets, Jabotinsky offered to provide him with a personal Zionist military protection unit and a police force to help his army with a planned invasion of Ukraine, ostensibly to halt further pogroms. In exchange, Jabotinsky publicly denied that Petliura was culpable for previous killings. (The pact would be aborted and Petliura was later assassinated in France by a Russian-Jewish left-wing poet whose family had been murdered by pogromists.)


 From Left: Ze'ev v Jabotinsky, Symon Petliura

Shockingly, the Zionists’ willingness to collude with enemies of the Jewish people later included even the Nazis themselves. In fact, it could be argued that the Zionists privately welcomed Hitler’s rise to power because it lent credence to their separatist beliefs. When a ban of German products in the United States and UK was organized in response to the Nazi Party’s persecution of Jews in 1933, the Zionists convinced many Jewish businesses in America and across the pond to oppose the anti-Nazi boycott.

Meanwhile in the Third Reich itself, the Zionist Federation of Germany offered to cooperate with the Nazi government in the event they supported the development of a Jewish state abroad to their economic benefit. In an outright betrayal of their own people, the German Zionists negotiated with the Hitlerites for the transfer of tens of thousands of Jews to Mandatory Palestine in return for opposition to the boycott campaign in what became known as the Haavara Agreement. Lenni Brenner continues:

Even after the Kristallnacht pogrom, or the “Night of Broken Glass,” the secret pact went uninterrupted. As reactionaries, the Zionists were too eager to find common ground with the German fascists in their shared racism and hostility to the left. So much so, they never saw the Final Solution coming and only then was the unholy alliance finally ended in 1941. Still, this has not prevented Israeli politicians today from downplaying Nazi war crimes such as the claim by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who put the Germans up to the task all along. According to Bibi, Hitler only wanted to “expel” and “not exterminate” the Jews, an admission that the Zionists regarded ethnic cleansing by the Nazis as helpful to the development of Israel.

Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini [Source: en.wikipedia.org]



 

It is true that the British-appointed Mufti met with the Führer in 1941, even though he was not the inspiration for Germany’s genocidal plans. Except an overlooked but perhaps more significant takeaway from al-Husseini’s flirtation with the Axis powers is that the strategic alliance and his avowed anti-communism may have tainted Arab-Soviet relations.

Prior to World War II, it was the British Mandate for Palestine which had increased Jewish immigration into the region throughout the inter-war period. When the Arabs revolted in the late 1930s, the British temporarily suspended the influx of Jewish settlers, incurring the wrath of Zionist terrorist organizations like the Irgun and the Stern Gang whose insurgency launched attacks against British soldiers, assassinated the Minister-Resident for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, in Cairo, and bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Suddenly, the Zionist leadership in Palestine turned to Moscow for a helping hand in a war of independence against their former imperial patrons.

Officially, the Soviets had denounced Zionism up to that moment as a form of bourgeois nationalism which stratified Jews on class lines. In the introduction to Marxism and the National Question, Stalin condemned Zionism as a form of “crude chauvinism” and “a reactionary nationalist trend of the Jewish bourgeoisie, which had followers among the intellectuals and the more backward sections of the Jewish workers. The Zionists endeavored to isolate the Jewish working-class masses from the general struggle of the proletariat.” Earlier, Lenin had even ridiculed the Jewish Labor Bund, who were far from Zionists, when they advocated an autonomous socialist organization for Jewish workers. Moscow was also well aware that one of the primary goals of the Zionist movement was to relocate Jews to Palestine from nations where they had been dispersed, especially the USSR.


Jewish Bund logo. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]


The turning point came with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Understandably, the existential threat of German aggression which ultimately cost the lives of 27 million of its citizens shifted the Soviet priority toward rallying international support for the war effort. Rightly or wrongly, Moscow chose to defer its long-established opposition to Zionism as thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime came pouring into the USSR. In the same way that the Russian Orthodox Church was enrolled during wartime to mobilize Soviet patriotism which saw religious life for Christians undergo a renaissance and churches reopen, Jewish religious activities commenced and synagogues were built. By relaxing previous constraints on religious liberties, the Soviets may have been trying to placate their new Allies in the United States and Britain.

At some point, pragmatism began to overshadow ideological concerns and cynical geopolitics clouded the judgment of the Politburo. Without modifying its formal position denouncing Zionism or official stated preference for a democratic bi-national state shared between Jews and Arabs, Soviet foreign policy reluctantly became pro-Zionist in the aftermath of World War II.

The Kremlin had initially rebuffed David Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency in Palestine during war-time in consideration of their alliance with Britain, but things changed as soon as postbellum relations soured. Once the full extent of Nazi atrocities committed against Jews was revealed, Moscow wrongly assumed that, after having saved their ethnicity from extermination while Western countries enabled the rise of fascism, a Jewish state would be one that was pro-Soviet. Needless to say, this was quickly shown to be a false prediction but it was too late. In the eleventh hour, the USSR voted in favor of the UN proposal to divide Palestine. The Zionists had taken full advantage of the post-war circumstances with the collective responsibility felt toward the treatment of Jews while the Soviets regrettably fell for the deception of Zionism as interchangeable with Judaism.

It is difficult to say precisely what led to such an unforgivable mistake on the part of the Comintern but many forget that the Zionists also successfully portrayed themselves as socialists in this period. By the 1930s, Ben-Gurion and the secular Labor Zionist faction had surpassed the Political Zionist wing led by Chaim Weizmann, both internationally and within the Yishuv.

Given its reactionary record, this was perceived as an encouraging change. Unlike their counterparts, Labor Zionists espoused that a Jewish state could only be formed through its proletariat making aliyah to the Holy Land and developing a new society centered around collective farming (kibbutzim). On this basis, a limited number of Soviet Jews were permitted to emigrate in the naive hope that a Jewish proto-state would become socialist and expedite the decline of British imperialism in the region.

Of course, the irreconcilable ethnocratic contradictions of kibbutzism soon eclipsed any utopian ideals of communal living it purported to uphold through its brutal exclusion of indigenous Arabs. It is worth noting, however, that the Soviets were far from the only socialists misguided by the Labor Zionists, which included the Communist Party USA and even Albert Einstein among supporters.

To their credit, the Soviets had already done a great deal to try to solve the Jewish national question without displacing any native inhabitants in the process, with mixed results. After the February Revolution, the Pale of Settlement confining Russian Jews was abolished by the provisional government and all discriminatory Tsarist-era legislation was nullified. Once the Bolsheviks took power, the condition of Jews as an oppressed minority was addressed as part of the nationalities problem generally — which was their first mistake. Hebrew was outlawed because of its Zionist associations while Yiddish-speaking was encouraged in its place so that Jewish language and culture would be “national in form, socialist in content.”

Yet by undeservingly elevating the identity of Jews to the standing of a nationality, the Soviets may have inadvertently strengthened Zionist dogma in the long run. While serving as the People’s Commissar for Nationality Affairs, Stalin had clearly defined the nationality qualifications for a minority group as the sharing of a common culture, language, and territory. Even though the transnational Jewish diaspora did not meet the requirement for the final category, nationhood status was awarded and with it came the prospect of a Soviet-based homeland to rival Zionist aspirations in Palestine.

Following the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks originally considered the Crimea as a suitable zone for Jewish autonomy due to its significant minority population. But by the late 1920s — mostly in response to the rise in agricultural settlements in Mandatory Palestine — Stalin set up Birobidzhan, or the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a remote territory in the far east reserved for Jewish settlement. Encouraging Soviet Jewry to migrate to the Siberian town on its border with China, Birobidzhan was not unlike other administrative units put in place for the sovereignty of the various nationalities previously oppressed under the Russian Empire, which Lenin had dubbed the “prison house of peoples.” While its aims of developing a substitute were intended to divert Soviet Jews away from Palestine, it ultimately backfired.


[Source: goyimtv.com]

Due to its severe climate and the inability of territorialism to compete with Zionism, Birobidzhan never attracted enough Jews to contend with Israel, though at its peak its minority population was estimated to be around 30,000. While mainstream accounts directly attribute the failure of the JAR to Stalin and the purges of the 1930s which weakened Birobidzhan’s leadership, other historians such as Grover Furr have placed blame for the excesses of the NKVD on Nikolai Yezhov. (Although the district still exists in the present-day Russian Federation, just 1% of the remaining population is Jewish.) In the end, the unrealized dream of Birobidzhan meant that no progressive alternative to Zionism stood in its way. Not coincidentally, a socialistic façade was initially given to Israel in order to entice Jewish immigration into the newly formed ethnocracy, a left-wing pretense that was just as quickly abandoned.

It is hard not to wonder if the Soviets could have prevented the creation of Israel given the USSR’s emergence as one of the two Cold War superpowers. On the one hand, the question of Palestine was not a domestic Soviet matter where the Kremlin was the sole contributing factor but rather one of several states involved when the British Mandate was handed over to the United Nations and Resolution 181 was adopted. Then again, without the crucial shipment of Soviet arms via Czechoslovakia, it is likely that the Haganah would not have prevailed.

For any Marxist-Leninist, it is sickening to know those weapons were used to massacre Arabs in the Nakba, not to mention forcibly expel more than 700,000 Palestinians. What is certain is that realpolitik and Moscow’s overemphasis on ensuring a withdrawal of the British corrupted its decision-making and it is forever a stain on Soviet history. In hindsight, the Kremlin was slow to recognize that Washington had become its larger foe and Israel’s closest ally.


Nakba year: 1948


The synthetic left never misses the chance to cite the short-lived Soviet-Zionist cooperation as evidence of a revolutionary betrayal by leadership after Lenin’s death. While even the most hard-line defenders of the USSR would concede the disastrous move as deserving of the utmost criticism, only opportunists would weaponize the Palestinian tragedy to try to diminish the achievements of the world’s first socialist state.

For an intellectually impoverished Western left, it is much easier to blame it all on Uncle Joe. Failing to recognize the complex historical conditions which led to such an unfortunate turn of events is anti-Marxist. That the Soviets so quickly reversed course suggests there was internal division over the issue which refutes the presumption that policymaking came simply by dictatorial rule. The inability to grasp complicated historical factors has resulted in a similar misunderstanding of the Russia-Ukraine conflict by the mainstream left which can never be allowed to have the final say on matters of Soviet history.

As Friedrich Engels wrote on the Irish question:

The bourgeoisie turns everything into a commodity, hence also the writing of history. It is part of its being, of its condition for existence, to falsify all goods: it falsified the writing of history. And the bestpaid historiography is that which is best falsified for the purposes of the bourgeoisie.”


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A Tumor Poisoning the Levant (for 74 Years)

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MIDDLE EAST IN DEPTH WITH LAITH MAROUF EPISODE 12 – ISRAEL THREATENS RAFA – COLLEGE PROTESTS

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AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7

Read this article (and pass it on) to fully comprehend the depravity of the Zionist regime in Palestine.


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British Doctor Trying to Save Lives of Gazan Civilians Severely Injured by Israeli Bombs

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British Doctor Trying to Save Lives of Gazan Civilians Severely Injured by Israeli Bombs

 

 

[Warning: This interview features graphic images.—Editors]

The Israeli tactic of hiding the ongoing genocide is to suppress the truth in the media. This includes pressuring mainstream media outlets like CNN to filter and/or distort reports to suit Israel’s interests, preventing journalists from reporting from Gaza, or simply killing them—a fate that has befallen dozens of journalists to date, “more than in any other conflict in over 30 years.”

Systematic Censorship

The greatest irony is that CNN, which supports Israeli censorship, is now criticizing the Chinese government for not suppressing the anger of Chinese citizens over the horrors in Gaza, and vilifying the Chinese as “anti-Semitic” for doing so.

A Summary of the Horror

We would like to remind our readers that every inhabitant in Gaza is hungry, that some 50,000 pregnant women receive neither medical care nor adequate nutrition, that infants are dying in droves, and that 100,000 people have died or been injured by military violence in the Gaza ghetto so far —that is one in twenty—and that many of the injured have no access to medical care.

Despite this frightening new high in violence, the majority of Israelis still believe that not enough force is being used, according to a recent poll. Given that “Israel’s use of disproportionate force is a long-established tactic — with a clear aim,” this might not come as a surprise. The indiscriminate killing by Israel does not stop at its own citizens. On October 7, 2023, Israeli attack helicopters and tanks killed numerous citizens in their homes.

After the news in which it was falsely claimed that Hamas had beheaded Israeli babies, this followed: “In a desperate bid for international sympathy, the Israeli government has sought to stir outrage over the killing of a 12-year-old girl during the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on October 7,” according to this report.

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, chimed in to proclaim that “Liel Hetzroni of Kibbutz Beeri was murdered in her home by Hamas monsters… We’re fighting the most just war: to ensure this can never happen again.” That was a shameless lie. She was killed when an Israeli tank fired on her house.


Naftali Bennett

Naftali Bennett


And an Israeli soldier held hostage in Gaza was killed with poison gas, not by Hamas, but by Israel—a fact that led his mother to allude to the gas chambers in Hitler’s Germany.


Brian Mast (R-Fl) wearing IDF uniform in Congress. [Source: dailycaller.com]


We also watch in disbelief as the last vestiges of moral decency are turned upside down: Those of us who oppose genocide are accused of condoning it. Those who commit genocide are exercising their right to self-defense!

In September, before the paramilitary wing of Hamas overran the Israeli border on October 7, 2023 (a sober analysis can be found here), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu showed a map of the so-called New Middle East at a session of the UN General Assembly. The Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem had all been incorporated into a Greater Israel. Ironically, he insisted that Israel should extend “from the river to the sea.” Palestine had ceased to exist. Palestinians are forced to choose between death by bombing, disease, exposure, starvation or expulsion from their homeland.

Nazism Is in Full Swing Again

Both prominent Israeli politicians and ordinary Israelis use the terminology of the German Reich to refer to the Palestinians as sub-human animals (and therefore acceptable prey to kill). They are forcing the Palestinians who have survived this far to leave, “benevolently” referring to this as “voluntary emigration from Gaza,” which is supported by 83% of Israelis—a term and tactic of ethnic cleansing also used by Nazi Germany.


Nazi ethnic clansing


Greater Israel’s Model: Greater Germany! [Source: Screenshot of Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum] Israel is doing the same in Gaza with German thoroughness. That is why the International Court of Justice (ICJ) recently ruled that “Gaza has become a place of death and despair” (ICJ Ruling, page 13, point 47).

The Necessary Counter-Statements

We provide a voice to those who witnessed the carnage but are usually left out of your papers and screens. Examples include the Palestinian intellectual who barely escaped with his life after Israeli bombs destroyed his entire neighborhood and the British doctor who worked through the chaos and carnage and agreed to an interview with us.

Masha Gessen, a Jewish relative of Holocaust survivors and a Hannah Arendt prize winner, explains that “the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today.”  And as your media refuse to report on the unprecedented horror of our time, we have decided to show you graphic pictures of helpless citizens severely injured by Israeli bombs, kindly provided by our interviewee, Dr. Khan. However, we will not show you pictures from another source of dead women and children who have been torn to pieces.

The Most Cruel War Zone in the World

Conducted by Felix Abt, below is an interview with Dr. Suheal A. Khan, Senior Orthopaedic Consultant, Visiting Professor, Director and Founder, Mobile International Surgical Teams (MIST) Foundation.



Felix Abt: Dr. Khan, you have just returned from Gaza. It is the second time you have worked there. In 2010, you spent a year in the Gaza Strip as Head of Orthopaedics at Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis where you taught and trained the local surgeons in the art of Ilizarov surgery and performed many cases of limb deformity, infection, and mal-unions of fractures. You wrote the book Nowhere to Run: A Surgeon’s Tale from the Gaza Strip about your experiences there. Since then, the situation has changed dramatically, and for the worse, as you discovered during your recent visit. What has become of this hospital and your former colleagues there?

Dr. S.A. Khan: I arrived at European Gaza Hospital [EGH] with the Red Cross [ICRC] team and was very surprised and pleased to see surgeons and nurses I had worked with more than a decade ago! The Head of Department of EGH was one of my Residents over a decade ago! So it was a sort of homecoming with many of the other EGH staff. I also met displaced colleagues from Al Shifa working now at EGH.

The problem was getting to and from work was now getting dangerous…so we started operating theaters at 10:30 a.m. and many of the staff would sleep in theaters till the next shift came in.

Some of my former colleagues were trapped with their families at the Al Muwasi camp…which is a strip of beach in the ‘safe zone.’ Many fear if they now return to Nasser Hospital, the IDF will arrest them as many of the Al Shifa medics are still missing, raising questions.

Felix Abt: Israel forced patients and medical staff to leave hospitals, condemning these patients and the new patients to death. Could at least some of these patients be saved, and if so, how?

Dr. S.A. Khan: Any patient can be saved if there are enough resources and specialists available. Forcibly removing patients from hospitals…[I] am sure that goes against Geneva Conventions… You may want to check?

Felix Abt: As a doctor working in developing countries and conflict zones, you’ve probably seen a lot of terrible things. What went through your mind when you saw missing limbs, deep infected wounds, women’s and children’s intestines spilled on the ground, and other horrific scenes, this time on an unprecedented scale in Gaza?

Dr. S.A. Khan: No words can describe it…the Foundation’s media team did not put up any horrific photos or videos on its Instagram…maybe we should?

Felix Abt: On January 5, the United Nations reported that there have been “600 attacks on health care in Gaza and the West Bank” since the beginning of the war in the Gaza Strip. Dozens of hospitals and other medical facilities have been rendered inoperable since October 7 by apparently direct and systematic attacks on medical personnel and facilities. The disruption of electricity and communication links by Israel was another barbaric act to prevent adequate medical care. In addition, the destruction of infrastructure led to severe hygiene problems due to a lack of water and sanitation facilities. How do you assess the extent of this obviously deliberate vandalism by the occupying forces and what impact will this have on the health and survival of the population?

Dr. S.A. Khan: There are many facets to your question….

  1. Attacks on health care workers…I was just emailed the UN figures for deaths till January 22, 2024, from October 7th:
    1. 63 doctors
    2. 111 nurses
    3. 23 paramedics
    4. 29 pharmacists
    5. 13 lab staff
    6. 337 additional health care workers (orderlies, caregivers, support staff)

Hospitals are supposed to be sanctuaries of healing and safety…This is the first time in 30 years of humanitarian work that I have seen such blatant killing of health care professionals…some with a white flag…others have been kidnapped and we do not know their whereabouts… what about these Israeli Human Shields and POWs who happen to be medics!

Israel attacks six British surgeons in their home with a thousand-pound GPS-guided bomb

On January 18th IDF bombed their residence on the beach! The facts I have just received and on MAP website…the UN did an investigation and the type of explosive used was a 1000-pound GPS-guided lump of metal and destruction…evidence gathered from the fragment analysis…only IDF or UK or USA have that type of bomb. MAP is asking the UK government why they are not doing something to protect their humanitarian workers in Gaza….The IDF have our coordinates! Every time we [ICRC] move, we have to coordinate with the IDF and Hamas.

  1. The health conditions are deteriorating and many people already had upper respiratory tract infections and we, meaning myself and teams from Norway, still have chest problems…The air was sometimes thick with dust…bombs did fall about 500 meters away…I mean big bombs!
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  16. In terms of vandalism by IDF: I am attending an international meeting in Amman, Jordan, on February 7th, hosted by the King. “Rebuilding Gaza Healthcare” is the Conference and the MIST Foundation will provide input on orthopaedics and training. You can register for FREE with on line access. The Strip has been stripped…[much] of the infrastructure destroyed, but perhaps a blank canvas to erect beautiful hospitals for the Gazans…That’s what I hope to achieve as one of my aims at the conference.

Another British doctor, Dr. Andy Ferguson, who worked in the European hospital in Gaza over Christmas and New Year, described the situation there as follows: “Complete chaos reigns. There are about 22,000 people currently living in makeshift tents on the ground of the hospital or actually on the floors in hospital corridors themselves. (…) The situation within the emergency department particularly was chaotic. There were hundreds and hundreds of patients in there at any moment. Many of them because the primary healthcare system has broken down, looking for the management of their diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure, kidney failure, and cancer, and on top of that you get groups of ten, twenty, thirty, newly injured patients, often with a number of dead bodies arriving within that chaos.” [Source: instagram.com]


Felix Abt: Some doctors in Gaza explained that they can’t even use a cold compress because of the lack of water, others explained that they clean wounds with vinegar and detergent and operate on people without anesthesia and even without painkillers. Let’s take a concrete example: How do you treat a child whose body is covered in shrapnel—with severely damaged limbs and perhaps dozens of open wounds from “head to toe”—given the extremely limited resources you have at your disposal and the extreme conditions (such as non-sterile areas, no anesthesiologist to assist you, etc.) in which you are working?

Felix Abt: When there is a shortage of almost everything—supplies, staff, hospital beds and facilities—the health workers in Gaza not only have to make inhumane sacrifices, but also have to make serious decisions and practically decide which patient can continue to live and which has to die, “playing God” so to speak. In addition, you can be in constant fear for your life, as you could be hit by an Israeli bomb at any time. In fact, journalists and medical personnel seem to be among the main targets of the Israeli “defense” forces. How do you cope with this incredible psychological strain on top of the extreme working conditions?

Dr. S.A. Khan: The last question is easy…and with humor. The Gazans have a very dry wit and are extremely generous people…That’s probably why I get on with Gazans…I have described them as the ”Pathans [Pashtuns] of the Middle East”….an Afghan tribe!

“Swimming with the fish” as my Norwegian colleague Eric from Norway would say….When you sit, and eat, and you work together and stop for a smoke…you become part of the team but you then direct the team, as there has been no senior doctor for weeks at the hospital.

Felix Abt: On January 5, UNICEF reported that “cases of diarrhea in children are up 50 percent in just one week, with 90 percent of children under two now subject to ‘severe food poverty.’” Now, with thousands of children already dead as a result of the violence, it looks like a tsunami of child deaths is on the horizon. And the trickle of aid [the amount and type of which is controlled by the occupying forces] is not making the situation any better. How do you assess this situation?

Dr. S.A. Khan: I had a WhatsApp message that one of the patients I treated had [contracted] hepatitis A…the living conditions will only get worse from an already bad situation.

Felix Abt: Hamas has been trying for years to persuade Israel to release the countless Palestinians, including children, many of whom have been imprisoned for years without trial. After failing to do so, it tried to take Israelis hostage on October 7 to force the release of the Palestinian prisoners. As a result of the hostage exchange, the returned Palestinians stated that many of them had been horribly mistreated [including torture and rape] in Israeli prisons. Did you or your colleagues have the opportunity to talk to the returnees and possibly have them medically examined?

Dr. S.A. Khan: NO COMMENT. As a humanitarian, I treat all injured irrespective of who they are…but we also do not disclose those we have treated, unless we have permission from the patient.

Felix Abt: Is there anything else readers should know?

Dr. S.A. Khan: Stop attacking hospitals…a BIG FULL STOP…Let the humanitarian agencies do their work.

Felix Abt: Is there anything readers can do, such as donate money to the Mobile International Surgical Teams (MIST)?

Dr. S.A. Khan: [Any] money donated goes to buying kits and consumables….All MIST members are volunteers and do not profit from any of their endeavors. Visit our website to donate: www.mistngo.co.uk

MIST builds capacity and supports surgical centers in developing countries to become self-sustaining and provide excellent health care to local populations, regardless of the race, religion, or nationality of patients, and without adverse discrimination of any kind.

Pictures


Patient lost his leg. [Source: easternangle.com]

Shrapnel wound. [Source: easternangle.com]

Shrapnel wounds. [Source: easternangle.com]

Damaged left foot. [Source: easternangle.com]

Shrapnel wounds. [Source: easternangle.com]

Shrapnel wounds—buttocks and perianal area. [Source: easternangle.com]

 


This article was first published in Eastern Angle.


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Things to keep in mind...

Neo-Nazi ideology has become one of the main protagonists of political and social life in Ukraine since the 2014 coup d'état. Meanwhile, fascist ideology and blatant lies also permeate the consciousness of most people in the West. Those in the comfortable top 10%, the "PMCs" (Professional Managerial Class), are especially vulnerable. They support and disseminate such ideas. They are the executors of the actual ruling class' orders, those in the 0.001%, who remain largely invisible. The PMCs are the political class, the media whores, the top military brass, some people in academia, and the "national security/foreign policy" industry honchos. Push back against these unethical, contaminated people with the truth while you can.

AND...where the US Government is at: LYING 24/7


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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

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