The terrorists of the Middle East, Takis Fotopoulos, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol. 2, no.4 (November 2006)

In the last few days in the Middle East the world has, once again, seen the implementation of pure Nazi methods, which everybody had thought to have been forever condemned to the rubbish bin of History. The capture of a single Israeli soldier by Palestinian guerillas in a battle with the Israeli army (following the killing of scores of Palestinian women and children over the previous days by the same army, for which Israel refused to accept an independent inquiry) is now being paid for through the collective punishment of the entire Gaza population. This is occurring in addition to the killing of dozens of Palestinians in the last couple of days, following the re-occupation of a significant part of the Gaza strip that was evacuated just a year ago, as an act of Zionist magnanimity, to the fanfare of the transnational elite’s media! The Gaza strip lost about 60% of its electricity when the Israeli air force struck six transformers with missiles at the territory's only power plant. This, together with the systematic bombardment of Gaza’s infrastructure, which included several bridges even a University, left much of Gaza without electricity and running water. Particularly so, since Israel also took care to shut down deliveries of fuel. Furthermore, the wrecked plant was only fully on line for three years and it will cost about £8m to buy and install new transformers. It is also worth mentioning that Israel provides the rest of the electricity in the area (about 40%) and that it used to supply it all and may do so again, “meaning that Israel's electricity company could make a handsome profit from the army's destruction”.[1]

Naturally, these bombardments constitute one more flagrant Israeli violation of international law, since the 1948 Geneva Conventions explicitly prohibit the deliberate targeting of services essential to the civilian population, like water and electricity. A statement by the Swiss foreign ministry, which it issued in its capacity as the depository country for the Geneva Conventions, condemned this action declaring that there is "no doubt Israel has not taken the precautions required of it in international law to protect the civilian population and infrastructure”. However, the Israeli army (following the well- trodden path of every occupation army in History) simply named the capture of the soldier as a ‘terrorist’ act, while at the same time the criminal bombardments, the terrorising supersonic booms over the heads of the Gaza population (following the Israeli prime minister’s order to the military to "make sure no one sleeps in Gaza at night") and the truly terrorist abductions of half the Palestinian ministers and almost a quarter of the Palestinian members of Parliament were tacitly approved by the transnational elite (USA, EU, ‘Quartet’ etc). This, despite the fact that these politicians have been properly elected, following all the rules of representative democracy supported by the transnational elite – as long as this ‘democracy’ does not give the ‘wrong’ results, of course, in which case it is strangled financially, if not physically!

These events are neither symptomatic nor simply indicative of the fact that ‘Israeli society seems to have lost its soul’.[2] From the moment the UN passed the Partition resolution (1948) to create a bi-national Arab-Jewish state in Palestine, without bothering to ask the opinion of all the residents of Palestine at the time although the Jewish population were by no means the majority of the people living there —despite the massive settlement of Jews from all over the world to Palestine during the previous half a century or so— everything that followed was inevitable. Particularly so, as the Zionists interpreted the UN resolution as giving them the green light for an ethnic cleansing of Palestinians with the aim to create a ‘pure’ Jewish state, whereas the West saw in this resolution the opportunity to use the new state as the policeman of the Middle East against the oil-rich Arab states. The brightest minds of the Jewish Left condemned this solution to the Jewish problem at the time, exactly on the grounds that it was going to lead to a vicious circle of totalitarian violence by the Zionists and popular counter-violence by the Palestinians. What could not be predicted at the time was that Zionist expansionism would ensure the radical changing of the Middle Eastern map: the UN resolution which created the state of Israel (1948) assigned about 55% of Palestinian land to the Zionist state (despite the fact that the Jewish population at the time was less than 40% of the total), while Zionists now possess about 90% of the land in historic Palestine – out of which only 12% is anticipated by the ‘Roadmap’ etc to be returned to the Palestinians![3] The inevitable outcome is that millions of Palestinian refugees have been dispersed among the miserable refugee camps all over the Middle East. Despite all this, the reformist Left all over the world does not hesitate to put Zionist violence and popular counter-violence into the same bag!

It is indicative of the huge power of Zionist propaganda, which is reproduced by the mass media controlled by the transitional elite, that today it is Zionists who are presented as the victims, just because in History they were, indeed, the victims of systematic persecution. Even some German ‘anarchists’ (clearly because of their guilt complex on account of the Nazi crimes of their fathers) as well as some of their imitators elsewhere (because of sheer nonsense) do not hesitate to adopt Zionist propaganda and support the “argument” that even today the victims are the Israeli people who are entitled to a safe fatherland –a fatherland which is now being threatened to the point of extinction by Islamic fundamentalists.

However, it is only in the last few years that Palestinians have turned to the Islamists, certainly not because they suddenly became fundamentalists, but simply because they discovered that the policy of compromises followed by Fatah was leading to their uprooting from their own fatherland. Similarly, no one could deny the right of persecuted Jews to a safe fatherland, a right to which the Arabs, who have been living there for hundreds of years, are also, of course, entitled. The real solution, therefore, to the problem has always been in terms of a single fatherland that would host all the persecuted Jews in the world (this does not, of course, apply to the hundreds of thousands of mainly American Jews who, not being persecuted by anybody, just move to Palestine in order to protect the land ‘promised to them by their God’!), as well as the Palestinians, including the refugees. This solution is rejected, however, not just by the Zionists, who want to establish a ‘pure’ and powerful Jewish state next to a kind of Palestinian Bantustan, but also by the majority of Palestinians who cannot, as yet, absorb the fact that a two-state solution, consisting of two sovereign states next to each other, is no longer possible (if ever it was!) in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, as I mentioned in a recent article,[4] more and more people today see the bankruptcy of the two-state solution. Such people can be found not just among progressive Jews and Palestinians but even among the orthodox analysts hosted by the elite-controlled mass media. For instance, in a very recent article in Foreign Policy and reproduced by The Guardian, Mathias Mossberg[5] admits the total bankruptcy of the two-state solution and proposes the solution of a ‘dual state’, in which both peoples would be given the right to settle in the whole area that lies between the Mediterranean and Jordan. Citizens could freely choose which system to belong to — their citizenship would be bound not by territory, but by choice, with the basic administrative structure following the Swiss example of the cantons. In this dual state, smaller territorial units could be given the right to choose which state to belong to, based on a majority vote, while individuals would be able to choose citizenship for themselves regardless of where they lived, and they would be free to move about within the area and territories now occupied by Israel. The functions of the common state would be similar to those of a federal state (a common currency, common taxes, shared social services, joint defense force and customs service etc), whilst local affairs would be dealt with by canton administrators on a majority basis.

Naturally, Mossberg, presumably aiming to secure the sympathy of ‘progressive’ Zionists with his plan, does not foresee the return of the millions of refugees –a key aspect of any genuine solution to the Palestinian problem—since this would convert the present artificial demographic majority of the Jewish population into a minority. However, given the huge economic and social superiority of the Jewish population over the Palestinian population, it is only the re-establishment of the natural demographic superiority of the latter that could reduce, to a certain degree, the built-in inequality in favour of the former, which the dual state solution would inevitably create.

In conclusion, the genuinely progressive forces among Jews and Palestinians could join forces today and fight for a short-term solution based on a dual state that would accept all Palestinian refugees, as the basis for a future confederation of peoples in Palestine based on an Inclusive Democracy.

* The above text is an extended version of an article which was first published in the fortnightly column of Takis Fotopoulos in the mass circulation Athens daily Eleftherotypia on 8/7/2006.

[1] Chris McGreal, ‘Israeli tanks turn screw on besieged Gaza Strip’, The Guardian (29/6/2006).
[2] Moses Litsis, Εleftherotypia (3/7/2006).
[3] see Takis Fotopoulos, ‘Palestine: the hour of truth’, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol.2, No.2 (January 2006).
[4] ibid.
[5] Mathias Mossberg, ‘Superimposing a Solution’, Foreign Policy (27/6/2006).