BY ASHIQ HUSSAIN
Israeli Zionists fear that sooner or later Arab Muslims would throw them into the Mediterranean Ocean. So, they seek to frighten Arabs into submission with their military power and with the support they receive from the United States and its Western allies. By the time of writing this paper in the last week of June 2024, Zionist Israel has, since October 07, 2023, killed about 38,000 Gaza civilians, mostly women and children, besides damaging the Gaza infrastructure, hospitals in particular.
For now, Muslim states are focused on letting down one another. Some of them, like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and even Qatar, nurture ambitions of becoming regional hegemon. To which purpose they sponsor international terrorism in various countries (as for example Iraq, Syria, etc.) which results in the weakening of Muslim states and in the killing of Muslims. And yet with their misplaced ambitions, every one of these states, except Iran, is afraid of Israel.
Also, Muslim states have been in the habit of launching unnecessary bloody wars against each other. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980. This war devastated Iran. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and set fire to its oil wells giving rise to environmental disaster. Saudi Arabia-led coalition invaded Yemen in 2015 reducing its population to starvation.
Muslim states have miserably failed to focus their attention on Zionist Israel. The latter has proved to be a malignancy implanted in their midst by Christian racist Europe to hide their anti-Semitic crimes committed by them through centuries.
Anti-Semitism is the uncalled-for prejudice and hostility felt by Christendom of Europe against Jews. Jews are as good human beings as any. Muslim in general and Arabs in particular seldom harboured anti-Semitic feelings. On the contrary, Muslims, Arabs in particular, showed empathy for Jews, be it during the time of the Great Caliph, Hazrat Umar (peace be upon Him), in whose time, A.D. 634-644, Arab Muslim dominion spread over Palestine; or in the time of Salaud-Din Yusuf bin Ayub (Saladin) who brought them, along with Muslims, back to Palestine towards the end of 12th century after he finally defeated the Christian Crusaders – Crusaders killed Muslims, Jews, and even Christians; they ate human flesh after killing men (p. 140 Destiny Disrupted Tamim Ansari); or be it in Muslim Spain, 8th c. to 15th c., where the Jews thrived under the rule of Caliphs; or be it the Sultans of Turkey who gave them refuge after they were evicted, along with Muslims, from Spain ending 15th c. (p. 178 ibid).
Europe’s Christians proclaimed themselves as civilized. They hated Jews so much so that lynching them, murdering them in mass, destroying their property, was a normal in their civilized continent. Europe’s anti-Semitism reached its peak around the year 1900.
The Jewish response to Europe’s anti-Semitism was the Zionist Movement which was named after Mount Zion, in Palestine. Mount Zion is termed as Sehun in Oriental languages, hence the Zionists are called Sehuni in the Orient.
The Zionist Movement was launched in 1897 by an Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist, Theodor Herzl. The aim of the Zionist project was to settle East European Jews in Palestine – (European Jews were/are called Ashkenazi Jews). It was a half-blind scheme that saw Palestine as empty land, beckoning Zionists to settle and establish Der Judenstaat, the Zionist state.
The US-based Afghan scholar Tamim Ansari writes (p.320 Destiny Disrupted) that Palestine for Zionists was a land without people; and Jews were a people without land.
Yet, Palestine was not empty land. Arabs lived there. What would happen to native Palestinians whose ancestors lived there for centuries; and who had protected the ancestors of Jews?
Furthermore, Zionists laid a strange claim to the land. They said that God had granted them the land of Palestine in the time of Prophet Moses (peace be upon Him) and that therefore they were entitled to take the land.
A question could be posed: Which God and Whose God? Do the Zionists have a copyright on God? Do they have a patent registered on Palestine land?
On the contrary, anti-Semitic Christians maintained that Jews were responsible for crucifying Prophet Jesus (peace be upon Him). Hence their anti-Semitic behavior.
According to Israeli Zionist journalist Ari Shavit, (pp. 2-3 My Promised Land), in the year 1900, there were about 11 million Jews in the world: 07 million in Eastern Europe; 02 million in Central and Western Europe; one and half million in North America; one million in North Africa and the Middle East.
Some 5000 (five thousand) Jews lived in Palestine that constituted about 1% of the population of Palestine. As against 5000 Jews, five hundred thousand Arabs lived there, constituting about 99% of the population of the land.
In the year 1900 there was little chance of success for the Zionist Movement in its bid to set up Der Judenstaat. Palestine was then ruled by Ottoman Turkey, which, once the most eminent power astride Asia and Europe, was suffering decay, and therefore, crumbling. The decadent Ottomans had left this province into the hands of absentee landlords. Zionists purchased land from these absentee landlords in thousands of acres leaving the Palestinian serfs at the mercy of settler colonialists.
During the first half of the 20th c. about two-thirds of European Jews were exterminated by European Christians through lynching, massacres (called pogroms), and finally through the Holocaust perpetrated by Adolph Hitler-led Germany. Theodor Herzl seemed to have foreseen the Holocaust in the 1890s. Hence, he thought that in order to survive, the Jews needed a state of their own rather than live as persecuted minorities in various countries of Christian Europe.
Setting up the Zionist state was a fantasy, quite impossible in the circumstances. The British Mandate of Palestine (1918-48) made it possible. Zionists got British support to move in and prepare themselves to drive out the Palestinian native people.
Subsequent to the massacre of 49 Jews in Moldova in the year 1903, one million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe. However, they did not opt for Palestine but for North America. In America they could make life, in Palestine life would be uncertain. A small portion, some 35000, moved into Ottoman-ruled Palestine up to the beginning of World War I.
Post- World War I, the Zionists began purchasing large swathes of land, thousands of acres, in British Mandate Palestine from absentee landlords in Egypt and Lebanon. Simultaneously they organized armed terrorist groups. Haganah was founded in June 1920. Irgun was set up in 1931. These were duly supported by Wingate’s Warriors, a group of British occupation forces, incepted in 1938. Together these terrorists forcibly evicted Palestinian serfs from lands upon which their ancestors had lived and worked for centuries. Stern Gang was founded in 1940. Its cadres killed both British soldiers and Arabs.
Palestinian Arab resistance led by Izz Abdul Qadir Mustafa Yusuf was of no avail in the face of combined British and Zionist forces. Izz Abdul Qadir died in action on November 20, 1935.
While as hapless Jews in Europe had fallen victim to rabid racism of Christians, they, on converting to Zionism, in turn turned into as rabid racists, whose object was to settler-colonize Palestine at the cost of native Arabs.
Zionism is settler-colonialism. Zionism is racism. Zionism is terrorism.
When some Jews converted to Zionism which was a settler-colonialist conspiracy against natives of Palestinian, the former identified themselves with their European racist victimizers against Arabs whose ancestors had given protection to their own (Jews’) ancestors. Conversely, the West’s racists exterminated Jews, but gave wholehearted support to Zionist racists so as to use them as imperial outpost in the midst of Arabs. Thus, the Arabs had to pay for crimes committed by European Christendom.
Allied victory in WWII proved favourable to Zionists. Victorious Britain, France, and the US supported Zionists. Arabs could not counter these by enlisting the support of the fascist Adolph Hitler which they would be in their rights to do – pitching German Axis racists against Allied racists. Mohammad Syed Haj Amin al-Husseini, the fanatical Grand Mufti of Palestine, had remained in touch with Adolph Hitler-led racist regime of Germany during the course of the 2nd World War (pp.38-43 O Jerusalem Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre).
Fate also dealt a severe blow to Palestinian Arabs when their charismatic resistance icon, Abdul Qadir al-Husseini, nephew of the Grand Mufti, died of a
stray bullet in April 1948.
Allies set up in 1945 treaty organization the United Nations (UN) to take the place of the League of Nations. Months before the British Mandate of Palestine was scheduled to expire, the UN endorsed partition of Palestine into Zionist and Arab states.
Thus, the UN endorsed Zionist terrorist racist settler colonialism.
The Arabs rejected the Palestine Partition Plan. They vowed to drown Zionists into the ocean.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben Gurion declared the establishment of Der Judenstaat in Palestine to be called Israel. The United Nations recognition of Israel may be said to have conferred international legal status to the Zionist state but it seems difficult that Israel would ever enjoy legitimacy in the Afro-Arab Middle East.
Unsuspecting Arabs had thought that they could live amicably together with Jews. The Jews who settled there in Palestine were no longer ordinary Jews, but rabid Zionists. Zionist mission was to rid Palestinian land of its Arab population. To that purpose Zionists pretended friendship during daytime and during night-time prepared intelligence reports against individuals, groups, neighbourhoods. Ari Shavit writes: “ … each file … included an aerial photograph, a map, a demographic breakdown of the population and its leadership, its strengths and weaknesses, its roads, its command posts. Every village file contains the village’s demise (p. 118 My Promised Land).”
Zionism is said to have saved Jews. The question is, how? Zionism turned simple Jews, victims, into victimizers, racists, terrorists, settler colonialists, West’s imperial tools, with no legitimacy in the land, surrounded by Arabs. Not only surrounded by Arabs, Arabs are in their midst! As against 7 million Zionists living in Israel, some 2 million Arabs live in Israel, 2 million Arabs live in Gaza (which has been in a state of siege since 2005), and 3 million Arabs live in the occupied West Bank. Also, there are about 6 million Palestinian Arab refugees waiting to return to their homeland. So, the Zionists happen to be in a state of perpetual minority-hood. Is this how Zionism saved the Jews?
It is the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.
Zionists devastated the Palestinian native people, killed them, destroyed their villages, forced them to flee their homesteads. Arabs remember 1948 – (the year when Zionists set up Der Judenstaat) as the year of Nakba, catastrophe, great calamity. Jews even then lived a life of privilege in various Afro-Arab Muslim states, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, etc.
Nakba is ongoing.
When Zionists set up Israel in 1948, the Zionist population in the land was about 650,000. Compare with the figure of 5,000 (five thousand) Jews in 1897.
In a decade the population of Zionists in Israel jumped to about 1800,000 when Oriental Jews thronged to the Zionist State, because they now looked to Israel as their homeland and Muslims began to suspect their bona fides.
While as Zionist Movement had envisaged Der Judenstaat to be a country of East European Jewry, quite the contrary happened. East European Jews had preferred American life to Palestine uncertainty. So, in the 1950s half the population of Israel was composed of Oriental Jews, the Sephardic Jews (originally from Spain).
The emergence of Israel in Palestine resulted in the native Arabs losing their dignity, rights, homes, land, everything. The larger world might be sorry for them, but the larger world by and large supported the Zionists, victimizers rather than the victims.
Israel, initially with French assistance, increased its military power especially air power, and nuclear power – by 1967 Israel manufactured nuclear bombs. Surrounded by decadent Arab states, Israel emerged as a military super power of the region. The West’s hegemony in the Middle East helped the Zionists.
On the contrary Arab states used their oil wealth on spreading sectarianism and on purchasing expensive weapons systems which they used against one another. The West ensured that Arab states remained hostile to one another and that they never, collectively or individually, become more powerful than Israel.
Israeli Zionists made it their policy not to allow any Middle Eastern state to acquire nuclear technology. In 1981 they destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor during construction stage. Likewise, in 2006 they bombed Syrian nuclear reactor. Israel fears that nuclear armed Middle East states would threaten its existence.
However, Iran proved too smart for Israel and its Western patrons. Iran built multiple nuclear installations, Natanz, Bushehr, Parchin, Arak, Fordow. Hence the extreme hostility of the West and Israel (and of Saudi Arabia) towards Iran.
Despite crippling economic sanctions, assassinations of its nuclear scientists by Israeli agencies, and cyber-attacks, Iran’s nuclear programme has continued apace. As and when Iran tests a nuclear device, jealous Arabs would start a nuclear arms race with Iran.
Then, Zionists Israel would be surrounded on all sides by nuclear armed Muslim states with whom Israel never identified itself. It preferred to identify itself with the West. This would prove Israel’s undoing in future.
Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza and Syria’s Golan plateau and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula during the May 1967 Six Day War – (it returned Sinai in 1979 to Egypt). It emerged unscathed after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. It dealt with 1987 and 2000 Palestinian 1st & 2nd Intifadas (rebellions). It devastated Lebanon during its 2006 war with Iran-proxy-Hizbullah. By and by it grew complacent. It continued its policy of settler colonialism in the West Bank and placed a tight siege of Gaza from where it had evacuated its armed forces in 2005.
Then on September 22, 2023 Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu (Bibi), brandished a map of the Middle East before the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) depicting Gaza and West Bank as parts of Israel.
Gaza-based Hamas, Iran proxy, demolished its complacency on October 07, 2023, when Hamas cadres fired a barrage of rockets into Israel breaking through its Iron Dome Security System. This ill-conceived attack prompted an extremely disproportionate reaction by Israel against Gaza civilians killing women and children wholesale.
The perpetrator of the ongoing Nakba happens to be a bully. Should the Afro-Arab Muslim states manufacture nukes, this bully would come to senses. Also, American hegemony in the Afro-Arab region would come to an end.
It took 200 years to Muslims to defeat the Crusaders. It would take Afro-Arab states at the most 10 years to make nukes. Making nuclear weapons is not a big deal. It takes only determination and the will to expend resources. In any case pursuing science is cheaper than spreading religious sectarianism. What is needed would be to shift resources from madrasa education, sectarianism, and maintenance of geo-strategic assets to science. Pursuing a nuclear programme would endow Muslim states with all round scientific capabilities.
Iran humbled Israel when it launched on April 13, 2024, drone and missile attack against it and thus demolished the bogey of Israel’s invincibility. This, when Iran is not yet a declared nuclear power.
However, Iran’s interference in the Middle East countries has cost the wellbeing of Arabs. With the help of its Shia proxies, Lebanese, Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani, Iran contributed to the killing of tens of thousands of Syrian Arabs post-Arab Spring Syrian civil war. Actually everyone, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, ISIS, Al Nusra, Ahrar, America, Israel, Russia, France, Britain contributed to the killing of Syrians, but most of them were killed by Iran proxies.
Iran would do better to test a nuclear device to achieve credible deterrence and simultaneously discontinue the policy of maintaining geostrategic assets.
I believe Iran possesses nukes. I state this because if it had not been so, then the American government, which seeks regime change in Iran, would have invaded it like it did Iraq in 2003. The American government invaded Iraq because Iraq hadn’t nukes. The American government spent billions of dollars on the Iraq War. On the contrary, if the American government had invaded Iran, the war would not cost them a penny because the Saudi government had offered to bear expenses of such a war (p. 33 The Battle for Syria Christopher Phillips). The Saudi government seeks regime change in Iran like the American and Israeli governments do.
In any case, if Iran does not possess nukes, it should manufacture them and test them. Iran’s tests would prompt the jealous Arabs, especially the Saudis, to enter a nuclear arms race with Iran. By and by nuclear armed Saudi Arabia, Emirate, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Jordan, Qatar, Morocco, Algeria, etc., etc., would be nuclear powers.
Going nuclear would entail obtaining nuclear science education, training of technicians, engineers, setting up of multiple nuclear installations for nuclear enrichment, and missile technology. This the Afro-Arab states could do with help from Russia, China, India, North Korea, and Pakistan. Plus, the Afro-Arab Muslim states should know that this age is the age of cyber warfare, electromagnetic warfare and Artificial Intelligence (AI). They would have to remain on the forefront of defence preparedness in AI, radio, cyber and nuclear fields.
Ashkenazi Jews. Through centuries the Western nations have been mentally sick. Once they were anti-Semitic, then they suffered from Russophobia, followed by Japanophobia, Communistophobia, Islamophobia, and of late, from Sinophobia. Not surprising, if anti-Semitism returns to the Christian world. In that case the Jews living outside Israel, and outnumbering Israeli Zionists would immigrate to Israel – (there are some 06 million Jews in the US, some 500,000 in France, some 400,000 in Canada, some 300,000 in the UK, some 200,000 in Argentina, some 150,000 in Russia, some 125,000 in Germany, some 100,000 in Australia).
Israel would not be in a position to accommodate so many new immigrants (who would on arrival turn Zionist). Israel would demand more territory, living space, from contiguous Afro-Arab states, in the name of setting up of Greater Israel: Sinai of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Only a small body of water, the Gulf of Aqaba, separates Saudi Arabia from Israel.
Such sudden mass immigration has happened twice in the past. In the 1950s Sephardic Jews rushed to Israel. In the 1990s, post-dissolution of the USSR, one million Russian Jews (turned Zionist) immigrated as settler colonialists in Palestine.
If the Middle East states do not go nuclear, they would be at perpetual risk.
As stated earlier, Israel is a bully. Its government is in corrupt hands. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud party may end up in jail soon. Arya Deri of Shas party has already served a sentence in jail for indulging in corruption. Perpetual conflict suits their personal interests. Therefore, they make the Zionists see Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem as an affront to themselves (Zionists). They might go for the destruction of Al-Aqsa to humiliate the Muslim world, which is more than one and a half billion strong.
If the Muslim world does not obtain nuclear weapons, cyber, radio, and AI power, Zionist Israel would dare to blow up Al-Aqsa. Destruction of Al-Aqsa would be a humiliation to the entire Muslim world.
Zionist racists, settler colonialists, terrorists, do not know they are doing evil, do not know how much evil they have done to Palestinians. Therefore, they take pride in their brutal calling; and they will continue to do evil because they are powerful militarily. They will stop only when Afro-Arab states become as powerful, more powerful armed with nukes, missiles, cyber capabilities, and AI.
A bully understands only the language of power. Inebriated with the wine of power, the Zionist bully will understand only the language of power.
Afro-Arabs would not be required to use their nuclear and other military capabilities. Just obtaining nuclear capabilities would deal a blow to Zionist Israel at, what India’s premier military affairs analyst, Pravin Sawhney, calls “cognitive level of war”.
On October 07, 2023, Hamas launched a terrible attack against Israel. According to the Israeli government, Israel has a right to self-defence. Is Israel defending itself by butchering Gaza civilians, mostly women and children? Does it behove the descendants of Holocaust victims to kill non-combatants?
What rights do Palestinians have? Right to fight occupation. If yes, Is Hamas fighting occupation or just indulging in useless terror?
Hamas bosses should have known that there would be a disproportionate response to their attack and the target would be Gaza civilians.
Hamas must release Israeli hostages forthwith, no conditions. Resistance on the lines of modern resistance icons like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, would be a better path to take for non-state actors.
Whether there should be one state with Palestinian refugees to enjoy the right of return; or two states, one Arab (Muslim and Christian) and one Jewish (non-Zionist) would be for the Palestinians and Jews (not Zionists) to decide.
Zionist Israel is an upstart, audacious, and arrogant state because of West’s support. Zionists consider themselves as part of the same West that practiced anti-Semitism, lynching, pogroms, and the Holocaust against Jews in Europe.
Zionist Israel would remain a misfit, an anomaly, an uncertainty, in its Afro-Arab surroundings. Zionist Israel would have to introspect. And so should the Muslims do some introspection.
The author is a historian and can be reached at ashqhussainbhat@gmail.com
