For half a century, Jews have deflected criticism leveled against Israel by saying this is the kind of criticism that will lead to the destruction of Israel and the final solution of the Jewish question.
Every time
the Jews pulled one of these devious tricks, people thought it was the last of
them, and that henceforth the Jews will live like normal human beings, which
would have been a welcome relief to all of us. Unfortunately, however, this was
not to be, in that after every trick came another trick, and yet another without
respite, and without taking an interlude if only to let us catch our breath.
Now that
some things have changed in the world, what you expected will happen has
happened. It is that Jonathan S. Tobin saw yet another excuse to pull the same
old trick, fashioned this time in such a way as to respond to the new
circumstances.
What Tobin
took pain to elaborated on led him to end his current article with the
paragraph that follows the one you’re reading. His article came under the
title: “What Those Who Accept the ‘Stolen Land’ Myth Don’t Understand,”
published on January 23, 2022 in Algemeiner. Here is that ending:
“Far from
being a harmless woke myth, the fallacy about Jews stealing land doesn’t merely
enable slander; it is the foundation on which most forms of antisemitic hate,
delegitimization and terrorism rest”.
This is forceful
stuff. It took Jewish pundits — Jonathan Tobin among them — a
number of decades to get to this level of rage. Here, in brief, is how that approach
has developed over time:
First, the
Jewish leaders claimed that the Jewish Jewelers and tailors from Eastern
Europe, who stole Palestine, had the right to do so because they farmed the
land better than the Palestinian farmers who only managed to turn the place
into the Land of Milk and Honey, and make it a part of the Fertile Crescent.
Big deal! But when this argument was shown to be the same as that of the racist
colonial powers; one that modern societies abhor, the Jews stopped using it,
and switched to something else.
This time,
the Jewish leaders adopted the argument that Palestine belonged to no one when
the Jews grabbed it because, as shown by the Tweddle dumb-dumb Dershowitz and
Kantorovich, Palestine was occupied by the Ottomans and then by the Brits. This
is when the Jews “liberated” the land using the method of illegal infiltration
into the country, and the method of terrorizing everyone who stood in their
way, be that Brits or Palestinians. Thus the Jews earned the right to make Palestine
their own.
In
response to that absurd logic, it was argued that the Jews had the right to
take possession of Palestine because they “liberated” it from British
colonialism, no more than the Brits had the right to take possession of
Palestine because they “liberated” it from Ottoman colonialism. Upon seeing their
excuse shot down in flames, the Jews abandoned it, and argued instead that
contrary to what they were saying previously, Israel is composed of Jewish Arabs
more than it is of European Jews.
This being
the case, said the counter argument, more than half the Israeli government
should be made of Jewish Arabs, but the fact is that not a single Arab occupies
a high position in the Israeli bureaucracy or its political organization. And
when you see a system of apartheid as stark as this — keeping
apart even third generation Jewish Israelis of Arab descent —
you become convinced that Israel’s relation with the Palestinians under
occupation in the West Bank, is one of savage apartheid that surpasses by far
the evil that was practiced in South Africa and Rhodesia at the height of their
most loathsome application.
It was
this piece-by-piece dismantling of the fake arguments to the effect that Jews have
the right to steal Palestine, which forced Jonathan Tobin to draw the parallel
between the plight of the Palestinians and that of the “New World’s” indigenous
people. But here too, all that Tobin has managed to do, is build an edifice
that is so fragile, it can be sent flying into the air by blowing on it as you
would blow away a fly on your sleeve. Here in condensed form, is what Tobin has
written regarding the parallel which compares the Palestinian case to that of
the North American natives:
“One of the tragicomic customs is the
way that groups open meetings with acknowledgment that they are on ‘stolen land.’
It involves beginning any proceedings by first stating that those speaking are
‘on the lands’ of the Native tribe that once lived here. Part of the problem
with this toxic idea is that whatever you think the answer to the question
about the identity of the owners of the North American continent might be, the
notion that Jews are ‘European’ or non-indigenous to Israel [Palestine] is a
lie. With respect to North America, it’s true that the Native tribes were
dispossessed by the Europeans. What traditional American histories called the
‘winning’ of the continent involved tragedy for the Native American losers. But
few of those paying homage to indigenous tribes who once lived on such ‘stolen
land’ are planning on giving their property and homes to the descendants of the
natives”.
It took
us, who came to settle in the Americas, 500 years to finally recognize that
what we accomplished was immoral. Had our ancestors been more humane when they
first arrived instead of fighting to exterminate the indigenous people and rob
them of their possessions, we would be carrying on a different kind of relationship
with them. It would have been superior to the system we have now, which forces
the natives to live in reservations where life is abominable, and tearing at
our collective conscience as we see no possibility to correct what we have
created.
Whereas
the roots of our problem go back half a millennium, Jews of the Jonatan Tobin mentality,
wish to duplicate in Palestine of the 21st century AD what was done to the new
world during the Dark Age, under the pretext that “the process of dispossession
was the way that groups of human beings always interacted with each other since
time immemorial — with the strong subjugating the
weak,” as he put it.