Jonathan Freedland’s Inability to UnderstandIsrael’s Present Crisis is Symptomatic of Liberal Zionism’s Refusal to Accept that a Jewish Democratic State is an Oxymoron
Whatever
the situation and whatever the crisis, Jonathan Freedland can be relied on not to
understand it. So it is with his latest essay
on [Netanyahu is leading a coup against his own country. But the threat is not
only to Israel, Guardian 31 March 2023]
No one quite beats Freedland, the Guardian's Zionist gatekeeper, when it comes to the ability to write at length and say nothing
Freedland
is the man who waged a war against Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘anti-Semitism’ whilst
failing even to mention Boris Johnson’s own, genuine anti-Semitism.
Jonathan Freedland’s journalism is representative of the collapse in the
Guardian’s own journalistic standards. Its representation
on the D-Notice
Committee, its publishing of fake
stories on Julian Assange and the sheer trivialisation of every issue that
he touches. Freedland truly has a Midas touch in reverse. In a very real sense
the Guardian has been ‘freedlandised’.
West Bank settler at a new outpost
True
to form Freedland neither understands Israel’s present crisis nor where it
comes from. The very real threat to Jewish democracy, because there is no
democracy for Palestinians, including Israeli Palestinians, does not come out
of thin air but from the poison injected by the settlement project in the West
Bank. Freedland barely mentions the fact that the West Bank settlement project has
now gained critical mass with over 700,000 settlers and a corresponding
political influence, especially when allied to that of the Orthodox religious
parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism and Likud.
The
conquest of the West Bank and Gaza resulted in Religious Zionism, which till
1977 had formed coalition governments with the Israeli Labor Party, transforming
into support for political messianism whose ultimate goal could only be the
ethnic cleansing of Palestine and its coronation in a Third Temple.
But
who was it who sponsored the original settlement of the West Bank, including the
ultra-nationalists of Hebron, if not Israeli Labor? It was the stalwarts of the
Israeli Labor ‘left’, Yigal Allon, Yisrael
Galili and Yitzhak
Tabenkin, who helped found the Greater
Israel movement because they saw, quite correctly, that the settlement
project in the Occupied Territories was but an extension of the internal
colonisation of pre-67 Israel itself.
The Jewish Nazi Who is Israel's Police Minister
It
wasn’t Itamar Ben Gvir or Bezalel Smotrich who first Who up the Judaisation
(in Nazi Germany this was called Aryanisation) of the
Galilee, Negev and then East Jerusalem. This was all the work of the Israeli
labor movement.
Jerusalem - Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing and House Demolitions
In
a very real sense the demonstrations that we have seen in Israel are the rage
of Caliban at seeing his own face in the mirror. There is nothing that Smotrich
and Ben Gvir advocate, including the wiping out of Harara, that the Israeli Labor
movement did not pioneer in the Nakba.
Freedland
has no problem in justifying the Nakba and demonising anyone, which was Corbyn’s
‘crime’, for advocating for the right of return of the Palestinian refugees.
The Mothers of the Plaza
No-one
is more devoted to a ‘Jewish’ state than Freedland. What Freedland cannot or
will not understand is that Israel is not a refuge from anti-Semitism. Quite
the contrary. Zionism has always thrived on anti-Semitism as Argentinian Jews found
to their cost during the years of its neo-Nazi Junta (1976-1983 ) when Israel
collaborated with the Junta and refused
to say anything about its torture and murder of up to 3,000 Jews. Israel had
a profitable strategic, political and military relationship with that junta.
Nor
does Freedland understand why the sticking plaster of the Good Friday agreement
in Northern Ireland worked, up to a point, in securing a frozen peace whereas
the Oslo Accords were an abysmal failure. Ulster Unionism no longer had the political
strength to fight for a Protestant State for a Protestant People (James Craig)
whereas Zionism had lost none of its appetite for colonisation and a Jewish Supremacist
State. All it needed was time to consolidate. Yet even in Northern Ireland the
question of Partition looms large as we
have seen over Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.
Smotrich - Head of West Bank Military Administration - called for the 'wiping out' of the Palestinian town of Huwara
The
only solution in Israel is a state of all its citizens as opposed to a Jewish state.
However the abolition of Israeli Apartheid is the one solution that Freedland
will not countenance because he is a Jewish chauvinist. As the Israeli government
prepares legislation that will ban Israel’s Arab
parties, thus ensuring that the only governments Israel will know in the future
are those of the far-Right, Freedland fails to perceive that a ‘Jewish’ state,
like all ethno-nationalist states, can only go in one direction. If you want a state of racial purity then who
better to carry it out than those who will complete the project and not stop
halfway?
Lapid & Biden
All
Zionist parties are committed, in Yair Lapid’s phrase
to ‘maximum Jews, maximum land and minimum
Palestinians.’ Who better to carry it out than those who believe in there
being no Palestinians rather than ‘minimum’ Palestinians (other than slaves and
hewers of wood and drawers of water?
The
irony of Freedland is that when faced with finding a genuine Jewish hero during
the Holocaust to eulogise he was forced to choose an anti-Zionist, Rudolf
Vrba, since the Zionism movement had distinguished itself by its
collaboration with the Nazis!
Tony
Greenstein