A Colonizing Project Built On Lies

Source: Atheo News

M. Shahid Alam
April 2002
Excerpt from Challenging the New Orientalism

The chief moral asset of the Zionists in their makeover of Israel was the Holocaust. This had created a vast fund of sympathy born of guilt. The Zionists conserved this sympathy capital through endless commemoration - in movies, media and museums. Better yet they augmented the Holocaust capital by arguing that Jews had suffered horrors that were unique in history. Never before had a people been targeted for total extermination; never before had they faced death through incineration. Fortified with the shield of Holocaust capital and the sword of uniqueness, the Zionists have argued that their actions should be exempt from the moral scrutiny of concerned world citizens. They should be given a free pass.

The Holocaust capital placed Israel beyond critique. First, Israel was equated with Jews. Second, Jews were equated with survivors of the Holocaust. Once these equations were established, Israel became the object of all the natural sympathy that belonged to the Holocaust survivors. As the haven, the last refuge of the world's super victims, Israel was now above reproach. It followed that anyone that dared to call Israel to account could only be an anti-Semite. This was a powerful tactic.

Among other things this meant that there could be no Palestinian victims. It was logically impossible for Palestinians to be victims of Israelis. The Israelis, as victims of the Holocaust were super victims, perennial victims. Given this, how could Israelis victimize anyone? All the talk of Palestinian suffering must be slander, the product of Arab anti-Semitism, which they borrowed from the Nazis. In the court of Western opinion, the Palestinians didn't have a prayer.

Worse, Israeli victim hood nullified Palestinian rights. The rights of the Palestinians - to their land, their freedom and dignity - counted for nothing if they collided with infinitely superior claims of Israeli super victims. Indeed, any Palestinian action in defense of their rights - if pressed against Israel - automatically earned the charge of immorality. Thus, Zionists charged that Palestinians, by opposing unrestricted immigration of Jews in the 1930's, had sent Jews to Nazi death camps. Under this logic, the very existence of Palestinians was immoral.

Israel's victim hood could also justify violence against Palestinians. The Israelis had earned the right to inflict any violence on the Palestinians that did not exceed their own suffering at the hands of the Nazis. As the world's super victims, there was no risk that their own violence could ever cross the limit where it would become unacceptable. The Israelis would remain blameless as long as they were not transporting Palestinians to gas chambers. Among others, Chaim Weizmann, the first president of Israel, employed this logic when protesting the West's muted concerns over the condition of Palestinian refugees. The problem of refugees, he argued, was nothing compared to the murder of six million Jews.

It was easy stripping Palestinians of their most basic rights - to their homes, lands, villages, towns, heritage and history. The Israelis demolished these rights with propaganda masquerading as history. The Palestinians had forfeited these rights because they had fled their homes voluntarily, following orders from Arab radio stations; they were not fleeing from Jewish terror. This concoction entered history books in Israel and the United States. No one asked for the evidence; no one asked if this made sense. No one asked if the Zionists had not planned this exodus all along. After all, how could a Jewish state in Palestine exist with all the Palestinians still in place?

The Zionist ideologues went about demonizing the Arabs too. They argued that the Arabs rejected the 1948 partition of Palestine because of a primeval Arab hatred for Jews, hatred that is akin to European anti-Semitism. The Arabs were excoriated for doing what any people faced with destruction would have done - fight against those who sought their destruction. Implicitly, the Zionist argued that the Arabs, or any race of inferior worth, did not possess the right to defend themselves against destruction by a superior people, such as the European Zionists. This was the logic of European racism.