The Crime of the Zionists and the Transnational Elite and the Stand of the Left*
 
TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
 
 
 
Zionist violence as part and parcel of systemic violence
 
The Israeli Zionists, with their new brutal crime in Palestine, i.e. the bloodbath they have unleashed against a defenceless people who had previously been strangled economically, have perhaps surpassed themselves in their long criminal history. This crime is not only fully supported by all Zionists around the world who, in the last sixty years or so, have managed to dominate the Jewish communities which, before the second world war, were far from supportive of the Zionist plan, with several distinguished Jewish Left intellectuals attacking its potentially criminal nature. It has also been given the direct or indirect support of the equally criminal transnational elite[1] (i.e. the US and EU elites), as well as that of its tyrannical Arab satrap regimes (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Gulf emirates etc.). At the same time, however, the very magnitude of this new crime has led to a new awakening of peoples’ consciousness, which is already being expressed by a growing resistance movement, despite the gross brain-washing and disorientation perpetuated by the international media which are controlled by the elites.[2] Particularly so, when this new crime comes in the aftermath of the still-developing huge economic crime against humanity created by the growing economic crisis of the globalised capitalist market economy[3] ―which was also initiated by the transnational elite, the local elites and the privileged social groups associated with them, that enjoy the benefits of neoliberal globalisation.
 
This resistance is not surprising, of course, since it is inevitable that people will increasingly realise that the systemic violence against the Palestinian people is part and parcel of the overall systemic violence exercised by the very same transnational elite, with the assistance of local elites across the world, under the mantra of a pseudo «democracy» which has nothing whatsoever to do with genuine democracy ―i.e. the direct exercise of all kinds of power by the people themselves[4] and not by the political elites of professional politicians, or by the economic elites which control the internationalized capitalist market economy. It is the same systemic violence which:

--yesterday, in the form of brutal physical violence, killed and maimed hundreds of thousands in Yugoslavia[5], Afghanistan[6] and Iraq[7] in order to crush all resistance to the New World Order, as imposed by the transnational elite over the past twenty years or so;
--today, in the form of economic violence, condemns more and more millions of people to unemployment, poverty and misery, just so that the privileged social strata can further increase their accumulated wealth and continue to enjoy a lifestyle that has brought the planet to the verge of ecological destruction,[8]
--tomorrow, could materialise as a combination of both economic and physical violence in the countries of the transnational elite itself and the countries dependent on it, with the social explosion in Greece last December being the precursor of this[9].

The “crime” of the people of Gaza
 
The “crime” of the people of Gaza who are being slaughtered today, is that they voted ―faithfully implementing all «democratic» procedures imposed by the transnational elite― for a regime that was committed to the non-recognition of the Zionist regime which, over the past 60 years, has been occupying by force, or the threat of force (as progressive Jewish historians also admit),[10] not only the territories given to it by the United Nations in 1948 (without, of course, anybody having thought to ask the opinion of the indigenous Palestinians who were the overwhelming majority living on this land for hundreds of years!) but also the rest of Palestine, thanks to the campaigns of the Zionist army, namely the policeman of the West which, with the billions of dollars being poured into it by the West, is now one of the four most powerful armies in the world. The result: 1.5 million refugees have now been squeezed, under the most appalling conditions, into the coastal region of Gaza, an area about the size of the Isle of Wight.
 
Therefore, regardless of the Islamic character of the regime, the non-recognition of an expansionist and racist[11] regime and the resistance against its military occupation by all available means of popular counter-violence, is an obvious, necessary task recognized even by international law. Yet, there are some self-declared libertarian currents refusing to support those kinds of popular anti-systemic violence which are based on religious, irrational movements ―a stand which is irrelevant to the immediate priority of overthrowing systemic violence in the first place! The Gaza refugees had to be crushed, then, because they did not show any willingness to give in to the Zionists and compromise their rights, as the mainly bourgeois strata in the West Bank did in their support of the Abbas regime ―protected by Zionists, the transnational elite and its Arab satraps. This regime showed a readiness  to accept the role of leading a protectorate within the Bantustan kind of state that the Zionists would be willing to grant them, in exchange for the full recognition of a pure Zionist state in Palestine by the entire Arab world (what the “world community” ―read the transnational elite― euphemistically calls the “two-state solution”).
 
The campaign for “regime change” in Gaza
 
Thus, immediately after the victory of Hamas in Gaza, the transnational elite and its Arab satraps began a campaign for “regime change” ―exactly as was successfully carried out in Yugoslavia and Iraq. The aim was to crush the morale of the people of Gaza so that, in the forthcoming elections, they would vote for Abbas, the “chosen” one ―i.e. favoured by the Zionists, the transnational elite and its Arab satraps. The campaign began with an exhausting economic war. Thus, the alleged withdrawal of the Zionist occupying forces in 2005, in effect, meant the military blockade of Gaza by land, air and sea and the creation of perhaps the largest ghetto in history, complete with the faithful application of methods of collective reprisal employed by the Nazis. This massive crime against the Palestinian people was disguised by the “Holocaust industry”, i.e. the Zionist ideology which was denounced by a Jew[12] whose own family were victims of concentration camps ―a fact that did not prevent Zionists and crypto-Zionist crooks all over the world from accusing him of anti-Semitism, a charge also made against any other fair-minded Jew, or supporter of the radical left, who dared to denounce the perennial crime that is Zionism.
 
So, after 9/11, the unashamedly mendacious, state-terrorist Zionist elites (with the decisive help of the international media ―controlled by the transnational elite― which basically present only the Zionist version of the “truth”) promptly classified the non-yielding Hamas regime among the “terrorist” rogue regimes on the grounds that it supposedly threatened the very existence of Jews in Palestine! This ludicrous claim was made in the full knowledge that all the Arab armies and the Iranian regime put together (let alone the Hamas regime in isolation!) could never succeed in eliminating Zionist Israel, in the face of its hugely powerful army with its nuclear capability, backed by the most powerful army in human history: the criminal US army! At the same time, the Zionists have been promoting the myth of their withdrawal from Gaza, i.e. a “withdrawal” which, complemented by their economic war, has led to the present economic catastrophe in Gaza: according to the latest report of the International Red Cross,[13] 70% of the people in Gaza suffer from chronic malnutrition and about 40% of the population have been condemned to absolute poverty, with incomes of 90 euros a month being the norm for families needing to feed 7-9 people.
 
The Zionist campaign for "regime change" ―a plan which has inadvertently been admitted to by certain government officials, (e.g. a couple of days into the assault on Gaza, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gabriela Shalev, said it would continue for "as long as it takes to dismantle Hamas completely”[14]) ―is underway with the current crime and, once again, a systematic lie is being used to disguise it. While in Iraq the supposed threat was that of “weapons of mass destruction”, which were never found, in Gaza it is the “rockets” fired by Hamas, which were described as follows by a BBC correspondent:

Much of the Palestinian militants’ arsenal is made up of crudely-made, undirected rockets ― little more than explosives-packed pipes with metal fins welded onto the end.[15]

No wonder that this sort of “war”, as it is presented by Zionists and the world media controlled by the transnational elite, has so far claimed the lives of 4 Israelis as opposed to more than 400 Palestinians killed by the air raids. Clearly, the Zionists have well surpassed their Nazi teachers in terms of collective reprisals enforced against those resisting their occupation: while the Nazi ratio was 50 civilians killed for every German, the Zionist ratio is 100 Gaza inhabitants killed for every Israeli! Overall, in the past eight years Palestinians have fired 8,500 rockets from Gaza into Israel, killing 20 civilians, in contrast to the 5,000 Palestinians killed by the Zionist F16s and Apaches (i.e. a ratio of 357 Palestinians for every Israeli killed),[16] ―1,700 of them killed in Israeli military attacks since Jewish settlers were pulled out of Gaza three years ago[17].
 
The Zionist media campaign of pure distortion and lies
 
Contrary to the systematic Zionist lies about Hamas breaking the ceasefire etc, there is now, in fact, overwhelming evidence to suggest that the present criminal campaign was one of pure, premeditated murder, having nothing to do with what Hamas did or did not do militarily during the ceasefire period. Here is how a serious analyst of Palestinian affairs described this process in a revealing article in the Observer,[18] on the basis of information given to him by Dan Gillerman, Israel's ambassador to the UN until a few months ago:

Months ago, as Israel prepared to unleash its latest wave of desolation (…) (it) also understood that a parallel operation would be required to persuade the rest of the world of the justice of its cause (…) After the debacle of its 2006 invasion of Lebanon ― not only a military disaster for Israel, but also a political and diplomatic one ― the government in Tel Aviv spent months laying the groundwork at home and abroad for the assault on Gaza with quiet but energetic lobbying of foreign administrations and diplomats, particularly in Europe and parts of the Arab world. A new information directorate was established to influence the media, with some success. And when the attack began just over a week ago, a tide of diplomats, lobby groups, bloggers and other supporters of Israel were unleashed to hammer home a handful of carefully crafted core messages intended to ensure that Israel was seen as the victim, even as its bombardment killed more than 430 Palestinians over the past week, at least a third of them civilians or policemen (...) In briefings in Jerusalem and London, Brussels and New York, the same core messages were repeated: that Israel had no choice but to attack in response to the barrage of Hamas rockets; that the coming attack would be on “the infrastructure of terror” in Gaza and the targets principally Hamas fighters; that civilians would die, but it was because Hamas hides its fighters and weapons factories among ordinary people (…)  Hand in hand went a strategy to remove the issue of occupation from discussion. Gaza was freed in 2005 when the Jewish settlers and army were pulled out, the Israelis said. It could have flourished as the basis of a Palestinian state, but its inhabitants chose conflict.

In keeping with this strategy of utter distortion of the facts, Israel has been portraying Hamas as part of an axis of Islamist fundamentalist evil together with Iran and Hezbollah. In reality, the actions of Hamas have been an expression of popular resistance against the continued occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of Gaza and the Israeli military's continued killing of large numbers of Palestinians since the pullout. No wonder the Zionist leadership has had the nerve to deceive world opinion in such a blatant way, with crooked professional politicians like Tzipi Livni declaring in Paris, immediately after the start of the land invasion, that there was no threat of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza, despite reports to the contrary by UN and Red Cross organisations on the ground, and that "Israel is part of the free world and fights extremism and terrorism-- Hamas is not," while Simon Peres, the supposedly “progressive” ex-Labor party leader, had no qualms about declaring on 4/1/2009, in a contemptuous dismissal of mounting world disgust at the Zionist crime, that “"Hamas needs a real and serious lesson. They are now getting it”!
 
This purely Goebbelian propaganda was put forward not only by all the media controlled by the transnational elite, including formerly respectable organisations like the BBC (providing coverage that was completely biased in favour of the Zionists, and backed by a barrage of “Holocaust industry” stories in the midst of the Palestinian slaughter!), but also by the Israeli military, who posted video footage on YouTube, while Israeli diplomats in New York arranged a two-hour “citizens’ press conference” on Twitter for thousands of people. As if all this were not enough, Israel, perhaps for the first time in modern warfare, completely barred foreign journalists from witnessing the results of its strategy, even though its own courts judged this act to be illegal! Obviously, it did not want the world to see its “defensive” slaughtering of a defenceless people ―only the “agony” suffered by Israelis within Israel due to the pathetic Hamas “explosives-packed pipes”. Yet, it has the nerve to claim that it is a “democratic” oasis in the Middle East!
 
Needless to say that the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed could only be witnessed and heard about through Al Jazeera, the only international TV channel which could send pictures from inside Gaza (as it is manned by Palestinians who did not need approval from the Zionist regime): i.e. of events such as the deliberate bombing of a local fruit market which led to the deaths of many civilians, or the bombing of ambulances and private houses ―apart from the fact that, as doctors in Gaza’s hospital testified, wounded people were dying because of the lack of medicine resulting from the economic embargo.
 
No wonder that the Zionists have no qualms about interpreting international law in the way that could best “justify” their claims. The International Committee of the Red Cross ―guardian of the Geneva Conventions on which international humanitarian law is based― defines a combatant as a person "directly engaged in hostilities". But Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) spokesman Benjamin Rutland told the BBC[19]: “Our definition is that anyone who is involved with terrorism within Hamas is a valid target. This ranges from the strictly military institutions and includes the political institutions that provide the logistical funding and human resources for the terrorist arm.”
 
However, as Philippe Sands, Professor of International Law at University College London, has stated, he is not aware of any Western democracy having taken so broad a definition, and he damns the legalistic tricks of Zionist criminals as follows:

Once you extend the definition of combatant in the way that IDF is apparently doing, you begin to associate individuals who are only indirectly or peripherally involved (…) it becomes an open-ended definition, which undermines the very object and purpose of the rules that are intended to be applied.

In spite of this, Non Government Organisations like Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International, which were particularly vocal in demanding the prosecution of enemies of the transnational elite like Milosevic or Saddam Hussein for war crimes or crimes against humanity, never raised a single such demand against proven Zionist war criminals like Sharon in the past, or Tzipi Livni, Simon Peres, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert today!
 
The stand of the Left: keeping an equal distance from perpetrators and victims
 
However, these facts did not prevent the European centre-Left and the Left from condemning violence “from wherever it may come”, i.e keeping, as usual, an equal distance from perpetrators and victims and equating the systemic violence of the Zionists with the resistance movements’ counter-violence against the occupiers. No wonder that the European Left party once again called”[20] ―after the latest crime had begun to take place― for a 2-state solution under the slogan “Another Middle East is possible” in accordance with their similarly utopian and ultimately meaningless slogan, “Another World is possible”. Nor is it surprising that this “solution” is also supported by the transnational elite and its Arab satraps, as well as by the Zionists themselves, who would like their “pure” Zionist regime to be perpetuated side-by-side with a dependent protectorate of the Bantustan kind!
 
On the other hand, the Zionist “Left” (Crossman, Amos Oz, et al.) adopt a similar stand, also denying the right of the Palestinian people to resist, allegedly because their “terrorism” kills “innocent” people, (while the overwhelming majority of these people consents to the Zionists’ crimes ―particularly the latest one, as all polls indicated), whereas the multiple Palestinian victims of Zionist state terrorism are, of course, just referred to as  “collateral damage”, in adoption of the criminal language of the US military following its murder of civilians on a massive scale in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
 
The only real solution: a multicultural state in Palestine
 
Why this great bloodbath? The simple answer was given by John McCarthy, a British analyst, on the first day of the land invasion[21]:

There are few signs that the Israeli establishment, fully committed to the Zionist goals of creating Eretz Israel (a Greater Israel that stretches from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan), plans to relinquish very much land at all: 250,000 Israelis already live on the West Bank. On the contrary, Israel’s road and settlement building programmes continue apace. Israel’s policy has always been to build “facts on the ground” while delaying accepting any final borders. Her founding father and first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, summed this up with the phrase “where we plough our last furrow is where we put our border”. Ben-Gurion’s political heirs are still ploughing. While conceding that a Palestinian state of some sort is necessary to ensure Israel is kept as purely Jewish as possible, they will put off delineating that state until Israel ends up with as much land and as few Palestinians as possible on that land. As Israel continues to create ever more “facts on the ground”, the prospects of the Palestinians being offered a reasonable share of what was meant to be their homeland become ever more remote. The Israelis presumably will count on Palestinians becoming so desperate for their own state, amid international weariness and ineffectiveness, that they will achieve their territorial and demographic goals.

This confirms, once again, the conclusion which I reached in the past[22], that the historical crime of creating a “pure Jewish” state in Palestine would have been prevented, and hundreds of thousands of lives (the overwhelming majority of them Palestinian) would have been saved, if the condemnation of such a move by prominent Left-wing Jews like Hannah Arendt and Isaac Deutscher and the Left Zionists, who demanded a bi-nationalist state, had been heard[23]. In other words, if the Palestinian land had not been divided (unequally from the very beginning in favour of the Zionists!) with the aim of creating two states but, instead, had been used as the foundation for a single multicultural secular state, which would have housed both the Palestinians and those Jewish refugees, particularly from Europe, who had wished to move there. In fact, this is the type of solution which is now gaining increasing support among progressive anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians, who recognise that the “two-state” solution effectively leads to a Zionist monster and a Palestinian Bantustan.
 
This is particularly obvious now that it is clear that the Zionist aim has always been to Judaise Palestine by forcing the Palestinians to abandon their land under intolerable pressure ―a clearly racist objective, as was stressed by Avraham Burg who, despite having been chairman of the World Zionist Organization in the past, rejects as racist the Old Testament notion that the Jews are God's chosen people. On similar grounds, Shlomo Sand, a professor at Tel Aviv University, argues that Israel should not be a Jewish state, but a democratic secular one which belongs to all its citizens ―a position close to the Inclusive Democracy stand on the Palestine issue.[24]
 
It is, therefore, becoming increasingly clear today that the way out of the vicious circle of bloodshed would have to be one that transcends the catastrophic two-state solution. The demand for a multicultural state, which was initially proposed by the Jewish Left and backed by the radical Left in Europe more than fifty years ago, is again on the agenda. Several currents are strengthening among both progressive Palestinians[25] and post-Zionist Jews[26] to find a solution which, rejecting both Zionism and religious irrationalism (Jewish and Palestinian alike), would aim to create a multicultural and inclusive state for all the peoples living in Palestine today. In fact, such a solution would also be perfectly consistent with historical evidence, which clearly shows that Arabs and Jews did indeed live together harmoniously in the Mediterranean basin whilst the Arab nation was flourishing[27], and that irrational religious differences did not prevent millions of Jews, Christians and others from living harmoniously within the borders of the Ottoman empire. Similarly, millions of Jews today have no problem living (and thriving) together with other peoples in Europe and the USA either.
 
Clearly, a one-state solution in the form of an inclusive multicultural state would be an important step towards the creation of a Confederal Inclusive Democracy in Palestine. This is because such a solution could not only lead to a form of government which would bear no relation at all to the present racist Zionist “democracy” and the authoritarian Palestinian Authority ―thereby solving the problem of refugees on both sides― but it could also represent a crucial move towards a future confederation of peoples in Palestine based on an Inclusive Democracy. However, the Zionists, in perfect harmony with the transnational elite, are not even prepared to discuss the solution of a single multicultural state for the peoples of Palestine and have, instead, fought any solution that would undermine their “clean” (and expansive) Zionist state with all the means at their disposal. Furthermore, their present crime has not only made any 2-state solution which would be based on anything other than a Bantustan kind of regime impossible, but it has also made even the one-state solution almost impossible, given the immense hatred that the criminal treatment of the Palestinian people has generated among the Arab peoples. It is, therefore, obvious that the crimes of the Zionists will never be forgiven and forgotten by the peoples of the world in general and the Arab peoples in particular, unless the Jews in Israel and their communities abroad begin a systematic campaign to overthrow this criminal regime and its ideology and replace it with a multicultural regime for all the peoples of Palestine as the first step towards the creation of a confederal Inclusive Democracy there, i.e. a genuine democracy involving the equal distribution of power among all citizens.
 


* A much shorter version of this article was published in the fortnightly column of Takis Fotopoulos in the mass circulation Athens daily, Eleftherotypia, (3/1/2009).
 
 
[1] See for the definition of the transnational elite, Takis Fotopoulos, “Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation «Movement»”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No.  2 (July 2001). 
[2] Takis Fotopoulos, “Mass media, Culture and Democracy”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 5, No. 1 (March 1999).
[3] See Takis Fotopoulos, “The myths about the economic crisis, the reformist Left and economic democracy”, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2008),
[4] See Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy (London, N.Y.: Cassell/Continuum, 1997/1998), Part II
[5]  Takis Fotopoulos, “The First War of the Internationalised Market Economy”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 5, No. 2 (July 1999)
[6] Takis Fotopoulos, “The global «war» of the transnational elite”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 8, No. 2 (July 2002).
[7] Takis Fotopoulos, “Iraq: the new criminal «war» of the transnational elite”, Democracy & Nature, Vol. 9, No. 2 (July 2003)
[8] Takis Fotopoulos, “Is degrowth compatible with a market economy?”, The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, Vol. 3, No. 1 (January 2007).
[9] See Takis Fotopoulos, “A systemic Crisis in Greece” (in this issue).
[10] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Question (Cambridge University, December 11, 2003); Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006); see, also, Eric Rouleau, “The «ethnic cleansing» of Palestine”, Le Monde diplomatique (English edition) (May 2008).
[11] On the racist nature of the Zionist regime see Takis Fotopoulos, “Palestine: the hour of truth”, The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 2, No.2 (January 2006).
[12] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (Verso, 2000).
[13] Donald Macintyre, “Chronic malnutrition in Gaza blamed on Israel”, The Independent (15/11/2008).
[14] Chris McGreal, “Why Israel went to war in Gaza”, The Observer (4/1/2009).
[15] Heather Sharp, “Rocket attacks plague Israeli towns”, BBC News (28/12/2008).
[16] Seumas Milne, “Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crime that cannot succeed”, The Guardian (30/12/2008).
[17] Chris McGreal, “Why Israel went to war in Gaza”.
[18] Chris McGreal, ibid.
[19] Heather Sharp, “Who is a civilian?”, BBC News (Jerusalem 05/01/2009).
[20] European Left, “Another Middle East is possible” (29 December 2008).
[21] John McCarthy, “If it was your home, what hope «restraint»?”, The Independent (4/1/2009).
[22] Takis Fotopoulos, “Palestine: the hour of truth”.
[23] Stanley Aronowitz, “Setting the Record Straight: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Critics”, Logos, Issue 3.3 (Summer 2004).
[24] Takis Fotopoulos, “Palestine: the hour of truth”.
[25] See e.g. Ahmad Samih Khalidi, “A one-state solution”, The Guardian (29/09/2003) & Conal Urquhart, “Gaza shifts to a new solution”, The Observer  (14/09/2003).
[26] See e.g. Esther Addley, “Lines in the sand”, The Guardian (25/07/2002).
[27] John Rose, The Myths of Zionism (Pluto Press, 2005)
 

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