‘The Beginning of the End of the Zionist Project’ - Ilan Pappé

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

This analysis also applies to capitalism on a global scale. The US, as its most powerful representative is under siege from all sides and will lash out more violently as global capitalism continues to unravel. The US is is experiencing political, social and economic crises. Politically, the domination of the two main political parties that have ruled for over a century is coming to an end as more and more Americans abandon the electoral arena altogether. In 2016, 100 million opted out. In 2024 US Americans have to choose between the serial sexual offender Donald Trump and the aging bourgeois and former Senator from DuPont. This is no choice at all.

The country's infrastructure is crumbling. There is extreme poverty especially in the urban centers, the South and rural America. Americans are overwhelmed with debt as even those with health insurance fall victim to it as there is no national health system. Housing, mental health services, public services in general are inadequate.

The unending support of the Zionist regime, from both Biden and Trump is an example of the decline of US imperialism on the world stage. Without the Zionists, a regime living under siege as it were, surrounded by states and people's hostile to this European colonial settler state, US imperialism has no ally it can rely on in this crucial part of the world which has oil and also the Suez Canal that is an important trade route. The Arab regimes that the US arms to the teeth, are not stable, always under threat from the aspirations of the powerful Arab masses as the Arab Spring of 2011 showed.

We have a bizarre situation where the US and its junior partner, the UK, are bombing Yemen, perhaps the poorest country in the world as a retaliation for the Houthi disruption of shipping passing through the Red Sea headed for Israel as a means to bring about a genocide in Gaza.

This extreme violence from colonial powers under threat is common to all of them. The Apartheid regime in South Africa, British colonialism in Kenya, Malaysia, Yemen, all responded violently to resistance movements, like the Mao Mao in Kenya for example, despite fully understanding that their days as a presence on the ground were coming to en end.

Pappé talks of inthe long term there being some solution that would allow all to live in peace. This is honorable but unlikely from my viewpoint without the intervention of the working classes of the world, the revolutionary overthrow of the decaying capitalist mode of production and the transformation, in areas like the Middle East, to a federation of democratic socialist states. I do not believe capitalism can resolve this or any other crisis that are clearly of its own making. 

With the Zionist project as he calls it, it has to be dismantled. This was done in German to a great extent, de-Nazifying the civil service for example.

We should emphatically remind ourselves as well that  while Jews have always lived in Palestine, what led to this disastrous situation was the intervention of British and western imperialism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War 1. Desperate to maintain a foothold in this part of the world, the idea of a state for Jews in historic Palestine was put forward by the British. This would also rid Europe of its Jewish problem and in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust with hundreds of thousand of Jews without a place to go, Palestine was the answer.

For many centuries Jews in Europe have been discriminated against, expelled from one nation after another at the whim of the ruling class forced to convert to Christianity. Tortured, brutalized and finally almost entirely wiped out by the genocidal Nazi regime with 6 million of them dead. Many other European nations did nothing to help their Jewish populations. German Jews were the most integrated of all of them. A  book that gives an example of how shocked German Jews were and how "German" they considered themselves is The Oppermans; it's worth reading.

So it was Europe that massacred the Jewish people, not Arabs or Muslims. In general, the Jews lived in relative peace in the Arab and Muslim world compared to Europe.  The Palestinians are paying for the European's historic Anti-Semitism. So in this sense, the Jews in Israel have been used also. Zionism, is not Judaism and prior to the betrayal of Stalinism and finally the Nazi death camps, most Jews had no interest in Zionism and most Jewish workers belonged to the Bund or the left parties.

We don't accept that all Germans are Nazis and the same applies to Jews. All Jews aren't Zionists. Zionism is a political formation, Judaism is a religion. Chrstian Zionists are the largest Zionist group in the US I would guess.