Anti-Semitism and Palestine

Anti-Semitism has been humanity’s abhorable crime, a crime of hating, discriminating and killing a part of its own; especially since the institutionalisation of European Christianity after 380 AD. Since then the Jews have strived to establish themselves in almost every European country, but in each case the authorities would make humiliating laws against the Jews, forcefully segregating them into ghettos.

For centuries all these Jewish communities were systematically tortured, raided upon, brutally massacred and eventually expelled by orders of the monarchs from each country they had strived to dwell in; forcing repeated exiles. The massacre and expulsion of Jewish communities from at least 20 European states is well documented. The truth is that the whole of Europe could not provide a single shelter to the Jews that they could pridefully call ‘home’, in over 16 centuries.

Anti-Semitism did end in Europe, but not after the Renascence or the Enlightenment era. In fact, enlightenment brought enhanced outrage in the anti-Semitism stance of Europe, which eventuated in the Holocaust (WW11). Yes, anti-Semitism did end in Europe, at least overtly, only after the two world wars; only when Europe had found a way to transfer this scorn of its heart into the heart of the Islamic world, in Palestine.

The British Monarchy had succeeded in winning the Mandate of Palestine from the League of Nations from 1923. For decades before that the World Zionist Organization had worked relentlessly for successive waves of Jewish immigration to the land of Zion and for the cause of the establishment of a ‘home for the Jewish people in Palestine’. This eventuated in the British promise to the WZO that they will do all they can to establish a Jewish state within Palestine, in the Balfour Declaration.

This letter clearly shows that the Britain, being a Parliamentary Democracy at that time, without any consent of the Palestinian people or considering their democratic rights, expressed their earnest intent for such a happening, that too 30 years in advance. Thirty years later, when WWII had seen its fateful end, and states around the world were regaining their freedoms under the ‘democratic ideal’, how was Palestine to be thrown at the altar as an offering to satiate the gods of tyranny and occupation!

After the League of Nations was liquidated on account of its inability to avoid a major war, the UN was formed in Oct 1945. Its stated aims were “facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace”. But the case submitted at the first special session of the General Assembly, on April 1947, ‘the Palestine case’, was resolved in such manner by the UN that to this date it has been a continuous source of illegal occupation, state-terrorism, massacre, refugees and wars.

The case was filed between the five Arab countries — Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria — and the Jewish Agency. The UNSCOP, made up of 11 member states, was to investigate all questions relevant to the problem of Palestine. During the course of its investigation, “the Special Committee went to Palestine and the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Syria and Trans-Jordan, and also visited displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany, which had been ravaged by the Second World War and had experienced the tragedy of the European Jews under Nazism.”

One can identify the underlying absurdity: why did the committee visit Austria and Germany? What was the relation of the crimes committed by Austria and Germany with the ‘responsibility’ of Palestine? How was the killings of millions of Jews for more than a millennium and a half not the fault of Europe or Britain or Germany? And how was it Palestine’s fault? Is that how justice is served in the United Nations of Humanity and in the International Courts of Humanity?

The investigation further said, “While Jewish organisations cooperated with UNSCOP in its deliberations, the Palestinian leadership in the Arab Higher Committee decided not to participate…” Obviously the Arabs did not cooperate because the UN was deliberately obstructing its very own ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ by denying the Palestinians their basic human rights to life, dignity, liberty and security of person, and more so denying them their unalienable human right to self-determination, to which the UN and its members had pledged, in adherence to the Atlantic Charter, in 1942.

The 11-member committee recommended Palestine’s partitioning into an Arab State and a Jewish State, with a ‘majority’ vote. Approving the majority report, Israel was allowed to be born on 14 May 1948, an unnatural baby, to feed on the blood and devastation of the Palestinians for as long as it lives. Hurriedly Israel was admitted as a member of the UN on 11 May 1949. The UN and the Security Council declared Israel “a peace-loving state, willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter…” and Palestine was denied such a membership.

Like this, the Jews had been artificially inseminated into Palestine, and from the birth day of Israel onwards, anti-Semitism was declared a moral crime in Europe. And the first seed sown by the UN was of on-going-conflict not of an end-to-conflict.

As the years have passed, hundreds of queries and findings have been submitted to the UN offices, most of them by UN’s own independent observers, informing about the atrocities being continually inflicted by Israel upon the under-resourced, weakly-armed, internationally-segregated, and internally Bantustan-ed Palestinian people. Israel has been waging wars against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank every few years or so. Genocidal and apartheid policies have never ceased, yet the UN remains inactive.

In the post-Oct-7 Gaza War, the UN Special Rapporteur report has stated that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimise genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.”

Amnesty International’s Secretary General Agnès Callamard has stated that “the time to act to prevent genocide is now.”

The thing to be seen is: will humanity gather itself this time, to undo all the wrong and evil it has allowed itself to do for the last seven decades? And the thing to be noted is: how the West had attempted to cleanly expunged its hate and transplanted it in the heart of the Middle East — yet the hate was never lost!