Abuminah "Why Israel Won't Survive"
Ali Abunimah, is a Chicago based writer and left activist of Palestinian extraction.
Recent book contributions include "No Justice, No Peace," in "The Anti-Capitalism Reader,"
In the '90s Abuminah was close to Barack Obama and claims that Obama was then very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
From RBO
“I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator – when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time,” stated Abuminah during an interview last month with Democracy Now!, a nationally syndicated radio and television political program.
“I remember personally introducing [Obama] onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that’s just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation,” Abunimah said.
Abunimah also was recently quoted saying that until a few years ago, Obama was “quite frank that the U.S. needed to be more evenhanded, that it leaned too much toward Israel.”
Abunimah noted Obama’s unusual stance toward Israel, commenting “these were the kind of statements I’d never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere, rather than at the end of his career.”
Abuminah wants to see Israel destroyed and argues why that dream may be closer than ever in his website Electronic Intifada
Once again, Israel demonstrated that it possesses the power and the lack of moral restraint necessary to commit atrocities against a population of destitute refugees it has caged and starved.
The dehumanisation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims has escalated to the point where Israel can with full self-righteousness bomb their homes, places of worship, schools, universities, factories, fishing boats, police stations and claim it is conducting a war against terrorism.
Yet, it is Israel as a Zionist state, not the Palestinian people, that cannot survive this attempted genocide.
Israel’s “war” was not about rockets — they served the same role as the non-existent weapons of mass destruction did as the pretext for the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Israel’s real goals were to destroy any Palestinian resistance to total Israeli-Jewish control over historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
With Hamas and other resistance factions removed or fatally weakened, Israel hoped the way would be clear to sign a “peace” deal with chief Palestinian collaborator Mahmoud Abbas to manage Palestinians on Israel’s behalf until they could be forced out once and for all.
The US-backed “moderate” dictatorships and absolute monarchies led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported the Israeli plan hoping to demonstrate to their own people that resistance — whether against Israel or their own bankrupt regimes — was futile.
To win, Israel had to break Palestinian resistance. It failed.
On the contrary, it galvanised and unified Palestinians like never before. All factions united and fought heroically for 23 days.
According to well-informed and credible sources, Israel did little harm to the modest but determined military capacity of the resistance.
Israel not only unified the resistance factions in Gaza; its brutality rallied all Palestinians and Arabs.
Millions of people across the region marched in support of Palestinian resistance, and the Arab regimes who hoped to benefit from the slaughter in Gaza have been exposed as partners in the Israeli atrocities.
If there was ever a moment when the people of the region would accept Israel as a Zionist state in their midst, that has passed forever.
Israel’s problem is legitimacy, or rather a profound and irreversible lack of it.
Israel was founded as a “Jewish state” through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish majority Arab population.
It has been maintained in existence only through Western support and constant use of violence to prevent the surviving indigenous population from exercising political rights within the country, or returning from forced exile.
Despite this, today, 50% of the people living under Israeli rule in historic Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are Palestinians. And their numbers are growing rapidly.
Palestinians will never recognise the “right” of a settler-colonial society to maintain an ethnocractic state at their expense through violence, repression and racism.
For years, the goal of the so-called peace process was to normalise Israel as a “Jewish state” and gain the Palestinians’ blessing for their own dispossession.
When this failed, Israel tried “disengagement” in Gaza — essentially a ruse to convince the rest of the world that the 1.5 million Palestinians caged in there should no longer be counted as part of the population.
In his notorious May 2004 Jerusalem Post interview, Arnon Soffer, an architect of the 2005 disengagement, explained that the approach “doesn’t guarantee ‘peace,’ it guarantees a Jewish-Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews”.
Soffer predicted that in the future “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful.”
He was unambiguous about what Israel would have to do to maintain this status quo: “If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
Soffer hoped that, eventually, Palestinians would give up and leave Gaza altogether. Through their resistance, Palestinians in Gaza have defeated this policy.
Israel is not the first settler-colonial entity to find itself in this position.
When F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, came to office in 1989, his generals calculated that solely with the overwhelming military force at their disposal, they could keep the regime in power for at least a decade.
The casualties, however, would have run into hundreds of thousands, and South Africa would face ever greater isolation.
Confronted with this reality, de Klerk took the decision to begin an orderly dismantling of apartheid.
What choice will Israel make? Left to its own devices, Israel will certainly keep trying to massacre Palestinians into submission.
But what prevented South Africa’s white supremacist government from escalating violence to Israeli levels of cruelty and audacity was not that they had greater scruples than the Zionist regime.
It was recognition that they alone could not stand against a global anti-apartheid movement that was in solidarity with the internal resistance.
Israel’s “military deterrent” has now been repeatedly discredited as a means to force Palestinians and other Arabs to accept Zionist supremacy as inevitable and permanent.
Now, the other pillar of Israeli power — Western support — is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.
Israel began its massacres with full support from its Western “friends”. Then something amazing happened.
Despite the official statements of support, despite the media censorship, despite the slick propaganda campaign, there was a massive, unprecedented public mobilisation in Europe and even in North America expressing outrage and disgust.
Gaza will likely be seen as the turning point when Israeli propaganda lost its power to mystify, silence and intimidate as it has for so long.
Even the Nazi Holocaust, long deployed by Zionists to silence Israel’s critics, is becoming a liability; once unimaginable comparisons are now routinely heard.
Jewish and Palestinian academics likened Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Nazi massacre in the Warsaw Ghetto. A Vatican cardinal referred to Gaza as a “giant concentration camp”.
British MP Gerald Kaufman, once a staunch Zionist, told the House of Commons, “My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow, [Poland]. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.”
Kaufman continued, “my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza”.
There have been unprecedented expressions of support for boycott, divestment and sanctions from major trade unions in Italy, Canada and New Zealand.
An all-party group of city councillors in Birmingham, Europe’s second largest municipal government, urged the British government to follow suit.
Israel is extremely vulnerable to such a campaign. Little noticed amid the carnage in Gaza, Israel took another momentous step towards formal apartheid when the Knesset elections committee voted to ban Arab parties from participating in upcoming elections.
Zionism, an ideology of racial supremacy, is a dying project, in retreat and failing to find new recruits. With enough pressure, and relatively quickly, Israelis too would likely produce their own de Klerk ready to negotiate a way out.
Every new massacre makes it harder, but a de-zionised, decolonised, reintegrated Palestine affording equal rights to all who live in it, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and return for refugees is not a utopian dream.
It is within reach, in our lifetimes.
But it is far from inevitable.
We can be sure that Western and Arab governments will continue to support Israeli apartheid under the guise of the “peace process” unless decisively challenged.
The mobilisations of the past three weeks showed that a different world is possible and within our grasp if we support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Abuminah speaks some truth here.
Israel is doomed if it follows South Africa's path of appeasement.
Israel screwed up in Gaza by not finishing the job.
The PR disaster that was the Gaza invasion would have been worth it only if the Isreli Defence Force had been allowed to completely destroy Hamas.
Now Israel still has Hamas to deal with and has a greater PR problem than ever.
Israel's only hope is to ignore Western opinion, refuse advice from the Obama administration and vigorously defend her territory against all-comers.
If this happens Israel may have a chance. If it doesn't we are looking at the destruction of the only free nation in the Middle East.
Recent book contributions include "No Justice, No Peace," in "The Anti-Capitalism Reader,"
In the '90s Abuminah was close to Barack Obama and claims that Obama was then very sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.
From RBO
“I knew Barack Obama for many years as my state senator – when he used to attend events in the Palestinian community in Chicago all the time,” stated Abuminah during an interview last month with Democracy Now!, a nationally syndicated radio and television political program.
“I remember personally introducing [Obama] onstage in 1999, when we had a major community fundraiser for the community center in Deheisha refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. And that’s just one example of how Barack Obama used to be very comfortable speaking up for and being associated with Palestinian rights and opposing the Israeli occupation,” Abunimah said.
Abunimah also was recently quoted saying that until a few years ago, Obama was “quite frank that the U.S. needed to be more evenhanded, that it leaned too much toward Israel.”
Abunimah noted Obama’s unusual stance toward Israel, commenting “these were the kind of statements I’d never heard from a U.S. politician who seemed like he was going somewhere, rather than at the end of his career.”
Abuminah wants to see Israel destroyed and argues why that dream may be closer than ever in his website Electronic Intifada
Once again, Israel demonstrated that it possesses the power and the lack of moral restraint necessary to commit atrocities against a population of destitute refugees it has caged and starved.
The dehumanisation of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims has escalated to the point where Israel can with full self-righteousness bomb their homes, places of worship, schools, universities, factories, fishing boats, police stations and claim it is conducting a war against terrorism.
Yet, it is Israel as a Zionist state, not the Palestinian people, that cannot survive this attempted genocide.
Israel’s “war” was not about rockets — they served the same role as the non-existent weapons of mass destruction did as the pretext for the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Israel’s real goals were to destroy any Palestinian resistance to total Israeli-Jewish control over historic Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
With Hamas and other resistance factions removed or fatally weakened, Israel hoped the way would be clear to sign a “peace” deal with chief Palestinian collaborator Mahmoud Abbas to manage Palestinians on Israel’s behalf until they could be forced out once and for all.
The US-backed “moderate” dictatorships and absolute monarchies led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported the Israeli plan hoping to demonstrate to their own people that resistance — whether against Israel or their own bankrupt regimes — was futile.
To win, Israel had to break Palestinian resistance. It failed.
On the contrary, it galvanised and unified Palestinians like never before. All factions united and fought heroically for 23 days.
According to well-informed and credible sources, Israel did little harm to the modest but determined military capacity of the resistance.
Israel not only unified the resistance factions in Gaza; its brutality rallied all Palestinians and Arabs.
Millions of people across the region marched in support of Palestinian resistance, and the Arab regimes who hoped to benefit from the slaughter in Gaza have been exposed as partners in the Israeli atrocities.
If there was ever a moment when the people of the region would accept Israel as a Zionist state in their midst, that has passed forever.
Israel’s problem is legitimacy, or rather a profound and irreversible lack of it.
Israel was founded as a “Jewish state” through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish majority Arab population.
It has been maintained in existence only through Western support and constant use of violence to prevent the surviving indigenous population from exercising political rights within the country, or returning from forced exile.
Despite this, today, 50% of the people living under Israeli rule in historic Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip) are Palestinians. And their numbers are growing rapidly.
Palestinians will never recognise the “right” of a settler-colonial society to maintain an ethnocractic state at their expense through violence, repression and racism.
For years, the goal of the so-called peace process was to normalise Israel as a “Jewish state” and gain the Palestinians’ blessing for their own dispossession.
When this failed, Israel tried “disengagement” in Gaza — essentially a ruse to convince the rest of the world that the 1.5 million Palestinians caged in there should no longer be counted as part of the population.
In his notorious May 2004 Jerusalem Post interview, Arnon Soffer, an architect of the 2005 disengagement, explained that the approach “doesn’t guarantee ‘peace,’ it guarantees a Jewish-Zionist state with an overwhelming majority of Jews”.
Soffer predicted that in the future “when 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful.”
He was unambiguous about what Israel would have to do to maintain this status quo: “If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
Soffer hoped that, eventually, Palestinians would give up and leave Gaza altogether. Through their resistance, Palestinians in Gaza have defeated this policy.
Israel is not the first settler-colonial entity to find itself in this position.
When F.W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last apartheid president, came to office in 1989, his generals calculated that solely with the overwhelming military force at their disposal, they could keep the regime in power for at least a decade.
The casualties, however, would have run into hundreds of thousands, and South Africa would face ever greater isolation.
Confronted with this reality, de Klerk took the decision to begin an orderly dismantling of apartheid.
What choice will Israel make? Left to its own devices, Israel will certainly keep trying to massacre Palestinians into submission.
But what prevented South Africa’s white supremacist government from escalating violence to Israeli levels of cruelty and audacity was not that they had greater scruples than the Zionist regime.
It was recognition that they alone could not stand against a global anti-apartheid movement that was in solidarity with the internal resistance.
Israel’s “military deterrent” has now been repeatedly discredited as a means to force Palestinians and other Arabs to accept Zionist supremacy as inevitable and permanent.
Now, the other pillar of Israeli power — Western support — is starting to crack. We must do all we can to push it over.
Israel began its massacres with full support from its Western “friends”. Then something amazing happened.
Despite the official statements of support, despite the media censorship, despite the slick propaganda campaign, there was a massive, unprecedented public mobilisation in Europe and even in North America expressing outrage and disgust.
Gaza will likely be seen as the turning point when Israeli propaganda lost its power to mystify, silence and intimidate as it has for so long.
Even the Nazi Holocaust, long deployed by Zionists to silence Israel’s critics, is becoming a liability; once unimaginable comparisons are now routinely heard.
Jewish and Palestinian academics likened Israel’s actions in Gaza to the Nazi massacre in the Warsaw Ghetto. A Vatican cardinal referred to Gaza as a “giant concentration camp”.
British MP Gerald Kaufman, once a staunch Zionist, told the House of Commons, “My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of Staszow, [Poland]. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.”
Kaufman continued, “my grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza”.
There have been unprecedented expressions of support for boycott, divestment and sanctions from major trade unions in Italy, Canada and New Zealand.
An all-party group of city councillors in Birmingham, Europe’s second largest municipal government, urged the British government to follow suit.
Israel is extremely vulnerable to such a campaign. Little noticed amid the carnage in Gaza, Israel took another momentous step towards formal apartheid when the Knesset elections committee voted to ban Arab parties from participating in upcoming elections.
Zionism, an ideology of racial supremacy, is a dying project, in retreat and failing to find new recruits. With enough pressure, and relatively quickly, Israelis too would likely produce their own de Klerk ready to negotiate a way out.
Every new massacre makes it harder, but a de-zionised, decolonised, reintegrated Palestine affording equal rights to all who live in it, regardless of religion or ethnicity, and return for refugees is not a utopian dream.
It is within reach, in our lifetimes.
But it is far from inevitable.
We can be sure that Western and Arab governments will continue to support Israeli apartheid under the guise of the “peace process” unless decisively challenged.
The mobilisations of the past three weeks showed that a different world is possible and within our grasp if we support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Abuminah speaks some truth here.
Israel is doomed if it follows South Africa's path of appeasement.
Israel screwed up in Gaza by not finishing the job.
The PR disaster that was the Gaza invasion would have been worth it only if the Isreli Defence Force had been allowed to completely destroy Hamas.
Now Israel still has Hamas to deal with and has a greater PR problem than ever.
Israel's only hope is to ignore Western opinion, refuse advice from the Obama administration and vigorously defend her territory against all-comers.
If this happens Israel may have a chance. If it doesn't we are looking at the destruction of the only free nation in the Middle East.
posted by Trevor Loudon at
1/27/2009 08:48:00 AM
12 Comments:
The Abumiah rant is hot air. Israel is getting stronger as the years go by both economically and militarily relative to the Arabs. Israel's standard of living is now equal to western Europe and it is the worlds 5th largest weapons exporter. It's science and technology sector is the worlds largest per capita by a wide margin.It has new allies in India, China and Russia. Selling Israel short has been a losing bet for 60 years. It will be a losing bet in the future.
Israel is not going to disappear because western leftists and muslims protest and boycott. Nor will Israel be defeated by conventional arms. Israel's main worry is weapons of mass destruction specifically nuclear weapons. Even though Israel has the power to destroy Iran many times over with hydrogen bombs that may not deter the lunatic jihadists who run that nation.
Sorry reid, i just can't aree with you here.
I think israel is in major trouble, especially with obama in charge.
I think Israel will be pushed into a "2 state" solution by Obama, making big concessions on territory, immigration etc.
Israel is the next international leper and will eventually be betrayed unless its leaders take a much tougher line.
This is not what I want, but it is what I think.
Hi Trevor,
I am not as pessimistic as you. It looks like Netanyahu will win the election in 2 weeks and he is the toughest politician in Israel. He is both a capitalist and military hawk. The international community and the US has much less ability to impose a final solution on Israel then is generally believed. Israel can always change the subject by starting a large war with it's sworn enemies. Lebanon 2006 and Gaza 2008 were small wars with feeble enemies. Israeli tank divisions circling Damascus or a missle war with Iran will change the subject till Obama is out of office. The EU nations have zero capacity to impose ther will on Israel. Russia, China and India publicly still back the Arabs but privately are developing strong ties to Israel. Those nations are more and more finding common ground with Israel's battle against the global jihad. If Obama moves hard against Israel he will get a hurricane of domestic blowback in the US. I don't think he will try to force the issue unless he feels supremely confident domestically.
"big concessions on territory"
When you say concessions are you referring to land Israel currently occupies or are you referring to other terroritories.
Before you go into your anti-Semitic raving Steve, do you give a damn about let's say the Tamil people whom have proclaimed the recent war on the Tamil Tigers is "genocide" by the Sri Lankan government?
Is Sri Lanka a "Nazi" state by your logic? How'd about the Chin people whom reside in Southeast Asia? They proclaim they are being abused by two states-India and Burma. In Burma, it's worse for the Chin people, as they are placed into concentration camps, while in India, police are accused of beating up Chin people.
I don't see you go about and support the rights of the Tamil or Chin peoples. Yet you have the gall to only "care" about the Palestinians when they happen to face those whom happen to have survive a holocaust in a previous world war.
People like you ARE helping to revive anti-Semitism, while you ignore other minorities around the world whom are suffering a million times worse than what those of the Palestinian cause are stating.
How many U.N. resolutions have been presented against Burma and India for abusing the Chin people or Sri Lanka against the Tamils? Name those U.N. resolutions.
You can't because you're a blatant hypocrite whom would ignore their suffering, while you accept to promote and justify terrorism against Israel.
If I steal someone's lunchbox and then offer to give them back a couple of raisins, is that a concession?
"If I steal someone's lunchbox and then offer to give them back a couple of raisins, is that a concession?"
Are you referring to New Zealand, the United States or Israel?
Muslim minorities in Burma are also horribly abused by the Burmese junta government. Steve, I don't see you calling the Burmese government to be on the lines of the Nazis when it comes to oppression of their minorities.
No Muslim country has spoke out on behalf on the Muslim minority in Burma.
I also find it quite hypocritical that you don't take a look at why Turkey's sticking up for the Palestinian "freedom fighters" in Hamas. They often are accused of abusing the Kurds, and also have refused to recognize the Armenian genocide.
How does it feel to have Turkish "Nazis" endorse your cause in this hypocritical manner?
"Stop coming here just to harass me, because it seems you have no life when you do something like this."
What? Mad as? Dream on Zionist Mah mah.
The grandchildren of holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany. Building walls and fences to keep people in prison, check points not to allow people basic freedom of movement, arrests and harassments and destroying homes and livelihoods - same as Mad (Zionist) Mah.
Oh no Mah I am not anti-semite, vegimite or marmite ...OK! I am only anti Nazi.
Huhana
Huhana,
Do you care about the plight of Turkish Kurds and Armenian people? Why is a nation so hypocritical like Turkey gearing up to defend YOUR cause?
Stop being a blathering hypocrite.
They won't answer you MAH.
They never will.
EXOCET
I'm sure they also don't give a damn that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Iceland. A bicycle repair shop refused to offer service to Icelandic Jews, and 70 percent of Icelandic citizens have positive feelings for Hamas, versus 3 percent whom sympathize with Israel.
It's people like Huhana and Steve, whom are happily reviving anti-Semitism, meanwhile, those minorities around the world whom are suffering even more do not get the same PR as Palestinians do.
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