INTERNATIONAL: ISRAEL
Editors, INSAF Bulletin
From time to time, INSAF Bulletin carries articles of political significance dealing with issues in other parts of the world besides South Asia.
The Middle East is a perpetual cauldron of intrigue and violence, driven by imperialist ambition and by attempts to control its vast resources of hydrocarbons. It is also notable for the policies and actions of one particular state, Israel, which has been much in the news recently over the assassination by its secret service agents of a Hamas leader in Dubai.
Israel emerged as a country in the aftermath of World War II, amid the destruction of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis, as a colonial-settler state in the territory known as Palestine, which had come under British control following the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War.
For its own imperial policy reasons, Britain permitted the settlement of European Jews in Palestine, which was assiduously promoted by the Zionist movement in Europe. Buoyed by its success in establishing an expansionist state which seems to have no fixed boundaries, a success made possible in no small measure by the immense and totally unstinting and uncritical support provided to Israel by the United States, the Zionist movement has succeeded well beyond the wildest dreams of its founder and early supporters.
This success has allowed the Zionist narrative of the “miracle” of Israel’s founding to become the standard account especially in the western countries where it is rarely questioned let alone contradicted. However, its success has come at a price, viz. the creation of what even a former U.S. President dubbed an “apartheid state” which oppresses a significant fraction of its population, the Palestinians, the historic residents of the area for over a thousand years who were massacred, driven out of their homes and lands in 1948, or exist as second-class citizens in Israel or the occupied territories.
However, the Zionist narrative is not universally accepted in Israel itself or by religiously observant Jews. The article that follows analyzes the conflicts between Zionism and Judaism and argues that Israel in not a Jewish state from a religious standpoint; it provides reasons underlying the emergence of a messianic philosophy of conquest on the part of an important sector of Israel’s population that is driving Israeli politics today.
Editors