The Zionist Occupation - Still losing the fight for legitimacy after 76-years

On 14-May-1948, the Zionists usurped Palestine. The USA accepted it within an hour. But much of the world still rejects its legitimacy.

On 14-May 1948, hours before the scheduled expiry of the British Mandate, David Ben-Gurion announced the unilateral establishment of the “State of Israel”.

The United States recognised this so-called ‘new state’ within one hour.

Such a ‘declaration’ was seen for what it was by the Muslim world - a declaration of war on the people indigenous to the land.

Just over 30-years prior to this date, the land inhabited and farmed by #Palestinians for centuries, and which was part of the Ottoman state, was occupied by Britain in World War One.

During the period of the British mandate, Jewish migration was encouraged - so changing the demographics of Palestine. The Palestinian population were not allowed to organise politically, whereas the immigrant Jewish population was allowed to. The result was community tension which had not previously existed.

The Zionist entity has been continuous engaged in two battles:

The first is the blood-thirsty battle to drive out the Palestinian people so that they can dominate the whole of historic #Palestine and beyond. The slaughter and devastation in #Gaza is part of that.

The second is the battle for legitimacy - which 76-years later it still struggles with.

Indeed, whenever the first battle becomes more apparent to the world, it loses ground in the battle for legitimacy.

In a recent essay for the London Review of Books titled “The Shoah after Gaza”, Pankaj Mishra wrote:

Many of the protesters who fill the streets of their cities week after week have no immediate relation to the European past of the Shoah. They judge Israel by its actions in Gaza rather than its Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent security. Whether or not they know about the Shoah, they reject the crude social-Darwinist lesson Israel draws from it – the survival of one group of people at the expense of another. They are motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted. These men and women know that if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is ‘Never Again for Anyone’: the slogan of the brave young activists of Jewish Voice for Peace.

It is possible that they will lose. Perhaps Israel, with its survivalist psychosis, is not the ‘bitter relic’ George Steiner called it – rather, it is the portent of the future of a bankrupt and exhausted world. The full-throated endorsement of Israel by far-right figures like Javier Milei of Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and its patronage by countries where white nationalists have infected political life – the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy – suggests that the world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law is receding. It is possible that Israel will succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, and even the West Bank as well. There is too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice; powerful men can make their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught.

The fear of catastrophic defeat weighs on the minds of the protesters who disrupt Biden’s campaign speeches and are expelled from his presence to a chorus of ‘four more years’. Disbelief over what they see every day in videos from Gaza and the fear of more unbridled brutality hounds those online dissenters who daily excoriate the pillars of the Western fourth estate for their intimacy with brute power. Accusing Israel of committing genocide, they seem deliberately to violate the ‘moderate’ and ‘sensible’ opinion that places the country as well as the Shoah outside the modern history of racist expansionism. And they probably persuade no one in a hardened Western political mainstream.

Mishra’s hard hitting piece takes the battle wider than the legitimacy of the Zionist entity - but of the legitimacy of Western civilisation. The abandonment of international law; the acceptance of targeting of journalists, health and aid workers; the destruction of universities and hospitals - all of this has been seen by the world. It has damaged the brand of the West irreparably.

The legitimacy of the Zionist occupation has never been so low. The legitimacy of ‘civilisation’ and world order its colonial backers has never been so low.

The need for an alternative civilisation for the world - and alternative for the Middle East - has never been needed so much.

Abdul Wahid has been active in Muslim affairs in the UK for over 25 years. He has been published on the websites of Foreign Policy, Open Democracy, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, and Prospect Magazine. You can follow him on social media https://linktr.ee/abdulwahid101010