Wednesday Palestine Roundup--And Some More

There are four items in today’s post, but there’s a unifying theme—the influence of Zionist ideology on the tragic events in Palestine. That influence continues disastrously, as it has throughout the history of the idea. With that in mind, we begin with an excerpt from an eloquent letter written by a Jewish member of the British cabinet in opposition to the Balfour Declaration. I linked to this in a comment the other day, and this seems a good time to bring it to the attention of the wider readership. The letter is embedded in a post by Sheldon Richman at Antiwar.com:

Jewish Dissent on the Balfour Declaration

What follows is a greatly truncated excerpt of the letter, preceded by an excerpt from Richman’s introduction. I encourage readers to read the entire letter. Since it was written over a hundred years before today’s tragic events it’s obviously time conditioned, but it still speaks to fundamental principles that are involved in the Palestine tragedy:

In the fateful year 1917 the British cabinet had one Jewish member: Edwin Montagu. He was also the only cabinet member to oppose the Balfour Declaration of that year, which paved the way for the self-declared creation of the state of Israel, the so-called Jewish State, 31 tumultuous years later.

Montagu responded to the cabinet in a memorandum titled “The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”:

Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on The Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the “national home of the Jewish people”. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine ... Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.

I lay down with emphasis four principles:

1. I assert that there is not a Jewish nation. ...

2. When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, ... you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country, ...

3. I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in. ... I would not deny to Jews in Palestine equal rights to colonisation with those who profess other religions, but a religious test of citizenship seems to me to be only admitted by those who take a bigoted and narrow view of one particular epoch of the history of Palestine, and claim for the Jews a position to which they are not entitled. ...

Next, we take a look at the military reality, with Daniel Davis. It’s a 25 minute video in which Davis enunciates what we will see in writing further below: that Israel is pursuing a goal and a strategy with tactics that will fail in the long term. Bear in mind that Davis, like many professional military types (Doug Macgregor comes to mind), is a long time supporter of Israel who has come to his current views from his war experience in the Middle East. The point here, however, is that the manner in which Israel is waging war on Palestinians is conditioned by the implicit principles of the Zionist ideology as outlined by Montagu:

Next up, a very partial transcript from an eighty minute long video. Kwiatkowski is retired USAF, but unlike Davis comes from more of an intelligence—as opposed to a combat—perspective. Her emphasis is on the malign effects on a nation—any nation—of a war mentality. That war mentality is a product of Zionist ideology, as Montagu implicitly foresaw. She has a lot of other interesting things to say, but that’s what I’ve transcribed:

On the Path to Self-Destruction | Col. Karen Kwiatkowski

I don't know if people look at government and think, somehow, that the government is wiser than your average person--but they're not. Our own government in the US is very much an example. How many stupid things does our government do on a daily basis? They don't represent the best and the brightest--no government really does. I'm sorry to say, scum rises to the top. The Israeli government is not really serving Israel's future very well. In their minds they are doing something that they wanted to do, and they believe that it will make them winners if they do this. That's what's motivating the whole thing.

Are we learning anything from our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan? We had al Qaeda, then the Taliban. We had ISIS after that--even worse than al Qaeda. It doesn't look like we're learning anything. I can't say what the Israelis are learning because the United States is filled with people who don't know much about the Middle East. Most Americans don't pay close attention to that. It's a foreign policy area that is far removed from our day-to-day lives, so our government can do things that we don't even know about. Are Americans learning? I don't know, but we do have a political way of punishing certain patterns of foreign policy, and people in the United States are very sick of the Neo-conservatives. This is why Trump was elected and it's also why so much energy was put into defeating him in 2020 and preventing him from even showing up on the ballot in 2024. What does he represent? He represents a position in the country which is common to Democrats and Republicans and Independents. Americans are very tired of a really stupid foreign policy that doesn't seem to be learning from its mistakes. That's pretty much how Americans can communicate that we don't think our government is really learning from its mistakes.

However, Israel is much smaller. It's in the middle of the Middle East, of course. The Mossad is everywhere, it has infiltrated and co-opted. It's a very wealthy country. It is able to purchase, to fund, so many things in a much more rich and complex way then we can do. So our experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan are disastrous, but part of that is we don't know what we're doing. We never do in in these foreign places and we do make mistakes, because we have a small number of idiots running our country who imagine that they know how to impact things--and they don't. But in Israel there is much more investment in how to manipulate your neighbors, how to deal with your neighbors. Many of the people in the Israeli government--and many Israelis--have contempt for Persians, have contempt for Arabs, have contempt for Turks, you know, have contempt for all Gentiles. But they also do understand many things about how to deal. So they're not really constrained.

[Discusses the pros and cons of Israel supporting Hamas, and how the Israeli view differs from the typical view of the West. Do the benefits of supporting Hamas in the past outweigh the negatives of October 7 from an Israeli point of view? Perhaps.]

There are many things, from a Mossad or an Israeli point of view, that Hamas has helped with. Of course, you can't rewrite history, but so many times Israelis say, 'Oh, well, if it wasn't for Hamas we would have had a unified Palestinian movement and then where would we be, right?’ So I think they justify what we would call, what an outside observer would say, was a mistake. I'm not sure they view such things as mistakes. I think they view it as the way of conducting a continual war, and of course deception is a big part of it. Allies--how much do you tell them? What do you tell them? How loyal or disloyal you might be to those allies? All of this is part of war fighting. These are tools, and I think that's how the Israeli government looks at them.

What Kwiatkowski is expressing is that the Israeli state perspective may be: Supporting Hamas in the past worked for us; October 7 doesn’t change that, it simply means that we move on to some new strategy. Recrimination is unhelpful and will be minimal. I’m not sure I agree with that, although the repeated Israeli mistakes in dealing with Lebanon could support Kwiatkowski’s argument.

Unfortunately, what they're not looking at is what it does to Israel itself, what it does to Israelis. Israel is a country that has really chosen war for its people. It has chosen war as the way we will be unified. We are a country that is surrounded by enemies and we choose war, and we will be the victors, and we will be the Spartans--everybody will serve the military.

We found this out a little bit with Afghanistan and Iraq. We sent some of the same guys and gals on repeated tours in Iraq, repeated tours in Afghanistan, sometimes repeated tours in Syria, and these guys came back--many of them--scarred. Mentally scarred. Of course, a lot of them also came back physically scarred. But the mental scarring, the moral and ethical challenges that they faced and failed, in many cases, in their own minds, the legitimately bad things that they did. They're broken people. Their families know it, their friends know it. They understand why Uncle Joe's messed up, on drugs, suicidal, living on the street. Because he was sent somewhere to do some bad evil things to people, things that really were not morally or ethically justified. This is a problem with all wars, but it's particularly a problem when you send people to wars that don't need to happen.

Israel has chosen war and they're destroying their population, because all the good things about Israel, all the good things about being Jewish, all of the good things about even the global Jewry, the Diaspora--all of those good positive things are subordinated to killing, they're subordinated to war. And this is not good. This is not what people need for the health of their souls.

...

We're not helping Israel by loading it up with weapons and giving it top cover for whatever things it wants to to do. We're not helping it, and they're not helping themselves. It's not a good long-term survival path to continually fight with your neighbors, to continually hate everyone around you, to despise them almost in a way that many people say is racist--which it does have the same characteristics as racism. You know, we're sensitive to racism in this country. We hear about it all the time. We have a long history. You don't build a state on racism, but Israelis are leaning in that way--and that is also the result of a war mentality. ... War opens the door to so many evil, bad things that are not just not good for peace, they're not good for the survival of a country. Israel is being pushed and supported and egged on in many ways by the United States and others, and this is not good for Israel at all.

We finish with Tucker Carlson speaking with Rep. Thomas Massie. As it happens, I listened to Massie being interviewed by Glenn Greenwald. Whether you agree with everything Massie says or not, he is very forthcoming in explaining his policy views, which is refreshing. The Tucker interview has received a lot of attention—at CTH and Zerohedge ("They're Saying The Quiet Part Out Loud": Tucker And Massie Slam Additional Ukraine Funds For 'War They Cannot Win'), and possibly elsewhere. As you can tell from the Zerohedge title, much of the emphasis in the 20 minute interview is on Ukraine funding, but I’ve transcribed some broader comments:

Tucker: Maybe the single most consequential voice in this entire debate is a woman named Victoria Nuland, who's the Under Secretary of State. She was a driving force behind the war in Iraq--which was, of course, a disaster. She was never punished for that--in fact, she rose within the bureaucracy and now she's running this war in Ukraine! No one ever says her name. She's never held to account for all of this. She has far more influence on it than the entire United States Congress put together. How do we allow unelected lunatics like Victoria Nuland--who clearly hates the United States, and always has--to have this power over our lives and our children's future?

Massie: I don't know. I feel like some of these deep State bureaucrats, they're like the kids who had no friends in high school and somebody did something bad to them long ago, and now they've got some power and they're gonna have retribution on everybody else.

Tucker: Victoria Nuland was at at a classified briefing to all members of Congress just a few weeks ago--this was on Israel--and I thought, 'Wait, she's failed multiple times, she has no credibility, why are you having her brief Congress? I mean, she's responsible or shares responsibility in the deaths of more people around the world than maybe any other living American, and yet she's in a classified briefing. I'm not saying she should be in prison--though you could certainly make a case for that--but she certainly should not have a security clearance and be briefing members of Congress.

[Massie, in his response, points to the massive fraud in the aid we send to our vassal states--even paying the salaries of officials in agencies that don't actually exist!]

Tucker: An unrelated question that, I don't know if you're prepared for it, but the military has a problem with recruitment. The military said pretty clearly, 'We don't want any more white men, and then drove a lot of people out with the Covid requirements, with the mandates. Now we have tens of millions of military age foreign Nationals here illegally. There have been calls in the Congress for those people to join the military to fill the gap, so you could wind up with a military filled with people who are not Americans and have no loyalty to this country or knowledge of American history or affinity for the culture.

Massie: I think it's a horrible idea, and you characterized the vaccine mandate correctly--that was a purge. That was an ideological purge of our military. It was a loyalty test to a liberal agenda. It's sort of like taking the sacrament in the religion of Covid. ... A lot of good people were forced out. We'll be bringing in people with a different loyalty--or no loyalty at all--if those senators get their way.