By Jeremy Salt

Too late also for apologies and amends, not that any are forthcoming. Why would Israel want to apologize anyway?

If there is one infinite resource on the planet, it is hypocrisy in politics. Take Arthur Balfour as an example. As the British prime minister in 1905, he sponsored the Aliens Bill, whose sole purpose was to keep Jewish refugees out of Britain.

Yet by 1917, he was the savior of the Jews, promising them a national home in Palestine as long as nothing was done “to prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.”

Even after more than a century, this statement demands close dissection. Palestine wasn’t Balfour’s or Britain’s to give away. The “existing non-Jewish communities” were not a tiny minority, as the phrase suggests, but were 90-95 percent of the population.

“Existing” signaled their fate as planned by the British behind closed doors and in secret correspondence. One day the Palestinians would not exist in their homeland. That was the plan.

Once the demographic problem was overcome, Palestine would be incorporated as a Jewish colonial state protected by the empire and furthering its strategic and corporate interests across the Middle East.

The Palestinians might still ‘exist’ as a tiny minority in Palestine, but the best option would be to ship them all across the border into Transjordan, or perhaps some other British-dominated king or regent could be persuaded to take them.

As for Balfour’s concern for their “civil and religious rights,” he didn’t give a damn. In his private correspondence, he dismissed them out of hand. What were these Arab so-called rights compared to the genuine rights of a long-suffering people he personally was going to return to their ancient land? Not that it was their ancient land. Not that they ever saw it. Not that they had ever lived there and could therefore return to it. Not that they had any connection at all to Palestine beyond religion, and most of the settlers were not religious anyway.

And if Balfour cared at all for Jews, as his remarks showed when he tabled the Aliens Bill, it was the influential monied British Jews and not refugees or the struggling Jewish poor in London’s East End.

Needless to say, hypocrisy is not just Balfour or Britain, but as essential an ingredient to political life as baking powder is to cake mix. Politicians are forever saying what they don’t believe in or don’t intend to do. Politics without hypocrisy would be truth, and what political system could withstand that?

This special ingredient has been on display in the past week in Israel, where the abducted Gaza flotilla passengers were forced to kneel with heads forced to the ground and hands tied behind their backs while armed guards watched from walls, and Itamar Ben-Gvir strode among them, gloating, boasting, insulting, bullying and waving the Israeli flag as an extra provocation.

Ben Gvir behaved the same way last year when going into the cell of Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned for 24 years and reduced to a thin white shape by Israeli torture and mistreatment. The only reason for the visit by this sadist was to torment Barghouti, who listened patiently as Ben-Gvir raved on about erasing the Palestinians from existence, a favorite topic of his.

Ben-Gvir’s birthday present from his wife was a birthday cake with a noose iced on the top to celebrate ahead of time the hanging of Palestinians. She is obviously as bad as he is. A match made in hell, one might say.

The ICC is now reported to have secretly added Ben-Gvir and the equally vile Smotrich to its list of indicted war criminals.

What shocked the supposedly civilized West was that the people being kicked around in what the same West calls Israel, as opposed to the territories seized in 1967, which it at least agrees are occupied, were mostly its own citizens.

For more than two years, it had looked away from the mass abduction and humiliation of Palestinian men stripped of their clothing, blindfolded, and forced to crouch in lines against walls or on the sands of Gaza. It did nothing and said little, but with largely European activists treated almost as badly, they were outraged, horrified, and disgusted. Where lies the difference? In the color of their skin?

“Shocking and unacceptable,” said Australia’s foreign minister, Penny Wong. “Unacceptable,” echoed Giorgia Meloni. “Monstrous,” said Spain’s foreign minister, Jose Albares. Yvette Cooper, his British counterpart, was “truly appalled.” None of them had said anything like this even as Gaza was being obliterated and tens of thousands of people were massacred. All they did was call for ‘restraint.’

Netanyahu appointed Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to their positions respectively as ‘minister of national security’ and ‘minister of finance’ for the sole purposes of terrorizing the Palestinians of the West Bank and speeding up the building and expansion of colonies.

Under their authority, the settlers have been armed as never before. They have the freedom to commit any crime they want. Murder, burn, chop down, steal, bully, harass, intimidate, all of it for the greater good of greater Israel.

Their victims are usually defenseless and often aged. The settlers have the protection of ‘soldiers’, no different from themselves. Often, they are West Bank settlers themselves and thus have a vested interest in standing by during the violence of these rampaging armed hooligans.

There has never been a pogrom like this in Jewish or any other history. This is the world’s first permanent pogrom, yet another achievement for Israel. Instead of being the victims of a pogrom, Jewish Zionists are now the perpetrators, again breaking new ground.

This pogrom has continued on the West Bank not for days, as the pogroms in the 19th-century Russian ‘pale of settlement’ usually did, and not even for weeks, months, or years, but for decades, without the supposedly civilized West intervening. The Palestinians live under blockade, daily threat, and harassment, and only if they are lucky.

Embarrassed because the sumud activists were being openly humiliated in what the West calls Israel, not what it calls the occupied territories, Netanyahu said their mistreatment was “not in line with Israel’s values and norms.” There can be no argument with this because mere humiliation and bullying fall way below the line of Israel’s murderous “values and norms” as practiced since 1948.

If anything is written in stone, it is not the word of God but Israel’s fate. It poisons everything it touches. It is now dragging the US down into the depths like a stone tied around its neck.

The lobby is inside the White House and controls Congress through its money and its minders. It spent $25 million to roll Palestine-supporting New York congressman Jamal Bowman in 2024 and has just pumped millions into the campaign to bring down Thomas Massie in Kentucky, in what was more of a coup than an election.

The genuine right to choose when it comes to anything to do with Israel is being taken out of the hands of voters. The same pattern is being repeated in Canada, Australia, and other countries.

In the UK, the successful infiltration of the Labor Party by the lobby and an unrelenting campaign of vicious slander destroyed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. Starmer now stands accused of destroying the Labor Party, but behind Starmer lies the Israeli lobby. Its role in the lead-up to the existential crisis now facing the party will have to be part of any genuine inquiry into where things went wrong.

If there is any redemptive value in something as vile and inhumane as genocide, it is that Gaza has opened the eyes of the world to the reality of Israel behind the shams of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’ and ‘the most moral army in the world.’

Israel itself has flung the window wide open to reveal the truth. This is not a new truth or a recently evolved truth but a truth that has been there all along, avoided by a ‘west’ that could not own up to its complicity and responsibility for the catastrophe that has overwhelmed the Palestinians, led the Middle East region into one war after another and brought the world closer to global conflict.

There was no sudden change. Omer Bartov has posed the question of ‘What went wrong in Israel?’ Nothing went wrong because Israel was wrong, from the very beginning. It was a bad idea from the time Herzl started talking of a Jewish state, as the Jewish mainstream of the time recognized.

The circle is now being closed, bringing Jews back to the point of alarm at the existential danger of Zionism to their faith. Real Jews, that is, and not fakes like Netanyahu.

Israel was never planned as a democracy but only as a democracy for Jews, which means not a democracy at all. Even now, it is not the state of its citizens but a Jewish state. It is not a state of equal rights, and neither is it socialist, despite the faded romance of kibbutzniks tending their fish tanks or strumming guitars around the campfire in a Jews-only socialist nirvana.

At least it can be said of the avowedly fascist, racist, supremacist, and annihilationist right-wing that it has flung aside the flummery that fooled people for so long.

The supposed distinction between the 1948 and post-1967 generations flattered the egos of Israeli liberals. They might be decent people, compared to the masses putting their hands up for genocide, but they are fooling themselves. Whether secular or religious, ostensibly left or avowedly right, Israelis have always massacred, assassinated, occupied, bombed, and bullied the Palestinians. The argument that Israel compares well to Arab dictatorships doesn’t really cut it.

It took an openly flaunted chapter in the genocide, but finally, the supposedly civilized West has been forced to wake up to the consequences of what Israel has done. If it hadn’t obliterated Gaza so openly and brazenly and then boasted about its putrid achievements, maybe it could have kept ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ show on the road for a lot longer, but too late for that now.

Too late also for apologies and amends, not that any are forthcoming. Why would Israel want to apologize anyway? It hasn’t done anything wrong. It’s all Ahmad Shukairy’s fault, Nasser’s fault, the PLO’s fault, Arafat’s fault, Hamas’ fault, Hezbollah’s fault, Iran’s fault, but always someone else’s fault. Amazing how the antisemitic blood-libel world still sees the Palestinians as victims.

No going back now. Israel is going to brutalize its way towards fulfillment of the Zionist dream or die in the attempt. Heads or tails as to which will come first, but telescopes aren’t needed to see that Israel is a sinking ship.

The views expressed in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of The Palestine Chronicle.