Zionism After Systemic Expulsion of Palestinians from Their Homeland: US Prof.

“The answer to this question resides in the history of Zionism as it determined its purpose in Israel in 1939 to begin what the world knows now as terrorism, the planned, calculated destruction of those who lived in Palestine regardless of their rights under international law, or the consequences to those lives they mangled in the process,” Prof. Cook told the Tasnim News Agency.

William A. Cook is an emeritus professor of English at the University of La Verne. William A. Cook completed his Ph.D. at Lehigh University where he also got his Master’s degree. He was the university’s Vice President for Academic Affairs for 13 years. Prof. Cook has extensively written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and defended the confiscated rights of the Palestinian people. His writings have appeared on such news websites and magazines as Al-Jazeera, Foreign Policy Journal, Palestine Chronicle, Counterpunch and Al-Manar. He is the author of such books as “The Rape of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied,” “Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy” and “The Chronicles of Nefaria”.

Following is the full text of the interview.

Tasnim: Palestinians had been protesting outside the al-Aqsa compound since Israeli authorities installed metal detectors, turnstiles, and additional security cameras there following a deadly shooting attack more than a week ago. On July 14, three Palestinians opened fire on Israeli forces at the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, killing two of them before being shot dead. Palestinian worshipers had strongly condemned Israel’s new restrictive measures at al-Aqsa Mosque, engaging in bitter clashes with Israeli military forces. A large group of Palestinians were either killed or inured in the clashes. Finally, Israel removed its freshly imposed restrictions on the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem (al-Quds), prompting Palestinians to begin celebrating early on Thursday. What is your take on the latest developments in the occupied territories?

Cook: Preaching justice in a world that has no justice creates its own inevitable devastation; it is to be expected. All suffer its consequences. When Misbah Abu Sbeth was 22 his life in Israel had just begun. What future did he face? 27 years later we know as he made his way to the police station, shot two Israeli policemen and died in a hail of shots leaving his wife and five children grieving at home, their lives devastated forever.(1) Thus erupted the growing slaughter surrounding the sacred mosque at the Dome of the Rock as this month of July becomes, ineluctably, the hottest month of slaughter in the middle of Jerusalem. And why? Because of measures by the Zionist Government that prevent access to prayer, the only remaining hope left to those with nothing to live for.

The answer to this question resides in the history of Zionism as it determined its purpose in Israel in 1939 to begin what the world knows now as terrorism, the planned, calculated destruction of those who lived in Palestine regardless of their rights under international law, or the consequences to those lives they mangled in the process. I have written about this before and borrow here from previous work. The Zionists determined what was right and forced it into being. Theirs is an existence without morality, or mercy, or human empathy. They calculated in secret even from their fellow immigrants, imposing taxes on them with punishment to follow if they did not succumb to their demands, including death if necessary. (2)

Two consequences have erupted at this time that have released evil  of the worst kind in Palestine/Israel: Aldous Huxley observed that power comes to those who control truth, what will be made manifest to the people and what will be withheld; silence about truth corrodes knowledge, fosters ignorance, and enslaves the minds of the masses to the will of the dominant elite; secondly, once that control evaporates, the people awake to the reality imposed on them and their children recognizing internally their absolute despair and hopelessness and its cause, while those in power awake in fear that their power has been broken releasing the desperation caused by humiliation, injustice and powerlessness; anger, hatred and vengeance are released into the world. Chaos and fear reign. The very essence of the terrorist becomes the living hell all must face, when will the terrorist strike, where, how and who?

Next to wanton slaughter, no sin against humanity is more evil than control of truth.

 In my lifetime, from the Second World War to the present, the erosion of knowledge by controlled truth, by omission, by deceit, by bigotry, by racism, by intentional, calculated and absolute monopoly of the primary modes of communication to foster the goals of a dominant elite, resident predominantly in the United States and Israel, has metastasized like a cancer, spread, and now threatens to destroy a major portion of the mid-east even as it destroys the very blood cells that have given life to the principles of Democracy in America.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” Martin Luther King once noted. 

Apply this statement to the conditions existing in Israel as it occupies and oppresses the Palestinian people. At 22, in 2000, Misbah witnessed Ariel Sharon as he left a legacy of humiliation, torture, powerlessness, and fear on the population living under the boots of Israel’s IOF. Sharon began by mocking the Muslim faith, Misbah’s faith, as Sharon marched into al Aqsa Mosque with 1000 troops in September; he stole their land and placed squatters in illegal cities and settlements throughout the West Bank and Gaza; he subjugated Palestinians to incessant harassment by establishing over 200 military checkpoints on their land; he issued prison lock downs incarcerating the people in their homes for weeks on end; he demolished homes at will and without warning forcing thousands into the streets, killing many in the process; he instituted extra-judicial executions resulting in hundreds of assassinations of Palestinians denying them in the process due rights under democratic and international law; he imprisoned and his government continues to imprison without charge over 8000 men and women; he constructed a hideous wall that incarcerates an entire people in the greatest open air prison ever devised by a racist mentality; and he accepted as members of his government, racist fanatics who have declared their right to harm and kill Palestinians and a right to drive them from their land. This was to be Misbah’s future and that of his wife and children.

As his children reach their father’s age when Sharon desecrated their house of prayer, one glimmer of hope appeared that would allow the United Nations an opportunity to bring Israel before the International courts when Obama abstained from vetoing in the Security Council. Once more the SC condemned the Zionist power as it has done since 1949 for ignoring the UN Charters on peace and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the Zionist forces ignore the UN and press forward with their agenda.

Today in Palestine, Feb. 6, 2017, the Israeli Knesset passed, by a vote of 60 for and 57 against, a vote that forces the Israeli court to accept legitimization of all land in “Judea and Samaria,” the land still owned by Palestinians in anticipation of recognition by the communities of the world as the Palestinians’ state. Once again, a handful of “opportunistic” people who have “inserted” themselves into the Israeli government to “seduce” their own people of their right to this land because of beliefs proffered centuries ago destroys the rights of the Palestinian people despite the Charters of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, it is the United States Congress that becomes the means to make the Israeli state immune to international law by vetoing the implementation of justice.

“Great is truth, but still greater … is silence about truth.” – (Aldous Huxley)

Huxley captures in that observation the power that comes to those who control truth, what will be made manifest to the people and what will be withheld; silence about truth corrodes knowledge, fosters ignorance, and enslaves the minds of the masses to the will of the dominant elite. Next to wanton slaughter, no sin against humanity is more evil. In my lifetime, from the Second World War to the present, the erosion of knowledge by controlled truth, by omission, by deceit, by bigotry, by racism, by intentional, calculated and absolute monopoly of the primary modes of communication has devastated the mid-east.

It must be clear by now that Israel had and continues to have designs to confiscate as much Palestinian land as possible as it erases the visible presence of the indigenous people from the hills and valleys of Palestine.

It must be clear today that Israel and its obedient partner in war crime, the United States, has no intentions of seeking peace with the Palestinians. How else maintain an unending war of terror? How else fuel division, hatred, vengeance, retaliation and destruction than to systematically strangle by slow, insidious suffocation the rights of a people declared openly in a mutually accepted Universal Declaration of Human Rights? How else continue expansion and acquisition of another’s land than to foster violence with violence and cry aloud to the world your pain even as the cries and torment of the Palestinians are muffled behind the Wall of Fear Sharon leaves as his memorial to a lifetime of savagery and death?

Now, as this monstrous monument to human depravity encircles the Palestinians, as it lumbers over hills, slithers into barren valleys, slices its way through groves and fields of fruit and vegetables, cuts towns in two, indeed, cuts families apart, deprives children of access to their schools and families from their mosques, as it steals 60% of the agricultural land of the citizens of Bil’in and other villages and forces farmers in Jayyous to walk for hours to get to their olive trees, it also serves to protect the illegal squatters that live in American subsidized homes curried with lush grounds and foliage. This 400 miles of fear, stretched around the Palestinians like a taut steel belt constricting their every move, breeds the very seeds of vengeance that make peace impossible, not only because it suffocates the spirit that through hope gives purpose to life, but because it strangles the moral fiber of the Jewish faith that grew so strong from the middle of the last century it became a code of conduct, by inflicting on another what their forebears suffered so ignominiously at the hands of the Nazis. Both peoples are forced into a nadir of destructive action creating in that wake a vortex of anguish that engulfs the world.

Let it be said loud and clear, Israel alone can bring peace to the mid-east. Despite its protestations to the contrary, Israel exists as a major military force in the world, a silent member of the nuclear club, the only such in the mid-east. Yet it cries wolf to the world that Hamas threatens its existence even as Hamas stands imprisoned behind Israeli walls unable to leave by land, sea or air without Israeli IDF approval, unable to receive goods of any kind, including weapons of consequence with which to face the third largest military in the world. Thus does the oppressor become the victim letting injustice reign supreme. (4)

   1. (see Dr. Ramzy Baroud, “The story behind the Jerusalem attack,” Palestine Chronicle.)

   2. Read Dr. Ilan Pappe’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Cook’s The Plight of the Palestinians both relying on original documents seized or released from the terrorist groups that controlled from 1939 to the present day).

   3. See The Plight of the Palestinians, “Introduction.” Macmillan, 2010.

  4. For a comprehensive study about the Zionist movement fromits inception and its destructive intent through the years read Ralph Schoenman’s The Hidden History of Zionism, Verso Books, 2001, updated 2008).