Religion misused

BEN Levitas, as chairman of the SA Zionist Federation, may be “extremely proud” of Israeli achievements in saving the world from itself (“Browned off,” Cape Times Letters, December 27). Wow, it sounds remarkably similar to the apartheid government’s obsessions in saving an ungrateful world from both the rooi and swart gevaar!

The rest of the international community however, is increasingly unimpressed by Israeli war mongering. The response of 14 members of the UN Security Council to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intentions to build more illegal settlements in E1 and Al Walaja illustrates how time is fast running out for Zionist variations of apartheid in Palestine. The world is no longer cowed by Zionist smears of any criticisms of Israel as “anti-Semitic.” Whether in SA or Palestine-Israel, apartheid is internationally prescribed as a crime against humanity.

Jewish history, not only in Palestine but the whole Arab world, goes back thousands of years. Until 65 years ago, about a quarter of the population of Baghdad, Tripoli and many other cities across the Middle East and North Africa was Jewish. There were more than 40 synagogues in Tripoli, where I grew up until the age of 17, and where our immediate neighbours were Jewish. There are no Jews left in Libya, or most other Arab countries.

The Zionist theft of Palestinian land and water in 1947/48 was eventually exposed by Israeli historians such as Benny Morris and Illan Pappe. So too, the history of Zionist underground operatives in Arab countries is only now also being revealed.

Synagogues were bombed, and deals were cut with local politicians to allow Jews to emigrate against confiscation of their properties. The purpose was to force the emigration of about 800 000 Arab Jews to Israel, where they became and remain a social and economic underclass, the so-called Mizrahim.

The Israeli army wanted cannon fodder in war zones and unskilled farm labourers to work land confiscated from Palestinians. Arab Jews were expected to be only too grateful to have escaped with their lives, and to adopt the Zionist militarist and holocaust narratives of Jewish history. Ancient, cultured and prosperous communities were uprooted and their people transplanted to a land dominated by European Jews whose culture was not only foreign, but entirely hateful to them. The blatant racism still experienced by Jews of Yemeni and/or Ethiopian origins is shameless.

Now numbering about 3.5 million people, the Mizrahim comprise more than half of Israel’s Jewish population. Before the migration of over 1 million Russians in the 1990s – many with dubious claims even of being Jewish – the Mizrahim represented over 70 percent, and the demographic implications terrified the white European Ashkenazim.

Another Israeli historian, Avi Shlaim writes: “Israel has become a rogue state with an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders. A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism – the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all these criteria. Israel’s real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours, but military domination.”

The three Abrahamic faiths all produce gangsters. Religion is misused by politicians to justify human rights abuses and wars.

Just as apartheid in SA was a discredited heresy within Christianity, the behaviour of Saudi or Syrian thugs discredits Islam, and Gaddafi is estimated to have stolen US$500 million from Libyan Jews before stealing tens of billions from other Libyans. So too Zionism and gangsters like Netanyahu are a discredited ideology within Judaism but, in attempting to defend indefensible Israeli government behaviour, Levitas and his Zionist cohorts do Judaism no favour.

Terry Crawford-Browne

Milnerton