בְּחִירָה

The choice.

Israel had an opportunity to create something beautiful.

Israel could have been a beacon of peace and hope, a repudiation of everything that came before, a realisation of the highest ideals, an inclusive, progressive democracy that did not discriminate on the basis of its citizens' creed or colour.

Instead it chose a different path.

Instead it chose to repeat the patterns of the past.

It made itself into an inverted ghetto. It made itself into the ultimate diaspora. It let itself be defined by the crimes its people had endured and so let them off the hook for all the crimes they would subsequently commit. It circled the wagons when it should have been creating a state. It built a wall. It behaved according to the strict repertoire of 19th century European imperialism. It legitimised and was legitimised in return, by the worst actions least deserving repetition.

It turned itself into a beacon of prejudice and despair rather than peace and hope. It attracted settlers on the same prospectus as any 19th century North American land rush, settlers who were happy to hope at the expense of another's despair, without even acknowledging it, without even regarding them as human and competent and capable of hope or despair.

It inflicted ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. It is a matter of public record that Albert Einstein regarded the Tnuat Haherut of Menachem Begin as "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties". (Letters to the Editor, New York Times, December 4, 1948). Was Albert Einstein an anti-semite? We are fortunate not to have to rely on Israeli historians in relation to massacres and expropriations of the Palestinian people.

The Armenians, the Native Americans, the Australian Aborigines, the list goes on, of peoples who can testify that crimes against humanity confer no special status, grant no special privilege or permission, to excuse similar behaviour. At its best and most basic, when it comes to the official utterances of the State of Israel, we are confronted with a child's pleading. For the State of Israel is a child, installed in the deadly playground the toxic cocktail of indifference and incompetence European imperialism concocted to precede them in the region's Ottoman ruins.

And the common cause now found between Israel and Turkey is itself most eloquent. Their enemy's enemy turns out to be the same even if their enemies themselves are different. How convenient the final abdictation of any moral authority turns out to be. And so fascism agrees its terms and conditions and signs its non-disclosure agreements in a back room while a journalist (mother of two) is assassinated by car accident outside.

Consider the fate of Ethiopian jews seeking to settle in Israel. Consider the fate of holocaust survivors already settled there. Shame, embarassment, and prejudice result in neglect at best, discrimination at worst. It's not enough to be Jewish. You have to subscribe to and conform to a certain supremacist template to be acceptable. Israel is a racist state.

But it's not too late. It's never too late.

It has been said that the people of Israel have a birthright as "God's chosen people". On the other hand it has been said that they merely benefit from powerful lobbies in Washington, New York, London, etc. Neither of these is true.

The principal advantage they enjoy as a result of collective delusions mediated by scripture arises from the favourable disposition of North American protestants of the "Bible Belt" and similar. This is where the literal interpretation of the Bible is found to be beyond dispute, on which all insistence on divine preference is founded.

If they are convinced of their reading of the Bible, let these North American protestants compensate the Palestinians for every lost acre, every scrap of clothing left hanging on the line as they were chased from their homes by paramilitary gangs.

Israel was chosen. But the people of Israel are not God's chosen people.

The people of Israel chose themselves!