Continued:
After the Six Day War in 1967, Israel occupied further territory including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Some 55 percent of the West Bank land and 70 percent of the water were seized for Jewish settlers, a tiny fraction of the population. In Gaza, 500,000 Palestinians were confined to camps and slums; 2,200 settlers were given more than 40 percent of the land.
I say it again: Israel is an illegitimate state with no right to exist.
Let me end by coming back to my earlier point that Zionism is actually the primary creator of anti-Semitism in the world today. Here?s how I mean that.
The Zionists, aided by the powers in other countries that benefit from the geopolitical role Israel plays that has nothing to do with Jews and Judaism, have perpetrated a tremendous fraud. They have succeeded in equating, in the minds of most of the world?s people, two things that are antithetical: Zionism and Judaism.
Zionism is a political ideology. Judaism is a religion. By its acts, Zionism has demonstrated that it is a ruthless, murdering, colonizing ideology put forth for political power. The central tenet of the Jewish religion is to heal the world.
But the Zionists are smart. At every juncture, throughout their history but especially since the Palestine project began, they have publicly equated opposition to their political ideology as opposition to Judaism. Say something long enough and loud enough, and have powerful allies in your project (especially the United States and the U.S. media, which almost never reports honestly about Israel), and soon enough you?ll have the world believing your lie.
And so, by equating Zionism and Judaism, the Zionists have ensured that generations of Palestinian Arab youth have grown up making this mistake. That is why the Hamas-run television station in Gaza runs children?s programs that are so virulently anti-Semitic. It?s not because Palestinian Arabs are anti-Semitic per se, but because there is a false equivalency that has been constructed. To the person who is living in a refugee camp, oppressed by the Israeli state, Judaism and Zionism have become one and the same. The Zionists maintain this falsehood at whatever cost. Criticize Zionism, and you are labeled an anti-Semite. Hell, they even have created the notion of the ?self-hating Jew? to characterize Jews like myself who are opposed to Zionism.
I could go into tremendous detail about this phenomenon, but I think it speaks for itself.
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