Anti-Zionist activist Miko Peled says Israel is not a Jewish state. Rather, it was established by a racist, settler-colonial movement and is a violent, apartheid state that is engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
The biggest lie that the Zionist movement perpetrates in order to gain legitimacy is that it represents Jewish people. In fact Zionism represents a total betrayal of the Jewish people, particularly the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis.
It is also a betrayal of the Arab Jews who were not Zionists and resided in countries where being Jewish was not an issue.
Zionism was founded on lies and the legitimacy that was given to Zionist state was founded on misrepresentations of history of Jewish people and history of Palestine.
In his seminal book on the subject, “The Empty Wagon, Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft,” Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro describes the Zionist’s claim to represent Jews as nothing short of “identity theft.”
The Zionists claim that Jewish people are safer because of the existence of the Zionist state and that the Zionist mission is to protect Jewish people around the world, which is false. It is based on a gross misrepresentation of the reality in which Jewish people exist around the world.
Zionism is main enemy of Jewish people
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There are many ways to disprove the Zionist claims, but perhaps the following story does it best: Rabbi Elhonon Beck is the outspoken leader of the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in the United Kingdom. He lives in London, in Stamford Hill, which is the largest Jewish community in Europe. Rabbi Beck can be seen and heard speaking at rallies against the Zionists and he has given countless interviews explaining and demonstrating that Zionism is the main nemesis of the Jewish people.
In a conversation that I had with Rabbi Beck, he said: “I have lived in the UK for 35 years. I have never seen a British soldier and my children have never seen a gun. When we put the trash out for collection, we never worry that someone may think it is a bomb. Our neighbours are Muslims, we use cabs driven by Muslim drivers to send our children to school and we never worry about their safety.”
“In fact,” Rabbi Beck continued, “we never had a problem with our Muslim neighbours. I am easily identifiable as a Jewish man because of my beard and my clothes and I have never been harassed or felt in danger of walking freely anywhere I please. Would this have been the case had I been living in the Zionist state? No. It would have been impossible to say these things. And they want to tell me that I am not safe here in the UK and I have to leave and go to their state.”
The Zionist state is not a Jewish state. It is a state that was established by a racist, settler-colonial movement called Zionism. It is a racist, violent, apartheid state that is engaged in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
It is unthinkable that anyone would believe that this militaristic state represents Jewish people and that it is somehow a response to the genocide of Jews in Europe.
Zionism is built on lies
Jacque Bude is a Belgian Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust. Both of his parents were taken to Auschwitz and murdered by the Nazis when he was still a boy.
He is a secular intellectual Jew and he too is outspoken and rejects Zionism completely. He is outraged that the Zionist state uses the memory of his parents to justify the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Bude is featured in a short documentary titled The Orphan, which I had the privilege to co-produce and is now being shown at several film festivals, including the Free Palestine Festival (London) and the Nazra Short Film Festival (Italy). In this film, he describes being forced to go to “Israel” as an orphan survivor of the Nazis. “We had no choice; the entire orphanage was sent to Israel.”
“I couldn’t wait to leave and go back to my country, to Belgium, to the people who saved me,” Jacque says. “I was saved by Belgians who hid me and other Jewish children from the Nazis. Not to speak up, not to manifest for the Palestinians; that would be a betrayal of my parents; that would be unthinkable.”
Zionism is a betrayal of Jews
I repeat: Zionism represents a total betrayal of the Jewish people, particularly the Jews who were murdered by the Nazis.
It is also a betrayal of the Arab Jews, who were not Zionists and resided in countries where being Jewish was not an issue. Still, they too had to leave the countries where they lived and where they were an integral part of their societies and ended up living as second-class citizens in the Zionist state.
As Dr. Avi Shlaim says in his memoir, Memoir of an Arab Jew, “We were Iraqis.” Jewish-Arab co-existence was completely normal for my family, he writes. His family was forced to immigrate to Palestine when he was a child and then abandoned by the Zionists, who felt that Arabs, even the Arab Jews, were lesser people than the Europeans and denied them the rights, education, and privileges that were afforded to European Jewish immigrants.
Zionism was founded on lies and the legitimacy that was given to the Zionist state was founded on misrepresentations of the history of the Jewish people and the history of Palestine.
There are historical facts, an enormous body of international law, and the reality right in front of our eyes that point to the need to end all tolerance for Zionist ideology and the apartheid state that it created in Palestine.
It is time to dismantle apartheid in Palestine and make way for a free, democratic Palestine to be finally established between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.
Miko Peled is an Israeli-American activist, author, and karate instructor. He is author of the books The General’s Son: The Journey of an Israeli in Palestine, published in 2012, and Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five, published in 2017. He is also an international speaker.
