Exporting Zionism

"So we can understand what Israel is doing in various remote corners of the world when we contemplate the Middle East itself and consider what Israel is doing there. Given the past and the present of Zionism in the Middle East, what else could one expect? What Israel is doing in the Third World is simply to export the Middle East experience of Zionism. This product doesn't need much adaptation to suit the export market, because the Middle East is part of the Third World, and what Israel does in such remote corners of the world as Chile and the Philippines is a direct outgrowth of what it has done at home. What Israel has been exporting to the Third World is not just a technology of domination, but a worldview that undergirds that technology. In every situation of oppression and domination, the logic of the oppressed is pitted against the logic of the oppressor. What Israel has been exporting is the logic of the oppressor, the way of seeing the world that is tied to successful domination. What is exported is not just technology, armaments, and experience, not just expertise, but a certain frame of mind, a feeling that the Third World can be controlled and dominated, that radical movements in the Third World can be stopped, that modern Crusaders still have a future." (The Israeli Connection: Whom Israel Arms & Why, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, 1987, p 248)

"It is only a matter of time before the last redoubt of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) will fall. Armed resistance in the conventional sense of positional warfare will soon come to an end. But for all the triumphalism of the Sri Lankan army, it would be instructive to remember that since the fall of Killinochchi in October 2008, a small band of 2000+ LTTE cadres held out against 3 divisions of the Sri Lankan army for over 8 months. An army armed by China, Pakistan, helped by radars from India, manned by Indian personnel... Trained by the Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis and the Chinese... In the post-conflict situation, the Sri Lankans will keep conditions in the [Internally Displaced Persons] camps barely livable... They will... actively encourage the displaced to leave Sri Lanka for India or join the Tamil diaspora elsewhere and in a sense depopulate part of the north of that island. They will then... seek to implant Sinhalese settlers in that area... as they did successfully in the east where there is now a sizeable Sinhalese population in what was once a predominantly Tamil area... Any exodus of the Tamils from the north of Sri Lanka to India... would be inimical to the long-term interests of both the Sri Lankan Tamils as a historical community, as deeply rooted in the island nation as the Sinhalese. The Rajapakse brothers are devious but also farsighted... [They] are not merely looking at the military defeat of the Tigers; they want to write a new and final chapter of the Mahavamsa, which will conclude that the Sinhalese finally settled the 2000-year struggle with the Tamils under the Rajapakse brothers by sending the Tamils back in boats to where they originally came from." (Summer winds auger ill for the Sri Lankan Tamil, Ravi Nair, countercurrents.org, 11/5/09)

"The Sri Lankan government has learned an old lesson from, I suspect, a modern master: Israel. In order to conduct a slaughter, you ensure the pornography is unseen, illicit at best. You ban foreigners and their cameras from Tamil towns like Mulliavaikal, which was bombarded recently by the Sri Lankan army, and you lie that the 75 people killed in the hospital were blown up quite wilfully by a Tamil suicide bomber. You then give reporters a ride into the jungle, providing what in the news business is called a dateline, which suggests an eyewitness account, and you encourage the gullible to disseminate only your version and its lies. Gaza is the model. From the same masterclass you learn to manipulate the definition of terrorism as a universal menace, thus ingratiating yourself with the 'international community' (Washington) as a noble sovereign state blighted by an 'insurgency' of mindless fanaticism. The truth and lessons of the past are irrelevant. And having succeeded in persuading the United States and Britain to proscribe your insurgents as terrorists, you affirm you are on the right side of history, regardless of the fact that your government has one of the world's worst human rights records and practises terrorism by another name. Such is Sri Lanka." (Distant voices, desperate lives, John Pilger, johnpilger.com, 14/5/09)