Zionism as Protracted Madness

"I am not a psychologist, but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds." (Haim Hanegbi)

The following extraordinary story captures as well as any I've ever read the madness and cruelty of sacrificing real people on the altar of an inhuman ideological fantasy, in this case the Zionist project of forging and maintaining an exclusive ethno-religious state in Palestine at the expense of its indigenous population.

Those who call themselves Zionists should read it and weep:

"A group of Israeli Arab women flown to Paris in 1964 were met by a Mossad officer who told them that their husbands were not who they thought they were. He is not an Arab, the officer told each of them. He is a Jew.

"As related yesterday in the Tel Aviv Daily Yediot Ahronot, the story had begun a decade earlier when security officials decided to plant agents in Israeli Arab villages and towns. Israel's War of Independence, in which the new-born state battled for a year against Palestinian Arabs and the invading armies of surrounding Arab states, had ended just a few years before, in 1949. The purpose of the sleeper agents was to warn if Israeli Arabs would revolt in the event of another war.

"Ten young Jewish immigrants from Iraq were trained for a year before being sent into Israeli Arab communities, posing as refugees from the war who had escaped to a neighbouring Arab country and had now infiltrated back.

"It quickly became apparent that in order to maintain credibility the men would have to marry. It would have been suspicious for young, vigorous men to remain alone, without a spouse, said Shmuel Moriah, the security officer who headed the operation. We didn't order them to marry, but there was such an expectation.

"By the early 1960s, it was clear that the intelligence benefits from the operation were marginal and it was decided to dismantle the unit. The dilemma confronting M was whether to simply pull out the agents, leaving the women and children behind, presumably with compensation, or to transfer the families to Jewish communities where the children would be raised as Jews. The agents themselves insisted on the families remaining together.

"It was thus that the wives were invited to France, where they were met by the Mossad station chief. He told them they could either join their husbands in a Jewish community, where the children would be raised as Jews, or arrangments could be made for them to be resettled in an Arab country of their choice. The newspaper article did not explain why they were not given the choice of remaining with their children in their home village.

"The women chose to remain with their husbands. Israeli army chaplains brought to Paris converted them to Judaism and by special dispensation their young children were also recognised as Jews without undergoing separate conversion.

"The ensuing identity crisis required psychological intervention. We tried to rehabilitate the people involved but weren't really successful, said Moriah. The kids experienced serious trauma. They tried to forget their past, where they came from, but they couldn't. A few succeded in life, but most still suffer from problems." ('Your Muslim husband is a Jew', Abraham Rabinovich, The Australian, 22/2/11)