Many may not know that it was ten years before the conception of Israel that Albert Einstein speaking at New York’s Commodore Hotel said that: “A Jewish state with borders and an army runs counter to the essential nature of Judaism and I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain. I should much rather see agreement with the Arabs on living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.”
On 04 December 1948, 28 Jewish scientists and scholars including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt wrote an open letter to The New York Times. It coincided with Israel’s Freedom Party head Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States.
Claiming that Begin “openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state,” the letter stated that “the most disturbing political phenomena in Israel, is the emergence of the Freedom Party, a political party akin to the Nazi and Fascist parties formed out of the membership of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist organization in Palestine.”
Denouncing the Zionist’s Deir Yassin Massacre, the letter urged “all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism. The terrorist party betrays its real character and we can judge by its actions what it may do in the future.” The warning went unheeded. The Freedom Party morphed into Israel’s Likud Party, the genocidal entity that rules Israel today.
Following the death of Israel’s president Chaim Weizmann in 1952, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion asked Einstein to become Israel’s president. Einstein turned down the request saying that as president he would have to assume moral responsibility for the decisions of others; something that would be in conflict with his conscience.
In a Guardian article, renowned author and journalist Max Hastings recollected a person saying at a Jerusalem dinner party in 1977 that: “In the next war we’ve got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good.” Hastings wrote: “The words chilled my blood – that young person was Binyamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel.”
Today, the same Netanyahu has like-minded zealots as coalition partners. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power Party, has declared to build a synagogue in the Al-Aqsa compound. Bezalel Smotrich, heading the Religious Zionism party, holds that after the 1948 war, Ben-Gurion should have expelled all Palestinians from Israel.
This duo has repeatedly threatened to withdraw from the coalition government if Netanyahu cedes to a Gaza ceasefire. Netanyahu’s political survival in continuing with Gaza’s genocide has found confluence with the Zionist dream of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
After his speech at the US Congress to standing ovation galore, Netanyahu ordered the assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr in Beirut, Hamas official Samer al-Hajj in Sidon and Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
An encouraged Netanyahu’s provocative assassinations in Iran and Lebanon along with strikes inside Lebanon are part of his gambit to expand the war theater. He knows that Iran and Hezbollah have accumulated Israel-specific force over the past years. This conflagration may prove as destructive for Israel as it shall for its forced war adversaries.
Maniacally shrewd that he is, this is why Netanyahu is creating conditions that shall force the US and Europe to step in directly to aid Israel. This is an atrocious game plan, given that Israel’s myth of military and intelligence invincibility lies shattered with Hamas’s October 7 assault.
Eminent Israeli historian Illian Pappe describes this reversal in his article titled “The collapse of Zionism.” He likens the Hamas assault to an earthquake that strikes an old building with the already present cracks reaching the foundations. He contends that imposition of a Zionist state on Palestine, fomented by continuous wars, has intensified its disintegration with the imminent downfall of Zionism.
A predictor to this is unprecedented public condemnation globally and Israel’s fast-draining coffers. Rakefet Aminoach, former CEO of Israel’s Bank Leumi, says that having spent over $67.3 billion to date, the Gaza war further drains the Israeli economy of $260 million daily. This has forced its defense establishment to demand an annual increase of at least $5.39 billion.
Latest data from Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reveals that since the Gaza offensive, one in three businesses have either shut down or are operating at merely 20% capacity. Israel’s regions closest to Gaza are reeling with the closure of more than two-thirds of their businesses.
Tel Aviv’s Start-Up Nation Policy Institute confirms that 80% of Israel’s vaunted tech firms are facing a massive downturn amid the ever-worsening security situation. So dire is Israel’s predicament that 300 prominent Israeli and foreign economists have urged Netanyahu through a letter to “immediately come to his senses” and demanded a “fundamental change in national priorities.”
The images of the Gaza genocide are so horrendous that in Israel itself, young men and women dubbed refuseniks, are defying compulsory military service. Many of them have been sent to prison for the same. Thousands of Israelis pouring into the streets now see and comprehend what insecurity Netanyahu and the Zionist juggernaut has wrought on their collective lives.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an eminent Israeli scientist and philosopher, famously claimed that “with Palestine’s occupation, Israel has forfeited its right to self-defense” and that “Israel was turning its soldiers into Judeo-Nazis.” In a 1968 essay “The Territories”, Leibowitz quoted the Bible verse: “When you returned you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination” (Jeremiah 2:7).
Like other Israeli intellectuals, Leibowitz also foretold the steps leading to the end of Zionism saying: “The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime will also prevail in Israel. National pride will transport us from rising nationalism to an extreme messianic one. The third stage will be brutishness, with the final one being the end of Zionism.”
Avraham Burg, former speaker of Israel’s Knesset, echoes Leibowitz’s words admitting that “the Israeli nation today rests on oppression and injustice. The end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation.”
The Palestinians remain ever defiant and resolute in the face of genocide. The unparalleled barbarities wrought on them are the violent death throes of the Zionist abomination.
Mir Adnan Aziz is a freelance contributor based in Pakistan. He can be reached at miradnanaziz@gmail.com
