October 7 & 9/11: Same Purpose
by John Spritzler
May 16, 2024
To understand the importance of the information provided below--how it enables anti-Zionists to persuade most of the passionately pro-Israel people to become anti-Zionists--it would be good to first read "Here's Why Zionism Still Has Support from a Majority of the U.S. Public."
[Also read "Israel's Government Funds Hamas and Works to Keep It In Power"]
[Also read "There Should Not Be a Jewish State"]
[Also read "Why, Really, Zionist Leaders Have Always Wanted a State of Their Own"]
[Also read "A JUST Solution to the Israel/Palestine Conflict"]
My other articles about Palestine/Israel are listed here
The events of October 7, 2023 in Israel and September 11, 2001 in the United States both benefited ruling billionaire classes, of Israel and the United States respectfully. The U.S. billionaire ruling class obviously used the 9/11 attack as a pretext for launching its mass-murder so-called "War on Terror" against governments of several Muslim nations but also as a pretext for further clamping down on the have-nots of America itself with legislation such as the Patriot Act, and additionally--very importantly!--making Americans put on hold their various struggles against the ruling class on the grounds that it was "not now patriotic" to oppose the government. This suggests that 9/11 was an inside job, and specific evidence for that supposition makes it even more certain.
Likewise, regardless of what Israel's prime minister Netanyahu did or did not know in advance about the particulars of the October 7 Hamas attack (and yes, there are good reasons to suspect that he knowingly helped to make it happen), the important fact is that the Israeli billionaire ruling class has, for many decades, been using the ongoing Palestinian violence against Israelis--of which the October 7 Hamas attack is only the most recent--as a pretext not only for attacking Palestinian civilians, most recently in Gaza with genocidal violence, but also as a pretext for clamping down on the Jewish have-nots of Israel--the Israeli Jewish working class--and making them put on hold their struggles against the Israeli ruling class on the grounds that opposing the government is not patriotic. In Israel it is "9/11" almost every single day!
I make the following four part assertion about how, and why, Israel's rulers for many decades have been working to ensure that Palestinian violence against Israeli Jews would occur. Israeli Jews were manipulated to make them view the Israeli government as their protector against a supposedly existential threat. In exactly the same way Americans were made to view the U.S. government as their protector against a supposedly existential threat on 9/11 and during the following years. The rulers of both nations used fear of a bogeyman enemy to control their own population, a population of have-nots that had many major grievances against the ruling class and that, if not controlled, constituted a threat to remove those ruling classes from power. I provide here a sample of the overwhelming evidence for this assertion. Much more evidence--all based on mainstream sources--is in other articles of mine.
MY ASSERTION
Assertion Part #1. The actual rulers of Israel are billionaires and the generals and politicians beholden to them. The rulers are not religiously motivated; they are, and have been, either atheists or agnostics, as were for example the founder of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl; Chaim Weizmann: President of Israel from 1949-52; Moshe Dayan, Israel's most famous general; Israeli prime ministers David Ben Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and Netanyahu, and no doubt many others. The actual religious belief of these Zionist leaders has been characterized this way: "God does not exist, and He gave the land to the Jews."
The purpose of Israeli violence against Palestinians has never been to make Israeli Jews safe, not at all.
For the actual billionaire rulers of Israel and the politicians and generals beholden to them (as opposed to ordinary Israeli Jews and religious fanatic Israeli Jews), the true primary purpose of seven-plus decades of Israeli violence against Palestinians (violent ethnic cleansing and denial of the refugees' right of return, brutal and humiliating military occupation of the West bank, violent enforcement of apartheid laws inside Israel) is this. It is to make Palestinians as angry at Israel as possible and thereby make them a bogeyman enemy that the billionaire ruling class of Israel pretends to protect ordinary Israeli Jews from in order thereby to get away with severely economically oppressing working class Israeli Jews--including Holocaust survivors (see here and here and here and here)--to get rich off of the Israeli Jewish working class. I have proven this with mainstream sources (here).
In this sense, October 7 was for all intents and purposes an inside job even if its exact timing and nature were not known in advance by Israel's rulers.
Class conflict within the Israeli Jewish population is real even though its significance for understanding the deeds of the government are un-reported:
Israel's billionaire ruling class oppresses the Israeli have-nots, including the Jewish working class and including Holocaust survivors
The New York Times reports August 5, 2007:
Holocaust Survivors Protest Israel’s Stipend Plan JERUSALEM, Aug. 5—Several dozen survivors of the Holocaust, supported by hundreds of younger relatives and supporters, marched in protest today in front of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office, saying that a planned government stipend was too small, insulting both the living and the dead. Carrying signs that said, “Let us live in dignity,” the demonstrators demanded that Mr. Olmert issue a formal statement revoking a government decision to provide a stipend next year of 83 shekels, or about $20, a month to the country’s Holocaust survivors. A few wore yellow stars of David, reminiscent of the ones the Nazis forced Jews to wear, but many wore black T-shirts with the words in yellow: “The Holocaust is still with us—the survivors.”
The Jewish Daily Forward in 2006 reported:
“Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away—cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living.”
On January 19, 2023 the Jerusalem Post reported:
"More Israelis are poor as gap widens between haves, have-nots"
Like the United States, Israel is an oligarchy; it is ruled by Israeli billionaires (and generals and politicians beholden to them) using the trappings of a representative democracy to hide the fact that it is a fake democracy.
Who are the Israeli billionaires? See here a listing of them by name along with their net worth and its main source. Read details here about the top 30 richest people in Israel.
Writing in Promarket, the publication of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Asher Schechter states in a November, 2019 article:
"The corruption scandals in which Netanyahu has been ensnared revealed more than just the misdeeds of one man. What they exposed is far more insidious: an entire ecosystem of institutionalized corruption in which opposing gangs of monopolistic oligarchs pressure politicians and policymakers for regulatory concessions that hinder competition, often by using the media outlets they own (and the journalists they employ) as leverage. This system has been in place long before Netanyahu came to power."
Haaretz newspaper wrote on August 28, 2019 about the Israeli media owned by the billionaires in an article headlined:
"How Israeli Media Became a Playground for Billionaires: Instead of developing a competitive, decentralized market, a handful of businessmen are acquiring newspapers, websites and TV channels in order to gain influence."
The Israeli working class rose up against the billionaire ruling class in 2011
The Guardian reported:
Israeli protests: 430,000 take to streets to demand social justice
Up to 300,000 take part in Tel Aviv, 50,000 in Jerusalem and 40,000 in Haifa in Israel's biggest ever demonstration
Harriet Sherwood in Tel Aviv
Sun 4 Sep 2011 06.40 EDT
"Saturday's demonstrations followed 50 days of protests that have rattled political leaders and led commentators and analysts to ask whether a new social movement would transform Israeli domestic politics for the next generation.
"The movement, which has the support of about 90% of the population according to opinion polls, began when a small group of activists erected tents in Tel Aviv's prosperous Rothschild Boulevard in protest at high rents and house prices.
"Tent cities mushroomed across the country and protesters rallied behind the slogan: "The people demand social justice." Among the issues raised were the cost of housing, transport, childcare, food and fuel; the low salaries paid to many professionals, including doctors and teachers; tax reform; and welfare payments. The government established a committee led by the economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg to examine the protesters' demands, which is due to report later this month.
"Demonstrators in Tel Aviv on Saturday night blew whistles and banged drums as they marched in a carnival atmosphere to a large square for a rally. Residents hung banners from balconies and cheered as they passed." [my emphasis]
Another newspaper subsequently reported:
"While the social justice movement lacked a centralized leadership or clear goals for most of the summer, this didn’t stop it from gaining widespread sympathy from constituencies far beyond its leftist base. “Even though the momentum was clearly from the Left, all kinds of Israelis joined,” explained Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “There were settlers…there were Haredim. It was seen as a national movement.” A poll released one month prior by Israel’s Channel 10 found that 85 percent of the country supported the protestors, which would be impressive in its own right, but proved even more significant once the numbers were examined in depth." [my emphasis]
Note that the demonstrations had the support of around 90% of the population! This wave of demonstrations was not about grievances that only affected the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who are well known to be a sub-set of Jews in Israel who suffer from discrimination. No! It was against the economic oppression that harms ALL working class Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews. Nor were the grievances of the demonstrators things that only affected Israel's non-Jews: The Guardian article reports that some people on the Left didn't like that the demonstrations were against how Jews as well as non-Jews were oppressed:
"The protests have been criticized by some on the left for not paying more attention to the discrimination suffered by Israeli-Arabs, who make up 20% of Israel's population, or Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories."
These demonstrations elicited solidarity between Jews and non-Jews. The Guardian reports:
"At a rally in Haifa, Shahin Nasser, an Israeli-Arab, said: 'Today we are changing the rules of the game. No more coexistence based on hummus and fava beans. What is happening here is true coexistence, when Arabs and Jews march together shoulder to shoulder calling for social justice and peace. We've had it.'"
BUT THEN...
Zionism Killed the Movement
What did Prime Minister Netanyahu do? Did he grant the demands of “his people”? No! He killed the movement by letting the Zionist ideology do its job: demanding that the demonstrators (the Jews, at least) act "patriotically," i.e., support their [billionaire- controlled] government in the fight against “the real enemy”: Palestinians. When Hamas fires its rockets onto Israeli noncombatant civilians it greatly helps Israeli leaders such as Netanyahu to control the rebellious Israeli working class! Netanyahu killed the movement with Zionism. Here's how.
The Saturday September 4 "March of the Million" took place shortly after an attack (on August 18) in which Palestinians killed eight Israelis and Israel responded with an air attack. In response to the Palestinians' attack, "protest organizers decided that the demonstrations planned for that Saturday would still go ahead, but as silent candle-lit marches without speeches or music. From this point on, movement spokespeople’s statements began to pander directly to sentiments of vulnerability and patriotism." [https://libcom.org/library/israels-%E2%80%98tent-protests%E2%80%99-chilling-effect-nationalism] Fear of the "real enemy"--Palestinians--began to demobilize the movement.
A Guardian article September 4, 2011--one day following the "March of the Million" that was the peak of the movement-- reported another example of how the bogeyman enemy of Palestinians, which was created by the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, was used to demobilize this huge Israeli working class movement against the Israeli billionaire ruling class:
"Weekly demonstrations, whose turnout had been steadily building, were suspended for two weeks after an attack by militants near the Egyptian-Israeli border in which eight Israelis were killed. Some commentators suggested that the movement had lost its momentum."
Despite the huge participation and support for this movement, it did not win its demands. As the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported/admitted five years later about the effect of the demonstrations, in an article trying to put a positive "successful" gloss on them:
"It may not have changed the fact that those who led the government then are still in charge today. It didn’t even change Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s basic way of thinking about the economy and society, and it didn’t change the relative amounts spent on civilian social services as a percentage of GDP. These have all remained as they were."
The Israeli billionaire ruling class knows that, as long as Israeli working class Jews think that the government it controls is protecting them from the “real enemy” (Palestinians), then they will not mount a serious challenge to the power of that billionaire ruling class despite the serious grievances they have against it.
Assertion Part #2. Israel’s government for decades has been funding HAMAS and working to keep it in power in order to make the Palestinian bogeyman enemy maximally frightening--as the October 7 attack, of course, did in spades--but as Hamas's long history of overt terrorist violence aimed at killing non-combatant Israeli civilians (suicide bombings, rockets aimed at civilians in towns such as Sderot) also did. I prove this and explain the reason for it here, again with mainstream sources.
Forbes on January 16, 2009 reports:
"Incredibly, Israel also supplies Hamas with cash. It began transferring truckloads of cash to Gaza after Hamas' violent takeover of the territory in June 2007. The first transfer of more than $51 million (delivered in Israeli shekels) was purportedly to strengthen the influence of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the Gaza Strip and pay the salaries of 35,000 Palestinian Authority employees then allegedly loyal to him. Among those employees, however, were Ismail Haniya, the Hamas-appointed prime minister in Gaza, and Mahmoud Zahar, Hamas' foreign minister.
"Zahar prides himself on many successful terrorist attacks against Israel, and his position regarding Israel is clear. "All of Palestine, every inch of Palestine belongs to the Muslims," he has said. If the goal was to strengthen Abbas' position, the cash should have been delivered to him in the West Bank city of Ramallah. From there, he could have transferred the money to Gaza, as he has done in the past, and claim credit for it." [ https://www.forbes.com/2009/01/16/gaza-hamas-funding-oped-cx_re_0116ehrenfeld.html?sh=707b61407afb ]
Some so-called experts, such as Professor John Mearscheimer, in a talk given May 15, 2024, argue that the reason Netanyahu supported Hamas was because he and Hamas both opposed the two-state solution in contrast to the PLO (Palestine Authority), which supported it; Netanyahu thus wanted to have Hamas prevail over the PLO. The problem with this explanation is three-fold.
First, Israeli support for Hamas was ongoing (for proof see items b, c and d in the section "Here's Evidence that Israel Funds Hamas" in my article here) when Ehud Olmert was prime minister from 2006 to 2009 and was adamantly in favor of a two-state solution. Ha'aretz November 29, 2007, reported:
" 'If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished,' Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
" 'The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America, will be the first to come out against us,' Olmert said, 'because they will say they cannot support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for all its residents.' "
Second, as Netanyahu explains in this May 14, 2024 video interview, the prime minister only opposes a two-state solution before the defeat of Hamas when that solution would enable Hamas to be in power in the Palestinian state and to control a military force capable of threatening Israel; he says he does in fact want there to be a Palestinian state (i.e., a two-state solution) with the political power to rule over its residents, just not with the power to have a military force that could threaten Israel. Netanyahu thus supports a two-state solution. Mearsheimer's contention that Netanyahu supported Hamas because Hamas opposed the two-state solution makes no sense. Why would Netanyahu support Hamas because of its opposition to a two-state solution when his fear of Hamas controlling a Palestinian state is the only reason he opposed a two-state solution going into effect before the defeat of Hamas?
Third, Hamas does not in fact oppose the two-state solution. APnews.com April 25, 2024 reports:
Hamas official says group would lay down its arms if an independent Palestinian state is established
ISTANBUL (AP) — A top Hamas political official told The Associated Press the Islamic militant group is willing to agree to a truce of five years or more with Israel and that it would lay down its weapons and convert into a political party if an independent Palestinian state is established along pre-1967 borders.
The comments by Khalil al-Hayya in an interview Wednesday came amid a stalemate in months of talks for a cease-fire in Gaza. The suggestion that Hamas would disarm appeared to be a significant concession by the militant group officially committed to Israel’s destruction.
Assertion Part #3. The early Zionist leaders who became Israel’s leaders never were concerned with the welfare and safety of ordinary Jews. Early Zionist leaders opposed rescue efforts of Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust because these rescue efforts didn’t advance the Zionist leaders’ goal of obtaining a Jewish working class of their own to get rich and powerful off of in Palestine. I prove this and explain the reason for it here, again with mainstream sources.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister: No friend of ordinary Jews!
"If I knew that it would be possible to save all the [Jewish] children in Germany by bringing them over to England and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Israel, then I opt for the second alternative. For we must take into account not only the lives of these children but also the history of the people of Israel." [26] —David Ben-Gurion, 1938
"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 [Jewish] orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20] The reason for this cruelty? To send the children to Palestine to fight Palestinians so that people like David Ben-Gurion could have a “state of their own” to rule over. [from Baruch Kimmerling’s review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II [20]
In a letter to The Times (of London), June 6, 1961, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain, describes how the Zionist leadership in Great Britain opposed efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust. He writes that, contrary to the claims that the British government was "largely indifferent to and unwilling to take action in defense of the European Jews who were being massacred daily by the Nazis in spite of efforts by Zionist leaders to persuade the British Foreign Office to rouse itself into action on behalf of the victims...My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favour of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help."
Rabbi Schonfeld goes on to describe how, in December, 1942, he and others formed a Council for Rescue from the Nazi Terror which initiated a Parliamentary Rescue Committee supported by leading members of both Houses, and how they submitted a motion to Parliament calling for the government "to declare its readiness to find temporary refuge in its own territories or in territories under its control for endangered persons who are able to leave those countries; to appeal to the governments of countries bordering on enemy and enemy-occupied countries to allow temporary asylum and transit facilities for such persons; to offer to those governments, so far as practicable, such help as may be needed to facilitate their cooperation; and to invite the other Allied governments to consider similar action." But this is what happened, according to the rabbi's letter:
"As a result of widespread concern and the persistence of a few, this motion achieved within two weeks a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties. This purely humanitarian proposal met with sympathy from government circles, and I should add that H.M.Government did, in fact, issue some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits -- indeed, in favour of any threatened Jewish family whom we could name. Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum, voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: 'Why not Palestine?' The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives and that Britain could not then add to her Middle East problems, were of no avail.
"At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.P.s and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help? It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: 'Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland -- the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight'."
Assertion Part #4. The ruling American billionaire plutocracy supports Israel's violent ethnic cleansing project because:
a) it creates the "terrorist Muslim freedom-hating" bogeyman enemy that U.S. rulers use as a pretext for attacking governments and forces abroad whenever it wishes and for justifying the huge military industrial complex and enriching its owners at the expense of American have-nots: exactly the same purpose as 9/11;
b) it enables anti-democratic pro-U.S. governments in the Middle East to divert the anger that their own people have against the governments ruling them instead to anger at Israel; such governments pretend to oppose Israel but don't really do so, with the excuse that Israel is too powerful militarily (thanks to U.S support); and
c) it furthers the U.S. rulers' divide-and-rule strategy for controlling the American have-nots by falsely framing the conflict as "the Jews versus the Palestinians" and thereby pitting good people who support Israel against good people who support the Palestinians.
The glaring evidence for the pro-Zionism of the entire American billionaire class is the fact that not a single American billionaire opposes the Israeli violent ethnic cleansing project or does anything to weaken the pro-Zionism forces in the United States by doing the most obvious thing to accomplish that: tell the public the truth about the anti-working-class, including anti-Jewish-working-class, purpose of Israel's ethnic cleansing project.
Why this four-part assertion is so important, and why it is censored
If the public knew the truth about the real anti-working-class--including anti-Jewish-working-class--purpose of Israeli violence against Palestinians, and the truth about why the American billionaire ruling plutocracy unanimously supports Israel, then the vast majority of the public—INCLUDING GOOD PEOPLE WHO CURRENTLY ARE PASSIONATELY PRO-ISRAEL!—would be condemning Israeli violence against Palestinians the way that the vast majority of the public condemned apartheid in South Africa in the early 90s once they learned of its existence. I know this is true from personal experience talking with passionately pro-Israel individuals.
When people understand the truth about the conflict, then there will be massive unity of Jews and Palestinians demanding and fighting for a JUST solution to the conflict, such as the one I describe here, which would have the enthusiastic support of most Israeli Jews and virtually all Palestinians, but be vehemently opposed by the 18 wealthiest families in Israel.
For this reason, billionaires--American and Israeli both--work hard to censor the KEY TRUTH: the anti-working-class, including anti-Jewish-working-class, purpose of Israeli violence. It's not only the mass media and universities that censor this truth. All of the major anti-Zionism organizations are funded by billionaires such as the Rockefellers and George Soros who make their funding conditional on the organization censoring this KEY TRUTH that unifies the have-nots instead of dividing them as does the false framework of "the Jews versus the Palestinians." (For evidence of this censorship see here (re BDS, JVP, etc.) and here (focused on JVP) and here (focused on the Big $ funding))
The ruling billionaire plutocracies of the world can only remain in power and can only get away with treating the have-nots like dirt by controlling and dividing the have-nots with lies and bogeyman enemies and violent repression.
In order for Israel's rulers to have succeeded (as they have) in making most Israelis view Palestinians as an existential threat and thus fear (and hate, which is essentially the same thing as fear) Palestinians, Israeli rulers had to resort to decades of violent ethnic cleansing and persecution of Palestinians coupled with support for the maximally frightening terrorist Palestinians in Hamas, all the while censoring anybody explaining the truth about what the Israeli rulers were doing and why they were doing it.
The reason such prolonged and extreme and violent measures are required by oppressors such as the rulers of Israel to make have-nots support their own oppressors and the oppressors of others is this. Most people have the opposite values of the small oppressor classes and unless controlled with extreme measures they try to act on those positive values. Most people--the vast majority!--want what I call an egalitarian world with the rich removed from power, with real--not fake--democracy and with no rich and no poor. They want society to be based on the egalitarian values of truth, of fairness, of justice, of mutual aid and genuine democracy.
As the events in Israel in 2011--the enormous social justice protest movement--show, even though the Israeli have-nots were defeated because they had been made to fear Palestinians more than the Israeli billionaire ruling class, nonetheless what they wanted and fought for was to make Israel more egalitarian, more genuinely democratic and equal.
The main obstacle to making an egalitarian revolution is hopelessness. The obstacle is that most people wrongly believe that such a revolution is impossible because (they wrongly believe) hardly anybody else also wants it, and hence that it is foolish to organize an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement and instead the best one can hope to do is win some band aid reforms of the class inequality that leave the rich in power. We CAN replace this hopelessness with hopefulness, as I discuss here. And we CAN remove the rich from power, as I discuss here.
Ruling class censorship of the truth about conflicts such as the "Israel/Palestine conflict" is for the purpose of making have-nots remain convinced that it is not true that the vast majority of people want to remove the rich from power and abolish class inequality. It is for the purpose of making us feel hopeless. This is why it is vital to declare the truth about such conflicts.
MORE EVIDENCE FOR MY ASSERTION FROM MAINSTREAM SOURCES REPORTING ON ISRAEL (Note: mainstream sources are cited either directly or indirectly via other articles.)
Events in Israel 2011 Reveal that Israel's Rulers Made Oct. 7 Happen In Order to Use Palestinians as a bogeyman enemy to control the Israeli working class
Whether or not Israel's rulers knew in advance the exact (date, time and place) particular details of the Hamas October 7 attack, the fact is that they have been working for decades to ensure that such attacks by Palestinians against Israelis would occur. Thus Israeli leaders have been treating Palestinians like dirt to make them as angry as possible against Israel, and they have been funding Hamas (starting in the late 1970s) and working to keep Hamas in power because Hamas, in contrast to the less frightening (to Jews) Palestinian Authority, commits terrorist violence (first suicide bombings, then rockets and lately Oct. 7) aimed at killing unarmed Israeli civilians and officially aims to make Islam sovereign in all of Palestine. Israeli rulers did all of this in order to make the Palestinian bogeyman enemy as frightening as possible to the Israeli working class Jews whom they control with this bogeyman enemy.
The events in Israel in 2011 that are discussed next provide a stark illustration of the anti-working-class--including anti-Jewish-working-class--purpose of Israel's violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and of its decades-long support and funding of Hamas. These events make it clear that Israel's rulers were happy because of, not angry at, the recent October 7 attack.
What happened in 2011 in Israel?
In July 2011 the people in Israel (mainly, but not only Jews) launched a huge wave of protests against the Israeli government over the issue of their economic impoverishment.
“The 2011 Israeli social justice protests (Hebrew: מְחָאַת צֶדֶק חֶבְרָתִי), which are also referred to by various other names in the media, were a series of demonstrations in Israel beginning in July 2011 involving hundreds of thousands of protesters from a variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds opposing the continuing rise in the cost of living (particularly housing) and the deterioration of public services such as health and education. A common rallying cry at the demonstrations was the chant ‘The people demand social justice!’
“As the protests expanded during August 2011, the demonstrations began to also focus on other related issues relating to the social order and power structure in Israel.”
The movement kept growing and growing, with mass demonstrations and people pitching tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The movement reached its peak on September 3, 2011:
“On Saturday, September 3, an estimated 450,000 people participated in several demonstrations which were held over various locations across Israel and which were referred to by protest organizers as ‘The March of the Million.’
“In the Tel Aviv march rally, which was held between the Rothschild Boulevard and the State Square, an estimated 300 thousand protesters participated though using proprietary technology to measure mobile phone signals, an Israeli start-up gave a reduced estimate of the crowd of a still impressive 150,000 people in Tel Aviv. Over 100 thousand people demonstrated throughout the rest of Israel in various demonstrations (40 thousand in Jerusalem, 30 thousand in Haifa, 15 thousand in Afula, 8,000 in Kiryat Motzkin, 3,000 in Nahariya, 2,500 in Hadera, 3000 in Karmiel and Rosh Pina, 5000 in Kiryat Shmona, 10 thousand in Kfar Yehoshua, 500 in Arad, 800 in Mitzpe Ramon and approximately 1,000 in Eilat).[68][69][70]
“The next day, Channel 10 reported about an internal memo describing the demands of the organizers including 45 billion NIS which would obligate the government to increase the budget. The organizers proposed to make up for the shortfall with increased taxes of the rich, inheritance tax, and using surplus tax money.”
People were demanding basic economic things, such as affordable housing. Many Israelis could no longer afford to pay their rent. And the demonstrators wanted relief to come in part from “increased taxes of the rich.”
“The cost of living in Israel is horrendous,” said Daniel Levy, a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. “It’s hellishly expensive compared to what people earn and the inequality gap has only gotten wider.”
The Guardian reported:
“Saturday’s demonstrations followed 50 days of protests that have rattled political leaders and led commentators and analysts to ask whether a new social movement would transform Israeli domestic politics for the next generation.
“The movement, which has the support of about 90% of the population according to opinion polls, began when a small group of activists erected tents in Tel Aviv’s prosperous Rothschild Boulevard in protest at high rents and house prices.
“Tent cities mushroomed across the country and protesters rallied behind the slogan: ‘The people demand social justice.’ Among the issues raised were the cost of housing, transport, childcare, food and fuel; the low salaries paid to many professionals, including doctors and teachers; tax reform; and welfare payments. The government established a committee led by the economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg to examine the protesters’ demands, which is due to report later this month.
“Demonstrators in Tel Aviv on Saturday night blew whistles and banged drums as they marched in a carnival atmosphere to a large square for a rally. Residents hung banners from balconies and cheered as they passed.”
Another newspaper subsequently reported:
“While the social justice movement lacked a centralized leadership or clear goals for most of the summer, this didn’t stop it from gaining widespread sympathy from constituencies far beyond its leftist base. ‘Even though the momentum was clearly from the Left, all kinds of Israelis joined,’ explained Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. ‘There were settlers…there were Haredim. It was seen as a national movement.’ A poll released one month prior by Israel’s Channel 10 found that 85 percent of the country supported the protestors, which would be impressive in its own right, but proved even more significant once the numbers were examined in depth.”
Note that the demonstrations had the support of around 90% of the population! This wave of demonstrations was not about grievances that only affected the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who are well known to be a sub-set of Jews in Israel who suffer from discrimination. No! It was against the economic oppression that harms ALL working class Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews. Nor were the grievances of the demonstrators issues that only affected Israel’s non-Jews: The Guardian article reported that some people on the Left did not like that the demonstrations were against how Jews as well as non-Jews were oppressed:
“The protests have been criticized by some on the left for not paying more attention to the discrimination suffered by Israeli-Arabs, who make up 20% of Israel’s population, or Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.”
These demonstrations elicited solidarity between Jews and non-Jews. The Guardian reported:
“At a rally in Haifa, Shahin Nasser, an Israeli-Arab, said: ‘Today we are changing the rules of the game. No more coexistence based on hummus and fava beans. What is happening here is true coexistence, when Arabs and Jews march together shoulder to shoulder calling for social justice and peace. We’ve had it.’”
Another Guardian article reported on how the protesters included “middle class” people (aka working class people better off than other working class people):
“The Facebook-driven tent villages across Israel have echoes of the pro-democracy movements across the Middle East, but Nadav was quick to point out important differences. ‘This is a middle-class protest, focused on one issue. People in Egypt didn’t have a lot to lose. They had no civil rights and no trust in their government.’ But, he added, ‘I’ve kind of lost my trust in my government too because it doesn’t serve my needs.’
“The Israeli government is alarmed at the spread of the protests and how the issue has united left and right, religious and secular, and the middle-class with their less-affluent fellow citizens.
“The housing protest swiftly followed a widespread consumer boycott of cottage cheese in protest at the high cost of dairy products. Dairy companies were forced to cut prices, and the government initiated a review of the industry.”
An indication of the anger fueling the demonstrations is the fact that a small businessman, a Jew named Moshe Silman, during a 2012 demonstration, committed suicide by self-immolation; here is what Wikipedia reports about his suicide letter:
“Silman set himself on fire during a social justice demonstration held on 14 July 2012. In the suicide letter he passed out before he burnt himself, he accused the state of Israel and the welfare system of failing to treat disadvantaged people in his situation. He blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz for the economic policy that led him to commit suicide: ‘I hold the State of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and Steinitz, the bastards, accountable for the humiliation which the disadvantaged citizens, go through every day, as the rich and the government workers take from the poor.’”
Clearly, there was working class solidarity that frightened the Israeli ruling upper class!
Zionism Killed the Movement
What did Prime Minister Netanyahu do? Did he grant the demands of “his people”? No! He killed the movement by letting the Zionist ideology do its job: demanding that the demonstrators (the Jews, at least) act “patriotically,” i.e., support their [billionaire-controlled] government in the fight against “the real enemy”: Palestinians. When Hamas fires its rockets onto Israeli noncombatant civilians it greatly helps Israeli leaders such as Netanyahu to control the rebellious Israeli working class! Netanyahu killed the movement with Zionism. Here’s how.
The “March of the Million” took place shortly after an attack (on August 18) in which Palestinians killed eight Israelis and Israel responded with an air attack. In response to the Palestinians’ attack, “protest organizers decided that the demonstrations planned for that Saturday would still go ahead, but as silent candle-lit marches without speeches or music. From this point on, movement spokespeople’s statements began to pander directly to sentiments of vulnerability and patriotism.” Fear of the “real enemy”—Palestinians—began to demobilize the movement.
A Guardian article —one day following the “March of the Million” that was the peak of the movement—reported another example of how the bogeyman enemy of Palestinians, which was created by the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, was used to demobilize this huge Israeli working class movement against the Israeli billionaire ruling class:
“Weekly demonstrations, whose turnout had been steadily building, were suspended for two weeks after an attack by militants near the Egyptian-Israeli border in which eight Israelis were killed. Some commentators suggested that the movement had lost its momentum.”
Despite the huge participation and support for this movement, it did not win its demands. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported/admitted five years later about the effect of the demonstrations, in an article trying to put a positive “successful” gloss on them:
“It may not have changed the fact that those who led the government then are still in charge today. It didn’t even change Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s basic way of thinking about the economy and society, and it didn’t change the relative amounts spent on civilian social services as a percentage of GDP. These have all remained as they were.”
Preventing Israeli working class Jewish people from winning their struggles against their oppression by the billionaire Jewish ruling class is the very purpose of Zionism. It is the purpose of the brutal and violent ethnic cleansing of non-Jews (Palestinians) from most of Palestine: to create a bogeyman enemy with which to frighten and control and thereby exploit and oppress working class Israeli Jews.
As long as the Israeli billionaire ruling class can keep most Israeli working class Jews mortally frightened of Palestinians as “the real enemy,” a veritable existential enemy, then the ruling class can be confident that these Israeli Jews, despite their real grievances against the Israeli ruling class, will limit how far they will go to challenge its power over them because they view it as their protector against their real enemy.
Until Israeli Jews see that Palestinians are not their enemy but indeed their ally against their real enemy, they will continue to remain oppressed by the Israeli ruling class.
This anti-working-class function/purpose of Zionism is seldom mentioned explicitly in the mass media. But there are indirect references to it. Here is one, reported by The Christian Science Monitor, that makes the point by noting that, when the dangerous bogeyman enemy is not in the news, then working class people feel more free to stand up against the Israeli ruling class:
“Lull in Palestinian violence turns Israelis’ attention to pocketbook issues
“Netanyahu has touted himself as a responsible economic leader who supports liberalization amid a globalized economy, but the public also remembers him cutting social-welfare payments and pushing privatization of state companies as finance minister in the first half of the 2000s.
“‘The housing is a symptom … . Although there is a really good macroeconomic aggregates like GDP [gross domestic product] growth and unemployment, the problem is that we have very large income inequality,’ says Momi Dahan, an economics professor at Hebrew University.
“He says that such issues are coming to the fore because of a relative low in Palestinian violence.
“‘When it is quiet in the area of security, then all of the other problems come to the surface,’ Prof. Dahan says. ‘People are sick of the rules where some people get a six-digit salary, and a cleaning woman or a cashier has a hard time feeding their kids.’”
At the beginning of the 2011 demonstrations in July, The Christian Science Monitor reported about how Israelis were able to focus on their oppression by the Israeli upper ruling class (aka “pocketbook issues”) when their fear of Palestinians (aka “Israeli-Palestinian violence”) was relatively low:
“Widespread fatigue with talks about an ever-elusive peace agreement, together with a relative low in Israeli-Palestinian violence, has given new momentum to such pocketbook issues.
“‘There’s all the time discussion of the occupation. But the real occupation is not the occupation of Gaza or the West Bank. It’s the economic occupation,’ says Amit Adler, a writer and spokesman for the Facebook-organized protest. ‘It is all a distraction. We want to focus on the real issues. It’s the economy, stupid.’”
The flip side of the coin, of course (which The Christian Science Monitor did not point out), is that, when “Israeli-Palestinian violence” is at a relative high, then that takes away “momentum to such pocketbook issues.”
Chemi Shalev, writing in his Haaretz newspaper article about why the Israeli government uses over-the-top detention of individuals who support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, noted that it is for the purpose of creating an exaggerated sense of fear in Israelis out of proportion to the real danger BDS poses to Israel’s government:
“For Netanyahu and his partners, who wither when Israelis feel safe, and thrive when they feel threatened, isolated, and unfairly maligned, it’s a virtual slam dunk.” [Cited by Sylvain Cypel in The State of Israel vs. The Jews, location 2159 e-book version.]
In Israel, "9/11" is everyday
Americans old enough to remember the effect of 9/11 (the September 11, 2001, attack on the NYC World Trade Center and Pentagon by—supposedly at least—Muslim terrorists that killed almost 3,000 people, mostly civilians) on anti-establishment activism know that it totally put the kibosh on all such activism because people felt that it was unpatriotic to go against “our government” that was defending us against “the terrorists.” The events of 9/11 prompted a “rally around the flag” response, as does any perceived attack by a foreign enemy. The world-wide anti-globalization movement, which was described even by some in the mass media as an anti-capitalism movement, was at its peak just before 9/11 but then virtually vanished as a result of 9/11.
In Israel, the government can use the “Palestinian conflict” to make it seem like a 9/11 attack whenever it needs to put the kibosh on pro-working class activism. This is why there is a “Palestinian conflict” in the first place: It enables the Israeli upper class to control, dominate and oppress “its people.”
The Nation magazine, in a 2014 article titled “Israel’s Bloated War Machine: Prime Minister Netanyahu promotes and sometimes manufactures an endless series of national security crises. The military and settlers win; everyone else loses,” put it this way:
“Netanyahu controls the people of Israel by intimidating them with existential threats—if it’s not nuclear Iran, then it’s the tunnels of Hamas. If not ISIS, then Hezbollah in Lebanon. If not an international flotilla of solidarity activists trying to break the blockade on Gaza, it’s anti-Semitism taking over Europe. The premier has led his people to believe that it’s them against the world.”
Zionist Israeli leaders have worked very hard and unfortunately very successfully—with help from certain anti-working class Palestinian leaders such as the leaders of Hamas, as I discuss here—to make Jewish Israelis fear (and hence hate) ordinary Palestinians. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of Israeli Jewish opinion found:
“‘One of our key goals was to determine if there were areas of overlap in opinions and feeling among Israelis and Palestinians that might offer avenues for negotiation, leading the parties closer to peace,’ said Daniel Egel, lead author of the report and an economist at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND. ‘Sadly, the data show the opposite. The data highlight the deep distrust and profound animosity of each side for the other.’”
The social justice movement was unable to become a movement that could truly win its demands because it was unwilling to refute the Israeli government’s reason for not granting—paying for—those demands, namely that the money had to be used instead to pay for the bloated military and the expensive subsidies to the West Bank Israeli settlers for the purpose of enforcing the military occupation of the West Bank in order to (supposedly) protect Jews from the “real enemy”—Palestinians.
Using the government of Israel to carry out violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make Palestinians angry at Israel and then portraying this anger as hatred of Jews so that Israeli Jews will in turn fear and hate Palestinians is the same divide-and-rule strategy that the American upper class in the southern states used to divide-and-rule working class Americans. They did so by using Jim Crow discrimination against Blacks to pit Black and White working class people against each other in order to oppress them both, as Martin Luther King, Jr., explained in a speech you can listen to and read here. The violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is no more about protecting ordinary Jews from harm than the racist Jim Crow laws were about improving the lives of the poor Whites!