The Ben-Gurion Interrogation

by Dr abraham Weizfeld PhD
2019-01-25

Just a few days ago I was in a state of limbo sitting before two agents of the Ministry of the Interior at the Ben-Gurion airport, who assumed the roles of a Golda Meir by questioning my entry to the sacred realm of the Zionist State of Israel. It was of no consequence to the two women that my Jewish Agency Visa signed by the Consul of the State of Israel in Montréal was set for three years. The big deal was that I was not supposed to go into the Palestinian territories even though some 600,000 Zionist Israeli citizens are already living in the West Bank, with plentiful financial subsidies as well.
    Somehow they presumed that it was illegal to travel into the Palestinian territories past the famous Green Line because that was not the State of Israel, even though Israel assumes that it is. True enough, the Green Line is not an international border since Israel does not recognise the independent State of Palestine. Nonetheless, it was transformed into an impenetrable barrier by some sort of law that does not exist. By contrast, the constant flow of Christians to Bethlehem in the Palestinian Territories does not seem to violate this virtual law.
    As for Israeli citizens, there does seem to be some sort of legal barrier which is announced on big red signs at the entrance to the Palestinian cities and villages of the West Bank. It used to read that it was illegal for Israeli citizens to enter the Palestinian municipalities and anyone who actually does is subject to a penalty of two years imprisonment! But the sign was changed some years back since it gave the impression that there was an Apartheid policy in effect and so it was changed to say that the forbidden entry policy was for the safety of the Israelis concerned. Of course, the Palestinian-Israelis who went to Nablus to buy goods at advantages prices were not considered to be in violation of the edit. Hebrew-Israelis however were and are not supposed to make contact with the Palestinian non-citizens living in the ‘Territories’. The presence of the original Israelites called Samaritans or Karites, still living as Palestinians on Mount Gerizim in Nablus with identity papers from the Palestinian Authority, the Israel State as well as the State of Jordan is simply ignored.
    The routes to Israel’s colonies laced next to the Palestinian municipalities on private lands are serviced by particular roads and buses exclusive to the colonists. The idea being that seeing no Palestinians is equivalent to knowing no Palestinians which amounts to rejecting the existence of the Palestinians. This is a rather difficult task since within Israel proper, or ’48 Palestine, there are quite a number of Palestinians nonetheless who actually live in equal numbers in such municipalities as Jerusalem-Al Quds, Haifa, and Acca who are furthermore a majority in the northern regions where Christian Palestinians are more numerous. During the initial sweep of Zionist militias who forced the Palestinian villagers to escape the campaign of mini-massacres in each village during the 1947-49 Nakba, or war of independence, the Christian Palestinians were a sensitive subject for the Prime Minister Ben Gurion since Israel relied on the Christian Occidental powers for their sponsorship of the Zionist State in the United Nations General Assembly. In addition, there were some Jewish residents who protected Palestinians by placing themselves in front of the rifles of the Zionist militias as well, both of which prevented the wholesale expulsion to continue. Nonetheless, 750-825,000 Palestinian refugees were forced to flee. One friend’s grandfather told us in a video posted on my YouTube channel that the radio messages calling on the Palestinians to flee was from the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) Arabic language radio transmission and not from the Arab states radio news. At the time under British occupation, the Palestinians were not allowed to own a radio and the BBC Arabic service was amplified by loud-speakers in the town centres as the only legal radio news available.
    The remaining Israeli Palestinian population of 21-25% - if one includes the Druze Palestinian minority - is approximately the percentage projected by the Zionist political advocate Jabotinsky in his 1920 writings who advocated the expulsion of the Palestinian population to make ‘A Land without a People for a People without a Land’. Interestingly this remaining Palestinian population has 13 seats in the current Knesset-Parliament of Israel. Considering that only 50% of the Israeli-Palestinian population voted in the previous election it is conceivable that with a greater voter turnout the Palestinian parties could hold a balance of power after the upcoming election in April 2019.
    Back in the interrogation room at the Ben-Gurion Airport, a list of my sins was being written down in five pages of notes which were gleaned from my YouTube videos. One particular video made at the Jerusalem crossing point last year was my comment to an officer after he refused to answer me in the Jewish Yiddish language, making some disparaging remarks to me. My response to him was that evidently, I was Jewish but that he was a Zionist and that this was a big difference. The Palestinian journalist next to me recorded this episode and it was broadcast on the major Internet Palestinian news service Al Quds News Network and was viewed by 37,000 people. This theme is quite well appreciated by the Palestinians.
    The next topic of discussion in the interrogation room was the matter of making videos of the soldiers since they could be doing ‘bad things’. While there is a draft law prepared to make such videos of soldiers illegal, it has failed to pass in the Knesset, since the government has collapsed over the proposed bill to enforce conscription of the Orthodox Jewish residents of Jerusalem, who refuse to even register for military service. While the medias image of Jewish Orthodox ‘settlers’ has created a stereotype of fanatic Zionists, actually the greater part of the Orthodox refuse to accept the authority of the State and have carried a campaign of civil disobedience to resist induction, even going to jail to do so.  The government coalition of Netanyahu’s thus lost its major partner the Shas religious party and was forced to call an election even before the  Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit was about to submit three accusations of corruption against that Prime Minister.
    Meanwhile, at the Gaza frontier, about 300 Palestinians have been murdered, 6000 maimed - shot with live fire - while about 29,000 have been injured while demonstrating for the Right of Return since 80% of the resident population are refugees from ’48 Palestine. The Israelis who come to demonstrate on the other side of the fence have even stood in front of the soldiers M-16s to prevent further shootings.
    Now the actual story is this; the Palestinians are in a decades-long revolution against a military power that claims to be protecting the Jewish People and the Israelis in particular. This pretext is false as I can sense the response to my new book and its title ‘The Federation of Palestinian and Hebrew Nations’ elicits a favourable response from all the Palestinians that I have spoken to here in Nablus, Palestine. Meanwhile, the Left in the West is engaged in a futile unproductive debate of whether the ‘Two-State Solution’ or the ‘One-State Solution’ should be favoured. Here in Palestine that is not the question. Such a binary antimony ignores the Right of Return of the 7 million Palestinian refugees. The actual problem is that the Hebrew Israelis will not accept even the idea of becoming a minority again since that is the equivalent to being a persecuted nationality, either in the mild form of the Islamic Millet or as a targeted People by the Western Christian Nation-States. However, with a constitutional provision for National-Cultural Autonomy in a Federation, such a fear is in effect nullified.
    More so, the context to take into consideration is not that which is presumed. While there is much talk of the two sides in theocratic terms, even while a majority of Jewish people are no longer religious, there is a sociological demographic that is ignored. While the Palestinian and Hebrew populations are about equal inside the territory comprised by the State of Israel, there are two considerations that contradict this simplism. First of all, a majority of the Palestinian People live outside of Palestine as refugees under duress and are not permitted to return, in addition to the internal refugees displaced from their homes and lands. In addition, the number of Arabs inside the State is not what it may seem to some since presently half the Hebrew population are actually Arabs from North Africa in the Maghreb countries of Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt as well as Iraq, and Yemen. To consider the Arabs of the present State of Israel one must count the Jewish Arabs and so the existing balance of demographics is actually about 10 million Arabs and 3 million Jewish Hebrews who are of Ashken’azi and Russian descent. This non-theocratic context reveals the class and social strata character of the Israel State which is European in origin and dominated by an exclusive elite of Ashken’azi Zionist caste members. In effect, the Jewish Arabs have more in common with their Palestinian neighbours than they do with the elite imposed from European origins. The resultant common interests of the Arab nationalities provides for the potential transformation that reverses the historic discrimination enforced against the Palestinian Nation. Rather than force, war and violence it is the transformation of consciousness that would bring about the reversal of the hierarchical domination that relies upon militarism and fear to maintain control.
    Together with the return of the Palestinian refugees numbering 7 million, the 17 million Arabs of the country can find a common interest to live again in harmony and peace alongside the 3 million European Ashken’azim who would find their identity in the National-Cultural Autonomy of their national identity by equality with the Jewish Arabs of the same Nation. Autonomy is comprised of a shared language, religious history, educational system, government and national security police. The point, however, is that each major Nation would live in a reciprocal relation of Autonomy and not either being in a position to dictate social criteria from a position of centralised State control. In any case, the State formation is a European model that is certainly unsuitable for the multi-national social formations of the Orient and is found to be lacking even in the European context which is seeking to overcome that paradigm in the blundering attempts at Confederation in the European Union.
    This Palestinian struggle for coexistence in a multi-national society has endured over the decades and inspires other struggles in the Arab States known as the Arab Spring and furthermore stands as an example of endurance for social struggles throughout the world. The nature of the social struggle is not in itself violent but rather engenders the repression which relies upon force to maintain control. As opposed to the State it is the social struggle which seeks peace in the midst of oppression. The prospect of peace by a resilience in the face of occupation, militarism and imposed poverty looks forward to the day when the international agencies including the UN General Assembly, Security Council, the International Court of the Hague, the International Criminal Court and the Non-Aligned Nations will take it upon themselves to protect the indigenous people’s struggle for the peaceful resolution of social existence. To enable such a resolution the superpower machinations seeking to maintain their power bases and competitive edge in geopolitical manoeuvrings, oftentimes resulting in wars, must come to an end finally. It is in the resolution of this particular struggle that the world’s history will turn from the politics of power to the resolution of human interests from the premise of shared knowledge, rights and research.