A brief history of Israel's support for apartheid, atrocities, war crimes & genocide around the world. A 🧵
In the 1970s & 80s, Israel was one of the main arms suppliers 972mag.com/investigate-is…) to Chile's military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Israel trained (haaretz.com/israel-news/20…) the country's security forces, who abducted & murdered 3,000 persons & tortured 35,000.
In the early 1980s, Israel helped Guatemala's Efraín Ríos Montt carry out a coup. Israel supplied the country w/ weapons (nacla.org/news/2013/4/23…) to slaughter 45K-60K Mayans in Guatemala & destroy 440 Mayan villages b/w 1981-1983. Many call it genocide. (papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…)
During the 1970s & 80s, Israel became apartheid South Africa's most important arms supplier, all the while South Africa saved Israel's cash-starved defense industry after the apartheid state spent an unprecedented $1.7 billion on Israeli weapons. haaretz.com/2013-12-10/ty-…
In 1994, Israel supplied weapons to Rwanda while it carried out a genocide. This is how Yair Auron, an Israeli historian, described it: “To send arms to a country where genocide is taking place is like sending arms to Nazi Germany during World War II." middleeasteye.net/news/did-israe…
Israel sold weapons to Myanmar throughout its 2016-17 genocide of the Rohingya in which military, police & local militias killed at least 6,700 Rohingya during the first month of attacks alone (msf.org/myanmarbanglad…), ethnically cleansing >1 million haaretz.com/israel-news/se…
We haven't even mentioned Israeli spyware, which has been sold to the most repressive countries in the world to imprison, torture & kill activists fighting for social justice in Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kashmir & dozens of other countries. amazon.com/Palestine-Labo…
Apartheid, atrocities & genocide are very on brand for Israel, tragically so. I write about this stuff in my newsletter:
"If only the Zionist movement had been established earlier, millions of Jews could have been saved."
Debunking the #1 myth about Zionism. A 🧵
It's impossible to prove or disprove counterfactual history, to state the obvious.
But we can look at how the Zionist movement reacted to similar situations in which Jews faced persecution and the Zionist movement had the opportunity to rescue Jews.
What did they do?
The deadliest pogroms during the period 1870-1939 by an order of magnitude were the 1918-1920 pogroms in Ukraine.
It was a holocaust before the holocaust: 50,000-100,000 Jews killed, 120,000 orphaned children, hundreds of thousands of impoverished refugees seeking a safe haven.
How Zionists prolonged the suffering of Jewish Holocaust survivors, 1945-1948. A 🧵
After WWII, 250K liberated Jews found themselves in Displaced Person (DP) camps in Europe. The Zionists prevented their rescue to destinations other than Palestine, despite abysmal living conditions in the camps, despite offers of resettlement & despite the desire of many to go.
The British gov. accepted 1,000 Jewish children survivors in the late summer 1945, but only about 300 of them made it.
The British army flew the children to England & “did everything they could to ease up matters...It is possible that no other group of immigrants ever entered this country with a more favorable welcome.”
They settled into dormitories in the UK w/beds of “crisp white sheets” & “little bowls of sweets…placed on the nightstands.”
Israel’s exploitation of Jews as demographic hostages, a brief history 🧵
Zionist & Israeli leaders have a long history of going against the interests of Jews themselves, of weaponizing Jews & exploiting their J-positive blood to engineer a Jewish demographic majority in Palestine.
This began after WWII when 35,000 Jews in Palestine applied for repatriation home, to Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany & Poland. Zionist leaders instigated foreign consular officials to block their exit visas. palestinenexus.com/articles/zioni…
The last major case of intentional starvation in Palestine was during World War I. lessons from history. ⤵️
~11-16% of the population of what is today Palestine, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon died during the war, mostly from famine or famine related diseases. About 500,000 people.
During the war, the British, Russian & French navies blockaded the Eastern Mediterranean coast for a prolonged period of time, from December 1914 until 1918.
The blockade led to economic collapse in Palestine and elsewhere in the region. Tens of thousands of people lost their means of livelihood as a result.
The blockade led a shortage of critical goods, such as petroleum, essential to cook food and heat homes. In Palestine, the price of petroleum skyrocketed to five or six times its prewar price by April 1915, just six months into the war.
But Palestine is fertile and can produce its own food. Here, the problem was:
1) A massive locust attack in 1915 destroyed a lot of food.
2) the Ottoman government requisitioned the animals & took over the railways for military use.
Thus, it became prohibitively expensive to ship food via donkeys, camels or railways. The Ottoman State sabotaged the food delivery system.
Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was not a historical event or two or three that happened in 1948, 1967 or 2023. It's an ongoing process, a structure, that began in the late 19th century and has been ongoing to the present day. ⤵️