Palestine Think Tank

The following eleven voices from different countries show views on Palestine after the breakdown of Zionism, written in 2030, three years after the State of Israel had collapsed.

1. Shlomo Berge: "Three years ago, the last war in the region ended. We as Israelis never knew how real peace would feel like, because we were told that there will always be anti-Semites who want to exterminate us. In a way, the way things went was inevitable. We just saw no other solution and were backed by so many countries in our violent delusion. I remember from kindergarten and school how our army was glorified as was the defense against the enemies. Gaza 3 changed a lot of that. While in Gaza 1 and 2 some thousands of Palestinians were killed, Gaza 3 reduced the population by about 20 percent. Of course there had been many outcries, but Israel was used to face opposition and to preserve what was called 'self-defense'. Things then happened very quickly: riots and terror attacks from Palestinians inside Israel led to their expulsion by the army. When the settlements in the West Bank were attacked, the army went all the way and cleared the West Bank completely from the Arabs, claiming that the enemy wanted to make the region 'judenfrei', i.e. free from Jews. There was a huge celebration when Israel was finally freed, a little like back in 1967. As Israel had pre-emptively struck Iran with small nuclear bombs and also invaded Syria and Lebanon, there was no power left to immediately threaten us. The US had already weakened all other powers in the region. Only international rejection became really harsh and massive and Israel finally left the United Nations, stating that the anti-Jewish Nazi spirit in the UN countries was unacceptable and that nobody was to tell Israel what to do to save its existence. By that time, about four million people had been killed by Israel, while about 40.000 Zionist soldiers and some Jewish civilians were killed. Although the number of enemies had increased, nobody dared to attack the Zionist state, because Israel openly threatened to drop more nuclear weapons as it had done in Iran. But instead of having peace, Israel fell into a civil war. Some settlers tried to take over large portions of land declaring they represented the real Israel. Several Jewish groups launched terror attacks while Jews from many countries entered and claimed land and property. The army split up into several factions and soon we had no more government. There were hundreds of dead Jews every day and nobody could help us. Whoever tried to analyze the situation was called an anti-Semite, because allegedly Jews were seen as the perpetrators of all evil which is an old anti-Semitic cliché. People did not distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Many Jews were not perpetrators, but as non-Zionists they were not accepted as real Jews by the people in power. It was such a shame. The militias just had way too many weapons. It was chaos. Far more than a million Jews left the country in despair. In the end, the Palestinians just came back and founded the Democratic Republic of Palestine. They were the only ones left to run the country."

2. Lubna Younis: "I lost my whole family in the second Nakba, when the Zionists drove us out of Nablus to stop all resistance and terror attacks forever. I was just a child then, but I remember how the missiles flew and the tanks came in. The Zionists called it a 'transfer' and said it was to reach peace from the terrorists, but like in 1948 they killed many of the men in combat age. I played outside when a bomb destroyed our home. Everybody inside was dead. Such a typical Palestinian story ever since 1948. The neighbors took me with them to Jordan. Unlike 1948, the exile of the second Nakba only lasted for five years. The Zionists had no more targets and so they started killing each other. In the end, the whole country was devastated. You know, in the 5000 years of the history of this country it never faced such a destruction. Olive trees need decades and centuries to grow and so many thousands of them were pulled out of the ground. Pollution and the wall also helped in ruining the beautiful landscapes. Nothing like this had ever happed to this country before and never was the local population forced out like that. When the Zionists used up their weapons against themselves and when the government broke down in the Civil War, the United Nations sent troops to Dimona to make sure nobody uses nuclear weapons again. It was enough that some of them had been used against Iran. Then, when it was quiet, we just returned to our homes and villages. There were several waves of people returning, also from the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and other places. Today, a majority of 70 percent Palestinians live in Palestine, Muslims, Christians, Jews and atheists. The rest are former Israelis, the survivors of the Civil War minus the emigrants. Many went back to where they or their parents originally came from, the USA, Russia and other places. More than a million Jews moved during the Civil War and many others after the establishment of Palestine. Of course we persecuted the war criminals among the remaining Jews, but in the end only three or four thousand were put into jail. Some incidents of lynch mobs are known, but the new authorities were strictly against that and cooperated with the UN. (By that time the UN headquarters had already moved to Europe.) We wanted to stop all extra-judicial killings, we just had enough of all that. We then rebuilt our cities and villages and kind of resumed our history in a way that we had been deprived of since the days of Lawrence of Arabia. Nobody talks about terrorism anymore, all the borders are open now, and soon all Arabs will have a shared currency. It is good now, no more killing, and yet we still mourn the millions of victims. At least, so we want to think, all these people did not die in vain. But sometimes it is hard to recall all this horror. Every year, we commemorate the dead of all sides including the European Holocaust in the Count Bernadotte Congregation Hall in Jerusalem."

3. Umm Midian: "I belong to the very few Israeli Jews who have always been in solidarity with the oppressed Palestinian people. I lived in Israel then and I live much better in Palestine now. There was a huge fear that the Arabs would kill all Jews once the army would not defend them anymore. But it turned out that ironically the Jews in the country have never been as secure as they are now. Many Arabs felt honest sympathy when they saw how Jews killed Jews by the thousands, despite the fact that millions of Arabs and Muslims had been killed by the Zionists before. Racist Zionism was the original problem, there is no more doubt about that today, even in the US. Nobody seems to want to talk about Zionism anymore, as if the Zionists had come from outer space and then disappeared again like extra-terrestials. Of course the Zionist perpetrators were and are taken to account by their victims. This is normal and it is a matter of justice. But the fear of a heavy revenge proved to be unwarranted. Maybe deep in their hearts the Zionists thought: since we have been so brutal with them on a regular basis, they just have to hate us and give us exactly what we gave to them. But they forgot that those Arab and Muslim victims are no Zionists, they do not follow this logic."

4. Theodor Madden: "By the time Israel fell apart I worked in the US Foreign Office. They were difficult years ever since it came out that 9/11 was an inside job, orchestrated by parts of our own government. You remember the conspiracy theory according to which Islamic terrorists did the job. When the voices of architects and firemen got louder, asking how three buildings could collapse like that against all laws of physics, the pressure got really hard. Then there were many other unsolved questions, e.g. about the much too small hole in the Pentagon building, the lack of remains, the suspicious drills, strange facts about the so-called terrorists and so on. The government should just have provided answers. Instead, the Patriot Act was used against the critics. And we lost so many soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan and spent so many billions of dollars. Why? All this was originally linked to 9/11 without any logic. People started asking what we were trying to accomplish in the countries we attacked. So we were almost paralyzed when Israel targeted Iran unilaterally, when it expelled the Palestinians and when it started destroying itself physically. There was nothing at all the US could have done to prevent this. What should we have done? Send in troops into a civil war zone? To support whom? Our own country was about to collapse and this is actually still possible, although rather unlikely, because we brought all our troops back home now. The situation thus has deescalated for us. Moreover, we do not send weapons to what is now Palestine and do not pay the Egyptians and other regimes any more money, which saves billions of dollars. The whole arms industry is in decline and we do not really care after this nightmare. My personal opinion is that we should have arrived at this conclusion soon after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I personally never was an adherent of Zionism, but of course it was a shock to see our close ally Israel breaking down like a house of cards. The good thing is that there are many fewer weapons in the region now. We never thought that stability could be so cheap, financially speaking. We had to give up our hegemony of the oil fields and strategic places, but we are learning to appreciate the new possibilities that go with regional stability. We don't have the choice, anyway, I guess."

5. Agathe Mengel: "As a German politician it has always been clear to me that we had to stand by the side of Israel and there is nothing we have to be sorry for! The constant rocket-fire and anti-Semitism forced Israel to defend itself. The collapse of the State of Israel is a catastrophe, because it was a safe haven for all the Jews in the world. This is why we have recognized the new state only because the EU has made this decision and we could not have opposed it. It is beyond question that the German history has made the State of Israel necessary. Anti-Semitism is still very strong in the world and Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East. It may be true that there have not been any combat actions observed in the region for three years, but this can change any time. We certainly did not make a mistake here in Germany when we supported Israel, because we have a responsibility."

6. Yossi Feinsand: "I am one of the survivors of the Civil War and I admit that I used to be an ardent Zionist before this war. But in the end I recognized that we were the ones who made the biggest mistakes. I feel betrayed by my parents, schools, politicians, and media. They always told us we cannot be wrong and that it is an old anti-Semitic cliché that the Jews are the guilty ones. But it is we who were guilty in Palestine! Not because we were Jews, but because we were Zionists. It developed into a racist ideology not much better than Nazism, if at all. How many people did we kill? Millions. It started when we came from abroad, made our state without any agreements and at the same time expelled the indigenous population. We were told in our schools that we are special, the chosen people, eternal victims, and that we need a strong army to fight our vicious enemies. Today I live in Jerusalem among all these 'enemies' and they are much nicer than what we used to be. As Zionists, we actually projected all of our own faults onto the Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. We accused them of hostility when we were hostile. We called them violent while being violent. We held Islam to be an evil religion, because we as Zionists acted in an evil way. We claimed they want to take our land and what we did was take their land. Why did our friends not stop us? I feel so ashamed and can only say how proud I am to be a Palestinian now. I tell my story to everyone and even learned Arabic to do so. Wherever I come I receive so much affection and friendship that it makes me cry. How generous my fellow countrymen are, how great also the Islamic religion. They do not torture me, they all forgave me and I have nothing to fear in my great country, in Palestine!"

7. Naser Ateeq: "Like every Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Human Rights advocate I am more than happy that the long Zionist nightmare finally has ended. And it is clear to the world now what the 'conflict' was all about. They had taken our land and expelled us, killing many, and most of the world had called our legitimate resistance 'terrorism' and turned us from victims to perpetrators, because the weakest always become the scapegoat. Why did they not learn from the German history? But in the end the world saw the real face of Zionism and now they are quiet at last and we got our land back. Now we must face our own demons, because we do not want to make the same mistakes and project our traumas onto others. One of the taboos of our Palestinian society is, for example, child abuse. It has always been normal for our fathers to beat the children. And society has covered it up. Parents used to be like gods, beyond justice. Even for driving a car you need a license, but children can be raised by every idiot. This must stop now! The problems of our society were not all produced by Israel. By beating our children we have destroyed ourselves and by oppressing our sisters, because they are women, we also did wrong. We have had a damned pasha society and some even derived this sinful behavior wrongly from the Qur'an or the Bible. Some groups have killed and threatened Jewish civilians and there is no excuse for that, not occupation, not anything. We have killed collaborators and showed that we can also be killers, just like them. And we witnessed lynch mobs, even if they were few, after the collapse of the Zionist state. All this must stop immediately and without condition. No more killing! No more oppression! No more beating of our beloved and helpless children! In many respects, we are completely retarded and backward. 'Takhalluf' is the Arabic word for that, in case you have forgotten. A lot of all that is claimed to be Islamic, but I don't believe that. Fortunately, we are a democratic society now. It did not astonish me that in our second free elections the Islamic parties have lost their majority. They have their place and they are important, but Palestine has always been open to all faiths and so it is only normal that the Democratic Party has won the last elections. In it we find all currents in the good manner of Bir Zeit campus society in its best days. There are even some people in it who used to be in the collaborator party of Fatah."

8. Muna el-Missiry: "Egypt profited so much from the new time. Not only because the borders to Palestine and ALL other Arab countries plus Iran are open now, but we also got rid of the unwanted regime, even without a military coup. Like in some other Arab countries the Islamists started with a big success after Gaza 3. They are the only popular currents that were able to gain a huge block of voters, because they represent our main religion and because they are not as corrupt as other trends, especially those affiliated with the West. But then, like in Palestine itself, the peoples recognized that a liberal society in the end works better and that it does not deny religion, anyway. We will not forget that it was the Islamists who opened all the borders, in their quest to restore Islamic unity and the 'umma', i.e. the universal Muslim community. Traveling educated us Egyptians, us Arabs and Muslims a lot and we had hungered for that. Of course, not all of our problems have ceased with the disappearance of the Zionist state, but a lot of them really have. The falcons in Arab countries cannot take Israel as a pretext for weapon-trade and sternness anymore, and indeed we do not feel threatened, especially since the US has completely withdrawn all its troops from the region. Today I can travel from Cairo to Jerusalem in only a few hours, without a visa! In fact, I went there only two weeks ago to help rebuild the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque which were heavily damaged in the last years of the Zionist Civil War."

9. Yousuf Sharif: "Since we threw our king out of the country, Jordan faces much more than a renewal. People call it a rebirth. Everything seems possible now. We have a free press and nobody has to fear anything when speaking out against injustice. Jordanian kings have a long history of collaboration with the Zionists and this chapter is closed now forever! Every Palestinian in Jordan – that is about 70 percent of the population – is free to return to Palestine. Most of them don't, because they found a home in Jordan and they can travel to Palestine whenever they want. Only the victims of the second Nakba returned with an overwhelming majority."

10. Gulamhusein: "I am now an old man of 102 years. I was born in Bombay. For most of my life there I lived in terror, what with ghastly Hindu-Muslim riots breaking out on a regular basis. To make matters worse we had the British occupying our land, our beloved India, and lording it over us. Under the leadership of Gandhi we mounted a movement to drive them out and we ultimately did. Even as we gained independence in India, Palestinians lost more than half of their land to an Israeli state imposed on them by the international community, many members of which had their arms twisted to vote for the UN partition resolution. There followed a massacre of Palestinians. I simply could not understand how the Jews, who had suffered so much under the Germans and others, could inflict so much death, destruction and misery on the Palestinians so as to be able to create a Jewish state of their own on the land the Palestinians had occupied for centuries. Nor could I understand how those living in Israel, and even more puzzlingly, those living in other countries, could believe the Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians were trying to take their land and drive them into the sea when the truth was that the Jews were taking Palestinian land and trying to drive the Palestinians, if not into the sea or the Jordan River, then out of what used to be their land. It took me some time to learn and understand that not all Jews were complicit. Many were, from the start, opposed to Zionism. It was only the Zionists who were to blame and, even most of the Zionists believed and acted as they did because the truth was hidden from them and they were fed lies from childhood. As time went on, more and more of these came forward and said so. The Nakba of 1947/48, the 1967 War, the 2009 Israeli invasion and destruction of Gaza, and the failure of the international community to come to the aid of the Palestinians, take suitable action against Israel for its violations of international law and end Israel's illegal and brutal occupation of West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, left me shaken, and almost destroyed my faith in justice. I wondered if Palestinians would ever get justice. But history, as life, takes strange and unexpected turns. After the Civil War, the Palestinians, who had been driven out of their lands, started coming back from Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Iraq and even from far away countries. The Israelis feared that the Palestinians would do unto them as they had done unto the Palestinians. But the Palestinians, the majority of them Muslims, remembered their beginnings. Their Prophet and his followers (the Muslims), had been persecuted and tortured for years by the Meccans and had ultimately been driven out of Mecca. Years later, the Muslims marched triumphantly back into Mecca, led by Prophet Muhammad. At that moment, the Meccans hid, fearing that the Muslims would be vengeful and there would be a massacre. But Muhammad had ordered the returning Muslims that there was to be no looting or pillaging, no killing, no rape, no taking of slaves. And there was none. – In the three years that have elapsed since the collapse of Israel there has been a great change. There is, at last, peace in the region. The inhabitants of the Democratic Republic of Palestine — Jews, Muslims, Christians, no matter what their faith or ethnic origin – live in peace and harmony, as of old. The phony "war on terror" has ended. I never imagined this day would come. Nor did millions of others. But come it did, three years to this day. It is a miracle. As is my being alive at 102 years!"

11. Dana Azulai: "At the beginning of the Civil War my parents got killed in a bombing. I had just finished school by the time and did not know how to carry on. I was in despair. When my relatives in Canada invited me to come to them, I accepted their offer gratefully. They took care of all the formalities and, luckily, it all worked out rather quickly. Despite the fact that Israel had gained a very bad reputation in world, due to the 'transfer' of the Arabs, the attacks on Iran and the Civil War, I was well-received by most of the Canadians, and treated in a friendly way. I also found a job very soon. But despite all of that I never really felt well. The weather and the landscape are so much different and also the mentality of the people. When the Civil War was over I certainly thought about returning. But then the Palestinians founded their state and my dream to go back home, was soon over. Surely, the Palestinians would not allow the return of Jews. Besides, how could I voluntarily go to a land that was now governed by our enemies? But I still was in touch with some friends, who had stayed in Israel and who had survived. They, too, were afraid after the new state was built. But in the course of time they reported about the reconstruction work and about the peaceful coexistence. It was not so easy for me, but the country, that now called itself the Democratic Republic of Palestine, was my homeland. I missed my friends, the Mediterranean Sea, the sun, and everything. So half a year ago I returned. I was astonished about the fact that it was so easy. I just had to prove that I was born in the territory of what today is Palestine and immediately got my papers. It is not easy to be back. I am always confronted with what my people did to the Palestinians and to themselves. But I am happy that I ventured to do it."

# 10 written by Gulamhusein Abba (www.anis-online.de/1/rooms/gulamhusein/index.htm), # 11 written by Sabine Yacoub, www.sabine-yacoub.de, all other entries by Anis
http://www.anis-online.de/2/literatur/2030.htm