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"The Greatest Irony of the Century"

From SuperSpi, magazine of the Socialist Party of Ireland, published in 1978 soon after the first Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

The Greatest Irony of the Century The State of Israel recently celebrated er its 30th Anniversary without being able to say that its future was any more secure than at the time of its proclamation in 1948. What is unique about Israel that it is still surrounded by hostile neighbours and its existence still under question? It is the fact that the political basis of the state is founded on Zionism, a political movement founded on the principle that people of of the Jewish religion cannot be assimilated into any of the nations of the world bat must live in an exclusively Jewish state on their own. Zionism, first organised as a movement by Theodor Herzal 1897, was always a reactionary movement which found its greatest supporters in the GAL ranks of European conservatives. The ioe Jerusalem British government, the German Kaiser and the Russian Czar were greatly interested in Herzal's movement and he rec- eived support from them in his efforts to detach Jewish people from the nations of their birth and pressure them into joining this campaign for a seperate state for Jews. [Herzal] did not mind where this state would be established but, when after the First World War the British became rulers of Palestine, the land where once existed the Hebrew tribal states of ancient Israel and Judah, the Zionists fixed their sights on establishing a state on this territory. After World War II, when the Western powers at the United Nations agreed to allow the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people from Eastern Europe were helped by the Zionist movement to emigrate to Palestine and give the necessary muscle for establishing the State of Israel in 1948. The wishes of the Arab people of Palestine were totally ignored in all these developments and almost their entire number were forced, by terrorism and open warfare, to flee from their ancestral homeland into neighbouring Arab states. Since 1948, Zionist Israel, with its apartheid system of exclusive rights for people of the Jewish faith, has continually used brute force to maintain its existence and to expand its territory by agression against its neighbours. It is indeed ironic that the Jewish people, oppressed by Hitler's Germany should have adopted the Nazi ta[c]tic of "Blitzkrieg" which they use against the Palestine Arabs and the people of Egypt, Syria and just lately, Lebanon. Nevertheless, it is almost inevitable that a political movement the likes of Zionism, which is, no more no less, a Jewish apartheid system, should find itself more and more resorting to fascist tactics in order to preserve its existence. Is it any wonder also, that the Israeli Government has always had the closest links with the only other apartheid regime in the world; the vicious Vorster regime in South Africa.
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The full issue is available here: https://www.leftarchive.ie/document/560/

SuperSpi, June-July 1978 (1978) — Socialist Party of Ireland [1970]

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