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[This is the transcript of a talk I gave to Bath Friends of Palestine on 25 February 2022.]
Since I arrived with my family in the UK last summer, I have been repeatedly asked: “Why choose Bristol as your new home?”
Well, it certainly wasn’t for the weather. Now more than ever I miss Nazareth’s warmth and sunshine.
It wasn’t for the food either.
My family do have a minor connection to Bristol. My great-grandparents on my mother’s side (one from Cornwall, the other from South Wales) apparently met in Bristol – a coincidental stopping point on their separate journeys to London. They married and started a family whose line led to me.
But that distant link wasn’t the reason for coming to Bristol either.
In fact, it was only in Nazareth that Bristol began occupying a more prominent place in my family’s life.
When I was not doing journalism, I spent many years leading political tours of the Galilee, while my wife, Sally, hosted and fed many of the participants in her cultural café in Nazareth, called Liwan.
It was soon clear that a disproportionate number of our guests hailed from Bristol and the south-west. Some of you here tonight may have been among them.
But my world – like everyone else’s – started to shrink as the pandemic took hold in early 2020. As we lost visitors and the chance to directly engage with them about Palestine, Bristol began to reach out to me.
Toppled statue
It did so just as Sally and I were beginning discussions about whether it was time to leave Nazareth – 20 years after I had arrived – and head to the UK.
Even from thousands of miles away, a momentous event – the sound of Edward Colston’s statue being toppled – reverberated loudly with me.
My latest: Tearing down statues to slave traders isn't rule by the mob. It was only through defiance and disobedience that ordinary people won the freedoms and progress we enjoy today https://t.co/fl50HOUvrv pic.twitter.com/1Ac8PHlE8E
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) June 10, 2020
Ordinary people had decided they were no longer willing to be forced to venerate a slave trader, one of the most conspicious criminals of Britain’s colonial past. Even if briefly, the people of Bristol took back control of their city’s public space for themselves, and for humanity.
In doing so, they firmly thrust Britain’s sordid past – the unexamined background to most of our lives – into the light of day. It is because of their defiance that buildings and institutions that for centuries bore Colston’s name as a badge of honour are finally being forced to confront that past and make amends.
Bath, of course, was built no less on the profits of the slave trade. When visitors come to Bath simply to admire its grand Georgian architecture, its Royal Crescent, we assent – if only through ignorance – to the crimes that paid for all that splendour.
Weeks after the Colston statue was toppled, Bristol made headlines again. Crowds protested efforts to transfer yet more powers to the police to curb our already savagely diminished right to protest – the most fundamental of all democratic rights. Bristol made more noise against that bill than possibly anywhere else in the UK.
I ended up writing about both events from Nazareth.
My latest: Politicians and the police must not be left to define which protests are justified, which safe, which responsible. Because otherwise, they will define any protest against their corruption and incompetence as a threat to public health https://t.co/1fzpsOyGY8
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 23, 2021
Blind to history
Since my arrival, old and new friends alike have started to educate me about Bristol. Early on I attended a slavery tour in the city centre – one that connected those historic crimes with the current troubles faced by asylum seekers in Bristol, even as Bristol lays claim to the title of “city of sanctuary”.
For once I was being guided rather than the guide, the pupil rather than the teacher – so long my role on those tours in and around Nazareth. And I could not but help notice, as we wandered through Bristol’s streets, echoes of my own tours.
Over the years I have taken many hundeds of groups around the ruins of Saffuriya, one of the largest of the Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel in its ethnic cleansing campaign of 1948, the Nakba or Catastrophe.
What disturbed me most in Saffuriya was how blind its new inhabitants were to the very recent history of the place they call home.
New Jewish immigrants were moved on to the lands of Saffuriya weeks after the Israeli army destroyed the village and chased out the native Palestinian population at gunpoint. A new community built in its place was given a similar Hebrew name, Tzipori. These events were repeated across historic Palestine. Hundreds of villages were razed, and 80 per cent of the Palestinian population were expelled from what became the new state of Israel.
Troubling clues
Even today, evidence of the crimes committed in the name of these newcomers is visible everywhere. The hillsides are littered with the rubble of the hundreds of Palestinian homes that were levelled by the new Israeli army to stop their residents from returning. And there are neglected grave-stones all around – pointers to the community that was disappeared.
And yet almost no one in Jewish Tzipori asks questions about the remnants of Palestinian Saffuriya, about these clues to a troubling past. Brainwashed by reassuring state narratives, they have averted their gaze for fear of what might become visible if they looked any closer.
Tzipori’s residents never ask why there are only Jews like themselves allowed in their community, when half of the population in the surrounding area of the Galilee are Palestinian by heritage.
Instead, the people of Tzipori misleadingly refer to their Palestinian neighbours – forced to live apart from them as second and third-class citizens of a self-declared Jewish state – as “Israeli Arabs”. The purpose is to obscure, both to themselves and the outside world, the connection of these so-called Arabs to the Palestinian people.
To acknowledge the crimes Tzipori has inflicted on Saffuriya would also be to acknowledge a bigger story: of the crimes inflicted by Israel on the Palestinian people as a whole.
My latest: For 16 years I have been documenting Israel's treatment of its Palestinian citizens – 20% of the population. Here I explain in detail why Israel should be called an apartheid state https://t.co/IFuqm82B0w pic.twitter.com/tkY5T44uQp
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) March 18, 2018
Shroud of silence
Most of us in Britain do something very similar.
In young Israel, Jews still venerate the criminals of their recent past because they and their loved ones are so intimately and freshly implicated in the crimes.
In Britain, with its much longer colonial past, the same result is often achieved not, as in Israel, through open cheerleading and glorification – though there is some of that too – but chiefly through a complicit silence. Colston surveyed his city from up on his plinth. He stood above us, superior, paternal, authoritative. His crimes did not need denying because they had been effectively shrouded in silence.
Until Colston was toppled, slavery for most Britons was entirely absent from the narrative of Britain’s past – it was something to do with racist plantation owners in the United States’ Deep South more than a century ago. It was an issue we thought about only when Hollywood raised it.
After the Colston statue came down, he became an exhibit – flat on his back – in Bristol’s harbourside museum, the M Shed. His black robes had been smeared with red paint, and scuffed and grazed from being dragged through the streets. He became a relic of the past, and one denied his grandeur. We were able to observe him variously with curiousity, contempt or amusement.
Those are far better responses than reverence or silence. But they are not enough. Because Colston isn’t just a relic. He is a living, breathing reminder that we are still complicit in colonial crimes, even if now they are invariably better disguised.
Nowadays, we usually interfere in the name of fiscal responsibility or humanitarianism, rather than the white man’s burden.
We return to the countries we formerly colonised and asset-stripped, and drive them back into permanent debt slavery through western-controlled monetary agencies like the IMF.
Or in the case of those that refuse to submit, we more often than not invade or subvert them – countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Iran – tearing apart the colonial fabric we imposed on them, wrecking their societes in ways that invariably lead to mass death and the dispersion of the population.
We have supplied the bombs and planes to Saudi Arabia that are killing untold numbers of civilians in Yemen. We funded and trained the Islamic extremists who terrorise and behead civilians in Syria. The list is too long for me to recount here.
Right now, we see the consequences of the west’s neo-colonialism – and a predictable countervailing reaction, in the resurgence of a Russian nationalism that President Putin has harnessed to his own ends – in NATO’s relentless, decades-long expansion towards Russia’s borders.
And of course, we are still deeply invested in the settler colonial project of Israel, and the crimes it systematically inflicts on the Palestinian people.
Divine plan
Through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, Britain gave licence for the creation of a militarised ethnic, Jewish state in the Middle East. Later, we helped supply it with atomic material in the full knowledge that Israel would build nuclear bombs. We gave Israel diplomatic cover so that it could evade its obligations under the international treaty to stop nuclear proliferation and become the only nuclear power in the region. We have had Israel’s back through more than five decades of occupation and illlegal settlement building.
And significantly, we have endlessly indulged Zionism as it has evolved from its sordid origins nearly two centuries ago, as an antisemitic movement among fundamentalist Christians. Those Christian Zonists – who at the time served as the power brokers in European governments like Britain’s – viewed Jews as mere instruments in a divine plan.
According to this plan, Jews were to be denied the chance to properly integrate into the countries to which they assumed they belonged.
Instead the Christian Zionists wanted to herd Jews into an imagined ancient, Biblical land of Israel, to speed up the arrival of the end times, when mankind would be judged and only good Christians would rise up to be with God.
My latest: Evangelical Christians, driven by apocalyptic readings of the Bible, are interfering ever more explicitly in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories – and in ways that directly aid the policies of Israel’s far-right government https://t.co/jvdHmeDA6p
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) July 8, 2019
Until Hitler took this western antisemitism to another level, few Jews subscribed to the idea that they were doomed forever to be a people apart, that their fate was inextricably tied to a small piece of territory in a far-off region they had never visited, and that their political allies should be millenarian racists.
But after the Holocaust, things changed. Christian Zionists looked like much kinder antisemites than the exterminationist Nazis. Christian Zionism won by default and was reborn as Jewish Zionism, claiming to be a national liberation movement rather than the dregs of a white European nationalism Hitler had intensified.
Today, we are presented with polls showing that most British Jews subscribe to the ugly ideas of Zionism – ideas their great-great-grandparents abhorred. Jews who dissent, who believe that we are all the same, that we all share a common fate as humans not as tribes, are ignored or dismissed as self-haters. In an inversion of reality these humanist Jews, rather than Jewish Zionists, are seen as the pawns of the antisemites.
Perverse ideology
Zionism as a political movement is so pampered, so embedded within European and American political establishments that those Jews who rally behind this ethnic nationalism no longer consider their beliefs to be abnormal or abhorrent – as their views would have been judged by most Jews only a few generations ago.
No, today Jewish Zionists think of their views as so self-evident, so vitally important to Jewish self-preservation that anyone who opposes them must be either a self-hating Jew or an antisemite.
And because non-Jews so little understand their own culpability in fomenting this perverse ideology of Jewish Zionism, we join in the ritual defaming of those brave Jews who point out how far we have stepped through the looking glass.
As a result, we unthinkingly give our backing to the Zionists as they weaponise antisemitism against those – Jews and non-Jews alike – who stand in solidarity with the native Palestinian people so long oppressed by western colonialism.
Thoughtlessly, too many of us have drifted once again into a sympathy for the oppressor – this time, Zonism’s barely veiled anti-Palestinian racism.
Nonetheless, our attitudes towards modern Israel, given British history, can be complex. On the one hand, there are good reasons to avert our gaze. Israel’s crimes today are an echo and reminder of our own crimes yesterday. Western governments subsidise Israel’s crimes through trade agreements, they provide the weapons for Israel to commit those crimes, and they profit from the new arms and cyber-weapons Israel has developed by testing them out on Palestinians. Like the now-defunct apartheid South Africa, Israel is a central ally in the west’s neo-colonialism.
Jeff Halper talks to me about his new book: Israel's role in the global arms industry is making us all Palestinians https://t.co/vAJLep5STc
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) August 29, 2015
So yes, Israel is tied to us by an umbilical cord. We are its parent. But at the same time it is also not exactly like us either – more a bastard progeny. And that difference, that distance can help us gain a little perspective on ourselves. It can make Israel a teaching aid. An eye-opener. A place that can bring clarity, elucidate not only what Israel is doing but what countries like Britain have done and are still doing to this day.
Trade in bodies
The difference between Britain and Israel is to be found in the distinction between a colonial and a settler-colonial state.
Britain is a classic example of the former. It sent the entitled sons of its elite private schools, men like Colston, to parts of the globe rich in resources in order to steal those resources and bring the wealth back to the motherland to further enrich the establishment. That was the purpose of the tea and sugar plantations.
But it was not just a trade in inanimate objects. Britain also traded in bodies – mostly black bodies. Labour and muscle were a resource as vital to the British empire as silk and saffron.
The trafficking in goods and people lasted more than four centuries until liberation movements among the native populations began to throw off – at least partially – the yoke of British and European colonialism. The story since the Second World War has been one of Europe and the United States’ efforts to reinvent colonialism, conducting their rape and pillage at a distance, through the hands of others.
This is the dissembling, modern brand of colonialism: a “humanitarian” neocolonialism we should by now be familiar with. Global corporations, monetary agencies like the IMF and the military alliance of NATO have each played a key role in the reinvention of colonialism – as has Israel.
Elimination strategies
Israel inherited Britain’s colonial tradition, and permanently adopted many of its emergency orders for use against the Palestinians. Like traditional colonialism, settler colonialism is determined to appropriate the resources of the natives. But it does so in an even more conspicuous, uncompromising way. It does not just exploit the natives. It seeks to replace or eliminate them. That way, they can never be in a position to liberate themselves and their homeland.
There is nothing new about this approach. It was adopted by European colonists across much of the globe: in North America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand, as well as belatedly in the Middle East.
There are advantages and disadvantages to the settler colonial strategy, as Israel illustrates only too clearly. In their struggle to replace the natives, Israel’s settlers had to craft a narrative – a rationalisation – that they were the victims rather than the victimisers. They were, of course, fleeing persecution in Europe, but only to become persecutors themselves outside Europe. They were supposedly in a battle for survival against those they came to replace, the Palestinians. The natives were cast as irredeemably, and irrationally, hostile. God was invoked, more or less explicitly.
In the Zionist story, the ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians – the Nakba – becomes a War of Independence, celebrated to this day. The Zionist colonisers thereby transformed themselves into another national liberation movement, like the ones in Africa that were fighting after the Second World War for independence. Israel claimed to be fighting oppressive British rule, as Africans were, rather than inheriting the colonisers’ mantle.
But there is a disadvantage for settler colonial projects too, especially in an era of better communications. In a time of more democratic media, as we are currently enjoying – even if briefly – the colonisers’ elimination strategies are much harder to veil or airbrush. The ugliness is on show. The reality of the oppression is more visceral, more obviously offensive.
Apartheid named
The settlers’ elimination strategies are limited in number, and difficult to conceal whichever is adopted. In the United States, elimination took the form of genocide – the simplest and neatest of settler-colonialism’s solutions.
In the post-war era of human rights, however, Israel was denied that route. It adopted settler colonialism’s fall-back position: mass expulsion, or ethnic cleansing. Some 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and outside the new borders of Israel in 1948.
But genocide and ethnic cleansing are invariably projects that cannot be completed. Some 90 per cent of Native Americans died from the violence and diseases brought by European incomers, but a small proportion survived. In South Africa, the white immigrants lacked the numbers and capacity either to eradicate the native population or to exploit such a vast territory.
Israel managed to expel only 80 per cent of the Palestinians living inside its new borders before the international community called time. And then Israel sabotaged its initial success in 1948 by seizing yet more Palestinian territory – and more Palestinians – in 1967.
When settler populations cannot eradicate the native population completely, they must impose harsh, visible segregation policies against those that remain.
Resources and rights are differentiated on the basis of race or ethnicity. Such regimes institute apartheid – or as Israel calls its version “hafrada” – to maintain the privileges of their own, superior or chosen population.
Colonial mentality
Many decades on, human rights groups have finally named Israel’s apartheid. Amnesty International got round to it only this month – 74 years after the Nakba and 55 years after the occupation began.
It has taken so long because even our understanding of human rights continues to be shaped by a European colonial mentality. Human rights groups have documented Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians – the “what” of their oppression – but refused to understand the “why” of that oppression. These watchdogs did not truly listen to Palestinians. They listened to, they excused, Israel even as they were criticising it. They indulged its endless security rationales for its crimes against Palestinians.
My latest: Amnesty and the wider human rights community are holding back from clarifying the full implications of Israel’s apartheid character – because they still fear being accused of antisemitism https://t.co/XmMpeqfRp0
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) February 2, 2022
The reluctance to name Israeli apartheid derives in large part from a reluctance to face our part in its creation. To identify Israel’s apartheid is to recognise both our role in sustaining it, and Israel’s crucial place in the west’s reinvented neocolonialism.
Being ‘offensive’
The difficulty of facing up to what Israel is and what it represents is, of course, particulaly stark for many Jews – not only in Israel but in countries like Britain. Through no choice of their own, Jews are more deeply implicated in Israel’s crimes because those crimes are carried out in the name of all Jews. As a result, for Zionist Jews, protecting the settler colonial project of Israel is identical to protecting their own sense of virtue.
In the zero-sum imaginings of the Zionist movement, the stakes are too high to doubt or to equivocate. As Zionists, their duty is to support, dissemble and propagandise on Israel’s behalf at all costs.
Nowadays Zionism has become such a normalised part of our western culture that those who call themselves Zionists are appalled at the idea anyone could dare to point out that their ideology is rooted in an ugly ethnic nationalism and in apartheid. Those who make them feel uncomfortable by highlighting the reality of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – and their blindness to it – are accused of being “offensive”.
That supposed offensiveness is now conflated with antisemitism, as the treatment of Ken Loach, the respected film-maker of this parish, attests. Disgust at Israel’s racism towards Palestinians is malevolently confused with racism towards Jews. The truth is inverted.
My latest: The smearing of Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn as antisemites is the final purge by the west's political and media establishments of a left that favours class solidarity over a toxic and divisive identity politics https://t.co/jlafNhsF2O
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 8, 2020
This confusion has also become the basis for a new definition of antisemitism – one aggressively advanced by Israel and its apologists – designed to mislead casual onlookers. The more we, as anti-racists and opponents of colonialism, try to focus attention and opprobrium on Israel’s crimes, the more we are accused of covertly attacking Jews.
Into the fire
Arriving in the UK from Nazareth at this very moment is like stepping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Here the battle over Zionism – defining it, understanding it, confronting it, refusing to be silenced by it – is in full flood. The Labour party, under Jeremy Corbyn, was politically eviscerated by a redefined antisemitism. Now the party’s ranks are being purged by his successor, Sir Keir Starmer, on the same phoney grounds.
Professors are being threatened and losing their jobs, as happened to David Miller at Bristol university, with the goal of intensifying pressure on the academy to keep silent about Israel and its lobbyists. Exhibitions are taken down, speakers cancelled.
My latest: A British university dismissed David Miller after he exposed networks of influence promoting Islamophobia in the UK that included the very pro-Israel lobby groups that had worked so strenuously to get him fired https://t.co/h2v5QB1gHq
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) October 7, 2021
And all the while, the current western obsession with redefining antisemitism – the latest cover story for apartheid Israel – moves us ever further from sensitivity to real racism, whether it be genuine prejudice against Jews or rampant Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism.
The fight for justice for Palestinians resonates with so many of us precisely because it is not simply a struggle to help Palestinians. It is a fight to end colonialism in all its forms, to end our inhumanity towards those we live alongside, to remember that we are all equally human and all equally entitled to respect and dignity.
The story of Palestine is a loud echo from our past. Maybe the loudest. If we cannot hear it, then we cannot learn – and we cannot take the first steps on the path towards real change.
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A few points to make:
The Colston statue wasnt toppled by “ordinary people” but by self righteous students and BLM activists who are (willing) useful idiots for global Capital in its pushback against populist opposition to globalisation and supranational governance.
Fanatics like Cook drag up “slavery” as a means of undermining native British people. Ordinary Britons did their bit 150 years ago supporting the drive to abolish the trade – the first time such a moral act had taken place anywhere in the world. They would have been horrified that a century and a half later, their descendants – as young as Primary school age children – would have such a proud moment used as a psychological weapon used against them.
Similarly, Cook’s “anti racism” is missing in action when it comes to the racially and religiously motivated rape – the sexual enslavement – of 10s of 1000s of young white girls the length and breadth of the country. The man’s bitter fury for racists is nowhere to be seen then because he doesnt care. It’s like water off a duck’s back what has happened and continues to happen to those kids – because, well, theyre only chavs and those mass crimes were covered up by Leftists like him. Confronting what has happened in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford, Newcastle, Telford etc etc would cause serious problems for his brand of politics so they can be safely ignored. He’d be horrified however if a guilt trip about it were to be put on his descendants 150 years from now.
His politics arent motivated by principle but anger and hatred. For him to lecture anyone on “inhumanity” leaves you choking back the vomit.
Very telling that he’s chosen to get out of Nazereth though. Not going well over there?
Very well said.
Thanks JC for a penetrating analysis of the Zionist take over of British politics, ideology, history and media.
The Brits have seem to have readily accepted their country’s subservience to the Zio cabal.
Their dominance of all key sectors of the UK: politics, media, education and government gives them full dominance, with few objections.
This especially may have a lot to do with their control of the powerful banking sector, which nobody dares criticize.
The author is confused about a number of things. Why mix discussion of British slave trafficking with Israeli treatment of the Palestinians? What is the common ground?
The African slave trade, unlike the dispossession of the Palestinians, resulted not in worsening conditions for the subjects under consideration, but in bettering them–and that by a considerable margin. Slaves were much better off in America than they were in Africa. In Africa, they were grown as both a trade commodity and as food. As many European adventurers and explorers observed, when the King was hungry, an unfortunate, lowly slave was selected, butchered and served up for dinner.
Too, slave trading did not destroy the African economy as the author alleges colonialism to have done. On the contrary, selling slaves or trading them for iron implements was a stimulus to African rising standards of living.
And finally, as Richard Burton observed when he was there in 1860, British suppression of the slave trade was most resisted by the African slave-trading Kings themselves. They correctly perceived it to be a direct threat to revenue and tribal wealth. The African Kings practiced all manner of devious ways to run the British blockade and prolong slave trading.
“The Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron (or Preventative Squadron) at substantial expense in 1808 after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act. The squadron’s task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa, preventing the slave trade by force of arms, including the interception of slave ships from Europe, the United States, the Barbary pirates, West Africa and the Ottoman Empire”. Wiki
The most common fault in men like the author is that they, when discussing history, compare real human beings to Angels, rather than to the other humans who lived at that time.
Zionism, Identity Politics, Globalism, Ethno-Racism, Diversity, are all tools in the Yankee toolbox.
I once did a litmus test in comparing atrocities under colonialism with comparable atrocities under any other systems. I found in every case, colonial atrocities were much less. The one exception I could find was the imposed starvation in Bengal in World War Two. But Churchill was a Zionist agent so that doesn’t really count. True there were the British concentration camps in Africa. But that was fighting terrorist wars. Characteristically, colonialism was imposed to protect native peoples from predatory capitalism or predatory native chiefdoms. Very often native populations at least initially welcomed colonialism. When native peoples rebelled against colonialism that was because of a delusion about independence or they were not threatened by something worse. Often colonialism was to protect native peoples from their own vices. Jonathon Cook admits in this article Zionism is worse than European colonialism. Then he goes to Bristol and compares Zionism not to colonialism, instead to the capitalist and native slave trade centuries ago.
The most common fault is that they are (pseudo) moralising bullies who ignore anything which would undermine the psychological warfare that they wage against ordinary people.
Even 10s of 1000s of young girls being savagely abused by men who think they are “white trash” cannot deter these people.
They not only dont care about what happened / happens to those kids, they are complicit.
Wow. Knocking over statues. Now that’s really accomplishing something!
Hopefully, in Bristol, you will stop falsifying history. Tzippori is the original, Biblical name of the town. After the Arab conquest, its name was “Arabized”, and its Jewish and Christian inhabitants, replaced.
History is explicit, the Arab/Islamic conquest did not engage in genocide or ethnic replacement. they only sought to convert the local populace or impose taxation for their new governance. The Islamic/Arab conquerors wanted people to engage in commerce and their was little discrimination, with the general principle of each sects’ religious leaders maintaining civil and judicicial authority over their subject. These people at least in the Levan shared a similar language and culture.
The Zios cannot come to terms that the large and significant population of original Old Testament Semite were Arabs and they converted en-masse to Christianity and later to Islam, by their own free will. Swallow it and get over it, the Jews then were quite different from the Zio ethno-self serving Jews of today. They left of their own free will and are still living in Palestine and Syria and donot wish to re-convert!!!!
In 1899 the British rounded up and incarcerated several thousand Boer women and children in an encampment called Chrissiemeer. The first “Concentration Camp”. This was to deprive the Boer commandos of the food and support of the farms. Whilst there, thousands died, primarily of typhus and cholera.
At the same time my grand parents were living in worse conditions in the East End of London. Many more thousands died than in Chrissiemeer, of the same diseases.
In 1964 I was beaten (often) by a large bully in my first job in Johannesburg because his grandmother and two of her sisters died in Chrissiemeer.
The fact that I was only born 50 years after the war, that I had absolutely nothing to do with it made no difference. I was British and therefore it was only right that I got blamed for things which happened long before our births.
How much money should I have paid to him?
What could I have possibly done to change what happened?
The author and his ilk contribute nothing to this world, by all means report and comment on the past. By all means move for change, like Wilberforce on slavery and Edith Cavell on the treatment of women and children (ex the Boer War) but to tear down Las Vegas because it was built on “Mafia” money or the Parthenon because the Athenians built it is childish and stupid.
Without Cecil Rhodes there would be no “South Africa”.
He was a very unpleasant homosexual who I would not have invited to dinner, but nonetheless he built a country whilst building the British Empire and every person in that country owes him a debt of gratitude.
Instead of deriding the people of the past, why not try and build something?
So, you agree that Tzippori is the original, Jewish name of the place.
Regarding the Arabs not wanting to re-convert to Judaism, don’t be so sure. Simply, they have no chance. The (Orthodox) Rabbinate discourages would-be converts and the Muslims actually will kill them.
The southern plantations were largely self-sufficient due to the ability to grow one’s own food.
Slavery was the means to achieve food production on an industrial scale. Machinery was non-existent–human capital was the only means to achieve farm crop output on an industrial scale.
As an interesting note, there are two large-scale “slave plantations” still in operation here in the USA, one being Louisiana’s Angola State Penitentiary and another being Mississippi State Prison, Parchman Farms. Both plantations rely largely on manual labor (human capital) for their farm operations despite mechanical equipment being available. This provides labor to run the plantations and also provides food for the inmates. Both plantations are largely operated the same way they would have been 150 years ago and are good present-day examples of antebellum southern plantations.
There were two times out of the year where slave labor was needed–planting in the spring and harvest in the fall. The rest of the time was spent at a relatively leisurely pace. The slave owner was still required to care for his charges, whether they were working or not.
Even slaves that became incapacitated were cared for–laws saw to that.
One could not simply abandon a slave. Manumission papers were required to be filed at the local courthouse, just as was done for real estate transactions.
A little-known aspect of slavery was the threat of being abandoned (fired) by one’s master. Without a social support structure or a place to live, such abandonment would mean only one thing–a cruel death. Slaves KNEW that they had a symbiotic relationship with their master–they actually needed each other.
Many slaves acquired skills in trades that they could use to make money on their own. In many cases, they were able to “buy” their freedom, in the same way that indentured servants could.
A little-known fact is that there were many blacks who owned slaves.
In fact, Cinque, who was portrayed as fighting for his freedom in the movie “Amistad”, in real life, after gaining his freedom, became one of the most prolific and successful slave traders of his day.
You see, slavery was a part of the “human condition” and was not limited to whites owning blacks.
In fact, in those days, less that 3% of the American population owned slaves. The slave trade, from ship owners and insurers to auctioneers and investors was primarily a jewish enterprise.
Although from time to time, there may have been cruelty exacted on slaves, such methods of control were rare and almost always counterproductive. The slave owners KNEW that if they wanted to get any output from their slaves, they would have to be treated with a certain degree of empathy and kindness, not unlike children.
One of the oldest psychological “tricks” that overseers would use to keep their charges “in line” was to exact severe punishment on one male slave for a relative minor infraction. The punishment was meted out in front of the slave women, who were then instrumental in keeping their men slaves “on the straight and narrow”, to avoid further punishment.
Quite often, this “trick” was performed when a new batch of slaves was being “commissioned” (assigned to their new “masters”).
Many of today’s matriarchal attitudes in today’s black society can be attributed to this psychological “trick”.
As to the slaves themselves, our “imported farm machinery” was not the “best and brightest”, but were the dregs of the various black tribal societies that they were involuntarily separated from.
Quite often, they were the criminals, troublemakers, slow-witted, low IQ dullard individuals that the tribal chiefs wanted to get and be rid of. Killing two birds with one stone, gaining trinkets and baubles in trade while eliminating tribal “problems” was a “one-two” gain for the African tribal leaders.
Slavery still exists in much of the world but has been eradicated from western society.
It is interesting to note that even today, in jewish writings and philosophy, slavery is still accepted as being a part of the jewish supremacist condition.
This is non sense, the semitic names of villages and towns in the Middle East keep changing over time.
What a village was called 3000 years ago, before Old Testament Hebrews migrated to Palestine from southern Arabia was probably a little different. Semitic languages changed over time and Hebrew was not dominant in ancient Palestine, but Aramaic and Greek during the Hebrew period.
The Palestine area was largely Canaanite (or Phoenician) before the Hebrews migrated north to Palestine. See Prof. Kamil Saliba’s ” The Bible came from Arabia.”
Hebraic dominion on Palestine was never complete and short lived as the massive Israeli archeological digs attest, virtually no ancient Judaic or Israelite finds. Something that disappointed the ancient artifact collector, Moshe Dayan.
Please also recall that the study in the 1930’s commissioned by Ben Gurion concluded that the Palestians were probably the descendants of the Hebrews from the Greco-Roman period and that many of the village names close to the same.
I agree with your comments, and will add that the reason the Balfour Declaration
was due to the fact any new Arab states would treat Jews as second class citizens. In the 19th century, Britain and France saved the Ottoman Empire from Russia, and one of the demands for this assistance was that the Ottomans treat Christians and Jews equally as Muslims before the law. Arabs in Palestine (they had no concept of a Palestinian nation) were horrified that Jews would live amongst them as equals, and we’ve seen how Jews in other Arab countries, who had no connection to the Israeli state, have been cleansed from lands they had inhabited for centuries. Masochistic Westerners like Cook refuse to see the whole history and how Britain and America created a culture with rule of law and human rights, a world that everyone in the 3rd world now wants to flock to, and enjoy while telling the creaters of this culture how evil they are.
Yid rubbish.
Yid has no right to one dirt particle of Palestine.
So Jewish-Israeli-Brit Jonathan Cook has moved back to Britain
And now seeks to advance what can be seen as a Jewish agenda toppling historic British statues and denigrating the history and heritage of white Britons. Cook seems pleased to say of the vandalised statute of a long-dead white man, that
Cook condemns a historical Brit associated with the slave trade … but doesn’t seem to mention the large historical role of Jews in buying, selling, transporting and owning slaves, for example into and in the old USA South that became the Confederacy
Is it a bit unseemly for someone of a different ethnic background, to be on the attack against historical items in the native culture of the country hosting him … whilst keeping quiet about his own culture’s leading role in exactly those same awful bad historical practices?
Cook deserves many points for his railing against Israeli abuse of the Palestinians … but perhaps this arises from how Cook is on the Soros-globalist side of the Jewish agendas, willing to critique fellow Jews who are Zionists-nationalists, as well as whites who try to keep their own heritage cultures intact
Let’s see, 150 years ago would be 1872. You really aren’t acquainted with history, are you?
It is always dangerous to extrapolate from one’s own experiences. In the British cities that were involved in the slave trade, the subject is part of the school curriculum and has been for many decades. You may have thought about it only when prompted by Hollywood, but the citizens of Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow all know the history of the slave trade.
The trade in people was voluntarily ended by the British, and enforcement by the Royal Navy greatly reduced the maritime slave trade of the entire world. Liberation movements came later.
In contrast to the Muslim slave trade, which lasted nearly fourteen centuries, and ended in Saudi Arabia as recently as 1962. It ended in Palestine in the 1880s, but only because the British occupied Egypt and prevented the transport of African slaves to the rest of the Arab world.
I agree that the Palestinians did not deserve the treatment that they received since the First World War, and Britain has some degree of historical responsibility for that. However, to present some countries or ethnic groups as entirely bad, and others as morally pure victims, demonstrates a poor understanding of both history and human nature.
How did you manage to bring Palestinians into this?
Maybe you meant Palestinian Jew?
Who other than you and deceiving Yid have presented Palestinians as “pure”?
You really shouldn’t bring up historical facts at the same time the storyteller is trying to rewrite them. Where’s your manners?
Thank god the jews never went through with their plans to take over the top end of Western Australia. I like the author’s use of the royal “we.” As if the little man in the street can change history. If they so much as stole a loaf of bread they were deported to the other side of the world, where quite often they were treated poorly as slave labour.
And as for the trade in slaves and illegal goods ending centuries ago, I don’t think so. It still goes on today in just about every continent.
But in a way, it’s strange to make a job out of showing off other people’s hardships and mistreatment for a living. It sort of didn’t disturb him enough to not profit from the Palestinians lot in life. But ultimately you can’t condemn the author, as everything starts with baby steps.
Full of lying, racist, shite. Just the murder toll from the Great Famines in India under the English (of which Bengal was merely the last)exceeds all other genocides in history. And England stole 24 trillion from India. A really vicious, RACIST, troll.
Mulga you trolled your own comment? And wipe off your chin you have some froth on it.
Now take a deep breath and please cite some sources re; murder toll & 24T stolen.
FYI if you hit the auto-comment button again I think you can change or cancel your previous auto-comment.
The ‘Yankees’ are nothing more than the current host for the virus.
This is a fascinating ‘conspiracy’ theory, but unfortunately the link doesn’t support the claim. If Mr. Cook has a working link or some other source, it would be nice if he would provide it.
It’s my own opinion that the Christian Zionists have long worked with some Jews in a process of symbosis – with both groups seeking to get what they desired by helping each other.
The “origins’ link did serve to remind me of the King’s Torah, but the internal link there was a 404. Two from my own search are:
Book Reviews
The King’s Torah and the Killing of Palestinians
https://www.dohainstitute.org/en/lists/ACRPS-PDFDocumentLibrary/The_Kings_Torah_and_the_Killing_of_Palestinians.pdf
Prohibition ‘Thou Shalt Not Murder’ applies only ‘to a Jew who kills a Jew,’ write Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur.
https://www.haaretz.com/1.5088576
Now for a crazy notion which has just occurred to me: The Aparthied state has a great interest in steering the Wag-the Dog US of A into attempting to impoverish Russia. Success would open the gates for an easy conquest of Syria.
On the other hand, the long-time UK patron of the shithole state may have some powerful but shadowy Christians who figure it’s time to bring on Armageddon – to force the Second Coming of Jesus. This would serve to explan the extreme positions on Ukraine of the nation with the very elderly Queen.
Some really crazy crap here. I’d suggest you find some good books about slavery in the “New World”. And where in hell did you get the “Black Cannibal” business?
It reminds me of when I started realizing Robert Heinlein was a warped and crazy old man – and started discarding his books.
ReAd a BoOK!?!1!
Unlike you I and other are actually informed, the only problem with ThreeCranes assertion is that the business of transportation to America wasn’t better then Africa, but after they where no longer in the hands of jews things usually got better.
“And where in hell did you get the “Black Cannibal” business?”
I don’t know, you should ask where Ibn Khladun got his “Black Cannibal business”?
“To the south of this…there is a Negro people called Lamlam. They are unbelievers. They brand themselves on the face and temples. The people of Ghanah and Takrur invade their country, capture them, and sell them to merchants who transport them to the Maghrib. There, they constitute the ordinary mass of slaves. Beyond them to the south, there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.”
And of course this creature spews out a long slather of retarded drivel that is a mixture of factually inaccurate and morally hypocritical except this time he tells a million more lies and he pretends he is against zionism to aid him in his deconstruction of White countries already being deconstructed while Israel stands firm.
But in general he likes to talk about slavery inflicted on Black bodies and yet he never mentions over a thousand years of Islamic Arab slave trade where Black bodies where one of the chief commodities and the moral weight of this on the past of those nations while this ways heavily on Britain one of the first nations to do so by choice. Why are monuments to all of these Arab muslim traders and enslavers of black bodies allowed to stand without contest and it is not condemned to celebrate them?
He talks about colonialism being theft of resources, and to do so he says plantations are theft. And what does he mean by this; is he saying that the plantations where built and owned by natives before Britain stole them, is he saying that growing crops that don’t grow in your native country and sending them back to your country inherently theft? Is using black slave labor theft even though you paid other Blacks for those slaves?
And while he dubiously accuses the native population of the country he parasitizing he acts like no one else has actually maliciously seized resources from others in the entirety of the history of the world.
He also acts like in the history of the world no one besides westerners have seized land, tell me do you know that pygmies and Khoisan used to inhabit near all of Africa below the Sahara before bigger and blacker bodies started to eat them all thousands of years ago and went on to inhabit their land and continue to do so into the modern day? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effacer_le_tableau
Why are there no more Tocharians left in the central Asia? Why are the negritos nearly all gone from the isles of southeast asia and India? Why do Arabs inhabit north Africa as a majority?
What is the moral weight of that settler-colonialism?