“Farewell Israel”: Myth and Reality

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By Alan Hart

With his political documentary FAREWELL ISRAEL, Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam, American director Joel Gilbert has launched what could be described as Zionism’s propaganda weapon of last resort.

The film is described by its promoters as “An historic journey, from the birth of Islam, through its 1,200 year reign over the civilised world, to the last 300 years of Islamic decline, overtaken and dominated by the West - then humiliated by a Jewish state… In this groundbreaking film, the total rejection of Israel by Muslim states since its inception in 1948 comes to light as a religious duty for Believers.” (My emphasis added).

According to the same promotional script: “The Iranian agenda for acquiring strategic weapons to eliminate Israel comes clearly into focus. Today, at the direction of Iran, Islamists are preparing for a fateful war for Islam - and Israel is the number one target and obstacle in the path of Islamic revival for Muslims.”

For the sake of discussion, let’s suppose that sometime in the foreseable future Iran does have nuclear weapons. Would it then go for a nuclear first strike against Israel? The answer, I assert, is no. Never! So what really is all the Zionist and American neo-con fuss about?

Perhaps without realising that he has let a great, big cat out of the bag, Joel Gilbert has provided the answer. He says (my empasis added): “Even without attacking Israel, the mere capabilty of Iranian missiles to lay waste to Tel Aviv would create a ‘strategic umbrella,’ preventing Israel from using its superior strategic assets in a conventional war. With Israeli missiles neutralised, Muslim countries could overwhelm Israel with their superior numbers, conventional armor and short range missiles.”

And that’s the real point. Israel’s military leaders and their political yes-men don’t believe, and never have believed, that Iran, if it possessed nuclear weapons, would unleash them in a first strike against the Zionist state. The real problem for its leaders is that the moment Israel ceased to be the only nuclear-armed power in the region, would be the moment it lost its ability to impose its will on the region. And actually the world.

I don’t doubt that Joel Gilbert is “one of the few Western scholars of historic Islamic-Jewish relations”, but that has not prevented him from closing his mind to the reality of events and the truth of history. The statement that Muslim states have totally rejected Israel from its birth in 1948 is nothing but a manifestation of Zionist propaganda nonsense. As documented in THE IRON WALL, Israel and the Arab World by Professor Avi Shlaim, one of the two leading Israeli “revisionist” (which means honest) historians of our time, de-classified Israeli state papers and the diaries of departed leaders leave no room to doubt that it was Israel, not the Arab states, which never missed an opportunity to close the door to peace.

And still today the impotent but pragmatic regimes of the Arab and wider Muslim world are prepared, with the consent of the overwhelming majority of their citizens, to make peace with an Israel inside its pre-1967 borders. It’s true that Zionism is not interested in a genuine two-state solution because it’s mission was and is to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it; but that doesn’t change the fact that most Arabs and other Muslims would, even now, accept an Israel withdrawn from all the territory it grabbed in the 1967 war.

The main message of FAREWELL ISRAEL, Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam is addressed in particular to the present and the next occupant of the White House. It, the message, is something like this: “Don’t push Israel to do things it doesn’t want to do because it’s facing the real danger of annihilation, and that being so, it’s prepared to tell the world to go to hell if necessary.” (If necessary means in the event of the major powers led by America requiring Israel to be serious about peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept).

From reading between the lines of what Zionists and other supporters of Israel right or wrong have been saying and writing for the past year and more, it’s clear that at least some of them do believe that the day is coming when an America administration will conclude that the Zionist state is more of a liability than an asset, and will be prepared to apply all necessary pressure in an effort to cause it to make peace on terms the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and other Arabs and most Muslims everywhere could accept.

And that’s the context in which I suggest that Joel Gilbert’s documentary could be described as a Zionist propaganda weapon of last resort. Its purpose is to explain in advance why Israel might one day tell an American President to go to hell.

On the subject of Joel Gilbert’s vision of Israel one day being overwhelmed, I recall the words spoken to me many years ago by Golda Meir, Mother Israel, when she was prime minister. At a point during an interview I did with her for the BBC’s Panorama programme, I interrupted her to say: “Prime Minister, I want to be sure I understand what you’re saying… You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?”

As stated on the second page of Waiting for the Apocalypse, the Prologue to Volume One of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Golda replied, without the shortest of pauses for reflection, and in the gravel voice that could charm or intimidate American Presidents according to need, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Within an hour of that interview being transmitted at eight o’clock on a Monday evening, The Times (pre-Murdoch and not then a cheer leader for Zionism) had changed its lead editorial. Its new one quoted what Golda had said to me and then added its own opinion - “We had better believe her.”

I did and still do.