From the River to the Sea

Femi Fani-Kayode

“There is no peace for the wicked”- Isaiah 48:22.

There is no greater truism than that which Prophet Isaiah, one of the greatest and most revered Prophets in the Holy Bible, has enunciated in the scripture above.

What he is saying is that callous, merciless and bloodthirsty men and oppressors, subjugators, persecutors, slavers and occupiers of the land of others, whether they be the biblical Egyptians, the Ancient Romans or anyone else, coupled with those that trample on the rights and liberties of others with impunity and that repay good with evil can NEVER escape the wrath of God and neither will they ever know or experience lasting peace.

This is a lesson that evidently the Jews themselves and particularly the Zionists amongst them have failed to appreciate or learn.

That you were oppressed, subjugated, murdered, robbed, humiliated, enslaved, subjected to genocide and mass murder, ethnically cleansed and treated with scorn and contempt yesterday does not give you the right to do the same to others today. 

That you were once occupied, enslaved, thrown into captivity, scattered all over the earth, butchered, gassed to death, subjected to the holocaust and deprived of your beloved homeland yesterday does not permit you to do the same to others today. 

That you have experienced God’s love, mercy, blessings, grace and restoration does not mean that you are the chosen race or master race, it simply means that God has shown you His tender kindness and opted to restore you even though you also killed and oppressed others in the past and that you crucified His only Begotten Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ and sought to destroy Christianity even at the advent of its coming. 

Those who have suffered so much in the past surely have a greater duty to ensure that they desist from inflicting such suffering on others today lest they lose everything. 

It is in this context that I view the State of Israel and the Zionists.

No matter what they have suffered in the last 2000 years in the hands of their numerous haters, oppressors and persecutors they have no right to inflict the wickedness that they are inflicting on the Palestinian people today and as long as they continue to do so they shall know no peace.

They shall also continue to stir up hatred and opprobrium for themselves and their cause from all right-thinking people, including millions that once had sympathy for them, from all over the world. 

This is what we see unfolding today.

Now to the title and essence of this piece.

First coined by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organisation and other Arab nationalist movements in the 1960s, the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is the popular refrain and battle cry for the Palestinians and those that support their cause and struggle for self-determination and emancipation from Israeli occupation and oppression. 

And given what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank today, who can deny them the right to achieve this noble quest for freedom and the right and aspiration to exist as an independent sovereign state?

I have always loved the State of Israel and believed in the two-state solution but I hate what her leaders are doing to the Palestinians today.

I equate the actions of the Israeli Defence Force in Gaza today with the heinous and horrendous atrocities that Hamas inflicted on their civilian population on October 7th. 

I have always made the point that the Jewish State must be accorded the right to exist and reserves the right of self-defence.

I concede that she is also entitled to a measure of vengeance against those who visited the deplorable violence on her civilian population that we witnessed on October 7th but the targeting of innocent civilians in their thousands, the infanticide, the ethnic cleansing, the mass murder, the genocide, the crimes against humanity, the war crimes, the unprecedented and massive amount of bloodshed, the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians, the destruction and utter annihilation of Palestinian homes and infrastructures and all the other beastly and inexplicable horrors that are being unleashed and foisted on the women, children and elderly of Gaza today, including journalists, aid workers, hospital workers, doctors, nurses and other defenceless non-combatants and innocent civilians is unacceptable and indefensible.

20,000 civilians (mainly women and children) were slaughtered in Gaza and 85% of her 2.5 million people were displaced in two months!

Worse still 50% of the population of Gaza is facing starvation.

Such suffering, butchery and slaughter beggars belief and as painful, traumatising and tear-jerking as it is, the world can witness it in real time, thanks to Al Jazeera.

And frankly what we are seeing is unspeakable. Israel may consider this to be her finest hour and a glorious manifestation of her military strength and prowess but in fact but evidence of her irretrievable and inescapable descent into notoriety, savagery and barbarity and her relentless, degenerate, bestial and reprobate disposition.

This is not her finest hour or her best moment but rather her greatest mistake.

I say this because the Israel that millions of people from all over the world, including yours truly, once loved, cherished, defended and empathised with no longer exists.

What we have in its place is an unforgiving, unthinking, cruel, brash, barbaric, brutal, racist, evil, power-drunk and thoroughly repugnant fascist/apartheid state that is being led by a political class comprised of deluded monsters, narcissistic savages, obsessive psychopaths and blood-lusting child-killers who have lost their minds, who are devoid of any pretence to even a semblance of humanity, who are hell-bent on wiping out the Palestinian people and who do not believe that they are bound by the rules, regulations, canons & strictures of civilisation & international humanitarian law.

Given this, Israel should no longer be welcomed into the comity of civilised nations and neither is she worthy of the Western world’s consistent and unconditional support.

She has not only lost her right to be regarded as a responsible and law-abiding member of the international community but, as long as she denies the Palestinians the right to exist in peace and freedom and refuses to lift the occupation, she stands the risk of forfeiting her own right to exist.

What was once the inspiration, promise, pride and joy of millions from all over the world and the darling of civilised nations is now nothing but a vacuous, vicious, vengeful, lawless, petty, pitiful, tyrannical and bloodthirsty pariah state which celebrates and prides itself on its own barbarity, hatred, madness, war-mongering and rage, which openly espouses a racist and repugnant ‘Zionist’ philosophy, which considers itself racially and religiously superior to all others, which thrives on the suffering and pain of its Arab vassals and which is hell-bent on provoking the entire world into WWIII in an attempt to satisfy its senseless and dangerous delusions about re-establishing a biblical Zionist state and wiping out the Palestinian people.

Zionism is the greatest evil that has been foisted on earth since the advent of the Nazis.

It is an irony of fate & history that the Jews that are now calling themselves Zionists are the very same race whose forefathers suffered more persecution & cruelty at the hands of the Nazis than any other.

I have no doubt that if Israeli PM Netanyahu had the power, wherewithal and horrendous gas chambers that Hitler once did he would, without any hesitation, gas to death every Arab on earth and kill every Muslim and Christian in the Middle East.

They are the greatest threat to world peace and stability and the only way to free us from their insidious and sinister power and pervasive influence is by establishing a free and sovereign Palestinian state “from the river to the sea”.

Just as Nazi Germany was brought to her knees by the civilised world after WWII because of her heinous atrocities, Zionist Israel needs to be brought to her knees today.

Does a murderous, racist rogue state that considers itself above the law and delights in slaughtering children have the right to exist? I doubt it.

To those who say “But Israel is a democracy and indeed the ONLY democracy in the Middle East”, I say the following:

Nazi Germany was a democracy too and Hitler was a democratically-elected leader yet look where they took the world!

In light of all this, it is indeed a great shame that Israel’s greatest friend and ally, the United States of America, not only firstly vetoed a motion for a second ceasefire in Gaza at the United Nations Security Council last Friday but secondly, the American Congress passed a resolution that any criticism of or opposition to Zionism would be regarded as a manifestation of anti-semitism.

The first is nothing but yet another inglorious and graphic display of American immorality, hypocrisy, double standards, insensitivity and depravity and the second of the wilful blindness and glaring ignorance of the majority of members of the American Congress.

To equate political Zionism, a concept which only came into existence as an organised nationalist movement after it was enunciated and founded by Theodor Herzl in 1897, with Judaism which has existed for thousands of years is not only antediluvian idiocy and intellectual bankruptcy in its most raw, primitive, vulgar, crude and glaring form but also ignores the fact that millions of both right-wing, conservative religious Jews such as the Torah Jews and secular ones residing in Israel, America and Europe vehemently oppose the concept of Zionism themselves and deplore its malevolent and sinister delusions and political aspirations.

I love the Jews and the State of Israel but I despise and deplore the Zionists and what they have turned the latter into.

I despise them not because of their religious faith or Semitic racial identity but because of the evil political philosophy of subjugation, occupation, enslavement and destruction of others that they choose to espouse.

It is for this very reason that for millions all over the world and not just the Arabs of the Middle East, the battle cry and war song of ‘from the river to the sea’ resonates so loudly. 

Permit me to conclude this contribution with the following observation which is particularly relevant to those of us that are from Africa. 

At the end of WW11 In 1945 when the great debate began amongst the leaders of the victorious Allied powers, including America, France, Russia and the UK, about where to send the Jews after the holocaust, there was a very strong lobby to send them to Uganda where they would have established their long-awaited new Jewish homeland.

Uganda, like Palestine, was a British colony and the colonial power believed that, unlike the Palestinians, the local African population would not present much of a threat or even raise an objection to the appropriation and occupation of their land by millions of Western-backed European Jews who had suffered the most horrendous form of persecution in Europe for thousands of years.

Yet this interesting proposal was initially made 42 years earlier in 1903.

Known as the ‘Uganda Scheme’, it was a proposal by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to create a Jewish homeland in a portion of British East Africa.

It was presented at the Sixth World Zionist Congress in Basel in 1903 by Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement.

In a short piece titled ‘Exploring The Middle East Uganda Scheme for a Jewish Homeland’, the Middle East Monitor wrote the following “Did you know about the intriguing chapter in history where Israel was almost established in Africa? This “almost” moment was known as the Uganda Scheme and was proposed by Theodor Herzl the father of political Zionism, in 1903. Herzl presented the plan to the World Zionist Congress envisioning a Jewish homeland in East Africa, then under British colonial rule. The proposal came at a time when Jews in Eastern Europe were facing severe persecution and massacres, making the idea of a haven, even in distant Africa, appealing. Despite initial approval by the Congress, the plan faced opposition from the White settlers in East Africa who did not want to be displaced by other settlers. They formed an anti-Zionist committee and their disapproval led to Britain withdrawing the offer, altering the course of history”.

Isn’t that amazing? Now to the point. Given the disposition of the Zionists, I am of the view that had the Uganda Scheme been successfully resurrected, accepted and implemented by the Allied powers in 1945 and the State of Israel established in Uganda as opposed to Palestine in 1948, the history of the Middle East and indeed the world over the last 82 years would not only have been very different but the local African indigenous population in Uganda may well have either been enslaved or, worse still, extinct or exterminated by today. 

I say this because Zionism is a deeply racist and supremacist philosophy that takes no prisoners, seeks to dispose of, subjugate, humiliate, emasculate and enslave others and does not believe in sharing.

If the local indigenous African population had sought to resist  Zionist hegemony and occupation in the same way that the Palestinians have been doing for the last 82 years they would have been subjected to something even worse than the genocide we are witnessing in Gaza & by now there may well have been no black Africans left alive in Uganda or indeed the whole of East Africa!

Such is the danger that political Zionism presents to humanity wherever it is entrenched and wherever it goes.

And if anyone considers the elimination or extermination of entire races to be a far-fetched proposition in this day and age they should find out what happened to the black population in Argentina, the Native Indians of North America and the local indigenous tribes like the Incas and Aztecs of South America in the hands of foreign and non-indigenous settlers and occupiers.

The world is a very cruel place and the Ugandans and East Africans should count themselves lucky that Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, made a deal with the immensely wealthy Jewish Rothchild family and presented what was then known as British Palestine as a gift and offering on a silver platter to them in the form of a Jewish homeland in 1948 rather than Uganda.

Meanwhile, we shall continue to speak out against the evil in Gaza, agitate for a ceasefire and call for a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Fani-Kayode is a former Minister of Aviation