The nation of Israel was established in the 20th century after many years of effort by international Zionists who fanatically sought support for their project wherever they could find it. In WWI Zionists appealed to both governments of England and Germany to support their cause of "homeland" (or "nation" depending to whom they were talking). England finally came through, with the aid of American Zionists, in the form of the 1917 Balfour Declaration in order to secure financial support from international Jewry. (See other excellent histories here and here.) Leading up to and during WWII the Nazi regime collaborated with Zionists to support the emigration of European Jews to Palestine (see this, this, and this), and at the end of WWII the victorious capitalist Anglo-American Empire failed to seriously oppose the establishment of the state of Israel because they began to see it as useful as an imperial outpost in the Middle East. And, as they say, the rest is (a) history of apartheid and genocide.
Israel’s present assault on Gaza alas indicates that this policy [incremental genocide] continues unabated. The term is important since it appropriately locates Israel’s barbaric action — then and now — within a wider historical context.
This context should be insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every new wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.
