Backgrounder on Pale of Settlement

Origins: Jewish Viciousness and Violence
by Joachim Martillo (ThorsProvoni@aol.com)

Understanding the Russian Pale of Jewish Settlement is important because the Jewish Zionist violence and viciousness evinced during the Israeli attack on Gaza did not originate with the Holocaust but was an important element of Jewish society in the Pale and probably contributed to the form that Zionist ideology ultimately took.


Even though the Pale is often identified as a (cramped or overpopulated) Russian-established ghetto, in reality it was vast and initially corresponded to the Russian ruled portion of the historic homeland of Yiddish-speaking Russian Jews, who are more precisely described as ethnic Ashkenazim.


During the 19th century the Czarist government added Chernigov and New Russia to the territory of the Pale. Jewish income, education and life-span in the whole region were all greater than those of the non-Jews among whom they lived.

Yet ethnic Ashkenazim were on the whole extremely angry because they no longer had the elite status they had enjoyed in Commonwealth Poland. In fact, without actually ever having moved the ethnic Ashkenazim of the Czarist Empire lived in the imperial sticks and no longer at the imperial center.


Like all other populations in the Czarist Empire, ethnic Ashkenazim had no freedom to relocate to the central territories without an internal passport and official permission.

Ethnic Ashkenazi population was increasing while the traditional Jewish economic sector was vanishing.

Ethnic Ashkenazim were able in some ways to call upon the resources of extremely wealthy Jews that dominated the media and banking industries in Central and Western Europe.

From the 1850s onward German American Jews were developing similar power generally with the help of the capital resources of relatives in Europe.

As their political economic muscle grew German American Jews became ever more willing to flex it on behalf of Russian Jews.

When the Czarist Empire started moving Jews away from the Western boarders because of Jewish smuggling, the outcry from the Central and Western European press forced the Czar to reverse his decision.

As ethnic Ashkenazi economic and political frustration grew, a small segment of them undertook a campaign
of revolutionary violence, sabotage, and targeted assassination.

Ethnic Ashkenazim played major roles in the planning or execution of the three defining murders of Russian history: Alexander II, Pyotr Stolypin, and Nicholas II.

In reaction to increasing Ashkenazi violence, other populations in the Czarist empire (including Jews of other ethnicities) develop increasing hostility toward ethnic Ashkenazim.

In 1881 pogroms took place that are commonly associated with increased emigration of Jews from Czarist Russia to the USA even though economic issues probably constituted a far more important factor.

The anti-Jewish violence of 1881 is usually identified as instigating the Zionist movement. [Note that the collapsing Russian Empire was by the late 19th century a relatively violent place. Pogroms were not uniquely directed against Jews, and it is possible to identify Jewish rampages as well as Jewish-incited pogroms.]

Eventually, the Czarist Empire reached the breaking point, the Czarist government was overthrown, and then the Communists, whose top leadership was predominantly ethnic Ashkenazi, stole the revolution and imposef a regime of hitherto incomparable violence that included a tremendous amount of mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide generally planned and executed by senior and middle level ethnic Ashkenazi Soviet leaders.

Today's Zionist and yesterday's Czarist or Soviet ethnic Ashkenazi violence are almost certainly slightly different faces of the same brutal and vicious mentality that has developed among a growing subset of ethnic Ashkenazim since the 1850s. See The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine.

Americans are unaware of this history because Jewish dominated media and academia has created at least as false a picture of Jews in the Czarist Empire and in the Soviet Union as it has of the conflict over Palestine. [Note that claims about the Soviet Refusenik Movement are as much a fraud as Zionist propaganda that depicts the State of Israel as a democracy that shares American values.]

Not only do the techniques and mendacious practices of the Israel lobby predate Zionism, but non-Zionist media gatekeeping in the 20s and 30s was so effective that Americans were completely unaware of the Soviet Ashkenazi role in mass murder, mass starvation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

Zionists invariably assumed that they could make use of Jewish media gatekeeping.


Ben-Gurion advocated Zionist acceptance of the Peel Partion Plan (1937) because he assumed that the Zionist movement could steal the rest of Palestine later with a complete coverup by Jewish-controlled media.

Note that Ben-Gurion lost that debate over the Peel Plan because the British and American Zionist political economic oligarchs of the time period decided after some internal debate to oppose it. Then as now the leadership of the Zionist colony is subordinate to the political entity that I call the Zionist virtual colonial motherland (or Judonia) and that is roughly comparable to the Israel lobby in the formulation of Professors Walt and Mearsheimer. (See also Another Perspective on the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland.)

In other words, the framework of the Israel lobby was already in place approximately 90 years ago and developed its capabilities during the period between the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the publication of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt with little notice by political scientists or political leaders.

Even today only months after the American presidential candidates groveled and swore fealty to the Israel lobby, few American academics or politicians are willing to recognize the true nature of the Israel lobby as a virtual state ruing a wealthy empire consisting of a settler colony and a vast collection of neo-colonial revenue streams that have resulted from the hegemony of Friedmanite ideology throughout the world economic system.

[Followup (II): Origins of Modern Jewry discusses the development of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia in the 19th century.]

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