Zionism’s Lost Shine

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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby stefano » Mon Oct 20, 2014 2:58 am

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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 20, 2014 5:32 am

wow ...

my pics are too big (sorry that photo doesn't show up that way to me)......sorry Nordic I can't fix it now it was posted a month ago

I post something that isn't anti-Israel (not in the obvious overt usual way) ....yea I read it.....so what....now why would I do that? sorry stefano I can't fix it now was posted a month ago...if you would have said something sooner I could have deleted it

:roll:

I will spend the rest of my life here apologizing for everything I post to everyone that takes exception to it
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby stefano » Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:15 am

There's nothing to apologise for - I just thought it was weird that you'd post a standard Zionist rant and thought maybe you'd just read the title.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 20, 2014 6:25 am

or maybe I just was a little nostalgic and thought I should just start arguing with myself :)

alerting on myself ..is that an option?

sorry....just woke up and waiting for coffee Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 24, 2014 2:49 pm

The Battle for Palestine
October 23, 2014

From the Archive: You can’t understand the worsening Mideast violence without knowing the modern history of Palestine, a story that begins with European anti-Semitism causing Zionists to claim Palestine for the Jews and to expel the Arabs, wrote retired U.S. diplomat William R. Polk in the first of three parts.

By William R. Polk (Originally published Aug. 11, 2014)

What we call the “Palestine Problem” is really a European Problem. No European society treated Jews as full members, and most have ugly records of anti-Semitism. Even relatively benign Western governments exploited, segregated or banished Jews (and such other minorities as Gypsies, Muslims and deviant Christians). Less benign governments practiced pogroms, massacres and expulsions. European history reveals a pervasive, powerful and perpetual record of intolerance to all forms of ethnic, cultural and religious difference.

Jewish reaction to the various forms of repression was usually passivity but occasionally flight interspersed with attempts to join the dominant community.

When Jews were attacked by Christian mobs during the Crusades, they suffered and tried to hide; when they were thrown out of such medieval cities as Cambridge, they fled to new refuges; when they and the Muslim Arabs were forced out of Spain in 1492, most found refuge in Muslim countries which were far more tolerant of minorities than contemporary Christian societies; when Eastern (Ashkenazi) and “Oriental,” mainly Spanish, (Sephardic) Jews in small numbers began to reach Germany, Austria, France and England in the Eighteenth Century, many converted to Catholicism; finally, most of the European and American Jewish communities assimilated culturally and by generous public actions sought to prove their social value to their adopted nations.

French diplomat Francois George-Picot, who along with British colonial officer Mark Sykes drew lines across a Middle East map of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, carving out states with boundaries that are nearly the same as they are today.
French diplomat Francois George-Picot, who along with British colonial officer Mark Sykes drew lines across a Middle East map of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, carving out states with boundaries that are nearly the same as they are today.
Generally speaking, they were successful in their efforts in America, England and Italy but failed in France, Germany and Austria. Even when they faced existential threats, there is no record of a serious attempt by European Jews to defend themselves.

In the latter years of the Nineteenth Century, the reaction of the Jewish communities residing in Europe began to change. In part this was because, like other European peoples, Jews began to think of themselves as a nation. This transformation of attitude led to a change from the desire for escape to a temporary haven (Nachtaysl) to permanent establishment in what Theodor Herzl called a Judenstaat, the creation of a separate, faith-based nation-state which was viewed as the permanent solution to anti-Semitism. This was the essential aim and justification for Zionism.

Nineteenth Century Europeans understood and approved of the concept of nation-states but only for themselves; in France, Germany, Italy, Austria and the Balkans, Europe was reforming itself along national lines. However, no European nation-state was willing to tolerate a resident rival nationalism. So Herzl’s call for Jewish nationhood was generally regarded as subversive by non-Jews and was feared by the more established Jewish communities and the religious establishment as a probable cause of an anti-Jewish reaction. These attitudes would remain in contention down to our times.

Keen for Imperialism

Even before the Europeans were imbibing the ideas of nationalism, their ruling classes were thrusting into the Americas, Africa and Asia to create empires. Spain dominated the Americas and was insistent that the ethnic-religious problems of the Old World not be transmitted there so it sought ethnic “purity” of its colonizers; neither Jews nor suspect conversos were allowed. England effectively ruled India beginning in the last years of the Eighteenth Century, and the nature of its colonial government, drawn from the middle class, generally precluded Jewish involvement.

On the contrary, when France invaded Algeria from 1830, it opened its doors to fairly large-scale Jewish immigration from Malta and elsewhere. Germany briefly tried to create an empire in Africa but was stopped by the First World War.

Russia meanwhile was consolidating its Asian empire and in parts of it created Jewish zones in some of which people of non-Semitic backgrounds were absorbed into Jewish culture, but, in the western heart of the Russian empire, anti-Semitism was pervasive and violent. By the Nineteenth Century, Russian Jews were leaving in vast number for Western Europe and the United States. In the last decade of the Nineteenth Century almost 200,000 arrived in America alone.

Despite the differences, we can see that while nationalism was the ideology of choice domestically, imperialism captured the imagination of Europeans in foreign affairs. So how did these two ideologies impact upon what most Europeans regarded as “the Jewish problem?”

In England, we see most clearly what some leading politicians thought might be the answer: encouraging the emigration of Jews from Europe to the colonies. One of the early proponents of this, essentially anti-Semitic, policy was Sir Laurence Oliphant. As he proposed, getting rid of the Jews as neighbors — that is, in England — and thus solving the “Jewish Problem” would foster British trade and help Britain consolidate its empire if they established themselves as colonies in Africa or Asia.

Added to the benefit imperialists identified was the vague but attractive idea held by many fervent Christians that if the Jews returned to the Holy Land, they would become Christian. Thus, support for Zionism seemed to many Europeans to be a win-win policy.

Colonial Neglect

Europeans knew little about the peoples they were conquering in Africa and Asia and did not regard their well-being as of much importance. Americans, let us admit, were even more brutal in dealing with native Americans. So were the Australians with the Aboriginals and the South African Boers with the Bantu. Rich, Western societies generally regarded the poor of the world, and especially other races, colors and creeds, as subhuman, without claims on freedom or even sustenance.

This was the attitude taken up by the early Zionists toward the Arabs. Even their existence was often denied. The Zionist leader, Israel Zangwill, described Palestine and Zionist aspirations for it as being “a country without a people for a people without a land.”

Zangwill’s was a powerful slogan. Unfortunately, it masked a different reality. Given the technology of the times, Palestine was actually densely populated. The overwhelming numbers of the inhabitants were villagers who farmed such land as they could water. Water, never plentiful, was the limiting factor.

Nomads lived on the edges but they were always few in number, never as much as 15 percent of the natives. They too used sparse resources in the only way they could be used, by moving their animals from one temporary source of grazing to another as rain made possible.

Until massive amounts of money and new technologies became available from the 1930s, population and land were in balance but, of course, in balance on a lower level than in wetter, richer climates where societies had more advanced technologies.

Oliphant, his successors in the British government and others in the French government were not concerned about what their policies did to native peoples. The British were keen to take the lands of African blacks and to plunder the Indians of India while the French engaged in policies approaching genocide in Algeria. As focused on Palestine, the British sought to solve the problem of what to do with the Jews at the expense of peoples who could not defend themselves — and to benefit from the work of the Jews rather like medieval kings did — rather than to reform their own attitudes toward Jews.

Thus, as Claude Montefiore, the president of the Anglo-Jewish Association, declared on Nov. 30, 1917, “The Zionist movement was caused by anti-Semitism.”

The Deep Cause of War

The two World Wars set the parameters of the “middle term” causes of the struggle for Palestine. Briefly, we can sketch them under four headings: first, the desperate struggle of the British to avoid defeat in the First World War by courting Jewish support; second, the struggle of the British both to defeat the still powerful Ottoman empire and to avoid the danger of mutiny of Muslims in their Indian empire; third, the British attempts to “square” of the triangle of promises made during the war to Arabs, Jews and their French allies; and, fourth, the management of a viable “mandate,” as they renamed their League of Nations-awarded colonies.

Taken together, these acts form the “middle term” of the causes of war in our times. They are:

First, in the final period of the First World War, the Russians were convulsed by revolution and sought a separate peace with Germany (the 1917-1918 negotiations that led to the Brest-Litovsk treaty). The Germans’ incentive for the treaty was that it allowed them to shift their powerful military formations from the Eastern front to the Western front. They hoped that in one huge push they could overwhelm the already depleted and exhausted Anglo-French armies before America could effectively intervene.

The Allied High Command thought this was likely. Slaughter of the Allied forces had been catastrophic. At the same time, England faced bankruptcy. It had drawn down its own reserves and exhausted its overseas credit. It was desperate.

So what options did the British have? Let us be clear: whether their assessment was right or wrong is irrelevant because they acted on what they thought they knew. They believed that support for Zionist aspirations would, or at least might, change their fortunes because they thought that:

–The Bolsheviks who had become the Russian government were overwhelmingly Jewish and seeing British support for what was presumably their aspiration for a national home, they would rescind or not implement the contentious and unpopular Brest-Litovsk treaty and so keep the German army from redeploying on the Western front;

–A large part of the officer corps of the German army was Jewish and seeing British support for what was presumably their aspiration for a national home and also being disillusioned by the losses in the war and the way they were discriminated against by the Prussian high command they would either defect or at least fight less hard; and

–The American financial world (“Wall Street”) was controlled by Jews who, seeing British support for what was presumably their aspiration for a national home, would open their purses to relieve the desperate need of Britain for money to buy food and arms. (Again, these British perceptions may have been far off the mark but they were their perceptions.)

This appreciation was the justification for the Balfour Declaration of Nov. 2, 1917. As then-British Prime Minister David Lloyd George later declared, “The Zionist leaders gave us a definite promise that, if the Allies committed themselves to give facilities for the establishment of a national home for the Jews in Palestine, they would do their best to rally Jewish sentiment and support throughout the world to the Allied cause.”

British Maneuvering

Second, the Balfour Declaration was not a “stand alone” document: Britain had already sought the support of the predominant Arab Muslim leader. Since the Ottoman Sultan-Caliph had declared support for the Central Powers, Sharif ["noble descendant of the Prophet"] Husain, who was then the governor of Mecca, was the most venerated Muslim the British could hope to use to accomplish their two urgent objectives: the first was defeating the Ottoman army (which had just captured a whole British division and was threatening the Suez Canal) and the second was preventing what their jittery security service was always predicting, another Indian “mutiny” and/or the defection of the largely Muslim Indian army as a result of the declaration of a jihad by the Sultan-Caliph.

To accomplish these twin aims, the British encouraged the Sharif of Mecca to proclaim his support for the Allied cause and to organize a “Revolt in the Desert.” In return, the British offered to recognize Arab independence under his rule in most of the Middle East.

The British offer was spelled out by the senior British official in the Middle East, Sir Henry McMahon, in a series of official letters of which the first was dated July 14, 1915. The area to be assigned to Husain was essentially “Syria” or what is today divided into Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, part of Arabia and Palestine/Israel. This initial offer was subsequently reconfirmed and extended to Iraq by a series of separate declarations and acts.

Although the British government had committed itself to support Arab claims for this area, it also began the following year negotiating with France and the Russian empire for this and other parts of the Middle East. An Anglo-French accord was reached in 1916 by Sir Mark Sykes with M. Georges Picot. Their agreement allocated to France much of what had been promised to the Arabs and designated as an international zone the then Ottoman coastal areas from the Sinai frontier with Egypt including Gaza up to and including the now Lebanese city of Tyre (Arabic: Sour) except for a small British enclave at Acre.

Third, as the war ended and the negotiations began in Paris for a Treaty of Peace, the British had to try to explain, hide or revise these three wartime agreements. They were embarrassed when the new Bolshevik government published the hitherto secret Sykes-Picot agreement, but they managed for years to keep the Husain-McMahon correspondence secret. What they could not hide was the Balfour Declaration. However, they began a process of “definition” of their policy that ran completely counter to what the Zionists had expected.

Zionist Goals

The Zionists, from the beginning, were determined to turn Palestine into a Jewish nation-state (Herzl’s Judenstaat), but, being sensitive to British politics, their leaders denied “the allegation that Jews [aimed] to constitute a separate political nationality.” The word the Zionists proposed for what they intended to create in Palestine, coined by Max Nordau as a subterfuge “to deceive by its mildness,” was heimstätte (something less than a state, roughly a “homeland) to be employed “until there was no reason to dissimulate our real aim.”

Predictably, the deception fooled no one. As Lord Kitchener had remarked when the Balfour Declaration was being debated in the English Cabinet, he was sure that the half million Palestinians would “not be content [with an Old Testament role as a suppressed minority to be] hewers of wood and drawers of water.” He was right, but few people cared. Certainly not then.

The native Palestinians were not mentioned in any of the three agreements: the agreement with Sharif Husain dealt broadly with most of the Arab Middle East while the Sykes-Picot agreement shunted them, unnamed, aside into a rather vague international zone and the Balfour Declaration used the curious circumlocution for them as “the existing non-Jewish communities.” (However, while focusing on Jewish aspirations and avoiding naming the Palestinians, it specified that nothing should be done that would “prejudice” their “civil and religious rights.”)

It was not until 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, that an attempt was made to find out what the Palestinians wanted. No one in Paris knew; so, strongly opposed by both Britain and France, President Woodrow Wilson sent a mission of inquiry, the King-Crane Commission, out to the Levant to find out. Wilson, already desperately ill and having turned over leadership of the American delegation to my cousin Frank Polk, probably never saw their report, but what the Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians told the American Commissioners was essentially that they wanted to be left alone and if that was not feasible they would accept American (but not British) supervision. The British were annoyed by the American inquiry; they did not care what the natives wanted.

The British were also increasingly disturbed that heimstätte was being taken to mean more than they had intended. So, when Winston Churchill became Colonial Secretary and as such was responsible for Palestine, he publicly rebuked the Zionists for trying to force Britain’s hand and emphasized that in the Balfour Declaration the British government had promised only to support establishment in Palestine of a Jewish homeland. It did not commit Britain to make Palestine as a whole the Jewish homeland.

Echoes of these statements would be heard, because shouted back and forth over the following 30 years, time after time. Ultimately the shouts would become shots.

Irreconcilable Differences

British attempts over the years to reconcile their promises to the Arabs, the French and the Zionist movement occupies shelves of books, filled a number of major government studies and was taken up in several international conferences. The promises were, of course, irreconcilable.

One must admire the candor of Lord Balfour, the titular author of the Balfour Declaration, who, in a remarkable statement to his fellow Cabinet ministers on Aug. 11, 1919, admitted that “so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers [Britain and France] have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which at least in letter, they have not always intended to violate.”

Fourth, having driven out the Ottoman Turkish forces, the British set up military governments. Knowing about these double- or triple-deals, efforts at concealment, post-facto interpretations, lawyer-like quibbles, linguistic arguments and Biblical allusions, the British commander, General (later Field Marshal, Lord) Edmond Allenby, refused to be drawn into the fundamental issue of policy, declaring that such measures as were being taken were “purely provisional,” but the military government quickly morphed into a British colony, defined by the new League of Nations as a “mandate” in which the imperial power was obligated to “uplift” the natives and prepare them for self-rule.

Practical decisions were to be set by the civil High Commissioner. The first such official was an English Zionist, Sir Herbert Samuel, who came into office to begin large-scale immigration of Jews into Palestine, to recognize de facto a Jewish government (the “Jewish Agency”) and to give Jewish immigrants permission to acquire and irrevocably hold land that was being farmed by Palestinian villagers. I turn now to the transformation of Palestine under British rule.

The Deep Cause of War

The Palestine, which the British had conquered and around which they drew a frontier, had a surface area of 10,000 square miles (26,000 square kilometers) and had been divided among three sanjaqs (subdivisions of a province) of the Ottoman villayet (province) of Beirut. The British had expelled its governors and their civil, police and military officers, who were Ottoman officials, and had established a colonial government.

The population of 752,000 was divided mainly between 600,000 Arabic-speaking Muslims and roughly 80,000 Christians and the same number of Jews. Each group had its own schools, hospitals and other public programs staffed by religiously educated men. The Jews were mostly pilgrims or merchants and lived mainly in Jerusalem, Haifa and the larger towns. Christians, similarly, had their own churches and schools, but unlike the Muslims and Jews they were divided among a variety of sects.

A British study in 1931 found them to include adherents of the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Greek Uniate (Melkite), Anglican, Armenian (Gregorian), Armenian Uniate, Jacobite, Syrian Catholic, Coptic, Abyssinian, Abyssinian Uniate, Maronite, Chaldean, Lutheran and other churches. Whatever else the land of Palestine produced, it was certainly luxuriant in religion.

The Palestine that emerged at the end of the First World War was also an heir to the Ottoman Empire because the British had decided that Ottoman laws were still in effect. What these laws mandated would play a major role in Palestinian-Zionist affairs so they must be noted. The key point is that in its later years, the Ottoman empire had attempted various reforms that were primarily aimed at increasing its ability to draw tax revenue from the population.

The most important of these changes was the imposition of quasi-private ownership on the traditional system of land ownership. From roughly 1880 onward, wealthy urban or even foreign merchants, money lenders and officials were able to acquire title to lands by agreeing to pay the taxes. Similar systems and similar transfer of “ownership” occurred in many areas of Asia and Africa. “Modernization” often came at the price of legal dispossession. So important was this was a concept and a process in future events that it must be understood.

Land in Palestine (and adjoining Lebanon as in Egypt, India and much of Africa and Asia) was an extension to a village. Like the houses, the plots mirrored the kinship structure. If a family tree were superimposed on a map, it would show that adjoining parcels were owned by close relatives; the further away the land, the more distant the kin relationship. One could read into the land ownership pattern the history of births, deaths, marriages, family disputes and the waxing and fading of lineages.

Despite the Ottoman changes, villagers continued to plow and harvest according to their system. In fact, they did everything they could to avoid contact with the government. They did so because the collection of taxes resembled a military campaign in which their grain might be confiscated, their cattle driven away, their sons kidnapped for military service and other indignities imposed.

In Palestine as in Syria, Iran and the Punjab where the process has been carefully studied, peasants often agreed to have their lands registered as the possession of rich and influential merchants and officials who would promise to protect them. In short, the new system promoted a sort of mafia.

That was the legal system the British found when they set up their government in Palestine. Ottoman tax records specified that large blocs of villages and their lands “belonged” not to village crop farmers but to the influential “tax farmers.”

One example was the Lebanese merchant family, the Sursuks. In 1872, the Sursuks had acquired a kind of ownership (known in Ottoman law as miri) from the Ottoman government for a whole district in the Vale of Esdraelon near Haifa. The 50,000 acres the Sursuks acquired was apportioned among some 22 villages. In return for the title to the land, they agreed to pay the yearly tax which they extracted from the villagers in their multiple roles as tax collector, purchaser of shared crops and money lender. They apparently made at least 100 percent profit yearly on their purchase; the land was one of the most fertile areas in the country.

As an English traveler, Lawrence Oliphant, wrote in 1883, this land “looks today like a huge green lake of waving wheat, with its village-crowned mounds rising from it like islands, and it presents one of the most striking pictures of luxuriant fertility which it is possible to imagine.”

While the law was Ottoman, it corresponded to English practice dating from the Seventeenth Century “enclosures” of commons. The British imposed it on Ireland and enforced it on the Punjab, Kenya and other parts of their empire.

Selling the Land

The Sursuks had purchased the land, according to the records, for an initial £ 20,000. Under the Land Transfer Ordinance of 1920, they were allowed to sell it. So in 1921, the Zionist purchasing agency bought the land and villages for £726,000. The Sursuks became rich; the Zionists were delighted; the losers were the villagers. Some 8,000 of them were evicted.

Moreover, for the most laudable of reasons — the Zionist regulation that forbade exploitation of natives — the dispossessed villagers could not even work as landless laborers on their former lands. Nor could the land ever be repurchased from the Jewish National Fund which provided that the land was inalienable.

Both anger and greed gripped the Palestinian upper class: some sold their lands for what appeared then astronomical prices, but about 80 percent of all purchases were from absentee owners, like the Sursuks.

In less than a decade, tensions between the two communities reached a flash point. The flash point was then, and continued to the present time to be, the place where the Wailing Wall abutted the principal Islamic religious site, al-Aqsa mosque. For the first time, on Aug. 15, 1929, a mob of several hundred Jewish youths paraded with the Zionist flag and sang the Zionist anthem.

Immediately, a mob of Arab youths attacked them. Riots spread across the country and for the first but far from the last time, Britain had to rush in troops. Within two weeks, 472 Jews and at least 268 Arabs had been killed. It was a harbinger of things to come

The British were deeply disturbed. Riots were expensive; a civil war would be ruinous. So the Home government decided to seek advice on what it should do. It turned to a man with great experience. Sir John Hope-Simpson had been a senior officer in the elite (British) Indian Civil Service, had helped to solve serious problems in Greece and in China and had been elected to Parliament as a Liberal. He was commissioned to find a solution.

Not surprisingly, he concluded that the issues were land and immigration because “the result of the purchase of land in Palestine by the Jewish National Fund has been that the land … ceased to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future. Not only can he never hope to lease or to cultivate it, but, by the stringent provisions of the lease of the Jewish National Fund, he is deprived for ever from employment on that land. Nor can anyone help him by purchasing the land and restoring it to common use. The land is mortmain and inalienable. It is for this reason that Arabs discount the professions of friendship and goodwill on the part of Zionists.”

Hope-Simpson pointed out that Palestine was a small territory, only 10,000 square miles of which more than three quarters was “uncultivable” by normal economic criteria; with 16 percent of the good land owned by Jews or the Jewish National Fund. He thought that the remainder was insufficient for the existing Arab community. Further sales, he was sure, would provoke further Arab resistance and violence. Thus, he recommended a temporary halt to immigration.

Zionist Protests

Infuriated by his report, the Zionists immediately organized a protest movement in and around the government in London and in the English press. Under unprecedented pressure, the Labour Party government repudiated Hope-Simpson’s report and refused to consider his recommendation. From the episode, the Zionist leaders learned that they could change government policy at its source by applying money, propaganda and political organization. Dealing with the ultimate authorities first in England and then in America would become a persistent Zionist tactic down to the present time. Palestinians never developed such a capacity.

The Zionist aim was, naturally, to bring to Palestine as many immigrants as possible and to bring them as quickly as possible. Between 1919 and 1933, 150,000 Jewish men, women and children came to Palestine. In the four years from 1933 to 1936 the Jewish population quadrupled. In 1935, as many arrived as in the first five years of the Mandate, 61,854.

Seeing that the British government had spurned even its own officials and that it would not or could not control either the land or population issues, the Palestinians became increasingly furious. They concluded that their chance of protecting their position by peaceful means was almost nil.

In 1936, a general strike, something unheard of before, turned into a siege; terrorists blew up trains and bridges and armed bands, which also for the first time included volunteers from Syria and Iraq, roamed throughout Palestine and, most sobering of all, the Arab elite which had worked closely with the British as judges and officials registered their “loyal opposition”:

According to senior Arab officials in the Palestinian government, “the Arab population of all classes, creeds and occupations is animated by a profound sense of injustice. … They feel that insufficient regard has been paid in the past to their legitimate grievances, even though these grievances had been inquired into by qualified and impartial investigators, and to a large extent vindicated by those inquiries. As a result, the Arabs have been driven into a state verging on despair; and the present unrest is no more than an expression of that despair.”

Annoyed but not deterred, the British Colonial Office decided, as it was then also doing in India, to crack down hard on the “troublemakers.” It put Palestine under martial law and brought in 20,000 regular soldiers to be quartered on rebel villages, blew up houses of suspected insurgents and imprisoned Palestinian notables. Over 1,000 Palestinians were killed. But it was clear to the government in London that these were measures could be only temporarily and that more durable (and affordable) policies must be found and implemented. The British appointed a Royal Commission to find a solution.

Seeking a Solution

Echoing what previous investigators had found and recommending much of what they had suggested, the Royal Commission report has a modern ring. It concluded that:

“An irrepressible conflict has arisen between two national communities within the narrow bounds of one small country. … There is no common ground between them. The Arab community is predominantly Asiatic in character, the Jewish community predominantly European. They differ in religion and in language. Their cultural and social life, their ways of thought and conduct, are as incompatible as their national aspirations. … In the Arab picture the Jews could only occupy the place they occupied in Arab Egypt or Arab Spain. The Arabs would be as much outside the Jewish picture as the Canaanites in the old land of Israel. … This conflict was inherent in the situation from the outset. … The conflict will go on, the gulf between Arabs and Jews will widen. (emphasis added)

Agreeing that repression “leads nowhere,” the Royal Commission suggested the first of a number of plans to partition the land.

Partition sounded sensible (at least to the English), but in 1936 there were too many Palestinians and too few Jews to carve out a viable Jewish state. Small as it was to be, the Jewish state would have 225,000 Arabs or only 28,000 less than the 258,000 Jews, but it would contain most of the better agricultural land. (The land expert of the Jewish Agency reported that the proposed Jewish state would contain 500,000 acres “upon which as many people could live as in the whole of the remainder of the country.”)

Partition was immediately rejected by Vladimir Jabotinsky who was the intellectual father of the Israeli terrorist groups, the Stern Gang (Lohamei Herut Yisrael) and the Irgun (Irgun Zva’i Leumi), and the sequence of Israeli leaders, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.

He warned the British that “We cannot accept cantonisation, because it will be suggested by many, even among you, that even the whole of Palestine may prove too small for that humanitarian purpose we need. A corner of Palestine, a ‘canton,’ how can we promise to be satisfied with it. We cannot. We never can. Should we swear to you we should be satisfied, it would be a lie.”

The Zionist Congress refused the Royal Commission plan, and patterning themselves on Gandhi’s passive resistance movement, the Palestinians set up a “National Committee” which demanded that the British allow the formation of a democratic government (in which, the Arab majority would have prevailed) and that the sale of land to the Zionists be stopped until the “economic absorptive capacity” could be established.

And they offered an alternative to partition: essentially what today we call a “one state solution”: Palestine would not be divided, but the current ratio of Jewish and Palestinian inhabitants would be maintained.

The Royal Commission proposal got nowhere: because the Zionists thought they could get more while Palestinian leaders could not negotiate since they had been rounded up and put in a concentration camp.

Blocked from peaceful and non-violent action, the Palestinian leaders and their followers began a violent campaign against the British and the Zionists. To protect themselves, the British created, trained and armed a Jewish paramilitary force of some 5,000 men. Violence grew apace. In 1938, the Mandate government reported 5,708 “incidents of violence” and announced that it had killed at least 1,000 Palestinian insurgents and imprisoned 2,500.

Neither the British, nor the Zionists, nor the Palestinians could afford to give up. In the middle of the Great Depression, the British could not afford to rule a hostile country from which they expected no return (unlike Iraq, Palestine had no oil); the Zionists, faced with the existential challenge of Nazism and having gone far toward statehood, could not agree to the terms proposed by the Palestinians; and the Palestinians saw in every shipload of immigrants a threat to their hopes for self rule.

So, eight years after the Hope-Simpson report, two years after the Royal Commission another British Government commission (the “Palestine Partition Commission”) was sent to try to redraw the map in some fashion that would create a larger Jewish state.

A Single State

The best deal the partition commissioners could get for the Jewish state was an area of about 1,200 square miles with a population of roughly 600,000 of whom nearly half were Palestinians; to increase the Jewish ratio to Palestinians, the proposed Jewish state would have had to be drastically reduced in size.

A rumor that the British had decided to recognize Palestinian independence had the expected effect: throughout Palestine, Arab groups danced with joy in the streets and Zionist militants bombed Arab targets.

Actually, the British did decide to implement much of the new proposal: the Government favored a plan to stop Jewish immigration and to restrict land sales after five years and after ten years to make Palestine a single state under representative government. The policy was approved by Parliament on May 23, 1939.

The Zionist reaction was furious: Jewish hit squads burned or sacked government officers, stoned policemen and on Aug. 26 murdered two senior British officers. Five days later, the Second World War began.

While attention was otherwise directed in the midst of the war, partition was formally rejected by the Zionist organization in the so-called Biltmore program proclaimed in America in May 1942, and the solution to the dilemma of Jewish-Palestinian population ratios would be found in 1948 when most of the Palestinian population fled or was driven out of Palestine.

During the 1930s, while most of the world was plunged in a stultifying depression, the Jewish community, the Yishuv, profited from a material and cultural expansion. Money poured in from Europe and America. While the amounts were small by today’s standards, Jewish donations enabled land to be bought, equipment purchased, factories opened, systems of transport set up and housing to be built.

Jerusalem was built in stone by Arab labor and Zionist money, and Tel Aviv began to look like Miami. The Yishu became a quasi state with its own schools, hospitals and other civic institutions, and enlivened by the influx of Europeans, it pulled increasingly away from both the Palestinian community and from the surrounding Arab societies. That has remained the persistent aspect of “the Palestine Problem”: while physically located in the Middle East, the Judenstaat was and is a European rather than a Middle Eastern society.

Palestinian Evolution

The Palestinians slowly began to evolve from a colonial, peasant-farmer, village-centered society. Their agriculture spread in extent and began to focus on such specialized crops as Jaffa oranges, but villagers continued their traditional habit of isolating themselves from (now British) government and did not develop, as did the Zionists, their own governmental and administrative institutions.

The growing but still tiny urban middle class of Christians and Muslims worked with the British administration and enrolled their children in British-run, Arabic-language, secular schools. That is, they accommodated. Meanwhile, the traditional urban elite contested power not so much with the Zionists as with one another; whereas the Arab leaders spoke of national causes, they acted in and asserted leadership over mutually hostile groups.

Overall, the Palestinians never approached Israeli determination, skill and financial capacity; they remained divided, weak and poor. That is, they remained over all a colonial society. What constituted their national cause was not so much a shared quest for independence as a reactive sense of having been wronged.

So, year-by-year as more immigrants arrived and as more land was acquired by the Jewish National Fund, opposition increased but never coalesced. Whereas anti-Semitism created Zionism, fear of Zionism fostered a Palestinian reaction. But, until another generation had passed that reaction remained only a seedbed of nationalism, not a national movement. To understand this, we must look back to the previous century.

The idea of nationalism came to the Levant (Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria) and Egypt nearly a century after it had become dominant in Europe, and it came only to a small and at first mainly Christian elite. One’s identity came not from a nation-state, as in Europe, but either from membership in an ethnic/religious “nation” (known in Ottoman law as a millet) — for example, the Catholic “nation” — or, more narrowly, membership in a family, a clan or a village. The Arabic word watan catches exactly the sense of the French word pays: both “village” and “nation.”

Arabs, like Europeans, welcomed nationalism, wataniyah, as a means to overcome the evident and weakening effects of division not only among the religious communities, particularly the division between Muslims and Christians, but also among the families, clans and villages.

In Palestine, nationalism by the end of the British mandate had still not coalesced into an ideology; to the extent the concept of a watan had been extended beyond the village and had become popular, it was a visceral reaction to the thrust of Zionism. Anger over loss of land and the intrusion of Europeans was general, but the intellectual underpinning of nationalism was slow to be formulated in a way that attracted much of the population. It still had not attracted general support until long after the end of the British mandate. In part, it became possible in large part because of the destruction of the village communities and the fusing of their former residents in refugee camps: simply put, the watan had to die before wataniyah could be born.

A More Powerful Drive

Jewish nationalism, Zionism, drew on different sources and embodied more powerful thrusts. The Jewish community as a whole benefitted from two experiences: the first was that for centuries in what they call their diaspora virtually all Jewish men had meticulously studied their religious texts. While intellectually narrow, such study inculcated a mental exactitude that could be, and was, transferred to new, secular, broader fields when the opportunity presented itself in the late Eighteenth Century in Austria, Germany and France.

Thus, with remarkable speed, Polish and Russian Jews emerged in the West as mathematicians, scientists, physicians, musicians and philosophers, roles that were not part of the religious tradition. While the British had certainly been wrong to believe that Jews dominated the Bolshevik movement in Russia, Jews also certainly played a major political and intellectual role both there and in Western Europe.

The second experience that increasing numbers of Jews shared was the sense of exclusion but increasingly the reality of participation. During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries, while often disliked and occasionally maltreated, Jews were generally able to take part in Western European society.

Thus, they were able to expand their horizons and to develop new skills. Many thought that they had arrived at a satisfactory accommodation with non-Jewish Europe. It was the shock of finding this not to be true that motivated Theodor Herzl and his colleagues to begin the quest for a separate Jewish nation-state, a Judenstaat, outside of Europe, and it was the conservatism of religious Judaism that forced the Zionist movement to reject offers of lands in various parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia and to insist on the location of that nation-state in Palestine.

Jews, of course, had to focus more on Europe than on Palestine. The Zionist movement was located in Europe and its leaders and members were all European. From the end of the First World War, secular, “modern” Jews began to migrate to Palestine and soon outnumbered and overshadowed the traditional Jewish pilgrims.

Then, from the election of Hitler in 1932 and the collapse of the Weimar Republic in 1933, pressure on the German Jewish community moved through increasingly ugly incidents like the 1938 kristallnacht toward a crescendo of anti-Semitism. Desperate, increasing numbers of Jews sought to flee from Germany. Most went to other countries — particularly America, England and France — but they were often not welcomed and in some cases were actually prevented from entering. (America implemented restrictions and accepted only about 21,000 Jewish refugees up to the eve of the Second World War.)

So, in increasing numbers, mainly secular, educated, Westernized Jews went to Palestine. The numbers were important but more important was that the individuals and groups coalesced to create a new community. It was this “nation-state-in-formation,” the Yishuv, that set the trend toward the future.

Shaping Palestine

Nothing like these impulses were felt by the Palestinians. They had never experienced pogroms but lived with neighbors of different faiths in a carefully structured and religiously sanctioned form of mutual “tolerancem” and, despite the Ottoman empire’s moves toward modernization/westernization/fiscal control, they lived in an acceptable balance with their environment. Few had an enlivening contact with European thought, industry or commerce. To the English, they were just another colonial people, like the Indians or the Egyptians.

That is how the British officials in Palestine treated the Palestinians. As I read Indian history of the same period, I find striking parallels: colonial officials in India were equally dismissive of even the richest and most powerful Hindu and Muslim Indians. As “natives” they had to be kept in their place, punished when they got out of order and rewarded when they were submissive. Generally, the poorer natives could be treated with a sort of amused tolerance.

But the Jews didn’t fit in the colonial pattern and could not be treated as “natives.” After all, they were Europeans. So the British colonial officials never felt comfortable dealing with them. Should they “belong to white men’s clubs” or not? With the natives one knew where he stood. With the Jews, relations were at best uncertain. Worse, they were adept at going over the heads of the colonial officials direct to London. This minor but important aspect of the Palestine problem was never resolved.

Then, suddenly, as Germany invaded Poland, the world slipped into war.

The War Years

Both Palestinians and Zionists enlisted in large numbers — 21,000 Jews and 8,000 Palestinians — to help the British in their hour of need. But both kept their long-term objectives firmly in mind: both continued to regard British imperialism as the long-term enemy of freedom. And, like the Hindu Parliamentarian Subhas Chandra Bose, the Muslim Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husaini actively flirted with the Axis. Bose led a Japanese-supplied and -sponsored army into India. (Bose’s Palestinian counterpart, Hajj Amin had no such army. He fled the country.)

What Bose had tried to do fighting the British in India, Jewish terrorists, inspired by Vladimir Jabotinsky, began to do in Palestine. By 1944, Jewish attacks on British troops and police, raids on British arms and supply depots and bombings of British installations had become common, and military training camps were set up in various kibbutzim to train an army to fight the British.

In response, the British commander-in-chief in the Middle East issued a statement condemning the “active and passive sympathisers [of the terrorists who] are directly… assisting the enemy.”

On Aug. 8, 1944, a Jewish attempt was made to assassinate the High Commissioner and on Nov. 6, 1944, members of the Stern Gang murdered Prime Minister Churchill’s personal representative in the Middle East, the British Minister of State Lord Moyne. Churchill was furious and told Parliament that “If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labours for its future are to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past. If there is to be any hope of a peaceful and successful future for Zionism these wicked activities must cease and those responsible for them must be destroyed, root and branch.”

In the last months of the war, the tempo of attacks increased. Carefully planned raids were made on supply dumps, banks and communications facilities. With Germany going down in defeat, Britain had become the Zionist Enemy Number One.

The Holocaust

But for a time, Zionist action focused on Europe. As the war ended, the enormity of the Nazi crimes against the European Jews came to public attention, and demands to “do something” for the survivors moved to the forefront of British and American politics. The British asked the U.S. government to join it in enforcing a solution no matter what that solution might be.

In America, there was a sense of collective guilt: anti-Semitism, like anti-black prejudice, while still common was beginning to be equated to Nazism and Fascism. But only beginning. America had actually turned back Jews trying to flee Nazi persecution. So when President Harry Truman announced in December 1945 that the U.S. would begin to facilitate Jewish immigration, there was little public or Congressional support. (Only 4,767 Jews were actually admitted.)

Meanwhile, various schemes were bandied about to do something for Europe’s Jews. One, never really seriously considered, was to give a part of defeated Germany to the Holocaust victims as their heimstätte. It died aborning when moves toward the Cold War argued for the reconstruction of Germany as a barrier to the Soviet Union.

No one, to my knowledge, suggested that Americans cede a part of the United States as an alternative Israel. Americans quickly adopted the European program for having the “Jewish Problem” solved at the expense of someone else.

Zionists, quite reasonably, were not prepared to bet their future on Western benevolence. They were determined to act, and they did so in four interconnected programs: first getting the survivors of the Holocaust to Palestine; second, lobbying the American government to support their cause; third, attacking any and all who stood in their way; and, fourth, making staying in Palestine too expensive for Britain.

Building a Jewish Presence

First, the Zionists understood and were informed by the British studies that if they were to succeed in taking over Palestine, they would need far more Jewish immigrants than the British were likely to allow. So already in 1934, shortly after the Hope-Simpson report, they organized the first ship, a Greek tramp steamer, to take “illegals” to Palestine. The little SS Velos would be the first in what became a virtual fleet, and the 300 passengers it carried would be followed by many thousands in the years to come. British attempts to limit the flow — to try to keep the peace in Palestine — were generally ineffective and were, in part nullified by the anti-Semitism of the European states and particularly by the Nazis.

The Nazi involvement in the Palestine issue and the Zionist relationship to the Nazis form its most bizarre aspect. By 1938, not only the Nazis but also the Polish, Czech and other Eastern European governments were determined to get rid of their Jewish citizens. The Zionist leaders saw this as a major opportunity. So they sent an emissary to meet with the Nazis, and even with the Gestapo and the SS, to propose to help them speed the Jews away: they proposed that if the Nazis would allow the Zionists scope, they would set up training camps for selected young people to be shipped to Palestine.

Hitler had not yet made up his mind on “the final solution” but he was keen to promote a Jewish exodus. So the German officials, including Adolf Eichmann, made a deal with the Zionists that enabled them to select would-be emigrants. The choice of who was to go was purely pragmatic: it was not on humanitarian needs but on physical and mental capacity of the candidates to join the incipient Zionist army, the Haganah and its various offshoots.

By the end of 1938, the first batch of about a thousand Jews was being organized and trained by the “Committee for Illegal Immigration” (Mossad le Aliyah Bet), and roughly that many started their journey each month.*

As the Nazis moved to implement “the Final Solution,” they lost interest in the relatively small-scale Zionist emigration operation and began their horrible liquidation program in which millions of Jews, Gypsies and others died at Auschwitz, Treblinka and other concentration camps. With Europe closed to them, the Zionists turned to encouraging and facilitating the migration of Jewish communities from the Arab countries. To take over Palestine, they needed Jews from anywhere and so they actively recruited them from Iraq to Morocco. Then, as the war reached its final stages, the Zionists turned back to Europe.

Their first move was to take over — literally to buy — the virtually defunct Red Cross headquarters in Romania. The newly arrived Soviet army was otherwise occupied so under the “Red Cross” emblem, the Zionist organization was able to restart the program of shipping Jews to Palestine. What the Zionist agents found was that the condition of the hundreds of thousands of remaining Romanian Jews was desperate; they were willing to go anywhere to get out Romania. Allegedly 150,000 signed up to go to Palestine, but the problem remained, how to get them there.

The answer was found in Italy. Stationed there was the small Jewish logistical support formation enlisted by the British in Palestine. Its main piece of equipment was exactly what the Zionist organizers most needed, the truck, and they were also decked out in British army uniforms and armed with British army documents.

Under Zionist orders and literally under British noses, they ranged throughout Italy, gathering displaced persons in their trucks and delivering them to ships that had been hired by the Zionists to smuggle them into Palestine.

Then disaster struck: along with other formations, the Jewish unit was redeployed. So the Zionists made what was by far their boldest move: in one of the most remarkable ventures of the Second World War, they created a fictitious British army.

A Fake Army

In the chaos of the last months at the end of the Second World War, Allied military units and supply dumps were scattered throughout Western Europe. Most troops were in the process of being redeployed or sent home. Command-and-control structures were falling apart. Dumps were often unguarded or even forgotten.

So, into this chaos, the Zionists ventured. Almost overnight, they “became” a separate British army formation with their own faked documents, phony unit designation and looted equipment. They drew petrol for their trucks and fuel for the ships with which they could rendezvous on the coast. With forged requisition papers they seized a building right in the center of Milan to use as their headquarters and others to create staging areas in various areas of Italy.

Second, they were utterly ruthless in achieving their objectives. As Jon and David Kimche have written in The Secret Roads, the European Jews “hated the Germans who had destroyed their corporate life; they hated the Poles and Czechs, the Hungarians and Rumanians, the Austrians and the Balts who had helped the Germans; they hated the British and the Americans, the Russians and the Christians who had left them, so it seemed to them, to their fate. They hated Europe, they held its precious laws in contempt, they owed nothing to its peoples. They wanted to get out. … Thus, anti-goyism, that malignant growth in Jewish life, received a new lease of life. Linked with Zionism, it now galvanised the Jewish camps in Europe.”

Their Zionist guides stimulated this hatred among the Displaced Persons (DPs) because, as the Kimches wrote, “they had to be uplifted; they had to be galvanised; they had to be given a stronger pride than their cynicism, and a stronger emotion than their demoralised if understandable self-seeking. The only thing that could do it, as they had seen during the Hitler era, was propaganda — hate propaganda for preference.”

Jews who attempted to go back to their former homes found their ways barred; others had taken over their houses and shops so their attempted return stimulated vicious riots, particularly in Poland, that convinced most Jews that they could not restart their old lives. If they needed further convincing, the Polish government closed the frontier and threatened to shoot returnees. And where the displaced persons were in temporary camps, their hosts were anxious to speed them on their ways.

By All Means Necessary

So, the Zionists felt justified in slandering, boycotting or even destroying those who thwarted or threatened to reveal their actions. When the head of the United Nations program charged with giving aid to the displaced persons in Germany, General Sir Frederick Morgan, reported that some “unknown Jewish organization” was running a program to transfer European Jews to Palestine — exactly what they were doing – he was pilloried as an anti-Semite.

That charge came easily. It was a charge, not unlike the McCarthyite charge of being a Communist, that all those who dealt with or wrote about the Palestine problem would learn to fear. It was used often, usually effectively and was always bitterly resented by those so attacked. It is a tactic that Zionists and their supporters often employed and is still employ frequently today.

Third, back in Palestine, the Zionist organization was doing all it could to make staying in Palestine too expensive for Britain. The Zionist army, the Haganah, its elite military force, the Palmach and the two terrorist organizations (in British eyes)/freedom fighters (to the Zionists) , the Stern Gang and the Irgun, were attacking government buildings, blowing up bridges and taking hostage or shooting British soldiers.

When I first went to Palestine in 1946, the streets of every city were rivers of barbed wire, with frequent barriers and checkpoints manned by heavily armed British soldiers. The calm of evenings was frequently shattered by the sounds of machinegun fire and by night exploding bombs could be heard nearby. Everyone, including the soldiers of Britain’s crack parachute division, was constantly on edge. Calm was feared as a prelude to the storm. Danger was everywhere, even when not intended.

On Christmas Eve 1946 at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem I sat in the midst of a congregation armed with the unreliable but lethal sten gun, expecting at any minute one might be dropped and go off. A few days later, I was nearly shot, in the midst of Jerusalem by a very nervous soldier. Everyone was suspect in the eyes of everyone else.

Denying Responsibility

When the Zionist civil authorities tried to stand aloof, pretending that they knew nothing of the use of terror, the British published intercepted documents showing that they were orchestrating the attacks and were involved in collecting and passing out arms to the insurgents. For the first time against the Zionists the British cracked down as they had done against the Palestinians, and as they had been doing and were still doing against the Indians in their independence movement, putting hundreds of Jews into what amounted to a concentration camp.

In riposte, Jewish terrorists/freedom fighters blew up the headquarters of the British government in Jerusalem, the King David Hotel, killing 91 people and wounding about 46. To the English Parliament, press and public, the bombing was taken as an act of war. The Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee denounced it as a “brutal and murderous crime … an insane act of terrorism.”

But the “brutal and murderous crime … an insane act of terrorism” accomplished its purpose. Almost everyone — except of course the Palestinians — had concluded that the attempt by the British to establish an acceptable level of security had failed.

Fourth, the American government had long since decided to throw its support to the Zionists. Already at its presidential convention in 1944, the Democratic Party issued a statement stating that “We favor the opening of Palestine to unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization and such a policy as to result in the establishment there of a free and democratic Jewish Commonwealth.”

Shortly before his death, President Franklin Roosevelt affirmed that declaration and promised to do what was necessary to effect it. (But he, like the British in the First World War, also made a conflicting promise to the Arabs: just as the British had promised the Sharif of Mecca so Roosevelt promised King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, that he “would take no action which … might prove hostile to the Arab people.” Then he immediately reversed himself, reaffirming his unrestricted support for Zionism.)

When he came into office, President Harry Truman called in August 1945 for the immediate admission to Palestine of 100,000 European Jews. Not to be outdone, Truman’s Republican opponent, Gov. Thomas Dewey, called for the admission of “several hundreds of thousands.” The rush to win Jewish money, influence in the press and votes was on. It has grown stronger year by year.

Caught in the Middle

Feeling increasing isolated and desperate to turn to the host of problems it faced — both domestically and throughout the other parts of its increasingly fragile empire — the British government urged that America join in what was hoped to be a final commission, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was to focus not primarily on Palestine but, for the first time, on the plight of the European Jewish community.

It was in the emotional vortex of the hideous German concentration camps that the Commission began its work; its work would be continued in the context of American partisan politics. Its result was shaped both by the sight of the misery of the surviving Jews in Europe and driven by the political winds in America. It paid virtually no attention to the Palestinians.

The end of the mandate was in sight. The British decided to withdraw on May 15, 1948, eight months to the day after they had withdrawn from India. The results were similar: they had inadvertently “let slip the dogs of war.” Millions of Indians and Pakistanis and nearly a million Palestinians would pay a terrible price.

India was, perhaps, a more complex story, but the sole justification for the British rule of Palestine was the British obligation specified in the preamble to the Mandate instrument to “be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

Britain had failed. Indeed, three months before its forces withdrew, Britain warned the UN Security Council that it would require foreign troops to effect the UN decision to divide the country. In reply, the U.S. Government ducked. On Feb. 24, it informed the UN that it would consider the use of its troops to restore peace but not to implement the partition resolution. On March 19, it went further, suggesting that action on partition be suspended and that a trusteeship over all Palestine be established to delay final settlement. Britain refused.

UN Division

The United Nations decision was to divide Palestine into three zones: a Jewish state, a Palestinian state and a UN administered enclave around the city of Jerusalem.

While Britain and America argued at the United Nations, Palestine slid into war. Over 5,000 people had been killed since the end of the Mandate had been announced: trains were blown up, banks robbed, government offices were attacked, and mobs, gangs and paramilitary troops looted, burned and clashed.

Then on April 10, about five weeks before the final British withdrawal, came the event that would establish the precondition of the Palestinian refugee tragedy — the Deir Yasin massacre. The regular Zionist army, Haganah, had tried to take the village, known to be peaceful and, insofar as anyone then was, neutral, and ordered the terrorist group, the Irgun, which was under its command, to help.

Together the two forces captured the village. The Irgun, possibly acting alone, then massacred the entire village population — men, women and children — and called a press conference to announce its deed and to proclaim that this was the beginning of the conquest of Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Horror and fear spread throughout Palestine. The precondition for the flight of the entire Palestinian community had been established. Much worse was to follow.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 24, 2014 9:23 pm

The Battle for Palestine — Part Two
October 23, 2014

Special Report: After the Holocaust, Europe acquiesced to the Zionist settlement of Palestine and turned a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing that cleared Arabs from the land, as ex-U.S. diplomat William R. Polk describes in the second of a three-part series.

By William R. Polk

The British Foreign Secretary told Parliament on Feb. 18, 1947, that “there is no prospect of resolving this conflict by any settlement negotiated between the parties.” Further, he said, according to the League of Nations mandate, the legal basis for Britain’s rule over Palestine, Britain did not have the authority to partition the country as everyone thought would be necessary.

Thus, the British government had decided to turn the problem over to the United Nations. The Foreign Secretary did not mention, but it was obviously a significant factor, that Britain could no longer afford to keep nearly 100,000 troops employed in an increasingly vain effort to keep the peace in what was in comparison to India a relatively unimportant area.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister
In response to Britain’s request, the UN Secretary General on April 2, 1947, asked that the General Assembly (UNGA) take up the question of what should be done about Palestine. Five of the member states thought they already knew what to do: Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia proposed “The termination of the Mandate over Palestine and the declaration of its independence.” Their motion was rejected by the UNGA which instead, voted to establish a “Special Committee for Palestine” (UNSCOP) to recommend a different solution.

It should have been sobering to the members of this, the last in the long line of inquiries, to hear the British delegate say, “We have tried for years to solve the problem of Palestine. Having failed so far, we now bring it to the United Nations, in the hope that it can succeed where we have not. If the United Nations can find a just solution which will be accepted by both parties, [we would] welcome such a solution [but] we should not have the sole responsibility for enforcing a solution which is not accepted by both parties and which we cannot reconcile with our conscience.”

UNSCOP was to be composed of a diverse group, representatives of Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala, India, Iran, Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. As diverse as the committee was, its members shared one characteristic: none of them knew anything about Palestine. And they could not expect that they would get a “balanced” view since the representative of one party, the Palestinians, decided to abstain from collaboration with UNSCOP.

In the absence of a Palestinian voice – combined with the general ignorance of the members of the Committee and sporadic demonstrations in Palestine against its inquiry – the Jewish Agency dominated the proceedings.

Seeking Balance

Despite these problems, UNSCOP set out, or at least signed, a generally fair and informative appreciation of “the Elements of the Conflict” in its Report to The General Assembly. In summary, it portrayed two populations, one European, technologically advanced, united and determined, numbering about 600,000, and the other, numbering 1,200,000, Asian, divided both religiously and geographically into about 1,200 self-reliant, self-governing communities as well as “native quarters” of the few cities, suffering from all of the inherited problems of colonialism.

This population lived in one small (26,000 square kilometer/10,000 square mile) area of which “about half … is uninhabitable desert” with seasonal and limited rainfall and access to ground water only from fragile and (what ultimately have proven to be) endangered aquifers. Palestine was almost totally without minerals other than the potassium and sodium salts of the Dead Sea. The delegates must have thought there was little to divide.

UNSCOP accepted as given, probably on legal advice, that it should work within the intent and functioning of the League of Nations mandate. In retrospect curiously, UNSCOP did not apparently consider the utility of negotiating with and between the Palestinians and the Zionists. Nor, as in various contemporary and subsequent instances of decolonization did it regard the majority community as the presumed legal heir to the colonial government. Only the Arab states thought of turning the “case” over to the International Court.

Viewing the mandate document as tantamount to a constitution for Palestine, UNSCOP emphasized that the Mandatory Power (Britain) had been obliged to “secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home,” to “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions” and to “encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish Agency … close settlement by Jews on the land” while it “speaks in general terms only of safeguarding or not prejudicing the ‘civil and religious rights’ and the ‘rights and position’ of the Arab community in Palestine.”

In attempting to balance these unequal obligations, the Committee observed, the “Mandatory Power has attempted, within the limits of its interpretation of the ‘dual obligation’ of the mandate, to provide some satisfaction of Arab political desires,” but such moves “were generally rejected by the Palestinians and vigorously opposed by the Zionists.”

UNSCOP was told that the Zionists demanded the right of “return” for European Jews in numbers defined only by the “economic absorptive capacity of the state.” The Zionist representatives declared, however, that “The immigrant Jews [would] displace no Arabs, but rather [would] develop areas which otherwise would remain undeveloped.”

Promises of Peace

In an earlier communication (March 19, 1899) to an official of the Ottoman Empire, Theodore Herzl had written that the Zionist movement was “completely peaceful and very content if they are left in peace. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing to fear from their immigration. … Your Excellency sees another difficulty, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away? It is their well-being, their individual wealth which we will increase by bringing in our own.”

The basis of the Zionist claim to Palestine was, as from the beginning of the movement in Theodore Herzl’s words, “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home.”

In a separate opinion, the Representative of India held that the Jewish contention that they were the “original” natives was both historically questionable and, if held to be the basis of a legal claim, would be a recipe for chaos since virtually all modern states would be open to similar claims based on ancient history.

As he wrote, “To found their claim on their dispersion from Palestine after a period of approximately 2,000 years, whatever religious sentiment may be attached by them to the land occupied by their Prophets, appears to me to be as groundless as anything can be. A multitude of nations conquered various countries at various times and were eventually defeated and turned out of them. Can their connexion, however long, with the land which they had once conquered provide them with any basis after the lapse of even one century?

“If this were so, Moslems might claim Spain, which they governed for a much longer period than the Jews had governed part of Palestine … [moreover] this claim cannot be made by those who were subsequently converted to Judaism. Khazars of Eastern Europe, Turco-Finn by race, were converted to Judaism as a nation about 690 A.D. Can their descendants possibly claim any rights simply because the ancestors of their co-religionists had once settled in Palestine.”

There is no indication that UNSCOP as a whole reacted to the Indian delegate’s demarche. But it was, in part, foreshadowed by the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee which “postulate[d] the ‘natural’ right of the Arab majority to remain in undisputed possession of the country, since they are and have been for many centuries in possession…”

The Arab Higher Committee also made two further arguments: first, that “the term ‘Arab’ is to be interpreted as connoting not only the invaders from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, but also the indigenous population which intermarried with the invaders and acquired their speech, customs and modes of thought in becoming permanently Arabized.”

It is the descendants of this mixed group, they said, who the current Palestinian “natives.” And, second, they claimed “acquired” rights, which derived from the various British promises during and immediately after the First World War. Thus, the Palestinians “have persistently adhered to the position that the Mandate for Palestine, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration, is illegal.”

Disputing Arab Claims

UNSCOP found the Arab claims weak. It held that the Palestinian claim to “natural” rights is flawed by the fact that “they have not been in possession of it [Palestine] as a sovereign nation … [and] Palestinian nationalism, as distinct from Arab nationalism, is itself a relatively new phenomenon.”

Moreover, Great Britain “has consistently denied that Palestine was among the territories to which independence was pledged.” Finally, the Committee noted that the 1936 Royal Commission had pointed out that “there was a time when Arab statesmen were willing to consider giving Palestine to the Jews, provided that the rest of Arab Asia was free. That condition was not fulfilled then, but it is on the eve of fulfilment [sic] now.”

UNSCOP admitted that “the Jews would displace Arabs from the land if restrictions were not imposed … [And found that since this] would seem inevitable … continued development of the Jewish National Home … envisages the possibility of a violent struggle with the Arabs.” It concluded by quoting Lord Balfour saying that “The general lines of [the Balfour Declaration] policy stand and must stand.”

So, UNSCOP recommended that following the British withdrawal, there should be a short interval during which time Palestine and the incipient Jewish state would be held under some sort of trusteeship while Palestine would be prepared to be partitioned into two states that would continue to be unified economically.

Meanwhile, the living circumstances of 250,000 or so displaced European Jews would be alleviated. The Committee ducked the question of whether or not that meant that the Displaced Persons would be allowed to enter Palestine. Finally, it noted that violence, carried out until recently “almost exclusively” by “underground Jewish organizations” would “render increasingly difficult the execution of the solution to be agreed upon by the United Nations.” But it offered no means to lessen the violence or to avoid the likelihood of war.

After reviewing the reports, listening to emotional appeals by various delegates, individuals and groups and following orders transmitted by their home governments, the delegates to the UN General Assembly voted (Resolution 181) on Nov. 29, 1947, 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions, despite strong opposition by Arab member states, to recommend partition of Palestine. The key feature was that it awarded the incipient Jewish state, whose citizens-to-be owned or controlled less than 6 percent of the land, 55 percent of the Mandate.

On the Ground in Palestine

The General Assembly had issued its verdict but it left open the question of how to actually carry out the resolution when no UN-controlled military or police forces were available. As the British delegate warned the General Assembly, Britain’s “84,000 troops were leaving. And they had proved insufficient to maintain law and order, in the face of a campaign of terrorism waged by highly organised Jewish forces equipped with all the weapons of the modern infantryman.”

To appreciate the full meaning of the UN General Assembly decision, I consider it in the context of in four interacting categories:

First, the British military force began to disengage not only overall but selectively from cities, towns and camps. As it did, it opened areas that became essentially free-fire zones. The British commander reasonably took the position that his priority was to keep his soldiers out of harm’s way. They should be evacuated as quickly and as safely as possible.

What happened after they had left, or even what happened during the process of their leaving, was not their responsibility. Thus, as they vacated their former positions, one at a time, they necessarily if inadvertently favored one side or the other. Where they could, they tried to protect the residents; thus, for example in the city of Tiberias, they evacuated the nearly half of the residents who were Palestinians. Thus, they acted to protect the Palestinians but effectively turned the city over to the Jews. Overall, their actions necessarily favored the Zionists.

Second, the Arab states loudly and repeatedly proclaimed the responsibility to protect the Palestinians. However, until after the legal end to the Palestine mandate, they could not intervene. Doing so would have constituted an act of war against Britain, and the British would not allow them to move. So in the months between the beginning of the British withdrawal and May 15, 1948, they were effectively immobilized.

Legality was not the only reason. There were two other reasons for the inactivity of the Arab states. The first reason for their inactivity was that they were weak. Egypt and Iraq were effectively under British military occupation since their abortive revolts against the British (Iraq in 1941 and Egypt in 1942), and their armed forces were kept small, disorganized and ill-equipped. Corruption sapped their logistics while purges of officers suspected of political ambition or nationalist ardor weakened their command structures.

When the Iraqi army was sent to Palestine, many of its soldiers were not adequately armed, and some were without uniforms or even suitable footwear. The Egyptian army was the butt of British jokes – it was said to be the largest army in the world, judged by the girth of the officers. They were scorned as inferior colonials. The army had only cast-off British equipment. Morale was naturally low.

The only reasonably effective Arab military force was the Jordanian Legion which had been designed to patrol the desert and to provide income for Bedouin tribesmen who were its recruits. It was composed of only four battalions and one (as yet untrained) artillery unit. It had no transport and little ammunition. Moreover, it was not a “national” force: it was under the command of British officers.

No Effective Leaders

None of the Arab governments was an effective leader in its own country. King Farouk was generally despised by educated Egyptians; the mass of Egyptians lived on the edge of starvation; Egypt was already a “country of crowds” with roughly 1,000 people on each square kilometer of inhabitable land; disease was common and life expectancy was short.

Like the Egyptians, the Iraqis had troubles of their own. And they thought their governments were a big part of their troubles. The King of Iraq was a little boy who was under the control of a much hated regent who was regarded as a puppet of the British. Only Trans-Jordan’s Amir Abdullah seemed popular among his mainly Bedouin subjects.

The second inhibition was that the leaders of the Arab states were divided by personal ambitions. Each pursued his own goals. King Farouk’s Egypt wanted to take over at least Gaza to anchor the Sinai Peninsula while Abdullah had secretly worked with the Zionists for years to get their support for his incorporation of “Arab Palestine.” Neither he nor Farouk were interested in the Palestinians.

Farouk confiscated military equipment destined for Abdullah. Each ruler espoused a different Palestinian faction. In short, jealousies, ambitions and personal quarrels were of much more importance to them than their declared protection of the Palestinians. Thus, the Arab states had no unified strategy and did not seek, even separately, to work with such forces as the Palestinians mustered.

Realizing their incapacity, the Arab states got the Arab League to offer on March 21, 1948, two months before the Mandate was due to lapse, a compromise peace. They offered to take in the thousands of Jewish “illegals,” whom the British were holding on Cyprus, as citizens of their countries and urged that, rather than being divided as the UN had voted, the whole Mandate area be put once again under a trusteeship.

That proposal was briefly considered by the U.S. government which realized that a dangerous and destructive war, which was likely to harm American interests, was inevitable if the UN decision were implemented. The American “retreat” infuriated American Zionists who mounted a political attack on the Truman Administration, with articles in The New York Times castigating officials for “duplicity,” “shoddy and underhand turnabout” and “a shocking reversal.”

The Truman Administration quickly backed down. What the Administration did was a replay of the Feb. 14, 1931 British Government disavowal of its White Paper, based on the Hope-Simpson Report, that would have limited Jewish immigration.

A Weak Military

Third, the Palestinian cause attracted volunteer fighters — a category of combatants we see in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq — who began to infiltrate the Mandate before the British left. Some of them were displaced Palestinians who had been in exile since they had fought against the British in the 1936-1938 “revolt.” Most were from other Arab countries. They are believed to have numbered about a thousand by the end of 1947 and rose to perhaps 3,000 in the next year.

How effective these volunteers were is in doubt. Some carried out terrorist acts, particularly against Zionist targets in the area the UN had designated as the Arab Palestinian state, but the record shows that while they were brave, they were not decisive. In the village structure of Palestine, they were alien. In some villages which still sought to remain neutral, they were unwelcome.

Overall, the Palestinians had little military capacity. The intelligence agents of the Jewish Agency had been monitoring the Palestinians for years and reported in detail on their arms, organizations and sources of supply: they reported that the Palestinians had no arms production capability except in primitive bombs, few and mostly antiquarian rifles, usually with only 20-50 bullets a gun, practically no heavier weapons, no mortars, no machineguns, no artillery, no armored vehicles and no aircraft — their only potential source of supply, Britain, embargoed arms sales to them.

Perhaps even more important, they had no cadres of trained troops, no staff, no planning and no command-and-control organization. Perhaps most important, they had no intelligence sources in the Jewish community. Their only significant military leader was killed on April 8, 1948.

Villages operated independently and so, as the Israeli military intelligence reports confirm, “Villages in 1948 often fought — and fell — alone, the Haganah was able to pick them off one at a time in many districts. In many areas there was not even defensive co-operation between neighbouring villages, since relations between them, as often as not, were clouded by clan and family feuds.”

In short, the Palestinians had no significant military capacity. They were a typical colonial society. Already before May 1948, they had suffered at least 5,000 casualties. While the Israelis talked of the threat of an Arab-inflicted holocaust, “They were fully aware that the Arab war rhetoric was in no way matched by any serious preparation on the ground.”

Hidden Realities



Fourth, in every category, the Zionists had overwhelming superiority. Since much of the information in this section was sternly denied for years I have checked what I have collected against the two major and more recent Israeli accounts, both of which were derived from Israeli military and political archives.

For years honest discussion of the Palestinian refugee issue was virtually impossible in print — being almost certain either or both to get the historian labeled as an anti-Semite or to cause his books to be effectively banned in book stores. (Both happened to me.)

It came as a “bomb shell” in 1987 when the Israeli journalist, Benny Morris, published The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949. He had been given access to the Israeli archives — the first time ever — and used them to document, at least partially, the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians.

In 2004, in a second edition of his book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, he took a less neutral position on the issues he had discussed. Morris had set out his contention that “The Palestine refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterised the first Israeli-Arab war.”

Other Israeli scholars, notably Ilan Pappe in his 2006 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, expanded, corrected and developed the research of Morris. Pappe shows conclusively that what Morris saw as more or less accidental — the exodus of the Palestinian people — was a strategy inherent in Zionism from the beginning and implemented deliberately, brutally and effectively according to what in the Israeli archives is known as “Plan D” (Tochnit Dalet).

I have drawn extensively on both books for this part of my essay because, drawn as they are on Israeli government and army sources, they are incontrovertible. I have, of course, drawn also on a variety of other, including British official, sources.

A Longstanding Plan

From Ottoman times, the Jewish community, the Yishuv, had thought of itself as a proto-government and from the establishment of the League of Nations Mandate “all institutions were built with an eye to conversions into institutions of state.”

The British government dealt with and recognized the “Jewish Agency” as a de facto government which is how the Yishuv regarded it. Thus, it was able to make decisions that would be carried out. It had departments headed by ministers under a leader, David Ben-Gurion, who was virtually a head of state.

The Yishuv was literate, highly motivated, relatively wealthy and able also to draw upon European and American financial, political and personnel support. In short, it was a modern Western society and one with a multi-state capability.

The Yishuv had long had an agreed strategy: from the late Nineteenth Century, the Zionist leaders worked toward making Palestine into a Judenstaat. While in public, they disguised their long-term objective, using the subterfuge homeland (heimstätte), among themselves their aim was never in doubt. There was never, in private communications, serious consideration of either a bi-national state in which Arabs would also live or a smaller state in a partitioned Palestine.

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, the Zionists claimed the southern part of what became Lebanon and most of the agricultural area of what became Trans-Jordan as well as the major sources of water for the Mandate area. Trans-Jordan was divided from the Mandate of Palestine in 1922 to resolve the dilemma created by the French when they invaded Syria and overthrew its newly proclaimed independence.

The brother of the deposed ruler of Syria, Amir Abdullah, had marched into what became Trans-Jordan intending to fight the French. To stop him, the British in effect bought him off by establishing him in Amman. The British also asserted that this action would honor the commitments made to the Arabs to recognize their independence. Jordan was not to be subject to the Balfour Declaration and Jews were forbidden to buy land there.

Ben-Gurion’s Strategy

The basic element of Zionist strategy was spelled out by the Zionist leader, David Ben-Gurion just after the publication of the Royal Commission Report in 1937 when he wrote privately to his son, “We must expel [the Palestinian] Arabs and take their places … and if we have to use force — not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places — then we have force at our disposal.”

The force at the disposal of the Yushiv began to be established in 1920 when the collectives (Hebrew: kibbutzim ) set up semi-formal and part-time security guards units (Hebrew: HaShomer). In 1936, in response to the Arab nationalist revolt, the British enrolled some 5,000 Jews into what became the paramilitary wing of the Jewish community. This evolved into the Haganah that would evolve into the Israel Defense Force.

Under a British military expert, the soldiers were trained in guerrilla and counterinsurgency warfare. In what may have been the first punitive mission against a Palestinian village — a kind of tactic the British had long used in India and along the Northwest Frontier to suppress nationalist revolts — a joint British-Haganah expedition in June 1938 attacked a Palestinian village on the Lebanese border.

During the early part of the Second World War, when a German break-through appeared likely, the British enrolled, trained and equipped Jewish military formations and incorporated individual Jews into its Middle East intelligence organization. By about 1942, some 15,000 men were serving in the British army in some capacity. In addition, fearing what might happen if the British were unable to hold off Erwin Romel’s Deutsches Afrikakorps, the Jewish Agency in 1941 formed a “special forces” corps or shock troops known as Palmach (Hebrew: p’lugot mahatz).

But the Jewish leadership never forgot that its long-term enemy was Britain. Ben-Gurion and others soft-pedaled the long term and emphasized self-restraint (Hebrew: havlagah). This policy provoked a revolt within the Haganah by a group that came to be known as the Irgun Zva’i Leumi.

Deniability of Terrorism

The Irgun was inspired by Ben-Gurion’s rival, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who set out what was then the extreme right-wing of the Zionist movement (and later became today’s Likud Party). It favored an all-out war on both the Palestinians and the British. (The Irgun, in turn, would be split when Abraham Stern led about 200 of its members to form an even more radical and violent group called the Lohamei Herut Yisraeli or “Stern Gang.”)

These radical, terrorist groups, although differing somewhat in their philosophy, remained under the control of the Haganah High Command. While the Zionists publicly denied it, the British published (Cmd. 6873) intercepted Jewish Agency telegrams proving that it was using Irgun and the Stern Gang to carry out actions it wished to disavow.

As one telegram put it: “We have come to a working arrangement with the dissident organisations, according to which we shall assign certain tasks to them under our command. They will act only according to our plan.”

Perhaps the most remarkable element of the growing power of the Yishuv was in the field of intelligence. Already in 1933, a rudimentary organization had been created. A professor at the Hebrew University proposed that the Jewish National Fund make an inventory of Palestinian villages. His idea called for a dynamic, constantly updated, “map” of Palestinian society. It was a mammoth task.

As Jews from Iraq and other Arabic-speaking countries began to arrive, they were often assigned to this organization; then in 1944 a training school was established at Shefeya to train Hebrew-speaking operatives in Arabic and Palestinian culture and who were sent into every Palestinian village to identify potential enemies, map entry routes, inventory weapons, etc. In short, the agents produced an “appreciation” comparable to the CIA’s National Intelligence Studies but were much more detailed. They shaped the 1946-1949 campaign and determined the outcome.

International Volunteers

The Jewish Agency and overseas Zionist organizations also recruited European and American volunteers. These men and women were much more numerous than the Arab volunteers. More important, they included highly trained people, some of whom had flown for the RAF or the USAF, commanded ships of war in the Royal Navy or the U.S. Navy or worked in high technology intelligence (such as code-breaking and wireless interception).

By May 1948, the Haganah numbered 35,700 standing troops of whom 2,200 were the Special Forces of Palmach. That is, as Benny Morris pointed out, the Yishuv army numbered some 5,500 more soldiers than the combined strength of the regular Arab armies and paramilitary Palestinian forces. In addition, Haganah could draw on 9,500 members of the paramilitary youth corps.

By July 1948, when the Haganah was renamed the Israel Defense Force, it had 63,000 men under arms. Perhaps more important than numbers, it had a command-and-control capability that allowed it to conduct division-size or multiple-brigade, operations. No Arab force even remotely approached its power.

The size and organization of manpower was matched by weaponry. While the British embargoed arms sales to both sides, their actions particularly affected the Arabs.

The Yishuv got around the British embargo in four ways: first, it worked with the local Communist Party to effect an arms purchase deal with Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union; second, it used some of the money it received from Jewish organizations in Europe and America to buy arms; third, it raided British army depots in Palestine and Europe; and, fourth, it had already begun producing in its own workshops such weapons as mortars, sub-machineguns, heavy machineguns, and the particularly devastating and terrifying flame throwers.

These activities gave the Yishuv an overwhelming advantage. Finally, it achieved “aerial superiority” when, on March 27, 1948, it employed its first airplanes, some provided by South Africa and others stolen from the RAF.

As the Jewish army chief of staff Yigael Yadin proudly told Israeli officers in the last weeks of March 1948, “Today we have all the arms we need; they are already aboard ships, and the British are leaving and then we bring in the weapons, and the whole situation at the fronts will change.”

Expulsion of the Palestinians and War

Expulsion of the Palestinians began before large-scale fighting between the Jewish forces and Palestinian paramilitaries and at least three months before the withdrawal of the British forces and the arrival of Egyptian, Iraqi and Trans-Jordanian army units. From late 1947 until 1949, it was expulsion that set the terms of combat.

Beginning in October 1947, Yishuv leader (and later Prime Minister) David Ben-Gurion established a sort of politburo that came to be known as “the Consultancy” to guide the armed forces into action to establish the Judenstaat. (A detailed account of the “Consultancy” with the plans and the actions it called for is far too long to be included here. It is laid out with citations in Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, pages 27-28, 39-126. The existence of all of these plans and what they called for was vigorously denied for half a century.)

The Consultancy inherited a plan of action to take over the Mandate that had been drawn up already in 1937. This was known as Plan A. In 1946, Ben-Gurion ordered the intelligence unit of the Haganah to revise the plan. Various changes and refinements were made in Plan B and what became known as Plan C (Hebrew: Tachnit Gimel ) emerged.

Plan C laid out the strategy of the various military forces of the Yishuv “against rural and urban Palestine the moment the British were gone.” The envisaged offensive called for “killing the Palestinian political leadership, killing Palestinian ‘inciters’ and financial supporters, killing those Palestinians acting against the Jews, killing senior Palestinian officers and officials in the Mandate regime, damaging Palestinian transportation, damaging sources of Palestine economy (water wells, mills), attacking Palestinian villages and clubs, coffee house, meeting places, etc.,” according to the intelligence studies that were already drawn up.

A refined version, Plan D, was approved on March 10, 1948. As Ilan Pappe wrote, it “sealed the fate of the Palestinians within the territory the Zionist Leaders had set their eyes on for their future Jewish state … [it] called for their systematic and total expulsion from their homeland. … Each brigade commander received a list [based on the intelligence ‘map’] of the villages or neighbourhoods that had to be occupied, destroyed and their inhabitant expelled, with exact dates.

“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in the rubble) [to prevent the villagers from returning] … in case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.”

Systematic Cleansing

Beginning in April 1948, as the British troops were withdrawn, area by area, attacks on villages were increased. Ben-Gurion put aside the UN partition plan and ordered his troops to carry out as much as possible the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine.

Pappe wrote: “Every brigade assigned to the operation was asked to prepare to move into Mazev Dalet, State D, that is, to ready themselves to implement the orders of Plan D: ‘You will move to State Dalet, for an operative implementation of Plan Dalet,’ was the opening sentence to each. And then the villages which you will capture, cleanse [Hebrew: tihur] or destroy will be decided according to consultation with our advisors on Arab affairs and the intelligence officers.

“Judging by the end result of this state, namely April-May 1948, this advice was not to spare a single village … the operational orders did not except any village for any reason. With this the blueprint was converted into military order to begin destroying villages.”

Eventually, of the roughly 700 Palestinian villages in what became Israel, 531 were to be destroyed in addition to 30 which had already been destroyed. (About 600 villages remained in “Arab Palestine,” that is, on the West Bank — which was held by the Jordan Legion — and in Gaza — which was held by Egyptian forces.) Before the British withdrawal had been effected, about 250,000 villagers had already been uprooted.

The Palmach commander Yigal Allon’s words were transcribed in the diary of David Ben-Gurion: “There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family — we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty.”

The Deir Yasin Massacre

The best-known attack was by the Irgun and the Stern Gang, operating under the orders of (and in conjunction with) the Haganah, on the Palestinian village of Deir Yasin on April 9, 1948. The attack replayed the Nazi destruction of Lidice.

Already before the destruction of Deir Yasin, a member of the Defense Committee (Yosef Sepir) had warned his colleagues that the non-Jewish world might see the destruction of villages as an echo of the German destruction of the little Czech farming village of Lidice on June 10, 1942, in retaliation for the murder of SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich.

At Lidice, all the adult males and most of women were then murdered and the site was plowed under to be “forever blotted from memory.” The comparison of the two may be odious but it is hard to avoid.

Ilan Pappe summarized: “As they burst into the village the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed… [One survivor, then a boy of 12 later] recalled, ‘They took us out one after the other, shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front [of] us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him — carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her — they shot her too.’”

Terror is of little use if it is not known; so the Irgun called a press conference to announce the slaughter at Deir Yasin. What happened in Deir Yasin was repeated time after time and became a part of the “whispering campaign” that was employed by the Haganah intelligence agency to stimulate Palestinian flight. The villagers were, of course, terrified and so exactly carried into effect what the campaign sought.

As General Yigal Allon of Palmach said, “The tactic reached its goal completely … wide areas were cleaned.”

Disinforming Americans

Following Deir Yasin, Ben-Gurion telegraphed Amir Abdullah of Trans-Jordan to disclaim responsibility. More important, a “disinformation” campaign in America sought to blame the Arab states for the expulsion of the Palestinians.

One, fairly typical, demarche was a pamphlet submitted to the UN General Assembly and widely quoted in the American press in December 1951. Its author and publisher were not named, but some pages of the pamphlet were signed by a number of notable Americans including Reinhold Niebuhr, Archibald MacLeish, Paul Porter (who had headed the Palestine Conciliation Commission), former President Roosevelt’s principal foreign affairs adviser, Sumner Welles, together with various senior churchmen and academicians.

Attached to their message was backup material. The pamphlet’s key charge was that “The record shows that it was an evacuation planned by the Arab war leaders and the Arab Higher Committee for the three-fold purpose of: 1. Clearing the roads of the villages for an advance of the Arab regular armies; 2. Demonstrating the inability of Jews and Arabs to live side by side. [and] 3. Disrupting services following the end of the mandate.”

Those who questioned the account given in this and similar materials published in the campaign were charged as anti-Semites.

As the enormity of the human tragedy of Palestine began to be realized, if not by the public at least by governments, the UN Security Council decided to appoint a negotiator to try to stop the fighting.

It turned to Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte whose record included saving some 31,000 people, including 1,615 Jews, from German concentration camps during the Second World War. He was unanimously appointed (UNSC Resolution 186) on May 14, 1948, to mediate the war, and the outstanding Afro-American scholar and official Ralph Bunche was assigned as his deputy.

Working from Cyprus, Bernadotte negotiated two truces and outlined plans both for settlement of the war and for the creation of a United Nations agency to care for the refugees. As they evolved, the “Bernadotte Plans” called for a two-state solution — a Jewish state and an Arab state — with economic union.

Bernadotte also proposed readjusting frontiers according to population — that is, the Jewish state would have to give up substantial areas (including the Negev) which were overwhelming settled by Arabs — and he called for Jerusalem to be given a special status as a multi-faith world heritage site. (The UNGA voted in December 1949 to internationalize the city in Resolution 194.)

Killing the Messenger

On the issue of the Palestinian refugees, Bernadotte was even more outspoken. To the fury of the Jewish leaders, he reported to the UN on Sept. 16, 1948, that “It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.”

Folke Bernadotte was murdered the next day by a hit squad of the Stern Gang, allegedly on orders of its leader and later Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Bernadotte’s task was taken up by his deputy, Ralph Bunche.

Bunche wisely recognized the two realities of the Arab side of the Palestine war: the first was that the Palestinian people, now scattered over virtually the whole of Western Asia had no ability to negotiate on their own behalf, and the second was that the Arab states, their self-proclaimed protectors, were incapable of working together.

So during the spring and summer of 1949, Bunche worked separately with Israel and each of the four Arab states — Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Trans-Jordan, which from April 1949 was known as Jordan. Iraq had withdrawn from the war and did not take part in the negotiations to bring about an end to the fighting. For his work, he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.

Bernadotte’s and Bunche’s lasting legacy was the creation of a UN organization to care for the refugees. Relief efforts were begun in the summer of 1948 and in April 1950 a new organization, UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was created. It began its long life with 896,690 Palestinians on its rolls.

While the intent was to create opportunities for at least some of them to start new lives, the grim reality was that they could only be kept alive. They each received assistance of less than $27 yearly for food, medicine, clothing and shelter.

First-Hand Accounts

In 1950, I spent two weeks in one of the camps in Lebanon talking with the refugees and wrote articles on what I learned. In one of the articles I described an encounter with a young man who had been paralyzed. Lying in his cot, he entertained and was waited on by a group of children. He built for them a model airplane and arranged that it dropped pebbles on his bed.

As he told it and as I described it, the children played as though being killed by the bombs, something they had observed in real life. But the editors at The Christian Science Monitor, echoing the prevalent American view of the war had the children only “seeking shelter from the bombs.”

UN relief provided an average of 1,600 calories of food/day. But, if the physical diet was meager, the emotional diet was noxious. It consisted of a blend of exaggerated memories and unrealistic hopes.

Few refugees could find jobs. Idleness was a dry rot in adults. And a new generation was born that knew little beyond camp life. Within a few years over half the refugees were less than 15 years of age. They were becoming the modern version of Moses’s followers’ time in the Wilderness.

Trying to Leave the Wilderness

The Palestinian and Arab states’ “Time in the Wilderness” lasted many years. The Palestinians emerged from their expulsion a beaten, humiliated, divided people. The miserable refugee camps recreated the divisions of villages. Each watan remained just a piece of the little “nations” (Arabic: awtan the plural of watan).

Those who sought to deal with “the Palestine problem” had to deal not with the Palestinians but with the Arab states. But the Arab states were themselves, in the Biblical phrase, broken reeds “whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it.”

As the Palestinian nationalist leader and a founder of the League of Arab States, Musa Alami wrote, “In the face of the enemy the Arabs were not a state, but petty states; groups, not a nation; each fearing and anxiously watching the other and intriguing against it. What concerned them most and guided their policy was not to win the war and save Palestine … but to prevent their neighbors from being predominant, even though nothing remained except the offal and bones.”

Such public opinion as there was (and such press as was free to express it) turned bitterly against the rulers of the states. Demonstrations broke out, government officials including the prime minister and chief of police of Egypt were assassinated while riots, attempted bombings and threats were almost daily occurrences.

In Syria, the government was overthrown in an army coup d’état in 1949, and its leader was quickly ousted by another group. In Jordan in July 1951, the newly proclaimed king was murdered by a Palestinian. Then, on Jan. 26, 1952, “Black Friday,” mobs raced through Cairo, burning, pillaging and killing. It became obvious that no Arab government could cope.

Recognition that more was wrong with Arab society than government was spreading. Explicit was the conviction that corruption, poverty and backwardness were both the inheritance of decades of imperialism and also that they were the results of structural defects in Arab society. These defects were not caused by events in Palestine, but they were highlighted by the shock of the Arab defeat there.

Arabs everywhere agitated for change. Each state cracked down on its critics but, ironically, the divisions of the “Arab World” into states — one of the sources of weakness — made criticism of neighbors attractive to rival governments.

“A new wind blows,” wrote a long-time English colonial administrator. “Poverty and ignorance can lie down more or less happily together, but not poverty and education. That nowadays is likely to be an explosive mixture.”

An Egyptian Revolt

The explosive mixture was first set off in Egypt. On July 23, 1952, the “Free Officers,” under the leadership of Gamal Abdul Nasser, who as a young officer had experienced humiliation in Egypt’s campaign in Gaza, ousted the King.

Nasser was not an uncritical supporter of the Palestinians. He was, however, a dedicated believer in Arab nationalism. For him the Palestinian and Egyptian emphasis on the village “nation,” the watan, was a part of the Arab problem; what was needed, he thought, was to move beyond that narrow concept toward “pan-Arabism” (Arabic: qawmiyah).

Only if the Arabs could rise above parochialism, as the Jews had done with their national ideology, Zionism, could the Arabs play a significant role in world affairs, achieve a minimum degree of security or even overcome the humiliation of Palestine. [Regarding the impact of Zionism, see Shlomo Sand's ground-breaking The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2009)]

So, while Nasser dealt, or tried to deal, with a variety of domestic Egyptian and Arab World issues during his lifetime as well as with stormy relations with Britain, France and the United States, Palestine was never far from his mind.

Indeed, it could not be. If he or other Arab leaders forgot, Israel and the Western states reminded them sharply. When U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles visited the Middle East in 1953, seeking to enlist the Arab states’ kings, dictators and presidents in his anti-Soviet crusade, he found them turning always from what he saw as the threat of the USSR to what they thought of as the threat of Israel.

Despite the armistice of 1949, the borders of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt were constantly being breached by raids and counter-raids, intelligence probes, commando attacks and “massive retaliations.” They numbered in the thousands. All along the frontiers of Israel was a “no man’s land.”

The UN established a “Mixed Armistice Commission” to assess blame and to try to stop acts of aggression, but it was not effective. So some in America thought that a new approach must be found. And some thought that it had to be sought in Egypt.

The Israeli military intelligence organization was worried that Secretary Dulles’s obsession with the Soviet threat might lead him to promote some sort of rapprochement with Egypt. To head this off, the Israelis, with the help of members of the Egyptian Jewish community, decided to undertake a “spoiling” operation in the spring and summer of 1954.

Code-named “Operation Susannah” and popularly known as the “Lavon Affair,” the operation carried out a number of bombings and other acts of terrorism in Egypt. Included among them was the bombing of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) building in Alexandria, Egypt. The plan was to blame the attack on the Muslim Brotherhood; its aim was to turn Americans against Egypt by demonstrating that the Egyptians were dangerous terrorists.

The attack was botched and the agents were caught. Israel denied the episode, information on it was suppressed, but the Israeli government resigned. It implicitly admitted its involvement when in 2005, it decorated the attackers.

The Suez Crisis

Raids and counterattacks continued. One seminal Israeli raid was in February 1955 when the Israeli army attacked the Egyptian military headquarters in Gaza and killed more than 60 Egyptian soldiers. Apparently that raid so alarmed the Egyptians that they realized that they needed more and better military equipment.

Since the Western powers were supplying Israel, Egypt turned to the Soviet Union, just as the Zionists had done eight years before. That move, in turn, alarmed the Eisenhower administration.

Briefly put, it set in motion a sequence of events in which the U.S. (on July 20, 1956) withdrew its offer to help finance the major Egyptian development project, the High Dam; in riposte (on July 26) Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal; after a fruitless series of talks, Israel, joined by Britain and France, attacked Egypt (on Oct. 29). That was the Suez Crisis.

Both the shape of the British-French-Israeli “collusion” and the results of their action were then obscure, but President Eisenhower memorably spoke of the existence of “one law” under which all nations must live. To the annoyance of Secretary Dulles, he forced the three states to withdraw.

[Recounting the sequence of events in these years would lead me far afield and excessively lengthen this account so I refer the reader to my book, The Arab World Today which is the 5th edition of my book, The United States and the Arab World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).]
America’s brief turn against Israel resulted in the UN proclaimed ceasefire of Nov. 7, 1956, and the creation of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to act as a buffer between Israel and Egypt.

Those who ultimately paid for the attack were the Jewish minority communities of the Arab countries. Then suspect as active or potential traitors in the increasingly nationalistic Arab societies, long-time resident Jewish communities came under pressure. Many Jews, with Israeli help and encouragement, left. Some went to Israel.

On the other side, the Suez war made Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser the Arab hero. This suggested to Dulles that Nasser might be turned into the leader of a move toward peace. To find out, Dulles sent one of Eisenhower’s close friends, Robert Anderson (who later would become Secretary of the Treasury), to discuss terms with Nasser.

The initiative was a disaster: neither Anderson nor Nasser understood what the other was saying. So the meetings were short, the understandings limited and the decisions evasive. The “Anderson Mission” was diplomacy at its worst. But, since both sides realized that disclosure of the talks could be politically ruinous, they agreed to keep them secret.

Still treated as “Top Secret” and tightly restricted, the CIA account of the talks was one of the first batches of papers I read when I joined the U.S. government in 1961. The price of super secrecy was evident in them: no one had time or scope to figure out what the other was saying, as Nasser admitted to the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt. It was evident in the papers that Anderson did not understand what Nasser was saying. As a colleague of mine quipped, “if I had been part of that mission, I would want it to be kept secret too!”

Failure of the talks was followed by a new round of coups, revolts and regional wars. The late 1950s was a time of Arab political upsets (particularly the Iraqi coup d’état of 1958, which was predicted by Richard Nolte, a later U.S. ambassador to Egypt, and me in a widely read article in Foreign Affairs, “Toward a Policy for the Middle East,” which appeared two weeks before the coup.)

The late 1950s was also a time of American lethargy as Mr. Dulles’s anti-Soviet pacts fell apart. Only the Israelis seemed to know what they wanted and how to get it.

Yet, it appeared to the incoming Kennedy Administration in 1961 that at least in one respect John Foster Dulles had been right: only President Nasser was capable of making peace. So President John Kennedy put an ambassador who was known and liked by the Egyptians into Cairo, sent the most “liberal” man in his entourage (Gov. Chester Bowles) and me to talk openly with Nasser and instructed me to prepare a draft Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. (It was the first of three I was to draft in years to come.)

At the time, most observers and certainly the American officials regarded the Palestinians as mere bystanders. They were not thought of as having any serious capacity to make either war or peace.

Israel Moves Further Ahead

Israel’s first major task was to create a unified Jewish society from a deeply divided population. The Oriental Jews, as the Israeli-American scholar Nadav Safran wrote, “differed sharply in relevant historical background, culture, education, motivation, and even physical appearance from the European Jews.” Perhaps even more significant was their historical memory. Whereas European Jews had long suffered from anti-Semitism, the Oriental Jews lived as self-governing “nations” (Turkish: milleyet) in protected environments.

As Safran rather ponderously wrote, they “lived within a surrounding society that was itself organized for the most part on a regional and communal basis. Even where the host society’s traditional structure had begun to crumble under the impact of nationalism and modernization, the bulk of the Jews had not yet been called upon to make the kind of drastic adjustments to that society that gave rise to the sort of dilemmas European Jews faced.” That is, the cause of Zionism, anti-Semitism, was a Western, not a Middle Eastern, phenomenon. [See Israel: The Embattled Ally (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978) 91-92.]

And, of course, Oriental Jews had not experienced the Holocaust. So, one aspect of the “nation building” of Israel was to transfer to them the European Jewish experience. As several observers have commented, this involved the creation of a “Holocaust Industry.”

In addition to the constant and powerful emphasis on the Holocaust as a unifying historical memory, the Hebrew language was made into a powerful nationalizing force. To prosper in Israel, one had to speak, read and write Hebrew. Not unlike America, where immigrants dropped their former languages, dress and habits to become “American,” so in Israel arriving Jews rushed to become Israelis.

Education was the seedbed of the new nationalism and new nationhood.

Education had always been among the most laudable features of the Jewish experience.

The Western Jewish society was virtually completely literate, and from the beginning, it had more engineers, physicists, chemists, doctors and technicians than all of the Arab states and the Palestinian society combined. But among the Oriental Jews, more than half of the women and a quarter of the men were illiterate and by 1973 only one in each person in each 50 had graduated from university.

The founding of world-class universities and research institutions was the crown jewel of Israel. There was also a powerful military-industrial complex which enabled Israel to become one of the world’s major suppliers of weapons. It began in the Mandate and was fed by universities and research centers. From the 1950s, it also was subsidized by the United States which purchased equipment from it and shared technology with it.

Getting Secrets

And, where the sharing was not complete enough, Israeli agents penetrated American security – as in the case of the Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard – as well as other nations to obtain advanced and particularly dangerous weapons. The nuclear weapons technology of both America and France were successfully targeted. From at least 1961, Israel had acquired nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

In the field of foreign affairs, Israel used its arms industry and intelligence expertise to build relationships in both black African countries and white (Boer) ruled South Africa. Its main concern, however, was with the United States where it developed powerful alliances with lobbying groups.

This activity was the subject of a series of hearings conducted in 1963 by the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs under the chairmanship of Sen. William Fulbright on Israeli established and sponsored lobby groups that were considered to be foreign agents.

Another Israeli advantage was the Yishuv, its military command or its intelligence forces, which had a modernizing effect that was already evident in 1947 and became more so in the wars fought between the Arabs and Israel in 1956, 1967 and 1973. In each encounter, the Arabs were defeated decisively as Israel displayed military capacities of a different order.

Not only did Israel have sophisticated command and control techniques, including ground control for aircraft, but, given its social cohesion, it could increase its army from a standing force of no more than 50,000 to 300,000 in about 48 hours. I once was taken by the Israeli government to visit a tank brigade south of Tel Aviv that was maintained by only 200-300 men but could be put into action with 3,000 men in a few hours.

Wiping Out Arab Villages

Yet, from the Israeli perspective, perhaps the most important change in its national development was the wiping out of Palestine. Hundreds of villages were plowed under; the farm lands of many were converted into parks; old buildings, mosques and churches were bulldozed; roadways were changed; new maps were produced that no longer showed the old landmarks.

In a lecture, reported in Haaretz on April 3, 1969, Moshe Dayan acknowledged this policy, saying that “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don’t blame you, since these [old] geography books no longer exist. Not only the books do not exist — the Arab villages are not there either.”

Foreign journalists who tried to find the old villages, like Observer correspondent Sarah Helm and BBC and Guardian correspondent Michael Adams, were attacked as anti-Semites and had trouble even publishing their accounts. [See Christopher Mayhew and Michael Adams' Publish It Not (London: Longman, 1975).]

Some Israelis even denied the existence of the Palestinians. Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in the London Sunday Times (June 15, 1969) as saying that “There was no such thing as Palestinians. … They did not exist.”

Palestinian Seek the Initiative

Much has been written about the ugliness, drama and diversity of the events of the 1950s and 1960s and of the brutality, audaciousness and variety of the actors. There is a vast literature on this topic, but much of the intelligence information is “tactical,” dealing with how to apprehend or kill the various actors.

So complete is the focus on the dramatic aspects of these years that the underlying themes are often obscured. Yet, while the era’s events are only of transient interest, the themes have had an enduring impact.

As I have written, the Palestinians could be likened to Moses’ followers, former slaves whom he sought to turn into a warlike people by keeping them for two generations in the wilderness. Like all analogies, the comparison is not exact, but it is suggestive: the Palestinians had not been slaves but were a colonial people who had not yet received the stimulus of nationalism, and, while the camps in which they had been gathered were not exactly a “wilderness,” they were as isolated and as destitute as Moses had intended for his people. Moses thought his people needed 40 years to be transformed; by roughly 1967, the Palestinians had suffered 20 years.

In those years, three themes become evident. The first theme is that during those first 20 years the Palestinians recreated the diversity and mutual incompatibility of the Palestinian village society and also were shaped by the diversity and regional differences of the camps.

Moses was right: 20 years was not long enough for a new and unified society to emerge. After 20 years, the Palestinians were still unable to work together. Their Israeli enemies profited from and encouraged their mutual hostilities, but the Palestinians lent themselves, almost eagerly, to the Israeli objective.

The second theme is the effect of the brutality of the conflict. From at least 1950, warfare along the frontiers had been endemic. It had also been as ugly as the Seventeenth Century’s European Thirty Years War. Not only abduction, torture, rape and murder of men, women and children, but also mutilation filled the reports of the UN Mixed Armistice Commission.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of these events in shaping the attitudes toward one another of the Palestinians and the Israelis. Starkly put, the Israelis regarded the Palestinians as untermenschen while the Palestinians regarded the Israelis as monsters. Wounds were constantly opened and rubbed raw by thousands of incidents year after year.

Squeezing the Palestinians

The third theme is that during those years, few of the Palestinians had found “space” in which they could be peacefully active. Some actually prospered, at least financially, by moving to the oil-rich countries of the Gulf but at the cost of withdrawing from their people. Even the most successful realized that they had no future in their diaspora. They had acquired only what the Jews called a nachtaysl and the Arabs knew as a mahal — a temporary resting place.

And, as they competed with natives for jobs, contracts and wealth, the Palestinians found themselves the objects of local hostilities similar to those the Jews had suffered in Europe. While foreign propagandists insisted that the Arab states “absorb” the Palestinians, the natives regarded the Palestinians not only as foreigners but also as reminders of the Arab disgrace (Arabic: nakbah) in the 1948-1949 war.

Since there was no forum in which the Palestinians could be constructively active, those Palestinians whose names we remember turned to the weapon of the weak, terrorism. Middle Easterners would be hypocritical to claim the high ground of morality on terrorism. On terrorism, the Jews had led the way, and the Palestinians eagerly followed in their footsteps.

Terrorism is undoubtedly an ugly policy, but when other means of action are not available it has been adopted by people of every race, creed and ideology. [I offer proof of this in my book Violent Politics (New York: HarperCollins, 2007).]

Some of the former Israeli terrorists, having emerged victorious in their fighting against the British and the Palestinians, became leaders inside the Israeli government, just as former Algerian terrorists merged into the Algerian government. In a way, both were to become role models for at least some Palestinians.

By the 1960s, however, it was evident to the Palestinians that the small and ephemeral rival groups of anti-Israeli paramilitaries (Arabic: fedayeen) were not effective either politically or militarily. The reason why is simple. France could afford to leave Algeria — indeed it could not afford to stay — but the Israelis had nowhere to go and were determined to stay.

Fruitless Violence

So the dozens of Palestinian groups engaged in fruitless bouts of violence. The best known were the September 1970 “Hijack war” by the “Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,” the “Black September” attack of September 1972 on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in revenge for the destruction of two Palestinian villages, the flamboyant murders of the Venezuelan “Carlos the Jackal” and other incidences.

That these actions were pointless and drew opprobrium upon all the Arabs had become evident to the Arab states by September 1963, so the Arab states collectively agreed to form the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It is noteworthy that it was the Arab states (from above) rather than the Palestinians (from within) that took this step.

But, a group of some 400 Palestinians under the auspices of King Husain of Jordan met in Jerusalem where they took the step of actually setting up the organization. The objectives of the PLO were set in terms that the Palestinians generally approved — elimination of Zionism, destruction of Israel, self-determination for the Palestinians, and the right of return to the Palestinian homeland.

The PLO “constitution” did not proclaim statehood. It would be a decade before it demanded that status. Initially, indeed, the PLO was only a confederation of different, even opposing, Palestinian groups and could operate only on the sufferance of non-Palestinians.

The closest they came to having a territorial state was that they were recognized as having a notional claim to territory under Israeli occupation; Jordan did not recognize their authority on the West Bank nor did Egypt recognize their authority in Gaza. In effect, the PLO was relegated to a sort of observer status on the issue of Palestine.

The PLO’s largest component — eventually reaching about 80 percent of the membership — was FATAH (the reverse acronym of the Arabic: Harakat at-Tahrir al-Falastini).

Arafat’s Emergence

While its origins and early activities are necessarily obscure, we know that it grew out of meetings of a group of Palestinian refugees in Gaza led by Yasir Arafat, who had been born in Gaza and, although he spent his early life in poverty, trained as an engineer.

Arafat could have secured a job in the oil-rich Arab states, but he set his sight on Palestine. Having studied in Egypt, he probably joined the Muslim Brotherhood. Then forced to leave in 1954, he spent the next ten years moving through the refugee camps, recruiting followers and broadcasting his message “that the Palestinians had to take their destiny into their own hands and start harassing Israel.” [See Yahosifat Harkabi, Fedayeen Action and Arab Strategy, (London: Institute for Strategic Studies, 1968). General Harkabi, head of Israeli military intelligence and a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was probably the best outside observer of FATAH.]

As Arafat’s group coalesced, the members set about indoctrinating the Palestinian community with a series of pamphlets. Their fundamental thesis was that the only feasible action of the Palestinians was guerrilla warfare.

In this, Arafat and most Arabs drew on the lesson of the Algerian war of national liberation. Thus, they argued that the role of the conventional Arab states’ armies was largely irrelevant, just as the so-called External Army of the Algerians (which had sat out the war in Tunisia and Morocco) had been; what counted in Algeria and would count in the Palestine conflict, they believed, was the informal or guerrilla forces that were known in Algeria as the for “neighborhood” or “popular” (Arabic: wilaya) forces.

Beginning in 1966, the paramilitary forces of, FATAH carried out raids on Israel from bases in Syria. The Israeli government repeatedly warned Syria that it risked a massive Israeli retaliation.

In the first days of May 1967, Soviet intelligence passed to the Egyptian government information that Israel was preparing to attack, and this estimate seemed confirmed by a speech on May 12 by the Israeli prime minister.

Old enmities between the Arab states, no matter how bitter, were brushed aside as the crisis expanded. Even Kuwait, usually a cautious observer rather than an active participant, put its tiny armed forces at the disposal of the Egyptian general staff, and at an Arab League meeting all the members declared their support. The Middle East rushed toward war.

Toward the 1967 War

Here I must turn back from FATAH to the Arab states and particularly to Egypt. During the years following the 1952 Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt at Suez, Egypt had built a much larger and more competent army and with Soviet help had equipped it.

But, it seemed to me at the time, that it had two fatal weaknesses: first, it was obsolescent. It was essentially a Second World War army whereas Israel had an ultra-modern force, and, second, it was divided.

Most of the best units of the army were then in Yemen fighting the royalist guerrillas. But Nasser had accepted the assurance of his principal military adviser that the army was so strong that the Israelis would not dare attack it. He was wrong and should have known better.

That assessment led Nasser to play the dangerous game of brinkmanship which he was not equipped to play. He was partly pushed beyond reason by the Syrian and Jordanian governments and to a lesser extent by the Palestinians. They taunted him for cowardly hiding behind the UN force (UNEF) that patrolled the Sinai Peninsula.

Partly in an emotional personal reaction, Nasser decided to replace UNEF with Egyptian troops. The flashpoint was at the Straits of Tiran which was legally Egyptian — the ship channel, Enterprise Passage, is just 500 meters off the Egyptian mainland, — but it was of crucial importance to Israel as the only access to its port at Elath. Foolishly, Nasser “miscalculated.”

He announced that “Under no circumstances will we allow the Israeli flag to pass through the Gulf of Aqaba. The Jews threaten war. We tell them you are welcome. We are ready for war, but under no circumstances will we abandon any of our rights. This water is ours.”

All of the angers, frustrations and humiliations of the Arabs for the previous 20 years showed in that emotional statement. For Israel, it was tantamount to a declaration of war. But for the strenuous urging of the U.S. government, Israel would have immediately attacked.

Remarkably, the governments of the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union each tried to pressure Nasser into backing down. At the time, I warned that he would not or perhaps even could not. He was less able to do so when the normally cautious King of Jordan embraced him and Egypt’s policy. Meanwhile, President Lyndon Johnson told the Israeli government that he was prepared to break the blockade with American naval power.

In the flurry of diplomatic activity, the U.S. government believed as late as the evening of Saturday, June 3, that the crisis had passed.

War Comes

Walt Rostow, who was then head of the National Security Council, arranged a briefing for me with senior State Department officers, all of whom asserted that the danger of war had passed. I thought this was nonsense and wrote a memorandum explaining why.

Rostow promised to give my analysis to the President and secretaries of State and Defense. In it, I predicted Israel would attack within 72 hours. I was wrong. War began in 36 hours.

Two hours after dawn on Monday, June 5, fighter bombers of the Israeli Air Force caught the Egyptian Air Force on the ground and largely destroyed it. With mastery of the air, the Israeli army crushed the Egyptian forces in Sinai; then it turned on Jordan and threw the Jordanian army back across the Jordan River; and in a furious assault it destroyed the bulk of the Syrian army and reached the suburbs of Damascus.

Incidental to the attack against the Arabs was an Israeli attack on America. On June 8, 1967, Israel attempted to sink the U.S. Navy ship, the “Liberty” — the first time since Pearl Harbor that an American naval ship was attacked in peacetime. The attack showed both that the Israelis were prepared to “bite the hand that fed them” and that the U.S. government was willing to be bitten without even saying “ouch.”

The why behind the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty has long been debated. But Israel had secrets that it didn’t want the world to know. Among them, Israelis were executing bound Egyptian prisoners of war (which the Liberty overheard the Israelis discussing on the radio) and they had attacked a UN convoy. Johnson called back aircraft that were going to the aid of the Americans because he didn’t want to stop the Israelis.

While the Israelis, lamely, said the attack was an accident, they knew the ship was part of the U.S. Navy; they inspected it for eight hours and then Israeli jets and ships fired into it with machineguns, cannon and rockets and set it afire with napalm and launched torpedoes at it.

Clearly, they were attempting to sink it and the fact that they particularly targeted the life rafts suggests that they hoped there would be no survivors. They killed 34 U.S. service men and wounded 171. The surviving crew members were threatened with courts-martial if they discussed what had happened and the key intelligence materials including intercept tapes were kept secret for the next 35 years.

Other than the drama and the pain, what was the long-term import of this incident? If I were an Israeli policy planner, as I have been an American policy planner, I would discount all future American protests and warnings.

After all, if the U.S. government did not react strongly to an attack on one of its ships with the killing of uniformed sailors, would it react forcefully to lesser provocations? Apparently, that message was not lost on Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Second Arab Disaster

The war was a disaster for the Arabs and particularly for the Palestinians: In these encounters, the Arab states armies suffered the loss of about 25,000 men which, given their populations was proportionally equivalent to the loss of about 5 million Americans. About 175,000 Palestinian refugees were forced to flee once again and 350,000 additional people were turned into refugees. The humiliating defeats infected the “Arab street,” as journalists like to call the general public, with a sullen and tenacious hatred.

As a result of my accurate prediction of the war and because of my relationship with McGeorge Bundy to whom Johnson turned over the Middle East problem, I was called to the White House on June 5, 1967, to write a plan for a ceasefire and a subsequent peace treaty.

Johnson made both tasks impossible by deciding not to allow negotiations with the Egyptians. That was to be one of the several opportunities to bring the long war to an end. For better or for worse, it was missed and the fighting spread.

I had resigned from the Policy Planning Council in 1965 and was then Professor of History at the University of Chicago and President of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs.

An amusing personal note: I had purposely not kept up my security clearance because I wanted to be free to write completely independently. So when I arrived at the White House, I had to be escorted to the office that was assigned to me. It had been Lyndon Johnson’s office when he was Vice President. But all the furniture was taken out so I spent the first few hours sitting on the floor.

I took this as proof that unlike the 1956 Suez crisis, there was no “collusion” on the 1967 war. I was given, I believe, access to all the materials the President and Bundy were receiving. But my stay lasted only a day. When Johnson decided not to negotiate, I returned to Chicago.

A New Direction

Arafat saw the defeat of the Arab states and particularly of Jordan in the war as an opportunity. Once more, he thought, the Palestinians must take the lead: rather than being led (and unified) by the states; it would be the historical role of the Palestinians to lead (and unify) the Arab governments.

Nasser appeared to be a spent force; Assad in Syria had proven weak and vacillating; King Husain’s covert deals with Israel had not saved him; and Lebanon seemed irrelevant. Arafat’s FATAH took control of the PLO.

After the 1967 war, the second disaster for the Palestinian people, the refugee community grew to some 1,375,915. And, from the bitter defeats of the armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt, the Palestinians drew the lesson that they were on their own.

But Israel’s victory appeared, paradoxically, to create a new vulnerability: having battled for a strategically secure frontier, Israel had acquired a strategically insecure population. Arafat saw this in the context of what was then exciting to the Palestinians, the Algerian defeat of the French.

In that battle less than 13,000 Algerians defeated 485,000 French soldiers. By using guerrilla tactics, they wore down the French and got them to leave. Arafat thought the Palestinians might be able to do the same.

The confrontation with Israel had to be, Arafat maintained, a war of attrition. It was bitterly fought at first, but the cost was too high for Jordan to bear. Fearing that the PLO would use the conflict to take over Jordan and turn it into a Palestinian state (rather than, as he was prepared to allow, the Palestinians being or becoming Jordanians) King Husain rounded on the PLO with his largely Bedouin army.

Black September

To the Bedouin, the Palestinian cause was irrelevant while loyalty to the king was obligatory. On June 9, 1970, there was an attempt to assassinate King Husain, attacks were carried out on the royal palace and the national radio station and at least 60 foreigners were taken hostage.

Next the PLO demanded that the King dismiss his uncle as commander of the armed forces. The King complied. The final act in the drama was the hijacking of four commercial jets whose passengers were held hostage in the second week of September 1970.

It was a hijack too far. The king had to respond or abdicate. He responded. The Jordanian army rampaged through the refugee camps in what came to be called “Black September.” Casualty figures are only estimates but between 5,000 and 10,000 seems a reasonable guess.

In two weeks, the PLO had been crushed. But, wisely, Husain gave the PLO an out: he flew to Cairo to sign a deal with Arafat. Driven from Jordan, the PLO moved its operations to Lebanon where some 300,000 Palestinians lived in refugee camps under the UNRWA flag.

Though the Israelis were glad to get the PLO out of Jordan, they were not disposed to allow it free rein in Lebanon. They attacked the Beirut airport in December 1968 and began a series of further operations in the following months designed to force the Lebanese government to suppress Arafat’s followers.

Suez Ceasefire

Meanwhile, along the Suez Canal what amounted to “low intensity” war continued. The two armies were just a “stone’s throw” apart along the narrow waterway. Neither could move forward, but neither would retreat. Casualties were mounting steadily without any discernable result for either side. Sniping, augmented by commando raids, was backed up by artillery barrages.

The Israelis realized that nothing was being gained and they wanted to achieve a ceasefire; so Prime Minister Meir asked me to be the mediator with President Nasser. I did and the ceasefire was achieved shortly before his death. The Egyptian leader who once dreamt of Arab unity died on Sept. 28, 1970.

In this middle period of the Zionist experience – marked by the creation of the Israeli state and its successful wars against the Palestinians and neighboring Arab states – the land of Israel underwent an almost total transformation from what had been the British mandate. The transformation involved the arrival of about 1.5 million Jewish immigrants, with nine out of ten coming from Eastern Europe.

Israel’s transformation also benefitted from enormous infusions of American money. In the years from 1947-1973, that money amounted in various forms to over $100 billion or roughly $33,000 for each man, woman and child.

Finding Israeli intelligence very effective, the CIA also underwrote those activities with probably about $100 million a year to gain at least some access to Israeli findings and in return shared with the Israelis the CIA’s own “take.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 25, 2014 12:41 pm

Irish upper house backs Palestinian state
Seanad recognizes Palestine in nonbinding resolution, following British parliament's vote last week.
By Haaretz | Oct. 24, 2014 | 12:14 PM

Pro-Palestinian march in Dublin during Gaza war, July 19, 2014.

Image
People take part in a protest march through Dublin city center to call for an end to Israeli military action in Gaza and "justice and freedom" for Palestine, Sat., July 19, 2014. Photo by AP

The upper house of the Irish parliament joined the recent trend of passing a motion calling on its government to recognize a Palestinian state.

The British passed a similar, non-binding motion last week. The upper house, known as the Seanad, has limited power. The lower house, known as the Dail Eareann, is Ireland's principal legislative chamber.

The motion, tabled by opposition senator Averil Power, stated, "Seanad Eireann calls on the government to formally recognize the state of Palestine and do everything it can at the international level to help secure a viable two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

31 of 60 members of the upper house, known as the Seanad, signed the motion last week, according to Ireland's The Journal.

Ireland should "make it clear that statehood is a right of the Palestinian people and not a bargaining chip for the Israelis to play in further sham negotiations," said Power, according to AFP. "In doing so, we will help increase pressure on Israel to pursue a genuine peace process that has a real prospect of delivering peace and justice for both Israelis and Palestinians alike."

Israel's ambassador to Ireland, Boaz Modai, dismissed the motion even before it went to a vote, AFP reported.

"Stunt gestures such as recognizing 'Palestine' unilaterally are counter-productive because they only give excuses to those on the Palestinian side who hope to achieve their goals without talking directly to Israel," the embassy said in a statement.

However, Power told The Journal after the vote, “The more countries that recognize the State of Palestine, the greater the pressure on Israel to end its illegal occupation and agree to a long-term peace agreement in the region."

Sweden is the only sitting European Union to have voted officially to recognize a Palestinian state. Hungary, Poland and Slovakia all voted to recognize Palestine before joining the EU.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Oct 25, 2014 1:59 pm

The hidden documents that reveal the true borders of Israel and Palestine
Israel/Palestine David Gerald Fincham on October 23, 2014 77 Comments

I once believed that Israel has never defined its borders. It was one of those things that “everyone knows”. I was corrected by the blogger talknic. Mondoweiss is privileged to have talknic as a frequent commenter, and many readers here will be familiar with the document to which he pointed me: the letter written by Eliahu Epstein, the representative of the Jewish Agency in Washington, to President Truman and to the State Department, on May 14, 1948.

Epstein’s letter to Truman

In the letter, the Provisional Government of Israel formally requested the United States to recognize the new State of Israel which was about to be declared in Tel Aviv, effective one minute after midnight (6 p.m Washington time) when the British Mandate over Palestine ended. It begins (my emphasis):

My dear Mr. President, I have the honor to notify you that the State of Israel has been proclaimed as an independent republic within the frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of November 29, 1947.

(The full text is given in the link above, and also appears below.) The resolution referred to, UNGA Resolution 181, recommended the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Zionist leadership had publicly accepted the Partition Plan, and this letter defines the borders of Israel to be those specified in the Plan (see map attached).

As soon as I read the words “proclaimed… within the frontiers…” I knew that I had been fooled by Zionist propaganda. Reflecting further, I realized that the idea of a state without defined borders is actually completely nonsensical. Suppose there were no defined border between Canada and the USA. People would not know in which country they were living; what was their citizenship; whose laws they needed to obey; what currency they could use. It would be chaos. The Montevideo Convention lists the following requirements for the existence of a state: a permanent population; a defined territory; government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. If Israel had really been declared as a state without borders, it would not have been a state at all.

To understand how the Zionist leadership came to make this border definition, and why later they tried, very successfully, to convince the world that it never happened, we need to consider events in both Tel Aviv and Washington as the end of the Mandate approached.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence

Israel was reluctant to define its borders. According to an article on the Israel Government website, the Provisional Government of Israel met in Tel Aviv from May 12 to May 14 to consider the draft declaration of independence. It was led by David Ben-Gurion as Prime Minister and Defense Minister.

Partition plan, UN 1947, with '49 armistice delineated
Image

There were heated discussions about the borders. Some said stick to the Partition Plan borders, while Ben-Gurion argued strongly that they should say nothing about the borders, because it was his intention to capture territory outside the Partition Plan borders and include it in the state. His view was accepted by a vote of five to four in favor, with the four other members being absent. This vote is the origin of the story that “Israel has never defined its borders”. Ben-Gurion went home on the evening of May 13 and completely rewrote the draft declaration of independence, removing all references to the Partition Plan.

His motive is clear. He wanted to create the sort of chaotic situation I outlined in my Canada-USA illustration. If there was no defined border between Israel and the rest of Palestine, then all of Palestine could be considered open territory, available for conquest.

On May 14, the Ben-Gurion’s rewritten draft was considered by the National Council, the embryonic parliament of the new state, and was approved unanimously on the second vote: so we know that changes were made. The article does not say what they were, suggesting they were minor in nature. But if we look at the text of the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel we see that the references to the Partition Plan have been restored. Indeed, the Partition Plan is placed at the heart of the Declaration:

WE… BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

Being based on the Partition Plan, the Declaration implicitly defines the borders to be those specified in the Plan, but does not say so explicitly. Since the declaration of a new state is a once-only event, whereas borders can be changed later, the absence of a border definition in the Declaration itself is not significant. It was Epstein’s letter that formally defined Israel’s borders.

Epstein’s telegram to Shertok

Later that day, May 14, after Truman had responded to Epstein’s letter by recognizing Israel, Epstein sent a telegram to Moshe Shertok (later Sharett), Foreign Minister in the Provisional Government of Israel. It tells the dramatic story of how, pledged to secrecy and against a deadline, he came to write the letter to Truman:

United States Government has just recognized State in following language:
“THIS GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN INFORMED THAT A JEWISH STATE HAS BEEN PROCLAIMED IN PALESTINE AND RECOGNITION HAS BEEN REQUESTED BY THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT THEREOF. THE UNITED STATES RECOGNIZES THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT AS THE DE FACTO AUTHORITY OF THE NEW STATE OF ISRAEL.”

Informal conversations with White House representatives have made clear that recognition de facto rather than de jure because announced government provisional in nature.
The surrounding circumstances are as follows. Clark Clifford, White House spokesman, phoned Washington friends advising that the State Department, at noon, May 14, will agree immediate recognition in event request therefor received. After careful consultation here with Ben Cohen and Ginsberg, following letter drafted and sent to the President and Secretary of State:
My dear Mr. President: I have the honor to notify you that the State of Israel has been proclaimed as an independent republic within the frontiers approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its Resolution of November 29, 1947, and that the Provisional Government has been charged to assume the rights and duties of government for preserving law and order within the boundaries of Israel, for defending the state against external aggression, and for discharging the obligations of Israel to the other nations of the world in accordance with international law.

The Act of Independence will become effective one minute after six o’clock on the evening of 14 May 1948 Washington time.

With full knowledge of the deep bond of sympathy which has existed and has strengthened over the past thirty years between the Government of the United States and the Jewish people of Palestine, I have been authorized by the Provisional Government of the new State to tender this message and to express the hope that your government will recognize and will welcome Israel into the community of nations.

Very respectfully yours,
/s/ Eliahu Epstein
Agent, Provisional Government of Israel.

Wider consultation and prior notifications were precluded by pledge of secrecy demanded by Clifford.
Earlier during the day Loy Henderson phoned to ascertain boundaries of new State. Advised that boundaries in accordance with U.N Resolution.
Circumstances required that I take title for this act and assume responsibility for sending letter.
Clark Clifford was a strong supporter of the Zionist cause and encouraged Truman to recognize the State of Israel as soon as it was declared. In his memoirs he says that he helped Epstein compose the request for recognition, and that it was he who told Epstein “it was particularly important to claim nothing beyond the boundaries outlined in the UN Resolution”.

Loy Henderson was in the State Department, and had been opposing Truman’s recognition. Now that it was going ahead, he also wanted to make sure that Israel was defining its borders. Epstein gave a more detailed account of the phone call to Max Lowenthal, another Truman adviser. Henderson had asked whether the Jewish State wanted any territory other than was granted in the UN resolution. Epstein replied “No, and any territory taken until peace was achieved would be returned to the Arab state”.

It is clear that Israel would not have been recognized by the US if it had not declared on the Partition Plan borders.

The telegram suggests that Epstein was not able to communicate with the Zionist leadership in Tel Aviv before submitting his letter to Truman. Fortunately, both had made similar decisions: in Tel Aviv to base the Declaration on the Partition Plan; in Washington to define borders according to the Plan.

Israel and Palestine

There was no doubt in the 1948-49 period about the location of Israel’s borders. The text of Epstein’s letter, together with Truman’s response recognizing Israel, was released to the world press in Washington on May 15, 1948. Talknic’s website and my own list several occasions on which Israel publicly acknowledged the existence of these borders. All the states recognizing Israel knew the extent of the territory it was claiming.

The words of the Declaration are intended to suggest that the creation of Israel was authorized by the United Nations. This is not correct. The UN does not have authority under its Charter to create or divide states. The Partition Plan was a recommendation only. The Plan envisaged a process, starting at the end of the Mandate, which would lead to the establishment of two states in a series of parallel stages. Because the Plan was rejected by the Arab side, it could not be implemented.

Israel was created as a sovereign state by the decision of the Zionist leadership to preempt the process envisaged in the Plan, and to declare the State of Israel immediately on termination of the Mandate. The borders specified at that time are its sovereign borders: the borders within which Israel claimed and exercised sovereign authority and on which it was recognized by other states.

It is sometimes asked whether the creation of Israel was legal. The answer is that it was neither legal nor illegal, because there is no system of law governing the creation of states. Israel exists as a sovereign state because it satisfied the requirements of the Montevideo Convention, and was recognized as such by other states.

Israel’s Declaration partitioned the land into two territories: the State of Israel, and the remainder of Palestine outside the sovereign borders of Israel, corresponding to the area of the Arab state in the Partition Plan. Palestine was in a sorry state, with much of its population having become refugees, and it had no government because the Mandate had ended, and there was nothing to replace it. It became a non-self-governing territory.

The Jewish National Home policy of the British Mandate had made it impossible for the Palestinians to exercise their right of self-determination in Mandatory Palestine, as confirmed by the report of the UN Special Committee on Palestine (II.176). But, because Israel’s border definition limited the sovereign extent of the State of Israel to that specified for the Jewish state in the Partition Plan, it also defined the borders of the non-self-governing territory of Palestine, creating the possibility that the Palestinians could exercise that right, the right to their own state, in the territory allocated to the Arab state in the Partition Plan.

Borders can be changed, but a state can only acquire territory from a neighbor by legal annexation, that is, by agreement, and with a referendum of the population. Obtaining territory by war violates fundamental principles of the UN Charter. Nevertheless, this is what Israel did.

Israel expands: the 1948-49 war

Israel was founded in the midst of civil war between Jews and Arabs. At 00:01 on May 15, 1948, when the Declaration became effective, Jewish militias were already fighting outside Israel’s sovereign borders, in the territory of Palestine. That same night, forces of the Arab states entered Palestine, and the civil war became a war between Israel and the Arab States. Knowing the location of Israel’s borders gives a better understanding of the nature of this war. Israel was not invaded by five Arab states. Most of the fighting was in Palestine, outside the borders of Israel, and no Jordanian forces entered Israel. The Arab League told the UN that they were entering Palestine to protect Arabs from Zionist attack: Israel told the UN that its forces were operating in Palestine, outside its borders, in order to protect Jews from Arab attack. The UN did not identify either side as an aggressor.

Having achieved recognition by declaring the partition lines as its border, a few days later, on May 20, the Provisional Government decided that “Israel would not respect the partition lines”. On June 3 Ben-Gurion said, in a report to the Provisional Government, “the entire expanse of the State of Israel allocated to us under the terms of the UN resolution is in our hands, and we have conquered several important districts outside those boundaries… we will remain constantly on the offensive, which will not be confined to the borders of the Jewish State”, thus confirming both the existence of the borders, and his intention to capture territory outside them. As the war progressed Israel continued to gain territory, until the fighting stopped with the Armistices of 1949.

In the captured territory between the partition lines and the armistice lines (see map above), Israel applied Israeli law, rather than a military occupation under the laws of war, making the territory in effect (de facto) part of Israel. The armistice lines (collectively the Green Line) therefore became the de facto border of Israel. Needless to say, this was not a legal annexation, as the armistice agreements themselves make clear: “the Armistice Demarcation Line is not to be construed in any sense as a political or territorial boundary”. Since Israel has no intention of returning this territory, it is rightly called stolen land.

Israel’s sovereign territory amounts to some 55% of Mandatory Palestine, the stolen land another 23%, with the remaining 22% comprising the West Bank and Gaza. The stolen land includes the cities of Acre, Ashkelon, Jaffa, Nazareth, Ramle, Beersheba, Lydda, and West Jerusalem, all except the last having being allocated to the Arab state in the Partition Plan as they were major Arab population centers.

Under Chapter XI of the UN Charter a “sacred trust” is automatically created when a state (in this case Israel) administers a non-self-governing territory (parts of Palestine). Under this trust the responsibility of Israel in the stolen land was to recognize that “the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount” and to help them “develop self-government and free political institutions”. In other words, to help the Palestinian people achieve their right of self-determination in their own land.

Israel seriously violated this sacred trust. Making the territory part of Israel prevents its people from developing free political institutions and self-government. The refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return, the destruction of their villages, and their replacement by immigrant Jews, puts the interests of the Palestinian people below those of Jewish immigrants into Palestinian territory.

Chapter XI of the Charter also applies in the West Bank and Gaza, occupied by Israel in 1967. As the administration there is military, it must also obey the Geneva Conventions. Israel has violated those as well.

Palestine’s right to territorial compensation

Nothing has changed the status of the border between Israel and Palestine since 1949, as there has been no peace treaty between the two sides. The partition line is still the declared and recognized sovereign border of Israel. The Green Line is still the de facto border of Israel. And please, everyone, stop calling it the pre-1967 border: it is not a recognized border, and it did not move an inch in 1967. Nor is the territory inside the de facto border ‘Israel proper’. The stolen land is improperly regarded as part of Israel since it was obtained by war in violation of the UN Charter.

Palestine has said that, in the interests of peace, Israel can keep the land stolen in 1948-49. This is a wise decision. The stolen land is fully integrated with the rest of Israel, and this situation is irreversible. It is also a very generous offer. In fact too generous, because Palestine has not even asked for territorial compensation for the loss of much of its heartlands. This is a mistake. Israel has a population of around 8 million. The Palestinian population, including the West Bank, Gaza, and stateless refugees with a right to return, is around 9 million. A peace agreement that left only 22% of Palestine under Palestinian Arab sovereignty could not possibly be considered a viable or just solution which would lead to a lasting peace.

The failure to ask for compensation arises because the Palestinian leadership believes that Israel has never defined its borders. They believe it because it is one of those things that “everyone knows”, and also because their legal adviser has told them that Israel does not have “determinate borders”. Consequently, they do not understand the legal distinction between Israel’s sovereign territory and the stolen land. The same adviser also told them that UN Security Council Resolution 242 “set forth” the boundaries of the Palestinian State. This is another nonsensical fiction. Resolution 242 says nothing about the position of any borders, nor could it, because the UN has no authority to tell a state where its borders are; that is for states to agree between themselves.

I believe that Palestine can make a strong case that, in terms of justice, international law, and viability, it deserves and needs a transfer of territory from Israeli sovereignty in the southern Negev (that is, south of Beersheba, the city itself being within the stolen land). This would achieve three things: provide territorial contiguity between the West Bank and Gaza; provide space for the returning refugees; and enable the Bedouin, if they so wish, to transfer from Israeli sovereignty to Palestinian sovereignty.

This is not a new idea. The Negev was allocated to the Jewish state in the Partition Plan as an area capable of absorbing large numbers of Jewish immigrants, having at the time only a small population of mostly Bedouin. The UN Mediator was the first to suggest, (see his September 1948 Progress Report [One.III.6]), that some of the Negev be transferred to the proposed Arab state, at that time as compensation for the loss of western Galilee. The Arabs, at the failed attempt at a peace conference in Lausanne in 1949 said that they would need the Negev to accommodate the returning refugees, since Israel was not willing to accept them. (See this report of the Conciliation Commission [IV.15]). During the conference President Truman wrote a secret Note to Ben-Gurion deploring Israel’s refusal to provide territorial compensation for areas it had acquired outside the Partition Plan borders.

The expulsion of 750,000 non-Jewish Palestinians and Israel’s de facto enlargement in the 1948-49 war meant that the original reason for allocating the Negev to Israel had become obsolete. Although Israel has been actively developing the Negev for Jewish occupation since 2005, population density is still low. It should be possible to produce a suitable division of territory. To keep contiguous both Israeli and Palestinian territory, there could be a neutral crossing point between the two states, similar to those in the Partition Plan (see them in the attached map, to the south-west of Nazareth and of Ramle).

Negotiation of new borders needs to be handled with respect to the wishes of residents. It would not be legal to transfer people from one sovereignty to another unless the majority of them agreed, and the border lines should be drawn so as to minimize the number of people who consider themselves adversely affected. For example, as far as possible Jewish settlements in the Negev should be kept within Israel. Everyone whose sovereignty is changed should be given dual citizenship

The one-state solution

All this discussion of borders and territories would immediately become irrelevant if there were a one-state solution. I expect this will happen eventually, my own view being that the solution with the greatest chance of success would be a union of the two nations to form a single state, along the lines of the England-Scotland model. But at the moment, the two states already exist, and the only way that they can successfully become one is by a voluntary merger, federation or union. It cannot be voluntary unless the two nations negotiate on an equal basis. So, a one-state solution can only proceed by way of an intermediate two-state solution. The territorial question must be sorted out.

Israel’s deceptions

Israel’s declaration of sovereign borders on May 14, 1948 was a deception practiced upon President Truman and the rest of the world, designed to elicit recognition of Israel. Israel never had an intention to stick to those borders. Since those days, Israel and its Zionist supporters have practiced another deception: that the border definition never happened.

How did such a nonsensical and easily disproved idea become something that “everyone knows”? And “everyone” includes some surprising people: the historian Avi Shlaim, Professor at Oxford University, said in an interview that “the Armistice Lines are the only internationally recognized borders that Israel ever had”; Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois is the adviser to the PLO, already mentioned, who said that “Israel does not have determinate borders”; Uri Avnery, veteran Israeli journalist, politician and peace activist, has said that “from its first day, the State of Israel has refused to fix its borders”; Jeremy R. Hammond, editor of Foreign Policy Journal, in his book The Rejection of Palestinian Self Determination (Chapter IV) says, of the creation of Israel, “significantly, no borders for the newly proclaimed state were specified”; John B. Judis, political historian, in his recent book Genesis about Truman, Zionism, and the creation of Israel, discusses the events of May 14, 1948 in Washington (page 317), mentioning that Clifford worked with Epstein on the letter asking for recognition, but shows no knowledge of its content and gives no reference to the text.

Provision of misleading information, such as the article about Israel’s Declaration of Independence discussed above, is one Zionist propaganda technique, but the main one is simple silence and suppression of information.

I may be exaggerating somewhat by describing Epstein’s letter to Truman as “hidden”, since it has been in the public domain since May 15, 1948, but for a document of such historic significance it has a very low profile on the internet. As far as I can determine there is not a single Israel Government or Zionist website which mentions this letter when talking about the foundation of the State of Israel and Truman’s recognition. The full text appears on only three well-known websites: as an unsearchable facsimile of the original in the Truman library; the Avalon project at Yale Law School; and in the Jewish Virtual Library, where it is indexed only as a “Letter from Provisional Government to USA” and nowhere are its contents or significance discussed. Otherwise it appears mostly on blogs, news archives and discussions.

Active suppression also takes place. I have sometimes entered a polite and relevant comment, quoting the first sentence of the letter, into the website Times of Israel, to find that it has quickly been moderated out.

My second document, Epstein’s telegram to Shertok, is both a fascinating piece of history and of great importance since it confirms that the US would not have recognized Israel if it had not defined its borders according to the UN partition lines. This one has really been well hidden. A link to it, as an unsearchable facsimile, first appeared in 2012 in a story on the website of the Israel State Archivist (Document No. 3). Until now, the only other links to it on the internet have been from my own writings, and the only plain text copy of the document on the internet has been on my website.

Summary of conclusions

The Zionist leadership did not want to define the borders of Israel when they declared independence from the rest of Palestine on May 14, 1948, but were forced to specify borders according to the UN Partition Plan in order to achieve recognition by the USA. The territory captured by Israel outside these borders in the 1948-49 war and incorporated de facto into Israel was obtained by war in violation of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter. Since 1949 Israel has attempted, very successfully, to convince the world that this border definition never happened in order to hide the fact that the captured territory is outside Israel’s declared and recognized sovereign borders and is therefore rightfully part of the territory of Palestine, within which the Palestinian people have the right of self-determination. Although the Palestinian leadership has accepted that Israel can keep this territory in a peace agreement, there is a very strong case for compensation for its loss in the form of a transfer of Israeli territory in the southern Negev to Palestinian sovereignty.

For more details on the topic of this essay please see my website article The Borders of Israel and Palestine.

Requests to readers

Did Ben-Gurion really turn up on the morning of May 14, 1948 with a new version of the Declaration that did not mention the Partition Plan? Or was it actually he who realized overnight that the idea of creating a state with undefined borders was not going to work? The various drafts of the Declaration are said to be on display in Independence Hall in Tel Aviv. Is there an Israeli reader who could go along, take a look and let us know?

How did the Zionists manage to persuade “everyone” that “Israel has never defined its borders”? It would take a major project in social psychology to answer that question fully, but it would be interesting to hear the views and experiences of readers. I will respond to all comments.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Oct 26, 2014 7:32 am

Israel Risks Turning al-Aqsa into Powder Keg
Abbas appears powerless as Jewish extremists seek to gain greater foothold at al-Aqsa Mosque
by Jonathan Cook / October 24th, 2014

With East Jerusalem already smouldering, it emerged this week that the Israeli parliament is to consider a bill that could set the region ablaze. The measure would lift limitations on Jews visiting the al-Aqsa mosque compound, the most sensitive site in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Details of the measure have yet to be published. But one possibility is that it will overturn a prohibition in Israeli law on Jews praying at the site, ending also a long-standing rabbinical injunction against such activities.

Other reports, however, suggested the bill would extend visiting times for Jews, possibly by forcing the Islamic authorities to divide the site and create a dedicated area for Jewish visitors.

For several weeks clashes have been raging at the site, known as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, to Muslims and Temple Mount to Jews. If passed, the legislation would likely trigger a much-anticipated third Palestinian intifada, or uprising, and set off protests across the Muslim world.

The bill, which apparently has the backing of the deputy religious services minister, Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan, would probably create arrangements similar to those already in place in Hebron, where Israel has imposed stringent security procedures and restrictions on times of worship at the Ibrahimi mosque.

The mosque has been split in two, with the Jewish half – the Tomb of the Patriarchs – becoming a major attraction for Israelis. Jewish settlers have also created a series of enclaves protected by the Israeli army in and around the Palestinian city.

Settlers pose as tourists

Although Israel describes the Jews who visit the Haram al-Sharif simply as “tourists”, most are extremist settlers, including many who wish to destroy al-Aqsa and replace it with a Jewish temple.

They have been visiting in ever larger numbers. During the week-long Jewish holiday of Sukkot this month, hundreds of such Jewish “tourists” were escorted by armed police on to the esplanade, triggering a furious response from Muslim worshippers.

Jordan, which is officially responsible for the site, protested to Israel this week. The Jordanian ambassador to Palestine, Khalid al-Shawabka, told Maan TV that “the al-Aqsa mosque and Jerusalem are red lines”.

The Fatah movement of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, sounded the alarm too. Its Revolutionary Council issued a statement that any move to divide the mosque “is invalid under international law and is a step that will blow up the whole region”.

Apparently fearful of the wider repercussions, the United Nations secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, was uncharacteristically outspoken during his visit to the region last week. “I am deeply concerned by repeated provocations at the holy sites in Jerusalem,” he said. “These only inflame tensions and must stop.”

Officials for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, tried to placate Jordan, saying Jews would not be allowed to pray at the site, and there was “no intention of changing the status quo”.

Although Netanyahu is probably too wary to light the powder keg that is al-Aqsa by allowing the measure to pass, claims that Israel has not changed the status quo at al-Aqsa are far off the mark.

Erosion of status quo

Over the past few weeks al-Aqsa has been the scene of repeated clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians incensed by Israel’s continuing erosion of arrangements that are supposed to leave Islamic clerics, known as the Waqf, in charge.

Netanyahu’s repeated claims that Israel guarantees freedom of worship for all faiths in Jerusalem are misleading.

During this month’s lengthy high Jewish holidays, Israel intensified already severe restrictions on Muslim prayer at al-Aqsa, apparently to accommodate demands from Jewish extremists for greater access to the site.

Since the signing of the Oslo accords two decades ago, Muslim worshippers have faced ever-tighter limitations on their freedoms at the compound.

Israel, which treats East Jerusalem as an integral part of its territory, has refused the great majority of Palestinians – those in the West Bank and Gaza – the right to visit and pray at al-Aqsa. Israel has further limited prayer rights by imposing a minimum age for Muslim men, including those in Jerusalem and Israel.

During the recent holidays, Israel barred Muslim men under the age of 50 from entering al-Aqsa. Meanwhile, Jewish “tourists” were escorted by armed police on to the esplanade.

The ensuing clashes led Israel’s police minister, Yitzhak Aharonovich, to temporarily close the site to non-Muslims. However, Aharonovich indicated that he was considering further changes to the status quo: “I am examining the possibility that if the mount is closed to Jews it will be closed to Muslims too.”

Such closures might provide useful leverage for Israel, which could tie a reopening of the site to an agreement from the Waqf to provide better terms for Jewish visits.

Jewish enclaves

But the encroachments on al-Aqsa are not limited to the growing presence in the compound of Jewish extremists who want either to split the al-Aqsa site or to destroy the mosque.

Israel has also been extensively altering the geography around the esplanade, including by helping settler groups create enclaves in Palestinian communities close to al-Aqsa, as a way to encircle the site.

The focus of such activities has been Silwan, which is just outside the Old City walls and only a stone’s throw from the mosque itself.

For the past two decades Silwan has been home to a settler-run archaeological theme park called the City of David, supported by the Israeli authorities. Attracting hundreds of thousands of Jewish visitors each year, the park claims to prove that the area right next to al-Aqsa was the capital of the Biblical King David.

But it has also given the settlers a foothold from which they are slowly taking over ever more of the Palestinian neighbourhood.

Tensions in Silwan heightened dramatically this month as dozens of settlers moved under cover of night into Palestinian homes, doubling their presence in the neighbourhood almost overnight. Their armed compounds have won Netanyahu’s blessing.

Local residents have responded with predictable outrage. In recent days there has been an almost constant stream of reports of stone-throwing and fire-bomb attacks on settlers’ cars and homes. The violence has spread to many other neighbourhoods being infiltrated by settlers.

The Palestinian driver who careered into passengers disembarking from the city’s light rail system on Wednesday night – in an incident being treated by Israel as a “terror attack” – was a 20-year-old resident of Silwan. A three-year-old baby was killed and eight people injured.

Unifying symbol

Palestinians have strong grounds for fearing that all this activity is designed to gain greater control over the al-Aqsa compound.

Since East Jerusalem was occupied in 1967, Israeli politicians and religious leaders have viewed the site as a powerful symbol, one capable of unifying religious and secular Israelis. The esplanade, adjacent to the Western Wall, is assumed to stand over two Jewish temples, the last one destroyed nearly 2,000 years ago. For this reason, Israelis refer to the site as the Temple Mount.

Israel has been trying to whittle away the Waqf’s control for decades. In all peace talks since Camp David in 2000, Israel has demanded that it be given a much greater say in affairs at the site.

It was a visit in 2000 to the esplanade by Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s opposition leader, that triggered the second intifada. Backed by 1,000 armed guards, he went to the site with the express intention of demonstrating Israeli sovereignty.

As East Jerusalem teetered on the brink of intensified clashes this week, Netanyahu went on the attack. Vowing to “restore quiet and security” in the city, he accused Abbas of inciting the violence and aiding terrorism.

“We are encountering weakness from the international community against these actions from the Palestinian Authority president,” said Netanyahu. “They are not willing to say two words, or even one word of criticism against him.”

Netanyahu’s accusation echoed that against Abbas’ predecessor, Yasser Arafat, 14 years ago, when Israel blamed him for engineering the outbreak of the second intifada.

PA role eradicated

Then as now, the claims are grounded in little more than fantasy.

As Israeli intelligence experts conceded later, Arafat had no control over the outpouring of Palestinian anger that swept across the occupied territories in 2000, in the wake of the failed Camp David peace talks. Instead he did his best to ride the popular wave of fury.

Abbas is even further removed from the action than Arafat, and can do little more than watch events unfold in East Jerusalem from the sidelines. In fact, it is his very impotence in Jerusalem that is fueling much of the current tension.

At Israel’s insistence, Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority, the supposed Palestinian government in waiting, have had no discernible presence in Jerusalem for years.

Since the second intifada erupted in late 2000, Israel has worked strenuously to eradicate any role for the PA in the lives of East Jerusalem’s residents.

The extent of that success was highlighted this month when Israeli police broke up a meeting attended by foreign diplomats at which PLO representatives were – paradoxically – to have explained how Israel had shut down all Palestinian institutions in Jerusalem.

The Israeli government’s stance has backing from the Israeli public. A poll this week showed three-quarters of Israeli Jews were opposed to a Palestinian state if it meant conceding control over East Jerusalem.

Empty words

But the absence of a Palestinian leadership has fed a growing sense among East Jerusalem residents of their isolation and vulnerability.

With Jerusalem now effectively severed from the rest of the West Bank by walls and checkpoints, its residents are slowly being stripped of their place at the heart of a future Palestinian state. And as a result, the potential threats to the al-Aqsa mosque seem to them only magnified.

Tough talk by Abbas over the past week has only underscored to them his powerlessness.

At a press conference in Ramallah last Saturday, he urged Palestinians to use “any means” to stop what he described as a “fierce onslaught” by Jewish extremists trying to gain greater access to the al-Aqsa compound.

A short time later Abbas announced he had changed the penalty for Palestinian collaborators who sell properties to settlers, such as has occurred in Silwan. They will now face imprisonment with “hard labour for life”. His Fatah party also declared such acts “high treason”.

But the truth is that Abbas’ words are empty. He has no ability to enforce Palestinian law on collaborators in Jerusalem, which is why they have become such a problem. And his call on ordinary Palestinians to protect al-Aqsa simply highlights the fact that his security forces are in no position to do so.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 29, 2014 7:31 pm

OCTOBER 29, 2014

A Sea Change in the Middle East?
Palestine, Israel and the ADL
by ROBERT FANTINA
On October 24 of this year, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which, according to its website, “…was founded in 1913 ‘to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all’,” printed an overview of what it called ‘Anti-Israel Activity on Campus After Operation Protective Edge: A Preview of the 2014-2015 Academic Year’. This article provides information about student groups that were appalled at Israeli cruelty during that country’s so-called ‘Operation Protective Edge’, the ridiculous name of the most recent invasion and carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip. It discusses the increase in student activity opposing Israeli policies, and projects that it will probably only continue to grow.

It is certainly true that opposition to Israel’s decades-long, brutal occupation of Palestine is growing. But the ADL made some statements in the article that belie belief. A look at one sentence suffices: “Student groups that constitute today’s anti-Israel movement hurl a multitude of hateful accusations against Israel, falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes in an effort to demonize Israel.”

Let us break this amazing sentence down into its component parts, and see what we can learn from it.

‘Student groups that constitute today’s anti-Israel movement’. Certainly, it can’t be denied that college campuses not only in the United States, but also throughout the world are seeing more opposition to Israeli practices. But such groups do not constitute this movement; they are simply a part of greater, ad-hoc organizations around the world that are finally waking up to Israel’s unspeakable cruelties.

‘Hurl a multitude of hateful accusations against Israel’. It would not be difficult to diffuse these ‘hateful’ accusations. If Israel is indeed innocent of these charges, all it would need to have done would be to have cooperated with any of the international investigations of the last few years, or that are currently ongoing, into its practices. If Israel has nothing to hide, why not show the facts to the world? On the other hand, if the facts are already there for all the world to see, why not try calling them ‘hateful accusations’ and see if that accomplishes anything?

“Falsely claiming that Israel is guilty of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes”. Are these false claims? A quick Internet search shows this definition for apartheid: ‘any system or practice that separates people according to race, caste, etc.’. Palestinians in the West Bank cannot drive on the same roads that Israeli’s use. They are hindered in their daily activities by countless checkpoints that Israelis establish and man arbitrarily. A Palestinian arrested in the West Bank may spend months incarcerated without charge, and without access to legal representation. An Israeli arrested in the West Bank is either charged or released within hours, and has access to legal representation immediately. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank need to ask permission from Israel to farm their own lands, and to harvest their own crops. No such restrictions or requirements are placed on Israelis.

Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Going to the same Internet source, this is how ‘ethnic cleansing’ is defined: “The elimination of an unwanted ethnic group or groups from a society, as by genocide or forced migration.” Israel was established in 1948 only after the forced removal (‘migration’) of 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral homes. In the decades since that time, Palestinian homes have been, and continue to be, routinely demolished to make room for illegal Israeli settlements, in which only Israelis can live.

Now let us look at the charge of genocide. Returning again to the same dictionary site, genocide is defined thusly: “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political or cultural group.” When three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forcibly removed from their homes in 1947 and 1948, at least 10,000 of them were killed. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were completely destroyed, leaving no trace of mosques, museums, schools, cemeteries or other signs of Palestinian culture. Since then, countless mosques, schools and other vital structures of Palestinian culture have been obliterated by Israel, in order to make room for more, Israeli-only, illegal settlements. Ironically, in June of 2011, Israel bulldozed the ancient Muslim cemetery, Ma’man Allah, in order to build a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on the site.

During Israel’s recent horrific bombing of the Gaza Strip, many more ancient mosques were destroyed, further decimating Palestinian culture.

These student groups accuse Israel of ‘a number of other war crimes’, says the ADL article. According to International Law, an occupying force (Israel) cannot move permanent settlers into the occupied territory. Israeli Prime Murderer Benjamin Netanyahu has stated flatly that he has no intention of giving up the West Bank, where over 500,000 settlers live illegally. It is also in violation of international law to remove residents from their property, something Israel does routinely, and has done for decades, causing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many who had to leave their homes for refugee camps.

International law also says that in war time, schools, hospitals, residences, places of worship and press and media facilities cannot be bombed. During the recent bombing of the Gaza Strip, Israel bombed all of these, as well as clearly-defined United Nations refugee centers, with apparent impunity.

All possible care, according to international law, must be taken to prevent civilian casualties. Yet IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers (read: terrorists) blatantly targeted children playing a beach, killing them in front of international reporters.

The protection of the occupied people is also a requirement of international law. Yet in the West Bank, IDF soldiers and illegal settlers constantly harass Palestinians, and routinely shoot and kill Palestinians, including children. When this happens, if there is any international outcry at all, Israel says it is ‘investigating’. Yet nothing substantive ever comes of these ‘investigations’.

Like many other organizations that exist ostensibly to protect poor, vulnerable little Israel from the non-existent power of its enemies, the ADL attempts to defend the indefensible. The many crimes that Israel commits on a daily basis may once have been hidden behind a wall of secrecy. But that was before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media enabled everyone with a cell phone and an internet connection to broadcast facts to the world. People around the globe see the horrors that Israel perpetrates, and understand it as all the things the ADL denies: apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and a number of other war crimes.

That students are waking up and taking action is another positive sign for Palestine. That Israel is becoming more and more isolated in the world community, with more and more countries recognizing Palestine and sanctioning Israel, is also very positive. That the ADL and other similar organizations are in panic mode, no longer able to defend a cruel, racist, apartheid regime, bodes well for a better future for Palestine.

Perhaps Israel felt it could once again bomb the Gaza Strip, and kill youths in the West Bank who have no weapons other than stones, with complete impunity. It must not be blamed for believing so; that was the model that was followed for years, and Israel can’t be faulted for not paying attention to sea changes that were occurring. Now that those changes have hit it in the face, full force, it can’t avoid seeing them. This new knowledge makes Israel all the more dangerous; any wild animal cornered will lash out, however erratically, in instinctive defense. Yet like the cornered animal that is eventually captured and controlled, this is what Israel can realistically expect. It will take time, but the process has begun, and it cannot be stopped now. Despite all Israel’s efforts to obliterate Palestine, it will fail; Palestine will be free.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 31, 2014 3:12 pm

Israel's Palestinian Residents Are Treated as Second-Class Citizens
The country’s political leadership is actively enacting laws that ensure a pervasive institutionalized system of discrimination.

October 27, 2014 |

My mother, Zakia, was so proud that my sister and I spoke better Hebrew than Arabic. Osman, my father, believed that by achieving the highest levels of education, we would one day be treated as equal in our country, Israel. He sincerely believed that Palestinians capable of articulating their narrative would win the hearts and minds of Israeli Jews.

My parents believed in the promise of a democracy that transcends ethnicity. I still retain that dream, but it is tested every time I go home. I am a citizen of Israel, married to an American Jew, yet I am not welcome in Israel. For I am Palestinian.

During a recent visit, my husband breezed through security at Ben-Gurion airport, but our teenage daughter and I — who both have dual citizenship of Israel and Italy — were strip-searched. I’m inured to the procedure: I have to endure it almost every time I enter and leave the country. But our daughter, age 17, sobbed with chagrin. “This place breeds hate everywhere!” she cried.

On the same trip, I attempted to renew her Israeli passport. “She is not Jewish,” an official told me, “and therefore we are not sure she is entitled to citizenship.”

For Israeli Palestinians — and we make up 20 percent of the population — these are ordinary humiliations. But I wonder what my parents, both now dead, would have made of the graffiti that recently appeared on the walls of our family home in Haifa, a mixed city in the north of Israel.

“Death to Arabs,” it read.

During the recent war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, my cousin was walking on the beach near her home, also in Haifa. She overheard a group of Israeli sunbathers casually discussing how the Israeli Army should deal with the residents of Gaza — “Just kill them all,” she heard one say.

“I’ve never felt so scared in my 32 years,” she told me. “I don’t want them to know I’m Palestinian.”

Israel is increasingly becoming a project of ethno-religious purity and exclusion. Religious Zionist and ultra-Orthodox parties occupy 30 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, and are part of the coalition government. Central to their politics is a program of discriminatory legislation, designed to curtail the civil rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens.

Chief among the more than 50 discriminatory Israeli laws documented by Adalah, the Haifa-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, is the Law of Return, which automatically guarantees Israeli citizenship for every Jew regardless of birthplace. Often, they are shepherded into settlements in the West Bank (illegal under international law), where they receive government benefits. Palestinian Israeli citizens, meanwhile, are subject to a ban on family reunification: If they marry a fellow Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, they are prohibited from living in Israel under the Citizenship and Entry Into Israel Law.

In September, Israel’s Supreme Court dismissed a petition challenging the Admissions Committees Law, which allows communities to reject housing applicants based on “cultural and social suitability” — a legal pretext to deny residency to non-Jews. In practice, even before the law was passed, it was virtually impossible for a Palestinian to buy or rent a home in any majority-Jewish city.

Further ethnic separation is maintained by the education system. Aside from a few mixed schools, most educational institutions in Israel are divided into Arab and Jewish ones. According to Nurit Peled-Elhanan, a Hebrew University professor of sociology who has produced the most comprehensive survey of Israeli public school curriculums, not one positive reference to Palestinians exists in Israeli high school textbooks. Palestinians are described as either “Arab farmers with no nationality” or fearsome “terrorists,” as Professor Peled-Elhanan documented in her book “Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education.”

Israel’s system of segregation has led to a situation where, according to a recent poll, 42 percent of Jews say they have never met a Palestinian.

Historically, ultra-Orthodox Jews did not serve in the armed forces. Today, they do — and serve in every capacity, including in the most important elite Israeli army units, such as the Sayeret Matkal special forces and Unit 8200, whose responsibilities include gathering intelligence on any Palestinian they deem a “security threat.”

Unlike every former head of Shin Bet, Israel’s equivalent of the F.B.I., Yoram Cohen, who today heads the agency, is a religious Jew. That change is typical of Israeli society. The greater integration of ultra-Orthodox Jews clearly offers benefits to Jewish Israelis, but for Palestinian Israeli citizens, it has meant a new, religiously inspired racism, on top of the old secular discrimination.

National leaders proudly promote hate policies. Israel’s foreign minister and the leader of the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, Avigdor Lieberman, has championed a call to boycott the businesses of Palestinian citizens of Israel and, ominously, has even sought to make the “transfer” of Palestinians legal. Secretary of State John Kerry has met with Mr. Lieberman — apparently without challenging him on such reprehensible views.

This is the atmosphere in which Israel’s Palestinians live. And there is no redress available to us elsewhere. Our rights and welfare certainly cannot be represented by the Palestinian Authority, whose jurisdiction is limited to partial control of the population of the West Bank. Its president, Mahmoud Abbas, cannot negotiate for us because we are Israeli citizens. Israel, however, prefers not to think of us as such, and thus resorts to all manner of petty aggressions to prove it, like trying to deny my daughter a new passport.

Israel is quick to point out efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Yet what truly undermines Israel’s international standing is not its critics, but Israel’s abysmal treatment of its own citizens who are Palestinian. It is little different than other countries that have systematically discriminated against and segregated a whole class of its people based on race, religion and ethnicity.

While Israel (like the United States) claims to abhor racism and human rights violations elsewhere, the country’s political leadership is actively enacting laws that ensure a pervasive institutionalized system of discrimination. What Israel needs, conversely, is a civil rights movement.


Under Israeli Apartheid, Palestinians Cannot Ride Israeli Buses
by Ben Norton / October 28th, 2014

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has officially banned Palestinians from traveling on Israeli-run public transportation in the West Bank, according to a new report by Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent newspaper.

The new apartheid law dictates that Palestinians cannot take buses that go from central Israel to the West Bank. They must go out of their way, to the Eyal Crossing, near the city Qalqilyah, “far from populated settler areas.”

It is already difficult for Palestinians to enter Israel. Palestinian workers traveling into central Israel for their jobs have to go through high-security, militarized check points. Those who are allowed to cross are not allowed to sleep in Israel. Unemployment and poverty are high in the West Bank because of the 47-year Israeli military occupation. Palestinians seek employment opportunities in Israel, often in low-paid, dangerous work such as construction. Because of the checkpoints and Israeli militarized security apparatus, it takes Palestinians a long time to travel into Israel (if they are even able to do so at all). This new decision will increase their already inordinately large commute times even more.

A security official involved told Haaretz that “no Palestinian will be prevented from reaching his destination”; this may be true, but the question is how much longer will it take that Palestinian to travel between work and home?

Haaretz notes that the decision to segregate buses did not come out of the blue; Ya’alon decided on it after facing “intense pressure from settlers.” The paper explains the Samaria Settlers’ Committee and local Jewish authorities “conducted an aggressive campaign” to ban Palestinians. It adds that “settlers have tried on multiple occasions to prevent the Palestinians from commuting on those buses, and have released a video calling for them to be banned.” Ya’alon “met with settler leaders” and assured them he would implement the apartheid, Jewish-only policies they desired.

It is clear that this decision is explicitly motivated out of a racism, not out of “security” concerns. Haaretz indicates that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has officially stated it “does not view the presence of Palestinians on West Bank buses as a security threat.” The paper interviewed IDF GOC Central Command Major General Nitzan Alon, who insisted that West Bank Palestinians do not pose a “security threat,” as they already “must obtain pre-approval from the Shin Bet security service and Israel Police in order to receive permits. They then undergo body checks at the border crossings.”

Member of Knesset Moti Yogev, of the far-right, religious, pro-settler Habayit Hayehudi party, explained his reasoning: “Riding these buses is unreasonable. They are full of Arabs.”

This call for bus segregation is not new. AFP reports that “Israeli settlers in the West Bank have called for years for Palestinians to be banned from public transport.” In many ways, Israeli buses have been moving toward segregation for some time. In March 2013, Israel created Palestinian-only buses. Although not technically mandatory, racist Israeli settlers used the existence of these buses to pressure Palestinians into de facto segregation.

A variety of human and civil rights organizations publicly criticized this de facto racism. Among these was Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. In the wake of this most recent decision, the Israeli government officially implementing de jure segregation, AFP interviewed B’Tselem, which insisted: “It is time to stop hiding behind technical arrangements… and admit this military procedure is thinly veiled pandering to the demand for racial segregation on buses.”

Motivated by a Racist Society

It is most telling that this decision was pressured from below, not imposed from top-down. Racism in Israeli society is not just systemic; most Israelis themselves are obscenely racist toward indigenous Palestinians and African refugees.

In Israel, it is not uncommon for fascist mobs to roam the streets “Death to Arabs!” and “Gas the Arabs!” (as well as “Death to leftists!” and “Gas the leftists!”).

The vast majority of Israelis support their ethnocracy‘s ethno-religious supremacist policies. 95% of Israelis supported their country’s most recent military attack on Gaza, “Operation Protective Edge”—a 50-day assault that killed close to 2,200 people—including roughly 1600 civilians, 500 of whom were children—wounded over 11,000, and made over 100,000 homeless.

As I have noted in a previous article, in 2012, also in Haaretz, renowned journalist Gideon Levy published the results of a poll that found “Most Israeli Jews Would Support Apartheid Regime in Israel.” This study, “expos[ing] anti-Arab, ultra-nationalist views espoused by a majority of Israeli Jews,” was not based on an internet survey. It was conducted by Dialog and directed by professor Camil Fuchs, Haaretz’s polling expert and head of the Department of Statistics at Tel Aviv University’s School of Mathematical Science, and commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund.

The study revealed the following unsavory facts about Israeli society:

– 59% want preference for Jews over Arabs in admission to jobs in government ministries.

– 49% want the state to treat Jewish citizens better than Arab ones.

– 42% don’t want to live in the same building with Arabs.

– 42% don’t want their children in the same class with Arab children.

– c. 33% want a law barring Israeli Arabs from voting for the Knesset.

– 69% object to giving 2.5 million Palestinians the right to vote if Israel annexes the West Bank.

– 74% majority are in favor of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians.

– 24% believe separate roads are “a good situation.”

– 50% believe separate roads are “a necessary situation.”

– 47% want part of Israel’s Arab population to be transferred to the Palestinian Authority.

– 36% support transferring some of the Arab towns from Israel to the PA, in exchange for keeping some of the West Bank settlements.

– 38% want Israel to annex the territories with settlements on them.

– 31% don’t admit that Israel practices apartheid against Arabs.

– 58% do admit that Israel practices apartheid against Arabs.

In August 2014, Haaretz released a report titled “Israeli teenagers: Racist and proud of it,” revealing that “Ethnic hatred has become a basic element in the everyday life of Israeli youth.” The piece opens with a quote from a 10th-grade Israeli girl from a high school in the central part of the country.

For me, personally, Arabs are something I can’t look at and can’t stand. I am tremendously racist. I come from a racist home. If I get the chance in the army to shoot one of them, I won’t think twice. I’m ready to kill someone with my hands, and it’s an Arab. In my education I learned that … their education is to be terrorists, and there is no belief in them. I live in an area of Arabs, and every day I see these Ishmaelites, who pass by the [bus] station and whistle. I wish them death.

The article is a review of an upcoming book from which this interview is excerpted. Scenes from School Life is based on three years of field work by Israeli sociologist Idan Yaron at a six-year, secular Israeli high school. The school was “the most average school we could find,” says professor of education Yoram Harpaz, who wrote the book with Yaron. The quote above was taken from a student at this “most average school.” Yaron’s book is filled with myriad instances of Israelis calling for the murder, and even genocidal extermination, of Palestinians.Yet Israeli racism is not just directed at indigenous Palestinians. Journalists Max Blumenthal and David Sheen released a brief documentary titled “Israel’s New Racism: The Persecution of African Migrants in the Holy Land,” detailing the horrific extent to which anti-black racism pervades Israeli civil and political society. In it, they show video footage:

– of prominent politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Member of Knesset Michael Ben-Ari, among others, calling African refugees “infiltrators” and/or “cancer,” and even openly using the n-word;

– of Israeli citizens harassing fellow Israelis for engaging in interracial relationships; and

– of some politicians even going so far as to propose the creation of concentration camps in which to hold African refugees.

De jure bus segregation such as this reminds us that Israel is simply an apartheid state; there is no candy-coating this fact. In 2007, David A. Kirshbaum, of the Israel Law Resource Center, published a piece titled “Israeli Apartheid — A Basic Legal Perspective,” meticulously detailing the many ways in which Israel is an apartheid state, under its very own laws.

Once again, Israel’s most-read newspaper has published pieces confirming this fact, admitting that “Israeli Arabs have never been equal before the law.”


The Chickenshit Lobby Is Mad As Hell
– but just how mad are they?

by Justin Raimondo, October 31, 2014
Israel, Israel, Israel, Israel – can we ever escape the endless kvetching of its partisans? In the media, in both houses of Congress, on the campuses and in the streets, Israel’s fifth column in America is everywhere, making its presence felt. From Chuck Hagel’s confirmation battle to the public relations campaign accompanying their latest Gaza massacre, the Jewish state’s on-the-ground army of American flacks, publicists, and fanatic rank-and-filers mobilizes the moment someone looks cross-eyed at Bibi Netanyahu – and the Chickenshit scandal has them screaming to high heaven.

The scandal was created, unsurprisingly, by Israel’s semi-official flack-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, a former Israeli prison guard turned journalist, whose pronouncements carry the authority of someone with impeccable connections in both Tel Aviv and Washington. Writing in The Atlantic, he reports:

"The other day I was talking to a senior Obama administration official about the foreign leader who seems to frustrate the White House and the State Department the most. ‘The thing about Bibi is, he’s a chickenshit’ this official said …

Goldberg has a carefully cultivated image as a moderate-to-liberal Obama sympathizer, and he goes into his familiar riff about how the rapidly fraying US-Israeli relationship is largely a function of Bibi’s truculence. Yet it’s clear Goldberg – who surely knew what the response to his reporting would be, even inside the President’s own party – is appalled by this display of candor:

"’The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,’ the official said, expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks like. ‘The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts.’"

The Lebanese and Gazans might quibble with the notion that Bibi’s "scared to launch wars," but then again those weren’t wars, they were massacres. And why should Bibi fight anyone who can possibly fight back when he has the United States to do his dirty work for him?

Goldberg’s assessment of the rupture is that "The fault for this breakdown in relations can be assigned in good part to the junior partner in the relationship, Netanyahu" – but perhaps Bibi doesn’t recognize his junior status because that isn’t the way it worked during most of the Bush years.

Obama is apparently much less willing than his predecessor to sacrifice American lives while Bibi directs the action from behind the scenes. The President’s initial reluctance to get more deeply involved in Syria, not to mention his eagerness to get the heck out of Iraq ASAP, had Tel Aviv – and its American amen corner – fuming. On the other side of the equation, the dramatic escalation of Israel’s "settlement"-building campaign has at least some in the Obama administration infused with a "red-hot anger," as Goldberg reports the phrase used by one Obama administration official, possibly the same one cited here:

"I ran this notion by another senior official who deals with the Israel file regularly. This official agreed that Netanyahu is a ‘chickenshit’ on matters related to the comatose peace process, but added that he’s also a ‘coward’ on the issue of Iran’s nuclear threat. The official said the Obama administration no longer believes that Netanyahu would launch a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities in order to keep the regime in Tehran from building an atomic arsenal. ‘It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.’"

The reality is that there was never any possibility of an Israeli strike, as I pointed out in 2011, when speculation was at an all-time high:

"The problem with this alleged plan is that Israel doesn’t have the military capacity to do the job and do it well: Iran’s nuclear facilities are enclosed within hardened sites, and are spread out to such a degree that Israeli war planes would have trouble reaching them. While the Israelis have recently tested a long-range missile that has the capacity to hit Iranian targets, the idea that they could take out all the intended targets in one fell swoop is simply a fantasy. Therefore, this alleged “debate” taking place within the Israeli leadership, complete with a phony “investigation” by Netanyahu into who leaked the nonexistent Israeli attack ‘plan,’ is a non-event. The whole thing, in short, is a bluff.

"But who is being bluffed here? Not the Iranians, who are surely aware of Israel’s incapacity. The volume of the war hysteria is being turned up with one purpose in mind: the Israelis want the US to do their dirty work for them. This is a threat aimed not only – or even primarily – at Iran, but at us."

The Obama administration is well-aware of Israel’s technical incapacity, as is Goldberg’s source: so what, exactly, is the purpose of this manufactured controversy?

The Israelis are hoping a propaganda campaign in the US will subvert the administration’s plans to reach a deal with Iran. As Goldberg reports;

"Netanyahu has told several people I’ve spoken to in recent days that he has ‘written off’ the Obama administration, and plans to speak directly to Congress and to the American people should an Iran nuclear deal be reached."

Goldberg’s contribution to this whiny narrative – "Israel has been thrown under the bus!" – is pretty clear, but then again none of this is surprising. After all, what is Goldberg doing in America aside from acting as a kind of semiofficial (albeit ostensibly self-critical) Voice of Israel in the US media?

What’s surprising is how Netanyahu, in a speech to the Knesset, took the opportunity to answer his critics in the Obama administration: "Netanyahu angrily insisted he was ‘under attack simply for defending Israel,’ adding that he ‘cherished’ Israel’s relationship with the US."

The famously combative Israeli Prime Minister went on to say:

"When there are pressures on Israel to concede its security, the easiest thing to do is to concede. You get a round of applause, ceremonies on grassy knolls, and then come the missiles and the tunnels."

Bibi, who spent many years in the United States, is surely cognizant of what his "grassy knoll" reference connotes. You can argue it was just an infelicitous phrase, or that Bibi was referring to himself, not Obama. Maybe so. But what if, say, an Iranian official, even a low-ranking one, had said such a thing? The uproar would be deafening. And so the question must be asked: was Bibi threatening the President of the United States?

If we take seriously Goldberg’s depiction of the poisoned relationship between Bibi and Obama, the possibility can’t be completely dismissed.

The Chickenshit Lobby, otherwise known as Israel’s amen corner in the US, is mad as hell – but just how mad are they? I don’t know the answer to that question, but as the prospect of a peace agreement with Iran looms larger, those whose job it is to protect the President need to take this potential threat seriously. As we’ve seen recently, the White House isn’t exactly an impregnable fortress. In the meantime, it’s time to start reevaluating the "special relationship" in light of an Israeli leader who talks about the "grassy knoll" while denouncing an American president.






Image
Haaretz cartoonist: I was mocking Netanyahu's handling of U.S.-Israeli relations
Amos Biderman says image of prime minister flying plane into skyscraper was supposed to be a warning of disastrous relations with Israel's 'most important strategic asset.'
Haaretz's political cartoonist, Amos Biderman, defended the editorial cartoon published on Thursday, following wide-spread criticism on social media.

The cartoon depicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu piloting an airplane with the word 'Israel' on the side, apparently flying toward a skyscraper, reminiscent of the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, with an American flag on top.

After receiving several angry tweets, Biderman tweeted the following response (in Hebrew): 'The message is that Bibi is arrogantly and wantonly destroying Israel's ties with the U.S. and leading us to a disaster on the scale of 9/11.'

"It was certainly not my intention to insult or upset anyone," Biderman told Haaretz on Thursday. "I wasn't sufficiently aware of the great sensitivity that 9/11 holds for Americans."

According to Biderman, his cartoon contained criticism of Netanyahu.

"I was mocking Bibi," he said. "He's been acting like a bull in a china shop with the United States, which is Israel's most important strategic asset."

There has been criticism in many quarters of Netanyahu's handling of Israel's relationship with the United States. Critics have accused the prime minister of timing announcements about new construction projects in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to cause maximum embarrassment to the administration of President Barack Obama, with whom Netanyahu has a famously strained relationship.

Biderman also told Haaretz that he has never censored his cartoons, which have grappled with many controversial issues.

"I have drawn cartoons depicting every war that Israel has fought, including the Yom Kippur War – which I was involved in – where we suffered thousands of casualties. I have used some of Israel's greatest tragedies as the background for my cartoon. In one of my recent cartoons, which poked fun at the so-called Milky protest, I even referenced the Gestapo. I never imagined that by using an image that evoked 9/11 I would cause such a storm.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Dec 08, 2014 9:13 am

Prominent Israeli writers call on European parliaments to recognize Palestine

Amoz Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman are among 800 signatories of letter to Belgian parliament

Prominent Israeli authors Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua and David Grossman joined hundreds of Israeli public figures in calling on European parliaments to recognize a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

The three writers are among 800 signatories of a letter slated to be sent to the Belgian parliament on Sunday, which calls on lawmakers to vote in favor of recognition during this week's vote.

"We, the citizens of Israel who want security and peace, are concerned with the political stalemate and the ongoing occupation and settlements, which has led to conflicts with the Palestinians and torpedoed any chance possibility of an agreement," the petition reads.

"It is clear to us that the chances of Israel's survival and its security depend upon the creation of the State of Palestine, based on the 1967 borders as well as Israel's recognition of Palestine and Palestine's recognition of Israel."

"Your initiative to recognize the State of Palestine will promote the chances of peace and encourage Israelis and Palestinians to resolve the conflict," the letter concludes.

Other signatories include Nobel Laureates, former ambassador Alon Liel, Labor party member Colette Avital, a number of academics, former left-wing Meretz MK Yossi Sarid and Communist party MK Tamar Gozansky, among others.

According to organizers behind the petition, letters were also sent out to the Irish and Danish parliaments, who are expected to hold a similar vote to the one in Belgium. The parliaments of Britain, Spain and France have already voted for Palestinian statehood recognition.



The State Of Palestine Was Declared Way Before Europe's Push For Recognition
The Huffington Post | By Charlotte Alfred
Posted: 12/05/2014 2:37 pm EST Updated: 12/05/2014 2:59 pm EST

Every week, we bring you one overlooked aspect of the stories that made news in recent days. You noticed the media forgot all about another story's basic facts? Tweet @TheWorldPost or let us know on our Facebook page.

The state of Palestine was declared to great fanfare. People set off fireworks. Government stationery was embossed with the new state's moniker, and new passports were promised.

This is not a far-off dream cooked up by lawmakers in Europe, where a string of parliaments have voted to recognize a Palestinian state in recent months. This already happened, two years ago.

On Nov. 29, 2012, the United Nations General Assembly voted to give Palestine "non-member observer State status." Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called the U.N. resolution the "birth certificate of the reality of the state of Palestine." But while the U.N. statehood resolution had symbolic and legal weight, nothing changed on the ground. Today, Palestinians still only control fragments of territory, and are no closer to reaching a peace deal with Israel about where the borders of a future state will be.

Now, Europeans' push for recognition seeks to inject new momentum into the Palestinian effort to establish a sovereign state.

state 2012 palestine fireworks

A Palestinian youth plays with fireworks in the West Bank city of Nablus during the statehood vote at the U.N., Nov. 29, 2012. (AP Photo/Nasser Ishtayeh)

In October, Sweden's government became the first major country in Western Europe to recognize a Palestinian state, followed by parliamentary votes recommending a similar move in Britain, France, Spain and Ireland. Belgium and the European Parliament are expected to follow suit soon.

But yet again, these moves are expected to have little practical impact. Analysts note the parliamentary votes are just recommendations and won't rewrite Europe's foreign policies.

"These are symbolic steps, but symbolism does matter, especially in politics," Matt Duss, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The WorldPost. Europe is taking an increasingly active role in trying to push for a two-state solution, Duss notes.

The U.S. and Israel oppose recognizing Palestinian statehood. Washington insists that a peace deal is the only way a Palestinian state will ever be born. The Israeli government accuses Palestinian leaders of pursuing international recognition in order to bypass the hard business of negotiating and to blame Israel for the impasse.

Duss suggested that recognizing a Palestinian state is part of Europe's efforts to put pressure on Israel, or "playing bad cop to the U.S.'s good cop."

Following the collapse of another fruitless round of peace talks in April, Europe has grown increasingly frustrated that no peace talks are on the horizon. “We’re not going to wait forever,” one senior European official told The Wall Street Journal.

Amid the impasse, European politicians hope to encourage proponents of a peaceful resolution to the conflict, especially amid recent outbreaks of violence in Jerusalem and Gaza. "It is important to support those who believe in negotiations and not violence," Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom explained to Al Jazeera regarding her country's move.

But some Palestinian critics say the whole project of winning recognition is too little, too late. They warn that empty talk of statehood just gives the illusion of progress, and could end up prolonging an unacceptable status quo.

"These European moves may have been beneficial if they had happened ten years ago, but now it's just a symbolic gesture," Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American scholar and activist, told The WorldPost, citing the diminishing prospects of a two-state solution to the conflict.

Most Palestinians have never been under any illusion about the gulf between the rhetoric and reality of their state. In fact, the state of Palestine was declared even earlier, when Yasser Arafat's Palestinian government-in-exile issued a Declaration of Independence on Nov. 15, 1988. Palestinians still celebrate the date each year -- with considerable irony -- as as their national independence day.

Dozens of sympathetic countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe recognized a Palestinian state following the declaration, decades ahead of the recent European votes.

"Before Sweden, 134 countries had already recognized Palestine ... this is not very radical," Erekat said. "But this is a bit of an awakening in Europe."

november 29 2012 palestinian

Palestinians celebrate the U.N. vote on the streets of Ramallah, West Bank, on Nov. 29, 2012. (Uriel Sinai/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, Jordan vowed to take another resolution to the U.N. Security Council before Christmas to set a deadline for Palestinian statehood. European powers are preparing a separate U.N. initiative on a deadline for a negotiated settlement that may be more likely to get U.S. support at the Security Council.

But as the Palestinian statehood issue returns to the U.N., there is a palpable sense of déjà vu all over again. It might not be time to pull out the next set of fireworks just yet


Belgium may unilaterally recognize Palestine – report
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby coffin_dodger » Tue Dec 09, 2014 11:43 am

‘Palestine is not an environment story’ Medium.com Dec 3 2014

How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas

After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.

cont - https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/palestine-is-not-an-environment-story-921d9167ddef


That shining beacon of hope, The Guardian.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby slimmouse » Wed Dec 10, 2014 10:43 am

coffin_dodger » 09 Dec 2014 15:43 wrote:
‘Palestine is not an environment story’ Medium.com Dec 3 2014

How I was censored by The Guardian for writing about Israel’s war for Gaza’s gas

After writing for The Guardian for over a year, my contract was unilaterally terminated because I wrote a piece on Gaza that was beyond the pale. In doing so, The Guardian breached the very editorial freedom the paper was obligated to protect under my contract. I’m speaking out because I believe it is in the public interest to know how a Pulitizer Prize-winning newspaper which styles itself as the world’s leading liberal voice, casually engaged in an act of censorship to shut down coverage of issues that undermined Israel’s publicised rationale for going to war.

cont - https://medium.com/@NafeezAhmed/palestine-is-not-an-environment-story-921d9167ddef




That shining beacon of hope, The Guardian.


Thanks for that CD.

Its almost as if were expected to think that this conflict is all about racism, terrorism and all the rest of that jazz, which of course it is on a basic level.

However this very conveniently obfuscates a deeper truth , which effectively equates to the well planned machinations of a tiny minority of deranged psycopaths who are screwing ordinary Israelis, Palestinians and just about anyone else you care to mention.

On edit and having reflected on a recent discussion with WR, I would like to replace the part that reads ''tiny minority of deranged psycopaths", to " tiny minority of very emotionally sick people""

Not only is this gentler, but its probably much more appropriate to boot.
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Re: Zionism’s Lost Shine

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 26, 2014 11:16 am

counterpunch

DECEMBER 24, 2014

Five Reasons Why
2014 Was a Game Changer in Palestine
by RAMZY BAROUD
In terms of losses in human lives, 2014 has been a horrific year for Palestinians, surpassing the horrors of both 2008 and 2009, when an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip killed and wounded thousands.

While some aspects of the conflict are stagnating between a corrupt, ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA), and the criminality of Israeli wars and occupation, it would also be fair to argue that 2014 was also a game changer to some degree – and it is not all bad news.

To an extent, 2014 has been a year of clarity for those keen to understand the reality of the ‘Palestinian-Israeli conflict’ but were sincerely confused by the contrasting narratives.

Here are some reasons that support the argument that things are changing.

1. A Different Kind of Palestinian Unity

Although the two leading Palestinian parties Hamas and Fatah agreed to a unity government in April, little has changed on the ground. Yes, a government was officially established in June, and held its first meeting in October. But Gaza is effectively still managed by Hamas, which has been largely left alone managing the affairs of the Strip after the Israeli war in July-August. Perhaps Mahmoud Abbas’s authority is hoping that the massive destruction would weaken Hamas into political submission, especially as Egypt continues to seal shut the Rafah border.

But while the factions are failing to unite, the Israeli war on Gaza has inspired a new impetus of struggle in the West Bank. Israeli plans of targeting holy sites in Jerusalem, particularly the al-Aqsa Mosque, coupled with the deep anguish felt by most Palestinians over the massacres carried out by Israel in Gaza, are slowly reverberating into a wave of mini-uprisings. Some speculate the situation will eventually lead to a massive Intifada that will engulf all of the territories. Whether a third intifada takes place in 2015 or not, is a different question. What matters is that the long-orchestrated plot to divide Palestinians is breaking apart and a new collective narrative of a common struggle against occupation is finally forming.

2. A New Resistance Paradigm

The debate regarding what form of resistance Palestinians should or should not adopt is being sidelined and settled, not by international do-gooders, but by Palestinians themselves. They are opting to use whatever effective form of resistance they can that could deter Israeli military advances, as resistance groups have actively done in Gaza. Although Israel’s latest war killed nearly 2,200 and wounded over 11,000 Palestinians that were mostly civilians, nevertheless, it has still failed to achieve any of its declared or implied objectives. It was another reminder that sheer military strength is no longer the only overriding factor in Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians. While Israel brutalized civilians, the resistance killed 70 Israelis, over 60 of whom were soldiers; this was also an important step testifying to the maturity of Palestinian resistance, which had previously targeted civilians during the second intifada and reflected more desperation rather than a winning strategy. The legitimization of the resistance was to a degree, reflected in the recent decision by the European court to remove Hamas from its list of terrorist organizations.

Resistance in the West Bank is taking on other forms. Although it is yet to mature into a steady campaign of anti-occupation activities, it seems to be forming an identity of its own that takes into account what is possible and what is practical. The fact is that the ‘one size fits all’ modes of resistance debate is becoming less relevant, giving way to an organic approach to resistance devised by Palestinians themselves.

3. BDS Normalizes Debate on Israeli Crimes

Another form of resistance is crystalizing in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) which continues to grow, gathering steam, supporters and constant achievements. Not only was 2014 a year in which BDS managed to win the support of numerous civil society organizations, academicians, scientists, celebrities and to reach out to people from all walks of life, it did something else that is equally important: It normalized the debate on Israel in many circles around the world. While any criticism of Israel was considered a taboo in yesteryears, it has been forever broken. Questioning the morality and practicality of boycotting Israel is no longer a frightening subject, but is open for debate in numerous media outlets, universities and other platforms.

2014 has been a year that made the discussion of boycotting Israel more mainstream than ever before. While a critical mass is yet to be achieved in the US, the momentum is constantly building up being led by students, clergy men and women, celebrities and ordinary people. In Europe, the movement has been hugely successful.

4. Parliaments are Feeling the Heat

While, traditionally, much of the southern hemisphere offered unconditional support for Palestinians, the West conceitedly stood with Israel. Following the Oslo accords, a bewildering European position evolved, where they flirted with finding the ‘balance’ between an occupied nation and the occupier. At times, the European Union (EU) timidly criticized the Israeli occupation, while continuing to be one of Israel’s largest trade partner, providing weapons to the Israeli army, who then use them to carry out war crimes in Gaza and sustain its military occupation in the West Bank.

This debauched policy is being challenged by citizens of various European countries. The Israeli summer war on Gaza exposed Israel’s human rights violations and war crimes like never before, revealing along the way EU hypocrisy. To relieve some of the pressure, some EU countries appear to be taking stronger stances against Israel, reviewing their military cooperation, and more boldly questioning the rightwing policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A spate of parliamentary votes followed, overwhelmingly voting to recognize Palestine as a state. While these decisions remain largely symbolic, they represent an unmistakable shift in EU attitude towards Israel. Netanyahu continues to rail against European ‘hypocrisy’, assured, perhaps, by Washington’s unconditional support. But with the US losing control over the tumultuous Middle East, the Israeli prime minister might soon be forced to rethink his obstinate attitude.

5. Israel’s Democracy Exposed

For decades, Israel defined itself as both a democratic and Jewish state. The objective was clear: to maintain Jewish superiority over Palestinian Arabs, while continuing to present itself as a modern ‘western’ democracy – in fact, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East.’ While Palestinians and many others were never sold on the democracy charade, many accepted the dichotomy with little questioning.

While Israel doesn’t have a constitution, it has a ‘code’, called the Basic Law. Since there is no Israeli equivalent to a ‘constitutional amendment’ – the Netanyahu government is pushing for a new law at the Israeli parliament, the Knesset. This will basically put forth new principalsunder which Israel will define itself. One of these principals will define Israel as ‘the national state of the Jewish people’, thus casting all non-Jewish citizens of Israel as lesser citizens. While, for all intents and purposes, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been treated as an outcast, and discriminating against in many ways, the new Basic Law will be a constitutional confirmation of their state-enforced inferiority. The Jewish and democratic paradigm is dying for good, exposing Israel’s reality the way it is.

The Year Ahead

Certainly 2015 will bring much of the same: The PA will fight for its own existence, and try to maintain its privileges, bestowed by Israel, the US and others by using every tool available; Israel will also remain emboldened by American funds and unconditional support and military backing. Yes, the next year will also prove frustratingly familiar in that regard. But the new, real and opposing momentum will unlikely cease, challenging and exposing the Israeli occupation, on one hand, and sidestepping the ineffectual, self-serving Palestinian Authority on the other.

2014 was a very painful year for Palestine, but also a year in which the collective resistance of the Palestinian people, and their supporters, proved too strong to bend or break. And in that, there can be much solace.


And in that, there can be much solace
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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