Zionism and The holocaust

The U.N. decisions to partition Palestine and then to grant admission to the state of Israel were made, on one level, as an emotional response to the horrors of the Holocaust, Under more normal circumstances, the compelling claims to sovereignty of the Arab majority would have prevailed. This reaction of guilt on the part of the Western allies was understandable, but that doesn’t mean the Palestinians should have to pay for crimes committed by others — a classic example of two wrongs not making a right. The Holocaust is often used as the final argument in favor of Zionism, but this connection cannot be justified. First lets examine the historical record of what the Zionist movement actually did to help save European Jewry from the Nazis.
As late as 1941, the Zionist group LEHI, one of whose leaders, Yitzhak Shamir, later prime minister of Israel, approached the Nazis, using the name of its parent organization, the Irgun(NMO). Shamir was quted tio have stated that, “the establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian Period bound by a treaty with the German Reich would be in the interests of strengthening the future German nation of power in the Near East. The NMO in Palestine offers to take an active part in the war on Germany’s side.” However it was reported that the Nazis rejected this proposal for an alliance because, it is reported, they considered LEHI’s military power negligible.
In 1938 a thirty-one nation conference was held in Evian, France, on resettlement of the victims of Nazism. The World Zionist Organization refused to participate, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine.  Yet wasn’t the main goal of Zionism to save Jews from the Holocaust?
The main goal of Zionism was summed up in a series of telling comments by key figures in Zionist his-story. David Ben-Gurion, in the meeting of the Jewish Agency’s Executive on June 26, 1938  the Zionist thing to do “is belittle the Evian Conference as far as possible and to cause it to decide nothing. We are particularly worried that it (the conference) would move Jewish organizations to collect large sums of money for aid to Jewish refugees, and these collections could interfere with our collection efforts. At the same meeting, Ben-Gurion’s stated : “No rationalization can turn the conference from a harmful to a useful one. What can and should be done is to limit the damage as far as possible. He further stated that “if I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.” In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogroms, Ben-Gurion commented that “the human conscience might bring various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany”. He saw this as a threat and warned: “Zionism is in danger.”
David Ben-Gurion did nothing practical for rescue, devoting his energies to post-war prospects. He delegated rescue work to Yitzak Gruenbaum, who stated, “they will say that I am anti-Semitic, that I don’t want to save the Exile, that I don’t have a varm Yiddish hartz…Let them say what they want. I will not demand that the Jewish Agency allocate a sum of 300,000 or 100,000 pounds sterling to help European Jewry. And I think that whoever demands such things is performing an anti-Zionist act.” Zionists in America took the same position. At a May 1943 meeting of the American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, Nahum Goldmann argued, “If a drive is opened against the White Paper (the British policy of restricting Jewish immigrants to Palestine) the mass meetings of protest against the murder of European Jewry will have to be dropped. We do not have sufficient manpower for both campaigns.”
The Zionist movement, interfered with and hindered other organizations, Jewish and non-Jewish, whenever it imagined that their activity, political or humanitarian, was at variance with Zionist aims or in competition with them, even when these might be helpful to Jews, even when it was a question of life and death. Beit Zvi documents the Zionist leadership’s indifference to saving Jews from the Nazi menace except in cases in which the Jews could be brought to Palestine. One example of such interferance was the readiness of the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, to absorb one hundred thousand refugees and the sabotaging of this idea – as well as others, like proposals to settle the Jews inAlaska and the Philippines – by the Zionist movement…
“The obtuseness of the Zionist movement toward the fate of European Jewry did not prevent it, of course, from later hurling accusations against the whole world for its indifference toward the Jewish catastrophe or from pressing material, political, and moral demands on the world because of that indifference.” Israeli author Boas Evron, “Jewish State or Israeli Nation?”
In his Memoirs,David Ben-Gurion stated, “I have already gone exhaustively into the reason for our being here, reasons that I as a pioneer of 1906 can affirm have nothing to do with the Nazis!…We are here because the land is ours. And we are here because we have again made it ours in this time with the work we have put into it. Nazism and our history of martyrdom abroad do not concern our presence in Israel directly.”
In hindsight, it is easy to say that the  Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust could have been saved if Palestine had been available for unlimited immigration. The history of this period is not so simple, however. First, keep in mind that other realistic resettlement plans were proposed but actively opposed by the Zionist movement. Second, the great majority of Jews in Europe were not Zionists and did not try to emigrate to Palestine before 1939. Third, after the start of the war, as the Nazis occupied various countries, they refused to let the Jews leave, making emigration virtually impossible. And Palestine, as was shown, was already occupied; the indigenous Arabs had more valid reasons than any other country for wanting to limit Jewish immigration.

Emigration to Palestine before World War II
Prof. William Rubinstein, in  The Myth ofRescue, stated that “In 1936, the Social Democratic Bund won a sweeping victory in Jewish kehilla elections in Poland…Its main hallmarks included ‘an unyielding hostility to Zionism’ and to the Zionist enterprise of Jewish emigration from Poland to Palestine. The Bund wished Polish Jews to fight anti-semitism in Poland by remaining there. The Zionist goal was also opposed, as a matter of principle, by all the major parties and movements among pre-1939 Polish Jewry.  Elsewhere in eastern Europe, Zionist strength was weaker still.”
Israeli historian, Tom Segev, The Seventh Million, also waded in by stating, “In fact, Zionism suffered its own defeat in the Holocaust; as a movement, it failed. It had not, after all, persuaded the majority of Jews to leave Europe for Palestine while it was still possible to do so.”  “With the start of the war,” according to Prof Rubinstein, “Nazi edicts forbidding emigration followed in all countries under direct Nazi control: after 1940-1 it was in effect impossible for Jews legally to emigrate from Nazi-occupied Europe to places of safety…The doors…were firmly shut: by the Nazis, it must be emphasized.”
Even Palestine at the time was not necessarily a safe haven either. Again Tom Segev from The Seventh Million; “In September 1940, the Italians, at war with Britain, bombed downtown Tel Aviv, with over a hundred casualties. As the German Army overran Europe and North Africa, it appeared possible that it would conquer Palestine as well. In the summer of 1940, in the spring of 1941, and again in the fall of 1942 the danger seemed imminent. The yishuv panicked, many people tried to find a way out of the country, but it was not easy…Some…were taking no chances; they carried cyanide capsules.”
Israeli leader, Moshe Dayan, quoted in Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi’s Original Sins, stated that, “We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish, state here…Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages…There is not a single community in the country that did not have a former Arab population.” While can find argument for the right of a persecuted minority to find refuge in another country and able to accommodate it; one is hard-pressed, however, to imagine an argument for the right of a peaceful minority to politically and perhaps physically displace the indigenous population of another country. The latter was the actual intention of the Zionist movement.Still, his-story is respledant with tales of such blatant actions (a) the Dutch boars of Azania (b) the British in any and every nook and cranny of the planet (c)Napolean (d)King Phillip and Alexander of Macidonia (e) the illigitamate child of England, currently called the United States of America, and many more European and non-European expantionist states..
The use of the Holocaust for political gain
According to Israeli historian, Ilan Pappebeing interviewd in The Link, March 1998. “In 1947 the U.N. appointed a special body, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), to make the decision over Palestine and UNSCOP members were asked to visit the camps of Holocaust survivors. Many of these survivors wanted to emigrate to the United States, a wish that undermined the Zionist claims that the fate of European Jewry was connected to that of the Jewish community in Palestine. When UNSCOP representatives arrived at the camps, they were unaware that backstage manipulations were limiting their contacts solely to survivors who wished to emigrate to Palestine,”
“Inside the DP camps, emissaries from the Yishuv organized survivor activity – crucially, the testimony the DPs gave to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry and the UN Special Committee on Palestine about where they wished to go…The Jewish Agency envoys reported home that they had been successful in preventing the appearance of ‘undesirable’ witnesses at the hearings. One wrote his girlfiend in Palestine that ‘we have to change our style and handwriting constantly so that they will think that the questionaires were filled in by the refugees.’”Peter Novick, “The Holocaust in American Life.”
Roosevelt’s advisor writes on why Jewish refugees were not offered sanctuary in the U.S. after WWII, in 1947.
“What if Canada, Australia, South America, England and the United States were all to open a door to some migration? Even today it is my judgement, and I have been in Germany since the war, that only a minority of the Jewish DP’s [displaced persons] would choose Palestine…”Roosevelt proposed a world budget for the easy migration of the 500,000 beaten people of Europe. Each nation should open its doors for some thousands of refugees…So he suggested that during my trips for him to England during the war I sound out in a general, unofficial manner the leaders of British public opinion, in and out of the government…The simple answer: Great Britain will match the United States, man for man, in admissions from Europe…It seemed all settled. With the rest of the world probably ready to give haven to 200,000, there was a sound reason for the President to press Congress to take in at least 150,000 immigrants after the war…
“It would free us from the hypocrisy of closing our own doors while making sanctimonious demands on the Arabs…But it did not work out…The failure of the leading Jewish organizations to support with zeal this immigration programme may have caused the President not to push forward with it at that time…
“I talked to many people active in Jewish organizations. I suggested the plan…I was amazed and even felt insulted when active Jewish leaders decried, sneered, and then attacked me as if I were a traitor…I think I know the reason for much of the opposition. There is a deep, genuine, often fanatical emotional vested interest in putting over the Palestinian movement [Zionism]. Men like Ben Hecht are little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.” Jewish attorney and friend of President Roosevelt, Morris Ernst, “So Far, So Good.”
Finally in a case called victimology or playing the victm card, we find a coiple of statments by Rabbi Mayer Schiller, quoted in Issues of the American Council for Judaism, Summer 1998, in wich he states; “Jewish proponents of the ‘victim’ card are aware not only of its social effectiveness but of its usefulness as a means of insuring Jewish solidarity and, hence, survival. If we were forever hated by all and are doomed to be forever hated by all, then we’d best stick together and make the best of it…Personally, I have never found this view of the eternally-hating gentile to have any resemblance with reality. It seems a myth, pure and simple, and an ugly one at that.
“Is it a good means of social control? Perhaps, but at what cost? It strips the faith and history of Jew and gentile alike of all but their months of antagonism. It wallows in evil imagery and postulates a forever morally superior Jew, victimized by the forever morally inferior ‘goy’..I have spent most of my adult life among Hasidic Jews, almost all of whom were Holocaust survivors, and I’ve heard almost nothing of the of the relentless harping on victimology and our need to forever memorialize it…(Victimology) allows Jews to bypass their own faith and offers the national allegiance of Holocaust/Israel in its place.” .

Home Invasion on steroids- Part two

The 1967 War and the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza

Did the Egyptians actually start the 1967 war, as Israel originally claimed?
Below are some statements culled from very public utterance by some of the brightest “stars” and “heroes” of the State of Israel.
(1) General Ezer Weitzman, former Commander of the Air Force and regarded as a hawk, stated that there was “no threat of destruction” but that the attack on Egypt, Jordan and Syria was nevertheless justified so that Israel could “exist according the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.” Iraelie Prime Minister, Menahem Begin also made the following staement, “In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”
(2) Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s Chief of Staff in 1967. “I do not think Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent to The Sinai would not have been sufficient to launch an offensive war. He knew it and we knew it.”
(3) War Hero (to some), Moshe Dayan, who as Defense Minister in 1967, gave the order to conquer the Golan, in an interview to the New York Times, May 11, 1997, admitted publically that many of the firefights with the Syrians were deliberately provoked by Israel, and the kibbutz residents who pressed the Government to take the Golan Heights doing soless for security than for the farmland. He stated, ‘They didn’t even try to hide their greed for the land, we would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was. The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.’”

David Ben-Gurion, in 1936 highlighted the history and intension of Israeli expansionism when he said, “the acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan; one does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today. But the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them.”
However a counterweight to the Zionist and Western (white) supremist initiative in North East Africa ( so called Middle East) was Israeli professor, Israel Shahak in his very interesting thome, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3000 Years. In it Shahak stated that, “the main danger which Israel, as a ‘Jewish state’, poses to its own people, to other Jews and to its neighbors, is its ideologically motivated pursuit of territorial expansion and the inevitable series of wars resulting from this aim. No zionist politician has ever repudiated Ben-Gurion’s idea that Israeli policies must be based (within the limits of practical considerations) on the restoration of Biblical borders as the borders of the Jewish state.” (italics mine)

In Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharatt’s personal diaries, quotes Moshe Dayan as follows: “Israel must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no – it must – invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge…And above all – let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space.”

American Senator J.William Fulbright proposed in 1970 that America should guarantee Israel’s security in a formal treaty, protecting her with armed forces if necessary. In return, Israel would retire to the borders of 1967. The UN Security Council would guarantee this arrangement, and thereby bring the Soviet Union – then a supplier of arms and political aid to the Arabs – into compliance. As Israeli troops were withdrawn from the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank they would be replaced by a UN peacekeeping force. Israel would agree to accept a certain number of Palestinians and the rest would be settled in a Palestinian state outside Israel. “The plan drew favorable support from newspapers in the United States. The proposal, however, was flatly rejected by Israel. Fullbrights’ biographer Randall Woods wrote that, ‘The whole affair disgusted Fulbright, the Israelis were not even willing to act in their own self-interest.”
After the 1967 war ended and in violation of international law, Israel has confiscated over 52 percent of the land in the West Bank and 30 percent of the Gaza Strip for military use or for settlement by Jewish civilians. From 1967 to 1982, Israel’s military government demolished 1,338 Palestinian homes on the West Bank. Over this period, more than 300,000 Palestinians were detained without trial for various periods by Israeli security forces.” Under the UN Charter there can lawfully be no territorial gains from war, even by a state acting in self-defense. The response of other states to Israel’s occupation shows a virtually unanimous opinion that even if Israel’s action was defensive, its retention of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was not. The UN General Assembly characterized Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a denial of self determination and hence a “serious and increasing threat to international peace and security.”
In studying the effects of Israeli occupation one can look to a study of students at Bethlehem University reported by the Coordinating Committee of International NGOs in Jerusalem showing many families frequently going five days a week without running water. The study goes further to report that, water quotas restrict usage by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, while Israeli settlers have almost unlimited amounts.A summer trip to a Jewish settlement on the edge of the Judean desert less than five miles from Bethlehem confirmed this water inequity. While Bethlehemites were buying water from tank trucks at highly inflated rates, the lawns were green in the settlement. Sprinklers were going at mid day in the hot August sunshine. Sounds of children swimming in the outdoor pool added to the unreality.
Dr Samir Quota, director of research for the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, quotes in “The Journal of Palestine Studies,” Summer 1996, p.84
“You have to remember that 90 percent of children two years old or more have experienced – some many, many times – the [Israeli] army breaking into the home, beating relatives, destroying things. Many were beaten themselves, had bones broken, were shot, tear gassed, or had these things happen to siblings and neighbors…The emotional aspect of the child is affected by the [lack of] security. He needs to feel safe. We see the consequences later if he does not. In our research, we have found that children who are exposed to trauma tend to be more extreme in their behaviors and, later, in their political beliefs.”
And Edward Said, in “The Nation”, May 4, 1998. “There is nothing quite like the misery one feels listening to a 35-year-old [Palestinian] man who worked fifteen years as an illegal day laborer in Israel in order to save up money to build a house for his family only to be shocked one day upon returning from work to find that the house and all that was in it had been flattened by an Israeli bulldozer. When I asked why this was done – the land, after all, was his – I was told that a paper given to him the next day by an Israeli soldier stated that he had built the structure without a license. Where else in the world are people required to have a license (always denied them) to build on their own property? Jews can build, but never Palestinians. This is apartheid.”
All Jewish settlements in territories occupied in the 1967 war are a direct violation of the Geneva Conventions, which Israel has signed.
“The Geneva Convention requires an occupying power to change the existing order as little as possible during its tenure. One aspect of this obligation is that it must leave the territory to the people it finds there. It may not bring its own people to populate the territory. This prohibition is found in the convention’s Article 49, which states, ‘The occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.’” John Quigley, “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice.”
Following are some excerpts from the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices from 1988 to 1991:

• 1988: ‘Many avoidable deaths and injuries’ were caused because Israeli soldiers frequently used gunfire in situations that did not present mortal danger to troops…IDF troops used clubs to break limbs and beat Palestinians who were not directly involved in disturbances or resisting arrest..At least thirteen Palestinians have been reported to have died from beatings…’

• 1989: Human rights groups charged that the plainclothes security personnel acted as death squads who killed Palestinian activists without warning, after they had surrendered, or after they had been subdued…

• 1991: [The report] added that the human rights groups had published ‘detailed credible reports of torture, abuse and mistreatment of Palestinian detainees in prisons and detention centers.” Former Congressman Paul Findley, “Deliberate Deceptions.”

Writing in The Jerusalem Report (Feb. 28, 2000), Leslie Susser points out that the current boundaries were drawn after the Six-Day War. Responsibility for drawing those lines fell to Central Command Chief Rehavan Ze’evi. The line he drew ‘took in not only the five square kilometers of Arab East Jerusalem – but also 65 square kilometers of surrounding open country and villages, most of which never had any municipal link to Jerusalem. Overnight they became part of Israel’s eternal and indivisible capital.”

Allan Brownfield in The Washington Report On Middle East Affairs, May 2000.

A home invasion on Steroids – Part one of two

The story of this unusual home invasion is still being talked about today. It started out as a simply criminal act, but morphed into a complex series of acts, with far reaching social implication and involving a myriad of political and enforcement figures, organizations and even individuals.

You may think this is a product of a science fiction story, but this is real.

It started several years ago in a suburban housing complex where a gang of thugs, were terrorizing a minority of long time residence. Relatively new to the complex, these thugs claiming to be members of a clandestine neighbourhood watch, never the less were embraced by the majority because of the whisper campaign directed against the smaller group of residence. Slurs such as “snitch”, government agitators and drug dealers were banded around to convert the fence sitters and harden further the converted. Several vicious attacks were perpetrated against the smaller members in some cases causing fatalities. Eventually the media got a hold of situation, started a series of campaign geared to alert, and embarrass the municipal government who up to that point would rather bury their collective heads in the sand than to do the right thing.

Apparently these vigilante gangs of thugs were connected to the government as a lobbyist group AND to the local police force as distributor of narcotics to the immigrant young members of the housing complex. The ostracized members though not vocalizing their outrage against these series of activities by the police and the councillors, decided instead to form their own committee, where they proceeded to agitate for better and alternative representation

The subsequent attention caused outrage across the city with voters calling for the government to do something or resign from office. Fearful of the bad publicity and the potential for exposure and eventual criminal charges the councillors sent the police in to the complex to calm the community. The vigilante group, in reality a drug gang, was heavily armed against outside influence (read other gang take over) and to enforce their position within the community. A series of raids and arrests, including a few shoot outs caused injuries on both sides.

After a week of raids and arrests, the gang was neutralized (though not completely wiped out) and the government hailed as decisive and courageous in protecting the interests of the more vulnerable members of society. Yet there were others who derided them for their obtuseness and the long term obfuscation which led to an eventual series of unfortunate events. With in a week after the gang of thugs was neutralized the question of what to do with the ostracized members became a hot topic on the streets and the in council chambers of City Hall. After several public debates and private sessions with the housing complex group an agreement was reached amongst the councillors that the best way to prevent future difficulties was to relocate them to another complex farther north of the city in a more remote farming community. Logistics where laid out, preparations made and the relocation set about… except for the rise of NIMBYISM (Not In My Back Yard) a phenomenon of ethnocentrism and circle the wagon mentality and fear rose up amongst the rural population. Pressure was put on those who represented the rural communities; votes were changed denials of ever agreeing to such a move splashed across the evening newspapers and on the noon, six o’clock and 11:00 clock news.

Desperate to end this political hot potato, the Mayor with the advice of several councillors with input from a developer organization, decided to force relocate the group to another housing complex, not as populated or as upscale as their previous, but one with rich real estate potential, neighbouring a yuppie enclave crying out a long time for some sort of re-gentrification from the “disease” of low income elements, who were affecting their property value.

Are you following the story so far?

Long term residents in the new complex were moved about to make room for the new residents. It was a nightmare of epic proportion. Two or more single families with no connection to each other except for being complex residences were moved into a small family dwelling. Homes were confiscated, claimed to be crack dens or abandoned and turned over to the new residents. Ignoring the cries of the aggrieved the government proclaimed the rightness of their program informing all it was necessary to prevent further abuse of this minority group. The mayor then went further by seeding committee representative status on the minority group even going as far as giving them special voice (read lobbyist) powers and giving them special “tools” to ensure their maintenance of group status quo.

Since then the low income group has been trying to advocate for as voice on counsel and for new political powers and proper allocation of resources for their children and the families displaced in the original relocation. Eventually verbal disagreement and frustrations boiled over into physical altercations, with the young members of the original members smashing the windows of the newer members. In retaliation the police was called in to assist the newer members in identifying the youth and or “ring leaders” who were subsequently arrested or injured in incremental raids and aggressive police tactics.

By this time you are wondering what backwards political organization or “third world” dictatorship did I draw this story from. Let me assure you the story is real, the names have been changed to set up the punch line. In order to bring the story full circle, let’s engage in a bit of addition and subtractions. I will draw a two column table to illustrate in panoramic view of the story in its entirety.

The Home invasion story

The original housing complex	Old Europe
The ostracized group	European Jews
The gang of Thugs	Germany and the Nazis
The City and Police force	America and England
The drugs pushed	European nationalism and white Supremacy
The Police raids	WW2
The relocation efforts	The attempted relocation of the European Jews
The NIMBY group	Other European countries
The New Housing Complex	North East Africa – Later Called Middle East after the Suez Canal
The low income residence	The so called Arabs
The Yuppies	White Supremacy and European colonialism
The special voice for the relocated group	The Zionist powers based on the “right of white” privileges for the American/European Proxy in North East Africa

In “Our Roots Are Still Alive” by The People Press Palestine Book Project “. The British mandated relocation, “pogroms forced many Jews to leave Russia. Societies known as, ‘Lovers of Zion,’ which were forerunners of the Zionist organization, convinced some of the frightened emigrants to go to Palestine. There, they argued, Jews would rebuild the ancient Jewish ‘Kingdom of David and Solomon,’ Most Russian Jews ignored their appeal and fled to Europe and the United States. By 1900, almost a million Jews had settled in the United States alone.”

If you are a rational human being and you take the element of the bible or Torah out of this geopolitical arena, the Zionist state of Israel, the “great Satan” America and her mother Europe, have no intelligent discourse to submit to explain the phenomena of the so called “middle east” dilemma that is causing horrific death and destruction, setting back civilization for 100 of years.

The Zionist position is that they showed up in Palestine century to reclaim their ancestral homeland. Jews bought land and started building up the Jewish community there. They were met with increasingly violent opposition from the Palestinians due to anti-Semitism. Forced to defend themselves, they fought to preserve their culture and to stave of extension. According to Israel this same situation continues up to today.

This explanation is simply not true. The Zionist movement, from the beginning, set out on to completely dispossess the indigenous Arab population so that Israel could be a wholly Jewish state. Land bought by the Jewish National Fund was held in the name of the Jewish people and could never be sold or even leased back to Arabs (a situation which continues to the present).

The Arab community strenuously opposed further Jewish immigration and land buying because it posed a real and imminent danger to the very existence of Arab society in Palestine. Because of this opposition, the entire Zionist project never could have been realized without the military backing of first the British and then the American. The Arab population of Palestine, has occupied this area since the seventh century A.D. (Over 1200 years)

Zionism was based on a colonialist world view that the rights of the indigenous inhabitants didn’t matter (the stories from the African Continent, Asia, South America in fact every where outside of Europe documents this). The Arabs’ opposition to Zionism wasn’t based on anti-Semitism but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the people being driven off their ancestral lands.

The Zionists after WW2 had a strong desire to establish a place where Jews could be masters of their own fate. The mythic “land without people for a people without land” as proposed by the colonialists was already home to 700,000 Palestinians in 1919.

In 1516, Palestine became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this made it no less fertile, no less Arab or Islamic. Despite the steady arrival in Palestine of Jewish colonists after 1882, it is important to realize that not until the few weeks immediately preceding the establishment of Israel in the spring of 1948 was there ever anything other than a huge Arab majority. For example, the Jewish population in 1931 was 174,606 against a total of 1,033,314.” Edward Said, “The Question of Palestine.”

In the book “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice,” John Quigley wrote that. The aim of the [Jewish National] Fund was to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people. As early as 1891, Zionist leader Ahad Ha’am wrote that the Arabs “understood very well what we were doing and what we were aiming at.” Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism stated, “We shall try to spirit the penniless Arab population across the border by procuring employment for it in transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly”. At various locations in northern Palestine Arab farmers refused to move from land the Fund purchased from absentee owners, and the Turkish authorities, at the Fund’s request, evicted them. The indigenous Jews of Palestine also reacted negatively to Zionism. They did not see the need for a Jewish state in Palestine and did not want to exacerbate relations with the Arabs.

According to Don Peretz in the book, The Arab-Israeli Dispute, “Before the 20th century, most Jews in Palestine belonged to old Yishuv, or community, that had settled more for religious than for political reasons. There was little if any conflict between them and the Arab population. Tensions began after the first Zionist settlers arrived in the 1880′s…when [they] purchased land from absentee Arab owners, leading to dispossession of the peasants who had cultivated it.” In “Bitter Harvest,” Sami Hadawi stated that, “During the Middle Ages, North Africa and the Arab Middle East became places of refuge and a haven for the persecuted Jews of Spain and elsewhere…In the Holy Land…they lived together in [relative] harmony, a harmony only disrupted when the Zionists began to claim that Palestine was the ‘rightful’ possession of the ‘Jewish people’ to the exclusion of its Moslem and Christian inhabitants”.

Jewish attitude towards Arabs when reaching Palestine was further highlighted in “Bitter Harvest.” By a quote from Zionist writer Ahad Ha’am; “Serfs they (the Jews) were in the lands of the Diaspora, and suddenly they find themselves in freedom [in Palestine]; and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.”

The British Mandate Period
1920-1948

In the book The Question of Palestine, Edward Said stated that “the Balfour Declaration, made in November 1917 by the British Government…was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, c) in flat disregard of both the presence and wishes of the native majority resident in that territory…[As Balfour himself wrote in 1919], ‘The contradiction between the letter of the Covenant (the Anglo French Declaration of 1918 promising the Arabs of the former Ottoman colonies that as a reward for supporting the Allies they could have their independence) is even more flagrant in the case of the independent nation of Palestine than in that of the independent nation of Syria. For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…The four powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desire and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land,’”

Britain‘s high commissioner for Palestine, John Chancellor had recommended total suspension of Jewish immigration and land purchase to protect Arab agriculture. He said ‘all cultivable land was occupied; that no cultivable land now in possession of the indigenous population could be sold to Jews without creating a class of landless Arab cultivators’… Of course the British Colonial Office rejected the recommendation.

In 1919, the American King-Crane Commission spent six weeks in Syria and Palestine, interviewing delegations and reading petitions. Their report stated, “The commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favour…The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conferences with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.

The Zionist land policy was incorporated in the Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, land is to be acquired as Jewish property and the title to the lands acquired is to be taken in the name of the Jewish National Fund, to this end that the same shall be held as the inalienable property of the Jewish people. The provision goes on to stipulate that the Agency shall promote agricultural colonization based on Jewish labour. The effect of this Zionist colonization policy on the Arabs was that land acquired by Jews became extra-territorialized. It ceased to be land from which the Arabs could ever hope to gain any advantage. The Zionists made no secret of their intentions, for as early as 1921, Dr. Eder, a member of the Zionist Commission, boldly proclaimed, “there can be only one National Home in Palestine, and that a Jewish one, and no equality in the partnership between Jews and Arabs, but a Jewish preponderance as soon as the numbers of the race are sufficiently increased.” He then asked that only Jews should be allowed to bear arms. Even if nobody lost their land, the Zionist program was unjust in principle because it denied majority political rights. Zionism, in principle, could not allow the natives to exercise their political rights because it would mean the end of the Zionist enterprise.

A nationalist revolt

In 1936-9, the Palestinian Arabs attempted a nationalist revolt, David Ben-Gurion, recognized its nature. In internal discussion, he noted that “in our political argument abroad, we minimize Arab opposition to us, but he urged, let us not ignore the truth among ourselves. The truth was that politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves. The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country, while we are still outside.” The revolt was crushed by the British, with its usual and considerable brutality. In 1948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine…After 1940, when the mandatory authority restricted Jewish land ownership to specific zones inside Palestine, there continued to be illegal buying (and selling) within the 65 percent of the total area restricted to Arabs. Thus when the partition plan was announced in 1947 it included land held illegally by Jews, which was incorporated inside the borders of the Jewish state. And after Israel announced its statehood, an impressive series of laws legally assimilated huge tracts of Arab land (whose proprietors had become refugees, and were pronounced ‘absentee landlords’ in order to expropriate their lands and prevent their return under any circumstances.

Statehood and Expulsion 1948

The Arab states declared war immediately after the State of Israel was founded in May. Fighting continued, almost all of it within the territory assigned to the Palestinian state causing about 700,000 Palestinians to flee or were expelled in the 1948 conflict. The Arab League hastily called for its member countries to send regular army troops into Palestine. They were ordered to secure only the sections of Palestine given to the Arabs under the partition plan. But these regular armies were ill equipped and lacked any central command to coordinate their efforts. Jordan’s King Abdullah promised the Israelis and the British that his troops, the Arab Legion, the only real fighting force among the Arab armies, would avoid fighting with Jewish settlements. Western historians later record this as the moment when the young state of Israel fought off “the overwhelming hordes’ of five Arab countries. In reality, the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians intensified.” This then became the urban myth leading to the so called invincibility of the Jewish Army.

Ethnic cleansing of the Arab population of Palestine

Edward Said, in the book “The Question of Palestine,” quoted Joseph Weitz who was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund and had declared on December 19, 1940 that , “’It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples in this country, the Zionist enterprise so far has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘land buying’ – but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries, to transfer them all; except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a single village, not a single tribe’…There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists.

Israel historian, Benny Morris in speaking of the “Righteous Victims” also stated… “Following the outbreak of 1936, no mainstream (Zionist) leader was able to conceive of future coexistence without a clear physical separation between the two peoples – achievable only by transfer and expulsion. Publicly they all continued to speak of coexistence and to attribute the violence to a small minority of zealots and agitators. But this was merely a public pose. Ben Gurion summed it up thusly: “With compulsory transfer we (would) have a vast area (for settlement)…I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.” According to Morris, Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish state. He hoped to see them flee. He said as much to his colleagues and aides in meetings in August, September and October [1948]. But no [general] expulsion policy was ever enunciated and Ben-Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals ‘understand’ what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the ‘great expeller’ and he did not want the Israeli government to be implicated in a morally questionable policy…But while there was no ‘expulsion policy’, the July and October [1948] offensives were characterized by far more expulsions and, indeed, brutality towards Arab civilians than the first half of the war

The Issue of Palestinians leaving their homes voluntarily during the 1948 war

Israeli has largely relinquished the claim that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was voluntary. In official circles there were concessions that the Arab population fled as a result of Israeli action – whether directly, as in the case of Lydda and Ramleh, or indirectly, due to the panic and of similar actions (such as the Deir Yassin massacre) inspired in Arab population centers throughout Palestine. However, even though the historical record has been reluctantly set straight, the Israeli establishment still refused to accept moral or political responsibility for the refugee problem it- or its predecessors – actively created. The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put. Ben-Gurion’s ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish ones. To achieve his purpose most decisively, the destruction of whole villages and the eviction of their inhabitants…even if they had not participated in the war and had stayed in Israel hoping to live in peace and equality, as promised in the Declaration of Independence.

During May 1948, ideas about how to consolidate and give permanence to the Palestinian exile began to crystallize. Some of the acts perpetrated on the inhabitants of that region included the deliberate destruction of Arab villages to prevent return of Palestinians. Earlier, on April 10, Jewish army units took Abu Shusha, the village was destroyed in one night. Khulda was levelled by Jewish bulldozers on April 20… Abu Zureiq was completely demolished… Al Mansi and An Naghnaghiya, to the southeast, were also levelled. . By mid-1949, the majority of the 350 Arab villages were either depopulated, in complete or partly in ruins or uninhabitable

The first UN General Assembly resolution–Number 194- affirming the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and property, was passed on December 11, 1948. It has been re-passed no less than twenty-eight times since that first date. Whereas the moral and political right of a person to return to his place of uninterrupted residence is acknowledged everywhere, Israel has negated the possibility of return and systematically and judicially made it impossible, on any grounds whatever, for the Arab Palestinian to return, and be compensated for his property, or live in Israel as a citizen equal before the law.

Is there any justification for this expropriation of land?

“The fact that the Arabs fled in terror, because of real fear of a repetition of the 1948 Zionist massacres, is no reason for denying them their homes, fields and livelihoods. Civilians caught in an area of military activity generally panic. But they have always been able to return to their homes when the danger subsides. Military conquest does not abolish private rights to property; nor does it entitle the victor to confiscate the homes, property and personal belongings of the non-combatant civilian population. The seizure of Arab property by the Israelis was an outrage.” Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”

Israel, the terrorist proxy of a terrorist America.

After Israel was admitted to UN it promptly then reneged on the conditions under which it was admitted.

Israel for the first time on 27 April 1949, accepted the principle of repatriation of the Arab refugees and the internationalization of Jerusalem, when the Palestine Conciliation Committee was successful in getting a signed joint protocol on the framework for a comprehensive peace. Walter Eytan, the head of the Israeli delegation stated, “My main purpose was to begin to undermine the protocol, which we had signed only under duress of our struggle for admission to the U.N. Refusal to sign would…have immediately been reported to the Secretary-General and the various governments.”

The fate of the Palestinians refugees

The winter of 1949, the first winter of exile more than seven hundred fifty thousand Palestinians families huddled in caves, abandoned huts, or makeshift tents, mere miles away from their own vegetable gardens and orchards in occupied Palestine now called the “State of Israel.” .At the end of 1949 the United Nations finally acted. It set up the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) to take over sixty refugee camps from voluntary agencies. It managed to keep people alive, but only barely.