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.