The Hidden History of Zionism
(1988)
|
|
The Hidden History of Zionism, Veritas Press, Santa Barbara (Calif.)
1988.
Copyright (c) 1988 by Ralph Schoenman
All Rights Reserved
Reposted here by permission
The Hidden History of Zionism by Ralph Schoenman is presented
online for personal use only.
No portions of this book may be reprinted, reposted or published without
written permission from the author.
Most of this text has been copied with permission from the Balkan Unity site
The remainder of the text was transcribed by Einde
O’Callaghan.
Marked up by Alphonsos Pangas for Balkan
Unity and Einde O’Callaghan for REDS – Die Roten.
To The Memory of Khalid
Ahmed Zaki
Fallen Comrade and Beloved Friend
* * *
For Hamdi Faraj and
Mohammed Manasrah
“Thawra Hatta al Nas’r”
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface: The
Uprising
1. The Four Myths
2. Zionist
Objectives
3. Colonizing
Palestine
4. Tragic
Consequences
5. The Seizure of
the Land
6. Zionism and
the Jews
7. The Myth of
Security
8. Blitzkrieg and
Slaughter
9. The Second
Occupation
10. The
Prevalence of Torture (not yet transcribed)
11. The Prisons
12. Strategy for
Conquest
13. A Strategy
for Revolution
Map: The Zionist
Vision of Eretz Israel
Suggested
Reading (not yet transcribed)
Appendix
(not yet transcribed)
About the
Author
Copies of the printed edition of The Hidden History of Zionism, in hardcover or paperback
form, can be purchased either directly from Veritas Press (in the above
address), or through Amazon.com.
Most of this online edition of The
Hidden History of Zionism was transcribed from the 1988 Veritas Press
edition by Alphonsos Pangas in 2000,
by permission of the author, and originally published in the Balkan Unity site.
This on-line edition was copied
from the Balkan Unity site with permission and is also posted here in REDS – Die Roten by permission of the author.
Some chapters were added to complete the book by Einde O'Callaghan.
It goes without saying that the
permission to publish this work doesn’t imply that the author is in agreement
with the content of the REDS – Die Roten site.
The Hidden History of
Zionism by Ralph
Schoenman is presented online for personal use only. No portions of this book
may be reprinted, reposted or published without written permission from the
author.
|
About the Author |
Ralph Schoenman was
Executive Director of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, in which capacity
he conducted negotiations with numerous heads of state. He secured the release
of political prisoners in many countries and initiated the International
Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Indo-China, of which he was Secretary General.
Long active in political life, he
initiated the Committee of 100 which organized mass civil disobedience against
nuclear weapons and U.S. bases in Great Britain. He was founder and Director of
the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and Director of the Who Killed Kennedy
Committee.
He also has been a leader of the
Committee for Artistic Freedom in Iran, Co-Director of the Committee in Defense
of the Palestinian and Lebanese Peoples, Director of American Workers and
Artists for Solidarity, and Executive Director of the Palestine Campaign which
called for an end to all aid to Israel and for a democratic secular Palestine.
His previous books include Bertrand
Russell: Philosopher of the Century, Death and Pillage in the
Congo: A Study of Western Rule, which he co-authored with Khalid Ahmed
Zaki, Prisoners of Israel written with Mya Shone and Iraq
and Kuwait: A History Suppressed.
Acknowledgements
|
|
During the Dark Ages in Europe, Greek science, mathematics and philosophy
were preserved by Arab scholars. From Avicenna to al-Kindi, Arab science and
mathematics nurtured the legacy of Greek natural and moral philosophy.
The Zionist movement subdued
Palestine and assaulted its culture with a relentless barbarity shocking even
to those familiar with the cruel annals of colonial conquest. This history has
been suppressed during the past one hundred years. It has only been brought to
light through the writings of a relatively few intrepid scholars.
A profound debt is owed to them –
Moslems, Christians, Jews and non-believers – whose work of preservation and
exegesis has made possible this attempt at synthesis.
Alan Benjamin has devoted hundreds
of hours to all facets of this work. Co-thinker, discussant, editor and friend,
he has sharpened the analysis, economized the presentation and taken charge of
multiple technical problems inherent in its production. It would not exist
without him.
Mya Shone, my wife and companion,
but for her own reticence would be listed as the co-author of this book. Her
role in writing and shaping the text is equal to my own. Every sentence has
been tested by her insistence on precision of expression and lucidity. To the
extent that either has been achieved, the energy and will flowed from her, the
writing shared in a labor of love.
To our treasured Palestinian
friends and comrades, I would paraphrase Dylan Thomas: We are alone and not
alone in the unknown world, our bliss and suffering forever shared and forever
all our own.
Preface
|
|
With anger, hatred, and
sheer ferocity, thousands of youngsters hurled rocks at their Israeli
occupiers, undaunted by the gunfire that greeted them. This was more than civil
unrest. ...It was the beginning of a civil rebellion. [l]
This is how Jerusalem
Post correspondent Hirsh Goodman described the uprising of Palestinian
youth in the West Bank and Gaza in mid-December 1987.
Goodman’s remarks were written the
day before the December 21, 1987, general strike which engulfed every
Palestinian community under Israeli rule. The strike was described by the Israeli
daily, Ha’aretz, as “writing on our wall even more serious
than the bloody riots of the last two weeks.” [2]
On that day, – wrote John
Kifner in The New York Times, – the vast army of Arab laborers
who wait on tables, pick vegetables, haul garbage, lay brick and perform
virtually all Israel’s menial work, stayed home. [3]
The Israeli response to
the uprising was brutal. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered the use of
tanks, armored vehicles and automatic rifles against an unarmed population.
The San Francisco Examiner
cited Rabin as openly advocating assassination. “They can shoot to hit leaders
of disorder,” Rabin said in defense of the army’s practice of using marksmen
with high-powered .22-caliber rifles to shoot indiscriminately at Palestinian
youth. [4]
Rabin ordered house-to-house
searches, first for young men and later for anyone of whom an example might be
made. By December 27, over 2,500 Palestinians were seized, many of them as
young as twelve; by the end of January the number reached 4,000 and was rising.
[5] The
“militants ”were marked for deportation. Israeli high-security jails and
detention centers were overflowing. Mass trials of Palestinians were underway.
The act of brutality which most
inflamed the Palestinian population was the army seizure of the wounded from
hospital beds. This practice, standard procedure throughout the invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, made Shifa Hospital in Gaza a center of resistance. Great
crowds amassed to defend the wounded, whom, they rightfully feared, would never
be seen again.
The youngsters in Gaza
and the West Bank where riots erupted, – wrote Jerusalem Post
correspondent Hirsh Goodman – have not received any terrorist training, nor are
they members of a terrorist organization. Rather they are members of that
Palestinian generation that grew up knowing nothing but occupation. [6]
A mother of a Palestinian
man shot three times in the head by Israeli soldiers was asked if she would let
her remaining sons join the demonstrations. “ As long as I am alive, ”she
responded, “I am going to teach the young people to fight ... I don’t care
whatever happens, as long as we get our land.” [7]
Rashad Shawa’a, deposed Mayor of
Gaza, expressed the same sentiment:
The youth have lost hope
that Israel will ever give them their rights. They feel the Arab countries are
unable to accomplish anything. They feel that the Palestine Liberation
Organization (P.L.O.) has failed to achieve a thing. [8]
Los Angeles Times correspondent Dan Fisher’s account is even
more significant:
This new-found sense of
unity has been one of the most striking changes to foreign observers and
non-Gaza Palestinians ... It is a phenomenon that extends to previous divisions
between young and old and between those who work in Israel and those who do
not. [9]
Force, Might, Beatings
As the uprising intensified, the Israeli cabinet and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin implemented “collective punishment, ”a tactic characteristic of the Nazi occupation of France, Denmark and Yugoslavia. Food, water and medicine were prevented from reaching Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (U.N.R.W.A.) personnel reported that children seeking powdered milk at U.N. depots were shot at and beaten with sticks.
The Casbah, where over half of the 125,000 inhabitants of Nablus live, has been sealed off by concrete barricades and iron gates. Qabatiya and the nearby refugee camp at Jenin were placed under siege. At the time of writing, the siege, which has cut off all food, water, fuel and electricity, has lasted fifty-five days.
A Jerusalem Post
analyst explained the policies of Rabin:
The first priority is to
use force, might, beatings. [This] is considered more effective than detention
... [because] he may then resume stoning soldiers. But if troops break his
hand, he won’t be able to throw stones. [10]
By the next day, the news
media were reporting the most bestial beatings by soldiers throughout the West
Bank and Gaza. The account by John Kifner was compelling:
NABLUS, Israeli
Occupied West Bank, January 22: Both hands encased in plaster casts, Imad Omar Abu Rub explained from
his bed in the Rafidiya Hospital what happened when the Israeli Army came to
the Palestinian village of Qabatiya.
“They entered the house like animals,
shouting,” the 22-year old student at Bir Zeit University said. “They took us
from the house, kicking us in the head, beating us, all the soldiers with their
rifle butts.”
Then he was taken to the
construction site of an unfinished house where, he said, the soldiers put an
empty bucket over his head. Several of the soldiers held him down, he said,
gripping his arms to force his hands against a rock. Two others, he said, beat
his hands with lengths of two-by-fours, breaking the bones.
The injuries are the product of a
new officially declared policy of the Israeli Army and the police to beat up
Palestinians in hopes of ending the wave of protests in the occupied West Bank
and Gaza Strip that began in early December. At least thirty-eight Palestinians
have been killed by Israeli gunfire in the protests.
In the bed next to Mr. Abu Rub’s,
Hassan Arif Kemal, a 17-year old high school student from Qabatiya, told a
nearly identical story. [11]
Labor and Likud leaders
responded with one voice to world-wide outcry over these practices. President
Chaim Herzog declared: “The alternative facing us today ... is between
suppressing these riots or allowing them to develop into a new Teheran or
Beirut.” [12]
John Kifner reported in The
New York Times:
Prime Minister Yitzhak
Shamir and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin continued to defend the policy, with
both men saying publicly that the purpose of the beatings was to instill fear
of the Israeli army in Palestinians.
Shamir stated that events
had “shattered the barrier of fear ... Our task is to recreate that barrier and
once again put the fear of death into the Arabs of the areas”
He concluded that the uprising
would never have taken place “had the troops used firearms from the very first
moment.” [13]
Palestinian Resistance Grows
The rebellion of the
Palestinian people of the West Bank and Gaza has engulfed every village, town
and refugee camp. Children as young as eight and old people in their seventies
and eighties defy the Israeli army daily. Entire village populations, waving
makeshift Palestinian flags of bedsheets and cloth, mass defiantly, singing and
chanting and hurling stones at soldiers firing automatic weapons.
The Great Uprising – the
“Intifadeh” has become a symbol of Palestinian nationhood as the brutal
repression that once filled the people with despair now fuels their
determination and will, which encompasses the readiness to die.
The Israeli reprisals have been
barbarous. The repression has been unleashed with particular savagery against
the refugee camps and the old quarters of the cities inhabited by the
impoverished.
By April 1988 over 150 Palestinians
had died. The Israeli government had admitted to the arrest of 2,000 people,
bringing the acknowledged total to 4,000. The real figure was far higher.
Sources in the West Bank and Gaza
established that the number detained by the weekend of March 27 had exceeded
13,000. Bassam Shaka’a, deposed Mayor of Nablus, placed the total held solely
in a hastily constructed barbed-wire encampment at Dhariyah at 10,000.
In the Balata camp outside Nablus,
and in the Casbah – the old quarter – l,000 people were arrested in a period of
48 hours. The discovery of people in ditches in the fields – shot in the back
or with their heads caved in – has been reported from villages throughout the
West Bank and Gaza.
Bassam Shaka’a described the
rampage of the Israeli armed units:
No matter which house one
calls, the anguished accounts of family members wounded or arrested pour forth.
Convoys of buses cruise the streets of Nablus followed by vans of the Mossad,
Israel’s secret police. Army units go from house to house pulling youths from
their beds at 3 a.m. As the buses fill, the soldiers beat the youths viciously
around the head, shins, groin and back. Shrieks fill the air.
As the army makes its rounds
kidnapping the young from their homes, people gather at their windows and on
the roofs of houses shouting in unison, “Falistin Arabia, Thawra Hatta al Nas’r,
Allah Akbar” [Arab Palestine, Revolution Until Victory, God is Great]. [13a]
Bassam Shaka’a described
the attempts by the Israeli army to spread panic and terror in Nablus and
outlying villages:
Fleets of helicopters fly
over Nablus at night dropping a dense, green toxic gas over the city. The smell
pervades every house. Armed units fire canisters of the substance into houses
at random. Doctors at Ittihad Hospital reported several deaths and severe lung
injuries from this as-yet unidentified asphyxiating chemical, totally distinct
from tear gas.
Among the victims were
the grandmother of the Da’as family and the 100-year-old father of noted Nablus
attorney Mohammad Irshaid. Soldiers had entered the house at 2 a.m., smashing
furniture and firing a canister of the dreaded green gas while preventing the
family from leaving.
Two of the children, ages 9 and 11,
were taken by the soldiers in their night clothes, frog-marched in the streets
and beaten as they were forced by the jeering soldiers to clear debris.
Simultaneously, the Israeli army
targeted the hospitals. Army trucks rammed ambulances and blocked them from
reaching the homes of those overcome by the gas. Soldiers entered the Ittihad
Hospital in Nablus numerous times, arresting the wounded and those waiting to
give blood to family members. Even the operating theater was invaded while
surgeons were operating on patients.
Doctors were beaten and equipment
smashed. Family members were prevented from entering the hospital and the cars
of doctors and nurses were destroyed by soldiers.
Meanwhile, all of Nablus was
paralyzed by a total strike. All the streets in every quarter of the city were
without open shops or business activity. As gas permeated the city, cries and
chants filled the night.
Gas canisters recovered by Bassam
Shaka’a, Yousef al-Masri [chief of Ittihad Hospital] and American author Alfred
Lilienthal bear the markings “560 cs. Federal Lab. Saltsburg, Pa. USA MK2
1988.” Biochemists are studying their properties as casualties mount.
John Kifner reported on April 4
that “Hundreds of refugees were treated in United Nations clinics for gas
inhalation.” On April 15, Kifner wrote, “...gas has been thrown inside homes,
clinics and schools where the effects are particularly severe.” [13b]
His report was the first, after
four months of the use of such chemical weapons, to acknowledge the fact:
Agency doctors have seen
symptoms not normally connected with tear gas, and U.N.R.W.A. is seeking
information on the contents of the gas ... to provide antidote ... especially
for the most vulnerable groups ... pregnant women, the very young and elderly.
Kifner later reported,
“Warnings on the canisters say the contents can be lethal.” Throughout the West
Bank and Gaza, cases of miscarriages, vaginal bleeding and asphyxiation were
occurring after the use of the gas.
A Glimpse of the Savagery
One of the most vicious
incidents occurred in the town of Qalqiya. Soldiers entered the house of
workers and poured gasoline over them, setting them alight. Six workers were
covered in flames. Four of the victims managed to rush out of the building and
rolled on the ground, ripping off their clothes. Two were severely burned and
are in critical condition.
On February 20, two youths were
arrested in Khan Yunis, beaten savagely and taken to the beach where they were
buried alive under the sand. After the soldiers left, villagers managed to dig
them out.
Reports in the establishment press
give a glimpse of the scale of Israeli brutality. A soldier’s account reported
in the Israeli newspaper Hadashot was cited in Newsweek:
We got orders to knock on
every door, enter and take out all the males. The younger ones we lined up with
their faces against the wall, and soldiers beat them with billy-clubs. This was
no private initiative. These were the orders from our company commander. [13c]
The accounts make clear
that Israeli protestations about excesses of individual soldiers are
transparently false. Newsweek revealed:
Armed with 30-inch wooden
clubs and urged by their prime minister to “put the fear back into the Arabs”,
Israeli soldiers have methodically beaten up Palestinians since early January,
deliberately breaking bones and beating prisoners into unconsciousness.
Casualties included not only young men ... but also women. Most of the injured
shunned hospitals for fear of arrest.
The avoidance of
hospitals by the injured has prevented accurate reporting of the vast scale of
the savage beatings and of the deaths of those who endured them. But an
indication was provided in the reports of the medical team inspecting the
wounded in the hospitals in early February 1988. Dr. Jennifer Leaning, a
faculty member of Harvard Medical School and a trauma specialist, reported her
findings: “There is a systematic pattern of limb injury that is clearly
organized to cause fractures ... a consistent pattern of bonebreaks across the
back of the hand and in the middle of the forearm that ... come from holding
the hand or arm in place and applying a strong blow to the bone.” [13d]
Dr. Leaning and the team of
Physicians for Human Rights traveled throughout the West Bank and Gaza. They
concluded, “It is a pattern that is controlled. A systematic pattern over a wide
geographical area. It is as if they have been instructed.”
Dr. Leaning’s account of the new
patients brought to Shifa Hospital in Gaza is compelling:
They looked like they had
been mauled. What is impressive is the number of fractures per patient. These
patients look as if they had been put through a washing-machine wringer. They
would have had to hold them down and just keep beating them.
Repeated instances of
young males shot deliberately through the testicles were reported in Shifa
Hospital in Gaza and Makassad Hospital in East Jerusalem. Soldiers poured
boiling water over a 2-year-old infant, rendering her catatonic.
“Quelling the Protests”
New York Times correspondent John Kifner called the
systematic roundups “part of a series of tough new measures, including economic
sanctions and collective punishment, that the Israeli army and other officials
are imposing in hopes of quelling the protests, which have grown into an
increasingly organized Palestinian mass movement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza
Strip.” [13e]
The army’s new orders allow
detention without any specific charge or trials, even in military courts.
Moreover, according to the March 23 New York Times, “the new
procedures do away with judicial review of the administrative detention
sentences and allow local commanders to order the arrests.”
Immediately after the order, people
were seized overnight in more than a dozen refugee districts, villages and
towns in the West Bank and Gaza.
Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak
Rabin announced that Israeli civilians have the same authority as soldiers to
shoot. He added that soldiers need not fire warning shots before shooting
Palestinians. [13f] Newsweek
was more explicit: “The decree meant Israeli soldiers could shoot to kill
Palestinian youths ... Yitzhak Rabin [was] effectively deputizing settlers.” [13g] The
decision, according to Newsweek, would “open the floodgates of
the 60,000 settlers’ pent-up frustration [sic].” It was not long before an
attack occurred. On April 6, settlers engaging in a clear provocation shot in
cold blood a Palestinian working in his field outside the village of Beita.
Attention, however, focused on the death of Tirza Porat, a 15-year-old settler
girl among the group. The settlers reported Tirza Porat had been stoned to
death by the Palestinian villagers, but an army autopsy report revealed she had
been shot in the head by the Kahane follower acting as her nominal guard.
[Rabbi Meir Kahane is the founder of the Jewish Defense League.]
Despite the autopsy report, Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir used the occasion to vow that Palestinians “would be
crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” [13h]
In Beita village, the scene of the
incident, thirty houses were blown up. The number of houses destroyed was
confirmed by Hamdi Faraj, a noted Palestinian journalist.
Forms of Self-Government Emerge
The recent Palestinian
uprising has done more to challenge Israeli control than had been achieved in
twenty years. The entire infrastructure of Israeli rule has unraveled. Spies
are asking forgiveness, confessing their deeds and exposing the apparatus of
control. Police are resigning.
The Village Leagues, Israeli
organizations of collaborators, have collapsed. The Los Angeles Times
reports that challenges by the “Unified National Leadership of the Uprising”
have led to resignations by municipal, village, and town councils.
Before the uprising, 20,000 Palestinians
worked under Israeli army and police control, providing services to the West
Bank and Gaza. They were teachers, clerks and administrators. Most have
resigned.
Increasingly, forms of
self-government are emerging in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis close the
schools; the resistance organizes classes. The Israelis order shops to open;
the resistance keeps them closed. The Israelis close the shops; the resistance
opens them.
The West Bank and Gaza are trapped
in what Newsweek calls a “colonial setup”. Newsweek
cites Israeli demographer Meron Benvenisti, the former Deputy Mayor of
Jerusalem, as follows: “The Occupied Territories became a source of cheap labor
and a captive market for Israeli goods.” [13i]
Israel’s trade surplus with the
West Bank and Gaza, Benvenisti reveals, is $500 million a year. The government
takes a further $80 million a year in taxes above what it provides in meager
social services. The territories import $780 million a year of Israeli goods at
high prices.
But the uprising has changed
everything. Newsweek states:
The Palestinians have
some economic weapons of their own. Thousands of Arab workers had long since
walked away from jobs at Israeli farms, factories and construction sites.
Palestinian shoppers cut back their purchases of Israeli goods. Arab merchants
and self-employed professionals struck a more direct blow at the occupation;
they refused to pay Israeli income and commercial taxes.
Thus, as Newsweek
acknowledges, the economic sword cut in two directions. Israel’s construction
industry, which drew 42% of its workforce from the Occupied Territories “has
been hobbled by Arab walkouts”. Hotels in Jerusalem report a sharp drop in
spring bookings.
Israeli Economic Minister Gad
Yaacobi estimated that the first three months of “rioting” cost Israel’s
economy “at least $300 million ” – 10% of U.S. aid for a full year.
“Liberated Zones”
No respite can be
expected for Israel. The villages in the West Bank and Gaza have responded
defiantly to Israel’s barbaric onslaught, declaring themselves “liberated
zones”, barricading their streets, and flying the Palestinian flag.
Newsweek reports: “Their protests are adroitly
coordinated through leaflets issued by the shadowy Unified National Command of
the Uprising. Their leaflets are the law of the land.” [13j]
Despite the massive repression,
Palestinian spirits have never been higher. This spirit is perhaps the factor
of greatest concern to the Israeli state. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told
Israeli television:
The people who are
throwing stones, the inciters, the leaders, they are today in a situation of
euphoria, of great enthusiasm. They think that they are the victors.
Middle East editor of the
Jerusalem Post Yehudi Litani reported that “[Israeli] security
forces estimate the army has now detained the majority of those now pulling the
strings of the uprising” – and yet the uprising continues, the leaflets
continue to appear, and a mood approaching panic is settling in among Israeli leaders.
On March 30, Land Day – the day
Palestinians inside pre-1967 Israel protest the confiscation of their land – a
general strike of Palestinians inside the pre-1967 borders was called. This
action renewed a general strike in support of the uprising which was first held
on December 21, 1987.
The Unified National Leadership of
the Uprising in the Occupied Territories called for “huge demonstrations
against the army and settlers” to coincide with the general strike.
For the first time since 1948,
Palestinians throughout Lebanon – joined by Lebanese in Sidon, Beirut and other
cities – also staged their own demonstrations and general strike in solidarity
with the uprising. The uprising has galvanized not only the Israeli Arabs, but
the Palestinians in the Diaspora. The participation of the Palestinians of
Lebanon and of thousands of Lebanese themselves was felt throughout the Arab
world.
This new phase of the Palestinian
revolution was not lost on the Israeli authorities. In an attempt to counter
coordination between the Palestinians inside the “Green Line” [pre-1967
borders] and the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israelis
completely “sealed off’ the West Bank and Gaza.
“Since Intifadeh
[Uprising] is taking place both in the West Bank and in Israel,”
[emphasis added] a senior military source said, “we decided to separate the two
and to prevent large-scale public disorder.” [13k]
“We want to signal very clearly
that we are not going to hesitate to use whatever measures are necessary,”
Defense Minister Rabin said.
Ariel Sharon, former
Defense Minister and current Trade Minister, announced that the uprising “would
lead inevitably to war with the Arab states and the necessary expulsion of the
Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the Galilee.” [13l]
But the Palestinians,
entering their 40th year of occupation since the founding of the Israeli state,
have not been deterred. The “revolutionary war” of the Palestinian people is
recruiting the hearts and minds of youth in every Arab country and in capitals
across the world.
This spirit was fully captured in a
letter written by members of the Palestinian underground resistance in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank to a rally in Paris, France, on March 3, 1988, organized
by an ad-hoc committee of supporters of Palestinian human rights. Their letter
states in part:
Dear friends,
We send you this letter
from inside our beloved land – Our land of honor, of dignity, courage and
defiance – from our Palestine, from Jerusalem, the sacred city.
We send you this letter in the name
of our people, a patient people who are today standing tall and are waging a
struggle unparalleled in our entire history.
We want you to know that the
Palestinian people have not been defeated. They are alive. They are struggling.
They are saying that they will not accept humiliation and submission.
The confidence of our people in the
legitimacy of their struggle is immense. And our people know that their victory
is certain – whatever the sacrifices, whatever the price that must be paid.
Today, our people are suffering.
They are shedding their blood to win their freedom, dignity, and honor; their
right to determine their own destiny; their right to live in their homeland and
to build a free, democratic, and sovereign state in all of Palestine.
To all free men and women, to all
our comrades, we say the following:
The Palestinian people have been
the victims for many decades of an international plot – of vicious attacks –
aimed at exiling them and chasing them from the lands upon which they have
lived for centuries.
We have been expelled from our
lands – lands which have now been settled by foreigners in accordance with the
aims of colonialism and imperialism. This settlement has been imposed by the
laws of oppression promoted by the Western nations and the Eastern totalitarian
regimes. These oppressive laws are also those of international Zionism.
We have been subject to terror,
assassination and torture. Today, we are deprived of even our most elementary
and legitimate rights. “They have wanted to make of us an exiled people,
destined permanently to refugee camps. They have wanted to destroy us
physically and eliminate us.
Through the wars of 1948 and 1967,
they carried out the occupation of all of Palestine. But they forgot that by
occupying all of Palestine they also unified the entire Palestinian people in
their struggle against oppression.
That is what is happening today as
the children, the elderly, the women and the youth have risen up as one single
person, without arms, to face the military machine of Zionism and imperialism –
to face the violence of the guns, the clubs, the kidnappings, and the
assassinations.
Our weapons come from our homeland.
They are the stones with which our people have built up a wall to defend their
combatants and the Revolution.
Dear friends: You should know what
is going on in our homeland. Two weeks ago, the forces of occupation buried
eight young Palestinians alive after having beaten them savagely and broken
their limbs. Four of them were saved by the people; the other four were never
found.
Three days ago, Israeli military
forces dropped three live Palestinian youths from a helicopter flying at a high
altitude. One of the youths was only 13 years old.
This is what they are currently
doing to our people.
Dear friends: We want you to know
that we reject all so-called solutions and peace projects that some people
would like to impose on us through international conferences. We want you to
know that we are committed to continuing our revolution until the total
liberation of all of Palestine, until the establishment of a democratic and
free state in which all free men and women, from wherever they may be, are
welcome to live so long as they accept to live with us as equals on our land of
Palestine.
We are no longer on our knees. We
are standing tall. We will not yield. We feel that it is legitimate for us to
demand aid and assistance from people throughout the world who are struggling
for the freedom of all oppressed peoples.
We ask of you not only that you
speak out in support of our struggle in your speeches and protests but that you
demand that your governments take a clear position in opposition to the
repressive and criminal methods of Zionism. We ask for your moral and material
support for our Palestinian people, who are struggling to obtain their final
victory.
The Palestinian people
have risen, their yearnings for emancipation stirring the pauperized masses in
every country of the Arab East. Reduced to a condition of penury by corrupt,
country-selling regimes, the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi people have begun to
respond to the extraordinary example set for them by the Palestinian people.
Perhaps more significantly, a
detailed report by Robert S. Greenberger in The Wall Street Journal
describes the profound effect of the Intifadeh on the Jewish masses themselves,
notably the Arab Jews, or Sephardim.
Now nearly 70% of the Jewish
population of Israel, their sentiments are shifting. In contrast to rabid Likud
[Israel’s ruling party] figures such as Reuvin Rivlin, who declaimed ominously,
“I believe God is Jewish. I believe the demographic problem will be solved,”
the Sephardic Jews are responding differently:
The riots shattered the
myth perpetuated by Likud founder Menachem Begin and his successor Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir ... The Sephardim are demanding social services and
want to bridge the gap between ideology and practical solutions to the
Arab-Israeli conflict ... They care more about jobs, housing and education than
keeping faith with a territorially inviolate Israel. [13m]
Henoch Smith, a U.S.
pollster, reflecting on the new “challenge” from the Sephardim, notes: “This
year, for the first time, they will account for 51% of voters.”
As the letter from the underground
attests, the Palestinian people, self-activated and increasingly confident of
the power of mass struggle, are demanding “aid and assistance from people
throughout the world who are struggling for the freedom of all oppressed peoples.”
This message is beginning to reach
Israeli Jews. The day is dawning when they too will seek a future free of a
Zionist state which has combined subjugation of the Palestinian people with the
exploitation of the Jewish poor.
This book seeks to uncover the
hidden history of Zionism, a movement rooted in the ideology of racist
oppression of Jews and colonial subjects alike. It has been written in
anticipation of that day when the dedication and fervor of the Palestinian
people, so long persecuted and oppressed, will speak to the Jews, recalling to
them their own painful history, with a program for a Palestine in which
victims, past and present, will create together the Intifadeh of the future and
overthrow a state predicated upon oppression, torture, expulsion, expansion and
unending war.
Notes
1. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
2. Ibid.
3. John Kifner, New York Times, December 22, 1987.
4. San Francisco Examiner, December 23, 1987.
5. First hand account to the author from Dheisheh camp.
6. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
7. John Kifner, New York Times, December 21, 1987.
8. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1987.
9. Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1987.
10. New York Times, January 21, 1988.
11. John Kifner, New York Times, January 23, 1988.
12. John Kifner, New York Times, January 27, 1988.
13. Ibid.
13a. Bassam Shaka’a: Telephone conversations with the author from February
5, 1988, through March 13, 1988.
13b. John Kifner, New York Times, April 4 and April 15,
1988.
13c. Newsweek, “A Soldier’s Account”, February 8, 1988.
13d. New York Times, February 14, 1988.
13e. John Kifner, New York Times, February 21, 1988.
13f. Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1988.
13g. Newsweek, April 4, 1988.
13h. New York Times, April 1, 1988.
13i. Newsweek, March 28, 1988.
13j. Ibid.
13k. Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1988.
13l. New York Times, April 1, 1988.
13m. The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 1988.
Chapter 1
|
|
It is not accidental that
when anyone attempts to examine the nature of Zionism – its origins, history
and dynamics – they meet with people who terrorize or threaten them. Quite
recently, after mentioning a meeting on the plight of the Palestinian people
during an interview on KPFK, a Los Angeles radio station, the organizers of the
public meeting were deluged with bomb threats from anonymous callers.
Nor is it easy in the United States
or Western Europe to disseminate information about the nature of Zionism or to
analyze the specific events which denote Zionism as a political movement. Even
the announcement on university campuses of authorized forums or meetings on the
subject invariably engenders a campaign designed to close off discussion.
Posters are torn down as fast as they are put up. Meetings are packed by flying
squads of Zionist youth who seek to break them up. Literature tables are
vandalized and leaflets and articles appear accusing the speaker of
anti-Semitism or, in the case of those of Jewish origin, of self-hatred.
Vindictiveness and slander are so
universally meted out to anti-Zionists because the disparity between the
official fiction about Zionism and the Israeli state, on the one hand, and the
barbarous practice of this colonial ideology and coercive apparatus, on the
other, is so vast. People are in shock when they have an opportunity to hear or
read about the century of persecution suffered by the Palestinians, and, thus,
the apologists for Zionism are relentless in seeking to prevent coherent,
dispassionate examination of the virulent and chauvinist record of the Zionist
movement and of the state which embodies its values.
The irony of this is that when we
study what the Zionists have written and said – particularly when addressing
themselves – no doubt remains about what they have done or of their place in
the political spectrum, dating from the last quarter of the 19th century to the
present day.
Four overriding myths have shaped
the consciousness of most people in our society about Zionism.
The first is that of “A land
without a people for a people without a land.” This myth was sedulously
cultivated by early Zionists to promote the fiction that Palestine was a
remote, desolate place ready for the taking. This claim was quickly followed by
denial of Palestinian identity, nationhood or legitimate entitlement to the
land in which the Palestinian people have lived throughout their recorded
history.
The second is the myth of Israeli
democracy. Innumerable newspaper stories or television references to the
Israeli state are followed by the assertion that it is the only “real”
democracy in the Middle East. In fact, Israel is as democratic as the apartheid
state of South Africa. Civil liberty, due process and the most basic human
rights are by law denied those who do not meet racial, religious criteria.
The third myth is that of
“security” as the motor force of Israeli foreign policy. Zionists maintain that
their state must be the fourth largest military power in the world because
Israel has been forced to defend itself against imminent menace from primitive,
hate-consumed Arab masses only recently dropped from the trees.
The fourth myth is that of Zionism
as the moral legatee of the victims of the Holocaust. This is at once the most
pervasive and insidious of the myths about Zionism. Ideologues for the Zionist
movement have wrapped themselves in the collective shroud of the six million
Jews who fell victim to Nazi mass murder. The bitter and cruel irony of this
false claim is that the Zionist movement itself actively colluded with Nazism
from its inception.
To most people it appears anomalous
that the Zionist movement, which forever invokes the horror of the Holocaust,
should have collaborated actively with the most vicious enemy ever faced by the
Jews. The record, however, reveals not merely common interests but a deep
ideological affinity rooted in the extreme chauvinism which they share.
Chapter 2
|
|
The objective of Zionism
has never been merely to colonize Palestine – as was the goal of classical
colonial and imperial movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. The design
of European colonialism in Africa and Asia was, essentially, to exploit
indigenous peoples as cheap labor while extracting natural resources for
exorbitant profit.
What distinguishes Zionism from
other colonial movements is the relationship between the settlers and the
people to be conquered. The avowed purpose of the Zionist movement was not
merely to exploit the Palestinian people but to disperse and dispossess them.
The intent was to replace the indigenous population with a new settler community,
to eradicate the farmers, artisans and town-dwellers of Palestine and
substitute an entirely new workforce composed of the settler population.
In denying the existence of the
Palestinian people, Zionism sought to create the political climate for their removal,
not only from their land but from history. When acknowledged at all, the
Palestinians were re-invented as a semi-savage, nomadic remnant. Historical
records were falsified – a procedure begun during the last quarter of the 19th
century but continuing to this day in such pseudo-historical writings as Joan
Peters’ From Time Immemorial.
The Zionist movement would seek
alternative imperial sponsors for this bloody enterprise; among them the
Ottoman Empire, Imperial Germany, the British Raj, French colonialism and
Czarist Russia. Zionist plans for the Palestinian people anticipated the
Ottoman solution for the Armenians, who would be slaughtered in the first
sustained genocide of the 20th century.
Zionist Plans for the Palestinian
People
From its inception, the
Zionist movement sought the “Armenianization” of the Palestinian people. Like
the Native Americans, the Palestinians were regarded as “a people too many”.
The logic was elimination; the record was to be one of genocide.
This was no less true of the Labor
Zionist movement, which sought to provide a “socialist” patina for the colonial
enterprise. One of the principal theorists of Labor Zionism, a founder of the
Zionist party Ha’Poel Ha’Tzair (The Young Worker) and a supporter of Poale Zion
(Workers of Zion), was Aaron David Gordon.
Walter Laqueur acknowledges in his History
of Zionism that, “A. D. Gordon and his comrades wanted every tree and
every bush to be planted by Jewish ’pioneers’.” [14]
Gordon coined the slogan “conquest
of labor” [Kibbush avodah]. He called upon Jewish capitalists, and the
Rothschild plantation managers, who had obtained land from absentee Turkish
landlords over the heads of the Palestinian people, “to hire Jews and only
Jews”. He organized boycotts of any Zionist enterprise which failed to employ
Jews exclusively, and prepared strikes against the Rothschild colonists, who
allowed Arab peasants to sharecrop or to work, even as cheap labor.
Thus, the “Labor Zionists” employed
the methods of the workers’ movement to prevent the use of Arab labor; their
objective was not exploitation but usurpation.
Palestinian Society
There were over one
thousand villages in Palestine at the turn of the 19th century. Jerusalem,
Haifa, Gaza, Jaffa, Nablus, Acre, Jericho, Ramle, Hebron and Nazareth were
flourishing towns. The hills were painstakingly terraced. Irrigation ditches
crisscrossed the land. The citrus orchards, olive groves and grains of
Palestine were known throughout the world. Trade, crafts, textiles, cottage
industry and agricultural production abounded.
Eighteenth and 19th century
travellers’ accounts are replete with the data, as were the scholarly quarterly
reports published in the 19th century by the British Palestine Exploration
Fund.
In fact, it was precisely the
social cohesiveness and stability of Palestinian society which led Lord
Palmerston, in 1840, when Britain had established a consulate in Jerusalem, to
propose, presciently, the founding of a European Jewish settler colony to
“preserve the larger interests of the British Empire”. [15]
Palestinian society, if suffering
from the collaboration of feudal landowners [effendi] with the Ottoman Empire,
was nevertheless productive and culturally diverse, with a peasantry quite
conscious of its social role. The Palestinian peasants and urban dwellers had
made a clear, strongly felt distinction between the Jews who lived amongst them
and would-be colonists, dating from the 1820’s, when the 20,000 Jews of
Jerusalem were wholly integrated and accepted in Palestinian society.
When the colonists at Petah Tikvah
sought to push the peasants off the land, in 1886, they were met with organized
resistance, but Jewish workers in neighboring villages and communities were
wholly unaffected. When the Armenians escaping the Turkish genocide settled in
Palestine they were welcomed. The genocide was ominously defended by Vladimir
Jabotinsky and other Zionists in their attempts to obtain Turkish support.
In fact, until the Balfour
Declaration [1917l, the Palestinian response to Zionist settlements was unwisely
tolerant. There was no organized Jew-hatred in Palestine, no massacres such as
the Czar and Polish anti-Semites prepared, no racist counterpart in the
Palestinian response to armed colonists (who used force wherever possible to
drive Palestinians from the land). Not even spontaneous riots, expressing pent
up Palestinian rage at the steady theft of their land, were directed at Jews as
such.
Courting Imperial Favor
In 1896, Theodor Herzl
set forth his plan for inducing the Ottoman Empire to grant Palestine to the
Zionist movement:
Supposing his Majesty the
Sultan were to give us Palestine; we could, in return, undertake to regulate
the finances of Turkey. We should there form an outpost of civilization as
opposed to barbarism. [16]
By 1905, the Seventh
World Zionist Congress had to acknowledge that the Palestinian people were
organizing a political movement for national independence from the Ottoman
Empire – a threat not merely to Turkish rule but to Zionist designs.
Speaking at this Congress, Max Nordau,
a prominent Zionist leader, set forth Zionist concerns:
The movement which has
taken hold of a great part of the Arab people may easily take a direction which
may cause harm in Palestine. ...The Turkish government may feel itself
compelled to defend its reign in Palestine and Syria with armed force. ...In
these circumstances, Turkey can be convinced that it will be important for her
to have in Palestine and Syria a strong and well-organized group which ... will
resist any attack on the authority of the Sultan and defend his authority with
all its might. [17]
As the Kaiser undertook
to forge an alliance with Turkey as part of his contest with Britain and France
for control of the Middle East, the Zionist movement made similar overtures to
Imperial Germany. The Kaiser took nearly ten years in his on-and-off dealings
with the Zionist leadership to formulate a plan for a Jewish state under
ottoman auspices which would have as its principal task the eradication of the
Palestinian anti-colonial resistance and the securing of the interests of
Imperial Germany in the region.
By 1914, however, the World Zionist
Organization was already far advanced in its parallel bid to enlist the British
Empire to undertake the break-up of the Ottoman Empire with Zionist assistance.
Chaim Weizmann, who was to become president of the World Zionist Organization,
made an important public announcement:
We can reasonably say
that should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should
Britain encourage Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could
have in twenty to thirty years a million Jews out there, perhaps more; they
would develop the country, bring back civilization to it and form a very
effective guard for the Suez Canal. [18]
The Balfour Declaration
Weizmann secured from the British
what the Zionist leaders had sought simultaneously from the Ottoman and German
Imperial governments. On November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration was issued.
It stated, in part:
His Majesty’s Government
view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish People, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement
of this object [19]
The Zionists were cynical
in the delineation of their claim to Palestine. One moment they would assert
that Palestine was a wasteland visited by occasional nomads; in the next breath
they proposed to subjugate the very Palestinian population they had attempted
to render invisible. A. D. Gordon, himself, repeatedly declared that the
Palestinians whom, he insisted did not exist, should be prevented, by force
from cultivating the soil.
This translated into the total
expulsion of non-Jews from the Jewish “fatherland”. A like description informed
pronouncements by British and Zionist leaders in their plans for the
Palestinian population. By the time of the Balfour Declaration, British
imperial armies had occupied most of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East,
having enlisted Arab leaders to fight the Turks under British direction in
exchange for British assurances of “self-determination”.
While the Zionists in their
propaganda insisted that Palestine was unpopulated, in their dealings with
their imperial sponsors they made clear that subjugation was the order of the
day and offered themselves as the instrument.
The British responded in kind. The
Balfour Declaration also contained a passage intended to lull Arab feudal
leaders shocked by the treachery of the British Empire in handing over to the
Zionists the very land in which Arab self-determination had been promised:
it being clearly
understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and
religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. [20]
The British had for years
used the Zionist leadership to enlist support for its war against Imperial
Germany from all the major Jewish capitalists and banking concerns in the
United States and Great Britain. With Weizmann they prepared to use Zionist
colonization of Palestine as the instrument for political control over the
Palestinian population.
The land without a people for a
people without a land was in fact a country in ferment against colonial
subjugation. Former Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour,
himself, was brutally explicit in memoranda for the eyes of officials, despite
the lip service for public consumption about the “civil and religious rights of
the non-Jewish [sic] communities in Palestine”.
Zionism, be it right or wrong, good
or bad is rooted in present needs, in future hopes of far profounder import
than the desires of the 700,000-plus Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.
[21]
The South African Connection
There is a particular
dimension to this secret consort between Balfour and the Zionist leadership to
betray the aspirations of the Palestinian people. It was Weizmann’s close
friend and future Prime Minister of South Africa, General Jan Smuts, who, as
South African delegate to the British War Cabinet during World War I, helped
push the British government to adopt the Balfour Declaration and to make a commitment
to construct a Zionist colony under British direction.
The relationship between the
Zionist movement and the South African settlers had evolved earlier, as had the
friendship between General Smuts and Chaim Weizmann. By the turn of the
century, a large Jewish population, primarily from Lithuania, had settled in
South Africa. The Zionist movement regarded this population as particularly
susceptible to Zionist ideas because of their already established settler
status in South Africa. Zionist leaders travelled constantly to South Africa
seeking political and financial support.
N. Kirschner, former chairperson of
the South African Zionist Federation, provides a vivid account of the intimate
interaction between Zionist and South African leaders, the identification of
Zionists like Weizmann and Herzl with the South African conception of a
racially distinct colonizing populace, and the importance of a virtual pact
between the two movements. [22]
In identifying Zionism with South
African settler ideology, Chaim Weizmann was following the early admiration
expressed by Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, for the
quintessential colonial ideologue, Sir Cecil Rhodes. Herzl attempted to model
his own political future on the achievements of Rhodes:
Naturally, there are big
differences between Cecil Rhodes and my humble self, the personal ones very
much in my disfavor; the objective ones are greatly in favor of the Zionist
movement. [23]
Herzl advocated achieving
Zionist dispersal of the Palestinians by using the methods pioneered by Rhodes,
and he urged the formation of a Jewish counterpart to a colonial chartered
company, an amalgam of colonial and entrepreneurial exploitation:
The Jewish Company is
partly modelled on the lines of a great acquisition company. It might be called
a Jewish Chartered Company, though it cannot exercise sovereign power, and has
no other than purely colonial tasks. [24]
The poorest will go first
to cultivate the soil. In accordance with a preconceived plan they will
construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations, regulate rivers
and build their own habitations; their labor will create trade, trade will
create markets, and markets will attract new settlers. [25]
By 1934, a major group of
South African investors and large capitalists had established Africa-Israel
Investments to purchase land in Palestine. The company still exists after 54
years with South Africans as joint stockholders, the assets held by Israel’s
Bank Leumi. [26]
The Iron Wall
The tension between the
claim that the land was empty and the demand that the “non-existent”
inhabitants be ruthlessly subjugated was less acute when Zionists discussed
strategy among themselves. The reality of what was necessary to colonize
Palestine took precedence over propaganda.
One of the ideological forbears of
Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, is known as the founder of “Revisionist Zionism”,
the Zionist current which had little patience with the liberal and socialist
facade employed by the “labor” Zionists. [Revisionist Zionism is represented
today by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.]
In 1923 Jabotinsky wrote The
Iron Wall, which could be called a benchmark essay for the entire
Zionist movement. He set forth bluntly the essential premises of Zionism which
had, indeed, been laid out before, if not as eloquently, by Theodor Herzl,
Chaim Weizmann and others. Jabotinsky’s reasoning has been cited and reflected
in subsequent Zionist advocacy – from nominal “left” to so-called “right”. He
wrote as follows:
There can be no discussion
of voluntary reconciliation between us and the Arabs, not now, and not in the
foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind
from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a
voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of
Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority. Each of you
has some general understanding of the history of colonization. Try to find even
one example when the colonization of a country took place with the agreement of
the native population. Such an event has never occurred.
The natives will always struggle
obstinately against the colonists – and it is all the same whether they are
cultured or uncultured. The comrades in arms of [Hernan] Cortez or [Francisco]
Pizarro conducted themselves like brigands. The Redskins fought with
uncompromising fervor against both evil and good-hearted colonizers. The
natives struggled because any kind of colonization anywhere at anytime is
inadmissible to any native people.
Any native people view their
country as their national home, of which they will be complete masters. They
will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers
among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be
tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept
this view of the Palestinian Arabs.
They have the precise psychology
that we have. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true
fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie.
Each people will struggle against colonizers until the last spark of hope that
they can avoid the dangers of conquest and colonization is extinguished. The
Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.
It matters not what kind of words
we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and
inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and by every Arab. Colonization has
only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is
impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of
the Palestinian Arabs and the same condition exists now.
Even an agreement with
non-Palestinians represents the same kind of fantasy. In order for Arab
nationalists of Baghdad and Mecca and Damascus to agree to pay so serious a
price they would have to refuse to maintain the Arab character of Palestine.
We cannot give any compensation for
Palestine, neither to the Palestinians nor to other Arabs. Therefore, a
voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most
restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population.
Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which
comprises an Iron Wall through which the local population can never break
through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be
hypocrisy.
Whether through the Balfour
Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for establishing in
the country conditions of rule and defense through which the local population,
regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding
our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role –
with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful
differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron
Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.
To the hackneyed reproach that this
point of view is unethical, I answer, ’absolutely untrue.’ This is our ethic.
There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the
Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words
nor for any tasty morsel, because this is not a rabble but a people, a living
people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful
questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every
opening visible in the Iron Wall. [27]
The Metaphor of Iron
The theme and imagery of
coercive iron and steel evoked by Vladimir Jabotinsky was to be taken up by the
nascent national socialist movement in Germany, even as Jabotinsky had, in
turn, been inspired by Benito Mussolini. The mystical invocation of iron will in
the service of martial and chauvinist conquest united Zionist, colonial and
fascist ideologues. It sought its legitimacy in legends of a conquering past.
Cecil B. de Mille’s Samson and
Delilah was more than a Hollywood biblical romance about the perfidy of
woman and the virtue of manly strength. It carried, as well, the authoritarian
values of the novel from which it was adopted, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Samson,
which trumpeted the necessity of brute force if the Israelites were to conquer
the Philistines.
“Shall I give our people
a message from you?” Samson thought for a while, and then said slowly: “The
first word is iron. They must get iron. They must give everything they have for
iron – their silver and wheat, oil and wine and flocks, even their wives and
daughters. All for iron! There is nothing in the world more valuable than
iron.” [28]
Jabotinsky, the siren of
“an iron wall through which the local population can not break through” and of
“the iron law of every colonizing movement ... armed force”, found his call
echoed in major Zionist forays against victim peoples in the decades to come.
Israel’s current Minister of
Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, launched the 1967 war as Chief of Staff with “Iron
Will”. As Prime Minister in 1975 and 1976 he declared the policy of Hayad
Barzel, the “Iron Hand”, in the West Bank. Over 300,000 Palestinians were
to pass through Israeli prisons under conditions of sustained and
institutionalized torture exposed by the Sunday Times of London and denounced
by Amnesty International.
His successor as Chief of Staff,
Raphael Eitan, imposed the “Iron Arm” – Zro’aa Barzel – on the West
Bank, and assassination was added to the repressive arsenal. On July 17, 1982,
the Israeli cabinet met to prepare what the London Sunday Times
would term “this carefully pre-planned military operation to purge the camps,
called Moah Barzel or ‘Iron Brain’”. The camps were Sabra and Shatila
and the operation “was familiar to Sharon and Begin, part of Sharon’s larger
plan discussed by the Israeli cabinet”. [29]
When Yitzhak Rabin, who had
supported the Revisionist Likud in Lebanon during the war, became Shimon Peres’
Minister of Defense in the current “national unity” government, he launched in
Lebanon and the West Bank the policy of Egrouf Barzel, the “Iron Fist”.
It is the “Iron Fist” which Rabin again cited as the basis for his policy of
allout repression and collective punishment during the 1987-1988 Palestinian
uprising in the West Bank and Gaza.
It’s interesting to recall, as
well, that Jabotinsky located his colonial impulse in the doctrine of the
purity of blood. Jabotinsky spelled this out in his Letter on Autonomy:
It is impossible for a
man to become assimilated with people whose blood is different than his own. In
order to become assimilated, he must change his body, he must become one of
them, in blood. There can be no assimilation. We shall never allow such things
as mixed marriage because the preservation of national integrity is impossible
except by means of racial purity and for that purpose we shall have this
territory where our people will constitute the racially pure inhabitants.
This theme was further
elaborated by Jabotinsky:
The source of national
feeling ... lies in a man’s blood ...in his racio-physico type and in that
alone. ...A man’s spiritual outlook is primarily determined by his physical
structure. For that reason we do not believe in spiritual assimilation. It is
inconceivable, from the physical point of view, that a Jew born to a family of
pure Jewish blood can become adapted to the spiritual outlook of a German or a
Frenchman. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid, but the nucleus of
his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish. [30]
The adoption of
chauvinist doctrines of racial purity and the logic of the blood were not
confined to Jabotinsky or to the revisionists. The liberal philosopher, Martin
Buber, located his Zionism equally within the framework of European racist
doctrine:
The deepest layers of our
being are determined by blood; our innermost thinking and our will are colored
by it. [31]
How was this to be
implemented?
Notes
14. Walter Laqueur, History
of Zionism (London, 1972).
15. Joy Bonds et. al., Our
Roots Are Still Alive – The Story of the Palestinian People (New York:
Institute for Independent Social Journalism, Peoples Press, 1977), p.13.
16. Theodor Herzl, The
Jewish State (London: 1896).
17. Hyman Lumer, Zionism:
Its Role in World Politics (New York: International Publishers, 1973).
18. Chaim Weizmann, Trial
and Error: The Autobiography of Chaim Weizmann (New York: Harpers,
1949), p.149.
19. John Norton Moore,
ed., The Arab-Israeli Conflict (Princeton, N.J.: The American
Society of International Law, Princeton University Press, 1977), p.885.
20. Ibid.
21. Cited in Harry N.
Howard, The King Commission: An American Inquiry in the Middle East
(Beirut: 1963).
22. N. Kirschner, Zionism
and the Union of South Africa: Fifty Years of Friendship and Understanding,
Jewish Affairs, South Africa, May 1960.
23. Theodor Herzl, Diaries,
Vol.II, p.793.
24. Theodor Herzl, The
Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question,
p.33. Cited in Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (London:
Zed Books, Ltd., 1987), p.4.
25. Ibid.,
p.28.
26. For Love and
Money, in Israel: A Survey, Financial Mail,
Johannesburg, South Africa, May 11, 1984, p.41.
27. The Iron Wall
– “O Zheleznoi Stene” – Rassvet, November 4, 1923.
28. Lenni Brenner, The
Iron Wall: Zionist Revisionism From Jabotinsky to Shamir (London: Zed
Books, Ltd., 1984), p.79.
29. London Sunday
Times, September 26, 1982.
30. Jabotinsky’s Letter
on Autonomy, 1904. Cited in Brenner, The Iron Wall, p.29.
31. Brenner, The
Iron Wall, p.31.
Chapter 3
|
|
In 1917, there were
56,000 Jews in Palestine and 644,000 Palestinian Arabs. In 1922, there were
83,794 Jews and 663,000 Arabs. In 1931, there were 174,616 Jews and 750,000
Arabs. [32]
Collaborating with British
Colonialism
With the forging of a
tacit alliance with the British, the Zionists now received support on the
ground for their conquest of the land. The process was described by the
Palestinian poet and Marxist analyst, Ghassan Kanafani:
Despite the fact that a
large share of Jewish capital was allocated to rural areas, and despite the
presence of British imperialist military forces and the immense pressure
exerted by the administrative machine in favor of the Zionists, the latter
achieved only minimal results with respect to the settlement of land.
They, nevertheless, seriously
damaged the status of the Arab rural population. Ownership by Jewish groups of
urban and rural land rose from 300,000 dunums in 1929 [67,000 acres] to
1,250,000 dunums in 1930 [280,000 acres]. The purchased land was insignificant
from the point of view of mass colonization and of the settlement of the
"Jewish problem". But the expropriation of one million dunums -
almost one third of the agricultural land - led to a severe impoverishment of
Arab peasants and Bedouins.
By 1931, 20,000 peasant families
had been evicted by the Zionists. Furthermore, agricultural life in the
underdeveloped world, and the Arab world in particular, is not merely a mode of
production, but equally a way of social, religious and ritual life. Thus, in
addition to the loss of land, Arab rural society was being destroyed by the
process of colonization. [33]
British imperialism
promoted the economic destabilization of the indigenous Palestinian economy.
The Mandatory Government granted a privileged status to Jewish capital,
awarding it 90% of the concessions in Palestine. This enabled the Zionists to
gain control of the economic infrastructure (road projects, Dead Sea minerals,
electricity, ports, etc.).
By 1935, Zionists controlled 872 of
a total of 1,212 industrial firms in Palestine. Imports related to Zionist
industries were exempted from taxes. Discriminatory work laws were passed
against the Arab workforce resulting in large scale unemployment and a
substandard existence for those who were able to find employment.
The 1936 Uprising
Loss of land and
repression heightened Palestinian awareness of the fate intended for them and
fueled a great uprising which lasted from 1936 to 1939.
The revolt assumed the form of
civil disobedience and armed insurrection. Peasants left their villages to join
fighting units which were formed in the mountains. Arab nationalists from Syria
and Jordan soon entered the struggle.
The decision to withhold taxes was
taken May 7, 1936, at a conference attended by one hundred fifty delegates
representing all sectors of the population and a general strike swept Palestine.
British reaction was immediate and
harsh. Martial law was declared July 30, 1936 - approximately five months after
the uprising had begun - and widespread repression was unleashed. Anyone
suspected of organizing or sympathizing with the general strike or other
resistance was detained. Houses were blown up throughout Palestine. A large
section of the city of Jaffa was destroyed by the British on June 18, 1936,
rendering 6,000 people homeless. Homes, as well, in the surrounding communities
were demolished.
Britain sent large numbers of
troops to Palestine to quell the revolt (estimated at 20,000). By the end of
1937 and the beginning of 1938, however, British forces were losing control to
the armed popular revolt.
The Zionists as Police Enforcers
It was at this point that
the British began to rely on the Zionists who provided them with a unique
resource they had never tapped in any of their colonies: a local force which
had made common cause with British colonialism and was highly mobilized against
the indigenous population. If before this the Zionists had handled many of the
tasks of reprisal, they now played a larger role in the escalated repression
which was to include mass arrests, assassinations and executions. In 1938,
5,000 Palestinians were imprisoned, of whom 2,000 were sentenced to long terms
of imprisonment; 148 people were executed by hanging and over 5,000 homes were
demolished. [34]
Zionist forces were integrated with
British intelligence and became the police enforcers of draconian British rule.
A "quasi-police force" was established to provide cover for the armed
Zionist presence encouraged by the British. There were 2,863 recruits to the
quasi-police force, 12,000 men were organized in the Haganah, and
3,000 in Jabotinsky’s National Military Organization (Irgun). [35] In
the summer of 1937 the quasi-police force was named the "Defense of the
Jewish Colonies", and later the "Colony Police".
Ben Gurion called the quasi-police
force an ideal "framework" for the training of the Haganah. Charles
Orde Wingate, the British officer in charge, was, in essence, the founder of
the Israeli army. He trained such figures as Moshe Dayan in terrorism and
assassination.
By 1939, Zionist forces working
with the British rose to 14,411 organized into ten well-armed groups of Colony
Police, each commanded by a British officer, with an official of the Jewish
Agency as second in command. By the spring of 1939, the Zionist force included
sixty-three mechanized units, each consisting of eight to ten men.
The Peel Report
A Royal Commission was
established in 1937, under the direction of Lord Peel, to determine the causes
of the 1936 revolt. The Peel Commission concluded that the two primary factors
were Palestinian desire for national independence and Palestinian fear of the
establishment of a Zionist colony on their land. The Peel Report analyzed a
series of other factors with uncommon candor. These were:
1.
The spread of the Arab nationalist spirit outside Palestine
2.
Increasing Jewish immigration after 1933
3.
The ability of the Zionists to dominate public opinion in Britain
because of the tacit support of the government
4.
Lack of Arab confidence in the good intentions of the British government
5. Palestinian fear of continued land purchases by Jews from absent